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Work is utterly insane these days. The design and production teams are slated for projects through the end of the year. Tightly scheduled, as in: if someone misses a deadline, everything falls like a line of dominoes. Fun! All of the design and production involves hordes of people and cross-functional teams. So it’s like a huge gamble with chaos on one side and the triumph of discipline on the other. Oh, and gods with lightning bolts up in the heavens, I suppose. Go team!

At the end of this, or maybe *almost* at the end of it (if all is going well), I am heading to Mysore. Either December or January. Or maybe some of both. We’ll see.

No Karanda Krashes this morning, which was kind of sad. As Grim notes, the falling on your butt thing is amusing. I’m not sure why — perhaps some special kind of grounding of the chi. Like a spanking from the universe. Primary was lovely and the happy, energetic kind of blissful that I especially enjoy. I only use the Shuffle and earbuds on Fridays, and at the end of my practice, I realized that in order to continue on in my exquisitely happy state, I had to go to the iTunes store and download a bunch of Beegees songs.

So, anyone else see the parallels here with traditional Ashtanga practice?

After an ugly morning of emails pouring in as I sat on con calls, helplessly watching the work pile up in my mailbox, I spent my lunch break at the eye specialist.

This all started at my annual eye check up. The doctor looked in my eyes with the bright light and asked if I’ve been experiencing any visual distortions. Negative. Still, he said he saw an abnormality in my retina and that I should book an appointment with a specialist.

So that’s where I went today. Nice office but no wireless or 4G reception. Great. Finally some time as I sat waiting for my appointment and I couldn’t even get at my emails, which were continuing to increase. Sigh.

A technician puts drops in my eyes to dilate them, and I sit there. Blurry.

Finally my eyes and the doctor are ready. She then takes a series of instruments with increasingly brighter lights and shines them directly into my eyes until I feel like she is burning a hole into the middle of my skull. Ow! I am light sensitive to begin with, so this was AWFUL. She was VERY thorough, combing my eyes over and over with the blowtorch light. I don’t complain about the dentist; I don’t complain about root canals. I am complaining about this. Seriously, it seemed like a good torture device.

She pushed her chair back after five leisurely minutes spent searing my eyes and my brain and everything that connects them. “I don’t see anything,” she announced.

Huh.

Well, that’s good news, though hard to feel really cheerful when I am blinded and teary and thinking about migraines.

I make my way through the check out process mostly by remembering where the desk is and estimating where the face of the attendant is when I smile and say “thank you.”

She says, “You had your eyes dilated. Would you like some dark glasses?”

“No, thanks,” I say breezily. “My glasses darken in the sunlight…” and then I step outside into a July Scottsdale sun and my brain screams, “…but not FAST enough! And not DARK enough!” I stumble to my car which has crazy dark tinted windows (which I usually rather hate), and yay, my eyes stop imploding.

A probably not entirely safe drive to work. And as I walk down the hall to my office, everything is lightness and blurry edges. “Like walking toward God,” I think. Yup, this is just how Hollywood would style an office building set in heaven.

45 emails and 4 hours of conference calls between 8 AM and noon. Not funny.

Everything converges. Starting here.

Then there’s this:

Now The Cop’s post-mountain-bike-accident, pre-osteopath’s-intervention pinkie:

And finally, picture #7.

“Don’t you want to see the others?” the photographer asked.

Today I had to get a headshot done for work. I’d managed to elude the head of PR for quite a while, but she finally showed up in my office on Friday. We use images of authors on white papers and reports and presentations — and she had arranged a visit for me with her photographer.

“There is nothing I hate more than having my picture taken,” I told her. She dismissed that with a wave of her hand.

So I drove to the studio and sat there under the lights, in my buttoned up jacket on a 108 degree day in the desert. The photographer’s studio is totally cool — an old barn that’s been renovated and is now a studio and gallery. He has a great selection of work dotting the walls, from abstract, architectural etchings to conceptual combos of words and photographs, to some straight up documentary-like photos of contemporary cowboys. Plus an exquisite set of 15 foot high wooden doors from an old church in Mexico.

As he was setting up, I jokingly commented that his camera was certainly a lot more complicated than my iPhone. He pulled out a new iPhone 4 and told me how impressed he is with the quality of the flash and the images. I mentioned the Hipstamatic app that I love so much.

I looked at the first handful of the dozens of shots he’d taken and settled on the seventh. I am not remotely interested in looking at myself more than that. The only parameter from the head of PR is that the photo has to look professional. Easy enough to do with a nice jacket, a little extra attention to makeup, and a lot of product and praying for my crazy hair.

I’m kind of surprised at my lack of …curiosity? …concern? What if there was a better picture in there, a better picture than number 7? Meh. Whatever. There are some vrttis I can do without.

Okay, so I have been going along practicing practicing practicing. Every day. La la la. Saturdays off.

Simple.

Except I have this weird thing in my back. It’s been around for months and it hurts in back bends. Some days not so bad (only hurts in UD when I walk my hands in close), and some days pretty annoying (hurts in every up dog and any other back bend in the entire practice).

Quadratus lumborum, I thought. Ice. Heat. Stretch. Epsom salt baths. Arnica oil. Wintergreen oil. Capsaicin lotion. Mind control. Hypnagogic suggestion. Visualization.

Nothing.

Went to a chiropractor. He diagnosed a tight psoas. Okay.

Adjustments. Ultrasound. Heat. Ice. More adjustments.

Nothing.

Decided it doesn’t freaking matter WHAT it is, it just needs to go away.

Practice. Stretching on the chair, the bed, the couch, the kitchen counter, the office. Tightened bandhas, loosened bandhas. Breathed deeper, breathed more lightly. More raw food, more grains, add some dairy, subtract dairy, ditch soy, add hemp, grow suspicious of nightshades, consider dropping — once and for all — my Tootsie Pop habit.

Damn! Still here.

Okay, so here I am sitting in the office. It’s Friday, so I have on jeans and clogs. Which means I can kick off the clogs and sit cross legged in my chair.

What do I feel? A pully-stretchy feeling in *exactly* that spot. “Oh, that feels good,” I think, and then it hits me: I do not sit cross legged in my chair all day every day any more because I now wear skirts and high heels every day. (Stupid high, by the way — because my shoe aesthetic is in direct conflict with my foot health.) Over the past 6 months, it’s been more and more skirts and higher and higher heels.

Duh!

I believe I will be shopping for some pants and flat shoes this weekend. I need to sit the right way for a week and see if it corrects this back krink.

***

The experiment will be thrown off by one variable that’ll get tossed into the mix as soon as it gets delivered to the house and The Cop can install it:

Rewards narrow our focus (and restrict possibilities).

I know it’s late over there, but any of you Londoners want to suggest a nice hotel in central London? We need a place that’s got a fancy/comfy enough lobby for us to meet with/entertain executives. Thoughts?

Leading Your Boss: The Subtle Art of Managing Up
Harvard Business IdeaCast

Dance with Chance
The Invisible Hand: Management, Economics and Strategy (Episode 85)

Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization

The Reflective Practitioner

I listen to podcasts while I clean the house on the weekend. And then I look up books related to the podcasts. Today has been pretty entertaining. I mean, what more can I ask for: Managing up! Change management! Two of my favorite things. I am still reading last week’s find: James Austin’s Chase, Chance, and Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty, which is about Chance! and Creativity! and Science! More favorite things.

Okay, so today’s podcasts. Managing up (or down, or across) can be pretty discouraging, right? I have a few burn-out bald spots on my aura ’cause of being a manager, it’s true. And effecting organizational change? Using real people? Haha! As if!

Okay, so I recognize that the job of management can be unforgiving, and I recognize that people pretty much scoff at the idea that adult humans can really change, but here’s the God’s honest truth: I always feel optimistic about these things. Why? Because we can use *creativity* in the workplace, and an organization is an enormous petri dish just waiting to house new experiments! The more things seem impossible, the more I think up new ideas. I can’t help myself. I get invited to LOTS of meetings/teams/projects — it’s something my boss tries to protect me from, but it’s also something I find incredibly energizing. I think it’s a result of (and, let’s face it) a source of tapas. Yes, I think it’s intimately linked with my practice.

Yeah, I know. We’re supposed to use the energy that results from tapas to pursue spiritual enlightenment. I can’t shake the conviction, though, that we’re supposed to dig into real life, like the zen practitioner who finally rides the ox he’s tamed into the marketplace. Apparently, my ox is pointed toward a business setting. I’m as surprised about this as anyone.