Bienvenido!

Hello!
I am so proud of myself that I finally got this blog together. I've been meaning to do so for awhile, but I kept taking care of other things first and putting it off, until finally....
What bring me here at this exact moment? The fact that I am ill and cannot practice yoga, funnily enough. I am stuck in my apartment warding off a weird sore throat/sneezy cold while it absolutely POURS outside, guzzling down a green smoothie.
It is actually quite a shame that it's raining, because my parents are supposed to come into the city today and my mom had a great plan all worked out that involved walking around Brooklyn Heights and checking out a neighborhood where she used to live. Now, I guess the plan will be modified, which is just as well because in my sickly state I'm not sure how well I could handle all the walking.

So I've started this blog, mainly because I've wanted a real, live, well-written, often read blog for a long time. I haven't really had a specific topic in mind, and I've haphazardly created personal life blogs or secret poetry blogs or travel blogs, but never stuck with them for too long. Several weeks ago, I booked a 4 week trip to Costa Rica with very little plans on my way, and ended up backpacking all over the country and extending it to 5 weeks and having an amazing time. I did this because I was feeling directionless, unfocused, uncentered, and uninspired.

[As an aside, I finally decided to read "Eat, Pray, Love" this week, and I am a little dismayed that I am not the only one who took a hedonistic journey and wrote about it on the way. I am also angry that everyone I know is mocking me for reading this book. I clearly relate, okay? Even if I thought I was solo in this idea, and the first to decide to write about it, and she had a book deal before she even wrote about it, and I guess her problems were much greater because they involved divorce and serious depression and clearly she traveled more than me, and then there gets to be a movie about her journey as well starring Julia Roberts and etc. etc.]

Anyway, I kept both an actual journal and a travel blog throughout the trip, and I found it incredibly comforting and mind-clearing to write about everything that happened. And a lot happened. I really felt the universe at work throughout the trip, sending me people and signs and experiences to confirm or erase thoughts or ideas I had. Fears and doubts would cross my mind only briefly before something new and exciting came and changed my perspective.

One main theme of the trip was yoga. I was lucky enough to spend my first week at Pura Vida Spa & Retreat Center, doing their Mind, Body & Spirit program. What that essentially meant was that we did yoga twice a day, ate delicious vegetarian meals, took a couple of day trips and had some fun activities like aerial silks class or salsa dancing, and had plenty of opportunity to experience body work with amazing people (personally, I did a deep tissue massage, reflexology/reiki treatment, ear candling, an ayurvedic consultation, and this fascinating thing called bodytalk). That sort of set the tone for my trip, and then as I continued throughout Costa Rica, I was able to take a couple other classes in various places and met a ton of yogis on my journeys. Costa Rica is a pretty yogic place, I guess.

All of this, and all my discussions with the yogis and yoginis I met on my way, sort of highlighted a major fact for me. I feel my absolute best when I am pursuing a yogic lifestyle. I feel amazing post-yoga, I love cooking and eating healthily, I am fascinated (and intimidated!) by true yogi spirits, and I want to know more and more about the whole lifestyle. I can't identify any feeling I have felt that is better than lying in savasana after a solid, physically exerting but also spiritually rich yoga class.

So now, here I am, back in NYC. Trying to get the career part of my life together - I am a fairly recent college graduate (Dec '09) - and I had been working in film production for awhile, but I'm trying to branch out otherwise. But I think a really important part of my life that I do not want to let go of is the yoga part. So I've made a commitment to really pursue yoga seriously, in all my spare hours. That means classes several times a week, seriously studying the methods of the various studios and teachers I experience, hopefully reading some books that are out there on the subject, and just doing a lot of thinking and analyzing as to whether perhaps yoga is something I want to pursue as a career. For the moment, I need to pay the bills doing something I got my degree in, but I want time to explore that side of me, and I want to incorporate it into all aspects of my life eventually.

So here is this blog. This blog will be about me, of course, and probably there will be some entries that are lacking in yoga entirely. After all, I am a young 20-something living in NYC, some would say the center of the universe. Sometimes exciting or interesting things happen to me. Sometimes my life is so boring and mundane I want to kill myself. But I hope that this blog will overwhelmingly aide me in my journey to becoming a true yogini, and I hope that I will be able to bring some people along with me on the ride.

Thanks for coming, I hope you stay awhile!