The 10% Solution

Hi, Boomers,

The learning curve keeps on giving. I was just interviewed on an internet radio site for my book, Sixty, Sex, & Tango, Confessions of a Beatnik Boomer. It was probably a very small station by comparison to other internet feeds, but I was happy to be asked to speak about my book. The woman who asked me to be on her radio show, Jennifer Hillman, lives in Tucson and is a life coach. She was taken with the themes of my book and I was happy to expound on them while she was at my booth. Jennifer is a hard working and very spiritual being.

While we were dialoguing on the phone, she asked me many questions about how the book came about, what provoked me to write such an honest and forthright memoir, what was the most difficult section to write, what was the most fun to write, how I published it and what expectations I had about the book's trajectory. There were many more questions because it was an hour show, but I was struck by the honesty of questions. I had to be concise and honest in my answers, of course, but it was also a discipline in listening and and it gave me even more clarity about what my path, my Tao, in life. In short, I was challenged.

One of the ideas I'm thinking about lately is that it is important not to invest 100% of our energy and emotion into situations in life. Eckhart Tolle in his book, The Power of Now, writes exquisitely about staying present, being conscious in life and reflecting on ways to raise the level of our conscious being. One of the ways that Tolle and the yoga philosophy blend ideas is in the area of detachment.

For those who do not understand this concept, let me say that that is doesn't mean that we are not empathetic or sympathetic or caring. On the contrary, the way we express those feelings in any situation is to understand the nature of what we are observing. If we jump right in to the fray, into other's issues and problems and catastrophes, we lose objectivity.

Detachment involves standing back (mentally and emotionally) and disengaging about 10% or more even when we are confronted by other beings. Listen and observe more and and our reactions will be appropriate to the moment. It might sound cold to an untrained ear, but the intention of being present fully when helping a friend or family member or any human being will increase mindfulness and awareness. If we are not fully present, we cannot be of service because emotion and clarity become difficult to come by.

Which leads me into my favorite subject: meditation. Jennifer asked me if I take time daily to meditate, to the clear the mind (or try to because sometimes that doesn't work all that well), but to at least let the thoughts go by without attaching emotions to that thought. In truth, meditation isn't precisely the absence of thought because we will always, always have a thought every second or so. But the intention is to let the thoughts go by - as my master yoga teacher, Max, says - like a cloud passing. Just watch the thoughts without labeling them, judging them or attaching emotion to them.

I also learned in my drug counseling work that when the limbic brain takes over - our pain/pleasure center - consciousness is hard to come by. We make decisions on the basis of the unconscious, which resides in the limbic brain, which can lead us to making decisions that are not good for us. So practicing a modicum of detachment - minimum 10% - we increase clarity, consciousness and understanding. We are on the way to self-mastery, boomers.

Simple, huh? Yeah, but it takes practice.

Namaste

Joan

The Dog Days Are Over

Hi, Boomers,

It's the eve of August 31st, 2010. It's technically the beginning of the end of the dog days of summer. The end of the week marks Labor Day and the beginning of a fall cycle - back to school, back from vacation, back to work, back to back responsibilities.

In the days when I taught drama in high school, I loved this time of year. I loved going back to a crop of new students, mostly dysfunctional, pop smoking, LDS taking strangers living in the alternative universe of Las Vegas. It was Clark High School, Las Vegas, Nevada, an outpost of mostly dispossessed kids, with one parent, maybe two but they worked shifts on the Strip - some graveyard, some early morning, some split shifts. But they loved coming into my class because they knew I truly thought they were special. Our dog days were times of experimenting with improvisation and reading and acting in the new and exciting scripts from Off Broadway's golden years in the late 60's and early 70's. The weather didn't quit snap into fall mode because it was still hot as hell in Vegas until October. Yet, we sweat through that first month getting to know each other and allowing the senior thespians show the way to the newbies, the wanna-bes who took drama/theater to find a refuge against their adolescent angst.

Dog Days were days of optimism and hope in my life and they still are. Now my grandsons go back to school and I still get a thrill of hearing about their teachers and books and friends.

I love the fall weather. It's my favorite time of year. Los Angeles can provide that fall weather snap, cooler nights and less warm days in the shade. Sometimes there is a bout of heat around Labor Day, but I can still smell football season and see the band practice outside my yoga room at the John Wooden Center on the UCLA campus and sometimes catch a glimpse of the football team warming up on the field as I walk to my car.

As the feeling of renewal comes over me, I am cognizant of old memories from grammar school and high school when I was part of campus excitement and new classes and old friends returning to our familiar posts.

I'm feeing nostalgic for my parents, particularly my father because he drove me to St. Raphael's grammar school for so many years. I was so very happy growing up, and I loved sitting next to my dad in the car as we listened to Don McNeill's Breakfast Club on the radio. We would sit in the car and watch the Dominican nuns get out their taxis on the side of the school while my dad and I continued to listen to the radio. I wouldn't get out of the car until the nuns entered the building.

Every end of August and beginning of September memories come back with a vengeance and take me back deep into my past - a past that gave me my values, my sense of direction, my loyalties, and my sense of self.

Namaste

Joan

Retreating and Transformation

Hi, Boomers,

Sometimes you just have to say: Enough! I'm full. I can't take it anymore. There is no more energy left. I'm spent. Basta!

Sometimes destiny plays a role in my life. Sometimes the "others" get in the way of my life. And sometimes I'm just plain tired.

It was a week of practicing the Tao. Daily losing. I had to pick my self up emotionally, spiritually and physically. It began on Saturday night at the milonga - the place where I dance tango. I lost someone I thought was a friend. I don't know why. Men retreat when they are emotionally tied up; women plow forward to explain and explore. I couldn't even begin to penetrate my male friend's feelings and angst. I had to let it go. I'm not sure I have just yet. Daily losing.

My book arrived via UPS at and my door: Sixty, Sex, & Tango Confessions of a Beatnik Boomer. I had read the manuscript for months, edited it, stared at the cover endlessly, and when I got the books - hard and soft cover - I didn't know what to do and I didn't know what to feel. It was familiar and yet foreign. Who wrote this? What's it about? What kind of value does it have, if any? Was it a dream? Did someone else write it? A swirl of emotions and feelings engulfed me. I wanted my mother at that moment. Mom, I did it. I wrote it. Are you proud of me? "I knew you could do it, honey. You can do anything you set your mind to." I missed my mother intensely for days. Where was my dad? Smiling and laughing at his daughter whom he adored. Daily losing.

Endless decisions about marketing the book. Google ad decisions. Book signing decisions. Meta tags. What is everyone talking about? No one was speaking English. I was out of my element I had no learning curve left. You have to have a public relations arm. Why? I'm selling the book on Amazon and Barnes so why do I have to hire a someone? Press releases. I can't decide on which cities. Frustration mounting. Daily losing.

Over a month ago, I had thought it time to go on a yoga retreat with one of my yoga teachers at my home studio - the place where I started teaching yoga. I had gone on several retreats over the years but I hadn't been on one for years. I committed to going on the retreat without knowing exactly why. It turned out it was a good decision.

I leave tomorrow for 3 days to Ojai in order to leave myself behind. My brain is in over-drive and I am challenged daily because I want my old self back. Too many tapes playing in my head. More stress than I can handle. I want to find emptiness and peace, and maybe, a little transformation along the way.

My state of being needs a wake-up call. I realize that some things need to change in this moment.

So what is my intention on this retreat?

Stress is uncomfortable and disturbing. The way I work through stress is in my yoga practice. I've neglected my practice. I have left no room in my life to practice except rarely. I'm teaching way too much. I need to return to the spiritual nature of my being, to the teachings and practices of yoga and meditation, to chanting, to exploring paths to enlightenment all the while remaining unsure and insecure about my path, and I need to reside in the center of my path with acceptance and surrender.

I have been blessed with so many gifts in my life: my incredible sons, my four vibrant grandsons, and my soon to be born granddaughter, my beloved Penelope. I was nurtured by loving parents and supported unconditionally by an amazing brother. I have been blessed with some talent to teach and inspire in theater and in yoga and I want to be daily aware of these gift and not get lost in situations and frustrations. I'm going to take my gifts with me to my retreat and absorbed the light.

Namaste

Joan

The Brain Matters

Hi, Boomers,

I was strolling on the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica Saturday morning, walking toward the AMC theater to see "Inception" and enter the dreamscape of the mind. The annual UCLA health fair was in full swing. Booths lined either side of the center aisle of the Promenade. It was a health information overflow. I was proud. UCLA is my employer. One of the places I teach yoga on campus is in the Public Health department, a building which also houses the brain mapping imaging center. It is in this building that meditation classes are held and the effects of mediation on the brain are studied - or mapped.

I was a women who spent most of her life on the floor of my bedroom or in a gym for early morning aerobics to keep fit. I loved the effect of releasing endorphins. It made me joyful and gave me unending energy. One of my fondest memories was attending a 7 am aerobics class in the trendy Las Vegas gym called The Sports Club and working out with a room full of executives, judges,lawyers before we all took off for work. Our teacher was AJ an Army drill instructor, who put us through our paces non-stop for forty minutes. I then went out to lift some weight before going home to make my boys breakfast and start the day. It was all sweat and work for the next twenty years until I discovered yoga - and that was after a trail of Jane Fonda aerobics, step aerobics, spinning, cardio machines, and a variety of pumping iron.

And then yoga entered my life at the most perfect moment. My long term relationship was in trouble and it would be winding down eventually and I was not in a good place emotionally. He was away for quite awhile in the last six months that we lived behind Muscle Beach in Venice. I was alone a lot. I worked and came home and there was yoga to comfort me. I followed my son and his girlfriend (now wife) to yoga classes at their favorite studio and it became my home, too. And then I learned to meditate and chant and there was the promise of peace.

Push-up, crunches, gyms and personal trainers - all strategies for toning the body and building muscle. But what did it do for my brain?

Not much. And know that as as I aged, my brain was going to begin the long process of shrinking. Oh, yes, the brain gets smaller and smaller as we age.

In a story published in the journal NeuroImage, UCLA researchers who used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of people who meditate report that certain regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger than in a similar control group.

I pay close attention to these findings because meditators show significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus. These are regions known for regulating emotions.

Brain researchers have known for a long time that meditators have the ability to produce positive emotions, retain emotional stability and engage in mindful behavior; in other words, raise the level of awareness and stay calm in the middle of daily stress.

The study of brain anatomy can give researchers clues as to why mediators have some exceptional abilities in the area of positive behavior. Studies have been conducted on meditators who had practiced various forms of meditation that ranged from five to forty-six years, with an average of twenty-four years. Most meditated between ten and ninety minutes every day. Deep concentration played a pivotal roll in their practice. Researchers measured differences in brain structure; they found significantly larger cerebral measurements in meditators compared with controls, larger volumes of right hippocampus and increased gray matter in the right orbito-frontal cortex, the right thalamus and the left inferior temporal lobe. These are areas of the brain are closely tied to emotion. It may be that is why meditators have the ability to regulate their emotions and allow for well-adjusted responses to whatever life thrown at them.

More study is needed. Does meditation produce an increased number of neurons? Does meditation produce the larger size of the neurons? Does it produce a particular wiring pattern in meditators? Lots more of the brain to study as it relates to meditation. But it's certainly exciting to realize that our brains don't have to shrink, we don't have to devolve into early senility, and we can stay mentally active well into our 90's.

See, it's fun to age gracefully. It's fun to explore our inner being and find inner peace. It's a heck of a lot better than listening to AJ every morning barking order to a room full of sleepy zombies and walking out of an aerobics class brain dead.

Can't wait for my yoga retreat at the end of the month. I'm logging enough meditation hours to last me at least three months.

Oh, yeah, "Inception" was fascinating. I got to use my brain. It's about dream espionage and sharing dreams in order to get people to do what other people want them to do. Too long but so very interesting a concept. My gray matter wasn't shrinking that's for sure.

Namaste

Joan

Leading With The Heart

Hi, Boomers,

I had to make a rather big decision last week. It involved matters of the heart.

As a yoga instructor, the overriding emphasis in a practice is the opening of the heart. Yoga is a heart-centered practice. The symbolic nature of the heart is its generosity of spirit, it's aspect of forgiveness, its ability to understand and create compassion and empathy for the human spirit and its aspect of gratitude and universal love. That is not to say that our heart centered practice concerns romantic love, although one can't have romantic love without an open heart. An open heart implies a more spiritual aspect of love.

If my heart is open and I am conscious of leading my life with heart centered intention and I am mindful (present) about listening to my heart charka, (i.e., the energy in my heart), then I hope that all my decisions that involve the heart are truthful.

I think about the heart every day when I teach yoga. I think about it so much that when some experience in my life actually takes me to my heart, I am often so surprised that I am rendered unconscious.

I was going to visit a new friend, a tango friend, and over the last couple of months a man who has become someone I got to know in a more intimate sense through emails and phone conversations. I had met this man in Los Angeles several days before he was returning to his home city. In the course of our conversations, we both thought it would be fun to meet up in his city, dance tango and explore the beautiful city where he resides. He would be coming to Los Angeles to spend four months during the winter with his family as he does every year and so we would get a head start on knowing each other by spending time together on a couple of occasions before he arrives in southern California.

It all sounded perfectly logical until several weeks ago. I realized that email and phone conversations were the most imperfect way to understand and acknowledge another human being, especially someone of the opposite sex. It began to feel like an artificial situation whereby we both have to always be on our best behavior. I was so busy being accommodating that I was losing track of feelings and emotions. What exactly were my feelings and my emotions in regard to him? I didn't have time to breathe and reflect upon our male/female situation for any length of time. The emails kept coming; the information kept arriving; the time frames of voice conversation was shrinking. Mix messages multiplied. Confusions set in.

In the past, the younger Joan would have said, "screw it, " I'm going anyway. What the hell! It's only a week. But a week in my life at sixty-six is a precious week. Besides, walking into a "maybe" situation is fraught with the possibility of conflict and struggle. We didn't actually know each other for long enough to make a decision about spending a week with each other. But because we were excited about a new friendship, we wanted to spend more time exploring our relationship. So we jumped the gun and pulled the trigger and made reservations.

Were those decisions made from the heart or from the adrenalin of meeting someone new and with potential possibilities? Hormones make us do the darndest things. And most of the time the things we do when we are excited are manifestations of our unconscious nature. We are going into the lizard mind, the limbic system where pain and pleasure receptors reside. Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! I want, I need, I desire.

I don't think my situation with the potential male partner was a conscious response to my open heart. But I think my canceling the trip to spend a week with him revealed a conscious intention of listening to my heart. My heart said stop, wait, patience, listen to your breath.

One of my yoga students asked me why I wasn't taking the week off as I had indicated I would to my students - preparing them for a substitute and letting them know I would be away as a point of courtesy. I told her that I was not sure it was the right thing to do because my heart didn't lead me to this man at this time. The yogini smiled at me as we both took in the silence.

"I want to be just like you when I get to your age," she said.

"Why?," I asked her.

"Because you are not afraid of life. You are not afraid to say it was a mistake. And you are now moving on from that decision."

I told her I was able to do that because my heart was open and clear and full of energy in this moment. It's all about taking my yoga practice off the mat and applying what I have learned from my practice to my life. I released the struggle; I released the negativity. And I brought myself back to balance.

Namaste

Joan

Musings on the Tao

Hi, Boomers,

In the middle of my busy week of teaching yoga, I found myself musing on my tao, that is to say, my life's journey. Here I am, post 65 years old and reflecting on what it means to follow my bliss by staying present and grounding myself in the power of now while not succumbing to my fantasies or daydreams. The good part of being my age is that I have relatively few off the wall fantasies. Yet, I understand that fantasies are good to have as long as we don't get stuck on them. Fantasies and daydreams expand our minds and provide us with energy as we put one foot in front of the other and, as people in recovery say, "show up." But the real work on self is done in the present.

My journey has been an exquisite blend of teaching, either acting or English as a second language or yoga and attending to my family. It is a full life with lots of consistent behavior and lots of surprises. This journey of mine is a gift and I honor it with daily gratitude.

However, my daily challenge is not to resist my tao. Non-resistance has been a mantra I have been using in my yoga classes this week. Resisting is one of the primary ways we trip ourselves up in life. In effect, our journey stops dead in its tracks when our minds resist staying present; or in yoga, when our bodies resist embracing the asana or posture we are working on in class. This mind/body resistance prevents growth and transformation and we find ourselves locked inside our heads, muddled in struggle, unable to find the joy.

Most of our thoughts during the day are negative. If we ask ourselves whether we feel we are a positive person or a negative person, I'm sure we would all say we are positive in our outlook. However, if we truly reflect on our thoughts, we will discover that we are intoning negative resistance most of the time. It is a moment of challenge when we discover our negative bent. But the opposing force of the negative is positive so we can actually program our thoughts into positive reflection. Check out what you are thinking about before you fall asleep at night. It's amazing to discover what a negative track our minds run on.

Yogis stress mindful awareness in thought, word and action. During my yoga teacher training class, one of my teachers suggested we use a timer and set it for every ten minutes so that we can reflect consciously on the present and then express gratitude for our gifts. This practice of reminding ourselves to be mindfully aware directs us into our joy, our bliss and infuses us with non-resistance.

Something to think about.

Namaste

Joan