We Live in Public

For the past few years I've gone to a documentary film festival called the True False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri.

In 2009, I was introduced to a powerful documentary about the future of this digital landscape we live in called We Live in Public.  In the film, the protagonist, Josh Harris, a dot-com visionary who has been penned the “Nostradamus of the internet,” creates an experiment where dozens of volunteers in New York City live underground for an entire year with food, alcohol, living quarters and even a firing range all provided to them.  The catch is that everything they do is videotaped – from their showers to their sex lives.  These brave souls agreed to be filmed 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for an entire year.

Harris predicted sites like Facebook and Hulu before they ever existed.  In the film, Harris says “Years ago the lions and tigers were kings of the jungle and one day they wound up in zoos, I suspect we’re on the same track.”

I bring up this film because Harris, as crazy as he was (and oh, he was CRAZY) did have a point about the future of technology.  We currently DO live in public.  And, it’s not going away. 

Sure, you can choose to not participate in sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, Google Plus and the countless others I can name (wait, you’re reading my blog, right?) but when was the last time you googled something?  Ever notice how you were searching for some winter boots and then all of sudden you’re checking your Gmail account and an advertisement for winter boots comes up?  Very few people living in modern society can manage to live off the digital grid and frankly, I don’t think it’s such a horrible thing.

Social media has been blamed for many a scandal: political, business, personal etc. Yet, I have to wonder, being the optimist I am, what if we embraced living in public?  What if we aligned ourselves with those things that are honest and preserve the integrity to who we are as people?  What if we allowed our Facebook feeds and Twitter feeds to provide a glimpse into who that is and utilized these new mediums to form communities instead of feeding our ever growing narcissism? 

A social media professor once said, “If there is something that you say or do that you’d be ashamed of if it showed up online, then don’t do it and don’t say it.”  Shouldn’t we be doing that anyway?  Shouldn’t we strive to live good, ethical and honorable lives?  Is transparency so radical an idea?  We all are the first to fight for transparency when it comes to government funds and corporate board rooms, but what about ourselves?  What are we so afraid of?

We will make mistakes, quite possibly publicly, but maybe instead of judging others so harshly for their mistakes we will learn to be more empathetic and understanding of one another.

More about Harris here:

Trailer for the film:

Preserving Authenticity: as you are in anything is as you are in everything

Aside from writing poetry and practicing yoga, I have a career I very much treasure and enjoy.

When I was younger in my career I believed everything was easily categorized and could neatly fit into a box.  If I was going to work in business I needed to BE business in the narrow-minded way I saw it to be: this rigid, cold, rule-abiding clear-cut thing.  After all, I was born in the 1980s where everything was marketed to me in a neat package since inception.

I spent years feeling conflicted because I am not clear cut.  I am a mix of everything from the indigenous blood mixing with the Spanish blood in my veins to my attempts at perfecting eagle pose before a conference call to my ideas of a fun Friday night consisting of watching Shark Tank while working on a new drawing.

I wrote a rap song once (my alterego is simultaneously an MC folk singer) and one of the lines from it goes:
...but til then I'll face the struggle of living in square boxes
too many right angles don't fit my round face
but it's packaged and it's pretty and easy to place...

For too long I felt I'd have to sacrifice my creativity and all those marvelous things that make me me in order to become this great business leader that I wanted to be.

During this time I was the epitome of ambivalence: a bohemian creative type that wanted to take over the business world.  Who did I think I was?

That's precisely the best question I could have ever asked myself.  In reading a business article on leadership I came across this quote: How you do anything is how you do everything.

Business is coming of age.  It is recognizing that we as humans, employees, consumers are not this one-sided square thing.  Our motivations stem from a number of different factors: our relationships, societal norms and a sense of purpose.

And sometimes we do headstands...

My shifting consciousness on the state of business has guided me to this simple conclusion: find out who you are and be the best you you can be.  As you are in other aspects in life, you are in business.

I lived in the middle of the New Mexican desert surrounded by wolves to learn to be comfortable with always being uncomfortable.

I traveled all over the world (and counting) to understand and embody diversity.

I practice yoga because I am the greatest resource and ally I will ever have.

I listen to others because I'm a perpetual student fortunate enough to view everyone as a teacher.

I write my life lessons down because I believe in sharing.

In business, I am all of this: the risk taker, a holistic thinker, transparent, the student, the teacher, the people person who strives for connectivity in all she does.  I'm not only my title at my company.  I am guided by purpose in all things because as I am in yoga I am in business and as I am in business I am as a friend.  How you do anything is how you do everything.

Fear, Headstands and Snuggling up to Dragons

What do I fear?  What am I so afraid of?  I tried kicking up into a headstand in the center of the room half paralyzed with this “fear” thing and half completely self-aware that everyone was watching me. 

When people think about yoga they don’t necessarily consider it a daring sport, to say the least, yet, in so many ways it’s the most daring of all because it pushes you to know your greatest ally and your biggest enemy: yourself.

I’d been going to the studio regularly for a couple of months before I picked up Ana Forrest’s book, Fierce Medicine.  Ana Forrest is a contemporary yoga teacher and founder of a specific practice called Forrest Yoga.  With combined expertise in overcoming trauma, psychology and physical therapy Forrest developed a style of yoga that is both physically and emotionally rigorous. 

Forrest Yoga is a transformative experience that pushes the practitioner into a deeper awareness and understanding of his or her own psyche in a “fiercer” way than many other styles of yoga.  Forrest pushes you to keep going the moment you’re ready to sink into Child’s Pose.  Forrest pushes you to fully experience the burning in your legs during Warrior II and not to stop until you can feel that euphoric sweet spot. 

It’s no surprise that much about this practice has to do with courage and being brave of heart, but first, back to my headstand.

I’d never done a headstand before and here I was in front of all of my fellow teacher trainees in the center of the room in one.  It felt like a long time, though I’m sure I was only in it for a few seconds.  Inversions are often the scariest poses in yoga.  They literally turn your world upside down and all of your weight is balanced on your head.  You may fear that all the delicate muscles in your neck will break or perhaps that you just carry too much weight around to begin with.  My mouth tasted bitter, not quite like the iron when you bite your tongue too hard, but metallic.  My mouth tasted like fear.

Forrest says, “We have a lot of internal responses to fear.  We push it away, we deny it, we freeze, or attack (fight or flight syndrome). But there are alternate ways to responding to fear.”  Forrest’s preferred method is to go hunting for it until she finds the root of it and instead of “slaying the dragon,” she cuddles up to it and allies with it.

This, of course, is the furthest thing from my mind.  I felt the pressure on top of my head mounting.

Step 1: identify the fear.  Aside from the obvious (death from breaking my neck), I had always feared my own body.  I remembered hiking with one of my boyfriends in the dead of winter.  We crossed a river with very thin ice and had to jump huge rocks to get to the other side.  It took him all of 3 minutes to cross, jumping confidently from rock to rock.  It took me what seemed like an hour with a lot of encouragement from him on the other side. 

“Trust yourself,” my teacher whispered.  I had stopped shaking.  “Good, good now squeeze my hand.”  She had her hand between my thighs and I began to feel that burning sensation and my core strengthening through the pose.  The weight on my head lessened.

Step 2: Turn around, hunt it, stalk it.  Forrest says, “Fear is a signal.  Be alert.  Get vigilant.  It wasn’t that long ago that other humans or predators hunted us.  This means you have to take action.  You can’t just sit and meditate your problems away; many meditators become my students because their abuse or rage doesn’t go away by meditation alone.  It does teach you how to get steady though.  So get steady and now go out hunting.”

In Forrest Yoga, it’s not enough to have awareness of a trauma that happened to you that you now feel in the tightness of your hips, no, one has to be able to chase that trauma out of one’s body.  One has to be able to not back down when you’re in a pose and suddenly your breathing is shallow but take the courageous path to breathe in deeper and keep digging and once it surfaces get cozy with it.

Step 3: Stop making decisions based on fear.  This is one I’ve taken off the mat more than others through reading this book.   Forrest says, “…when I respond from that fearful or panicky place, 99 percent of the time I end up making terrible decisions…The hero’s choice is to disobey the dictates of the fear.”

When one chooses to not obey those dictates of fear, it’s empowering.  It’s as Forrest puts it, “the brave-hearted path.”  She says, “It takes a lot of courage to explore your fear.  Courage isn’t the numbed out, flinty, Clint Eastwood-esq stoicism we’re accustomed to, but instead it’s daring to experience our feelings-even if this requires painful awakening- with discernment and intelligence.”

Step 4: Find the healing within the fear.  How does one exactly do this?  What does my fear of heights say about me?  Does it say that perhaps I fear reaching new levels of success or perhaps I fear my potential or maybe I fell from a tree when I was a child?  How will snuggling up to that fear make me a better person? 

Fear is a very powerful thing when you think about it.  When you make the choice to not make any decisions based on fear you begin to realize how much it may dictate in your life, such as whether you talked to that cute guy at the cafe or not (fear of rejection) or whether you stated exactly what you thought in a business meeting (fear of communicating your truth).  Then you dig deeper.  You realize you fear your own honesty and you fear others not validating you as a person.  Dig deeper.  Maybe you never felt worthy as a child or maybe that one time you told the truth before things went wrong.

Now, what happens when that scary dragon of unworthiness creeps into my life?  How do I shift my reaction from fear to something else, and what is that something else?  Forrest has a unique approach to this: “Once you’ve faced your dragon, your next task is to ally with it.  Don’t kill the beast, you fool, because that’s your power!  This is the archetypal hero’s quest: you’ll meet the dragons and demons and fight and fight and fight them until you finally get the treasure.  Then you’ll depart that quest   irrevocably changed, with that treasure a part of you.  Every time you stalk your fear and choose life instead of oblivion, you’ll begin to reclaim the parts of you that have been blocked off.”

Step 5: Snuggle up to your fear: maybe this means confronting headstand head on (pun intended).  Maybe I won’t be able to get into headstand on my own for a while, but I’m still trying and that’s a win.  For me, snuggling up to my fear means trying even though it’s not perfect and I have to sacrifice my autonomy on the mat to go there for the moment.  Learning to be in the moment and confronting fears like turning your world upside down might be enough of a win for today. 

“I’d believed that in order to do what I was afraid of, I had to get rid of the fear first, but that turned out to be only an idea, not the truth.  You have to do something two hundred times before the fear will disperse.  Are you still afraid of something?  Just do it again.  Do it again.  Do it again.” – Ana T. Forrest