Back when I was a teenager, I refused to wear control top pantyhose when I had to go to an event, I felt like sporting the slimming-squishing-tummy-effect was fraudulent somehow. It was a cheat, not my body. I felt like because the effect was temporary, I shouldn’t try and pass it off as mine. That is the first time I can clearly remember the use of ‘the formula’ in my life: temporary = not mine. Fast-forward 30ish years: I was…
Eleven months after my ill fated move to New York, a few months after opening my own consulting business, I got a call: My successor at my old company had up and left, my old boss wanted to know if I could help fill in for a little while until they found someone else. I loved my old job and all the folks I worked with, I need new clients for my new business anyway, so I said, yes. I committed…
So Dear Reader, as a re-cap, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled program and interrupting this nice, orderly, temporally linear(ish) blog about my practice with an intrusion from the present day…. inspired by the filth, noise, overcrowding and rudeness of NYC…I bring you part four in my blog about hate. Last week, we left off with a real shift, a lightening of my hate load brought about by my seeing it for what it really is —…
So Dear Reader, as a re-cap, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled program and interrupting this nice, orderly, temporally linear(ish) blog about my practice with an intrusion from the present day…. inspired by the filth, noise, overcrowding and rudeness of NYC…I bring you part three in my blog about hate. We left off last week with a moment of realization: Hate is not built into the situations where I feel hateful, the seed of hate lies in my heart. So,…
So Dear Reader, as a re-cap, we are taking a break from our regularly scheduled program and interrupting this nice, orderly, temporally linear(ish) blog about my practice with an intrusion from the present day…. inspired by the filth, noise, overcrowding and rudeness of NYC…I bring you part two in my blog about hate. We left off last week exploring all the pain and suffering that comes with being a hater. So, the question DeJour: If it hurts so bad, why…
Well Dear Reader, it is once again that time when we need to put some of our ‘Interruption In Our Regularly Scheduled Program” Blogs — entries that were written’ real time’ and out of the order of this orderly (ish) blog that tracks the progress of my practice since its inception — back into their chronological place. The next few entries will be about my big ah-ha moments surrounding the cause and costs of my hate for New York. It…
Immediately after I wrote the blog post, A Topic the Never Gets Old — Me and Mine Again, I wrote the following journal entry which I will share in full (with a few modifications for clarity) here: I was working on a blog about self and self belongings. It is so clear that I collect items, claim them as my own, in order to reinforce my sense of identity, to prove my Alananess to myself and the world. But a deeper…
Immediately after I wrote the blog post Sand Drawings I wrote the following journal entry which I will share in full (with a few modifications for clarity) here: After I wrote the sand drawing blog I started thinking — how am I changing, decaying, just bits of matter, aggregated together, subject to decay like other bits of aggregated mater that exist in the world? Don’t my teeth wear away like kitchen knives? Doesn’t my skin dry and crack and sag like the…
I already had rupa on the brain, so it wasn’t surprising that I found myself on a bit of a rupa roll. Sitting in my apartment one day, I started looking around at my stuff and I asked myself, “Do you really understand these items? Do you know what they are and what they do?” My eyes fell on my favorite stuffed animal — Grux — a real fur bunny toy that Eric had bought me, for a small fortune,…
In all my contemplations about my ‘shield of special’ and my little bubble world — fabrications of my mind that let me imagine an Alana who is safe and comfortable and exempt from the suffering of the world — it was hard to ignore the obvious: My bubble world is full of stuff. I pin my ideas of what is ‘safe’ in my environment, on my belongings like houses and money and a husband that will shield my from unwanted…
I was at the hot springs and there was this woman there who was so obese. I tried to internalize what it would be like to be so fat, but my heart refused to accept it. The contemplation was shallow, going through the motions, but feeling nothing. I realized the reason why: I don’t believe I can ever be that fat — I am different, I work-out and mind my diet, that won’t happen to me. But the truth is,…
One of the key themes the exercises on uncovering hidden benefits and beliefs kept coming back to was that I continually quest for/seek to build a ‘bubble world*‘ — the kind of place where everyone lives in harmony, according to the rules and standards I think are ideal. In my bubble world, people are respectful and considerate, they are laid-back and peaceful, they are community-oriented and friendly. After living in Cali, fairly happy, for so long, my bubble world had…
Dear Reader, today’s blog is a direct continuation of last week’s, LP Nut’s Alana-fied Technique to Uncover Hidden Benefits and Beliefs Part 1, so please do read that one before continuing on here. In the last blog, we began an exploration of an Alana-fied version of a technique LP Nut taught at the 2017 retreat to uncover hidden benefits and beliefs. The premise behind the technique is a simple one — if we do stuff that we know hurts us, there…
At the 2017 retreat, Phra Nut taught a method of contemplation aimed at uncovering the hidden benefits and beliefs that lay at the foundation of our charged responses to situations we find upsetting. Now, I have to admit that from the get-go that I modified LP’s technique a bit to fit my understanding and thinking style, so, in the interest of transparency, what you are going to get here is an Alana-fied version/explanation of all this. From my understanding, the…
It was the 2017 KPY Retreat, I was on a nature hike out in the woods with a small group of attendees and I started talking to L.P. Nut: “I can’t stand New York”, I said, “I hate it so much. The people are so rude, they make so much noise, especially the hoking, it is unbearable and the the filth, the way people litter and trash stuff, it is overwhelming…I don’t know what to do, being there makes me…
I took a friend to lunch, trying to console her on the recent loss of her brother. She talked about how relatively young he was when he died and about how she didn’t feel like she got enough time with him in this life, especially at the end. Naturally, I started thinking back to when my own dad died. He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer when he was just 64 and I was 28. I remember so clearly thinking that…
A good friend of mine had a brother who had become seriously ill. The truth is, it was a long standing disease — slow progression at first, but suddenly much more severe. It looked increasingly like his death was imminent. All my friend wanted to do was to help, to find some cure, to put forth effort, to do something, anything, to make her brother better. Her efforts however were fruitless and my friend was inconsolable. Still, I tried to console…
I was sitting on the bathroom floor of my Manhattan loft, engaging in a-now-typical-ritual — crying my eyes out. I was miserable. I was so depressed. Above all else, I felt lost and trapped. The circumstances were this: Eric and I were in debt for a house we hated. He had a 2 year contract at work that, if broken, would require a significant sum to pay back our relocation expenses. Besides, Eric worried about his career, his resume, and…
I was out for a walk and I saw a swirl of leaves blowing around in the wind. I decided to try to use it as an Ubai, a metaphor for my own confused and upended life. I closed my eyes and began to imagine my own objects, details of places and people, from my Cali and NY life, swirling around me. All out of my control, moved by forces beyond myself. Suddenly, I opened my eyes and realized I…
