Vortex

       Moments fill up our lives like raindrops in a bucket, all blending into what we collectively call Life. But, unlike the raindrops once they fall, we are often able to separate the moments. We look at them, each a tiny universe on its own; we see how they created the water in the bucket, even as we experience each one as completely distinct. A few days ago, one of those raindrop moments hit me in the middle of my chest, its moisture now forever a part of me, as it made its way into the bucket of My Life.
       Kripalu is a magical place for me. It’s a kind of vortex. The Omega Institute, where I spent the last month before coming to Kripalu, is a vortex too. Certain experiences happen in a vortex that don’t as easily manifest themselves outside of that vortex. With practice, however, we can learn to create more of those kinds of experiences anywhere in our lives. Which is precisely what I’m aspiring to do once I leave these magical places.
       The other day, I had a brief, rather ordinary interaction with one of my fellow workshop participants. Immediately after that interaction, as I was walking to an outdoor yoga class, I experienced a visceral physical and emotional sensation, accompanied by a crystal clear image. I saw both sides of a giant, heavy double door made of iron and wood in the middle of my chest, suddenly open. The ornate door, the kind you would see entering one’s castle, opened naturally and rhythmically, at a smooth and steady pace.
       As the doors opened, I felt a flood of warmth spread throughout my chest and make its way throughout my whole body. This energetic escape floored me, as my lips trembled and my head vibrated, like one of those little electric motors that hums from the residual energy that can’t be translated into whatever it’s powering. Tears filled my eyes, and unable to be contained, streamed down my face. My voice made little quivering sounds, like the one a kid makes when he’s overwhelmed by the experience of receiving the teddy bear he’s always wanted.
       There was no voice in my head telling me that this private display of emotion was emasculating, or trite, or childish. In this moment, I gave myself full permission to just completely engage in whatever the fuck was happening to me; without judgement, without internal editorializing, without hardly any thought at all. Just feeling. Pure, beautiful, powerful feeling. For a few precious moments, all I felt was what I felt. All I felt was the unexplainable. All I felt was love.
       In that fleeting sacred space, I felt loved by all the everything that is My Life: all the people, all the things, all the circumstances. In that divine timeless vortex that made up but a single moment, I loved all that is, all that has ever been, and all that will ever be, My Life.
       Like I said. These places are magic.  

©2014 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.

Writing The Inner Beast

    I wrote the following piece a few weeks ago as an exercise during a writing workshop up here at The Omega Institute. The prompt was: “I don’t want to upset you, but…..”. We had fifteen minutes to write something that somehow incorporated that phrase.
    The great thing about the exercise is that you don’t have time to mind-screw your writing. You just roll with what comes out of you; you tap into your flow, and your unique voice comes through loud and clear. You write from a different place than just your head.
    When I read this piece aloud to the class, I really got into it, and became very animated. There was a lot of laughter. But one woman said that I scared her, in a good sort of way, with my fervor and intensity. That’s great news. It’s important that my writing impacts people, that it evokes an emotional response. It’s not up to me what that response is.
    For months, it’s been crystalizing ever more clearly for me that the performer in me aches to read my stuff aloud; to perform it for people. It’s apparent that writing alone will not quell my creative beast of story. The writing must be there as the backbone, but the rest of animal is growing hungry and must be fed. I need to broaden my output media. And I am.     

       One of the linguistic conumdrums of modern communication is when somebody prefaces a conversation with “I don’t want to upset you, but….” . Are you fuckin’ serious? Why on earth would anybody start a sentence like that? They’re asking to be found guilty before they even commit the crime. Our school system should teach you this in third grade English class. Just come out and say it. Let me ask you: Would you rather get stabbed and slowly bleed to death? Or would you rather just get a quick kill shot to head? Exactly.
       I question the motive of somebody who begins a sentence with “I don’t want to upset you, but...”, because it’s such an obviously moronic and inflammatory thing to say. I would wager that upsetting you is in fact precisely what they want to do when they open up with that. But they’re disguising that nefarious intent by proclaiming the exact opposite. It’s linguistic passive-aggressiveness at its best. Then, after they’ve given you the devastating news, and you’re having a nervous breakdown in front of them, they can cling to “I told you I didn’t want to upset you! Don’t do this to me!” That’s beautiful. You’re headed to the psyche ward at Bellvue, and they’re laying a guilt trip on you.
       Or, another trick is to use that phrase to set you up for something that really sucks, but doesn’t suck quite as bad as whatever your mind is going to make up in the four seconds it takes them to spit it out. They fake high and go low. But a shot to the groin, at least for a guy, can be just as nasty, or worse, than a shot to the head. At least with a shot to the head, you might get a cool battle scar out of it that you brandish proudly to the world. A testament to your toughness. To your manhood. A scar on the face may even get you laid, a consolation prize to the devastation your life suffered after hearing “I don’t want to upset you, but…..”. That’s still better, however, than a punch in the nuts, which could actually severely inhibit your ability to get some tail.
       Getting hit in the face is also preferable to getting a shot to the balls because a strike to your face is likely to create blood. And, I don’t know about you gentlemen, but when I see and taste my own blood, it’s like adding nitro to jet fuel. I get jacked up. I get pumped. I get juiced. The primal “Kill Or Be Killed” instinct takes over, and it’s possible I won’t even feel a shot to the face. Not until much later, anyway, when I’m sitting at the bar, downing shots of Jack Daniels, surrounded by adoring females who are admiring my facial gash and cooing me like the warrior I am. I’ll take that scenario over laying in bed alone with a bag of ice on my balls any day, and twice on Sundays.

©2014 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.

Call Me The SuperFly

       In college, my buddies gave me the nickname “SuperFly”, after my favorite professional wrestler, Jimmy "SuperFly" Snuka. His patented move, “The SuperFly”, was a flying leap off the top ropes, smashing down onto a prostrate opponent. I was known for doing my own version of the move, careening off of couches, chairs, cars, diving boards, you name it. Especially when alcohol was involved.       
       One of the workshops I took here at The Omega Institute was called The Flying Trapeze. It involved literally getting up on a real trapeze and doing shit thirty feet off the ground over a net. Here, I earned the nickname “SuperFly” all over again. And let me tell you. It was one wild ride.  
       The scariest moments were always between the time I started climbing the ladder and the time I actually took off. By the time I’m waiting on the platform chalking up, my heart and mind were racing like a Formula One car. Grabbing the bar as I leaned out over nothing but air and waiting for my cue to take that leap of faith, I felt like everything inside of me was about to explode outwards in a violent mess of brains, blood, and thoughts. But once I jumped into the void, I wasn’t frightened at all.
       It’s not as simple, however, as “I didn’t have time to be scared”. That is a part of it. Things are indeed happening fast once you start flying. Real fast. But remember, the mind only needs a second to go from serene to clamorous . Granted, when things are happening that fast, my mind has no time to idle, which is when it gets me in the most trouble. Climbing the ladder and waiting for the bar do not take a lot of concentration, so my mind fills itself with all the things that could go wrong up there, and all the other completely irrational fears that one experiences climbing thirty feet in the air preparing to swing off of a bar into mid air.
       Once I take off, though, an entirely new paradigm takes over. It’s as though the way I lived my life just a moment ago, The Operating System For Clint In Life, has been usurped by something all together different. I am suddenly fully and completely engaged in flying. I’m totally focused, paying attention, and bringing all I have to this endeavor. It’s like there is no room for anything else. The situation forces me to fill myself up with what I’m doing. I’m moving trough the air (maybe not with the greatest of ease, as the song goes, but I’m moving). I’m not directly attached to Mother Earth. My only tether to terra firma is a metal bar attached to a couple of nylon lines, attached to a massive apparatus of poles, stakes, and ropes. It doesn’t feel like I’m on earth anymore. And that changes everything.
       Flying through the air, not experiencing any attachment to the ground, well, it’s something I’m sort of used to. Mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, I have much more trouble being grounded than I do soaring through the metaphysical stratosphere of my own mind, of my own heart, of my own spirit. But this is different. Way different. This is physical soaring. Not just mental. Not just emotional. Not just spiritual. This isn’t just a mind thing. It’s a body thing. It’s a whole being thing.
       And while the body soars, my mind stays grounded, focused, engaged, and present. It’s almost a complete role reversal. Usually it’s my body that’s physically grounded, and my mind that’s soaring someplace else. Now it’s my body that’s no longer touching anything but air, and my mind that’s rooting me to the moment.
      It’s a mind/body role reversal, but on a different level, on a new playing field, a whole new continuum. Life is happening and I’m in it, one-hundred-fucking-percent. For those precious fifteen seconds, I’m free. Free of the mental chatter that sometimes derails me. Free of the ground that sometimes makes me feel trapped. I’m grounded, but it’s got nothing to do with the ground. I’m grounded in what I’m doing. My full engagement in life at that moment is what’s responsible. Paradoxically, my total commitment to flying is actually what grounds me.
       Fly with me into Part Two on Monday.


©2014 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.

I Hate Yoga

       I hate yoga. It’s uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Which is exactly why I’m doing more of it.
       It can be difficult, sometimes, to know the difference between doing something we don’t like because it’s good for us (like in this case, yoga), and doing something we don’t like because it’s bad for us (like driving sixteen-penny nails through our eyeballs). When do we just suck it up, and when is sucking it up just getting us in more trouble? That’s not always clear. But some things are becoming more vivid as I draw parallels between my fledgling yoga practice and the rest of my life.
       First and foremost, I have to show up. For yoga and for life. That means I get my ass into the game, even if that sometimes means just hopping out of bed, or showing up for a class. Whether I want to or not. And sometimes, I don’t. Not so much in life, but certainly for yoga. And, although such days are very few and far between, even getting out of bed some days wouldn’t be my first choice. And I’m not talking about those days when I wake up next to a beautiful woman and all I want to do is explore the Karma Sutra. I’m talking about the rare “I just don’t want to get up” days, when just showing up at all is a victory.
       But showing up is rudimentary. Now it’s time to actually do stuff. Yoga has shown me just how resistant I can be. My body fights the poses. Part of this is because I’m physically tight. As in “not flexible”. My body is used to resistance. My workout history is primarily weight training, which is all about putting up a fight. Thirty-five years of pumping iron, without enough stretching or other flexibility based modalities, will tend to make one tight.
       Working with weights since I was fifteen has made me comfortable with resistance. I’m at home with it. On a cellular level. It’s the world I’ve trained myself to be in. I know how to resist a weight and then force that weight through to completion. In the world of barbells and dumbbells, that’s how it works. In the world of yoga, not so much. My body is so used to resistance, to fighting and forcing my way through it, that it does so automatically. Instead of flowing and breathing into a yoga pose, I fight it. I’m physically unconscious about it. Only when I remind myself, physically and mentally, that “I’m not supposed to resist this” do I gain the ability to move with the motion, with the pose, instead of against it.
       This is the way it is with my body, as I’ve become acutely aware of after doing two and a half weeks of yoga classes. There is a saying that goes “The way you do yoga is the way you do life”. So I started asking myself how often in my life do I engage in resistance? How often do I just muscle through something, attempting to essentially force it (like during a bicep curl), instead of allowing it to unfold (like during a yoga pose)? How often do I act from force in an attempt to control, instead of acting from intentional effort and allowing things to flow? Put another way, how often do I create space in my life for things to happen?
       Forcing things is a learned behavior. So it can be unlearned. And I’m not talking about doing nothing at all and just waiting to see what happens. I’m not talking about passivity. I’m talking about allowing. I’m talking about creating space within the spheres of my life where space is as much a requirement as action. Which is basically all spheres. Even in pumping iron, you have to let the weight down. You have to allow the muscles to rest; in between reps, in between sets, and then for days at a time. Space is part of the equation. You have to give your body the space it needs to grow and change. I sometimes forget that. In the gym and in my life. I more naturally focus on the force. But the space has to be there. It’s an integral, vital, indispensable part of the overall process; of growth, of change, of development, of transformation. Of life itself.
       That’s why yoga is so hard for me. It feels like I should be forcing the pose. But when I do, it just feels like shit. That’s the opposite of pumping iron. In the act of lifting, when I force the weight up, it feels good. So in a way, it’s flipping what I know, what I’m comfortable with, on it’s head.
       On the other side of this is the realization that, in the rest of my life, as in yoga, I have great capacity for flow. I have great capacity to allow, and to create space. I just don’t always see it. And I don't always do it. Especially when I’m cursing my way through Warrior One, or some variation of Twisted Pretzel Position Twelve. When I get out of my own way, I naturally create space for many beautiful and wonderful things in my life to happen. For many wonderful and beautiful things to unfold.  
       But I have to be mindful of this. I have to bring a conscious awareness to it. I have to practice it. My over arching paradigm can not be one of force. My over arching paradigm can, instead, be one of conscious effort with clear intent, followed by letting go. I can engage in appropriate action and simultaneously practice allowance. I can create both the inspired acts and the space needed for those acts to take whatever wing will be.
       I’m discovering that my yoga, like my life, is more of a dance. And less of a bench press.

©2014 Clint Piatelli, MuscleHeart LLC, and Red F Publishing. All rights reserved.