Where I am at in Life right now

Sometimes I forget that I am only 22 and wonder why I haven't figured life out yet! I've dabbled in so many different "ways of being" and each time I thought "this is it! This is what I've been searching for all along!" When I went to Santa Cruz I fell in love with the West, the laid-back-lifestyle, the people, the consant go-with-the-flowness. When I got involved in theater I fell in love with the perpetual pursuit of getting in touch with myself, with being in the moment and the "nothing held back" imperative that it demands. While dancing or doing gymnastics I fell in love with the therapeutic mental and physical effort that I was forced to expend. In school, I fell in love with learning and thought that knowing and intuiting things would uncover the truth about life. Then I fell in love with yoga and the meditative, spiritual stillness that it offered. So I've been in love with music, sports, theater, spirituality, learning, health/wellness, dancing.... lots of different things. Being good at most of these things helped me come to the "conclusion" that I had discovered what life was really all about and who "I" really was. And I think that "being in love" necessarily means that that one thing, that one way of being and knowing, specifically the thing or person that you are in love with, takes precedence and priority over everything else. When you are in love, everything else fades away into the background and your focus is on the thing you are in love with.

I've had a number...3 I'd say... of really spectacular relationships (although the other person might not agree haha).... the kind that realy help you grow, know yourself, experience different parts of yourself, question things, love life.... they all had their ups and downs and FELT really good at times. Sometimes they were SO good that they made me wonder if I could ever experience a love, a feeling like this ever again. BUT there was always something that seemed to be missing.

I think I've finally discovered what that is.


I think that one of the things I am really good at is emptying myself. I like being alone, silence, stillness, having a lot of wonderful friends, but not a lot of close ones, nothingness. This is ultaimtely what god wants. "Be still and know that I am god." If we are consumed by lots of "stuff" then we can't know God becuase we are too busy worrying about how we are goig to deal with all of our baggage (material and immaterial). I think this strength is a product of a lot of things... of Christianity, yoga, meditation, and, as of recently, of trying to find a way to deal with my parents divorce. I think that God works in mysterious ways and truly does not close a door without opening up a window.

In order to "fall in love" with a person, place, experience, with life in general, which is finite, I think you have to FIRST fall in love with God, who is infinite. The problem I had in each of these relationships, I think, was that I had emptied myself and allowed the other person to fill me up with whatever they brought to the table and I thought that it was God's will that I love another person so much that I accept them for who they were AND adopt their chosen lifestyle as my own. I was essentially using relationships to help me discover the truth in life.

Anyway, while "empying myself" (physically,m mentally spiritually) is a good practice and a great thing to master, it, like anything in life, can be used for good or for not-so-good purposes. The problem with this approach is that human beings are relative in respect to their perspectives, emotions, decisions, and "truthts" about life. Human beings are notorious meaning makers and we constantly look to the external world and the constantly shifting tides of cultural change as offerings to which we can respond and use to find truth in life. God offers something more constant, something lasting and fulfilling, a way of functioning that takes the external world into account, that uses the external world without allowing it to use us. Being godly means living in the world, not of the world, and this is going to be an important apporach to functioning in this crazy, chaotic, insane, relativistic world, especially now since it is changing more rapidly than ever before. We are going to need SOMETHING consistent, some guidelines for living that allow us to make sense of the chaos and God can ultimately offer us this.

Soooooooooo i'm graduating in about 2 weeks! Where the heck did those 4 years go? Anyway, I've (obviously) been thinking a lot about the future - the person i want to create for myself, the experiences i want to shape my life, the direction I want to move in, etc.etc. I think I'm headed in a good direction because the underlying question that is ultimately driving all of my decisions is "how is this going to bring my closer to God?" A non-religious person might ask "How is this going to bring me closer to enduring happiness or ultimate truth?" But ultimately, in my opinion, God IS enduring happiness and ultimate truth.

Human beings are ultimately concerned with finding lasting fulfillment. This is why we get married and go to college (among other things)... because we hope that these decisions will provide us with something that endures (a job, a family). God is constantly working through and with us in order achieve this goal, yet our misperceptions and ulterior intentions draw us away from our inherent role cocreators of this one action. God's goal is to work with us in order to help us experience peace, joy, love, happiness. This goal is achieved by living consciously in order to reduce the degree to which we are influenced by superficial perceptions. Yoga, meditation, and everything else that encompasses that "stillness" that allows us to truly know God are all things that are concerned with allowing intentionality to permeate our thoughts, actions, and reactions so that we can live consciously and move in a direction that drives us closer to our ultimate goal. By being actively present, aware, and receptive to the ways in which we respond to external stimuli we can understand ourselves better and then align ourselves in a more forward-moving direction. Consciousness precludes intentionality and allows us to choose a direction in which to move and discern right thinking from deluded thinking. “Evil spirits” often masquerade as "good spirits,” offering up finite sources of pleasure as surrogate sources of lasting fulfillment. Suffering ensues when we take our delusions to be correct discernment and then act according to our misguided perceptions. “The goal of yoga is to reduce the film of avidya in order to act correctly." Yoga seeks to resensitize ourselves to ourselves in order that we might develop a level of awareness that allows us to act intentionally towards the perfect love that God desires we discover.

I'm going to grad school in the fall at NYU, serving as Orthodox SAB rep for the NY/NJ region, and this summer..doing a play and training to run a marathon. Ultimately, all of these thing will help me grow in mind (grad school), body (marathon), and spirit (SAB rep), so that I can heighten/strengthen my experience of God in ever aspect of life on a multitude of different dimensions. I don't think that we can truly know God and experience him in our lives by simply reading the Bible - we have to know him by seeking to know ourselves on a multi-dimensional level (mind, body spirit).

The great thing about falling love with God is realizing that the reason why you've fallen in love with ANYTHING is because he has allowed you to. So being in love with theater, gymnastics, dance, health, a place, a person ultimately means being in love with God. And, where in the past I thought that all of these different things, these different lifestyles necessarilry contadicted each ohter, I understand now that they don't have to.

I've always maintained that I would drop everything -grad school, yoga, living in NYC if I fell in love. This is my ultimate goal in life - to fall in love. Now I know who I want to fall in love with FIRST. Then, maybe, but maybe not, this will allow me to fall in love with a person, with a living manifestation of God's one true love in another human being. Until then, I look forward to continuing to align myself with God.


Here are some questions that I've been pondering.. maybe someone else can offer a response to some of them...

1. I read somewhere that you know that you have fallen in love with God when your external actions/self matches/is in line with your inner actions/self and you experience an overwhelming sense of peace and joy... when there is no descrepancy between the two. So if you want to pursue a realtionship with someone should you ideally wait until you have achieved this goal or work at it with someone else in the confines of a relationship?

2. My constant struggle is one of "emptying myself" ...doing cleansing fasts or giving up facebook/the media..I move back and forth between fasting from the external world I guess and then using it for the purposes of self-creation.... I think that there is a fine line between being nothing and experiencing God in everything... We are nothing and we are everything at the same time..... Idk.

3. I really enjoy going on service trips.... i think that they are spiritually enriching and I would do them perpetually if I could, but I don't want to do them for the wrong reasons... is it too self-serving to want to go on a service trip in order to grow spiritually? should they be about service and not about me?