What Have You Been Learning Lately?

People, especially in spiritual circles, talk a lot of shit about the ego...it's bad, it should be killed, etc. However, the ego is necessary. It's what motivates us to care for ourselves, to make sure that we get what we need in life to survive. Sure, when left unchecked it's a monster, but it doesn't need to be destroyed- just harnessed and closely watched. It's this sense of self-importance that inspires me to post these blogs and expect people to read them (you are reading, right??). On bad days this same sense of self-importance becomes grossly inflated and causes me to think that I'm important enough for people to think about me all the time. I've never been aggressively pursued by paparazzi, and yet I still manage to maintain these delusions of celebrity import. You don't care what brand of toothpaste I buy? What's wrong with you? For some reason I always think these thoughts other people are having are negative...someone doesn't cal

Back in the day my friends called me The Make Out Queen. I love kissing and used to do it all the time with just about everyone...at concerts, on buses, on the street, even at The Make Out Room one time. If you knew me somewhere between my 19th and 22nd birthdays, there's a good chance we've made out...and because this also coincided with the heaviest drinking period of my life, I might not remember. Sorry! I'm sure it meant something to me at the time. This week two very different things happened. I came home from White Tantric Yoga in LA flush with a sweet post-yoga vacation buzz and ready to embrace full time greatness by integrating my Siri Sevak self more fully into my life. Later in the week, I relived my early 20's by going out dancing late into the night and making out with a stranger while doing so. It was fun but the rush of kissing someone new gave way to boredom fairly quickly, and in my early 20's tradition I rode the owl bus back to the Sunset by mys

My Kundalini Yoga spiritual name is Siri Sevak Kaur. It means "Princess/Lioness of God who does great devotional service, and who loves and lives to serve God." No pressure, right? When I received my name it didn't come as too much of a surprise. I have always loved to help others, doing community service in high school and college although it wasn't required. I just get a kick out of giving back. What was surprising about getting this name was that I didn't mention this in my application. In fact, the little information I did give was about fear, not service. When asked to tell Nirinjan Kaur (the 3HO Chief of Staff and Chief Namer) a bit about myself, I talked about how I had always been filled with a subtle, underlying anxiety and a general mistrust of life. Today, on a long walk along the ocean between Venice and Santa Monica, I recalled what I wrote almost two years ago and was pleased to find that my heart felt very free. I walked along smiling at everyone,

In the six months before I turned 21 I blacked out three times. Gratefully there were never any terrible consequences, but I started cutting back on my drinking when I realized how much I liked it. I figured I should cool the relationship down before we got any more serious. I'm just not that ready to commit. Since then I've danced back and forth between sober and sloppy, sometimes giving my liver long vacations, other times making it work real hard (sorry, buddy). Being a passionate, intense woman tending towards extremes, I am capable of being very conscious, doing two hours of yoga a day...and then going out later and drinking too many martinis. For a while now I've enjoyed the stark contrast, and figured that it gave me balance and relatability. If I was to stop drinking entirely, would it alienate me from certain relationships? Is that really a reason to continue? If it were only my concern about losing touch with people that I care about, I could understand my mot

A couple of weeks ago I read an op-ed piece in the New York Times discussing recent research which concluded that it is mentally/emotionally healthier for people to be in stable, committed relationships (women in particular, but men, too). The author didn't take a moralistic, wait-until-marriage stand point- he just reported the information and suggested that perhaps we would be better off if we stopped being, well, slutty (my word, not his). It got me thinking about and reframing the way I view my own sexual history. You know how guys sometimes inaccurately inflate their number of sexual partners? I used to do the same thing. Having gone through my later adolescence watching Sex in The City, I was embarrassed by how little experience I had. I felt like I was missing some key component of adulthood by not having a lot of partners, so I counted higher than was true. Over the handful of years between losing my virginity and my first adult relationship, I did a fair amount of foolin