Triad of Truth

I felt the pull of the ocean today when I awoke. I could tell from behind the curtain that it was a balmy morning, just like the ones on my first mornings in this place two years ago. Back then, I walked to the beach every morning with a cup of tea to bask in the beauty of my new home and let the salty air cleanse my head and sinuses. That's what I did this morning. I swore when I moved here I would never take my proximity to the ocean for granted...that I would visit her every day. Of course, one only makes promises like that when they know how easy it is to slip away from the novelty of a thing.

But this morning it was novel again and that familiar scent of the sea and the balmy air took me back to a sense of gratitude and awe. And now, this place is truly my home. In fact, it is the true home I began my search for when I awoke in 2011. In these two years, I have begun a journey toward my true purpose and even found true love. This triad of truth is the outline of an intention I set back in 2011 when I began this journey...this journey to truth and authenticity.

I sat on a large piece of driftwood this morning, drinking my tea and breathing deeply the ocean air. I thought back to the beginning of my time here. I worked hard; my body was so tired from acclimating to standing occupations. But I was creative and liberated and living in that space of full appreciation for all that it took to get me to this place.

I have come so far and built so much since then. Two years have gone by in the blink of an eye. It is scary when everything you've been working and wishing for begins to become your reality. It certainly hasn't been easy and, it's sort of unbelievable sometimes. I have moments of fear, wondering when the bottom is going to drop out of this dream come truth. But when you build a house with a strong foundation, the bones of your home will be strong...I should rest easy, knowing that what I have built here has the most solid foundation and that the bones of my existence hold the strength of my truth.

On Surfing and Falling Hard

I very recently took up surfing. It's hard to call what I do now surfing exactly, but I'm learning and working up to a legitimate ride. Anyway, I'm hooked, and yesterday I was thinking a lot about why I've fallen for it so hard.

Having an intimate relationship with the ocean makes me feel powerful. And it's not just about being in the water, but being a part of the culture. It's as much about carrying my board and my gear through the forest path to a cold ocean with massive rocks lining the shore as it is sitting on the outside, straddling my board and riding over the waves, watching as they roll up underneath me. But the other reason I love it, is because it plays with my hold on control. Once I turn around to position myself to take a wave, I get to release that control. Sure, I can learn to balance and position myself on the board, but when that wave comes crashing down on me, knocking me off, all I can do is squeeze my eyes shut, hold my breath, cover my head and roll around in the white water until the wave is done with me and spits me out. That moment under water, in the swirl and chaos of the wave, is scary, but beautifully and completely out of my control. When I come up, I am tired and breathless, but not from fighting the wave...from the adrenaline rush of my surrender.

I make my way back through that chaos over and over again to experience the power and the release. I walk onto the beach, feeling breathless and exhausted, proud and strong like I won a battle, maybe lost it even. And it's not the battle against the waves I'm talking about, it's a battle against surrender and my ego mind. In that moment when I'm in the fetal position, rolling through the crashing wave, I'm not thinking about power or control or even survival. I'm just there, completely and utterly present in a moment, alone and alive. And when I come up for air, nothing around me has changed. The other surfers are still in the line-up, their backs to me watching for formed waves and waiting for their own ride to whatever it is they feel compelled by out there. I imagine it will be different at each stage of the game as my skills develop. Maybe one day I'll love the ride on top more than I crave the loss of control at the bottom. In the meantime, I'll keep increasing my strength, gifted to me by the sea with a wink and a nod, a lover playing hard to get and impossible to tame. Who, like me, fights aggressively and passionately to come into the full presence of its power. 

Car Alarms, Chaos and Meditation

Tonight a car alarm started going off as I attempted to sit in meditation at my studio. Surprisingly, it wasn't the alarm, but the silence in the aftermath of the alarm that was deafening. It seems my mind is in chaos with alarm after alarm going off these days. Alert! There's not enough money! Alert! There's not enough time! Alert! That man is wrong for you! Alert! Don't let that one go!

I've been in survival mode for so long that it feels like there will never be peace. Like there will never be ease or enough. My brain seems to weigh 200 lbs and my poor heart is weightless and neglected.

I have recently strayed from my personal yoga practice and gone to great lengths to stop the noise in my mind; replacing it with the meaningless drone and numbed out distraction of TV, which I'm watching on my little computer for the first time in 3 years. I'm exhausted and all of my endeavors seem increasingly difficult; sometimes even futile.

And yet, oddly, people keep thanking me. My students keep coming to my classes and one of them on his way out the other day, thanked me over and over and then asked me if there was anything he could do for me. My students say things like, "thank you for everything you do" and "I'm so thankful that you chose to come here." Community leaders and officials have noticed my enthusiasm to make a difference and make it a point to encourage me, asking that I please continue my efforts.

Even though I am in personal chaos, what I'm doing, what I'm trying to accomplish... is working. It's grown in that gradual and slow way that only something you're so close to can without your noticing it. But it's building and growing and the spiritual community I set out to create has a little baby backbone where there was once thin air. And somehow, in between making sure there were money and plans and paint on the walls and the right schedule of classes....I became a teacher. I became their teacher and they became mine. If all was lost tomorrow, I would be left here, miles ahead of where I started with more knowledge in the last six months that I would have imagined possible in a lifetime.

Yesterday I read this Deepak Chopra quote to my students:

     "Happiness is much more than an aspiration. Happiness is our true nature, our very source of being. When we expand our awareness within, we discover that there is no limit to our happiness. And as we grow in happiness, we can't help but share that happiness with those around us."

I explained to my class after I read the quote, what it meant to me. That we always carry our happiness within us, wherever we go, no matter what we encounter along the journey. Sometimes people or experiences come along to cloud that happiness, but they can never take it away because it is a part of our being, it is our source. It is up to us to remember, that when it gets cloudy, our happiness is still there. Even that there are endless opportunities to un-cloud that happiness if we can learn to take the responsibility of reaching out and grabbing them.

I'm happier in this challenging and meaningful chaos that I have been in my entire adult life. I've been carrying that happiness with me all along and it's been cloudy lately, but it's there and it's bright. As hard as it is, I need to make the effort to reach out for the opportunities to expand that happiness and reject any that detract from it.

Becoming the Heroine of a New Story

Tonight I went down to the sea. Night waves are so moving and standing before them, I can bring up every past experience I've had in their presence. When something is truly moving, you keep it with you. When you emotionally connect with something, you retain the memory as a vivid picture. I stood there in the sand tonight watching movies of kisses and fires on the beach, long walks and deep discussions. It's a somewhat rare thing to find yourself on the beach at night and maybe that's why it feels so powerful. But tonight, I was alone just pulling up pictures of the past and walking slowly in shoes not conducive to a spontaneous shuffle through the sand. But it was ok. Everything was ok. Even the stuff that isn't ok, was ok. I found an abandoned beach fire and sat on the warm ring of rocks surrounding it. I breathed in the scent of burning wood as it mixed with the fresh air and attempted to empty my mind of the relentless plans and logic going on up there. I tuned into the sounds of the waves, the crackling fire and I could hear the light wind through the tunnel of my down hood. I realized sitting there by the fire on the beach, that I needed a new story. In that rare state of nature-induced neutrality, I realized I have become a strong and compelling character in a past and irrelevant story. That was a scary thought, but more than scary, it was liberating. Guess what you get to do when you find out you're a heroine in the wrong story? You get to write a new one. You get to start from scratch and begin with chapter one.

Travels to India to Become a Yoga Instructor

Every year my mom puts together this really adorable, captioned photo montage to send to everyone in the phone book with her Christmas cards. She does a really nice job with it and includes pictures of all the kids, grandkids and disgustingly happy pictures of her and her husband. I know I'm not the only one who loves getting them.

I received mine in the mail today and started at the top with photos of all five grandkids belonging to my brother and step brothers. They’re all so smiley and sweet, it hurts I miss them so much. There are great snaps of their growing families and new houses, family members visiting mom out in Utah and of her husband's softball team. There are captions with all the photos: 

“Martin and family hiking the Provo River.”

“Jan's dad visits in Utah.”

“Mike still playing softball.”

“Bruno and Beth's new home.”

I get to my own year in review which takes up the real estate at the bottom left corner with a photo of Cape Kiwanda in Oregon and a caption that says:

“Seaside, OR.”

There’s also a stunning (if I do say so) photo of me taken by my photographer friend Camilla and a picture of me meditating by an ocean in India. My caption reads: 

“Kristin moves to Seaside, Oregon and travels to India to become a yoga instructor." 

Aside from the photo of Cape Kiwanda, a very accurate caption.

"Moves to Seaside, Oregon and travels to India to become a yoga instructor."

I posted the montage on the refrigerator and kept catching myself sneaking glances at my corner while I made dinner.

“Moves to Seaside, Oregon and travels to India to become a yoga instructor."

Grandpa will be so proud. Although completely true, in my mind, the caption is going a little more like this,

“Gives up a successful, lucrative, decade long career in LA, sells her car, her home and most of her worldly possessions, moves to a small town in the middle of nowhere, bartends at the beach, works at Rite Aid, quits Rite Aid, takes an assistant job at a (very) local magazine and spends more time on the bar stool at the local pub than on her couch. Oh, and went to India for a few weeks to learn to be a yoga teacher.” 

I guess my mom would have made a great editor. This is also why I don't send Christmas card letters.

So I stood there in the kitchen contemplating my caption as I stirred and stirred my cream of wild rice and mushroom soup. I’d had a wonderful morning yoga class full of inspiring students, a fantastic few days at the magazine, was making an awesome dinner, listening to my favorite music and feeling all-around content and happy with my life. Meanwhile, I kept repeating the caption over and over again in my head. Not in a judgmental way, just listening to how it sounded, this description of my new life; the way all my mom's friends and our family will see it on the bottom left corner.

“Kristin moves to Seaside, Oregon and travels to India to become a yoga instructor."

And actually, I'm quite proud. I'm satisfied that's the way I'll come off to them this year. Because I worked damn hard to get here; it's been the hardest and most rewarding thing I've ever done to be here on the Oregon coast, passing my days and making my meager living as a writer and yoga teacher. In fact, maybe I'll hire my mom as my editor....

My Big Thanksgiving Get

I performed my sun salutations this Thanksgiving morning to a radiant sun beaming in through the skylights in my loft. My loft is a space I have designated for my writing and yoga and I adore that room. I had a beautiful two hour yoga practice, worked on my business plan, did some writing and then went for a walk on the beach. The wild winter waves came to my feet and I breathed the cool air deep into my lungs. It was early and my holiday, in this moment and the ones since I'd woken up, was all about me. I felt nothing but gratitude and freedom.

As the minutes ticked away though, so did that sense of freedom. I allowed myself that freedom all the way up to the wire when I threw together some food, grated my finger instead of a carrot and began to melt down. My happy tank was full until I remembered it was not a day off, it was Thanksgiving. I had places to be and people expecting me. Because Thanksgiving is about being around family and friends and eating too much food right? That's what I was about to do, so why was I dreading it? What is wrong with me? I JUST WANT TO STAY HOME AND CONTINUE TO BE HAPPY! Ugh, I'm such a grinch.

I'm getting pretty good at seeing when I'm not being true to myself. In yoga, they call this right knowledge versus wrong knowledge. I've begun to know when I should say, "no, that beer is the one past my limit" or "no, I can't come today because I need some alone time". I can actually hear my inner witness and she is on point. What I haven't learned to do, is listen. I hear that voice very clearly, but I'm not listening to it. I'm not allowing it to be the command center. I'm still letting ego mind keep his job even though inner knowing is obviously the better hire. I hear it say, "that beer is one too many" and drink it anyway. Today, I heard it say, "you're having such a great day owning your freedom, stick with it and don't go to the party" and I went anyway. I suppose with this realization it's time to fire the ego from day to day operations. It's time to let the infinitely smarter wisdom lead.

It took me 33 years to realize Thanksgiving is not my favorite holiday. It's not unrealistic then, that it's taken me that long to hear this powerful voice inside. I'm thankful today because I am aware and conscious of it now and it won't take me another 33 years to listen and live from that center. And next year, maybe I'll go go to the islands for Thanksgiving and have a yoga party. Who's with me?!

Starting Over 10 Years Later

This morning I had a random thought of myself on a set 10 years ago. I had just found my footing among a group of production assistants and was finally starting to earn my keep at the bottom of the ladder. There was a moment, coiling cables for the electric department, when I suddenly felt happy and proud and content. I was learning and I was appreciated and I knew and was told I was doing a great job. A few months later I would be running a 10 million dollar show. I would have tripled my income. And I would continue to rise and make more money and have more and more success. But in that moment, on the side of that house for the show "Who Wants to Marry my Dad", I KNEW I was on the path. I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

Exactly 10 years later, here I am at the bottom of a different ladder, making exactly the same salary as I was on that day on the side of that house coiling cable with the electrics. I'm at the beginning, but I know and am told consistently that I am doing a good job. I am building a resume and a body of work. Perhaps in a few months, I will have tripled my salary and made a significant career move, but this time, in a field I am passionate about. There will be even more room for growth and abundance this time, because it is a path paved in purpose and passion. I'm doing something I am innately good at and love doing instead of something I have fallen into by accident because of my ability to achieve.

Here I go, with the realization and the knowing from experience that it can happen. That things can change overnight and with one phone call or one email or one boss having a thought that leads to one decision. There is infinite potential in every single moment for abundance and for success.

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