Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Long time, no update!  Here's what's been going on:

Finished my 200 hours yoga teach training close to five years ago.  Taught a couple of classes over the years, but it turns out I'm better at teaching meditation and pranayama than asana.

Hoping to start a 100 hour Mindful Yoga Therapy program in a few months, with the goal of adapting the MYT program for cardiac recovery.

Speaking of which, I am bizarrely seven years out of surgery.  How did that happen?  While discussing pathways of prana at a yoga workshop recently I asked how injuries and broken bones impact the flow of prana.  Everyone assumed I meant by sternum and various chest scarring; I honestly had briefly forgotten about all of that and was thinking of my repeatedly injured right foot (one break, one broken toe, two bad sprains, plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendonitis, and gout).  I seem to have passed the point where heart surgery is just a piece of my past rather than a defining point of my present.

On the gaming front, I've played a ton of Pathfinder and Fantasy Flight's Star Wars at the tabletop, and went through a great period of playing Far Cry 3 & 4, which may be the first time I've ever enjoyed playing a first person shooter.  Great stories, wrapped around mysticism and the wilderness, right up my alley. 

Along the theme of mysticism and the wilderness, I took a sharp reading turn into Occult Detectives, which got me into Simon Iff, John Taylor, Jules de Grandin, Doctor Taverner, and Doctor Owen Orient, among many others.  It's amazing how much yoga sneaks its way into these books, a good reminder that yoga has been finding it's way into western culture and imagination for centuries.

Finally, I'm moving on to a 300/500 yoga teacher training program in 2019.  

Curious Challenges of Captain Andoran

Captain Andoran.  Really.

Recently a friend gave me some grief that my Yogi Gamer blog is mostly about yoga, and not much about gaming.  He is correct, so let me offer the following- it’s fucking hard to practice yoga while playing Dungeons & Dragons.

When I say it’s hard to practice yoga, I don’t mean that it is hard to make a DC 15 acrobatics check to get into downward dog.  I mean that it is hard to practice raja yoga concepts like santosha and ahimsa in a game that is largely based on killing critters and taking their stuff, and where in many sessions your most noble motive is revenge.

A few weeks ago I was playing my “no character development, please, I’ll stick to two dimensions” character “Captain Andoran”, a paladin from a thinly disguised fantasy version of the early United States (and the subject of endless builds on the Pathfinder boards).  Our group of adventurers had come across a town being threatened by a band of hillbilly ogres, a band who had already taken over a close by ranger fort.  The few surviving rangers gave us information on the fort and a back way in.  To protect the town from raids by the ogres, we decided to scout the fort and see what we could do.

After sneaking in through a hidden entrance we encountered a guard who made a run for it.  Assuming he was going to warn the other ogres, I hurled my shield at him and… smashed his brains out.  It was that or we wouldn’t be able to protect the town, right?

Soon after that we encountered another group of ogres who promptly surrendered to us.  Were we to trust that they had seen the light and wouldn’t warn their marauding comrades?  Trust that we could tie up a pair of 12 foot tall ogres and they wouldn’t be able to break the ropes?  Or trust that shit happens when you kill rangers and ransack towns and sometimes that means getting killed right after you surrender?  Our party, with two paladins mind you, voted for the latter.

On we went through the fort, killing everything in our path.  At one point Captain Andoran ran heroically into a courtyard filled with ogres in an attempt to rescue a fellow adventurer who had been captured.  I arrived too late, and as his head was tossed to me the good Captain was surrounded.  In a fighting retreat I left nine dead ogres in my wake before we used a variety of magic and explosives on the remaining foes in the courtyard.

It turns out the Captain Andoran is not a pacifist.

Danger- geek math ahead!

I do think that it is possible to make a Dungeons & Dragons (well, Pathfinder, really) character who doesn’t leave trails of bodies in his or her wake.  I’ve had my head wrapped around the idea of a dual scimitar wielding Cavalier (Knight of the Blue Rose) 2 / Paladin of Sarenrae X with the Blade of Mercy trait.  Not only would this let you not take penalties to non-lethal attacks, but it would also give you +3 damage to all non-lethal attacks.  While dual wielding that extra damage would really stack up.  Crappy against zombies, but I would just have to stay out of Bissel (extra credit if you get that gamer inside joke).

Not sure who I’ll be playing next; probably a return to Gilbert, who I mentioned in my first post.  That is, if I can return to my original body and reverse the sex change.