Being Yoga and Navigating Life. For Real.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Yes. And … who cares, really? Certainly not reality. When a tree crashes down and no one is around to hear it, it still produces sound waves. But, these sound waves don’t actually produce sound as... Continue Reading →
Somewhere, back in the early 1800’s, Thomas Palmer, in an effort to encourage American schoolchildren to do their homework, he wrote in his teacher’s manual, “’Tis a lesson you should heed, try, try again. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Shortly after that, Edward Hickson put the phrase in his ‘Moral Song’... Continue Reading →
On a recent trip to England and the Netherlands, I must have said “thank you” a hundred times. Not once, did I hear, “you’re welcome”. At one pub, when the bartender served me a beer, I said “thanks”. When she responded with “no worries”, I thought I would test this a bit further. I then... Continue Reading →
We love to arrive at grand conclusions with very limited information. We’re great at making assumptions and we think we’re pretty damn smart. And we’ll tell ourselves (and others) that our intuition is amazing! Mmm ... assumptions and intuition are very different things. Intuition is a gut feeling, but doesn’t come from the gut. It... Continue Reading →
There was a time in my life when the people around me encouraged me to, just sign up for welfare. Imagine that! This was the atmosphere I grew up in. It was not a nice neighborhood. I have a library full of “excuses” I could legitimately claim, but this is not an origin story, so... Continue Reading →
The Japanese martial art of Aikido is made up of three words: Ai meaning harmony, Ki meaning life force, spirit and universal energy, and do meaning the way. Summed up, Aikido means The Art of Steven Seagal. What? No, Aikido is The Way of Harmony of the Spirit. It’s actually much more complicated than that. ... Continue Reading →
“So Rob, tell me; are you a God-fearing man?” Almost twenty years ago in Nashville, I was having lunch with one of my rep agencies. There were about eight of us. When my salad came, I began to eat it while conversing with the group. As their salads came, they waited for everyone to get... Continue Reading →
What if B.B. King had to pass a written, standardized advanced mathematics exam to be legally allowed to play guitar commercially? Crazy, right? What if Eddie Van Halen had to be able to write and decipher advanced music theory, such as in the photo above, in order for him to play and make music? Well,... Continue Reading →
Through a series of unfortunate events, surviving two decades in a violent, volatile, crime-ridden neighborhood and one particular incident where I had two guns pressed into my head, I realized something: what is taught and practiced in a dojo, doesn’t really translate to the street. Reality isn’t so neatly packaged. For 17 years after the... Continue Reading →
