"It's all fun and games until someone loses an ego."

Mark Morford: How to end it once and for all | Full Page:

"...Here is my dedicated and powerful yoga student. She is also going through a massive transition, a real dark night of the soul, questioning everything she thought she knew and exploding nearly all of it, as she lets her former identity slough away like rusted armor. It's a complete spiritual/career/perspective overhaul of who she is and what she wants to do in this life, which all sounds wonderful and healthy and positive, were it not for the headaches and the sleepless nights and the screaming.

As we say in the deeper yoga practice: it's all fun and games until someone loses an ego.

...something in her ego kept her nailed to the emotional floor, stuck like a pinned bug, her body endlessly sick and heart endlessly drained, always looking backwards, re-living stale memories, staring at photos of a life she built but never fully lived in.

You know that feeling? Or something very similar? Oh, I bet you do.

But recently, a shift. A wink of possibility, some forward momentum after far too many years of immobility, ill health and inertia. Someone swept into her life allowing for a fresh blast of why the hell not, of let's get this thing moving. I'm not exactly sure she quite sees it that way, but I sure do.

Here is the question: Is it possible? Are my friends ready? Or will their egos and stories, past patterns and melodramas trap them in an ever-recurring web of lies and bulls--t and suffering? Will yours? Will mine? On a day to day basis, is this not the only real question worth asking?

...Do we stay addicted to our patterns and our former selves, or do we harness the difficult opportunities when we see them, when the chance for change swims into view, knowing they won't wait around for long, knowing, deep down, that if we ignore them the energy will stagnate and congeal into fear and fat, misery and fundamentalist Republican Christianity, never to have hot sex again? There is one thing we know.

There is one thing shared across all traditions and religions, spiritualities and yoga paths, status quos and opportunities for change.

It is ritual. The marker. The sign of movement. You get baptized. You get the bat mitzvah. You perform the hardcore tribal thing with the face paint and the fire and the lions. You drop the hallucinogens and wander for 30 days in the jungle, communing with the specters of the gods. Hey, whatever works.

...Offer something to your gods. Tear up that old iPhoto library. Go on a cleanse. Wander oceanside, write yourself a mantra, repeat it 108 times, then tear it up and toss it to the waves, into the fire, into the compost pile. Swipe your hand across your heart, your crotch, your eyes, anywhere energy cords attach and suck the goddamn life force out of you. Purge. Cleanse. Burn. Ignite anew. What, too hippie? Too New Agey? I don't mind. Neither will your gods."