I don’t miss meat. The last meat item I ate was a chicken parmesan sandwich I ordered while drunk and crying at a Lower East Side deli. Even more pathetically, it was eaten, still drunk and crying (maybe even verging on sobbing), with only the street lights flickering through my apartment. I woke up the next day to 1/3 of a chicken parmesan sandwich on my couch throw pillow, crusty from the overnight exposure. And that’s the last time I ate meat.
I think it was December 2015 when I was at Kripalu, a retreat in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. I had taken my sister there for her birthday, and we rotated from class to class, from downward dog to mapping out our intentions for the year ahead. I was so stressed out that over the course of those 2 days, I had 5 massages in addition to the regularly scheduled programming.
There was an astrologer on site, and I booked an appointment hoping she would have some answers to help guide me out of my predicament. Predicaments, I suppose. It should have been plural. Continue reading Vegetarian, verging on vegan →
Navigating what you’re going to do with your life sounds daunting. The reality is that the moves you make matter and sure, they sort of do determine the course of your life and all your future opportunities. Eh, but nothing is permanent.
Traveling is a great activity and mode for gaining perspective and finding the source of who you are. When you take yourself out of your usual role and context in the life you’ve carefully (or not so carefully) constructed, there is blankish slate for you to start to draw out some options. Traveling also makes you realize that all the minutiae you think matters doesn’t matter. Who cares who’s going to come out with the first driverless cars? Yes, these things can change our world pretty fundamentally, but I don’t know that they’re at the core of where meaning comes from. We don’t engage with that often enough. We are human beings, not just a string of technological events we create, engage in, or are excluded from that we like to label progress. All that is meaningful in that way seems relegated to our private lives rather than our collective sense of belonging. There are probably just too many of us out there. It’s hard to see that we’re all part of the same continuous blob if we zoom out far enough. Continue reading Shit might be getting real →
I’ve been waking up at 4:30am as usual. It’s dark, and my bungalow has the usual mix of rumpled clothing and electronics strewn about. I cough up a lung from the air conditioning, which has dried the entire inside of my body. It’s freezing. I thought 29 degrees celsius was supposed to be close to sweltering. Too lazy to look at the conversion to fahrenheit.
My current routine involves staring up at the ceiling until the dawn light starts to creep in and then running next door to Samma Karuna for 7:15am vipassana meditation. A guy robed in white sort of leads this class in a sort of pagoda-like structure right off the beach. By leads, I mean he sits there and hits two bells together three times at the end of the hour. A barely audible recording plays in the background where an oldish sounding Indian guy utters a few words every 20 minutes. It adds an air of authenticity about the whole situation, but otherwise, it feels somewhat unnecessary…except perhaps to bring you closer to the present. Continue reading Quiet time →
7:30pm on a Friday night, and I found myself in a room full about 40 other people planted on yoga mats with bolsters underneath their legs, eyebags mounted atop eyes, blanketed underneath the head, blanketed on top as well. Wow, this is how London rolls. Or…I guess there are people in the world who choose to spend their Friday nights this way. I mean, every night at this point might as well be Friday night for me.
I was there for a class entitled “Yoga Nidra: How to Access Your Deepest, Wisest Self.” It had seemed good at the time when I’d handed over the 25 GBP. Continue reading Mind-walking Friday night in London →
Quick update: I loosely stuck to the 3-day diet regime. By loosely, I mean that I stuck to it for breakfast. I still lost 4 pounds in 3 days and have kept it off!
Sometimes in life, you get the same advice over and over again and then one day, it really does sink in.
When I had my corporate job and was jetting off every week and managing a busy personal and social calendar on top of that, I was in a constant stress loop. I felt like Jack Bauer rushing to beat the clock. Kind of like this guy. Now, there are always crazy busy periods in life, and if you are doing things you really love and enjoy, by all means. If years and years go by…well.
We as a society (maybe I mean major U.S. metropolises) have gotten addicted to being busy. It is a badge of honor to be stressed. Heroic to pile things on and still have it together. I used to feel this way as well. I ended up looking like shit, feeling like shit, and staying up late at night sweating fearing there was no escape and yet hoping I could just unlock a clue that would lead me to real happiness. Continue reading Breathing in London →
Two days ago, I started this 3-day military diet. It wasn’t a gesture of unkindness to myself. Rather, I wanted to bring some of a meal plan discipline to my life. All of this was further spurred on curiosity. Can you really lose 10 pounds in 3 days while eating hot dogs and ice cream? F’real???
On day 2, I woke up at 5am and had breakfast at 6am, which made the prospect of a long day of calorie-restricting pretty daunting. I told myself to try to stick to it, but by the end of the day, I was exhausted, dizzy, and cranky. It just wasn’t worth it. My happiness was not a good trade-off for this diet, so I gave in and ate until I felt somewhat normal. I still lost 0.9 pounds. 3.6 pounds total in 2 days is not bad! Continue reading 3-day military diet: Day 2 →
My time in London is about being alone, diet, exercise, thinking (the right way), and wellbeing. One of my goals is to lose some of the weight I’ve gained over the past 2 years.
A while ago, I was researching diets and came across the 3-day military diet. Apparently, it’s all the rage on Pinterest and other social media sites. The idea is that this calorie-restrictive diet allows you to lose weight quickly while continuing to eat a balance of your favorite foods like ice cream. There is a set meal plan for the first 3 days, and during the following 4 days, you eat anything but stick to 1500 calories per day.
On the diet front, I completed day 1 of the military diet yesterday. I lost 2.7 pounds on day 1! A lot of that is water, I’m sure, but potentially not all of it.
Continue reading 3-day military diet: Day 1 →
I took my first yoga class at Equinox my freshman year of college, and I have been a regular practitioner since 2004 (ok, with a pretty long gap in the middle somewhere). There are few things I feel that I absolutely need as part of my daily and weekly routine. The only three I can really think of are coffee, yoga, and writing. Meditation is in there somewhere, but I can definitely fall off of that sometimes. Unless the long bouts of catatonic staring at the wall count.
Kundalini is a unique form of yoga, known as the yoga of awareness.
“The primary objective [of Kundalini] is to awaken the full potential of human awareness in each individual; that is, recognize our awareness, refine that awareness, and expand that awareness to our unlimited Self. Clear any inner duality, create the power to deeply listen, cultivate inner stillness, and prosper and deliver excellence in all that we do.” –Kundalini Research Institute
Continue reading Kundalini, the yoga of awareness →
I started a meditation practice a few years ago, and it has been life-changing. In this transitional period of my life, especially when I’ve felt myself thrashing and resisting, I look to the practice and tenets of meditation to open up the mental space needed to find clarity and my own truths. I highly recommend the app Calm. It has tons of different programs and guided meditations focusing on themes like gratitude, creativity, sleep, etc. You can set the length of the meditation – anywhere from 2 minutes on up.
For me, this period in NYC is really about concretely planning some next steps and learning how to not be crazy in the craziest city in the world.
Sometimes you need to raze everything to the ground and build it all back up to know what is real. Creative destruction.
On Christmas Day last year, I started a loving-kindness meditation practice. My sister’s birthday is the day after Christmas, and I took her to Kripalu retreat in the Berkshires for a sister Christmas/birthday mindfulness getaway. Our days were spent finally relaxing and feeling our own tiredness and attending sessions on yoga, meditation, and life reflection sessions.
The loving-kindness meditation was the focus of one of these sessions. The idea behind this type of meditation is that it helps you foster feelings of compassion, acceptance, and love towards all beings. For me personally, this form of meditation helped me become more open, less cold, less judgmental – and generally happier and more hopeful. Even when it came to the most horrific people in my life, I found a space within myself to wish them the best because as much as they were torturing me, they were certainly torturing themselves 10x over (er, probably even more!). I had escape from them, but they had no escape from themselves. Shudder! I hoped they could find peace (and leave the rest of us the hell alone!). Continue reading Loving-kindness practice →
My musings on life, travel, and (I suppose eventually) work. Just trying to balance left and right brain, the urge to do vs. be. Easy stuff.
