Free Refills

Still dealing with technical issues. This is a placeholder post. We'll be back on schedule tomorrow.

We're still dealing with some technical issues here at FRHQ. Today's equinox post will be delayed until tomorrow or Friday.

Yesterday, I described the locals' view here in Summit County about how the tourists drive, but today I need to speak just for--and of--myself.

I practice flow, I teach flow, I do my best to live in flow. Get me going, and I'll get all mystical, asserting that the energy we channel in flow is in fact the great universal energy of which we're all a part. I'll make grand pronouncements that that energy, in its purest form, is Love.

Put me in traffic, though, and that all goes out the window. In heavy traffic, you won't hear me say a word about that unicorns-rainbows-and-love shit. In heavy traffic, I want to kill.

I live in the mountains full time now, and we see a relentless influx of tourists coming here to ski. People who live here may bitch about them, but none of us actually hate the tourists. We all recognize that without them and the money they bring, there'd be no economy here at all.

We don't hate them. We recognize that we need them. But holy shit do we hate the white-knuckle way they drive.

The Free Refills IT department made excellent headway today, but we're still dealing with technical difficulties. Don't worry, though! We're getting everything sorted out.

Give a hand to the FR IT people. They're fantastically attractive people, and a lot of fun at parties.

Technical difficulties continue. But don't worry! The Free Refills tech team is working furiously to get them ironed out.

Because of computer issues, today's Refill will be delayed. It's going to be about the way flow oh-so-perfectly dictated my current living situation. You're going to love it. You can't wait to read it.

My student today struggled and struggled, far more than I expected of him, and then suddenly he had a breakthrough and found himself actually skiing for the first time ever.

That was pretty cool. But far more cool was when I heard him remark to himself, "I can see now why people love this."

My lesson yesterday was with a 14-year-old girl who'd gotten hurt skiing about three years ago and had unsurprisingly been experiencing deep fear on the mountain ever since. I taught her the centered breath, then brought her attention back to the breath again and again. Her fear lessened, and she said, "Skiing is fun again!"

My lesson today was with a 16-year-old girl who was struggling with some issues in her home life. I taught her the centered breath, brought her attention to the breath again and again, and, in her case, taught her the basics of self-protective energetics--how to expand herself via the breath so as to have more confidence and meet challenges more boldly. At first, she wasn't sure she could learn to ski, or that she even wanted to, but by the end of the lesson, she said she was having fun. And she had new tools to meet the challenges in her life.

To both of them, I said, "These practices can change your life."

And they can.

Upside-down, right-side-up, or somewhere in between: what made me return to a publishing practice?

Long-time readers of Free Refills will remember how much I fretted about the value of what I was doing here. I hit a point at which I felt there was nothing more I could learn from daily publishing, unless and until something changed in my approach.

So what changed? I mean, besides everything? What in all that change pointed to a return to publishing?

I have explored and learned and grown in ways that I wouldn't have previously imagined--and wouldn't have invited into my life, truth be told, had it not been for the utter necessity of it. So surely after all that, I said, I can find something, five times a week, to say about flow.