Conversation Starters

 "When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.  When the student is really ready, the teacher will disappear." - Tao Te Ching For over 11 years, I had an almost daily yoga practice. It started in February 2008 when a housemate and dear friend of mine all but forced me to join her for a class.  She'd selected the studio and told me what time to be ready and because I'm a good wingman, I went along with it -- just for her.  I am  certain  I told the desk staff that I would never return. Famous last words. Not only did I return a week later, I returned the week after that and the week after that until I found a teacher or two I really enjoyed and the next thing you know, I was hooked. Before long, I was enrolled in a monthly membership and prioritizing time on my mat over afterwork drinks. Sometimes I'd compromise and go to class  and then  show up to drinks, normalizing the "wear your yoga gear in public" long before it became the now-standar...

I am terrible at math. You might (wrongly) assume that I'm being hyperbolic about this -- but when I tell you my addition-subtraction-multiplication-and-division skills are lost in a box in a subbasement of brain power somewhere -- I really mean it.  This morning I was watching an old episode of The Wire  where Bubbles, a heroin-addicted street hustler, presses his new teenage business partner (business partner?) to do the quick math of 5x4 plus 6x7 and shakes his head in disgust when the kid can't immediately spit out an answer. And it made me feel a certain way -- for I, too, couldn't do the math that fast. Bubbles would never want me working his cart with him. Say la vee. And while part of this is simply by virtue of being, oh, twenty-something years out of my last math class, part of it is how I've always been.  Math was always a challenging subject for me in school.  I struggled to see how the quadratic equation applied to my everyday life.  And I thought t...

It can be difficult to find a succinct and helpful tool to spark a dialogue about emotional abuse.  Gas-lighting, most specifically.  Emotional abuse, in general, is difficult to explain to people because there's no broken bones, no visible bruises, no stitched up skin, no discernible sign of physical trauma.  I'm not here to say that one is better or worse than the other (clearly, they are both horrible and difficult to overcome) but with more "invisible" evidence of emotional abuse, it can be frustrating to know that what folks went through was damaging, demoralizing, and destructive but then still have the added knowledge that there will be people who don't believe them -- who say they're exaggerating -- who don't understand.  People understand a broken bone.  They don't understand a broken sense of self.  Maybe they think   get over it  or   get over yourself  or   we still talkin' about this?   The recovery period isn't as...

I've pulled a few things from social media that I thought could inspire different posts, but as I stare at them off to the side here, my brain wants to call them pieces of the same puzzle.   The first one is this: Then there's this: Finally, there's this: That last one is obviously from a Timehop of mine -- a quote from an episode of  This American Life  that bangs like a drum through my healing process:  Sometimes we're not ready to let go of the lie that preservers our existence .  Yes, Ira Glass.  Yes, sir. But that sentiment ties back to the notion of the first meme I shared:  so many broken children in adult bodies .  For where else do we learn that we're less-than besides our childhoods? Where else do these patterns get established and engrained?  Where else are we told more that  we are resilient  than in our childhoods?  Kids just bounce back.  They're too young to understand.  What we say or do now will ...