During my first rolfing sessions, I ask my therapist if I can help her set up her table. She turns down the offer, which is relieving. My back hurts and I move with care and intention, trying not to fire off the twitch muscles. After my 6th session, I’ll learn how light it is when she leaves me the table and goes on retreat. Moving it around really is no trouble, as she insists.

My wife believes the back pain is from a mis-adjustment I received in yoga class. I agree and think that shooting down a 5′ wave that crashed on my back also contributed. It’s part of a collection of aggravations from the misadventures in snowboarding, biking, hiking, dancing, and even just exerting some. Sustaining bodily damage and persistent injuries puts me in constant recovery. My intention is to build up my strength, durability and resiliency for longevity. What happened in yoga class is ironic. Even as I seek out a healthy platform, I’m injured and slowed down.

happy in the city

My lower back bulges out. The vertebrae are sore to the touch. I behave like a timid swimmer, testing the water with a brush of a big toe across the surface before easing in. It concerns me, and my wife. For my last birthday, she gave me the rolfing 10-series. She offers this as help on my path of self-healing, so that I may live in comfort.

Let’s take the yoga intensive

We’re coming home from one of our walks, talking about the rolfing sessions. Why not use it to establish a health regimen? We both need it. Among our current options is an inneryoga intensive. We decide to sign up when we get home, where we learn that it started. That day.

Inclined to give up we call the studio instead. The class is on break. The person who answers asks Dina, the instructor, if we can join tomorrow. There’s plenty of room for us. After signing us up, he convinces us to come before the break ends.

Arriving late to class

The entrance is awkward. They’ve started. It’s a classic move for us. About as responsible and organized as a pub crawl, we lay out plans in advance which become difficult to follow. Yet we keep staggering on, barely able to keep ourselves together. We can be as tactful as a marauding party, occasionally making a scene. I’m afraid that’s happening during our entrance for a six-month long journey with these folks.

Invited in we find places to sit in the circle, and make ourselves comfortable. We go over the handouts for the class as it unfolds. We start with the inneryoga mandala and its balance of kindness, breath and awareness. The borders of it are the physical, emotional, and subtle bodies. In the center is the word ease and I’ve written underneath it the word flow.

We draw representations of our highest, and lowest, selves. We’re invited to accept the low-self without judgement, using the expression of the higher self to embrace its conditions and habits.

Developing our daily practice

We list out poses for our daily practice. I’ve chosen 36 breaths, main central, and sphinx pose to start.

Results of our gratitude practice

We write down what inspires us, and I have:

• hiking around and being outside
• reading, writing and learning
• trying something new and novel
• having intelligent conversation

I choose to go on short walks to look at the city, thinking about the view from a park near our home. Erica suggests that after we finish our poses, we write down a word or phrase of gratitude that comes to us in the moment. This rounds out the elements of a daily practice to support our higher selves.

Doing our homework

The handout states that we should contact Dina to make up absences, which I do. I hope to make up some for how we started out. She tells us to write down our emotional, physical, mental states and energy level each day for a couple of weeks. At the end of it, she’d like a little report of what we’ve noticed.

When I pay attention, little itches present themselves in my physical body. My emotional state is distracted and my mental state is not clear. My energy levels are usually low. Is it because I write these things down after our gratitude practice, right before bed?

Changes from yoga and rolfing

I’m starting to notice other subtle changes. My daily walks has me developing the ability to scan the whole landscape with my eyes. Instead of leaping from one object to another, I continually perceive everything as I look around. It’s like a rolling point of contact, only with my eyes.

I’m also incorporating lessons from my rolfer in to my days. She has me thinking about how the psoas controls my posture. My current exercise is to walk backwards and when I turn around, to incorporate those feelings in to my walk. It causes me to lift my toes, step on the heel, and push off the toes to propel myself forward.

Rolfing and yoga has me feeling mostly better. Yoga has aggravated an injury to my knee. I am being kind and patient with it and wear a brace for protection and support. Overall, the results have me feeling happy and calm. It’s improving my relationship with my wife, and work is more pleasant. Next weekend is the second one in our inneryoga intensive, and I’m ready for the next step in the journey to getting healthy.

• Over 26,ooo unique visitors
• 58% search traffic, 25% referral, 17% direct
• 80% visit once
• 26k unique visits, 45k page views
• 1 minute average on site, 82% bounce rate
• 206 subscribers on average, reach of 4
• Outliers: over 1,400 visits 6/09 and time on site over 9 minutes 11/09 and in June 2011 from 300 to 200 subscribers

Statistics for the last year

• 80% visit once
• 65% search traffic, 19% referral, 16% direct
• 9,400 unique visits, 14, 700 page views
• 1 minute average on site, 84% bounce rate
• 196 subscribers, reach of 6
• Outliers: over 100 page views on 1/11 and over 13 minutes on site on 12/22, reach of 53 on 12/24

Insights

Not much has changed on this site over the last year, from when I first started blogging. I think a few people who know me subscribe, and that’s about it. This successfully proves once again, how a poorly maintained blog gets little attention. So why do it? What do I want to get out of keeping a blog? I tried to explain that here.

Let me give you the answer I told my wife last when she asked. I blog for the same reason everybody else does. It’s the same reason you, me, and everyone else are on Facebook. To get laid. She probably won’t ask me again. Did you laugh as long and loud as she did? Then you might be someone who should consider subscribing to this blog.

If you’re someone who subscribes because of the Agile stuff it’s OK, I’m going to keep writing about it. If the rest of it is as interesting to you as the recent craze in kitting is to me, then you may want to subscribe to Agile fashion only. Just be prepared for a little more of my personality and humor in it. I’m no Agile Borat, but I might describe in a little more detail the people and situations that amuse me. I hope you find them amusing, too.

Or you may be the type of person, like almost the other 99% of us out there, that does not even know, nor care to understand, all about this Agile stuff. Perhaps you’re more amused by the likes of selfpoptart. While I will try to show a little creativity and humor, you’re really putting a lot of pressure on me to produce something unique. But you can see if I’m up to the task by subscribing to the other stuff worth mentioning.

Changes to the site

• Changed the name
• Created new categories
• Converted old categories to tags
• Updated Top Posts page
• Added tags to the top posts
• Now using cloud tag
• Added category-level feeds
• Adding media to excerpts
• Adding pictures to posts from New Zealand

Given the reasons I want to blog, I’ve made some changes. They’re summarized above. If I want the blog to be about more than work, I needed the name to reflect that. I also wanted to clean up the clutter of the categories, and put everything Agile under one category so that people could subscribe to that part. I also made a separate space for our adventures in New Zealand.  In an effort to pick up more search traffic, I started using the tag cloud. Old categories were converted to tags to help seed that cloud.

Some time ago in one of the upgrades it mangled some characters, so I’m going back through old posts and reformatting. While editing I’ve been reminiscing and throwing some pictures in there, too. In keeping with the blogs new name, I keep tinkering with things a little bit. I’ll probably keep messing with it until blogging is as popular as reading newspapers is now.

What do you think? Are you ready for my new attitude?

This all started for me last Thursday, when I awoke to the following status update posted by Cougar on Facebook. Thanks to whatever is the new algorithm for Highlighted Stories, it is at the top. I like to sort by recent first but due to a known issue I am confronted by Cougar’s posting his suicide note.

As I read through the comments, someone has located the guy and taken him to a nearby hospital. Unable to talk, he’s survived the ordeal. Cougar updates us later that the doctor is surprised that he did. But it’s as I read the last comment shown in that image to help get him a job that I start thinking, let’s raise some funds.

As I read on about people wishing the best and stating that they would contribute help and support, in any way that they could, I keep thinking that we should do a kickstarter type of thing for him. I look in to it, and it turns out they are only for projects.

So I do a quick search and find gofundme, a site backed by wepay that supports many different types of fundraising ideas. It’s integrated with other social media sites and I sign on through Facebook and create an account. The process is simple and in minutes from deciding to take action, I have posted it on a few of the social groups in which I’ve seen Cougar at events. Later on, I also post it to his wall. People are commenting there on what’s going on, and giving well-wishes.

This is pure chaos, and so I’ve decided to act first. Later on, people have asked me why I’ve done this. And at this time I question it myself. What I hope to accomplish is to help offset the medical expenses incurred in an intentional tragedy. Especially one inflicted in a circumstance of financial straits. I’ve seen this before. Actually, with this specific person. But with other people. too.

The most recent one was just a couple of weeks earlier. Someone in our family buried his best friend, who shot himself. The man had found an insurance policy years before which would still pay out in the event of such an event. The 5 suicides in Palo Alto come to mind. Another friend’s Dad went in to a suicide pact with his wife and daughter. They succeeded, he did not and spends his life in jail. I’ve had a cousin leave her family in a car left running in the garage.

There’s been some other close calls. A roommate from college. Another family member. The impact on people emotionally, and financially, is great. And I’ve heard of health, and other insurance companies, unwilling to pay out for such intentional events. How that must make the survivor feel, after such devastation.

While I can try and be there for people to work through the grief, that kind of help is so intangible and subjective, it can be tough to convince myself that anything but time could even start to make a difference. So giving financially seems to be a practical step, where the result is tangible, and progress can be checked. It is also a more productive channel for dealing with the nearly overwhelmingly out-of-control and helpless feelings I had when reading that post.

The outpouring of donations from of all us has helped me, and probably us, in trying to react appropriately to a situation we don’t understand. I hope it helps you too, Cougar my friend. While I had my own intention on how I’d hope the money could be spent, it’s not up to me. It is a gift to someone so clearly in need. It won’t solve the problem. Maybe it can help what seems to be a vicious cycle spinning out of control, fueled by financial problems which I feared this attempt could exacerbate.