Here It Is!

Hey everyone!

So glad to be back on my own blog! Feels so roomy in here...

The much awaited book is DONE! After years of seeing people coming into the studio absolutely crippled by an office bound life, I decided to stop pouting about the state of the world and do something to fix it!

It took a year for the idea to come into focus, and another year to execute it. Thanks for your patience. Here it is!


This is the first installment in a four part series I'm going to publish in 2010. This guide is all about getting back the tall, confident posture that you were born with and that sitting for hours in front of screens has robbed from you. It teaches you exactly how sitting affects your body and what to do about it. This isn't just another ebook, in its 55 pages you will find over 200 illustrations, laid out in an easy to read way that guides you through the basics of anatomy and movement.

These guides are truly the culmination of my last five years of work. All the tools I gained running the yoga studio and The Peak Condition Project have been refined and utilized to their fullest extent. I'm pretty proud of it!

It sells for $9.98. Consider buying a copy if you want to regain some of the flexibility and vitality you were born with. It will also support the work that I'm doing. Every day that I don't spend working for the man I will spend working for YOU!

Looking forward to your feedback.

-Patrick

What's the Deal Man?

Hey everyone, if you haven't noticed I'm being pretty strict about getting a weekly post up on The Peak Condition Project homepage, so if you're looking for homespun wisdom go check there for the meantime. Also I'm spending my writing capital finishing up a book that's been on the backburner for far too long.

So that's where I'll be until the new year. Here Lies Patrick will get back up to steam soon!

Surfing

I really enjoyed Jesse Ventura's recent spate of interviews as he promoted his new book. My favorite line from the former governor, pro wrestler and Navy SEAL was " I’ll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I’ll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders."

I thought that was pretty awesome. Anyway, what was more interesting to me was that Jesse Ventura has pretty much dropped out of society and devoted himself to a single pursuit, surfing. He's moved down to Baha, Mexico and just surfs.

If you don't surf you've probably heard someone waxing poetic about the power of the waves. What is it about standing up on a styrofoam board that makes people go gaga?

I think surfing brings together a few things that, once you've experienced them, are pretty irresistible. I'll try to break it down for you.

1. The thrill of being small. This is the same feeling you get at the foot of a mountain range, or looking at the stars. All the cares and worries of the mundane world are exposed as the trivialities they really are. From the shore waves don't look so big, but when you're on the board even a three foot wave will put you in its shadow. Once you get into overheads the wave might as well be a mountain. Albeit a living, churning mountain barrelling down on you. This is incredibly fun and tends to put things in perspective. I've never met someone coming off the waves with the slightest trace of stress in their body.

2. Getting a taste of the world's elemental power. The first time you successfully catch a wave and your board starts moving with the water's energy is something you'll never forget. Your meager paddling is laughable by perspective, as in a matter of seconds you lift and accelerate with unreal speed. I've tried to describe it to people, it's nothing like when a rollercoaster gets to the top of its first curve, or when you floor a car, or when a your airplane takes off. It's a meaty, organic acceleration. It always feels just right. When tapping into .001 percent of a wave's energy gives you such a rush, you come away with a whole new perspective on how feeble you really are. And in feebleness is freedom. Like number 1, being aware of how small you are is a gift of humility and gratefullness to be alive at all.

3. No winning or losing. I could never get into competitve games. I think I was always just too empathetic. Even when I wrestled, my whole heart wasn't in it, I had trouble finding that killer instinct. In the last second I'd feel kind of bad for the guy I was pinning and let up just that slightest bit that meant the difference between winning and losing. And win or lose, I never felt too attached to either outcome. What difference did it make? This is probably why surfing instantly appealed to me. There's no fooling yourself in surfing. You're participating in a meaningless activity. You paddle out, you surf in, you paddle out, you surf in. You might as well be moving piles of stones from one spot to another. For me this puts surfing squarely in the meditation column of activities. Life other forms of meditation, the more ego you bring into it the less you will excel.4. Enforced down-time. Any surf video will obviously focus on those 5-10 seconds of catching and riding the wave. But behind those few precious seconds are hours and hours of down time. You can't force the ocean to your schedule. For most beaches you'll get the best waves at high or low tide, meaning that even if you're surfing as much as humanly possible you've got 6 -8 hour stretches where there's nothing to do. So you sit around, sleep, talk to friends, and just slow down. Life takes on a more natural rythm when you start to work your schedule around the tides and winds rather than punch-clocks and train schedules. I've witnessed strong type-A personalities totally chill out and find their groove while waiting for the next set of waves to roll in.
So I hope this gives you some insight into why people get so hooked on surfing. It would be even better if it inspires you to pick up a board and get out there. You don't have to be an amazing surfer to get the feelings listed above. You just have to show up.

On Gurus

In my field of yoga, fitness and meditation, there's a constant churn of workshops and events rolling through town. They're usually 2 to 3 hour dealies on the weekend that cost between 80 and 100 dollars. And they will invariably feature a modern version of the guru. This is usually a yoga or meditation teacher who has gained some notoriety through a magazine or DVD sales, and is "living the dream," traveling the world spreading wisdom to a global community. I won't name names in this post but I'm sure you'll feel like you've met these people during your studies.

I used to feel compelled to join these events, usually because of the chance to network and make connections as I build my own career, in so much as I have one. But recently I've been developing a strong distaste for them after having the same "guru" experience time after time.

The overwhelming feeling attending these workshops is that the guru is oscillating between the need to please a paying audience with the boredom of having done the same routine 100 times. They know that at $80 a pop they have to deliver the goods, but at the same time, it being a new city, a new audience, they can cut and copy from their usual routine and get away with it.
What is lacking at these events is any sense of freshness.

Becoming a guru in the modern world is somewhat of a curse. The more well-known you become, the more you are locked in to living up to the aura that surrounds you.

This by itself isn't that big a problem, but when it couples with the need for income things get dicey. Something else you may not know is that these people on the cover of magazines, leading international workshops, are usually quite strapped for cash. Just like the rest of us they desire nice houses, exotic vacations, and sheets with high thread counts. The only way to keep the income flowing is to keep the workshop attendance high, and the only way to keep the attendance up is to project greater and "guru-power" into the media.

The result is that these teachers become so afraid of appearing to not know what they're doing that they avoid taking chances or trying new things. They settle into safe, stale routines that pay the bills.

When you actually go to these events, you will always find the guru is looking much older and tired than you expected and be far less dynamic than the image they project. This is because they all use ten year old photographs and are so worn down by the constant need to impress that they've lost their enthusiasm for the students who have payed so much to see them.

And to top it all off throw the seductive and corrupting element of fame into this mix. Even if these top-level teacher's wanted to step away from the workshop mill, a few months out of the spotlight will really start to bother someone who has spent time in it. When you start to rely on public affirmation of your worth you're really stuck in a cycle of having to get out there and get your fix every few weeks.

This all combines to create a workshop atmosphere that is all about the teacher, not the student. Nobody wins in these situations. The guru is pigeon-holed and frustrated, forced to go through the motions for the money and hollow gratification it will generate, and the students come away with a ho-hum experience that doesn't deepen their practice, only the empty space in their wallets.

My advice, if you're really on the path for physical and emotional development, is to skip these big events and invest that money and time in a local teacher who you respect. They won't have a lot of hang-ups dealing with fame and the burdens of guruship, and you'll get the kind of personal attention you need if real progress is to be made.

And if you do attend one of these events, get what you can out of it, but know that the person up on stage is just as fallible, confused, and unsure as you are. They're just afraid that you wouldn't pay them if you knew that.

Dealing With Too Many Ideas

I have this annoying tic that drives me nuts.

You might have noticed that I have a lot of ideas. I recently made a list of them all, and calculated that if I needed a year to get each of my ideas off the ground, I would still not be able to do them all before I died. But they just keep coming.

But what drives me nuts is WHEN they come. I can be sitting on my sofa, looking at the clouds pass by from my bay window, and my mind will be a complete blank. You know how some people ask, "what are you thinking?" in those quiet times. Well that question seems so weird to me because usually I'm thinking about absolutely nothing. Seriously. Nothing. No mind. I do this a lot.

But the second I get into a situation where I have to focus on something and can't take 5 minutes to sketch out an idea, the ideas come bursting forth. Like in the middle of teaching a yoga class. Or when I'm working hard for a deadline. Or at a fancy restaurant.

I don't know why this happens. There must be some sort of valve that gets loose in my brain when the other parts of my brain are doing something else, and all this random stuff spills out. But it's frustrating how many ideas I lose like this. You think I'd remember that idea that would make my next million dollars, but by the time I'm able to sit down and think properly it's usually gone.

I've gotten so sick of this that I made this little contraption for the one thing I always have with me, my wallet.
The idea book is actually chained on there. I used pliers and actually shaped the metal so that it can't come off. Also I bought that little micro-pen that fits into the change purse pocket so there's always something to write with. So my keys, money, and ideas are always with me. When I have a brainstorm I try to get to my wallet as fast as possible and get the idea down on paper.

It works!

Uh, You See... There Was this Guy Named Jesus

I have a little day-planner that I use (when I can find it!) to schedule workshops and events. Today I was going over this spring's schedule with a Japanese colleague. I like the day-planner I have because it lists every international holiday in the corners of the date boxes. It's always nice to know when the Chinese New Year goes down (Jan. 26th) or Tomb Sweeping Day in Taiwan (April 4th) or something called Whit Day in France and Denmark that falls on June 1st.

Anyway, my Japanese friend was looking at some of these funny holidays, and asked about one that falls on April 6th called "Good Friday."

Hoo boy. Fortunately I went to Catholic School so I know the answer to all this kind of stuff.

"Well, that's the day Christians mark the death of Jesus. It's two days before Easter."
"And what's Easter for?"
"Uh, it's the day that Jesus came back to life. And then he walked around for a few days and went back to heaven. There's a special day for that too. (Ascension)"
"What was he doing for the two days?"
"He was in a cave."
"Why?"
"That's where they used to put the dead bodies after they died. I don't know why..."
"Why did it take two days to come back?"
"I don't know. He needed a break?"

It went on like this for a few minutes, and the more I talked the more ridiculous the whole thing sounded.

My friend was genuinely puzzled that anyone would believe this stuff. I didn't go into how people kill each other over it.

Why Does Everyone Hate Zazen?

Over the years I have offered many kinds of classes at Yoga Garden.  Easy yoga, hard yoga, old people yoga, kids yoga, tai-chi, self-defense, healthy cooking classes, workshops on all manner of things, and for the most part these have all been successful and a lot of fun.

But one class consistently fails to gather students after three years on the schedule, and that is my weekly zazen class.  No matter what, that class is always sparsely if ever attended.

It's not that people don't try it, they do, but no one has continued to come for more than a few weeks.  Ever.

And I know it's not personal, because I have seen the same thing across zen centers and groups all over the world.  I can't tell you how many times I've found a zen center in a town I've visited, gone to sit, and been the only other person besides the leader.  It's a pretty sad state of affairs.

Brad Warner always quips that if just one percent of the people in LA who've bought his books actually came to his zazen sessions he'd have the place full to the rafters.  What is it about zazen that makes it so hard to get people to show up?  It's not like we're asking people for money or to do anything besides just sit.

I think the root of the problem is that zazen is fundamentally different from almost everything else we do in a day.  It's the only time in your life you are actually asked to do nothing.

This freaks people out to no end.  "What do you mean do nothing?  Surely you do something?"

Nope, you just sit there and be.  And it's incredibly uncomfortable.  It's not a territory that we have much experience in.  It's like being invited to a party where you don't know anyone.  It could be a great party, but you make excuses and skip it out of the fear that there will be some awkward moments.

For the first few years, zazen is awkward.  There's no discernible progress, little reward, and it kind of hurts your back.  Almost any other activity would start to pay off after a few weeks; you can play your first song, you can do a new move, you can create a piece of art, etc...

But zazen doesn't work like that.  Primarily because the more you strive the less progress you make.  There really is nothing like it.  Perseverance is important to get on the cushion, but once you're there you have to stop persevering.  This drives type As crazy and they give up soon.

That leaves the laid back people, and the truth of the matter is that they usually can't be bothered.  They don't feel that drive for self-betterment that gets them through the door of a zazen class week after week.  There are a lot more relaxing things to do than zazen.

So I'm not surprised that it's so unpopular.  But I am disappointed that more people don't find it as interesting as I do.  From the first time I did zazen, I recognized that it was a totally different way to use (or not use) my mind.  Zen meditation was a totally new way to experience the world and to find how I fit into it.

The history of zen is filled with hermits and old masters who retire to the mountains to finish out their years in solitude.  Sometimes I have the same dream.  Nobody cares about practicing zen, so why am I running around trying to get people into it?  Why not just look out for number one?  Who appointed me the zazen cheerleader anyway?

I'm kind of joking but kind of not.  It's a sad thing to leave a single person zazen class and pass bars that are packed.  Or see gyms full of people sweating and grunting to get their bodies in line without spending a second on their mental fitness.  

It just seems like everything is upside down sometimes.

Then again we are living on a ball floating in the middle of cold empty space.  That's pretty weird too.