No More Unicorns

For me, food is everything. i have a very delicate relationship with food. It directly represents how when why and in what way I can nourish myself, and those in my sphere. Are we surprised that in my new to New York haze I cant seem to find the one thing that tastes right? or cooks well? ok, i did find one thing that tasted right. No, two things. my morning warm beverage and chocolate.

My other issue is being highly sensitive in an environment that is over stimulating. Everywhere I look I see buildings and people and am auditorally assaulted with noise. Those sayings "look for the good" and "look for the beauty". That was child's play in boulder. Easy peasy compared to this shit. i get it now because if you do not find the one inkling of hope and faith in a sliver of beauty everywhere your eyes go you will literally die inside here.

Yesterday I sat down to eat with Elliot and we barely made eye contact the entire time, which was disturbing. I noticed every single person around me had their iphone out on the table like it was a napkin. If they didn't have it sitting next to them they were either talking on it or checking something. When I tried to get a break from this and look out the window all I saw were more people on phones.

New York might be the rawest place I have ever experienced. Everywhere I look I see the desire to connect and need for contact with little of it actually happening. Which is weird because everyone is going somewhere to see someone at some time in some place with some strategy of self-preservation and protection.

Ok, I’ll reframe so I am not projecting...

I feel the rawest I have felt in a long time. I want connection and contact but amongst the scarves and hats and glasses and ear buds and attitude carefully put on each morning with my clothes its sort of f-ing hard to make that happen.

Look all you shiny happy unicorns in Boulder; I don't even want to hear you complain that it is sunny too much or that your whole foods parking lot is a bitch. I have seen the sun one day since I got here and whole foods here is a death wish. The moment I walk in there, or to any store for that matter, my brain literally shuts off because there are so many people I can’t think about what I need.

The natural world is such a gift my friends. It makes spirit much easier to grasp. But when spirit comes in honking horns, over-sized squirrels and darting pigeons you really do gain a new perspective. Its a complete reframe. I literally have no schemas for some of what I see. I literally am a fish out of water. Or the person off their mountain.

It’s easy to be at the top of Maslows hierarchy of needs when the bottom layers are simple to achieve. When the basics are hard, your third eye gets a twitch. The antidotes I presume are practices that bring us back home to our own bodies. Oh right, I know those.

It is far too easy to be a character--to be the strategy one has built--in any town. It is easy to give up the practices that seem out of place in the context one is in. Yoga, meditation, dance and somatic practices of self-regulation and resourcing should be employed everywhere one goes.

The greatest teaching of yoga I am resting into currently is that we are adaptable creatures with unchanging, unscathed cores or essences of being. Structures and strategies change.  Environments change. Circumstances change. The only thing that we can contact that is true for more than a split moment is the deepest essence inside.

The irony of course is that we contact change in a sustained way. We contact our essence though in moments and flickers. When we live for the thing unchanging moment by moment. The changing moment does not matter as much or cause as much pain.

Well, I better run. I live in New York time now.