lazyyogi

[lazyyogi]

We don’t attach to people or to things; we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment.

Byron Katie

[lazyyogi]

What do you think about the "empty state"? Is it really possible to manifest anything in the void?

What we often call the empty state or emptiness is more clearly known as sunyata.

When Buddhists teach of emptiness, what is actually empty?

Firstly they mean empty of inherent self.

While in Hindu yogic philosophy ultimate reality is sometimes referred to as the Self, in Buddhist philosophy it is sometimes referred to as Emptiness or no-self. Both perspectives teach something useful and both are equally true.

The key distinction here is inherent. Although I can speak relationally of my own self and your own self as individual humans, those selves are temporary appearances. They are formed from transient phenomena that have come together at this specific point in time to give the appearance of an individual. But this individual has a beginning and an end, therefore there is no inherent aspect of that individuality. It does not exist outside of or independent of circumstances.

That is the Buddhist meaning of no-self and it is one particular meaning of Emptiness.

As an aside to close the loop here, in Hindu yogic philosophy, the Self is ultimate reality and it is One without a second. There does not exist two selves, just the one Self. That Self is known by all beings as the feeling "I exist." If you trace that feeling of existence to its source, you arrive at the Self as ultimate reality.

Secondly, there is another meaning of Emptiness which is nothingness--or better understood as No-Thingness. The more I talk about this aspect, the quicker it will seem abstract and strange. So lets just use a quick metaphor.

When you dream at night, you experience yourself in a body in a world. That body is not real but it is based on the physical body you experience throughout the day. The same goes for that dream world you experience.

Even though both that dream body and that dream world seem real with plenty of dream people and dream objects to encounter, in reality all of that is just consciousness taking on different shapes. That is no-thingness, when the distinction between subject and object collapses.

Again, all of this is a way to describe the nature of ultimate reality while also putting into perspective the relative reality we experience as this incarnate dream.

Lastly, you ask if it is possible to manifest anything in the void. My answer would be to look around you. It already has.

LY

[lazyyogi]

When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.

Unknown

[lazyyogi]

The most fundamental aggression to ourselves, the most fundamental harm we can do to ourselves, is to remain ignorant by not having the courage and the respect to look at ourselves honestly and gently.

Pema Chodron

[lazyyogi]

I have big crow energy. And it’s a problem.

Trinkets, shiny things, curios—it’s all treasure to me 🤩

Even just old clothes with certain significance.

And because I take good care of everything, it’s hard to let it go because there’s nothing wrong with it. But I need to purge my belongings.

So I decided to start a specific Moving Journal (needs a better name though).

Every time I discard or donate something that pulls at my heart strings, I write a little bit about it in the journal. This way I can still be custodian to some of its meaningfulness even as I let go of the object itself.

Two days until I move out!

And my new place? 28 stories up with floor to ceiling windows 🔥

[lazyyogi]

If you work any kind of desk job or spend a lot of time sitting (students), let me give you a piece of advice.

Learn how to stretch your hip flexors. Then do it daily.

You’ll thank me later.

[lazyyogi]

but actually 😅

thank you guys for playing blogs with me

[lazyyogi]

If you really want to know your mind, the body will always give you a truthful reflection, so look at the emotion, or rather feel it in your body. If there is an apparent conflict between them, the thought will be the lie, the emotion will be the truth. Not the ultimate truth of who you are, but the relative truth of your state of mind at that time.

Eckhart Tolle

[lazyyogi]

Gender as Terrestrial Gnosis

A ritual, a revelation, a return to the body.

If you want to finally and truly understand the meaning of gender, humor me by temporarily setting aside everything you currently believe, think, or feel about it. All of that will still be waiting for you later. Consider the rest of this post as an experiment. Take what resonates, ignore what doesn’t.

If you can’t or won’t do this—or if this is a particularly triggering topic you have no interest in touching today—please scroll past. You’re always welcome to return another time.

Are we good? Excellent. Read on.

Banishing

Let’s get one thing straight: Gender is an embodied phenomenon.

I don’t mean that in a strictly physical sense. Embodiment is more than just physicality—it is the domain of direct experience.

And so the most grounded and meaningful way to explore gender is experientially. Anything else is abstraction.

Let’s also clear up a few things:

We may use gendered terms metaphorically—describing a positively charged particle as masculine and a negatively charged one as feminine—but this is anthropomorphizing, and has nothing to do with the original meaning of gender.

We may also mythologize gender into goddess/god dichotomies, weaving vast networks of symbolism and correspondence. That has its place in many spiritual traditions—but it’s not our concern here.

What we’re addressing is gender in its most relevant and immanent form: the way we experience an aspect of ourselves in daily life.

Invocation

While sex is the biological trait of a reproductive organism, gender is one among many patterns by which Being expresses itself through the body.

Gender as identity or role comes later. That’s what happens when culture begins to interpret.

Before interpretation—prior to social experience—gender is there as a felt sense, an elemental, animal pulse that connects you to the primordial rhythms of life.

All of this is to say one thing:

When embodied, gender becomes nature itself. And nature isn’t one thing. Nature is all the things.

Conjuration

This brings us to the interactive portion of today’s lesson. You are going to feel your gender.

Delay the impulse to identify or label it. Instead, give yourself fully to the sensorium that opens through this technique.

Step 1: Perform a body scan using any method you prefer.

Step 2: Inhabit your pelvis. This includes everything from your hip crease to your navel: genitals, buttocks, anus, perineum. Feel through each part individually, then as one unified space: the whole pelvis.

Step 3: Find the energetic center of the pelvis. Most people first locate it near the surface of the skin, but it’s often felt deeper—close to the front of the spine, an inch or two beneath the navel. Feel it out. Don’t fixate on getting it “right.”

Step 4: Once you’ve found that center, relax from it. Feel your whole body as an extension of that point. Let the pelvic center become the core of a single, continuous wholeness.

Step 5: Inhale from the pelvic center. Let the breath be drawn from there. On the exhale, feel the vitality of that breath spread through your body. Repeat for several minutes.

Step 6: Feel into the quality of your gender within the pelvis. It may arise sexually, artistically, athletically, sensually, aesthetically… or in ways that resist naming. If you feel little or nothing, that’s okay too.

Step 7: Keep breathing and sensing. Now imagine an energetic center deep in the Earth’s core. Feel a thread-like stream of energy rising from that center, up through your pelvic floor, and into your pelvic center. Accept this without needing to explain it: You are here because Earth wants you here.

Step 8: Visualize yourself naked somewhere in nature— a sun-warmed beach, a stormy mountain, a grassy hill beneath the night sky. Choose a setting that brings a felt sense of intimacy with the wilderness. As you inhale, draw energy up from the Earth. As you exhale, let it move through your body and into the world around you.

Step 9: Now feel into your pelvis again. What sensations of gender arise when you are just this: a human animal, connected with the wildness of the planet? Be open. Be curious. When you're ready, release all visualizations and perform another body scan.

Integration

I hope you found something useful in the exercise. For some, it may have been an experience of gender as terrestrial gnosis.

Ultimately, I hope you intuited this for yourself:

Gender is nature. In its multiplicity. In its unpredictability. In its refusal to be pinned down. Gender is wild. It is earth, weather, tide, heat.

What matters most isn’t that others understand your gender. It’s that you do. Because only through direct experiential knowing can we feel truly at home in ourselves.

You don’t need permission to claim that. That throne of naturalness is yours by birthright.

License to Depart

You’d think, from the way people talk, that gender is a big part of who we are. And it may be—for some more than others. But ultimately, it is only one thread among many in the weave of being human.

And more importantly:

Gender is never who we are. To mistake it as such is no different than any other ego-fixation. And like any other ego-fixation, it only perpetuates confusion and suffering.

Gender is not identity. It is a weather system passing through a particular terrain of flesh.

Some of us are struck by lightning. Some grow forests in its rain. Some become wind.

The point is not to name the storm— but to feel what it’s like to be thundered into life.

And in the end, there’s enough space for all of us.

LY

[lazyyogi]

Many people choose to vacation and travel before starting their new job after they finish residency.

Me? I’ve been meditating two hours a day, exercising regularly, and doing soul retrieval pathworkings to process the past 5-10 years of trauma.

This is mandatory if I’m going to be a healer and not just a surgeon.

[lazyyogi]

Ground-Level Meditation Advice

A friend asked me for some meditation tips recently, and I figured I’d share what I told them here too—because honestly, most people don’t get useful advice when they’re first starting out. It’s either too vague or way too abstract.

So here’s a simple, real-world breakdown:

1. Application of attention is the foundation of every technique. No matter the form—breath awareness, mantra repetition, body scanning, focusing between your eyebrows—you’re paying attention to something. That’s it. That’s the whole root system of all meditation: deliberate attention. It's what differentiates meditation from relaxation exercises, “zoning out,” or other spiritual practices.

2. It’s focused and relaxed. The sweet spot is being concentrated but not tense. One metaphor I often use: imagine you’re a sniper waiting for your target. You don’t know if it’ll be five minutes or five hours before they appear. So you’re alert and watching, but also relaxed enough to sit with that uncertainty without burning out. That’s the presence cultivated during meditation.

3. Boredom is peace in disguise. A lot of people find meditation hard simply because it feels boring. But that boredom? It's just peace we don’t recognize yet—because we're used to always solving problems or being entertained. When we stop doing both, the mind gets fidgety. Our continual restlessness becomes more obvious. Learning to sit with that restlessness is part of the work. You will notice yourself feeling more at ease in your daily life in proportion to the degree that you release your restlessness by staying with it during meditation practice.

4. Consistency is everything. Like exercise, one day of meditation won’t change much. But a little bit every day does. Fifteen minutes daily will do way more than a three-hour session once a week. Meditation is a cumulative practice.

5. Make it part of your rhythm. The easiest way to stick with it is to link it to another part of your daily routine. I usually meditate at the end of the day after exercise and a shower. At other times in my life, morning practice worked better. Try different times and see what sticks—then build around that.

6. Keep it simple. Commit for a while. There are tons of techniques out there. The simpler ones are often the hardest, because your mind has less to chew on. Try a few and then pick one. Stick with it for at least a month. That’s long enough to know if it’s working. Apps like Headspace or Insight Timer can help if you're starting from zero. I never used them—I started before apps were a thing—but they might help you find your groove.

Meditation doesn’t need to be mystical or performative.

Just sit, watch, stay.

And if you can’t sit today, sit tomorrow.

No drama. Just return.

LY

[lazyyogi]

I’m sitting for a meditation.

If you were waiting for some kind of sign to do the same, this is it 😎

[lazyyogi]

There's a healthy alternative to being informed about current events.

Want to know what it is?

Being informed about local events.

Not “local” in the sense of town hall meetings or city politics--I mean truly local: the people you pass in the hallway, talk to in line, sit beside, or live with.

Everyone is quietly carrying something—goals, griefs, small victories. And in a world that feels more isolated and divided by the day, small human acts matter more than ever.

You don’t need to pry or play therapist. But offering encouragement, sharing a moment of real presence, or simply recognizing someone’s effort goes much further than another round of doomscrolling.

So if you’re fed up with the news—exhausted from reading about things you feel powerless to change—maybe try giving your attention to the people in your life instead.

This isn't to say you should bury your head in the sand or retreat into toxic positivity.

It’s about remembering that your energy is a resource. And you’re allowed to use it to cultivate care and connection right where you are.

If you want to help build a better world instead of just waiting for one—this is a great place to start.

[lazyyogi]

Congrats on your transition from residency to attending. For someone interested in a career change into medicine, can you tell me more about your journey? Any advice for prospectives?

Thanks so much! I majored in English with a concentration in creative writing, worked in the movie industry for a few years after college. Then from 2013 to 2015, I did a post-bac premed program. I did med school from 2016 to 2020, and then residency from 2020 to 2025.

Before all that, when I was still struggling as an unpaid intern in the movie industry, I was having lunch with an old family friend. I wanted advice. He felt strongly (for various reasons) that I should consider becoming a doctor. I said "that'll take a long time."

He looked me dead in the eye and said, "Oh I'm sorry--are you busy with something else right now?" 🤣

So just to get that part out of the way, YES it takes a long time. But that's only a bad thing if you are only focused on the end result. Otherwise, learning to work toward a goal that takes over a decade to manifest is an incredible learning experience for a number of reasons.

I regret nothing. Receiving a medical education and working in medicine has been a great decision for so many reasons.

After experiencing ghosting and rejection numerous times during my time job-seeking prior to medicine, it was immensely refreshing to find myself in a position in which I can just pick where I want to work. As a doctor, you really will never have a hard time finding a job for yourself, which was very important to me. I wanted to not only have that ease but also to have the option of just working in one place for the rest of my life, something very unusual these days. But I can also just as easily move to an entirely different place and work there too. So there's a lot of freedom in that.

Beyond all that, the education itself is incredible. The things you learn, the skills you cultivate, they are truly invaluable. You will be very helpful in countless situations from sporting events to zombie apocalypses. Furthermore, your education will also give you the knowledge base to pretty much understand anything so long as you put time into filling the relevant knowledge gaps.

Here's the other thing: your colleagues. They're actually really cool people.

When I made the decision to try to become a doctor, firstly I didn't know if I could actually do it. As someone who spent college avoiding all hard sciences, I just didn't know if I had the intellect and dedication to succeed academically. But I was willing to find out. There were a few close calls (calculus, physics, and orgo gave me a run for my money), however things generally went well otherwise.

Yet it wasn't until I got to medical school that I realized yes, I made the right decision. And that was because I found all my classmates to be genuinely cool and also incredibly brilliant. These were the kinds of people I wanted to be around.

It's said that a thousand mile journey begins with a single step, and that's true, but what I have found is that the entire journey is made of single steps, one after another. It's only when you look back and notice how far you've come that you realize how significant every little step is in its own right.

If you ever want to discuss making the transition to medicine more or have other questions, feel free to hit me up on messenger.

Best of luck!

LY

[lazyyogi]

With residency and the boards behind me, I have two and a half weeks before I move cities and start my new job.

That's the most free time I've had in 5 years.

As such, I am relentlessly and ruthlessly purging all my belongings--beginning with my closet. I've already donated two massive garbage bags filled with clothing and there will be more.

It feels really really good to be shedding things.

Typically I am very sentimental about my belongings and I take such good care of them that there's hardly ever reason to discard them due to damage or wear. I'm 37 and some of these items I've had since high school.

I may keep a few souvenir t shirts I know I'll never wear--like the one from the time I performed on Broadway or from the tall ship I crewed on from Boston to Newfoundland--but otherwise, as I said, I am being 🎶ruthless🎶

[lazyyogi]

Hey lately I’ve been trying to explore some somatic practices. It all started with working out more regularly and activating more muscles, which led to me exploring different parts of the my body & over time understanding which were stronger & which needed more work. It was as if as I kept working out more, more areas that needed work revealed itself ( but not in a negative way). Recently, I started focusing on my hips & the tension that has been there for a very long time. I’ve always wondered that it’s not just physical, but rather somatic. Further, I’ve been trying to meditate again, I am being regular with it but today, interestingly I felt some anxiety after a very long time. It’s peculiar coz it sort of coincides with my meditation. Honestly I don’t know if it is related but I feel I need to reach out to someone who can make sense of the whole thing for me holistically. I don’t think I am sick but I just need your thoughts on somatic practices and anything else that you can share as someone who practices meditation. Here is a link from YouTube, discussing some concept that I am curious of as well. Thanks & gratitude 🙏

https://youtu.be/x5PyElpPwUI?si=AhHSWtNH_2MUGJbN

Sorry 😅--I tried watching that video but it was 20 minutes of new age fluff without much direct wisdom.

Working out regularly, deepening internal contact with your body through somatic practices, and holding a daily meditation session is a truly phenomenal collection of path methods. Good on you!

It is totally normal, whether due to meditation or somatic techniques or even during massage, to have unpleasant and trauma-based imprints release. The release can sometimes be sudden and dramatic--like bursting into tears. Or it can be dull and vague, like an unexpected welling up of mild anxiety.

Just like you don't need to scrutinize each piece of trash when you take out the garbage, you don't need to over-analyze these things when they happen. So long as you continue your practices, they will continue to release. Imprints, holding patterns, tensions from this life, from childhood, or perhaps even past lives--who knows?

It is generally recommended to have a teacher, of course, as they can help you avoid getting stuck along the way.

I recommend you check out the book Trauma and the Unbound Body by Judith Blackstone, or any of her books that appeal to you. I think it'll be up your alley 😁

Much love!

LY

[lazyyogi]

i really really love and have a crush on this celeb. He is like a honey trap to me. What do I do? I see me in him and I am excited to see myself in someone else now I want to see him, feel him every single day. I wish he would just adopt me and control me. Its because I just want to be controlled by someone who gets me and sees me. His words just feel like he gets me, he knows me, perfectly understands me and my weakness and now it feels like I want to give my control reins to someone like him. Please help me understand why is it that we humans are so eager to give our control to somebody or something , be it a shiny star, or the paradise of a screen called phone or some group based delusion of an all seeing and knowing God or literally anything way too perfect and shiny and ideal that also knows us or is relatable enough to seem like it can understand us. Why do we get drawn to these people, why are we so attracted to these people to a point and extent that we want them to take over or possess us or control our lives.

Because humans intuitively seek happiness and freedom. How we go about finding happiness and freedom depends on our own forms of ignorance and confusion.

You say you see yourself in a celebrity. I would say that you see neither yourself nor the celebrity.

Do you really think that the image of this celebrity that is conveyed through whatever media you are using is an authentic representation of who they truly are? I can tell you this--whatever you see of a celebrity is what is deliberately shown to you. To think you have any kind of special or intimate knowledge of them as an authentic human is delusion.

Furthermore, that you are looking to complete strangers such as celebrities in order to know who you really are tells me that you yourself don't know.

The only understanding of yourself that is truly of any value is your own understanding--that cannot be taken from you. At the same time, it frees you from the burden of how others perceive you.

Who is the one that is seeking to surrender? Look in that direction and you will be much more likely to find true happiness and freedom.

A book I would highly recommend is The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And I would also recommend seeking out some therapy.

Much love,

LY