Yoga Sutras; Svadhyaya, Satsang

I've enrolled in an Embodied Philosophy 6 week workshop studying the Yoga Sutras with Edwin Bryant. I actually began reading his book The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali earlier this year in cominbation with two other versions (The Heart of Yoga by T.K.V. Desikachar and The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali by Sri Swami satchidananda) and I found Bryant's the most accessible to me. I also liked the Heart of Yoga which is more than just the Yoga Sutras. The last section of that book includes Sri Deskikachar's translation and commentary on the sutras so when I got their I decided to take do a comparison reading

What I'm Reading: Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You

I started a new book this last weekend It is called Your Survival Instinct Is Killing You with a subtitle of Retrain Your Brain to Conquer Fear and Build Resilience The author is Marcho Schoen, PH.D with Kristin Loberg. The link above takes you to amazon.

Premise of the book is that our flight or fight instinct that is controlled by the limbic or reptile brain is increasingly causing us to experience health, mental, emotional, and physical problems even though we are increasing safe and lead a live of relative ease and comfort. Many of our modern chronic diseases have at its root our survival instinct kicking in when we don't need it.

Well that's a loose summary, I'll let you know how close I was.

The Kid is using Krita

So back in the day when all my machines were Linux, our family were heavy KDE users. Used it for years and years never really liking Gnome. However, for photoshop type of work we generally used GIMP. Come to find out that my son, now 25 years old and an illustrator is a proud user of Krita. I was like, wait a minute I've heard that name before. Well, I looked it up and sure enough it was the same software from KDE. And I thought damn, ain't that cool!

Well I also found out that around 2009 after I had pretty much stopped using KDE and KOffice by that time largely because I wasn't on my machines as much by that point, that Krita changed direction and became a "painting" app. Which is exactly why my son switched from Gimp (on Windows) to Krita. He finds it much more useful and intuitive to use (he showed my the one exception) than GIMP so that's what he's using.

Open Source is still a cool place to be!

Bike Ride with Elly

I am currently in Washington DC to spend time with my daughter before driving us both back to Cleveland. Elly brought her bicycle from Japan so I brought mine from Cleveland. On Friday we were going to take a ride down to Mt. Vernon but due some other circumstances we were not able to do that so we just walked around DC.

This morning though we were able to go out for a ride which was fun. We rode around the Mall, rode through China Town which reminded me of all those Cavs vs Bullets games back in the Gilbert Arenas days. We stopped by the Supreme Court and rode by Union Station. Adding a few pics below.

Starting with Tiny Habits

A friend of mine mentioned to me the power of tiny habits. Simplifying the concept it basically means take baby steps. Yes really, really small baby steps. For example if you want to get into the habit of brushing your teeth after every meal, don't start with all your meals and brushing all of your teeth, start of with after one meal brush one tooth. It'll take you a second and your done.

Now that brushing your teeth example is a little silly, but that's the idea. Start small and go from there. If it is small enough it won't create the resistance to it that you naturally feel. If you are consistent you will gradually get there.

I have been trying to get back to blogging for years but never quite make it. I'm gonna try tiny habit, so my posts may be more like tweets than blog posts.

This is one

Seven Day Rescue Video

In yesterday's blog post about my new vlgo, I mentioned that the Rescue 10X is the 7 Day Rescue ten times in a row. Here is more info on the 7 Day Rescue:
https://youtu.be/AqgYL1mujUA. The first couple of scenes that are interviewing with Rip and Jane Esselstyn is in as at Hyland Software which was one of the two location Engine 2 conducted their programs in a non-immersion environment.

My Engine 2 Rescue 10X Journey Channel

I will be vlogging about my Rescue 10x hosted by Plant Strong by Engine2 on Youtube. I intend to embed the videos here on my blog to keep all my content in one place. This is new for me so the learning curve will be steep. It's not very good yet, but I published my first one.

I need to work at getting more natural at talking in front of the camera. I speak too fast, and not clearly enough. But I got the first one under my belt.

Lawn Chemicals

If you ever wondered why we seem to have more cancer, more digestive difficulties, more autism, more everything bad, look at the picture. You put toxic chemicals, strong enough to warrant a warning sign that says kids, dogs and adults should stay of the grass because it's been chemically treated. And it's like on every other lawn. Think people.

That shit also goes straight into our water system too. Granted, our water treatment centers run by our utilities do a fantastic job of treating our water before it comes to that, the reality in big storms they just open the valves and all the crap goes right into Lake Erie. I am not ripping the water department, I'm ripping the people that think dark green grass is more important than our collective health which costs well over a trillion dollars a year in the US.

Meet Debi, a husky formerly known as Queenie

This last Friday night, Arisa and I did a rash thing. We adopted a dog from a local rescue, the Berea Animal Rescue Fund. We had gone to visit a German Shepherd, which I love, but came away with a Siberian Husky instead.

Having moved to the west side, we had finally decided we’d get a dog. I’ve wanted one for quite a while but with the long commute it didn’t make any sense - 8-10 hours is way too long to leave a dog home alone in my opinion. Now, however, being just a 10-15 minutes away, we can come home at lunch, we are leaving later to get to work, and we are home sooner. So maybe 4 hours at time alone during the week, broken up by walks at lunch.

So we’ve been looking at websites like Adopt-A-Pet, Petfinder etc. and visited both the Berea facility as well as they Cuyahoga County shelter at least three times. We never quite found the right dog. We were also looking at puppies but couldn’t find the right one, or they were too far away.

Friday night I wanted to head to Berea Animal Rescue because they had a German Shepherd I wanted to see. We signed the waiver that’s good for letting us see animals for 24 hours, and as we were walking out to meet Paulie (the shepherd, they way they were putting away the other dogs made it clear this dog reacted to other dogs. In the neighborhood we are in that’s not going to fly, and it was a *big* German Shepherd, we probably would have had difficulty stopping it if it really wanted to do something.

“Queenie” caught our eye as she was the dog they cleared out from the cage we were going to see

Paulie in. Her tail was so far under her rump, she was clearly terrified. In the end, we didn’t even stay to see Paulie, went to the Cuyahoga County shelter didn’t find anything we wanted. On the way home, we talked about various dogs, and what we were looking for, etc, and we kept coming back to the husky. So we decided to go visit the husky one last time since BARF was open until 8pm on Friday nights. And we found Queenie, aka Debi, sitting in fear in her cage.

We did a meet and greet with her, and decided that we were going to adopt. Arisa in particular really wanted to get her out of that shelter. We decided after some discussion to take her home that night even though we weren’t prepared in order to give her some time to adjust to her new home before we had to leave for a work day. So we took her home Friday night, complete spur of the moment decision.

She is still really skittish though she has begun to eat and drink water, sometimes in front of us. She’s great on walks but is afraid of everything, or any loud sound. She shrunk away from a sewer in the street because the sound of the water scared her. She shrunk away from a tree with several loud and chirpy sparrows. Needless to say she is skittish around us as well.

We are looking forward to seeing her come out of her shell and show us who she really is. Already I can tell she is a chewer, and when she is really comfotable playful. I am also guessing that she is going to cause havoc. She already chewed up one plant, and was playfully jumping around last night. I plan to keep a running “diary” here: Meet Debi

2019 Intention - Summary : It's a Matter of Balance

This post will recap all three of my 2019 Intention posts, wrapping them all up in a nice little theme. And adding perhaps one or two more intentions for the year. I also intend to keep the door open for some additional goals and/or things I may want to add as go through the year. To start with here are the links to previous 2019 Intentions posts.

2019 Intentions

Part I Journaling #journaling

Part II Meditation #meditation

Part III Reading #reading #spiritualreading

Part IV Yoga Studies #yogastudies #yoga

As you have already guessed from the title of this post, this year will be about regaining balance or perhaps establishing balance. Let me explain.

2019 Intentions - Part 4 ; Yoga Studies

This post is number four in the series of posts I am making with regards to my 2019 Intentions. So far we have covererd

Part 1 Journaling

Part 2 Meditation

Part 3 Reading

Today's installment is to talk about my intentions to apply discipline and rigor to my study of Yoga. This post will cover a relatively wide range of topics that all fall under this category.

So hold onto your hats! Here we go!

2019 Intentions - Part 3 Reading

My continuing effort to clarify my intentions for 2019. This is the third post in the series and I'm guessing that there will be may 10 posts all told to clarify my intentions for this year. If you were curious, I do have a bullet list of handwritten goals and/or intentions for this year but writing these out help me clarify what I'm actually trying to achieve with each of them. In some cases writing them out is simply that I already know what I'm intending. In other cases I have an very general, vague idea of what I want to do and the blog posts will help me figure out the details.

Next up are my intention for reading in 2019.

2019 Intentions - Part 2: Meditation

updateI started this last week and am finishing it today. Just so you know.

This morning I'm hanging out at Starbucks while I wait for my Mom's testing to get done. She has about two hours of testing with the Neuro-Psychologist to see where she is at. She has already had some preliminary tests done with the neurologist and a MRI scan of her brain. We have a wrap up meeting next Wednesday with the gerontologist again. We should have a good baseline of where she is at and can more accurately evaluate any steps we need to take.

so while I'm waiting I thought it would be a good time to start my post for my next set of intentions for 2019. As I mentioned in my Part 1 post, I have about 10 goals for this year that I want to try and achieve but some of those are the same as last year. Overall, they are all related to making lifestyle changes that I hope make me more mindful, kind, and healthy in mind, body and spirit. Even if I don't achieve them all the goals and the journey are worth it. As mention in the previous post, my dabbling in journaling over the last year and half led to a some benefits, realizations, and ah-ha's that motivate me to make it a more consistent, bigger part of my lifestyle. Similarly, many of the items that are "rolling over" from last year have provided some benefits or enough of something to think I want to keep trying. Some I did fairly successfully, some I failed at. In this and upcoming posts I'll take about what I'm trying and why.

Following journaling first up is Meditation.

2019 Intentions - Part 1: Journaling

Like every year, I hope to get back to blogging more. I'll touch on the why of that for this year in a later post - assuming I ever make more than one or two posts. This post is intended to be a post about just one intention or goal I have for 2019. I have about 10, many of which are interrelated. I am hoping that by delving into each one I'll get a little bit more traction towards accomplishing them this year.

So my intention is to journal every single day of 2019. At least once a day. Now, I'm not going to freak out if I miss a day, I've done enough all or nothing resolutions to know they don't work if you are really trying to create a change. My focus is to set an intention(s) or goals that I want to achieve by the end of the year. So when I say I'll journal every day I mean by the end of the year journaling on a daily basis will be an establish part of my day-to-day activities.

Weekly Tao Te Ching Week 33

Happy New Year!!!

May your 2019 be the best year yet!

Welcome to this week's Tao Te Ching verse. See here for what this is all about. 

"Annual" Day After Christmas Post

It appears that that I post the day after Christmas every year. Most likely because I am not going to work and I have some time, plus it is that time of year to reflect on the year, and think about goals and aspirations for the upcoming year.

2018 was an interesting year for me. In some ways very successful, in others not so much. But isn't that true every year?

I started out the year trying to get up earlier in the morning so that I could get in a consistent yoga, pranayama, meditation, and reading practice to start the day. The difficulty of that is that I need to be in bed earlier in order to get enough sleep. I found that it was too difficult for a variety of reasons. Regardless of those reasons the reality is that it was beyond me this year to go to bed early enough to make getting up at 4-4:30am feasible. When I say it was "beyond me" or "not feasible", I realize that for the most part that comes down to my own discipline. And that's okay, I'm okay for not being up to the challenge this year.

Weekly Tao Te Ching Post - Week 32

So it's been exactly a year since I posted the last Weekly Tao Te Ching verse. Gonna see if I can start getting back into it in 2019. "It" being posting to my blog more consistently. I'll go into more about it later but it is something I want to keep up, probably more so as I think I'm going to start ramping down social media interactions. More on that later too.

Welcome to this week's Tao Te Ching verse. See here for what this is all about. 

Weekly Tao Te Ching Post - Week 31

As you can tell by the fact that I am only on week 31, I have not been posting regularly. I am okay with that but I hope to continue more consistenly from here on out through 2018 at least until I finish the book. Over the next week or two I may be posting a tad bit more than normal(which really isn't that hard, lol).

If you have followed this blog at all over time you will have noticed that around the end of the year into the first part of the new year I look back on what I have accomplished and make plans on what I want accomplish.

It's that time of the year again.

Weekly Tao Te Ching Verse - Week #30

A very long time has passed since I last posted at Tao Te Ching verse. Time to get back to that so I can finish it - start finishing and stop starting!

Since we (meaning me, myself and I) last chatted was in late April. As you can imagine quite a bit has happened since then. For one the YTT class I had been attending graduated and some are teaching, some have participated in a meditation challenge I started, another a book club discussion I started. At PlantBasedCLE we started our restaurant take over, I started teaching at Stat Crossfit on both Sundays and Wednesdays, picked up a second class at Fitworks. I started reading Banish Your Inner Critic and the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (for the book club ostensibly).

Weekly Tao Te Ching Verse - Week #29

Hey friends, it's been a while. I got out of the habit of doing the blog posts, not sure why. I am here to try and rectify that because I think it is important for me to have some discipline and rigor in my life. My goal for this blog, I guess, is to be a record of some of my thoughts and activities. Not earth shatteringly important to anyone other than myself maybe and that's okay. This blog, dear reader, is really for me.

The last time I posted we had just finished an unofficial Engine 2 Seven Day at Hyland. Well, coincidentally we are on Day 5 of our second Seven Day Rescue! And we have two more coming up, one in May and one in June. It's pretty awesome that Hyland stepped up and added it to their currently wellness initiative called the "Whole Hylander". It looks at wellness as more than just diet and excercise, but also community, mindfulness and financial well being.

I have also taken up a larger role in PlantBasedCLE as the previous President stepped down. She stepped down for the best of reasons, she is a victim of her own success, and Engine 2 where she works is giving her more and more responsibility. Which unfortunately for us means she has less time to dedicate to the organization. I have stepped in as President with my high school buddy John as Vice President. We created a new board of directors and re-started monthly meetings and activities which we had paused over the holidays.