Drishti (Sanskrit) [from the verbal root "drish" - to see] Seeing, the faculty of sight; focus; intention; also to behold with the mind's eye, hence wisdom, intelligence. What inspires you? What makes you feel light? What gets your heart-rate beating creative ideas into your head?
Harness whatever that is, and don't let it fall back into the shadows. Ever. Again. If you do, you are hurting the world by suppressing yourself. I have spent most of my life existing in a cloud of insecure delusion. Hiding my truth, shrouding my authentic voice, masking my spirits natural predilections in the name of societal survival. I have done this in a way that has been crippling and psychologically debilitating, spiritually asphyxiating... stagnating, to say the least. Until now, that is. The 27th year of mine has been a punch in the face... the kind I needed to shatter that delusional veil into a million little lessons (not regrets, mind you). I spent years "coping" with my spirits struggle to express its nature by over-indulging in subtances that would silence it. And it worked well for a really long time. Almost a year ago I woke up in a room full negligence. My plants were dying, my cats had no water, my beautiful wood floors were covered in whiskey and a thick cloud of cigarette smoke lay above my bed like smog over New Delhi. On this particular morning the hangovers headache wasn't even enough to drown out the screaming voice of self-hatred and spiritual starvation. I was losing every bit of feeling I had. Numbed by a love affair with Jack Daniels, drugs and death metal...and I wondered... was it better to live a life of feeling nothing, or suffer with the pains of change for a little while? Flash forward to now. I've been sober since that morning. It has been anything but easy, but just thinking about the things I have gained in one year of clarity gives me chills. I have traveled for 7 months in three different coutries, completed a 200 hour yoga teacher training in India, started a photography business, began my intensive study of tea, lived with a family in a small Himalayan village, began developing and planning my own tea house and most importantly began the long journey to love myself. These are all things that I have only ever dreamed about doing... and it only took one year of right thinking to achieve them. And the most inspiring part? None of it was very difficult (aside from the self love, but that actually began to come naturally with all the rest). The most important part was honesty. Being open and honest to the world. When you are open to it all, opportunities find you... the world can see your intentions more easily. It wasn't all rainbows and flowers this past year, I assure you. My cat died unexpectedly which devestated me and left me without the only stability i've known in years, I've been suffering from chronic pain for a year now which has kept me from asana, I've begun coping with the death of my father and all of the other things I neglected to deal with in years of inebriation, and I got my heart broken.... but the clarity of honest thinking always picked me up and pointed my tear-blurred vision back to the road. I am becoming my higher self... and because of that I am bettering the world. Because I love myself, everything I put forward to another living being is more authentic. I am largely at the service of others. I am here to listen. I am here to show you something new. I am here to inspire you and let you see yourself inspire me. I am here to observe and create. To offer perspective and a mirror for you to find your own. My photography is a self portrait. It tells you what attracts me, it shows you where my impulses and passions lead me.... it expresses my philosophies of life... my ever changing opinions of the human condition... my dreams... my struggles. It tells stories I find worth telling. And I can only hope that it inspires you to do the same, somehow, in what ever way comes naturally. Because in the end... what is the point of living if it isnt to harness the uniqueness that is our individual and yet collective consciousness? And to embrace our uniquely human ability to create art, to dream, and to understand a spectrum of emotion? Welcome... its simple and colorful and i'm excited to have arrived on smoother roads. I like to think you will find something here too... or maybe just like one of the pictures.
