Namaste

I am happy to report that I have made it safe and sound to India. I arrived here in Trivandrum last night around 10pm.  Fully rested from 2 wonderfully luxurious days in Singapore, I got up early this morning and went exploring a bit.  

Nothing is more exciting to me than being in a foreign place for the first time. The sites, the sounds, the smells, the energy. It’s all so wonderful. It kind of takes me back to my days in West Africa, especially this heat. WOW!

My first task this morning was to find an ATM and to get some money.  So I left the hotel and headed in the direction of Mahatma Gandhi Boulevard (great name for a street by the way). Well, the good news is that there were a plethora of banks.  The not so good news is that they were all on the other side of the street. Those of you who have been to India probably understand the challenge of the situation. But for the benefit of those of you who haven’t, let me tell you, it’s a daunting task.  There are no traffic lights and no real crosswalks.  So I just watched how other people managed to do it and eventually worked up my nerve.  I sandwiched myself in between 4 or 5 of my new best friends, and whew…success.  Back home I’m so fanatical about properly crossing the street.  Here, not so much.  

I’m sure there will be many more opportunities to learn to do things another way.   I look forward to them all. Tomorrow I leave for Neyyar Dam to begin my yoga training.  I am so happy and so fortunate to have this time to take my practice to a deeper level.   There’s something very powerful about separating oneself from the world of distraction and turning the focus inward.  Yoga has been such a grounding, powerful force in my life over the past few years.  I think Shwami Vishnu Devananda describes it perfectly when he says, “Yoga balances, harmonizes, purifies and strengthens the body, mind, and soul of the practitioner. It shows the way to perfect health, perfect mind control, and perfect peace within one’s self, the world, nature, and God.”

Thank you most especially Colleen Garrity, Shawn Bracha, Clay Kyle, and Peter Barnett, my yoga teachers over the past few years, for helping me to get here.   I am eternally grateful for your kindness, your encouragement and your example.  I aspire to follow in your teaching footsteps.    

OM SHANTI

Dreams in Motion: Part 2

"Yoga is a life of self discipline, built on the tenets of simple living and high thinking."

Swami Vishnu-Devananda

Having had some time over the past 2 weeks to reflect on my time in Paris as well as this entire year, I’m so happy, grateful, and humbled to have had such a year full of incredibly rich experiences:  Tony Robbins Unleash the Power Within weekend, which actually jump started this adventure; 12 weeks of Integrative Nutritional Counseling; Meditation Specialist Certification course; teaching meditation/relaxation classes; Yoga, Yoga, and more Yoga; fun trips to England, New York, and Hawaii; helping start the Southern California chapter of Gay and Lesbian Employees and Allies at Merck(GLEAM); Orange County AIDS walk; getting  laid off from my job; continuing to work  as a contractor after that, benefiting from 2 salaries; quitting that job; renting out my condo; attending language school in Paris; and finally, off to India.  What a year!   And to have spent it surrounded by so much love and so many wonderful friends, well…in my opinion, no one could be more fortunate.  

I leave for Singapore December 26^th for 2 days, then to Trivandrum, India until December 31^st, when I will go to the Sivananda Ashram in Neyyar Dam for a month of  Yoga Teacher Training.  After that, I’m not sure.  I have the option of attending the advanced training starting February 8^th, but I’ll wait awhile before making that decision. I’m also not sure what kind of internet connection I will have, nor how often I will be able to blog.   I will keep you posted. 

In the mean time, “bonnes fêtes de fin d’année" (Happy New Year).  And may 2009 be a year filled with “simple living and high thinking.”

 

 

 

Merci et au revoir

As I begin to pack my things and head back to LA, I wanted to take some time to express my gratitude to all those who made this experience so wonderful and so rich. 

First of all, to Valerie, Julie, Claire, Thierry, the teachers at OISE language school. Thank you for your professionalism, expertise, patience, encouragement, and humor. For knowing when to push and pull, and when to back off and support.  A delicate balance no doubt, but one you accomplished masterfully.

To Claire, the office administrator. Thank you for speaking so fast, and forcing me to improve my listening comprehension.   And for  your stories, especially the one about the mouse and the omelet. 

To Lucy, my host.  Thank you for your warmth and hospitality. It was such an honor to get to know you, your family and your friends.  They are truly a reflection of you and your many passions.  Thank you for that amazing Thanksgiving dinner. It was most definitely one of the highlights of my stay. I can’t remember the last time I dined with someone for 6 hours. Thank you.

To Azziz, my dear Morrocan friend.  Thanks for helping me to feel more secure in the way I speak.  For your warmth,  your kindness, and for introducing me to Morroccan cuisine.

To Yannick, the only person I knew in Paris before I arrived. Thanks for your encouragement and support the past month.  It meant a lot coming from such a distinguished Parisien as yourself.   Merci beaucoup, mon cher ami.  And thank you for inviting me to dinner with your friends on my last night in Paris.  I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect ending to my time here.  Je t’adore!

To the servers at The Gai Moulin restaurant.  Thanks for helping with my homework, for making me laugh, and for the best food in Paris.

To Veronique at the Montparnasse Boulangerie I went to every week day.  Thank you for your  musical accent, and  for the wonderful desserts and sandwiches. I don’t think there can be a better fondue or pain au chocolate in all of  Paris. How I didn’t gain any weight over the past month is a mystery to me.

Finally, to everyone with whom I spoke.  Thanks for listening and teaching me how to better speak this beautiful language.  In spite of the stereotypical view that the French are cold and stuffy, I found everyone to be quite warm and most welcoming. 

Merci Paris, 

Je t'aime.

A bientot.

PS. Thanks for all your emails of support during this first leg of my journey.  I’m sorry I haven’t been able to respond to them all yet, but I promise to catch up with my correspondence next week.

 

Incroyable!

I can’t believe how quickly the time is passing here.  Only one more week to go before I head back to LA, yet it seems that I just arrived.  Wow, what a ride!   I’m just trying to savor every moment and enjoy the beauty that unfolds before me every day.   Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be enough adjectives in either language to describe the magnificence of this city.  I mean how many times can you say  incroyabe, extraordinaire, magnifique, formidable, genial, chouette, without sounding so ordinary. Therefore, if everything is so, all of the above, is there anything that is actually just ordinary?

OK, there are a few things that are, hmm... shall we say, tedious. For example, the metro at 830am Monday through Friday. Oh la la! It reminds me of my days in the Ivory Coast except that it doesn't smell as bad, and it's definitely not as hot.  Boarding the metro during rush hour is neither for the light hearted nor the shy.  It's more like push, push, push, until your face is smashed up against the window.  Then you try and hold on to the rail, but  there are about 5 people between you and the end of your arm.  So you just stand there. The train moves and you realize that you don't even need to hold on because no one can move anyway.  We all support each other during the bumpy ride, and no one falls. Kind of a metaphor for life, I suppose.  Except that sometimes it's a bit challenging to breath, but "le voila" another metaphor.  It's quite a ride, literally. Then I have to change trains and do it all over again. By the time I get to class, I feel like I've been in some kind of school yard brawl.  Ah, but I'll take it over the 405 any day. Well, most days.

Then there's the torture, I mean, joy of French grammar, comprehension, news reviews, and constantly being corrected for tense misuse.  It's almost like starting over.  All my bad habits are being purged, a purification of sorts.  And you know how much fun that is.  But hopefully with a cleaner palate, I'll be able to express myself a little more clearly in the near future. 

It's been an awesome week, but I don' think I've been this exhausted in years. Perhaps it has something to do with going to a 5 1/2 hour opera after class on Tuesday.  Wagner's Tristan et Isolde with Bill Viola video.  It was an, I don't have the adjective to describe, experience.

Finally, I've attached a few pictures from my day at the Rodin Museum yesterday. Also one of those...experiences. Enjoy.

My first week of school

Saturday November 15th

They say Paris is for lovers.  I would argue that is simply more for the passionate.  Seems a bit more inclusive to me. When I woke up this morning and considered how to spend my day, I could think of nothing more amusing than taking a walk in the park. No park in particular. I simply wanted to sit somewhere beautiful and reflect on my amazing good fortune. So here I sit in the Luxemburg  Gardens on a pleasant, typically grey, November day in Paris, writing this blog entry.

I mean, really, who gets to do something like this?  “Whose life is this anyway?” I ask myself this almost everyday.  Even when I had a mini melt down earlier in the week, I was able to take a walk down the Seine and have a good cry.  Kind of puts things in perspective doesn’t it? Talking a walk down the Seine? Come on!  

The origin of the meltdown you ask—language woes.  I’m not exactly sure why I thought going from speaking French  1 hour a week to 12 hours a day was going to be an easy transition.  But in fact, that unmet expectation seems to have been the source of my frustration.  I thought my head was going to spontaneously combust and fly off my shoulders.  Holy #@$!!!

Anyway, thanks to my amazing professors/therapists, I was able to loosen up a bit and get back to work.  It seems that my expectations for improved fluency have been about as high as those of the world toward Obama.   Things are much better now that I’m starting to practice what I preach—breathing.

As for the language, suffice it to say that I understand much more than I am able to speak. It doesn’t matter though, because I speak to almost anyone who will listen.  I even make up things so that I can talk to people. But my new favorite thing to do is that when I learn a new way of saying something, I interject it into a conversation as much as possible. Kind of like Eddie Izzard in his “Dressed to Kill “act.  For instance, I was so proud to have successfully told Lucy, my hostess extroidinaire, that I couldn’t figure out how to work the coffee machine.  So I tell everyone I can,” Je n’ai pas reussi faire fonctionner la machine du café ce matin. “  You’d be amazed at how relevant to the conversation I can make that phrase.

Alas, French is like a symphony to me. I just love how it sounds, how it flows, how it moves me. Even how at times, frustrates me.   It’s truly a language of passion.

 

Paris at last

“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast. “  Ernest Hemmingway(1899-1961)

It’s hard to believe I’ve only spent a week in Paris thus far.  Truly, it has been a feast. A feast of cuisine, language, culture, history, and even spirituality.    I actually managed to find the Sivananda Yoga Center here, which is the tradition with which I will do my teacher training in India.  Talk about an exercise in mindfulness. I’ve only taken a few classes in this tradition back in LA, and now I’m taking them in French!  So between trying to remember the sequence of poses, deciphering the vocabulary, and focusing on my breath, I was starting to feel little bit like Lucy and the conveyer belt of chocolates.  

Feeling overwhelmed, as I’ve recently learned,  is only a  temporary feeling.  It’s actually a mind.  A mind that can be controlled with patience and mindfulness.  So my challenge this week has not been to not get frustrated, since that is inevitable when trying to adapt to all things new.  Rather, to observe the feeling as it arises and attempt to patiently accept it.   Accept that I am in a foreign country, adapting to its culture.  So spending 40 minutes trying to figure out how to make a phone call, getting lost in the rain looking for my school, after asking 3 different people for directions, and just getting lost in general, are merely opportunities to practice the mindfulness of patient acceptance.   Not yet quite there, ;).

The pictures I’ve attached are from my day at Sacre Coeur and Montmarte, the highest point in Paris.  It was a spectacular fall day, as is today.  Beautiful blue sky,  50 degrees, surrounded by the smell of pastries and the sounds of language.  As the French say, “rien ne me rend plus heureux”. Nothing makes me happier.

 

Attachment to Outcome

Interesting that I would think that the journey would not begin until I leave LA.    Quite the contrary.  I have found myself over the past week frantically trying to get everything done that I think needs to be done before I leave.   Primarily getting my house ready for the folks who will be staying here while I’m gone. However, the task that seems to be causing me the most distress is yoga. Yoga??  Isn’t that suppose to do just the opposite.  Well, normally yes.  But after going to a few sessions at the Sivananda Center(the tradition with which I’m doing my teacher training  in India) , I started to feel panicky. The style of yoga is different from anything I’ve ever done. Lots of breathing(like 20 minutes worth), chanting, and relaxing in between poses.  Hmm, I’m now thinking, I’ve just signed up for this training and I don’t know if it’s really right for me. Oh dear, what am I going to do? What if it’s not “it”? What if it’s not what I’m looking for? What if I don’t like it after all? 

In addition, there’s the arduous task of getting from Burbank to Marina del Rey at 530pm. I’ve decided it’s actually easier to get from LA to India that it is to make that trek.  So what to do? Where’s all this panic and suffering coming from? I realized after examining my crazy mind, that it was coming from my belief that all these changes have to look a certain way. They have to mean a certain thing.   Why not just let go of my outcome expectations and let the experiences be what they are? Perhaps they will be “it”. Or perhaps they will simply be.  I laugh at myself when  I consider this: you throw yourself into the fire of change and you complain about the heat.  Did you think it was going to be easy?