Lay down. Straighten your right leg, bend your left knee and bring your left foot into your right thigh, like tree pose on the ground.

Bend your elbows as if someone said, “Stick’em up,” so the back of the hands rest on the floor, the elbows more or less parallel to the armpits.

Close your eyes. Relax, take a few breaths. After a minute, change the legs around.

Now imagine: this is no joke. You are being held up. At gunpoint. Someone without compromise is pointing a gun straight at your heart.

They ask you a direct question, “Who are you?”

You answer immediately. “I’m Jamie, I’m Arnold, I’m Rose Heart, I’m Saraswati, Action Jackson.” Whatever your current name is, out it blurts.

The gun moves closer, the question is repeated. “Who are you?”

“I told you, I”m Billy, from Oceanside, Leslie, I live…

How best to describe Bali? At Clear Cafe where I enjoy my morning double cashew-milk coconut latte they’ve drilled a hole in the top of the toilet tank where twice a day they place fresh flowers.

At sunrise I take the laptap outside to write. Each morning, silent as the sun, Katuk, the owner of the house where I am staying, climbs the stairs to pray. His back to me, he faces the alter, removes yesterday’s offering of flowers and replaces them. Lights a stick of incense. Recites a silent prayer. Bows his head. Turning, he sees me, his smile brilliant against the backdrop of rice fields and coconut palms, small bamboo huts, and the early morning wake-up shrieks of wild forest life. Every time I see him I see the same effortless smile. Every time it wakes…

You take the kids to the mall because the desire to accessorize is impossible to resist.

Hunting and gathering go well. Not only have you found them perfect outfits but you’ve stumbled upon a few things with sequins to resurrect your own neglected profile. Truth be told, that was always in the back of your mind, which is why when the kids asked to go to the park you said, “after we shop.”

One unexpected bonus: Pedometer says five point two miles of head-lifted, tailbone-down, core-active walking.

One small problem: where are the kids? You asked the clerk to watch them while you were in the dressing room, for two minutes.

But the clerk is a clerk not a babysitter so when new customers entered who she knew were friends of the owner she inquired if they needed help.

Everything…

Paddle boarding down the Nosara River, a guided tour.

The guide: passionate about birds and monkeys, mangroves and root systems.

howler monkeys howl to establish their territory of leafy green nutrition

they consume a trees worth of greens and it takes most of their day to digest

as the facts kept coming I began to drift

literally

away from the group

they paddled up stream

I stayed where I was

I laid down on the board

there had been the naming of things, the division of things, the story of things

now there was pure perception

a concept and a precept can’t exist together

once the concept, the name of the bird is dropped, there is only my identity with the bird.

that identity has no name. it just is. When you let go of the name you release the mind. Only being remains and being is indivisible. Me, the fish, the sky,…

I’m researching eco-lodges in Costa Rica, to find a place to go where I’ll see things I’d never see here in my backyard. And while I research I forget to hear the birds singing in my back yard.

Each day more and more I love touching this earth here. I love planting and digging and am giddy at my own ignorance of how things develop and grow.

I’m learning by listening to what’s around me. Does that qualify me as indigenous? If the indigenous people flew all around the world would they qualify as indigenous? I”m wrestling with how and where and why to go. The season to explore new places is upon me, yet it feels lIke riding a camel in search of a camel. There’s always an element of absurdity to leaving home. Seems indigenous people, the romance…

I was over a friends’ house the day they were toilet-training their three-year old son.

“Squeeze it out,” said the Mother.
“Relax,” said the Father.

Notes From a Dragon Mom
By EMILY RAPP

Emily Rapp is the author of “Poster Child: A Memoir,” and a professor of creative writing at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Santa Fe, N.M.

MY son, Ronan, looks at me and raises one eyebrow. His eyes are bright and focused. Ronan means “little seal” in Irish and it suits him.

I want to stop here, before the dreadful hitch: my son is 18 months old and will likely die before his third birthday. Ronan was born with Tay-Sachs, a rare genetic disorder. He is slowly regressing into a vegetative state. He’ll become paralyzed, experience seizures, lose all of his senses before he dies. There is no treatment and no cure.

How do you parent without a net, without a future, knowing that you will lose your child, bit by torturous…

Yosemite taught me a lot in one day.
Painfully beautiful.
Formed by one trauma after another, upheavals without end.
It sits there, serenely bearing its scars;
maybe that’s the attraction.

“Take a breath,” I say. Most everyone obliges. Class begins.

I glance around the room for new faces, spot a familiar one, Kira’s, in the back row, next to her boyfriend Mike. In the space of no time I retrieve every single random fact I know about them. In a few weeks she’ll move across the country to attend Yale Divinity School. Mike will leave his chef’s job to join her. No longer would I see him in his beaten-up hoodie at the Farmer’s Market, shopping for that night’s specials. Kira had worked at the studio long enough to be part of it’s on-going public face. I’ll miss her. I know little about them as a couple, except for the unconscious opinionating the mind does about everything and everyone.

I look again. Kira has a black eye! There’s a…

Tonight we welcome Byron Katie to the studio. It’s a big deal as Katie usually “plays” to much bigger rooms. We’re putting up a video feed into the outer room so more folks can attend. We’re canceling the five o’clock class and my own 6:30 class so we can make sure everything’s properly organized. In 14 years of teaching I can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve canceled a class. There have been many times when I’ve been tempted to cancel. Times when I just wasn’t up to facing a room full of people, times I was feeling down, depleted and attacked by my own thoughts,

At those times I was lucky enough to have been exposed to “The Work.”

Katie’s work echoes the deepest spiritual instruction from teaching heavyweights like the Buddha and Yogananda. The…

Howard Wills will be visiting Yoga Soup this Saturday, September 17th.  This describes my first encounter with Howard, eleven years ago.

It is with great joy that I welcome Howard Wills to Yoga Soup. I’d like to share the circumstances of our first meeting — I will try to stick to just the facts, but when the topics are inner peace, cosmic light, ultimate truth, etc., the facts get pretty hard to fact check.

Nine years ago I received a phone call from my friend and teacher Steve Ross. His message was direct and mysterious: “Meet me tonight at eight o’clock in Carpenteria. There’s a guy you have to meet.”

I had enough faith in Steve to just say yes. He was my canary in the spiritual coal mine, having personally navigated me through some powerful experiences and introduced me to so…

Sex talk has its own cadence and urgency. As hormonal levels rise the ability to speak in complete sentences becomes less necessary; grunts and moans replace the need for words.

You wouldn’t speak in public as you might in the throes of passion.

“Oh, Mister, yes YES your hands there, ah ah ….on the ooohoo slicing machine, can I get, yes you know ….. more ham morehamMOREham on my sandwich ….”  is an inappropriate way of ordering lunch at the deli counter, though it might entertain the people behind you in line.

Those attending a boxing match, the library, the symphony hall, the Temple all have their own shorthand ways of communicating that in any environment outside of itself would seem silly and absurd at best, offensive and dangerous at worst.

There is one universal form of communication that would be appropriate in…

Last night, midway through class, the power went out. Lights flickered, the music wavered and then …. nothing.  Some shadowy daylight remained. I continued to talk but the shift in the customary environment was undeniable. Took some getting used to. I kept reaching to adjust the volume on a stereo that wasn’t working, which was appropriate as the “theme” of the class was, as it always is, to notice patterns. Patterns of movement, patterns of thought, patterns of belief — doesn’t matter. To notice to how large an extent what we call our life is really just a series of habits, patterns and tendencies designed to make us feel momentarily okay.

What we do in thought and deed reassures us that we’re here. I think therefore I am. I fix my hair, therefore I remain a version of myself that…

This is the birthday present to myself. Don’t care what’s written here, just as long as something fills the space until whatever need to indulge in such activity ceases of its own accord.

B-day dream: with my friend H at a Chinese restaurant. He orders a great bottle of wine. H has serious liver issues, and I’m on strict orders from his wife to not let him drink and besides I have class to teach in an hour. Then I remember: H is dead! Waiter, fill to brim.

Just like the oft-quoted Achan Chah story: The master takes his favorite drinking goblet off the shelf. “See this object,” he tells his students. “I know one day it will fall to the ground and break, or someone will take it. I know it’s already broken. That’s why each time I drink from it…

Before it was a ballet school Studio Two was a roller rink

of Star Babies and juicy fruit blisters.

Now silver seals marvel how a

soap bubble could contain all that plus the pastrami sandwich

served to Mr. Klein, with coleslaw.