I cannot believe I am doing this. I thought I would live in California forever. When I moved up to San Francisco from the Silicon Valley in 2009, I told myself that I’d never move back to the East Coast… but I am. And when I cut through all of the sadness of leaving my friends, I’m excited about it.

In September of last year, I started dating an amazing girl that lives in Northern Virginia by the name of Hillary. We met on Jam Cruise in January of 2011 and kept in touch throughout the year. In September, we both met up in New York City for a weekend of music and adventure, and I think we both knew that we were on the verge of something very exciting.

This past January, we decided that this East Coast-West Coast relationship was just too difficult and we needed to do something if we wanted to try to make this work… Enter New York City.

I’ve spent the last week in New York finalizing one of the most critical components of my upcoming relocation, the apartment. I’ve found an amazing 1++ bedroom in Park Slope, Brooklyn and just need to coordinate the physical move. Work has been incredibly flexible about the entire thing, especially considering that half of the team that I manage is based in the NY office.

I’ve done three long-distance moves in my life and this move is very different. This is the first time where I actually have a lot of feelings for the city I’m leaving and will be very sad to say Goodbye to the West Coast and the incredible people and city of San Francisco. Since re-starting my life in SF in 2009, I’ve met so many awesome people through work, kickball, the music scene, yoga and life. The transition is going to be tough, but I know I’m making the right decision. I love Hillary and I know this is right. It’s just the adaptation back to the east coast lifestyle is going to take a lot of getting used to.

So here I am.. on an airplane back to San Francisco for the very last time as a California resident.  My plan is to leave San Francisco after Memorial Day and drive out to New York. Fortunately, there’s enough going on the next few weeks to keep my mind off of the sadness of leaving California… but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.

I’ll definitely miss this place.. I’m just happy to know that I have someone as wonderful and loving as Hillary to be there on the other end to help make this whole thing worth it.

It’s funny the way things work out. After participating in a fun Twitter Meme started by a former co-worker celebrating 13 years at Boston.com, it got me thinking about my favorite events working at the company.

One thing that came up whilst on my trip down memory lane was the summer afternoon where a few folks from the Washington Post came to visit and meet with us and share best practices and discuss our CMS. It must’ve been sometime around 2002 or 2003. The meeting took place between our marketing and design departments and I was asked to come along to talk to this guy Mark about potential CMS projects. I was a marketing web developer at the time and our CMS was non-existent. I wasn’t even involved with the project, either, so it was a bit strange that I was the one that was invited to the meetings.

Mark and I ended up running into each other a year or two later at an online advertising conference known as AdMonsters. We kept in touch and would often reach out to ask about advertising implementation strategies or discuss some new ad product that launched on one of our two sites, to share some insight into how it was done behind the scenes.

Mark ends up leaving the Post to go out to California, eventually finding himself at Google and I end up leaving Boston.com shortly thereafter to move to New York. A year or so goes by, and Mark reaches out to me asking me if I’m interested in applying for a job at Google. I thought it was a totally ridiculous idea, but figured it was worth a shot.

After 6 months of stress and interviews, I end up getting the job and we move out to California. Five and a half years later, Mark and I are still with Google; we even worked on the same team at one point. So, thanks Mark! Who knew what a last-minute meeting with some folks Washington Post would end up having such a profound impact on my life.

One day, I hope that I’ll look back and smile when I think of how a yellow button with black lettering that read “Obscene Things!” also changed my life.

I started 2012 by writing a mission statement. I’ve memorized my mission statement and will say that 20 days into the month of January, I’ve been doing a pretty good job living up to it.

Despite only being 20 days into the new year, the year has already taken a very interesting turn.

I am very excited to see what this new year will bring.

I’ve spent the last hour preparing myself for this coming year, what I’ve been calling 20.12, by writing a personal mission statement to help guide my way on this next journey around the sun. So, as we say goodbye to 2011, I thought it’d be fitting to take a moment to reflect on the past year. Here are some of my highlights, in no particular order.

• I completed my 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Certification and teach a weekly yoga class at YouTube.
• I sailed the high seas with 2,000 of my closes friends on Jam Cruise.
• I held my newly-born nephew.
• I let go of the last remnants of things I’d been holding onto from my marriage.
• I spent a week in Black Rock City, NV for the 20th annual Burning Man Festival
• I traveled to Brazil, Argentina, New Orleans, Boston, Toronto, Chicago, Honduras, Mexico and New York.
• I met Hillary.
• I went to my second Jazz Fest in New Orleans. It was a touch classy.
• I have identified myself as a Pantheist.
• The High Rollers won the WAKA SF Kickball Championship.

Thank you for a wonderful year, 2011. I look forward to enjoying everything that 20.12 has to offer. Happy New Year, Ethernet!

I’ve bitched a lot about Facebook the past year, primarily because I disagree with the way that Facebook assumes that everything you do wants to be public information.

You’re opted by default into Facebook Places, allowing people to broadcast to anyone where you are.
Photos, people can tag you doing stupid things, all without your permission unless your carefull modify your settings.
Facebook started using your name and photo in ads, unless you opted out.
Facebook has been found to be publicly sharing user data with advertisers and other developers.

You post everything on Facebook. You tell it what you like. What you’re doing. Where you’re doing it and who with. This is your life. It is your timeline (I love the design, for the record).  Now, don’t you think you should be able to choose which information you share and with whom (including developers, partners, advertisers,etc.)

Let me explain why this gets me so worked up…

I work at Google. One of my responsibilities is to ensure that all of the advertisers running on our AdSense partner sites (the Google Display Network) are respecting your right to Internet privacy. The team I manage ensures that  our advertisers are not storing any data about you and that they fully declare how they use it by way of the advertiser’s privacy policy. We ensure that advertisers are not stealing your online identity, allowing them to thus target you without your express knowledge and agreement.

We review every ad that is served on our network to ensure that it is not dropping any tracking cookies from shady advertisers, ad networks or other online entities. For the select vendor tracking cookies we allow, we carefully screen them for data collection practices, malware protection and require that they each include a method in their privacy policy to allow you to opt out from being tracked.

Google collects behavioral data about which sites you visit, to put them into categories for advertisers to target. We tell you this information up front and allow you to delete or change what we know about you. Hmmm.. Google thinks I’m 35-44 years old. I’m kind of offended.

We tell you exactly what we know about you and how we use it.

Now let’s talk about Facebook. You tell Facebook everything. Facebook is your online identity. If an someone could take a snapshot of your life (your books, conversations, interests) and put it in one massive database, it’d be Facebook. All this information is then shared with advertisers, research companies its partners.  For example, the marketing research company Nielsen has a new product known as OCR, which will report back to advertisers which ads you’ve seen, on which pages of the internet, how you responded to the ad and compare that with your Facebook profile. You can’t choose what information is shared with Nielsen and what’s not. But that’s ok, right?

They’ve now allowing applications and partners to post directly to your stream and share everything you do, with or without your permission. I’m not sure how you feel about that, but I’d rather not tell everyone what movies I’m watching, reading, or listening to without me saying so. Do I want people to know that I a closet Real Housewives fan (I’m not)? Or that I’ve been listening to an unhealthy amount of Vitamin String Orchestra? I’d rather choose tell that to people, not assume that what I do in my private life is up for public consumption.

Spotify! I love it. Greatest app ever. I am a paying user for $9.99 a month. I get an email from them last week, with the subject line “Ron Bailer is listening to ____.” I open it up and it’s a promotional email from Spotify, who has a list of all my friends and is allowing the use of their names in promotional emails. I don’t want my name showing up in anyone else’s promotional email. Even if I love a product, I don’t want them to assume they can use my name in their advertisements. What is Ron hates Spotify?  I asked Spotify about this, and they told me:

The email you are referring too comes from Spotify Social and occurs when you link your Spotify account to Facebook. It will send out these emails occasionally to other users within your social network, so it is possible that from time to time your Facebook friends who have also linked their accounts to Spotify will receive similar emails with your information in.

There is no “opt in” or “opt out” option for this as it is part of the social experience. If you do not wish for information to be shared in this way you will need to disconnect your Facebook account from Spotify.

I like using Spotify and I want to share my playlists with other people. Why must I give up my right to privacy in order to get the convenience of sharing a song or a playlist with someone else. I know what you’re going to say.. this is Spotify’s problem (not Facebook’s). I disagree.

Google would never allow a partner or advertiser to do this to you, without your permission (or at least a way to opt out).

Advertisers on Facebook can target any demographic or profile term they want and hit you with a display ad. These ads can then drop cookies (and flash cookies) on you that can tag you as having specific qualities. You can’t opt out of it. You don’t even know it’s happening or when. The Facebook Privacy policy doesn’t offer any opt-outs for these sorts of things.

The information you share online is information about you. Think about it this way. If you have a secret or a personal story that you want to tell someone in real life. Who would you rather trust? The person that will keep your secret and allow you to say with whom they can and cannot share it? Or someone who thinks that “the age of privacy is over” and is willing to tell it to anyone that’s willing to listen?

Ever since I started The Diatribe, I’ve been getting all sorts of spam. Spam from comments. Spam requests to advertise. Spam requests to be my friend. All sorts of stuff, but my latest email … well, I don’t think I can even classify it as spam, because it seems legit. I figured I’d post the entire email on my blog as well as the link that she shared, because I think it’s hilarious.

If she really did stumble upon The Diatribe and read the last 25 or so posts, she probably saw they were all about yoga.. I have no idea why she thought this would be interesting to my readers, but that’s besides the point. Either way, here’s the email I received:

Dear Brandon,

My name is Candice and I promote content across the web. While searching for some resources, posts and pictures around cats and cat lovers, I came across your site and thought your readers would enjoy this cat infographic.

Many would consider cat paws to be nature’s masseuses, given the natural tendency of paw kneading. This infographic humorously illustrates some techniques you could teach your kitty cat to relieve some of those stress created knots.

The Guide to a Cat Massage [Infographic]

The link also provides the embed of the graphic, which ensures creative commons.

I hope your readers enjoy this graphic! If you have any questions regarding this infographic or any others, please feel free to contact me.

Thanks,
Candice P.

As part of the Teacher Training requirements, we need to attend four basic types of Hatha Yoga classes: Anusara, Ashtanga Vinyasa, Restorative and Iyenger. I had saved the “best” for last, as we’ve talked quite a bit about the Iyengar style throughout much of the training and I have been somewhat nervous to try it. I decided to take the class at Yoga Garden on Divis this evening and it was an experience.

The focus of Iyengar yoga is alignment. You spend a lot of time in each pose, focusing on each body part and where it is supposed to be and act during each pose. I enjoyed this part of the class, however, I had a very hard time connecting with my breath and found it very difficult to find a rhythm because of all of the constant interruptions. In order to focus on the alignment, you end up using a ton of props and various “accessories” during the class to get the alignment just right. At one point, I looked around the room and each of the 7 students in the room had: 5 blankets, two blocks, 2 straps, 1 sand bag and one pole. You heard me right, a pole.

There was a lot of discussion in the class, asking about how to do something or what should I do with some body part. This is fairly unusual, as conversation and discussion with the teacher during a vinyasa class are generally not recommended. Each student is supposed to have their attention focused inward, not involved in discussion with the teacher about specific poses. I don’t disagree with this aspect of yoga — I think students should be able to ask the teacher questions about specific poses, but it’s usually a more one-on-one thing as opposed to disruption to the larger class.

Speaking of discussions, I’ve never been in a yoga class before where we had a 5 minute discussion on a philosophical topic about yoga. Again, I enjoyed it, but it was not something I’m accustomed to. The teacher had asked us if it was possible to find “God” in Asana, or yoga poses. A few people spoke up. Considering my mind state lately, I jumped at the opportunity to share my thoughts. I said most definitely. By focusing your attention inward, you can find your inner Self, which in my opinion, is God. The teacher countered by asking if you couldn’t do the same thing riding a bicycle or playing guitar. I said “Yes, but you didn’t ask that. You asked if it could be found in Asana, which it can — much like riding a bicycle or playing guitar. The difference being, though, that when you are in Asana you are focusing inward and looking for that quiet space. When you are riding a bike, I hope your attention is on the road ahead of you.”  He didn’t appreciate my answer. I didn’t appreciate his.

Needless to say, it was an interesting discussion and not part any other yoga class I’ve been to in the past few years. I think the most interesting point in the class came when he instructed us to use our poles and sit on them (legs perpendicular) so that our sits bones are balanced on the pole in Dandasana (Staff Pose). Not only was this challenging, but very uncomfortable. I had to remind myself that this was the point of yoga, as I breathed through it.

I don’t feel I got that great of a workout tonight. I don’t very grounded or centered. I wasn’t able to connect to my breath. The interruptions were annoying. But, it was a different experience. I really enjoyed some of the poses, including uttanasana (standing forward fold) as we really focused on each muscle being stretched in the forward bend. It was probably the deepest standing forward bend I’ve experienced, for sure.

I’d go back to an Iyengar class. I was expecting something much more harsh and serious — but it was fun. Would I choose it over a hatha flow or vinyasa class? Probably not. But it was fun for a change.

It’s Sunday. Today was our last full day of Yoga Teacher Training class. Next week, we’ve got our final exam on Saturday followed by the graduation ceremony on Sunday. And that’s it. Six months. Over.

I’ve learned so much in the past six months… about yoga. About myself. About my fellow students. It’s been an amazing experience. I loved every minute of it — even in those times when I didn’t. Our class has grown so close that the saddest thing is to say goodbye to everyone. Many of them I’ll see in classes here and there — but some of them are leaving to go back home.

Just like any other experience, these things have to come to an end. Burning man. Jam Cruise. A vacation. It’s time to say goodbye. It’s time to enjoy our last moments together as a group and to move on to whatever comes next in our lives. For many of us, we plan to teach. For others, it was more of a learning and self-discovery experience. Either way, it’s been great to getting to know everyone and while I’m looking forward to having my weekends back. At the same time, there’s so much I’m going to miss. Friday nights at waiting outside Stanyan Studio waiting for class to start.  The great conversations and discussions we had in class. The fear and excitement of learning to teach. The immense sense of calm I feel on Sundays, after spending nearly all of my waking weekend hours in the Yoga Studio.

Whatever happens, there will be something just as amazing for each of every one of us coming just around the corner. I’m just so fortunate and grateful to have shared this incredible experience with all my wonderful classmates and teachers. Thank you.

What’s next for me? I do plan on teaching. I’m setting up a weekly evening class at work. I’m also looking at various opportunities to rent a studio in SF to teach an evening or weekend class for my friends and classmates. I’m also going to continue my education and hope to assist one of my favorite teachers here in San Francisco. On top of that, I’m considering starting my “graduate” program with a one-week intensive class in October… But I’m still tossed up about that. Like most “graduate” programs, I might want to teach for a while before I embark on that journey.

So that’s it. My notebook’s full. My books are read. My homework’s turned in. All I have left to do is study for the final exam.

With only a few weekends left of Yoga Teacher Training, we’re entering the final stretch. This past weekend’s classes were a wonderful after our weekend off. It actually all started on Friday night, when Darren led our advanced pranayama class focused on pranic breathing. Pranic breathing is very similar to other techniques known as Kriya Yoga, Holotropic Breathing or Rebirthing. Earlier the training, Darren had mentioned a night when we’d have a very long meditation — though I don’t think any of us quite knew what to expect.

Earlier in the week, Darren sent us a list of instructions which resembled a pre-surgery checklist.  We not supposed to eat or drink anything several hours before class. We were not supposed to consume any intoxicants 24 hours before and after the class and caffeine should be avoided. I couldn’t imagine what this was going to entail.

Once we were settled in class, each of us had a blanket to lie on, a bolster to use as a pillow and an eye pillow to help block out the light. Darren taught us the basics of the breathing technique which we were going to use, which was very straightforward — deep breaths through the mouth, sighing on the exhalation.

By continuously focusing on this breath throughout the meditation, regardless of what happens, was the only other instruction. We did this breathing for about 5 minutes and then were told to do a breath retention technique known as Kumbaka until the moment it became uncomfortable. Immediately after this first hold, I had noticed a tingling in my arms and legs. We continued in this fashion for 2 more holds, each time I felt more and more relaxed when I regained my breath.

And when I say more and more relaxed, I literally felt as though things were getting even darker and I had less and less actual sensation in my body. Everything just let go a little more each time. After the third hold, we were then focusing our inhalations and exhalations on people we cared about in our lives for several breaths followed by another hold. At this point, I started to become somewhat emotional as did many other people in the class. You could hear that some people were starting cry.

This continued into the next hold and when I regained my breath I slipped even deeper and my eyes started to tear up without any real reason that I was consciously aware of. I then started to have a shortness of breath, as if I was balling — though the tears wouldn’t quite come. I could hear other people in the room become much more emotional, some people sobbing very loudly. I am fairly certain I was making some sort of noise myself. Keeping with the long slow breath was getting quite challenging, though I had known this was my sole task.

We then continued through several dedications of our breath which only got myself and others even more worked up. Once we were done with the breathing exercise, Darren guided us into savasana — or corpose pose — to help us relax from this intense journey.

It was at this point that I had noticed that there was music playing in the background. What was strange, though, was that I could hear a hissing in the background of the soundtrack. It was as if there was a blank cassette tape being played — just that quiet white hissing noise. The noise continued to get louder up to the point where it was actually louder than the music. I assumed this was part of the song, though I later learned I was the only one that heard this.

When we were guided back into consciousness, I remember sitting up with my eyes closed and practically falling over. We had been in this practice for about an hour, though it felt as though it was maybe 20-30 minutes at most. When we opened our eyes, I was in a state of shock — quite literally. I was confused and rattled. I looked at my friend Tiffany next to me, and I feel as though I gave her a “where am I?” type look — because she immediately gave me a very compassionate hug. Things didn’t make sense — though I wasn’t quite sure what I was trying to figure out. It was just this general haze. I had a hard time forming sentences.

I felt as though I had just been in a car accident or maybe woken up from surgery and was still under anesthesia. Several other people had experienced similar effects after waking up, and listening to everyone else’s experience was just as interesting yet completely different than mine. I had plans to go out that night — which were immediately canceled. I was trying to figure out if I was going to be able to drive home.

I felt out of sorts most the night and even the next morning was a little blurry. I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain it. But I know one thing for certain… There is something very powerful about the breath. You may be still be reading this and think this all mumbo jumbo. I would too. But having experienced this first hand, I now know for certain that pranayama, and even yoga as a whole, is incredibly powerful.

Several times during our teacher training, I’ve been either practicing or in the class and have suddenly “found” a pose. Now, I know I’ve just talked about how you’re not supposed to focus on the achievements or doing things right.. you’re not. But sometimes, you just happen to get adjusted in such a way or hear a description of alignment in such a way that you’re body suddenly realizes “oh, this is what it’s supposed to _feel_ like.”

For me, this weekend, I actually discovered two things. Yesterday, I felt low lunge for the first time. For me, I’ve always felt the strengthening in the front leg, but I’ve never felt the stretch in the back quad. At Kerri Kelly’s class yesterday, I discovered where my back leg should go to get that stretch. Let me point out, though, that I’m focused on how to get the pose to feel right in my body.. and not what it looks like. It felt amazing.

The second, was the hop between downward dog and forward fold/uttanasa in the sun salutations. In the rare instances when I have hopped forward, my legs clump to the floor. But I realized that it’s actually all core if you’re doing it right. How did I miss this?! I love jumping back/forward now. Another trick that I learned from Kerri this weekend, just based on the way that she queued some of the transitions. Loved it.

After practicing with her twice this past weekend, I’ve decided that I really admire her teaching style. She’s very core-focused and isn’t afraid to make people work through challenging sequences — but teaches with enough off-the-mat philosophy that it helps you breath through it. I definitely plan to observe one of her classes in the next few weeks.

Despite not being in teacher training this weekend — I spent a lot of time focused on own practice. But it makes a huge difference when you can practice on your own schedule.