Little 900

Back in January, this article ran in the New York Times about how the field of life coaching is getting younger and younger. I didn’t think much of it at the time (except to scoff a bit at the idea of a 25-year-old giving life advice to I don’t know… me), but now my interest is quite piqued.

Rewind.

Sometime last year, I started getting emails from a lovely young woman I had met on a New Year’s silent meditation retreat in western Massachusetts.  Back then, she had recently returned from 4 months as a Buddhist nun in Burma and was planning her next steps — probably grad school.

Well, Zoe Wild decided not to get a MFA, but did become a Sufi minister and a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC).  She’s not much older than me, but I remember a thoughtful and straightforward contemplativeness in her presence that defied her youth.  Having picked up her life to go be a nun in Burma, she also seemed kind of weird. And I envied her terribly.

But I digress.  The point is to say that Zoe was the first young woman I came across directly who has gone into life coaching.  The second was a woman I don’t actually know but whose blog I came across while researching a business idea to help Millennials take control of our personal finances (and eventually the financial system).

Jenny Blake writes a blog much more popular than this one called “Life After College” – a veritable smorgasbord of simple advice for Millennials drowning in this recessionary morass.  And, of course, at some point she revealed that she’s pursuing certification as a life coach and thinking about turning her blogging into a full-fledged business.

Finally, a friend and quasi-mentor (well, she’s older and smarter than I am) seems to have launched a website geared towards building a career out of helping others in the ways she knows (Dharma, movement, engagement, nutrition, movement… er, and everything else). Sebene is the bomb — I’ve long admired her practice and her person.  And she has the sweetest, loveliest dog ever!

She only alludes to a new career path as a coach — I will no doubt no more when I interview her for a post on diversity in American Buddhism later this month — but man.  If Sebene Selassie is going into life coaching, this is something I should be paying attention to.

I’ve been thinking about going back to school for joint Masters in Public Policy and Social Work but am now toying with the idea of business school.  The idea of a Social Work degree speaks to my practice and my passion for helping others.  It appeals to my idea of becoming a meditation and yoga teacher / psychotherapist / idea person.  Like Shoken Michael Stone.

And now, so does a life coaching certification.

In the end, though, I right now doubt I’ll join the ranks of 30-something coaches and/or psychotherapist.  When I look at people like Sebene and Shoken, I feel I’ll never have confidence in my own wisdom and the sageness of my advice standing next to them.

My path is somewhere else.  I just don’t have much of an idea where yet.

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“Our bodies are the perfect place to focus on in order to do… Yoga, because as Milarepa taught, the body is the border where mind and matter meet each other.  Our bodies are made of matter, yet matter that is suffused with mental sensation and feeling.  Body and mind are interdependent: changes in the body affect the mind, and mind’s perception and feelings bring about physical changes as well.  By penetrating to the true nature of the body, we can discover the true nature of the mind.  And by ascertaining mind’s true nature, we can discover what the body actually is.  Ultimately, our practice of Buddhist Yoga reveals to us that the difference between body and mind is merely a conceptual one, and in the true nature of reality — nondual, inexpressible awareness — body and mind are inseperable.”

– “Joining with Naturalness”, by Ari Goldfield and Rose Taylor in Freeing the Body Freeing the Mind (ed. Michael Stone)

With the seemingly overnight move to Minneapolis and a rapid succession of big changes to Sweetheart’s and my near-life plans, things have been feeling kind of tornado-ish recently.

Add to that the fact that I turn 30 in less than two months, and I’ve been a tightly wound ball of stress and task lists on uneven ground for a few months.

Things came to a head a few days after making our move to Minneapolis — suddenly I had convinced myself that I was not in love and unlovable.  I honestly couldn’t feel much but self-doubt and despair.  If it weren’t for the constant drumbeat of work and moving tasks, I would have been a lump on the floor.  The sunshine and birds, the loving company of Sweetheart’s family — none of it was a consolation or source of sparkling joy.

As a typical Type A over-achiever, I am adept at focusing on plans and the future — whatever comes next.  And I’m very good at making plans where there are none, or not enough to fill all the space I see ahead of and around me.

And that’s where things get really sticky.  The more I allow myself to be driven by the stress of my own making, the farther I get from what is right in front of me — whether that’s uncertainty and fear, or love and appreciation.  Eventually, things get frayed at the seams.  By which I mean me, and it’s not a pretty sight.

At first it manifested at being annoyed and frustrated with almost everything Sweetheart did and didn’t do.  This included his attempts to be sweet as well as his not taking charge of the mundane life tasks ahead of us (donating our old car, buying a new car, travel, moving) while I work and he has days off.

It was a profound act of courage and compassion for him to pick me up from the coworking space yesterday and spend the evening walking and talking to figure out what was really wrong — why I was/am so unhappy.

It took hours to let out, mostly because I am so good at keeping the lid on my own pressure cooker of thoughts, judgements, and emotions.  Slowly, the steam started to escape, and then it was a screaming, constant stream of scalding and stinky vapor the likes of which are portrayed in my favorite early 80s movie, GhostBusters.

At the root is the remaking or refining of myself as I approach turning 30.  Here I am in Minneapolis, having followed Sweetheart — in fact, having managed the entirety of the move from finding a subletter in Bloomington to finding a sublet here to packing and cleaning — when I am used to going where I want when I want to actualize my newest business or self-growth scheme.

A lifelong striver often seen to have brazen ambition and boundless self-confidence, I have fastidiously avoided responsibility at the job I started in September in order to maintain a healthy work/life ecology. (The work/life culture at my current company is pretty darn bad, with a hundred people consistently working in startup fashion, late into the night and without weekends free.)

My avoidance of expanded responsibilities means that I haven’t advanced while others around me have.  In fact, due to a re-org, I’ve kind of been demoted (though so was almost everyone else except those remarkable or lucky few).

And for the first time in my life, I’m surrounded by people who excel in everything they do — in the same fashion I’ve felt I’ve excelled in what I choose to do.  So, surrounded by amazing, brilliant people full of ambition, is this what it finally feels like to be average?

When I first started at this job, my Dharmic practice set me apart from the rest.  If I worked hard to maintain a healthy work/life balance it was because I was older than many and had a more virtuous commitment to being calm, simple, and present for myself and Sweetheart and everyone else.  I was still above average, I told myself.

Now, even that has taken a bit of a blow, as I’ve realized several others at the company are meditators and yogis, and we’ve even started a little online group in our intra-company social network.  (But really, that’s a lovely thing as now I have other meditators and yogis to talk to about a dharmic approach to our work changing the world. But see?  I can hardly appreciate even this!)

Where am I going?  What am I doing?  Who am I?  Who do I want to be?

All of this is up in the air.  Under pressure to start having the answers, I’ve been stressing about not knowing exactly where I’m supposed to be going and doing.  After all, aren’t these things supposed to be clear when you turn 30?  Aren’t you supposed to be grown-up and know everything then?

Clearly, the answer is no.

And obviously, the tornado I’m in is another part of the path — a deeper part of the stream — in which I’m coming more starkly face to face with my most deeply engrained habit patterns and ‘defilements’.

A Zen priest in Chicago maintains an absolutely lovely blog.  A recent post was about “striving” to be middle of the road, or mediocre.  Letting go of ambition and striving is liberating, I know, though damn hard.  Seeing a middle-aged Zen priest deal with the same is comforting — I’m not alone.

And growing older doesn’t mean knowing everything.  In fact, the real work on the path is signified by things getting harder, not easier, as we peel away all the layers of misperception and illusion that keep us from seeing ourselves fully naked — fully ambitious, clinging, striving, averse, angry, scared, self-obsessed.

Today, I still have no idea what comes next for me.  But I feel like I’ve managed to clear just enough of the clutter to see that all of that planning and stressing was, indeed, just clutter.  Here I am, right now, rootless and living out of suitcases without much of a clear idea of what I am going to be when I grow up.  And that’s a little more okay than it was yesterday.

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Sweetheart and I are relocating to Minneapolis for the summer — in 5 days.  So life is full of packing, cleaning, scrounging boxes, finding homes for the plants, etc.  And no blogging.

I’ll be back soon!  Hopefully, with a slideshow of the move.

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I’ve seen slings and straps for carrying a yoga mat in studios, stores and on the internet for anywhere from $10 to $30. Definitely a step up (or down, in terms of gross resource consumption) from a full-blown yoga bag that can retail for as much as $130 at Lululemon, a strap is simple and functional.

But you don’t have to buy one with fancy snaps and dongles — if you have a length of rope at home (or can pick some up at the local hardware store, crafts store or climbing gym), you can make your own yoga mat strap super easily.

I haven’t been climbing much recently, and certainly haven’t been doing any rappelling in Indiana, so I just re-purposed my autoblock with two fisherman’s knots.  Took about 2 minutes and if I had bought the rope at the climbing gym, probably about $1.

This sling also doubles nicely as a practice strap for Dancer’s pose, Hand to foot, Cow Face, etc.

Here’s how to make your own yoga mat strap/sling:

Step 1: The rope I had is probably 3’6″. Anything that length or longer will work. Start with a loop at one end of the rope. The long end of the rope is towards you and the short end crosses over the top of the end pointing towards you.

Step 2: Thread the short end of the rope through the loop, sort of wrapping the part of your loop that’s at 6 o’clock.

Step 3: Wrap the short end of the rope around the back of the loop and then through the loop, like it’s poking out of its hole to say hello to your face.

Step 4: Thread the short end of the rope through the two coils you’ve created, then pull tight. The size of the loop should be easily adjustable just by pulling the knot along the rope. Repeat on the other end of the rope.

Now, just make the loops big enough to slide over the end of your rolled up yoga mat and pull the knots down towards the mat to tighten.

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Ok, I’m not just a yoga dork — I’m a nerd.

Reading Karen Lo’s compilation of interviews with pioneering second wave yoga teachers like Jason Crandell, Sianna Sherman, and Jason Nemer, titled “Blessed to Serve: Lessons learned and stories shared from torch-bearers of modern yoga” made me realize this.

Don’t get me wrong — I appreciate the privilege of hearing advice for new teachers from these more experienced, master teachers.  Some of the advice is quite significant, raw, and honest — like, keep your day job and embrace (but remain wary of) technology to promote yourself and bring in students.

And with privates starting out at $80/hr for these teachers, these teachers’ time and their advice is pretty high-value.

But I want data.  If, in addition to the advice Lo offers on her website to young yoga teachers about utilizing new media, she could also do some real metrics-driven research into who’s teaching, how many yoga teachers are being churned out a year, who students are, what they’re willing to pay for a class, etc — and it could back up her advice and offerings, I’d be pretty pumped.  And a lot more likely to buy into her product.

(On a related note, I wish Yoga To The People would release its financials so we can see what it takes for a donation-based yoga studio to work.)

I don’t imagine this is all that difficult — the Yoga Alliance certifies new teachers and must have numbers on this.  Geographic distribution, age, race, the styles of yoga they teach — all of this should be easy information to get.

And if young teachers could be brought in as equal partners, benefiting from the findings of said research, I imagine they’d be pretty likely to share anonymized information gathered from email list signups and liability waivers re: birthdates, gender, and occupation.  Acquired data could also fill in a lot of gaps based on locality alone — by which I mean zip codes overlayed with census data.

But I’ve also seen surveys from Yale at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA on the effects of meditation practice on retreatants, complete with questions about race, ethnicity, age, and income brackets.  And many folks were filling them out.  Temper that high opt-in rate with age (retreatants were older and usually less willing to give out personal information than Millennials, say) and it probably would shake out.

Anyway, the anecdotal stuff has a role, for sure.  For one, Lo’s enthusiasm and excitement to speak with each of these celebrity teachers practically jumps off the page.  Sometimes, I felt like she was giving them a bit too much credit for winning at life as yoga teachers.  Hindsight is 20/20. And the past often gets rosier or blurred with time.

But, it was super interesting to know what these teachers think of the current and future states of yoga — each from their own personal perspective.  Some, like Jason Crandell, said it had leveled out — the boom was over (which I tend to agree with: Prepare to hear the massive yoga bubble burst).  Others still saw it as a growth industry.  Some predicted the way forward as niche yogas — like Broga, AcroYoga, Buddha Body Yoga, etc.

Real numbers from a broad sample of practitioners and teachers would be even more interesting — a huge undertaking, but potentially very valuable information.  Sadly, who would pay for it?  Most yoga teachers and studio owners, perhaps those interviewed by Lo included, would not be likely to pay for this kind of information — they’re pretty happy living in their little yoga bubbles.  I’m slightly terrified to think that only companies like Lululemon would be willing to shell out cash for this data.

Lo’s book is worth picking up.  A lot of us vie for time with these master teachers, through workshops and festivals, but it’s really nice to see into their worlds a little and from a distance.

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Wow.

Wow.

Leave it to the amazingly multicolored and youthful Art of Living Foundation to inspire two Argentine musicians to create a new worldwide phenomenon: the Yoga Rave.  I am floored:

It feels kind of weird to say it, but the fact that the So What Project are Argentine and not say, American or European, makes this more authentic to me.  It’s not like Argentines are all that brown — Argentina effectively wiped out and assimilated much of the indigenous population in the late 19th century — but yeah…

Have fun. Explore yourself. Find peace. Without drugs and alcohol. What a funky idea.

All of a sudden, I’ve been inundated with media on the interwebs emblematic of Millennials’ upbeat culture and infectiously optimistic outlook.

I mean, seriously.  If these two songs/videos aren’t a Millennial generation anthem, I don’t know what the fuck is:

These music videos are just, yeah — fun. They’re full of hipster swagger, but they’re happy and goodhearted.  Absent is the self-conscious, self-insulating cynicism of Gen X indie rockers and Conscious Hip Hoppers — who could easily flip from disparaging injustice on the corner to being straight up douchecanoes to the old lady next door.

Listen to this line from Wretch 32′s lyrics from “Unorthodox”: “Yeah I’m a good guy / If you heard otherwise / It’s a true lie”.  Um, excuse me?  Beg your pardon?  Oh, yes: “I’m hype I don’t do shy / I bark up every tree and I do bite / Syke I’m only playing… So the 8th day of the weeks my own lay in / And that’s sounds sad but I’m happy”.

This guy is rapping about working hard and being seen as nerdy or lame — but he’s ok with that because it makes him happy.  Wow, we really do live in a world of Steve Urquells all grown up (see: Ryan Gosling & Van Jones).

And we love them, by the way — because making geeky kids feel still welcomed and accepted is now the cool thing to do, in case you didn’t hear.  By far my favorite moment from the Spring Standards’ video is towards the end, when one woman’s awkward dance moves become a veritable hipster flash mob.  Again, the signature cynicism and “fuck you” attitude of Gen Xers is notably absent.  It’s all about smiles, doing your own thing, having fun, and then letting everyone else join in the merriment by suspending judgment and competitiveness.

That’s something that’s missing from Wretch 32′s song, as well: “We don’t follow no crowd, they follow us / Don’t follow no sound it follows us”.  But compare that to a Gen X rapper like Jay-Z who has to follow up talking about his own prowess with disparagement towards those he out performs.  It’s about excelling, but not gloating at the expense of others.  Weird.

And then, getting into an even stranger, tongue in cheek, and utterly uncool-but-i’m-still-a-winner space is the new ad campaign for the Toyota Prius C:

I don’t even know how to talk about this yet.

Except to say: The Millennials are here.  And we’re taking over.  Boom.

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A male voice, inflected with some laid back Southern California surfer dude, instructs students to bring a knee to their opposite elbow from Downward Facing Dog: “Just some simple movement. And… Boom.”

This is Broga, according to the video on the website of the eponymous Broga, based out of Somerville, MA.

I actually hadn’t heard about Broga at all until I was handing out fliers at the Bloomington Farmers Market to gin up more students for my donation-based classes on Sundays.  I totes thought it was something the guy I was talking to made up.  But no, it’s been covered by the Boston Globe and even Time.  Kudos!

I’ve been finding a little bit of Broga in my own voice when I teach my Sunday classes, which tend to be younger and more active than the classes I’ve been teaching through Mukti, the local teachers collective.  I think it’s awesome — it’s my more authentic voice to crack a joke about how “opening the groin” in a hip-openers class sounds kind of dirty.  I’m looking forward to throwing a “Boom” and “Zing” in there pretty soon.

Which is actually fine, in my humble opinion, because Yoga isn’t just about being serious and enlightened.  It’s also just about moving towards being comfortable in your own skin.  It’s not a destination — it’s a path, and one that we need to live.  And hey, this is the century I’m living in.

And hey, if exercise and embodiment can help Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver) do the awesomenous that he does — well, shit.  I’m pretty sure there’s a new generation of folks who are happy to bring our own take on mind-body fitness to the rest of the world:

On the road DVD Trailer from Rogcity Fitness on Vimeo.

As “On the Road” workout DVD director says, “You can workout to cool music instead of something stupid.” And just check out how un-self conscious those musicians and roadies are.  Not ideal bodyshapes.  But who give’s a flying fuck?!  They’re feeling good and enjoying themselves — through some good old fashioned wholesome exercise.

Huzzah!

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I get these Daily Dharma quotes from various Buddhist teachers in my Inbox everyday from Tricycle Magazine, and I can’t say how much I appreciate them.  Especially on weeks like this when I’m so overwhelmed and busy I need persistent but brief reminders of what it means to be on the path and in the world.

I really love this one from Ayya Khema, the Jewish-German-American nun who helped establish Wat Buddha Dharma in Australia, and its emphasis on getting rid of, not accumulation on the spiritual path.  Especially for a Type A overachiever like me, the idea of letting go is both terrifying but essential.

Click here to sign up for the Tricycle Daily Dharma.

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