Episode 52: AUTHENTIC Day Old Pizza…

I STILL HAVE NOTHING FIGURED OUT!!! Shocking, I know. BED PIZZA!!! A TOTAL OF 3 RANTS ABOUT AUTHENTICITY VERSUS ARROGANCE!!! Great new alt-jams!!! THINGS THAT REALLY BOTHER ME!!! Wild child. SELF LOATHING!!! SOCIAL MEDIA: The curated moments we want to share. The blossoms in the spring, the quotes on how to access your inner strength *gets a little nauseous*… begging look at me I’m authentic. (And I’m just as guilty of it as anyone) No one’s posting a video of me screaming at my computer while I try to figure out why I have so many TOLL VIOLATIONS and watching me throw my phone (which is loudly playing Mass EZ-pass hold music) across the room… SELF-LOVE VS ARROGANCE (the epic face-off). LONG DISTANCE RELATIONSHIPS!!! OLD LOVERS & those hot summer nights…

Excerpt 1:

SO there’s this thing… that really bothers me… which obviously means it’s something I do myself. No, hahahahahahahahahhahah…. I mean I’m just reminding you of the old, “if you have one finger pointing at someone else there’s always 3 fingers pointing back at you” saying. But anyway, I’m nowhere near perfect, and my life is not shiny or glamorous, I mean I came home from my client sessions today. Toaster-ovened some day old pizza I left in the back of my truck last night by accident and lay down in my bed on the floor to eat my toaster-oven pizza covered in olive oil under the covers while watching working moms. I spent Friday night dancing till 2 am swaying and moving to the dope beats of a great DJ. Finally lost in my element, movement, and sound. Breath and body. Undulations. That is my temple. A sweaty dance door. That is where I go to worship, temples of sweat and flesh and awkwardness. The raw humanity of it. The primal nature of it.

And for some reason, it’s been bothering me, the cookie-cutter look at me detachment of social media. Another yoga teacher in another pose, another happy engagement. We get these snapshots, and I’m just as guilty of it as anyone, of the curated moments we want to share. The blossoms in the spring, the quotes on how to access your inner strength, begging look at me I’m authentic. No one’s posting a video of me screaming at my computer while I try to figure out why I have so many toll violations and watching me throw my phone which is loudly playing mass EZ pass hold music across the room. No no, it’s just "Look at me and how far I’ve come," and "Here I am glowing." Well yeah, that’s great, and it can be true and authentic, but it can also be a ploy, come to my classes, I have it all figured out. And boy do I not have anything figured out. I mean you can come into my studio and lay on my table and I’ll put my hands on you and maybe relieve some small part of your suffering for a moment, that I am capable of. But I make no claim to have my own life figured out.

So this brings into question well then what is authenticity. Authentic expression is grounded in a deep sense of self; a self-knowledge. It does not SEEM, or CLAIM, or PANDER. Authenticity simply IS. Because it IS who and what you are (at your deepest core). And whether that’s you dressed up in drag and outrageous makeup, or you sitting in your underwear in a river. It honestly doesn’t matter. But the QUALITY, the quality will always be something I recognize. Is it true? Now my definition of true and your definition of truth might be different. But to me, it is true if you are fully shining through as YOU. The only message here is, I am HERE. HELLO! Or THIS IS MY PRODUCT AND IT'S DOPE. And here we have the enemy of authenticity, arrogance, the “I’m more evolved than you” the posturing, the sob story that comes before the big reveal. Somehow I have come to a place where I no longer need healing and I’m all stitched up and at your service. I have to say, I cannot imagine a time where I would tell someone “I am healed” because healing is not linear, and neither is love or life. THERE WILL BE CURVEBALLS, and moments of incredible failure, and moments of triumph, and moments when someone or something comes leaping back out of the past at you like a demon from hell. No matter how much I meditate, or chant, or do yoga, or reiki, or hike mountains, or consciously communicate with my partner, life will still happen. There will be new scars, new beautiful moments. But the idea, the arrogance of any kind of arrival? I’m not about it. I want to be the perpetual student. I want to be broken down, time and time again, with the reminder that the only body I can know what is right for is my own. That your healing and my healing are different. And of course, here I am every week trying to scrape together some ridiculous promo for this show, and not a single one of them looks or sounds the same. Because nothing is ever really the same as it was last week is it? And I will admit that it’s hard in this day and age, in this culture to find your authentic voice, your vein, your thing, what lights you up. It’s hard to sort through the imposter syndrome, and the voices in your head put there to stifle your creativity or inhibit your full embodied expression. And social media makes it even harder.

So I’ll address something that may be controversial here. I think, that there is a major similarity between self-love (as it is fed to us by social media) and arrogance.

You will often hear, “the only thing that matters is what I think about myself, I love myself, that’s enough” but are you using this to avoid being held accountable for your poor actions? Are you using this to walk away from places that could potentially help you grow, or force you to confront your treatment of other people? Because what you do affects everything around you, it directly affects it. And I don’t want to be here to not take other people's feelings into account, I’m in this harm reduction paradigm here. I want to be humble enough that you can tell me when I’ve done something wrong and I’ll apologize, and learn. Not just brush it off and say well, I love myself, so you don’t matter. And I have to say, that IT'S TRICKY. Because so much of what we see and hear from the yoga community, or other communities of healing preach this radical self-acceptance, radical self-love. But are you conscious of how your individualism separates you from the greater community? Will you get down on your knees to pick someone up off the street? Do you read and retain social justice work? Are you actively donating or volunteering in reparations (you know like without anyone knowing about it?!)?

“The work of love proves, that I am more than just a gritty animal” -from The Work That Cannot Be Done Alone, remember?

And that is it. Real love, is more. Real love is universal and encompassing. It’s I’m over here learning to stand hanging out with myself so I can show up as a better community member and not put my BS on you. This is not love and light people. This is brimstone and fire and vast hells-cape of my psyche, and man, I’ve seen some stuff…. But that doesn’t mean that you haven’t too. Your struggle may be COMPLETELY different than mine, but that just means you have different medicine to offer. I am no leader, I am no better, no different from anyone. And I LOVE THAT. In the program, they say, "just another bozo on the bus." Which is a term I hate but have come to love. I'm not here to save the world. Nothing makes me a special little snowflake. I'm a worker bee, here in service of love, here in service of connection, of healing whatever that looks like. I am not separate. I am just like you. With my own intricate neuroses, and weird bed pizza.

Because we are all connected by one single thread, our very own humanity.

Excerpt 2:

“And I remind myself, again and again, if I’m focusing on the problem I’m not working on the solution. And if I’m looking at the negatives I’m not remembering all the beauty. Or you know, something like that. And yesterday the person I did that you know the other woman episode about, basically the nutshell version is that I found out they had had another partner for the last two years that didn’t know about me, and I’d been their lover for the better part of our lifetimes, well they texted me. And it read as follows:

“Hello, Olivia.

Thinking of you as the days are warming.

How are you?! Sending warm sun greetings.”

And they were my confidant, my lover, my friend, for so many years. I finally said something. Hopefully not warranting much of a response:

“I always get nostalgic in the spring too. It has been a beautiful couple of days, hasn’t it. I went out dancing last night, it was beautiful to feel free and alive under the full moon. I hope you’re doing something to bring in the equinox tomorrow. This one seems special.

And you know how it goes, everything is different, and somehow exactly the same. And I just keep studying and learning and hiking and dancing, and life goes on.”

Because well life just went on, as it did. And there was a bittersweetness in it. And life’s never gonna be like that again. Those days in the summer when you kissed me in the heat pressed up against my truck, and brought me a flower, and told me my luck was more like fate.

And all of that beauty is tarnished. Is irreparable in some way. Those hot summer nights in that little room atop the waterfall.

I’ll never be there again. But you changed me. Because you did one thing, you forced me to confront my self-loathing. Some of which came from words you gave me when I was young. And I became the woman I was despite you. You got to watch me bloom, against all odds, still in your arms, despite everything you did to tear me down. Until there you were on your knees at my feet. And if I hadn’t had that stark mirror to measure my worth against, then maybe I wouldn’t have found out who I was. I became myself until you didn’t determine what I was worth anymore. And I gave you nothing but compassion. That was my gift, to you. To never treat you the way you treated me.

So this week has felt bittersweet, tinged with longing, for a hug that never ends. Sitting alone in a room eating leftover pizza. Almost like nothing’s changed, but everything’s different.