On leaping (and the myth of fearlessness)

The body in the photo above, casually floating in space halfway down the (depending on who you ask) 20-30 foot tall cliff, is mine. Sorry, Mom and Dad. I had a point to prove to myself.

It's a tired trope, analogizing jumping off a cliff to risk-taking in general, but like most cliches, it retains its power because of the truth at its foundation. So even though I was going to write about work this week, I hope you'll forgive a brief interlude to instead discuss fear, its role in our lives, and the conquering thereof. I assure you, the banalities of the day-to-day aren't going anywhere and will be captured in short order.

A caveat: I haven't conquered fear, nor am I claiming to know the best way for you to do it. This is more of a reflection on my experience with fear and my own best practices for steadily chipping away at its grip on my life.

The myth of fearlessness

By way of background, I am NOT by any means a fearless person. I am gripped by crippling anxiety every time I have to call someone on the phone. I lost a considerable amount of sleep last night over a small spider perambulating one of my bookshelves. My first attempt at jumping off the above cliff resulted in my taking two steps toward the precipice and actually DUCKING INTO A CROUCH at its edge. You get the picture.

A certain amount of fear is healthy. Fear tells us we might be in danger, and turns into hyperdrive all of our senses and reaction mechanisms in case we have to make a run for it or fight for our lives. We are naturally afraid of heights because, in reality, jumping from them can pretty easily smush us.

Too much fear, however, and we become helpless bunnies scampering from one tree to the next, hoping for some cover from the onslaught of a cruel world out to get us.

So how to conquer fear? Given its fundamental role in securing our safety, I don't think fearlessness is the right goal (where I come from, we call that sort of behavior "acting a fool"). Instead, consider treating a healthy relationship with fear like a practice, taking controlled, regular steps to engage with fear and reflect on the experience.

Do one thing a day that scares you

I know. It's another cliche. But as a perpetually terrified person, I actually try to follow this advice. Not dogmatically (I'm not going around trying to find trouble if I'm spending the day watching TV on the couch), but it's something I consciously aim to notice and work with on a regular basis. If there's someone I'm intimidated to approach, a dark and cobwebby hole I'm scared to stick my hand in to get a thing I need, a risk I am scared to take, I pause. I take stock. I go through a series of questions to assess whether I'm letting the fear take over, and whether I'm okay with that.

These are the questions I ask before I leap:

1. What am I afraid of? This doesn't always have a rational answer, but when it does, and that answer is that it's a sensible thing to be afraid of (yeah, let's NOT walk into that bonfire because we might die), sometimes the next step is just to decide not to do the thing. And that is absolutely okay. And if it's less obvious or I decide it's a lame reason to be afraid (e.g. EVERYONE WILL LAUGH AT ME), move onto:
2. What are the consequences of not leaping? If you're going to be saddled with weeks or months or a lifetime of regret over having passed up this opportunity, then sometimes even when the fear is a rational one, you might have to leap anyway. My parents are pretty firm believers in this notion and, even when I came to them with some terrifically questionable life decisions, they steered me in the direction of the action NOT taken being the bigger regret. And they're right. After I dove off the above cliff, my friend went through a (painfully realistic) assessment of how long he'd have to hear my neurotic self-flagellation at mealtimes: "Oh god, do you think I should have jumped?" "Do you think I'm a wimp?" "We'll get to go back to Devil's Well so I can jump next time, right?" and so on. Spare yourself and those around you these questions and just do the damn thing.
3. Who has my back? Often, fear makes us forget that we have a support system -- people in our corner, rooting for us to succeed. As I stood on the cliff's edge between my first (recall, the ungraceful crouch) and second attempts, my friend in the water below shouted up at me, "I'll catch you!" This was, of course, completely nonsensical and taking her at her word would likely have maimed or killed us both. But it was the reminder I needed that my friends were here, they were cheering me on, and they would pick up the bloody bits of me should things go terribly wrong.
4. This last one isn't a question so much as a reminder: it's okay not to leap. It's okay not to conquer the fear every time. Like any practice, it's a process, and it does no good to beat yourself up and fall into a death spiral of despair over failure. There are always more cliffs, and more opportunities to be brave, and you don't have to ALWAYS do the brave thing to be a brave, or good, or complete person.

The remarkable thing about being human, a defining characteristic of our condition, is our ability to choose whether we act on our instinctive emotional response or not. We possess the unique muscle of discernment that allows us to decide: do we give in to our fear and respond accordingly, or do we flex the muscle, say "fuck it" and leap? Like any muscle, though, it atrophies from disuse. With enough lethargy, we can become paralyzed -- locked in a state of being totally driven by our anxieties -- and that paralysis is antithetical to growth, which by its very nature requires some amount of discomfort and venturing into unknown territories. So I say practice being scared, embrace it as an opportunity to show up.

But whether you leap or don't leap, know that I've always got your back.

Halfway to somewhere

Believe it or not, I am 6 months into my stay at the Himalayan Institute (or was, as of Monday). It's tempting, for me as a writer, and for you as a human in the modern era of attention deficit disInstagration, to quantify the experience. And I can easily do that:

• Asana practices done: 180 (if I do only one thing each day, it's this. For sanity. For joy)
• Gratitude Journal entries made: 108 (108 is an auspicious number in yoga, so I suppose I auspiciously stopped after 108 days)
• Weekend workshops attended: 7
• Books read: 7
• Times baked for the Institute: 4
• Rugs knitted: 5
• Paintings painted: 2
• Pints of ice cream consumed: dozens
• Entire seasons of television shows watched: 20+ (don't judge me)
• Storms weathered (external): 4 snow-type, 10 lightning-type
• Storms weathered (internal): ...

But then it gets hard. It's easy to look at life as a series of quantifiable tidbits, but like a picture examined from too close up, life loses its bigger meaning, its purpose, when you think about it in terms of how many times you brushed your teeth or went to work. Frustratingly, in life the bigger picture isn't always clear until much later.

So if I haven't written much, it's been because I don't, as yet, have any great revelations. And maybe those won't ever come. But I've been finding a lot more peace -- if not joy -- in the mundane, more freedom in the routine, and less stress about the uncontrollable. And for now, that has to be enough. I have to be enough.

Next week (really!), I'll tell you about how awesome my new job has been, and how cool it is to finally work in the creative space, given that I've been there in spirit since I can remember.

Mild Mild Country

In case you've been living under a rock (for which I'd be the last person to judge you, since I don't even get NPR out here), Netflix recently released a documentary series that received quite a bit of buzz called "Wild Wild Country". It centers, fittingly, around a yoga cult that had its heyday in 1980s Oregon. And since a central question of my experience here has been "wait so, I haven't accidentally joined a yoga cult, right?", I obviously had to binge-watch the whole 7-episode arc over the course of a few days, digest the experience, then write about it.

If you're not familiar with the show or the history it follows, and I highly recommend you see "Wild Wild Country" because it's a good story exquisitely told (from a couple of perspectives, anyway), my editorialized 20-second distillation is: Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (later known as Osho) rose to popularity in India in the 1970s with his ashram in Pune, riding a wave of surging spiritual tourism by Westerners. Some stuff happened in India between Rajneesh and the government, so further expansion was planned for the US. The whole merry band of "Rajneeshees" moved to the (highly conservative, heretofore sleepy) middle of nowhere in Oregon, where they threw raucous orgies, eventually armed themselves with semiautomatic weapons and tried to poison a town with biological weapons, and generally caused a huge ruckus until they eventually flamed out in a blaze of legal troubles and high-profile finger pointing.

Given the sheer volume of yoga scandals and cult blowups (literal and figurative) we've seen in recent years, it's worth reflecting on the Rajneeshees' saga and how we might avoid their plight. It's also worth reflecting on what I've seen here so far, on what can go really really well when a group unites around a shared intention. I am by no means an authority on the subject, but I think it says something that the Himalayan Institute has been in continuous operation in America for almost 50 years. That's longer than Microsoft. It's twice as long as Justin Bieber has been on the planet. So I feel like whatever it is we're doing, it's got some legs to it, and what follows are my highlights and conclusions, if you're going to start a collective or commune or movement, on how to do it right.

Make friends with the locals

We're pretty famous around these parts.

This seems pretty obvious on the surface, but I think there's an urge, when you're really excited about a new idea that's gathering a lot of momentum, to ram it down people's throats before they are necessarily ready. But as The Supremes so wisely instructed, "you can't hurry love." No, you just have to wait. And as you do so, it's enormously helpful to make peace with the surrounding community. The central tension of "Wild Wild Country" occurs between the Rajneeshees and the straight-laced, small-town Oregonian natives whose land they invaded, a war the documentary would have you believe led to their ultimate demise. The newcomers flaunted their difference, strutting around town in the nude and going on talk shows to decry the ignorance of the local populace. By contrast, our Retreat Center director is known as the honorary mayor of Honesdale (nearest town) and we regularly host local career fairs and service club meetings. This is a deliberate choice and the result of decades of relationship building; Pandit Rajmani Tigunait ("Panditji", as we call him, Spiritual Head of the Himalayan Institute) talked before Easter dinner about how we've worked tirelessly over the years to avoid being known as the "cult on the hill".

Obey the laws

If you want to avoid getting in trouble, it's best to avoid breaking the rules to begin with. If for no reason other than to prevent your enemies from gaining more ammunition with which to attack you, it's generally a good idea to stay on the right side of the law. Osho's group was accused of a bunch of crimes in its day (some of which they admitted to, some of which remain alleged), not limited to immigration and voter fraud, the aforementioned bioterrorism incident, and attempted murder. But following the rules doesn't just mean staying clear of law enforcement, it also means sticking to the guidelines your group was founded upon to begin with. The yamas and niyamas form, if you will, the 10 Commandments of yoga, and a cursory review of these basic tenets will tell you that somewhere along the way, the Rajneeshees went off the rails. Honestly, if you follow those ten simple principles (which are, incidentally, posted in our kitchen, which is typically the likeliest place for things to get out of hand), you're unlikely to commit any felonies anyway.

Work industriously

This is actually a place where I think the Rajneeshees were onto something. They built a town from nothing into a thriving center of commerce and production in a matter of months. Osho wrote dozens of books, some of which I've read (all of those were powerful, succinct, and clearly the work of a master, which makes the rest of the story all the more puzzling) and many of which were and continue to be bestsellers. They continue to run the "Esalen of the East" in India at their old Pune ashram. And like our cultish cousins, we stay busy as well, running our own publishing house and retreat center, carrying out several humanitarian missions abroad, putting out tons of content on our website (which is what I do here now!), and introducing the West to the joy of nose teapots and launching and spinning off Yoga International along the way. It's easier to gain traction when you're contributing tangible things to society, and besides, you know what they say about idle hands.

Be boring

Getting mild at the Himalayan Institute during a recent power outage.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it helps to just be lame. It's a lot harder to cause controversy when your philosophical bedrock is the practice of relaxation, you're going to bed at 10pm every night and keeping a dry campus, and your side hustle is a chocolate and coffee producer. It doesn't make you immune to scandals (yes, we had our own #metoo moment in the early 1990s), but generally putting people to sleep makes the scandals much less likely to gain traction. If you're patient, you can actually build a network of highly motivated people who may not be the life of the party, but just might spark a revolution.

And now, some fun facts!

• Rajneesh apparently learned pranayama (yogic breathing) from Swami Rama, founder of the Himalayan Institute. According to Swamiji, Rajneesh was one of his quickest students ever to master the practice.
• A couple of the teachers here went to Rajneeshpuram, either as aspirants or just as tourists after the whole thing went down. My general sense is everyone here thinks the Rajneeshees went pretty far off the deep end, but most people are down with Osho's general teachings/books. Aside from the weird free love stuff.
• I'm still reasonably sure I haven't accidentally joined a yoga cult.

the 7 stages of growth

It has been a while. I've now been here for over two months, which feels alternately like two days and two years, depending on which mood you catch me in.

I meant to write sooner, but I've been busy. Busy, you ask? With what? Moving to an ashram isn't exactly designed to leave you with an action-packed schedule. And that's true, to an extent, but the trouble with clearing space in your life is that it leaves you with an awful lot of time to yourself. Time... with yourself. To sit, and think, and contemplate, and stew, and pretty soon all of that stuff you've been avoiding and bludgeoning into submission with appointments and obligations and to-do lists comes straight to the surface, or perhaps more accurately comes tumbling down on your head like an icy waterfall filled with piranhas. And because I like frameworks (and not just odd and graphic metaphors), I'll summarize the last month or so with a process usually applied to the loss of a loved one -- which I guess this is, if you think about how attached we get to the stories of ourselves -- the expanded/adapted for ashram life Kübler-Ross model for stages of grief, or

7 Stages of Growth

1. SHOCK
   You set up your room in 36 hours. You start tracking the number of days you've been here in your gratitude journal, prisoner-wall-tickmarks-style. Giddy with the newness of your surroundings, you make a bunch of new friends, throw yourself headlong into programming and practices, and get unreasonably excited at the breakfast schedule (two oatmeal days each week! Four if you get there early enough for leftovers!!).

2. DENIAL
   You begin to miss things, people, donuts. Subconsciously, you begin to fashion a life for yourself in the image of your old life. You bake cake for everyone. You stomp the halls in your sassiest shoes. You maintain a stash of your favorite ice cream. You start online shopping again. You enthusiastically accept consulting work from your old company. None of this helps, and you realize you are missing the point; since your old life was what drove you here in the first place, modeling your new life in a carbon copy of it won't get you anywhere. Anytime someone asks how you're doing, you say everything is going great.

3. GUILT
   Quiet time for contemplation gives you ample opportunities to examine everything you have ever done wrong in your life, including interrupting that guy at lunch today. Fully cognizant of the fact that you chose to come here, you fixate on what you have done to deserve such a miserable, solitary existence. You attend a Bhagavad Gita workshop. You are sure that your dharma is to be forever alone. Your meditation practice becomes a form of atonement.

4. ANGER
   Having exhausted the path of self-flagellation, your attention turns outward. You pick a fight with your new friends. Your grandmother comes to visit, and you spend the weekend responding to her curiosity with defensiveness, up to and including defending the very things that have bothered you for weeks. You get mad when there are guests here for the weekend because it means the yoga rooms are occupied by paying customers.

5. BARGAINING
   Somewhat inexplicably since you've never been into astrology before, you begin to follow your daily horoscope in an attempt to figure out why everything feels so off. Mercury is in retrograde, though this knowledge doesn't help. You ask people who have been here longer than you if and how they have grown, and are somewhat heartened to learn that the process is more facing difficult things, then reflecting some time later that your negative patterns have changed, and less bright-lights-big-revelations. You tell people you are in your "awkward phase" of spiritual development.

6. DEPRESSION
   You mope around the halls like a yogi Eeyore. You do your practices with a mechanical and defeated resignation, and eventually miss a couple of days here and there. You learn to knit. You spend time making, and then unraveling, messy creations. Everything is a metaphor. You feel simultaneously trapped in your mind and overwhelmed by the freedom of your new life. You bake another cake; it turns out too sour for your tastes.

7. ACCEPTANCE
   You remember, eventually, that the reason you came here in the first place was to sit with the discomfort of your inner self. You realize that pretty much everyone around you is in the same boat. You make amends with the old new friends, and make some new new friends. The sun comes out for a day, which helps with all of this a great deal. There are no earth-shattering breakthroughs, but you realize you are, above all, perfectly okay.

carrot cake for 100

If you know me, you might know that I love to bake. All cooking, really, has been a big part of my life for decades, but baking was my first love, from when I was a toddler "helping" my great grandmother make ridiculously overbuttered Russian-Jewish treats in our Soviet kitchen. I made pastries every month for my coworkers' birthdays, brought trays of homemade cookies to neighborhood bars, and painstakingly crafted color-coordinated gum paste flowers to adorn my dad and stepmom's wedding cake. I even tried out for the Great American Baking Show last year, which is a story for another day and a level of kitchen-induced anxiety I'm still recovering from.

I've missed that since I moved here. There's something magical about puttering around a kitchen all day, part mad chemist and part mischievous child, and making something for others (and/or yourself) to enjoy. Apparently it's even a yogic thing, given how fundamental the nourishment in our bellies is to our overall health and vitality. I don't know about all that. I just know it makes me happy and fulfilled in a way I don't care to question. But I don't have daily access to my kitchen and tools and whiz-bang gadgets anymore (NB: I don't actually believe in gadgets. I was once told I would be happy to produce a perfect steak dinner given a sizeable rock and a firepit, and I buy that) and the cheffy part of me was starting to whine.

Here's a thing they don't tell you before you move to the ashram: we get to eat dessert here. Once each week, at Sunday dinner, like ravenous wolves (which is crazy, because we are very well fed) we descend: pear cobbler, wilderness bars, brownies and ice cream -- whatever, skip the dinner line, YOLO, eat dessert first. And sometimes, they let a resident act as "guest chef" and make a dessert for everyone to enjoy.

This week, that guest chef was me. I made carrot cake. So, sooner than anyone anticipated, the descent of this record into unadulterated food porn heaven. Recipe follows.

In what was to be a two-day affair, I started early Saturday morning by assembling ingredients. We begin with prep.

The carrots, finely shredded in a matter of seconds in the "robo", a.k.a. a miniature woodchipper.

I took this opportunity to develop a level of kitchen discipline I have never before exhibited. My mise was totally en place. What's that in the background, you ask? Oh, just a GIANT BOWL OF BREAD DOUGH. I avoided the urge to bury hands and/or face in it. Image of restraint.

If you are baking with dried fruits, you must first plump them. You can do this by steaming, but I prefer to bury them in a mixture of alcohol and jam and let it all get juicy together.

The eggs here are all fresh from local farms and so colorful!

Properly prepared pans are essential. Butter the whole thing, then line the bottom with parchment paper, then butter the paper, then dust the whole thing with sifted flour.

Once you have all of the boring stuff done (I had two wonderful assistants, one eager, one slightly grumpy but equally useful, for the first day of baking), you get to do the fun stuff. And oh my goodness, is it fun to bake in a professional kitchen. I got to use the TWO biggest stand mixers I've ever seen in my life -- the first one is the size of a water cooler. The second is almost as tall as I am and in lieu of a spatula, one uses what can only be described as a canoe paddle to hand-mix in it.

First you gently goopify the butter in the "small" stand mixer, and add the sugar.

Adding the butter-sugar mass to the beaten eggs with the help of a friend.

The sifted dry ingredients (cocoa is the secret to rich carrot cake flavor and color!) get added to the behemoth mixer and ever so delicately stirred in.

And then the carrots and the now-plump dried fruits are hand-canoed in.

It's important to pause for photo breaks while baking with oversized equipment. You know, for posterity. That's the canoe paddle in my hand.

Batter divided evenly(ish) and spread into pans, and ready to bake.

The scariest part of carrot cake for me, because it's so dense and squishy, is getting it out of the pans. We handled it like champs. Oh god. This is a fuckton of cake.

That was it for Day 1. The cakes got tightly wrapped and stored in the creepy freezer downstairs (which is essential for the cakes to chill out and hold springily up to the frosting process, lest you end up with a goopy mess of cake blobs covered in runny icing). I should also mention I was simultaneously participating in a weekend retreat program, running back and forth between the hot kitchen and intense lecture/meditation/asana classes. It's a miracle I can still tell my sacrum from a spatula. On the second day, I baked alone. Yeah, with nobody else. Cause you know, when I bake alone, I prefer to be by myself. Sorry, I promise there will be no further George Thorogood references.

6 lbs of cream cheese, nbd.

It's really important to sift powdered sugar before adding it to the butter and cream cheese. Which is terrible news, because sifting powdered sugar is tedious and painful and sticky.

Butter gets whipped first, then cream cheese beaten in. Don't question my authority on this.

Add a bit of the powdered sugar at a time and mix between additions, or your kitchen (and face) will look like the victims of an anthrax attack.

Once beaten, then fill.

Then top with a second (third, et al) layer and generously frost the outside.

Now comes the fun part. I decided to go with a classic theme of pecans for the nutty version...

... And an even more literal interpretation for the nut-free.

And that's it! The recipe follows.

Carrot Cake
Adapted (my revisions noted) from Maida Heatter's Cakes. Went with the original scale to spare you the trouble of scaling down from my 100 portions.

5 ounces (1 cup) dark raisins, plus a handful of chopped prunes and dried cherries, or whatever dried fruit you have on hand, plumped in a mixture of 2T apricot jam, 2-3T bourbon (I used rice wine today and it turned out great), and 2-3T water
1 pound carrots to make 4 cups shredded, firmly packed
2 cups minus 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons cinnamon
Dash of nutmeg
Sprinkle of ground cloves or allspice
1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup dark brown sugar, firmly packed
1 c vegetable oil, 1/4c butter, softened (the original recipe calls for all oil, but I find this gives the cake an unpleasant oil flavor, so I sub out some of the oil for butter)
5 1/2 ounces walnuts, medium-coarse chop

Cream Cheese Icing, recipe follows

a handful of pecan halves, for garnish

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter three 9-inch cake pans, line the bottoms with parchment, and butter the parchment. Dust sifted flour into the pans and tap out the excess.

Plump the raisins and fruit as directed by placing in a saucepan over medium-low heat until boiling, cover, and set aside to cool.

Grate the carrots using a food processor (any size grate works! really!) or a standing metal grater. Measure and set aside.

Sift together the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, cinnamon and spices, and cocoa, and set aside.

In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter and sugars. Separately, beat the eggs, then beat in the butter and sugars. Add the vanilla and oil, and mix until well combined. Add the dry ingredients and mix on low speed only until combined. Stir in the carrots, raisins, and nuts.

Divide the batter evenly among the three pans and use a spatula to even out the batter. Bake the pans for 35 to 40 minutes or until the tops just spring back when gently pressed with a fingertip and the cakes begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Remove from the oven and let stand 2-3 minutes in the pans on a cooling rack. Run a small knife around the perimeter of the cake and invert the cakes onto a cooling rack and allow to cool completely. It is not necessary to remove the parchment from the bottoms of the cakes at this time.

Brush any stray crumbs from the sides of the cakes and transfer the cakes to the freezer, unwrapped, for at least an hour, or until cakes are firm enough to handle. If you wish to freeze the cakes longer, wrap the frozen layers in plastic wrap and return to the freezer until you are ready to frost the cake. Do not thaw the layers before icing.

When ready to ice the cake, prepare a large, flat cake plate by lining it with four strips of wax paper to make a square. This wax paper will catch any crumbs and icing while frosting the cake. Remove the parchment paper from the bottoms of the cakes. Place one cold and firm cake layer upside down on the plate. Spread a thin layer (2/3 cup) of the icing evenly over the cake. Cover with the second layer, also upside down. Spread another 2/3 cup icing over the second layer. Place the third layer on top, also upside down and spread the remaining icing over the top and sides of the cake. Remove the wax paper strips carefully. Garnish the cake with pecan halves. Refrigerate the cake for a few hours or for a day or two. Serve cold right from the refrigerator.

Cream Cheese Icing

16 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
4 ounces unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 cups sifted confectioners' sugar
1/4 t salt

In the bowl of an electric mixer, beat the butter, then add the cream cheese and beat until soft and smooth with no lumps. On low speed beat in the vanilla and sugar, adding the sugar 1/2c at a time, and then on high speed beat for a few moments until smooth.

Origin story

This week, I thought I might give you a break from the present moment to take this story back to its beginning. An origin story of sorts, if you'll allow me the brief fantasy of painting myself as a comic book hero (not sure what my superpower would be. Awkwardness? Operational excellence? Having killer outfits but being otherwise useless in battle?). Incidentally, if you ask anyone at the Himalayan Institute how they came to live here, they inevitably respond with a rich, colorful tale full of unlikely coincidences and fateful encounters, the sort that belongs in a coming-of-age movie or a Salman Rushdie novel. It is often said (and I repeat here with no judgement) that the Institute has a way of attracting exactly the person it needs at the right time. Like some kind of great dharma magnet (which would also make an excellent comic book world-domination-device).

My story begins in August 2015. I was the Chief Financial Officer of a hedge fund in Berkeley, CA, living the San Francisco dream in a South of Market loft, performing feats of accounting and operational wizardry by day and dancing to techno by night. Through a series of events random enough to deserve their own origin story, I decided to attend my first yoga teacher training with Rusty Wells (with whom I had never practiced before the first day of training). Those 10 days broke my heart open and changed my life in more ways than I can adequately express here, but critical to this story is a guest lecturer Rusty had invited to teach us about proper breathing, relaxation, and pranayama (breath/energy control) techniques. I'd been a dedicated yoga practitioner for about 8 years at that point, but the way this man (Luke Ketterhagen) talked about the diaphragm gave me the sort of fluttery chills you only get when you discover a vast new category of knowledge you're truly passionate about. Like finding out there's a parallel universe and being given the key to the door between that world and your own. Luke talked about a place, a school, an ashram, where everyone was as nerdy about this stuff as he was, and he exuded equal parts giddy, infectious excitement and profound, grounded kindness. The bell in the back of my mind (you know, the one that tells you to sit up and listen because a major plot point is coming in the story of your life) tinkled to indicate some gear had just fallen into place. Naturally, I shoved that bell back in its box and told it, "not now, it's not convenient". And to be fair, there were still important things to do where I was: I kept practicing and started teaching yoga, I helped my company grow and flourish, I implemented a yoga program at work. 

Luke and me in 2017

But the next year, I did another training with Rusty, and there was Luke again. The bell jangled louder. Back in the box it went. Work got stressful, conflict increased, initiatives were met with seemingly inexplicable roadblocks. I found myself wondering what my path was supposed to look like, and whether I was still on the right track. That December, I took a trip to Mauritius (fun fact: Mauritius is the antipod of San Francisco on a globe -- I literally could not get any farther away from home than where I went. Telling of my mental state at the time?) and decided to bring the Bhagavad Gita along as my beach reading. In case you're not familiar, the Gita is a seminal piece of Hindu scripture that focuses on the themes of duty (dharma), devotion, and the practice of yoga. There are literally dozens of high-quality English translations of this text, but for whatever reason and through the magic of the Amazon recommendation engine, the first one I happened to read was Swami Satchidananda's The Living Gita. Near the end, in the commentary accompanying verse 18.47, which reads:

 It is better to do your own dharma imperfectly than to excel at another's dharma. Whoever accepts the duties of his own nature is free from sin.

I found a most curious passage, one that seemed to be written directly to me. Below is a picture of that passage:

At this point I'm pretty sure I threw down the book, grabbed my friend's arm, and started babbling incoherently about burning bushes. 

Nevertheless, I returned home, went back to work, and a couple of months passed. By this time, a cascade of issues at the office came to a head with me at the center. Whether or not they were actually a big deal in the grand scheme of things isn't as relevant as the fact that it served as a major wake-up call for me to make some changes in my management style and the ways I handled stress. Around that time, I was idly browsing the Himalayan Institute website and came across an opening for a residential staff role: Bookkeeper.

Okay, Universe, I thought. You win.

Nearly a year after that, after two visits to HI, much wringing of hands and many two-columned lists, and a lot of transition planning, I arrived. And the rest is yet to unfold.

welcome to somewhere

As much as someone could ever truly land somewhere, I have landed. I've spent a week building, arranging, acclimating, working, communing, eating, organizing, cleaning, laughing, enjoying, struggling, trying, practicing, reading... in short, living. Here, in my new home. And in that week, I've begun to feel like this IS a home, my home; I have a home, and it is here.

My room, in it's mostly finished state. I didn't even pick the purple wall! It just came that way.

So far, I've been spending my mornings working in veggie prep (peeling, chopping, and rinsing vegetables in the kitchen to get them ready for the cooks to use), with afternoons free to settle in and contemplate. It's been the right pace for me, since a) I only operate at one speed and so am completely physically drained by the time lunch comes around, and b) I hadn't really taken stock of how exhausted I was from the nonstop working-packing-moving show that my life has been for the last couple of months. The kitchen is staffed with an eclectic mix of locals from the surrounding towns (including a troupe of astonishingly sweet guys in a program that trains special needs folks for full-time jobs, who have love lives far more colorful than my own and who know an awful lot about Marvel comics and Nickelodeon cartoons), some long-time Institute residents who came here after they retired and have 20 years worth of stories and gossip, and a French-Canadian chef who is equally versed in Ayurvedic principles and Tartine sourdough bread. The food is nourishing and healthy; there's dairy and hearty protein and the aforementioned delicious bread and butter served with every meal, and though we get our veggies on trucks like everyone else, I've seen firsthand how fresh the produce is and how picky we are in selecting only the tasty bits for our dishes. After a couple of weeks of working here, I'll transition into my more permanent role on the business side of things, which might include work for the creative/marketing team as well as the finance group.

Practicing in one of the many beautiful yoga spaces available on campus.

If there's a recurring theme so far, it's one of pleasant surprises. From immediately finding a group of dudes not unlike any other nerdy friendgroup I've had in the past, to the fact that people in ashrams like Dungeons & Dragons and Game of Thrones and the occasional pizza and beer on the weekend, to the candor with which people here talk about everything from past Himalayan Institute scandals to current struggles with Parkinson's, it seems like every day brings a new sigh of relief or giggle of delight. It's not that I wasn't hoping for all of this, it's more the dawning realization that I'm in the right place. That the voice in the back of my head that whispered, then pestered, then screamed that this move was the right decision... wasn't wrong. My intuition, as it turns out (again), doesn't eff around. I am way less anxious and my moods are more stable since I've arrived. Even my skin looks better. That's not to say there aren't things I miss; with a program steeped in traditional meditation techniques and a daily yoga class schedule that has to accommodate a range of abilities and includes the elderly, I've had to supplement with a more vigorous and rigorous home practice. I'm having trouble making it to morning and evening group meditations in our shrine. There are communal eating and shared shower situations to acclimate to, and (like with any new company or city) local politics to navigate. But through it all, people have been genuine, and warm, and welcoming, and I feel, even in this completely foreign situation and surrounded by new faces, pretty darn safe. Maybe more safe than I have in a while. And when you have a stable and rooted base, all kinds of upward, outward, and unexpected growth happens.

I am here. I am open. And truly, I am ready.

The drive (part 2 of 2)

The second part of the trip was a lot more grueling, not just because the lack of sleep began to catch up with us. The weather in Colorado, Nebraska, and Illinois can best be described as "frozen hellscape" (which has the positive side effect of making PA feel downright balmy. From there we made a stop in Chicago to visit some dear business school friends of mine, then on to Pittsburgh, and the following day was the longest of the trip. It went something like this:

1. Leave Pittsburgh at 7am. Discover an hour into the drive that one of the plastic wraps for the stuff on top of my car had developed a new hole, stop to repair.
2. Arrive in Scranton just before noon to pick up a rental SUV for Nick to drive.
3. Go to the "Greyhound" station in Scranton, which is an unmarked codeshare counter. Yes, my stuff is here, and in the shed, but the guy with the key to the shed is on his lunch. ETA of guy unknown, but we can "go do something in the area" in the meantime. There is nothing we need or want to do in Scranton. We wait.
4. Guy opens shed. Only 7/9 of my things have arrived so far. ETA of other things unknown. Relief at finding out the missing items include ONLY my bedframe (not mattress, that's secured and can be on the floor), chair, and a miscellany of items unfortunately including all of my toothpaste in the world. No matter.
5. Set off for the Himalayan Institute, arrive too late for lunch, unload cars, carry everything upstairs to my room, build one bookshelf.
6. Get back in the cars around 5pm for Philly, where we spend our last night at the Ritz-Carlton downtown (because you kind of have to in this situation).
7. Nick leaves first thing in the morning on a first class flight back to SFO, I leave second thing in the morning in my filthy car back to HI.

And so I am here. I've made some progress unpacking, I've caught up on a bit of sleep, I've met some really nice people. I start my two weeks of seva (selfless service) work tomorrow, chopping veggies in the kitchen for lunch and dinner. I'm pretty excited for that part, both as a means of settling in and as a (not very) creative outlet for my urge to cook things. After that, I get to start my regular job and flex my surely-atrophied-by-now operational muscles, while getting to do workshops and yoga classes on my evenings and weekends. More to come once I make sense of my brainspace. For now, more photos!

DAY 4: Colorado - Nebraska (Hellscape day 1)

Descriptive of drive

Midway point

The Good Life

DAY 5: Omaha - Chicago

Tundra vehicle

Made it to Chicago

Dinner with Boothies

DAY 6: Chicago - Pittsburgh

Pennsylvania was an immediate relief

Pittsburgh at dusk

DAY 7: The longest day

The shed

My room! At Himalayan Institute!

The long unload

Swami the Snowman

My room isn't my room until there's a Hippo

Ready or not, here I come

The drive (part 1 of 2)

As promised, here is a chronicle of our journey so far. Mostly in photographic form, with minor descriptive bits here and there.

DAY 1: packed up the car

arrived at our friend Joe's

went to bed

DAY 2: wrapped up Nevada and drove into Utah

truck stops with great gear

Saw my dad in Park City for dinner

DAY 3: drove through Wyoming most of the day

Frolicked in some snow and natural beauty

It started snowing buckets as we drove into Colorado

Evolution of a storage unit

I am on my way and will post an account of the first part of the journey tomorrow, but wanted to illustrate an example of a highly efficient but completely non-earthquake-safe way to fill a storage unit. Let's collectively pool our intentions (thoughts, prayers, etc) on The Big One not coming in the next 12 months.

Sidebar: while I did find the cheapest way to ship things cross-country (Greyhound Busfreighter, $350 for 8 boxes and one couch), I was informed two days ago that my things arrived in Scranton and there's no place to store them. They don't even have their own station there, it's a counter at a state-run station. Oh, and a snowstorm is coming, 12-15" of fresh powder. Eventually, "a shed in the back" was located. So that's the status on my stuff. In a shed. Allegedly.

Furniture tetris

If you've ever tried to get an accountant or financial planner to let their hair down, break some rules, or let the road take them where it may, you may have experienced some frustration at their inability or unwillingness to participate to your liking. Let's face it: my people, we are not always the best at "going with the flow". It's taken me years of self-work and practice to get comfortable with impromptu picnics and letting people borrow my books (and not throwing a hissy fit when paperbacks get returned with the spines creased -- there is a special place in detail-orientation hell for you spine creasers).

But there are times when a decade of work experience in operations comes in handy. When you downsize from 1800 square feet of living space (plus a garage with overhead storage) to 100, you can't, at least not with success, just wing it and hope everything fits. I owe a great debt to my mother here, for teaching me from a young age the lost Russian art of Furniture Tetris (also Dishwasher Tesselations and Refrigerator Optimization, but that's highly advanced and out of scope here). To play along, you will need:

Room dimensions are 8' x 14', with the first 3' of the long wall taken up by the sink-door-closet combination. Bringing the sofa is non-negotiable. It has colorful buttons.

1. Graph paper
2. A tape measure to measure your furniture
3. Precise dimensions and layout of the space to be occupied

Below are the results of this exercise for my current situation. As you can see, there's a limited number of ways to make it work without turning Tetris into Frogger and having to leap over furniture to get into bed. Please note that 4 squares are equivalent to 12", so while some of the layouts look appealing, they leave little room for a big booty to squeeze through. Input is most welcome.

The way I thought it was going to work is unfortunately hindered by physics.

Legitimate(ish) options shown below.

The FAQs

Due in large part to my own personal laziness and tendency toward irritability at having to answer the same questions with the same answers over and over again, I thought it might be helpful to provide, in one convenient location, the Details About Everything. Troof 'n' FAQs, if you will. So in no particular order, here's the deal:

Where are you going?

I am moving to the Himalayan Institute. Which, confusingly, is not in the Himalayas at all, but in fact in a remote part of the Poconos Mountains in Pennsylvania, about 3 hours north of Philadelphia, or 40 minutes northeast of Scranton (if you're a local).

What's the Himalayan Institute? It sounds like a cult.

Dwight Schrute, famous Scrantonian, demonstrates use of a Neti Pot. Image from Buzzfeed

Well, their website provides a lot of good information: www.himalayaninstitute.org, but broadly speaking it's a fully functioning ashram (like a monastery-slash-school, but for yogis instead of monks) in the Himalayan tradition of yoga, which is heavy on experiential learning (Tantra), meditation, and self-study, and light on Instagram selfies of fancy yoga poses (but I plan on taking some anyway, because I'm a rebel). It's set on a beautiful piece of foresty hilltop, and they offer a variety of retreats, training programs, and an Ayurvedic (Indian medicine) spa. They run a publishing house that has put out over 100 books, founded Yoga International (www.yogainternational.com, a major provider of yoga teacher source material), have an on-site coffee and chocolate factory that sources beans from their own (mission-driven) plantations in Africa and South America, and have a couple other ashrams in India. Aside from all of that, they were the original importers of the Neti Pot to the US, helping millions to clear their sinuses while looking absolutely ridiculous in their bathroom mirrors. One particular aim of the Himalayan Institute that resonates with me is the desire to bring together the positive aspects of Western civilization with the highest forms of Eastern philosophy and tradition to find a more unified, better way forward for everyone.

Okay but it sounds like a cult. And you're avoiding the question. Is it a cult?

I don't think so, but I guess one can never be THAT sure. All I can say is from multiple visits, I've seen no evidence of group marriage, creepily charismatic leadership, idolatry, or goat sacrifices (they're vegetarian). People from all religious backgrounds and non-religious people alike live and work with these philosophies with no issues, if that helps. Yoga, generally, is a non-denominational, non-dogmatic set of principles and practices.

When are you leaving [already]?

My last day at my current job is January 31, 2018. I ship out of the Bay Area on February 7, 2018. I am due to arrive there and begin my new chapter on February 14, 2018. Why yes, that IS Valentine's Day. Yes, I'm a huge dork.

How are you getting there?

Driving across the country in 7 days with my best friend (called Nick) in my purple crossover SUV (called Wolfram). Here is our route:

And you're moving there to do what, exactly?

Broadly, to be of service. More specifically, I'm going to be using my business/accounting/finance skills to assist their operations team. I'll be working 9-5ish like a normal person, and in my spare time I'll be able to immerse myself in their programming -- basically, become a student again. Along the way, I'm also hoping to become a little more patient, empathetic, and gentle; living communally with your coworkers is pretty much management and tolerance training on Beast Mode.

For how long?

I've committed to a minimum of 12 months. Obviously, if it's not a fit on either side, it will be less time. But part of this is trying to let go of unnecessary expectations, so I'm not trying to be rigid with planning in either direction.

Why? Why leave a high-flying executive role at a growing company that lets you have purple hair and a nose piercing to move to a commune the woods, away from your friends and family and all of your beautiful THINGS?

Well, ultimately, because it feels like the right thing to do for me, right now. I've been considering it for two years and the actual opportunity has been in the works for almost a year, so it's not exactly a spur of the moment, impulsive decision. But in a nutshell, I'm going because I'm in a position where it's financially and responsibly feasible for me to:

• Improve myself in the ways I know I want to improve (patience, empathy, kindness)
• Further explore the practice of yoga I've found to be so beneficial in my life, and delve deeply into ONE lineage
• Learn new stuff about myself that I DON'T know I need to work on yet (isn' t that always the case?)
• Remove the rest of the pressures and distractions to allow the above to happen. There are always a million different directions you can go in, especially living in the Bay Area. I'm trying to limit the noise of nearly all of them so I can pursue one, with focus.

What are the living conditions there? Wait, did you say VEGETARIAN?

I will have a private room which I'm furnishing to make it cozy and home-like. More on the room in a later post. The kitchen is communal, with three meals provided per day -- this also means I won't have a kitchen to play/bake/mess around in anymore. There may or may not be social clubs for such frivolities. Yep, the premises are no-meat. I think I can get a steak in town if it's an absolute emergency, but it probably won't kill me to cut down on my meat consumption anyway. But there is butter and dairy with each meal, which is critical for my survival.

Fin.

The stuff of life, a life of stuff

I've moved a lot. More than most people. There was a period in my life (say, a couple decades long) when I averaged a move or two a year. Packing and unpacking, purging and rebuilding, it's all kind of second nature to me now. I don't get stressed about it; home is a pretty fluid concept (more on that in a later post), and it's actually kind of soothing and nostalgic to get the opportunity to take stock of the "stuff" you've built up over this period in your life. And in the past 4+ years since business school (4 moves, if you're counting), I've built 1800 square feet (plus a garage)'s worth of stuff: a beautiful collection of art, a harmonious assortment of furniture that supports my seat and reflects my aesthetic vision, and (truthfully) a sickening amount of clothing. If I had to pick one aspect of my life that most closely resembles addiction, online clothing shopping wins by a mile.

A move, especially one that involves a major life shift, always positions us uniquely to evaluate (from a material, gross perspective, anyway) what we want to carry with us, and what we're ready to let go of. We get to choose, quite literally, our baggage. And that's profound and impactful, if you do it consciously. And that leaves me with a fundamental dilemma of stuff: how much stuff do I need? How much stuff do I want? What do I do with all of my stuff? Whose stuff is it, anyway?

But this move feels different. Charged, somehow. There's an expectation, I think, that someone deciding to move to an ashram (or a monastery, or a nomadic lifestyle) is shedding all of their stuff in the process. Physical stuff, mental stuff, emotional stuff. Fresh start. No baggage. But of course, that's impossible; we're not solely defined by the things we own, borrow, or carry with us. In a recent yoga training I did, the (Tibetan Buddhist, if it matters) lecturers briefly discussed nonattachment in the context of this question of stuff. I was somewhat surprised, pleasantly so, when their conclusion wasn't that all stuff was bad, but that each person finds the right amount of stuff for them. If you get rid of all of your stuff and then you feel awful about it, that's too much purging; you're going against your internal, natural order. So in making decisions about my stuff in preparation for this move to the Himalayan Institute, I'm feeling a lot of pressure to hear and reflect my inner voice. To be true to mystuff. But also to think carefully about the future; it feels really wasteful and self-indulgent to purge everything now, only to have to buy new stuff and support the stuff-generation-advertising-industrial-complex-machine all over again upon my (assumed) return to the normal world.

So where does that leave my stuff? I have to take some of it with me, to furnish my 100sft corner of the world and clothe myself and provide me with stuff to do -- but only what fits into my hatchback, since I'm driving there. All of the art and most of the lovely furniture is going into storage, some is being lent to friends or kept at my old workplace, a small amount is getting sold off or given away. Some of my clothing is going into storage as well, but I'm limited to a 10x9ft space. Everything else must go. "Raid my closet" party, donation bins, and consignment fill the calendar for my next few weeks. So far, that feels just right to me.

my last New Year's sunset in sf

For now.