DEFINITION: Pronoia is the antidote for paranoia. It’s the understanding that the universe is fundamentally friendly. It’s a mode of training your senses and intellect so you’re able to perceive the fact that life always gives you exactly what you need, exactly when you need it.
HYPOTHESES: Evil is boring. Cynicism is idiotic. Fear is a bad habit. Despair is lazy. Joy is fascinating. Love is an act of heroic genius. Pleasure is our birthright. Receptivity is a superpower.
PROCEDURE: Act as if the universe is a prodigious miracle created for your amusement and illumination. Assume that secret helpers are working behind the scenes to assist you in turning into the gorgeous masterpiece you were born to be. Join the conspiracy to shower all of creation with blessings.
Sometimes i make weird boring movies. This one is about the details of sitting in a cafe in New York City one day in early June 2010… Lykke Li adds the appropriate inner monologue and musical back drop…
a beautiful terror
I am still dreaming
of hanging from cliff edges
I wake with a pang
of cold delicious Fear
this wet and throbbing body
proclaims itself to me
My left eyelid swollen shut
I hear the small dog’s throat rattle
There are many passing voices
outside the tall window shut
And suddenly
I have such clarity
that my skin swims frightened
with aliveness
View Postyoga: why? because!
Yoga for me is not just a physical or spiritual practice limited to a certain square of time in my schedule. It may have begun that way, but now yoga infiltrates every aspect of my life. I have been practicing yoga for 10 years and teaching for 3, but I still consider myself a beginner. It is much more interesting to approach the practice with beginners eyes, and ask “what can I learn today?” rather than exercise my already “mastered” poses. When we feel we know it all, we become jaded, and tend to go on auto-pilot. Yoga is not meant to be another thing on our to do list, it is a practice that we carry off our mats with us into our days. Yoga reminds me to be more aware of my breath, and my overall being, as I go about talking, walking, eating, working, etc. When i approach my practice in an open way, I find that yoga continuously surprises me with its lessons and gifts. Just when I think I have it figured out, I realize I know nothing, and I begin again. Its beautiful!
This continuous sense of wonder, discovery, and destruction & rebirth is what keeps life wonderful and fulfilling for me. Yoga has given me this gift. When I do not do my practice I start feeling stuck and disengaged from my own life and the actions I take in it. Being fully present and open for all of life’s moments (the good, the bad, and the ugly!) this is what gives me incentive to return to my mat, again and again. As a yoga teacher I strive to share this gift with others. I hope that everyone may realize how amazing their lives already are! We just need to stop and remember to breathe and feel.
I am attracted by the strangeness that surrounds all large cities… In Asnieres there is a nakedness of earthen embankments, wooden shacks inhabited by extraordinary people, skinny horses, nondescript carriages, and stray dogs. I respond to all that, it answers a need I have for sorrowful charm, a love of strange silhouettes…
-Jean-Francois Raffaelli, 1881
De Young Museum Acquires the Absinthe Drinkers
my very most favorite poem ever
The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
4 Artists I currently find inspiring.
Delicious food for your eyeballs.
View Post Amanda Blake, artists, David Cook, drawing, inspiration, inspire, Jean Tripier, Julianna Swaney, paintingBack to REAL_ity(?)
2 weeks ago I went to colombia for a week. It was the first real vacation i’d had in years. Not traveling to see family, not traveling for a training, or for work in some way, but a real honest to god vacation (palm trees, beaches, relaxation and all). But of course a week of adventure, romance, and beauty was not enough. It only wet my palette for all the other places to discover, people to meet, and experiences to be had. I’ve been bitten by the travel bug before and so I am familiar with it’s itch. I have always been a bit of a wanderlust. So now I have half a mind to sell everything I own and go globe-trotting for a few months or years. But for some reason I seem to be convinced that there is work to be done in San Francisco right now. I am building something… a feel something comparable to an actual foundation hardening beneath me (something i’ve never really had), and it is a sensation that is both startling and comforting. But getting my feet back on the ground and returning to the daily grind—-teaching, striving, art studio, networking, launching a start-up business, organizing shows, keeping up with friends, and of course the never ending to-do list of mundane maintenance like emails and laundry—-it all felt so overwhelming and unnecessary. What are we all DOING??? And why can’t I keep my mellow vacation mood whilst doing the urban yogi warrior dance? Hmmm.. well, it is getting easier. With each day that passes, that pink cloud of vacation memory feels like a dream and the concrete here proclaims itself to be reality. But the cloud felt real when i was there, so what is real anyway? It seems like the “real world” everyone refers to all the time is just one version of reality, and since everyone agrees and believes in it, the solidity of its truth grows incredibly convincing… Oh, i don’t know. Its late and i’m tired. I have to wake up early tomorrow and get back at it. Or do i?
I leave you with some snap shots of a reality I briefly found in south america.
Cartagena—>Taganga—>Tayrona…
View Post adventure, cartagena, colombia, nature of reality, south america, taganga, tayrona, travel, vacation, wanderlust