infrared camera selfie, gemstones, elephants and dinos oh my!

Well, hello again.  July and August certainly were a whirlwind-like blur for me.  I don’t want to bore you with details but suffice it to say that these summer months included: a job ending, a successful photo show opening, my yoga teacher graduation, traveling all over SoCal visiting loved ones, and a lot of…well lets just call it de-com-pression.  But I am rejuvenated and feel ready to write, write write! In fact I want to put it in writing that I vow to update this blog at least twice a week from here on out.  So keep checking for lots of new stuff.

But all this free time spent in the company of old places and old friends brings me now to the intended topic for this entry: childlike wonder.

Do you ever revisit a place that was simply awe-inspiring as a child and upon return, you are able to feel those wavelengths of wonder and excitement travel through you once again?  Well , I made it a point while I was in LA to go in search of some of those wavelengths again.  LA is where I grew up and while she and I have certainly had a complicated relationship over the years, I am learning to love her just as she is, in this moment.  And one of my strategies for repairing my relationship with this city is to visit the places I loved the most: the beach, the Getty, and Exposition Park.  When I visit these places I am flooded with memories of a little me, lunch money in hand and an overwhelming curiosity.  In my mind, the beach made me a marine biologist, the Getty made me an artist, and the Natural History museum made me a time-traveler.

Yesterday, I spent most of the afternoon at the Natural History museum.  One thing I love about that place is how little it has changed.  So in a way I was able to time-travel to two different time periods simultaneously: the era of my childhood and the era of each exhibit. The same old African mammals are still there, with their acrylic painted backdrop and stoic expressions, but remember waiting to see if you could catch a wink or a sneeze from one of them as a kid? The same gemstones and minerals are there glittering behind their glass displays.  There was always something magical to me about seeing all those illuminated gems and minerals in that dark room.  The revelation that the earth held such inspiring beauty within a humble rock sent me searching for gems in every rock bed I encountered.  (Was I the only one who did this?)

Walking through that dark gem exhibit hall as the “adult” version of myself, I found myself instantly transformed back to that curious kid.  I began to wonder how alike the elements and atoms in each of these beautiful stones were to the elements and atoms in me.  I thought about how many millions of years it takes the earth to produce each one of these treasures.  (sigh) I’m feeling a metaphor coming on…

In a lot of ways I think what draws me again and again to this exhibit, and what makes it so magical for me is the implications it holds for us as humans.  In Buddhism, we often talk about polishing our Buddha nature. Inside we all possess the most rare and shining gem of compassion and loving kindness, but it takes constant polishing (and sometimes over many lifetimes) to be able to extract that 100% pure sweetness for the world to encounter on a daily basis.  The magic these gems held for me as a child is essentially unchanged.  They continue to remind me that mystery is held inside all things, even the most mundane.  It inspires in me the notion of possibility.  And when I felt that wavelength pass through me again at the Natural History museum, I was renewed.

Earlier in the week I was perusing the Getty Center gift shop with Jenn, my new friend and fellow photographer/yogi extraordinaire when she referred to her practice as “following her bliss”.  I had of course heard this phrase before, but it always rings truer from the mouth of someone living it.  Jenn is a living example of how to live a life “following your bliss”.  She’s humble and creative and passionate about life, or in other words– a pretty well-polished gem.  But whether you call the practice “following your bliss” or “chasing wavelengths” the message is still the same.  I hope you have a life that enables you to have regular, mini-epiphanies (instead of those pesky, life-altering major epiphanies).  Each time I experience one, it only makes me more grateful for my past, and excited about the future.  In constant pursuit of those wavelengths of wonder, the things that break us out of our auto-pilot minds and into the unknown– Where do you find yours?

So that’s what I want to address here:  How do we find time to feel like ourselves when time to ourselves is in such limited quantities?  How can we reconnect with whats most true and valuable to us when we feel like worker bees just fulfilling our task list one after the other, after the other?

It helps me to have silence.  Silence stops the buzzing in my mind of all the things that need to get done and all of the places I need to be.  Silence helps me to stop and look around me, taking in the surroundings and appreciating the present.  Its for this reason that I banished my bedroom TV once and for all.  The TV, though appearing to provide me comfort and relaxation during this busy time, I discovered was actually sucking the life force out of me.  I find in my busiest times, even my ipod gets neglected because I simply need emptiness.

The fifth step or limb in yoga is called “pratyahara” and is defined as “the conscious withdrawal of energy from the senses.” This is sometimes experienced by holding a pose for a very long time or in savasana.  Both of these actions create a place for you to experience the body in a way that is not dominated by the senses.  The job of the senses are to categorize things and therefore divide them.  But withdrawal, or pratyahara allows us to encounter the body in a more integrated way.  One example of the phenomenon is when you are laying in savasana without moving–you notice that you can’t feel each finger separately.  Its only when we wiggle our fingers and toes that we feel them as divided entities, right?  In this way, the practice of pratyahara– of creating distance from our sensory input and our immediate experience– can at times reconnect us with the profound, even as the world is buzzing all around us.  And once developed, it becomes a muscle that you can flex when you need to return to the totality of each moment.

So try it!

Pick a yoga pose that is normally not too challenging for you to hold.  This will vary slightly depending on your level but here are a few:

High Mountain Pose

Staff Pose

Triangle

Bridge

Downward facing dog

Now move into the pose and time yourself.  See if you can hold the pose for 5 minutes or longer.  Things will naturally start to occur in your body.  New muscles will reveal themselves to you in the form of discomfort, burning, or shaking.  Your mind and ego will want to give up, but try to move into those sensations and listen to what is really surfacing.  For me, I found out just how weak my ego really wanted me to believe I was and how strong I could be if I stopped listening to it alone.    Of course, listening to your body is paramount and if you think you are at risk of injuring yourself, stop the exercise.  But otherwise your only job is to hold the pose, breath, and observe.  We did this activity in yoga teacher training and many people experienced the first stage of pratyahara and even a kind of giddy feeling afterward.  Try it for yourself and see what opens up!

Here is an article on pratyahara by Judith Lasater

Our memories II, originally uploaded by lifeisBuddhaful.

Hello again!

I have been out and about these past few weeks and am happy to have new experiences and memories to share here. Last week I was in Honolulu, Hawaii for the 10th anniversary lantern floating ceremony. It was my first time witnessing the event in person and what a palpable, healing experience it was. Everyone there (over 40,000) sent there prayers, thoughts, and love into the 2000 lanterns and floated them on the sea to commemorate lost loved ones, ancestors, and to pray for a more peaceful world.

This past fall I lost a childhood friend, Bronwynn to breast cancer at just 24 years old. I was glad to be there this year so I could wish my friend well on the other side.  Even more moving was being surrounded by people who have each experienced loss in their lives. It reminds me of one of my favorite stories of the Buddha:

A grieving mother approaches the Buddha and begs him to resurrect her son. The Buddha agrees but on one condition, “You have done well to come here for medicine, go into the city and get a handful of mustard seed.” And then the Buddha added: “The mustard seed must be taken from a house where no one has lost a child, husband, parent, or friend.” The mother agreed and journeyed out to find that person who has not suffered from a loss, but on her journey she encountered person after person with their own personal stories of grief and suffering.

It was at this point that she realized the Buddha’s compassionate lesson. She went to the edge of a forest and tenderly laid her son’s body in a drift of wildflowers. “Little son,” she said, taking the child by the hand, “I thought that death had happened to you alone; but it is not to you alone, it is common to all people.”  There she left him and returned to the Buddha.

He asked her, “Did you get a handful of mustard seed from a house in which no one has ever lost kith or kin?”

“That, Lord, is now past and gone,” she said. “Grant me support.”

“Dear girl, the life of mortals in this world is troubled and brief and inseparable from suffering,” declared Buddha, “for there is not any means, nor will there ever be, by which those that have been born can avoid dying. All living beings are of such a nature that they must die whether they reach old age or not. “As early-ripening fruits are in danger of falling, so mortals when born are always in danger of dying. Just as the earthen vessels made by the potter end in shards, so is the life of mortals. Both young and old, both those who are foolish and those who are wise – all fall into the power of death, all are subject to death.”

From that point on, the mother entered the dharma stream, becoming the Buddha’s disciple and shortly afterward she became an Arhat [found Nirvana for herself], becoming the first woman to have attained Nirvana under the dispensation of Sakyamuni Buddha.

The lantern floating event is in every way a manifestation of that parable.  Immense healing occurs when one realizes the universality of suffering and impermanence.  I was grateful for the opportunity to take part, especially as I was able to serve as a volunteer, helping people to place their loved ones’ names onto the lanterns.  Many of them wanted to take pictures with the lanterns as well.  It was extremely moving to hear their stories, share in their loss, and assist in even the smallest way possible in their healing.  I was also grateful to have some quality time with my better half, and my dad.  I left feeling released from the residuals of a stressful winter and rejuvenated.  Many pictures to come as well!

Mahalo.

Hope you had a beautiful day!

These are my maternal, maternal great grandparents, the Lohmans.   I never met them.  I find it strange to look at photos of ancestors. I wonder what an encounter with them would be like.  What did they sound like? What were their hobbies? What were their shortcomings or fears? What would they think of today’s world?

Jonas Salk said “Our great responsibility is to be good ancestors.” Reading this, I am inspired to live more for our future generations while deepening my gratitude for the ones that came before us.  Those that’s lives brought us here to this very spot on earth, at this very moment.  Without them, there is no us.

Even still, as imperfect as this world may seem right now it can be easy to blame our ancestors for the difficulties we are experiencing such as global warming, ethnic conflict, or resource depletion.  But the reality is, we can’t pinpoint a single cause or understand completely the forces that brought on these challenges.  I don’t want to underestimate the importance of examining the lessons from history, but it is easy to overstep the line from compassionate evaluation to detached criticism. We can however, draw from the experience of our ancestors, the wisdom of our elders, and the hope for our future generations, when we make choices.

I recently heard a great decision making strategy.   Ask yourself what the impact of your decision will be in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years.  Another approach comes from the Native Americans, who used the 7 generations rule.  Every decision they made, they thought about the effect it would have on the next 7 generations.  (Incidentally, that’s actually what the green household product line “7th generation” was named for.)  I truly believe that considering the long term consequences of our decisions on an individual , local, national, and international level, is what will make us “good ancestors”.

You can think of it simply as a legacy, or if you believe in reincarnation it can go even farther.  I was recently given an analogy for life, that we are all waves riding along the sea and when we die we crash up onto the shore, but the water that comprised your wave doesn’t disappear, it simply recedes back into the ocean only to become a wave again.  Nothing ever truly dies, it just transforms.  This metaphor makes me think about how I can make my wave contribute to a positive transformation.  So that when I crash onto the shore, the ocean I recede back into is a little better then it was the last time around.  It is this kind of thinking that has me pausing to think about the long term consequences of all my decisions– from my career path, to using plastic water bottles, and going vegetarian.

What would you like to contribute to our future generations?

Anyway, I was thinking today about what a childhood hero could tell us about ourselves. Plus I am feeling a bit psychoanalytical today, so here goes….

Lucy was silly above all else.  She loved travel and dance and the latest fads. She was stubborn and proud.  She was loyal and sincere. She was self conscious and jealous. She valued her friends and neighbors.  She was a schemer and a gossip.    She was curious and inventive.

The closer I look into Lucy’s character, the better I understand why I was drawn to her as a child and ways in which some of her qualities have manifested in me.  Okay– maybe that last part is an overstatement, but perhaps its not…after all how can we effectively separate the influences on our development?   (and I did watch a heck of a lot of Lucy) What if we used our childhood heroes, real or fictional, as mirrors to highlight things about ourselves?  For example, I have a lot of creative ideas just like Lucy did, but I can also relate to her concern about what others thought of her.  I think there are some lessons to be learned in this…

Who were you childhood heroes? And in what ways could they have helped to shape who you are today?

http://29gifts.org/

and more recently I came across this site about a girl who blogs (and doodles!) about her consumption:

http://www.obsessiveconsumption.typepad.com/

And at yoga tonight, we talked about this sketch “A place for my stuff” by George Carlin (warning it is a little profane, but not bad by Carlin’s standards)

I am not ready to comment on the relationship but I will come back soon (maybe in the morning) to explain some of my thoughts.

In the meantime, please check those really cool websites out and share you viewpoints here!