Nonstop Awesomeness!

So much to post about this week! I thought I’d start with this though.

Before my trip back to L.A. I discovered a blog by a former actor and current traveling healthy food lover, Nathan Agin. I got all excited and emailed him. Entertaining, travel, and food are a couple of my favourite things, so I thought if we crossed paths anywhere that we should meet. And it turned out we would be in L.A. at the same time, so guess what? We met up for dinner at a place in the valley called Hugo’s. I learned a bit more about his plans for a series based on good food around the world (or the U.S.) and he learned a bit more about my plans to…. well I can’t remember what my plans were at that point so I’ll just say go act in Bollywood. It was a great evening, and before parting ways he gave me an awesome bracelet. No, really, it has the word awesome on it. I mean his blog is Nonstop Awesomeness, so it’s an awesome bracelet.

We actually managed to meet up again the next week, this time late in the evening because of our oh-so-hectic schedules. 😛

It was two days before my stand up comedy showcase performance and I was still panicking about my set. Even with 6 weeks of class, I felt extremely unprepared and unfunny. So I showed up with a happy bottle of wine, and he made some avocado cacao pudding, and we sit down to hammer this thing out. Neither of us got actually hammered, though my set got some kinks worked out. Whew. Thank you, Nathan! I should have video of the final product soon, so I’ll share it in it’s very own blog post when I have it.

In the morning (yeah, I’m lazy, Glendale is far from Topanga) I joined in the morning routine of our lovely traveler and did some exercise and 30 minutes of meditation. My leg fell asleep. I’m pretty sure that’s the longest I’ve ever meditated. I’ve been meditating again lately, trying to get back into the habit, but I actually haven’t been timing. But I’d say I sit there for 5-10 minutes. For a while I was following the SRF (which I keep wanting to call SFR, but that’s a phone company in France) methods but fell off the wagon. I plan to hop back on. Anyway, meditation, then we had a lovely green smoothie. Yum yum. Not a bad way to start a morning. I need to figure out my own morning routine. So many things I’d like to do! I find it easy to create a routine when I’m living alone or not traveling, but I think it’s time to figure out a variety of routines based on my situation so I’m not thrown for a loop every time I change location or have another person around. Some things I’d like to incorporate:

• Reading the Bible
• Stretches
• Meditation
• Vocal warm-up

And I know the first thing I should do after everything is not go check my email, but do the most important thing of the day. Which right now I feel like would be to work on music. I really want to push forward in creating music. But it’s easy to procrastinate and make excuses for, because it doesn’t come easy. 

I think having a quiet morning routine is important though. So many of us just roll out of bed and start moving through our day without any time to reflect. So much that we “have” to get done, we have to get started right away! And so we’re busy busy busy, but neglecting our well-being. I’m excited to be meditating again. I think it’s already helping me out. I’ll explain a bit in my post on my comedy show.

What I’ve been learning is that mindful meditation helps to balance out the activity between your left brain and your right brain and helps control knee-jerk fear-based reactions. At least that’s what the author says in the latest book on my Kindle (Rewire Your Brain For Love).  She lists 7 skills that can develop from practicing mindful meditation:

1. Management of your body’s reactions
2. Regulation of your response to fear
3. Emotional resilience
4. Response flexibility
5. Insight (self-knowing)
6. Empathy and attunement – within yourself and with others
7. Perspective shift from “me” to “we”

These are pretty important skills to have, and not all of us have them! I recognize so many fear-based reactions in myself, it’s ridiculous. And they’re hard to control or rationalize away! But with meditation, you’re letting your brain do the rewiring. Because sometimes your brain just isn’t going to listen to your logic. Have you ever noticed that, in your years of therapy? Or is it just me? 🙂 

Anyway, I learned something new about United’s stop-over policies (you can have a stop-over of up to a year?!) from Nathan before heading out, and started thinking again about what kind of rewards card I should get to make traveling more affordable.

And today I need to work on a video for my Indiegogo.com campaign. Gotta start the fund-raising for my next short film!

If you want to check out Nathan’s website, it’s www.nonstopawesomeness.me . I’m sure you’ll find some awesome things there (ack and now every time I use the word ‘awesome’ I think of a conversation I heard about the over- and mis-use of that word. lol) about staying healthy while traveling! And more. 🙂