“What a way to live. Fearless and strong. Honest and true. Relaxed and at ease.” –Brian Leaf, author of Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi

This is #50 of 108 Ways to Livin the Moment. Let’s take back our lives one beautiful, funny and delicious moment at a time!

#50 of 108:   Gangnam? Try Jersey Style!

Last year after a yoga class at Exhale in NYC, a student came up to me and said, “I just want to carry you around in a papoose.”

I didn’t know the word “papoose.”

I couldn’t tell if it was a compliment, or a critique, so I said, “I weigh like 200 pounds. I don’t think you’d want me on your back.”

She looked at me in the way you’d look at someone you thought was a little bit, ah…well…um…stupid.

So I made sure to learn the word “papoose” (see pic of woman with a papoose).

I am reading a book right now that is so so so so so good, that I want to carry the author around in a papoose, and have him tell me funny stories while walking around NYC.

Yes that would be weird, to have another man on my stomach in a papoose, but you get the point!

I am loving every second of Misadventures of a Garden State Yogi. The author, Brian Leaf, feels like the greatest of friends, the one you will never, ever lose touch with.

He is honest, humble, spiritual, and f-cking hilarious.

I parse out a few chapters each night before falling to sleep, so as not to let this journey end too soon. And I cannot tell you the last time getting in bed to read was the highlight of my day.

A few of my favorite lines from the book:

• “Usually I felt like a brain on a stick, and I welcomed moments of being present below the neck.”

• “It takes a pretty intense person to have a goatee. After all it’s the worst of both facial hair worlds. You still have to shave everyday around the goatee, just like a bald-chinned person, and yet you have to periodically trim the goatee.”

• “But yoga invited the whole me to show up, and really I’d say that was the first time that the whole me had been invited anywhere.”
  

The book shares Brian Leaf’s “quest for health and happiness–visiting yoga studios around the country” after falling in love with the ancient practice way back in 1989.

The journey takes you to a time, maybe the current time, when you first fell in love with yoga. Oh what a feeling! (I remember when I first fell in love with yoga…and Seane Corn…back in 1996, but that’s another blog)

The book’s short chapters leave me always wanting more, like the yoga class that is so perfect, so finely sequenced, so fun that you never once look up to check the time.

The irony of timelessness is that it’s usually fast and fleeting.

Such are the two adjectives I choose to describe Leaf’s tale, just so that those of you with ADHD who haven’t read a book in years…do yourself a really, really big favor, and start this journey now.

My morning in Central Park.

I was walking this morning in Central Park (see pic).

There are still glorious glimpses of Fall, yet I had a hundred things on my mind, and my buzzing iPhone in my hand, which is obviously how I took this photo.

For just one awesome moment today, I decided to go about life differently, to put away my phone, to turn down the volume on my worries…

…and show up fully to this moment!

How else could I truly enjoy New York City in its most glorious season!

We’re talkin’ bout a new type of courage to, at least once in your day, put the screaming demands of life into the background…and show up fully!

The Love Weapon 101 is the first in a series of one week online courses I will be offering in 2013.  It all starts in January.

“Love is a weapon of light!”

Email [email protected] and write MOMENTEER! in the subject to receive early registration info.

~

Ed: Kate Bartolotta

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