The Chicago Project: Validation and Humility

This past weekend I went to King’s Spa with some girlfriends of mine.  King’s Spa is a Korean spa so for the first part of the experience you get completely nude in a room full of other women to enjoy a steam room, showers and hot tubs.

King's Spa 

My girlfriends came up naked and we all looked at each other for a moment before one friend said: look at us; we’re beautiful.  We – as a whole – not based on this superficial notion of beauty but based on our willingness to share this experience with each other.

That set the tone: validation.

My friend has this tattoo on her arm: it says: do not seek outside of yourself in Latin.  I pondered this as an array of different bodies walked past me.  Body-positive experiences are something I’ve been intentional about having lately starting with the naked bike ride and taking my next steps with my yoga practice.

Throughout the evening I pondered the notion of validation within our society and seeking it from external factors.  I’m very guilty of this – as we all are.  I seek validation from the men I keep in my back pocket to make me feel attractive or the books I read to prove my intellectual prowess and the social circles I maintain to show some sort of status. Still, I keep coming to the same conclusion:  when you lose the ego you feel no need to be validated by others.

Humility is honest; it’s vulnerable and damn it, it’s scary.  It’s sitting naked in a hot tub and feeling at peace.  It’s telling the truth even when it hurts you to do so.  It’s smiling at a stranger on the street with no expectation of receiving a smile or recognition in return.  It’s walking into a room with quiet confidence knowing you have nothing to prove. 

It’s also very hard work as we fight against our conditioning in this society.  The ego likes to keep one safe.  The ego keeps my sunglasses on as I follow the beat of my heels hitting pavement attuned to my ipod making no human connections walking down my street.  The genuine me, however, wants to be honest, vulnerable and notice how lonely everyone really is and say, it’s okay, look at us; we’re beautiful.

Freedom Prayer

Feel the itch to

Shed some old skin

Live in the transformation

Let the Serpent back in

Watch as it coils around you

Until you can’t breathe

Your bones begin to crack

While your gender, age, height, race…

Those defining characteristics

Begin to deconstruct as your body condenses

Wrapped in the coils tight

The Serpent then begs the question

Of your identity

Before swallowing you whole

You’d be surprised just how seductive

That kiss of death could be

It strikes at you quickly

Without warning

Leaving you forever changed

The old you was far too safe

Too boring

Death comes in to set you free

Pray.

I am not my body

I am not my past

I am not my religion

I am not my sex

I am not my eyes

I am not my university

I am not my career

I am not my family
I am not even my poetry

If you could only remember

Death sits behind your left shoulder

What’s worth fighting for?

What’s left to cling to?

Comes a time

That you just can’t carry it around anymore

I pray to the Crows

Scavengers of the sky

I offer my body

If only to free my soul

Open my pumping heart

Satisfy their thirst

I am but my Father’s daughter

Came into this world with no possessions

This is all I have to offer

Tired of clinging to a false sense of autonomy

Freedom is the unhinged and unsecured

A floating leaf; subject to God’s will

The Wind’s doing

I’d lay naked before Her

This is how I pray

Lay bare enticing the Serpents, Crows

And Wind to come to me

I smoke the tobacco for all my relations

The animals too

Om

Aho

Hallelujah

And if I could strip down

Be delivered an empty vessel

For Spirit to live through

I would

Surrender completely

And watch how the Serpent saves you

A transmutation of DNA

An evolution of grandiose proportions

Don’t let the fear of death hold you back

For self preservation means nothing

Compared to this final sacrifice

I will never be anything more;

Anything less;

Than this.

The Boxer

The colors are brighter

When your bright red blood

Gets splashed against the monotone

I met a boxer at the bar

He asked me to look at his nose

‘cause it’s been broken 3 times before

You know I can relate

I’m the shadow boxer type

My opponent knows my every move

Faces me dead on – fierce

Every time I look in the mirror

He showed me his scar

The one below his jaw

Made me want to circle around the ring

Doused in gasoline

Waiting for someone to light a cigarette

 

I keep bracing myself for the next big thing

He keeps destroying his body

Over an elusive victory

My left arm wrestles the right

And I keep thinking I want to take him home tonight

I want to share battle scenes

‘cause I like his crooked nose

Despite everything

I need a strong opponent

Can he handle my blows?

Takes me into the ring

Just to practice sparring

Practice becomes the real thing

The colors are brighter

With our blood

Splattered against the monotone

But this time I won’t be alone

No, this time I’m not alone

Taking the Leap: Leap Year 2012

“People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.  We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult in a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.”

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Full excerpt here.

I’ve been meditating on Rilke’s words a lot.  People do have a tendency towards the easiest path.  We tend to like what we are good at and build up those strengths while neglecting our weaker skills and compensating with our strengths because it’s easy.

Crow Pose

I’m horrible at yoga.  (I know, I know, how can anyone be horrible at yoga?  It’s the most noncompetitive form of physical activity in existence, but I am!)  I’m awkward and completely lack the grace that most yoginis have when flowing into poses.  Sometimes I still confuse my left with my right, I fall out of balance and my crow has repeatedly kissed the earth and not in a good way.

So, clearly, I should become a yoga teacher, right?!  Totally!

I can never just wade into the water and gradually go in; I’ve got to dive in each time.  As such, I just handed in my expensive nonrefundable deposit this past week towards a yoga teacher training certification program – equivalent to getting a Bachelor’s in Yoga and now there is no going back.

Back in February, I thought about how 2012 is a Leap Year and then I stumbled upon this Leap Year project site and wanted something to contribute.  I think this is it.  My training begins this September and goes until my 29^th birthday in February.  I’ve done some pretty wild things in my life from living with wolves to fasting for 40 days to being a full time solo wanderer unsure of where I’d lay my head the next night, but I have to say I think this is the scariest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

I’ve never been much of an athlete and my relationship with my body, though it has evolved thanks to my yoga practice, has been a tumultuous one.  Committing myself to teaching a physical practice to others is incredibly intimidating and scary, yet I absolutely feel it is the next step in my own personal evolution.

I’m diving into the difficult, wrapping myself around my weaknesses and hoping to come out of this a better human, or in the least, knowing my right from my left.

"Death and Romance: Riddles of our Lifetime..."

People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition.  We know little, but that we must hold to what is difficult in a certainty that will not forsake us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it.

Rainer Maria Rilke

To love is good, too: love being difficult.  For one human being to lover another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.  For this reason young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot yet know love: they have to learn it.  With their whole being, with all their forces, gathered close about their lonely, timid, upward beating heart, they must learn to love.  But learning time is always a long, secluding time, and so loving, for a long while ahead and far into life, is solitude, intensified and deepened loneness for him who loves.

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?); it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another’s sake.  It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.  Only in this sense, as the task of working at themselves (“to hearken and to hammer day and night”), might young people use the love that is given them.  Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must save and gather for a long, long time still), is the ultimate, is perhaps that which for human lives as yet scarcely suffice.

Whoever looks seriously at it finds that neither for death, which is difficult, nor for difficult love has any explanation, any solution, any hint of way yet been discerned; and for these two problems that we carry wrapped up and hand on without opening, it will not be possible to discover any general rule resting in agreement.  But in the same measure in which we begin as individuals to put life to the test, we shall, being individuals, meet these great things at closer range.

The demands which the difficult work of love makes upon our development are more than life-size, and as beginners we are not up to them.  But if we nevertheless hold out and take this love upon us as burden and apprenticeship, instead of losing ourselves in all the light and frivolous play, behind which people have hidden from the most earnest earnestness of their existence – then a little progress and alleviation will perhaps be perceptible to those who come long after us; that would be much.

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Letters to a Young Poet