One of the first aspects of meditation I was introduced to is that it can be taken anywhere and practiced at any moment. But over my first few months of consistent practice, I developed an increasing aversion to finding new spaces in which to meditate. I had my ideal space at home dedicated to my practice, which felt like enough when I considered...
Read moreOff the Grid: Bringing it Home
The following post was written by Callie Ritter, a certified yoga teacher through The Perri Institute for Mind and Body, and a Restorative Exercise Specialist as of summer 2015. She's professionally trained the connection to her body and movement as a Modern dancer for over 15 years; she aims to spend the future helping others in their bodies with her accumulating knowledge and passion. Callie was born and raised as a cowgirl in Southeast Idaho, but currently resides in New York City.
I was appreciating an average but perfect glass of rosé when I caught my reflection in a window: solitary with a wandering gaze. I grimaced at the thought of going back to my accommodation for the night, never mind, I leave for the airport at 6 AM tomorrow morning. I left my extra euros for a smiling waitress with good English, and began the hour walk back, my eyes up and watching. I shared paths with a goose whose yellow gaze studied me carefully; I secretly took pictures of people’s window displays; I asserted myself to some young punk men: “Can you please leave me alone?”
I killed time by watching the underside of a tree.
Traveling is a lonely and not-lonely thing. It brings you into the unknown, where your perception zooms out and blows open your mind—yet it also zooms in, bringing into focus the intricate texture of an experience. The edge requires you to pay attention, helping you remember what it feels like to be awake.
I made a friend from Sao Paulo named Cauay. I remember his dark eyes shifting serious when he paused to see if his physician skills were needed in a huddled crowd in Amsterdam’s Red Light District. He later ordered Nutella-smothered waffles with such introverted, boyish excitement that it made me smile. I already had my pack on as he stirred from sleep on his bottom bunk. I wished him luck and shared our last glance.
Ellie was a mother and daughter and asked about my love relationships as we sunk our bare feet into the sand of a windy beach. We rode cruiser bikes under arches of great green trees, and on our path the sun laid Dalmatian-print shadows. She told me about being a new Singaporian, and how you can always start over—because you always have a choice. Whenever she orders tea, it’s usually for the biscuit that comes with it.
I had too many clothes on for the temperature inside the bus, but was too busy scanning for a recognizable street sign, my stomach unsettled. Quit pretending to know what you’re doing Callie—because the truth is you don’t. This is all new.
Traveling sharpens the perspective. I feel and see much more than I do in my normal life. I breach the ‘stranger wall’ by crawling over to ask someone for help, or if they mind having company. I open myself up to the experience—however uncomfortable, bland, or blissful it may be. I take in my surroundings and spread my consciousness, and something truly unique happens; I feel like I’m a part of it all.
Intersubjectivity is a philosophical and psychological term to define how one’s subjective, identity-driven experience relates to another’s. It’s typically found in anthropological and social contexts describing shared common culture and things we agree upon. On a deeper scale, it can provide a pure definition of relationship, where and when it is that we see eye-to-eye, or rather as I want to venture: eye-into-eye.
I implore to the goose, “Come on, be my friend. I’m sad I’m traveling alone.”
The goose replies by sidestepping away. “You’re a strange and tall creature who seems to want something.”
The city’s energy fades like a weekday, and the light from the west is dimming golden into blue. I’m wearing sneakers without socks and have a belly full of bread.
Traveling isn’t comfortable, and branching into new territory can be risky, but it requires you to absorb information at a heightened intake. This newly expanded awareness leads you to observe a moment so deeply that you begin to merge with it. Merge with the glance of the waitress, the sip of glassy rosé, the wet-foot smell of a hostel, the way sun comes through the trees. When you’re open to the smells, the sounds, and how you feel in a situation, you view yourself from the outside and you see what all around you sees as well. This is intersubjectivity: relating to everything else to the point that you dissolve into and overlap realities. You find that feelings of discomfort can actually help seal in how real an experience can be.
The Third Nobel Truth of Buddhism states that a remedy to the inherent discomfort of life is a state of Nirvana or connectedness. Christos Yannaras, philosopher and author, writes, “We know God by cultivating a relationship, not by understanding a concept.” Connection is about living in a state ofrelationship where all comes into focus. This is my meditation. My practice as a yogi is to try to come back to this state of intersubjectivity over and over again, and do so on and off the mat.
I step off the plane into the humidity of a high noon. Fulton Street is full of color and swagger and fresh ripe mangos in rows. I’m home but I’m not the same. What does this feel like? What are they wearing and saying; what’s in that window?
Can you experience the same walk home freshly each time? Can you get out of your head and into your body and your environment, and touch it with your perception? Wherever you are, do you hear the birds? The sirens? Humanity’s breath and profanity? Yourself inside this moment? Whatever the experience is—don’t you want to be here for it? Within it?
-Callie Ritter
Photography by Callie Ritter.
Off the Grid: New Zealand
IMAGINE mountains of volcanic ash. Emerald thermal pools, so pure that their vivid greens and blues reflect the towering mountains above. Spider webs straddling neighboring bushes, their translucent threads so fine yet so magnificently intricate in their weavings. Mud pools bubbling, popping, and plopping, fuming beside bursting geysers. Caves so cavernous your floating tube of a seat in the cold water seems to morph into a pew beneath a cathedral’s towering heights.
All of this I was lucky to witness on my visit to New Zealand a few weeks back. Your traveling bucket list may already include this wondrous country. If not, I suggest you add it. Now.
When I travel, I tend to fill with this overwhelming awe at all that surrounds me. This intense desire to absorb every little bit overcomes me; as I scan as many details of my new environment as possible, I fervently hope that I can tuck those very images and their accompanying sensations into the deepest folds of my core, so as to be able to access their light and smell and temperature whenever I wish. I realize, even at this young age, that memories can lose their vividness as time passes—and yet I attempt again and again to receive and deposit all that I can when I travel, not only because of the marvelous nature of the sights, but also because of the inner experiences that have been birthed out of such travels. My experience in New Zealand was no different. In truth, my craving to soak everything up was probably at its strongest, since I knew that I was halfway around the world.
Upon my return to US soil, I felt as if I’d arrived home from two parallel journeys—a beautifully scenic trip on the one hand, and a vast period of inner growth, abbreviated only by the axis of time, on the other. Something about New Zealand’s terrain and people amplified this secondary journey for me. Perhaps, too, it was the large span of the trip (two weeks), or its timing (its intersection with the New Year), or the act of spending the majority of my waking hours with my family, who reminds me both of where I’ve been and where I am, and then inevitably nudges me towards considering how I’d like to continue to grow. But even in acknowledging all of this, I cannot deny the power that a trip’s sights and sounds and colors have over one’s self-reflective capacity.
I’m always so fascinated by the ways our external environments can shape our internal worlds. Just the other day, actually, I felt this wave of calm wash over me when I was several blocks away from Central Park; despite being surrounded by apartment buildings and shops and New Yorkers bustling to and from the train, the sheer proximity of trees and rocks and grass buoyed my drained spirits. If even the knowledge of a nearby park could bring comfort to a nature lover like me in that moment, how much greater of an effect can a mountain staring you in the face, or a shimmering emerald lake, or a volcano with steam rising from its slopes, have? As I ask this question, I must also present this query: how often do you and a glimmer of your environment take a good look at each other? How active are your eyes? How open is your vision?
In New Zealand, I recognized how constricted my vision has become. Of course I look around at the seas of people who fill the streets and subway platforms; I notice, too, how much further I must walk to reach my door when the bitter cold strikes. But how much more time do I spend with my eyes glued to my phone’s screen and with my eyes not entirely open, as if curtains have been drawn, containing me in a room where I rehash schedules and choices and opportunities and superfluous matters again and again?
Knowing that I may never make it back to New Zealand (though I sincerely hope against that, now that I’ve been), my interactions with the people and land there became intimate, purposeful, and full of presence; this distinctly altered way with the world broke open my senses, particularly my vision. It was as if I could consume the mysterious yet potent energy of the mountains and the wistful character of the trees lining the roads we cruised along. All of this absorbed energy—most especially by way of my eyes—triggered a churning within my mind and heart. Countless questions seeking answers arose and tumbled over each other inside of me. Contradictions between ideas clashed, and confusion struck as I lost track of what was antiquated—having risen out of past experiences and necessitated release—and what was truthfully of me, not composed from some judgment or projection of what ought to be.
My drishti, my gaze in New Zealand seemed purified by the beauty of the country’s natural surroundings and its people’s seemingly simple, grounded, joy-filled way of life. As my eyes drew in such unspoiled sights, my core self began to crave similar clarity and simplicity. This reflective mode, spawned by my adventures abroad and its resulting cravings, has followed me back to my city life; yet with a smattering of goals and fewer answers than I’d hoped, I’ve found myself tossed back into the stream, trying not to be entirely overcome by the current. In spite of the grand propositions I returned with, I’ve fallen largely—but not entirely—back to where I began, because I’ve realized that in trying to find answers, I’ve been seeking a perfect balance, which, rooted in the unreachable notion of perfection, cannot be. Even the way I attempted to soak up all of my trip’s moments seems based in this desire to have it all, in one perfectly wrapped box.
And so, as I sit here, still with missing pieces to answers and with even more questions than when I began, I wonder about our relationship with our vision. In a beautiful restorative yoga class I took this last week, we were encouraged to cover our eyes with eye pillows in Savasana, in an effort to close out all light, all hints that could lead to outward vision and stimulation. There was such power in that, especially in the midst of the quiet of winter. So I wonder, then, if just a simple (but really not so simple) awareness of our eyes’ activity could secure vibrancy in our everyday lives, enhancing our present moments just as much as those mountains and lakes and caves that stole my attention and imagination miles away from where I sit now. Just as our eyes continually launch from one journey to the next, so too does that information from all that we see enter us, churn within us, and propel us forward—forward being a relative term of course. Forward as onwards, past where we are, to the next moment in which we’ll hopefully be present, with open eyes and ears and hearts and minds, where we’ll be ready to be carried to the next moment and the next, probably without answers but with even more questions that can incite curiosity and excitement within us for all that is to come.
- Liz Beres
P.S. A little anecdote that I wanted to share, just because of the sheer serendipity of it all: I sometimes brainstorm for my posts and write pieces of them while in transit. Parts of this post came to be underground, and in one particular moment, in setting aside my notebook to transfer from one train to another, I walked up the steps at Herald Square to hear a Beatles classic, “In My Life”, being played and sung. I couldn’t help but stop and smile, knowing that that very song connected perfectly to what I was learning and hoping to share in my post. So here are the lyrics I walked straight into. More food for thought thanks to John and Paul and George and Ringo!
There are places I remember All my life, though some have changed Some forever not for better Some have gone and some remain All these places had their moments With lovers and friends I still can recall Some are dead and some are living In my life I've loved them all
Photography by Liz Beres.
Off the Grid: Louisiana
It’s always amazing to me how markedly our surrounding environments affect our bodies, minds, and spirits. Whether visiting another city or escaping to the wilderness, I find that my city grip is loosened, maybe not completely but certainly significantly, when I get out of town. My mind can become cavernous (space to truly focus and think, how glorious!), and my spirit joyfully invites in the benefits of retreat; even my body seems to release its typical tight spots, softening, opening. Even so, I would never have guessed that a trip to Louisiana with some girlfriends – to first celebrate a dear friend’s wedding and then make the most of our proximity to New Orleans and its Mardi Gras festivities – would offer me such a strong sense of refreshment, clarity, purpose, and drive.
Within the course of our four days away, we left winter for spring, woke up to summer, braved a cooling fall night and chilly morning, and returned back to NYC’s relentless winter season. These drastic seasonal changes made our four days feel like a much more substantial passage of time, and perhaps it was this that contributed to the personal growth that ensued – time's provision of linear space opening our awareness to our habits and values, instigating subtle to large changes here and there…
I used to travel endlessly. My family set a hunger for travel in my bones with our many road trips through the States. I carried this with me into college, studying abroad and traveling elsewhere to dance, and extended my stay in a cheaper apartment to pay for excursions abroad. Each trip opened the bounds of my Midwestern-girl scope and planted seeds for further personal growth. In the weeks leading up to our Southern voyage, my cravings for travel started peeking out of their hideaway. Nostalgia was cropping up in my daily life as well, particularly on my yoga mat, highlighting and simultaneously altering my relationship with the past by yes, noting those past experiences, but even more notably underlining my present moment and sending my eyes and heart towards the future. I feel as if these two factors, along with a desperate need to escape my daily grind, only heightened my recognition of Louisiana’s fresh air, my lack of responsibility in the ways of work, and the vast opportunities for fun that lay in front of us once we stepped off the plane. To have such a broad, blank slate of time to explore was an unbelievable treat that offered me the chance to drop my day-to-day and cave in to community, spontaneity, and culture in a beautiful way.
Meeting new people in foreign places, especially locals, always excites me; learning of others’ traditions can be so eye-opening and intriguing. Meeting new people, too, magnifies my sense of my outer identity and makes me consider the essence of my being:
Who am I?
Which pieces of myself will I share in this place with these people?
Which pieces of myself will I explore through this interaction, and this one?
I recently came across a meditative exercise entitled ‘Who Am I’ that endeavored to showcase the way thoughts and emotions can spill onto our identity, covering, blurring our sense of our true core. Reading about it made me wonder about the ways we humans piece our lives together. Each of us has had and will continue to have such a different journey along the ride of life, and each of these journeys is composed of so many pieces that can hardly be predicted and perhaps aren't even as true to our deepest selves as we imagine them to be.
If you break down the word ‘vinyasa’ to its Sanskrit roots, you come up with a definition of ‘to place/put together in a special way’. Vinyasa classes are most commonly known for their flow, their movement linked to the breath with seamless transitions from one asana to the next; a unique aspect of this style of yoga is its creative sequencing. We certainly could characterize our lives, and the choices that we make each and every day, as their own sort of vinyasas, no? As human beings, the differences we share in the ways of genetic makeup and circumstance are distinguished all the more by the act of choice. Sensing my trip’s deep effects on my inner strength (self-confidence and motivation) and my physical body (relief from a cold and stability in my body’s physique even despite a lessening in my typical exercise regimen) brings numerous questions to mind…how does a different locale with its fresh population and string of experiences affect us in those initial moments of contact? How do those same elements inspire the moments that arise after we depart from such a place? With such a mix of factors, it becomes challenging, maybe even impossible, to pinpoint definitive answers to such questions. I presume, though, that space in whichever form we find it can be a catalyst towards refreshing our personal life-vinyasas.
Space can lead to an exceptional sort of openness and reflection, whereby our senses and intuition pick up on pieces of conversations, visual objects, emotions, and events that become special food for thought and lend wisdom to whatever it is we are pondering at the moment. I participated in my first tarot card reading in New Orleans, and after meditating on one particular predicament I’d been facing in recent months as the session began, was surprised and pleased to hear comments surrounding that very situation through the whole of my reading. While I would never act solely on such recommendations and predictions, I very much appreciated this sense of the universe supporting my growth process, encouraging me to move forward with the current of change, while still humbly submitting to and embracing what already is.
Are our lives not, in their own ways, thrilling choose-your-own-adventure stories? If we consider this to be true, I would hazard to suggest that travel is one of the most powerful ways to reevaluate, rejuvenate, and alter the course of our life stories. Visiting places outside the comfort of our own circles can initiate change, as we see how others live and consider our own choices based on the beliefs and actions of these others. Sometimes the effects of our travels are less obvious, and we arrive where we are unknowingly; there is a beauty – and if we’re real about it, sometimes a horror – in that moment when we suddenly comprehend where we have landed.
My March wall calendar’s quote for the month is this:
Right now my life is just one learning experience after another. By the end of the week I should be a genius.
(Jeanette Osias)
This quote seems to perfectly encapsulate my Louisianan trip, and perhaps travel more generally. If we consider how much we learn in one day, how much could we gather in a week, especially if we leave the comforts of home to explore somewhere else? I can’t guarantee I’ll be a genius like Jeanette after just one week. For now, I will just continue to brew on my Louisiana musings and move ever forward towards those experiences awaiting me, here in NYC and beyond….
- Liz Beres