Thoughts On It All

Emotions.  What the fuck.  Insane.  Not that I’m having bad ones, they’re actually fantastic right now but I had a night last night where everything happened.  What do I mean?  I essentially had a talk with a great friend of mine that was a decade in the making.  I told that friend today that I feel “like something that was bottled up and hidden forever was finally let out.”  That what it feels like.  It’s incredible.  SO incredible.  When this happens, however, it take it sometimes takes it out of me.  There are so many emotions and feelings that are released all at once.  In this instance literally 10+ years of emotions, thoughts, and feelings.  That can be overwhelming to the body and it can, in turn, start affecting me physically.  Now this physical experience is not exclusive to me, nor is it exclusive to only this one experience, I have had this happen many times in many different situations.  It’s essentially when I am dealing with an emotional moment or a bunch of moments that are too strong for my brain to handle and I cannot handle all of it it spirituality so my body then takes on and absorbs what is left.  You ever had something so incredible happen, good or bad, that you wake up the next day and you feel hung over?  You then think, “What did I drink or eat the night before that is making me feel this way?” and you then realize that you ate the same thing you always eat and you didn’t drink any booze.  Know that feeling?  That’s what I have heard referred to as an, “emotional hangover” and today mine was a doozey.  Usually it just sucks my energy away but today I actually woke up with a legit headache.  Sit and think about that for a sec.  Emotions physically fucking with our bodies.  That’s a hell of a thing to accept.  Took me a long long time to see that it actually happens to me.

Today was my yoga day and I went.  And it was rough.  So so rough.  I equate it to my emotional hangover and the fact that at the book store yesterday there were a bunch of home made candies and cookies.  Of course I ate a bunch after not eating much sugar.  I didn’t eat a lot though so I feel like todays bad experience with my yoga class was really mostly emotions.  On top of that conversation I had last night, yesterday right before the conversation actually I asked a bunch of people to help me with something I had come up to a wall with, something I have never really been capable of dealing with.  Some may read this and think that’s not a huge deal, but for me, it was.  HUGE.  I’m really really really really bad at asking for help, so to me that was massive.  That on top of the big talk I had made me feel like I was emotionally drained.  Totally.  In a very good way.  “Feels like light”  (btw, if you haven’t noticed I’m kinda hippy-esque when it comes to this shit so deal with it).  Back to the yoga.  It was so insanely hard today.  I was rehydrating because it’s Bikram Yoga and I was going less deep as I was trying to take it easy on myself yet I still got dizzy and had to sit some stretches out.  More than most.  2 days ago I had to sot out more than I ever have, even more than I did on my first day, so what if my body knew some how what was coming up.  WEIRD!  Anywho, back to the imbalance in yoga.  It was because I was a tad chemically imbalanced somewhere in my body.  I don’t know much of anything about the physiology of emotions and chemicals in the human body, but I do know how to listen to and hear my body pretty well and that is what my body was telling me.  Chemicals are off.  As in my body taking over what my head and heart couldn’t handle with yesterday.  I felt it in my athletics.  Big time.

Over the past month or so I have been dealing with a lot of sloth when it comes to my practice with running and cycling.  I have got out a little but not much more than once a week for each.  This is way better than not at all and I am also practicing yoga which does tak up a lot of time and energy, but I do truly love cycling and running so why not practice them too?  Emotional energy.  Or, actually a lack thereof.  I wrote above about only two situations, the emotional conversation and the asking for help, but there is rarely just one or two instances that lead up to the emotional hangover.  In my opinion, the human body very well could be the most amazing thing ever.  It can handle some insane amounts of physical and emotional ups and downs, so to have emotions physically affect the body is crazy big.  It’s never just the one thing that does that.  Ever.  Period.  I can now see that this has been weeks and months coming as I look at myself and my actions over the past few months, like slowly walking away from passionately cycling and running all the time.  That, to me, is a fantastic gauge. The best, really.  I love both pursuits so intensely, so to walk away from them and not practice at least one of them every day I am keeping myself from something I love.  Some may say, myself included, that in that action of walking away I am keeping myself from love.

I have worked SO hard at getting where I am in the world of running and cycling.  I have spent SO much time in my thoughts, asking for advice, taking the advice, reading, writing, on and one, all of which is in the spirit of building a healthy relationship with running and cycling.  When I make choices to not practice a lot, I am walking away from all that hard work.

I sit here marinating in an amazing moment of life that I probably will always remember and grow from.  It feels as if there was a massive explosion within me where some glaring character defects and short comings got blown away and I am now left to clean up and sort through what remains.  I still see all around me some things I need to work on but the balance has now shifted towards attributes and abilities (I’m assuming that’s what the opposite of character defects and short comings are).  What I’m super grateful for is the fact that I didn’t totally collapse inward and stop the cycling and running all together, because now, what I can do is take the new Pat (if you havent’s figured it out yet this is a rebirth) and gather up all I have learned so far and all that I continue to learn and apply it towards running and cycling among many other parts of my life.  I have a really cool feeling about that and I think some amazing things are going to be happening in the near future in regards to all that.  It’s a really cool time to be here where I am in my skin doing what I do being me and I can’t wait to see what happens next.

The Exercise of Nothingness

Tomorrow I leave the ‘garden island’ of Kauai for my home town of Pasadena. It’s been a kick ass time out here, it really has. I achieved my goal of running trails on top of the mountain that is one of the rainiest places on earth and I got the opportunity to jump out of an airplane with my beloved sister. That is something I have wanted to do since I was 12 or 13 and it was a kabillion times better in person that I thought it was going to be. I read one and a half books thus far, which got me out of the literary ADD which has been plaguing me for the past year, contributing to my inability to finish any book I start. For the past 2 days I have been practicing the exercise of doing nothing at all.

The nothingness. This is the hardest thing for me to do. I love LOVE LA. Love. I love existing in it, participating in it, and especially cycling though it. That’s how I feel I have control over it. There is however, a downfall to the LA culture. This is the fact that it makes me feel that no matter how hard I try and no matter how much I do, I am not doing enough and I am not trying hard enough. Maybe this isn’t LA exclusive. Maybe it’s more of a big city culture. What happens with this is I am exhausted half the time and I want to escape that exhaustion. Most of us are so stuck in that loop that it feels impossible to leave, even though it isn’t, so we seek escape via different routes. I run and cycle. Many other escape routed are behavioral. Some spend too much money to feel good, I have had a constant 2 steps forward, one step back with that myself. Some seek drugs and alcohol, some seek food, some seek sex, some seek other people as an escape, on and on and on. I’m not trying to pass judgements on people’s lifestyle choices, not am I trying to get super dark with this, I’m just saying it’s SUPER hard for me to get out of the loop of madness and to practice the art of doing nothing. It’s near impossible.

In my yoga practice, for example, there is a pose I forget the name of where the point is to lay on the ground and do nothing. Just breathe….it drives me fucking crazy. Loose all tension in the muscles and just lay limp as a noodle. Deep calm breath only. This is so crazy hard for me. In my meditation practice too, I somedays focus on my body seeking knowledge of what am I holding tense and why. The answer to that is almost always “most of my body.” I just can’t seem to let go of tension. So that is how hard it has been for me to let go and just do nothing. Zero plans. If you’re reading this and we are hang out type friends you’ll know that most of the time I book hangouts in advance and half the time something comes up and I either double book or need to cancel. This is all because I get stuck in that metropolis lifestyle loop and pack things so tight in my life that sometimes I go “pop!”

The nothingness. For the past few days I have been doing my best to wallow in it. Tons of reading. Tons of meditating. Zero running (on purpose). Zero exercise. I am in a way exercising the spiritual strength I gain by wallowing in the nothingness, wallowing of course being the positive form of the word like wallowing in something fabulous. I honestly hope I can stick to the nothingness wallow when I get back to LA. I feel lighter. I do really crave running because I love love love it. I can’t wait to get back to my yoga practice, I’ve had a ton of fun seeing how that has helped my head as well as my other exercise practices. Good god I can’t stop thinking about by bicycles, I’m near obsessing over riding them at this point. So what about there being something to this practice of nothingness. The practice of my time with myself. This, I think might be the importance of it all. I truly thing that I need to reintroduce into my life this practice of nothingness. I need to be constantly open to harboring new relationships with things that I potentially can build obsessions with, like my exercise. I have in the past had disturbingly unmanageable obsessions with cycling and running and I really thing that this practice, this exercise of nothingness, can and will help me take a far more spiritual approach to them. If I abandon this nothingness I feel that I might stop bonding and nurturing my relationship myself. That would be bad. I feel that now, at least over these past few days, I have been very much strengthening my relationship with myself and that, to me, is super important. Maybe the most important relationship building I can have. Seriously, how am I going to have a chance in hell gaining new friends and maybe even me a Mrs. Pat when I’m so busy that I’m ignoring the importance of the nothingness. I have very recently filled my life up with too much to do so that I can feel busy and in actuality not face anything I need to face in order to grow and evolve emotionally and spiritually. That’s kind of what I do. A lot. As I was writing about people seeking something in the sex, the substances, the food, I seek that in the busyness. In the self-debiting.

What I am hoping for when I get back is to hold onto the practice of the wallowing in the nothingness as I re-enter into my life-o-responsibilities so that I can take a clear calm approach to it all. A re-focus. For everything. It’s what I need. It’s what we all need. Maybe I can lead by example. Lead who? Well, maybe I need to lead myself.

This feels very good to write. I know I have been very sensitive as of lately. I have been a bit dark and snappy and I’m sorry if it’s hurt anyone. I have been in grieving mode as I have (hopefully temporarily) lost someone very dear to me so that all is a part of a process I am going through in the healing of that wound. It feels that this vacation has been a massive catalyst in that same healing process for said trauma and I am very excited to get back to the smooth hum (sounds better that “the grind) of life when I get back. I feel good. Great even. On the deep inside I do. I feel better than I have in a very long time and this makes my tummy fuzzy as I type because I know it to be the truth.

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Before I was known by my friends as a skater, before my art years came and went, a long time before I was the runner Pat or cyclist Pat, I read books. For ever I read books. It’s all I did and at one point it’s all I cared about. It was and is my religion. If I was forced to call my belief system by any name it would be called books. It’s all I cared about. It still is what I care about most. I have had the blessed opportunity to work at one of the all time great book stores in the so my relationship with books has evolved over time in many different fulfilling ways.

Then I go on vacation. That’s what is ending as I type this, that vacation. This vacation. On this here vacation I force myself back into reader mode. Demolishing books. Smashing through them. My heart beating faster and faster as the protagonists feels fears and loves and I relate. I am reintroduced to the source of my religion. It is purified in my life once again.

I know I have time to read, I just don’t dedicate enough time to it when I’m back home. There’s always time. As I type this sentence, my heart beats fast as I hope upon hopes that I can stick to this reading frenzy as I get back to the real world. I need to make time for it. I love running, I love cycling, and I love lots of other things, but before I loved all that, I loved reading books. It is, is a way, what truly taught me the importance of doing what I love. I seem to have lost that in my ‘busy’ life and I have been reintroduced to it. I don’t want to let go.