Super Bowl Sunday and my highly evolved, insightful, (frankly idiotic) set of thoughts!

So here is a post of sorts: 

I know very little about football, but appreciate it as something I would like to  intelligently know about (which I do not). I  have a fantasy that there's some football sports obsessed guy in life who feels a compulsive need to educate me. For now I have a  heartful correspondence on the matter with a (male) friend named Batkin who is well aware how much of a dullard I am in this department. But truth be told, I would appreciate  football as this new something to know something about, you know? For now, I know next to nothing. i watched this year with two of my friends in my hood here, with their little boy and some of their friends. 

So allow me to present to you the full extent of my highly evolved, insightful, (frankly idiotic) set of thoughts between me and me that I shared via email with my sports-obsessed friend, Batkin. He is one of my favorite friends to correspond with, hands down, sports or no. On any topic really. He is the same guy who has single handedly renamed any man I have ever dated: Tricycle Boy, Dog-Humper, O.B.P. (On Bended Pee, long story...) Merger-Dropper (that one I came up with myself and he adopted). Ernesto, Brooklyn....One of his old girlfriend's (well,  it was more interlude than girlfriend,  lets call it) we call R.B. (Rabbit Boiler, our homage to Fatal Attraction). He also calls anytime I date Date-A-Pa-Looza...but that is also another correspondence as well. For now we'll stick with sports. But you get the picture.

More to come.... 

Megan Griswold- Lost and Found

http://www.facebook.com/griswoldmegan
http://www.youtube.com/megangriswold20
http://twitter.com/megan_griswold

New site launched in January 2011!

Feeback on my new site! Hope you like it.







Megan Griswold- Lost and Found

http://www.facebook.com/griswoldmegan
http://www.youtube.com/megangriswold20
http://twitter.com/megan_griswold

Living on a Yurt

In this video blog, Megan Griswold sort of addresses the question of why she likes living on a yurt.

"Hope you enjoy this video and thanks for joining me in my life journal!" 

So far, what do you think?   Megan does a video blog twice a week, is there anything you would like to ask her? Stay tuned every wednesday and friday for a new video blog!

http://www.facebook.com/griswoldmegan

Sometimes its hard to say "no".

I definitely do not consider myself a chef! :)



Stay tuned every wednesday and friday for a new video blog!
Input needed! Let me know what you LOVE and what you don't! Things are changing quickly and would love to get some feedback! Thanks guys!
I look forward to hearing some feedback!

On Eggs

My grandmother Deany was wild about Easter eggs. Add to that her absentminded ways in the kitchen and you’ve got CHAOS: boiling eggs, dye cups, and 15 grandchildren armed with crayons. Spry despite her bow legs with ankles the size of grapefruits—even speed couldn’t prevent her from forgetting her eggs in the pressure cooker -- exploding a dozen all over the kitchen. From then on, I kept a closer eye on the eggs.

Now, 30 years later, I’ve got an eye on my own. But they’re not so much exploding as approaching their expiration date. The thing is, I’m at a scary age -38—with no baby in sight. With every laugh line or gray hair I picture my eggs withering by the hour - an exaggeration. But hey, that’s how my mind works. So I’ve frozen more than a dozen-- fourteen to be exact. But these eggs aren’t in a crate from Whole Foods. These eggs are mine.

Since I can’t put my eggs in a nest, I opt to pump my body full of hormones, have my eggs surgically extracted and then cryo-preserved. Sounds easy enough right? By freezing, I’ve tried to make up for lost time: being a late bloomer, spending too much time in graduate school, and waiting too long for my “real life” to begin. And while the technology is deemed experimental, with no guarantees--I don’t know of any guarantees in western medicine. DO YOU?

Haven’t I been fertile since I was like TWELVE? I’m mean, REALLY, what have I been DOING? I’m ready to take this womb out onto the open road to see what it can do. But you’re supposed to have all your ducks in a row before having children: the mate, the 401k…And a few of my ducks are stragglers.

Growing a batch of eggs takes about two weeks. People talk to their babies in utero. I talk to my eggs: “Okay ladies, let me go over the particulars. A nice doctor is going to come get you and put you in a freezer where you can take a long nap. If you’re awakened, that means I’m asking you to help make a BABY. But only come if you’re eager for a BIG adventure…”

The truth: I’m hoping not to need these eggs, that I’ll get pregnant naturally when the time is right. These eggs are my back-up plan, but I’m not going to tell THEM that.

In the clinic, the lobby is full of couples with fertility problems or women preserving their eggs before chemotherapy. But here I am, healthy with all my parts in order. It’s just that my life hasn’t lined up perfectly with my body’s abilities. Statistically--by 41-- over ninety percent of my eggs will be toast.

People ask how it feels to have preserved my eggs. I’ll tell you: it’s fantastic, like a weight has lifted. No matter what happens, I feel extraordinarily lucky to avail myself of the most advanced technology. Medicine aims to optimize health. And for me, reproductive longevity is an important part of that picture.

So now I’ve got 14 eggs living in something that looks more like a propane tank for a barbeque, than a home for my children to be. But I think of them like hope - like hope in a petri dish.

While Megan Griswold is on the road with her one-woman show ‘Fix It’ her eggs reside comfortably in Boston, Massachusetts.

How Yoga Keeps You Sane

 First off, the title of this piece is based on one very large assumption. So let’s just clear that matter up completely. The assumption is that I—the author of this article about yoga and sanity—actually am sane. It’s tempting to say the jury's still out on this, but to qualify to write this article I submitted to a battery of tests, went before a panel of experts, and just to be thorough did a few quick self-tests in some self-help books. I didn't actually buy the books, but I spent a good two hours tucked in the aisle of the Boulder Bookstore.
And apparently I did great. I was amazing. Spectacular. Record breaking. In fact this article was a bit late, simply because some of the experts who tested me wanted to speak with me privately about how extraordinarily balanced I am. I swear.
Honestly, though, if life were like the selection process for a fifth grade kick ball game—and the qualities they were selecting for were the extremely calm balanced mellow looking individuals—I would be that awkward embarrassed kid left sweating it out to the bitter end until finally—thank god—one of the two captains picked me. But you know how that goes. Everybody knows they kinda had to.
But no matter. As I understand it, each of us is a totally unique evolutionary, genetic, spiritual experiment. No one else is exactly like us. Some of us quiet, some loud, some more sensitive and wish we were less so. Some more stoic and wish we could feel more. And then some of us are pretty darn comfortable exactly where we are. But here's my second assumption: a lot of us would like to feel more balanced than maybe we routinely do. And because of this, we somehow find ourselves standing at the end of a yoga mat, listening to some tall guy with extremely long legs and a nice voice, who appears unusually concerned about the soft palette.
So why yoga?
No matter our make up, yoga is one way to learn to love the cards we were dealt. Why not love them, eh? I can tell you that the thirty some years I've been actively not loving mine, doesn't seem to actually have changed the cards. So now I'm working on the other direction. Trying to like them. Some of my cards I do actually like, then others I just as soon hide in the backseat of my car, in the seams of the seats where plastic wrappers, pennies, and dirt go to die. But sometimes those same cards we struggle with, also simultaneously contribute to the best of who we are.
Here are some of my most challenging cards—nothing extra special, they're just mine—the part of my deck that brings me to yoga:
I feel a lot. I feel a lot a lot of the time. I have a lot of energy, which gives me a lot of time to do stuff and then feel a lot about it. It appears one of my life's passions has been the following: I seem to like to worry, then criticize myself, then worry some more. Occasionally I think a couple of really solid thoughts, then I worry some more, then I worry about worrying...then I judge myself for being a worrier who worries too much. Then I worry about how I judge myself about worrying that I worry too much. Then I worry that I judge that I worry about worrying. Then I just worry. Then I get sad that I wasted so much time worrying. Then I get sad that I feel so sad. Then I am disgusted that I felt so sad about worrying. Then I fantasize about a couple of things about myself and then about a couple of other people. Then I work for a while and have a couple of really good thoughts. Then I notice I'm hungry. And then I start thinking about death and how we are all going to die sooner than we'd like. Then I think about how I hope I don't have cancer. Then I have a bunch of thoughts about how I wish my mother didn't have Alzheimer’s. Sometimes I cry. Sometimes I pick the callous on my thumb.
And here's a scary thought. They gave a person like me a bachelor’s degree. And a master’s. And a job. And a driver’s license. And I'm allowed to vote. Run for office. Run the PTA.
Then I step on my mat. And you know what happens? It’s magic.
I start to worry.
Why does my forward bend suck so hard? Could someone look and see if there's like crazy glue in my back? Or is it because I'm holding my grief there? Is that grief that's making me look like the hunchback of Notre Dame? And the woman next to me of course. She doesn't look like a hunchback. She's a goddess. And look at that tattoo. God that's sexy. Should I get a tattoo? What if I don't like it later? Am I rooting my feet evenly on the floor? God I'm fat. I wish I was already in savasana. Wait, no I like this part. That feels good when my body feels more elastic. Oh rats, I hate Warrior II. Was that five breaths? I’m not sure. Let's call it five breaths. Maybe that was four... what's wrong with me that I care if it’s four or five. Why am I in a rush? Oh god. The guy next to me is making some weird noise. What IS that NOISE? Seriously what in the WORLD is that noise?
Now what's the difference between that and any other part of my day? It is a commitment to myself, working with my nervous system, my particular random combination of genetic material, to witness being a person. Being a person who wants to be successful at this stuff called living. And by success here I don't mean putting big numbers on the scoreboard, or being picked first for the million different versions of adult kickball out here in the world. By success I mean being comfortable in my own skin—which also means comfortable with the discomfort. Yoga teaches me to be the person who can recognize those thoughts about whether I should I paint my toenails or not. Or why doesn't he want me? All those thoughts are just one part of the passing show.
Those thoughts aren't me. There's not actually anyone there with whom to talk. Firing of synapses that will fire, now, and again. And when I'm lucky I can see it as such. And with each time on the mat, I get to recognize how crazy it all is. And that feels sane. Incredibly, marvelously sane.
You hear a lot of people out there talk about how "relaxing" yoga is. But that's not how I would describe it. It reminds me of learning to hike off trail. Like bushwhacking, the internal terrain can be confusing, with dense vegetation, where you find yourself stuck in the trees, where even a good map is of no use to you. And sometimes there are objective hazards that you have very little control over—rock fall, big rivers, avalanches.
With experience, the terrain doesn't get any less complex -- there are still thick patches, and you are guaranteed to lose the clear ridgeline and bottom out landing in some thorny rosehip bush cursing like a sailor. But over time you can move more smoothly through that same messy terrain.
As I can see looking at the details of my life, the terrain hasn't gotten any less hazardous, but a practice like yoga provides an opportunity to lay down new clearer pathways. Now I don't know if any hard research has been done about this, but here's my third assumption: Yoga practice actually helps lay down new neuronal pathways—where our minds (not just our bodies) become stronger, more adaptive and better suited for life’s demands.
Because, lets face it: whether life is more like a bushwhack, a kickball game, or high stakes poker, they all have the potential to both exhilarate you or knock the mula right our of your bunda. It could go either way. But yoga helps me keep my eye on the ball, crawl out of the bushes, and deal.

A little bit about me...

Not to brag (and I’m not sure this is really something one would ever brag about in the first place) but if it’s out there and in English, I’ve probably tried it. And technically speaking I shouldn’t even limit it to English. I’ve tried a few things in Portuguese. What’s the ‘it’ you ask? That remedy, that discipline, that modality, that unexplainable thing it ain’t cool to admit you’ve done at the Ivy League mixer.  So it’s not pretty, but it’s true. I’ve logged some 15,000 hours ‘in search of,’ spanning thirty years and four continents. My search has included but is not limited to:  ways to become less neurotic, to become less of a romantic, to develop my emotional intelligence, get over childhood conditioning, get out of my own way, find my place in the world , be successful in love and relationship, become more evolved, and so on. Malcom Gladwell suggests something nearly alchemical happens right around the 15,000 hour mark – you become an expert of sorts. So I suppose in an unintentional way, I will declare myself one – in the ‘searching department’ that is.

Whether the drive was due to particularly odd/searching parents or my own sensitive nervous system and an anxious mind, I found myself at a young age with an emotional sensitivity that for a good long while felt more liability than asset. And I was trained early– for good and for bad – to look outside myself for something that might help me have a smoother relationship between me and me. At birth my parents assigned me a Christian Science practitioner, by age seven I asked Santa for my first mantra, by 12 I had begun taking weekend workshops on personal growth. By 27 I indoctrinated myself into the traditional halls of Yale. By 32 I was a Classical Acupuncturist. Freak show? Maybe so. Perhaps just an over-the-top-existential curiosity. 

The point: at my darkest hour, if somebody told me the sure fire way out of my predicament was to ditch my clothes and run naked around Balboa Island backwards under the full moon singing ‘God Save the Queen’ in Castilian Spanish, I’d have done it.

And I’m not joking.

Oh, and one last thing you should know about me: I hate, and I do mean hate, the spiritual expert. You know that person. They have a really regal air about them. And from the way they tell it, they know what’s what. Every time I hear somebody start speaking in that ‘wise’ voice and assert their authority about how they know EXACTLY what it is I need, that is the moment I stuff my fingers in my ears, and run screaming in the opposite direction. As in my experience, these puffed-up opinions don’t make for the best of advisors in tough times. So I want to assure you I am not this person.

            Instead I am the person who would rather like a dog splay open every one of my flaws like a belly to be inspected. The only authority I have is that I’ve tried a lot, stared down my dark places, and just want to save a fellow traveler a little (ok more than a little) time, effort and money.