primal scream

this is about your animal inside.

do you feel her, him, them, growling?
do you feel them calling?

i feel her. she's present, she's awakening, she's alive and she's raw.

there are instincts, biological, primal instincts that we repress.
i call you to answer them, to listen, to respond, to act upon them.

you are a creature, you are an animal, you are a bear a wolf a hawk a turtle a dog, you are these things and you should not forget that. you are earth, you are sky, you are dirt.

touch your skin and crawl your fingers up your arms, recognize your muscles and your tendons, your joints and your hair, your human.


everything that really matters is ensconced in your skin, your breath, your heartbeat. the breath of the world, my friend, of the literal and physical reality that we are a part of, no questions asked. you have no choice in the matter, you are here. can you leave?

lots of people leave. leave their bodies, leave their minds, leave their earth, leave their wind and their smoke and their pain. we have many tools for the leaving, the escaping, the distracting. we are incredibly, terrifying adept at the process of removing ourselves from our reality, from our insignificance.

from our truth.

there is no denying your flesh.

set your hair on fire, smell it burning. catch a fish from the stream and render its skin with your teeth. be freezing cold and burning hot, be taxed in every sense and see what else you can find. you have more left than you ever knew you did and, of course, it is always and never enough.

we can play our games and trade our papers and the greatest of any of us can be taken out by a rattlesnake just the same.

pay attention to your inner animal, she's talking to you and she has a few things she would like to say. are you capable of listening?

engage

This is what I have to say to women, to men, to anyone with a cognitive process, a brain, arms and legs and heart: Use them. All of them. Use them to their full potential, to your best ability, all the time. Use them for good and use them for each other, use them to encourage more laughter in the world, more empathy, more honesty and more life. 

We, as a human species, have a responsibility to turn on our brains, to tune in our bodies, to strengthen our hearts and hands and minds to prepare for a new reality. So many things we have learned, through our nearly catastrophic failures as a species in the past, we have then repeated. From the grand horror of war to the ever present experience of heartbreak,  with every lesson comes a period of remembrance and then an episode of forgetfulness. We have to re-learn our past mistakes with each new generation, sometimes seemingly with each new experience, forever participating in a crazy cycle that has run us to a point of near destruction. 

Your mind, your body and your lifetime upon this planet--those are the greatest tools you, you as one individual person in an unfathomably vast sea of people, you as one tiny, insignificant blip on the timespan of the planet upon which we walk, those are the tools that you were given. And we continue, again and again, to mis-use them, to depress them with fears and social anxieties and bad parenting and astoundingly trivial monetary disputes. Especially distressing is the degree to which women depress their potential with superficial, vain concerns--it is time to accept as fact the experience that when your body, your very vessel of life, is treated with respect and care, it is beautiful. When it is fed properly, exercised, watered and showered with positive attention it will be beautiful, you will be beautiful.  I am assuming that by reading this article you are affluent and lucky enough to be able to provide yourself most of these amenities if you so should decide--America can be an incredibly bountiful land and we are very, very lucky to be living in it. 

Our physical appearance, however, takes up far too much of our time, too much of our brainpower. So many women i know spend a large portion of their young adult to near adult lives nearly obsessing over this image of self--I know I did. An experienced bulimic, I can speak quite frankly on the ills and truths of consuming one's mind with shallow self-loathing. It is a waste of time, an insult to the future and a depression on the past to call yourself anything but beautiful. It is also a feat of incredible bravery to stare into a mirror and speak the words, "lovely."

We have to find a way to expedite our abilities to retain the knowledge of the lessons we learn in our lifetime. With the loss of oral history and family sense, and the amazing disconnects created by our increasingly digitized world, we can learn a lesson and then forget it faster than ever before. Consider the last time you were physically injured. Spend a few seconds dwelling on the sensations of pain, the frustration, the fear. Don't linger too long, but stay long enough to recall the promises that those emotions and physical reactions generated in your person. Promises like, "I will never take my _____ for granted again," or , "from now on, I will avoid leaping before i look," or, "I will pay attention when I am hammering." Easy enough, but how long did those passionate promises last? That freight train of disaster can, of course and with astounding ease, be applied to our relationships--if we aren't obsessing over our looks we are certainly gossiping about our relationships, creating patterns to our story that we do not even recognize and may never escape. 

Unless, we heighten. We take the time and do the work to create patterns of a new design. The brain is a function of patterning--a series of habitual and organic thoughts slung together through a series of incredible feats of anatomical genius. All those neurons firing and muscles twitches and mitochondria mitochrondria-ing just to bring us back around again, full circle? Lets progress from that. The patterns that create your reality can be uplifting or cause you pain--it really is a matter of your perception, of your intention and attitude.

Why are we not accepting, at birth, that we are worthy.  We should be able to rest in that we will have water to drink and food to eat. That we are valuable and possess a certain skill, an individual purpose that is exceptional in its uniqueness. Instead, we flail around for a couple decades, learning all our lessons of humanity that are constantly offered to you on a silver platter by those a few more decades ahead of you that we generally shun in the name of personal experience. And so many of us never get out. So many of us have battles to fight that are so much larger than any of this--abuse, violence, starvation, at least, when they are personally experienced they create a hell-hole of brain patterning that takes an incredible amount of focus and drive to pull oneself out of.

But we see it, everyday. I see it, in myself, everyday. I recognize my strength and admire my insanity. I truly believe that if each one of us, if every person who read this article, starting behaving in a manner where they would acertain to me that their mind and body and heart were engaged, fully, all the time, toward the effort of betterment of the world, in every direction--ecologically, economically, emotionally, physcially---i believe the ripples would spread and the laughter could be heard from the moon. 

We have a responsibility to remember. We have a duty to tune in, to pay attention and to recognize, to evolve within ourselves and create lasting changes that set the world up for greater success. 

I do not want to ruin this planet with sadness, fear and pain. It is an overwhelmingly exquisite place well worth the effort of preservation. 

breaking my knees for my own good

for a day, pretend as though you dont have functioning knees. i'm serious, its an incredible experience. everything changes--the way you move, the things you need, the emotions you feel. i imagine its the same with any major injury.

but, first, just standing. standing still becomes an entirely new experience. yoga becomes real. my whole life i have been standing with immense pressure on my joints--now, when i experience what it feels like to my swollen, fucked up knees to stand with my shoulders back, my lower back and core muscles engaged, my knees straight and facing forward, chin up, heart open----and it took me a year and a half of intensive yoga practice to realize how these simple, simple motions affect your entire life---now i can feel it.

try to do an entire yoga practice without putting pressure on your knees. if you can avoid this, you will experience engagement in other areas of your body like you have not yet considered. by imagining yourself light from the inside, lifting from your core and forgetting about gravity, you can experience lightness on your entire body. and your knees, your chins, your ankles, your heart...they will all appreciate the relief. relief that you've always been able to provide yourself--ways to make yourself feel better, by yourself and in your own skin. you do have to live in your body, after all. its rather nice if you can enjoy being there.

this has to be the right way to do this---all these lessons from this knee surgery have been incredibly powerful, rich and deep. to slow down, to focus, to love myself. i have been running a million miles an hour away from many things and toward no certainty.

i laugh at myself so much these days. granted, i have only had one week of immobility but, with my intense and rather overworked personality it has felt like a month. rather like the one time i went to jail for three days. that was moooore of enough of THAT shit, for me.

here's what i'm saying.

the things that im learning are not concepts that should be new to me, or anyone. these are the proper ways to live--paying attention to your body, listening to it, feeding it properly and nourishing it. standing up straight. being calm in your mind. doing work that makes you feel fulfilled as a human. letting the people you love in life know that you appreciate them and allowing them to appreciate you back. finding your focus and approaching your aloneness. laughing at yourself. sleeping. sleeping a lot. taking pain medication and putting in earplugs and submitting yourself to total darkness for 13 hours kind of sleeping.

nobody has time for this shit! we're all running around. and i most certainly plan to continue running but, the next time, those things will be a bit more focused, more calm, and more extreme in their allotments of joy and real expression. it is possible to take care of yourself properly on a very basic, daily level--no matter what you do or where you are--and, the best part of all of it is, that you will feel better, all the time. you will feel stronger, more beautiful and more interesting, just by treating yourself properly. i always thought the message of modern yoga, much like modern anything, is much too based in the visual, the appearance. my message for yoga is that yoga, much like life, should be based on acknowledging how it makes you feel, first, before acknowledging how it makes you look. and, fortunately and intriguingly, they are entirely symbiotic concepts. you feel better, you look better. they also cannot survive without the other, they're entire unsustainable as independent thoughts.

so far, there have been parades and antique air shows outside my window. i've been visited by my friends and family and had beautiful conversations with the ones i love who have involved lives somewhere else. i've had offers of financial support through art from a completely astounding amount of individuals from far and wide and i even have a handsome sound guy who comes by and fixes my speakers and sets them up for the perfect audio experience at my ear, couch-high, level.

the splendor of being loved is a bit too much, sometimes. there are so many out there who need love, crave it, search for it. and you gotta give it to yourself, first. what a doozy.