Winterized Space Chair

It’s a good list, I think, but a long one.

reading list (with Vishuda)

(Vishuda is my gargoyle hand puppet, in case you were wondering.)

The 2012 stack

I have had these books in my possession for a long time but have not “gotten around” to them.

One, the Tantra one, I read awhile ago but feel the  need to re-read now that I have been through so many trainings.

I have also started the Daniel Ingram book multiple times. I have gotten through one chapter doing the exercises in the Contemplative Photography book, as well.

So here’s my rather daunting  list from top to bottom:

Yoga Spandakarika

The Spiritual Teachings of Ramana Maharshi

The Great Good Place

Bringing Home the Dharma

What We Say Matters

A Path With Heart

Tantra: Path of Ecstasy

Transformational Speaking

Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha

Yoga Body

The Beauty of Different

The Practice of Contemplative Photography

The Practical Encyclopedia of Feng Shui

If you made a reading list for this year, care to share?

Today’s Reverb10 prompt is: what do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing –and can you eliminate it.

Of course the answer is: All my internet addictions: facebook, twitter, email, blog reading.  Sometimes I tell myself that the blog reading in particular gets my juices going, gets my mind thinking in bloggy ways, and while that does happen sometimes, it happens far more often when I read books.  So I’d be better off spending the time reading rather than wasting time online.

Most of what I do online is avoidance behavior, but a lot of it is also voyeuristic.  I want to see what other people are doing with their time, with their lives. I want to know what their “obsessions du jour” are. Do I want to know these things in order to be inspired?  To feel companionship? To feel connected?   All of the above?  None?

If it is connection I crave, who am I connected to?  And how deep are those connections?  When I have to answer that question, the truth is revealed.

But if I were to be really and truly honest I’d have to say that  I spend time online because it is just plain fun.  It makes me happy.  It has always made me happy, from the first day I opened an email account back in ’93 or ’94, until this day.

I have always loved my computers, my babies, and  I have always loved the internet. I have always wanted to know more about the  innards of these magic machines, and I have always been frustrated with the limits of my knowledge about them. I have even dreamed of going to study web design.  I purely and simply just dig it the whole scene.  It has provided me with hours and hours of happy.

But it is, without question, a time suck.   I’ve tried limiting myself to a daily portion of online “calories” of its yumminess but as with food, computer diets never work.

I’ve also tried “media fasting” where I unplug for a weekend, or just a day, and that definitely feels good.  Once I’m off, I don’t really miss it all that much. (For a while.)

So for me it’s a matter of limiting it rather than eliminating it.  I don’t want to eliminate it because if it were not for social media and blog reading I would never have found 750 words, where the idea for this post was born, or the reverb10 challenge that’s keeping me disciplined, and many other sites and people who have really enriched my life.

And if  I weren’t so in love and entranced with computers, I know I wouldn’t have a a website, or a blog, or the ability to make a podcast. I like that I can operate fairly competently in this whizzy world.  I like having these skillzzzz.

But the thing is, if I am, in my heart of hearts, a writer.  If I am, in the deepy-downy recesses of my soul, a person who loves words and yoga and the connection between the two, then there needs to be more time spent writing on 750 words, and blogging on this blog, and writing in my paper journal, and less time cruising around aimlessly, wasting gas online. I need to discipline myself to leave the internet and go into the yoga room and play on the mat and make discoveries there, so when I come back I have something to say.

The content for blogs and tweets and facebook status updates–at least content that’s interesting and sometimes even helpful for others, can most reliably be found for me when I go and DO things, and MAKE THINGS HAPPEN, and create CHANGE.

Whenever I think, “I have nothing to write about,” that should be the red flag to STEP AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER and go live life:  read a book, have a conversation, do some yoga, workout, write.  I don’t want to eliminate social media, I just need to use it better.  I need to put a little fence around it with a sign that says: Playground Hours are from blank to blank.  I need to be doing more living so I’ll have a better chance to be able to share  something useful and valuable here.

So here’s a little Aretha to give it to you a bit more soulfully:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IP9h40z0sk&feature=related

The big message of this book is: You’ve got to love what you do, work hard, and have patience.

There’s lots of other marketing advice too, but these are the big themes he pounds over and over, or I should say he “crushes.”

He uses the word “crush” like people use the word, “Win,” or “Nail”, or “Kill.”  As in: “I nailed that shot, OR, “My speech at the conference killed.”  Gary Vee wants us to “crush it,” in everything we attempt to do in life.

(All righty then!)

I absolutely love this guy’s exuberance.  This book is one of those fast, breathless reads, where I almost got whiplash from nodding my head in agreement so hard.  (ouch.)

Oh me and my “enthusiasms” as my mother used to call them.  “There goes Kath again, off on one of her enthusiasms.”

(Whatever, mom.)

But being the person I am, the one who is always trying to find mash-ups between yoga and life, as I was reading Crush It I was reminded of one of my favorite of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.

(Patanjali, for those non-yoga people, is to Yoga, what Buddha is to Buddhism.) It’s this sutra that came to mind: (the translation is Mukunda Stiles’)

1.14

That practice

Is indeed firmly grounded

When it is pursued incessantly,

With reverence,

For a long time.

When Gary Vee said you must totally love what you do, that’s what Patanjali meant by reverence.  When Gary Vee said you have to work till your eyeballs fall out, that’s Patanjali’s “incessantly.”  And when Gary Vee said you gotta have patience, and that this “Crushing It” may take a while? This is Patanjali’s “for a long time.”

I love it when marketing guys channel Pantajali.  Don’t you?

Gary Vee and Patanjali (pronounced Pah-TAHNGE-a-lee).

So. Cool.

(Yeah, and shut up, mom.)

I have committed to this blog for 6 days a week (Sundays off). And I kept to that schedule for the month of September, but I’m beginning to struggle with coming up with content every day.  I need “Food for Thought.”

I need to read.  Reading is my “food.”  When I am engaging with another mind through a book, all kinds of connections start happening and there is a firestorm in my brain, and I think that I will never STOP writing.

But without food it’s like gnawing on a shoelace.

I have so many books cued up on my Kindle and on my bed table it’s not even funny.  I need to schedule in some serious reading time.  But where?  Where can I find or steal time?  What needs to go?

Today Facebook was down for awhile.  I logged in and all my friends were GONE.  It was highly disturbing.  I felt like something I had painstakingly built had been destroyed.  And in a way that was true.  I have built something there: a network of shared moments, and shared lives with quite a few people, and I felt bereft when it suddenly disappeared.  (It returned.)

But when I think of where I will find the time to read, I know it will have to be here; I will have to cut back on online activities.  I spend entirely too much time here– time that would be better spent reading.

So I’m going to try to set some parameters here.  Anyone have any experience with doing this? Like “no computer after “X hour” or before “X hour?”  How about a media fast?  Anyone done that?

I’d really appreciate your input on this.

2.  I am deeply nourished by reading.  It is absolutely essential for my fluency, as well as to prime the pen, to read really good, inspiring writing daily.

3.  And finally, observing and studying the lives of people living creative andproductive lives really inspires me.  If I can’t observe these lives directly, within my immediate circle of friends, then I find and follow such people and their exploits in the media and on the web.

It’s essential that I know what nourishes me so I can intentionally incorporate these things into my day to insure that my creativity level stays high and never dries up.  It’s my recipe, and it never flops.  The only thing I have to do is remember to cook it  up, and serve it, every single day.

What’s your inspiration recipe?  What nourishes you?

I set my alarm every day for 5 A.M and read until my eyes bled.

And that was just for one class. I had equally extensive readings in two others.

My whole life was reading.  Reading and writing papers.  Every moment of my existence I read.  And read.  And read.

Now, I don’t read as much.  I do “social media” instead.  I have this blog.  I’m on Facebook.  I Twitter.  Something had to give, and I let it be reading.

And that is tragic. It makes me weep.  And I feel ashamed.

But one of the resolutions I came back with this vacation is that I am going to start reading again, in a big way.  I am starting by telling you right here, you hear?  And I am going to ask you to hold me accountable, if that’s okay.

I will tell you what I’ve been reading and you can check out my Good Reads page (I’ll update it tomorrow, it’s getting late), and you can join it yourself if you feel so inclined.  That would be cool.

On this vacation I kinda re-lived my grad school days, except I read under a beach umbrella in a bikini rather than in a wool sweater in a cold rental house in CT.

This is how I structured my days at the beach:

I watched the sun rise,

Ate breakfast,

Set up my umbrella

and read until lunch.

After lunch I read until dinner.

After dinner I drank beer, (and sometimes margaritas, and sometimes champagne.)

The next day, I did the same thing.  And the next day, and the next day, until it was time to go home.

I read Seth Godin’s Small Is The New Big.

I read Roland Merullo’s Golfing With God

I read Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.

Today I started Richard Brodie’s Virus of the Mind.

I feel back on track.

Oh, and for me, there can’t be reading without writing: