I’ve been thinking a lot about grounding this week. Here in Carmel, two very different kinds of chaos have collided at exactly the same time. It’s Car Week — when roughly 150,000 visitors descend on the Monterey Peninsula for the Concours d’Elegance and the constellation of events surrounding it. For those of us who live here, it means overwhelming traffic, commutes that can multiply in length, and a seemingly endless parade of extremely expensive sports cars revving, racing and announcing...
29 days ago • 3 min read
Have you ever gotten hung up on a word for no particular reason? One that quietly follows you around for weeks until you find yourself bringing it up in conversations that have absolutely nothing to do with it? I've become mildly obsessed with the word discombobulated. It has come up at least three times over the past couple of weeks, and every time I've found myself making the same argument. If you can be discombobulated... Surely, at some point, you ought to be combobulated. English has a...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Crop it like it’s Hotor: why not every thought needs a solo Last week we went to see my daughter’s musical theater showcase before their troupe goes on tour to Albania. I continue to be wildly impressed by the teacher who runs this program. The scale alone is enough to make me want to lie down. Multiple age groups, massive ranges in talent … and somehow every student gets their moment. Which is important. The kids worked hard, the parents paid. Everybody wants to see their person shine. And...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Years ago I read a story by Tom Robbins that apparently lodged itself somewhere deep in my nervous system. A woman sits down at a bar and orders asparagus. The man beside her keeps inching closer and she wants absolutely nothing to do with him. Halfway through dinner he leans over and says: "You and I have something very intimate in common that you don't know yet." Suspicious already. "Tomorrow morning our urine will smell exactly the same." Which brings me to an important point: The rubber...
4 months ago • 2 min read
There’s a particular kind of compliment that bypasses vanity entirely and lands somewhere much deeper. Not because it flatters you…but because it names something you’ve quietly recognized in yourself for a very long time. In a recent review of From Molecule to Movement — the short film Hanif and I created for the Shulgin Foundation about Sasha Shulgin, MDMA, and the strange, beautiful collision between chemistry, therapy, culture, and consciousness - I was described as a “ Movement and Design...
4 months ago • 2 min read
Read time: ~4 minutes Musing: astronauts, somanauts, and inner space Listen: Sasha Shulgin, 1983 Join: April 25 retreat + May 2 exhibit Over the past couple of weeks, something subtle has been moving through my world. A kind of shared pause. A collective exhale. For a brief moment, many of us found ourselves captivated by the language of orbit—liftoff, a release from the pressure of the known atmosphere. The Artemis program became more than a mission, it became a metaphor. For exploration....
5 months ago • 4 min read
Hi Everyone, I’m in the middle of one of those months. At the beginning of the year, the Universe made itself very clear:“You know now that I make better plans than you do. So don’t F this up by making your own plans.” By March, I got impatient. ( In my defense, Reader… I do have bills to pay down here on Earth.)So I made some plans. And now I’m in it. • Yoga Trapeze workshops this weekend.• A beautiful Somatic Retreat coming up on April 25.• And another large-scale art project being...
5 months ago • 1 min read
read time: ~4 minutes watch: therapeutic trapeze breakdown includes: free class + workshop details Last week I was down in Laguna Beach taking a Gyrotonic Level 2 course to fulfill my CEU’s. Which is slightly ironic, because as a former Master Trainer… these are courses I used to teach. And I’ll say this — I genuinely love the quality of movement the Gyrotonic method can evoke. But there’s a moment that happens in almost every system like this. Where the choreography starts to eclipse the...
5 months ago • 2 min read
Hello Reader, • 3 minute read — and a quick neck reset you can try today • a musing on agency, autonomy, and the machines we trust with our bodies • mini-workout:UnWreck Your Neck ( 9-minute reset with a band, chair & yoga block) • strength, mobility & decompression — trapeze workshop (online too) Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about agency and autonomy in our bodies. And I suspect many of us have been thinking about it too — especially lately, as a lot of long-standing assumptions start...
6 months ago • 3 min read