Nothing gives me the ‘not enough’s’ quite like Facebook, so I tend to avoid posting pictures of the embarrassment of riches that my life holds when it comes to love, travel and rich sensory experiences. But every day, again and again, my only prayer is ‘Thank You.’

How to bring abundance into your life and how to get out of a ‘more more more’ frame of mind?

As a life coach and on a personal level, I find gratitude lists to be one of the quickest and most effective ways to shift my perspective and keep the goodness coming.

Here’s today’s quick list in five blurry snapshots:

1.

I am grateful for Cholula the Wonderdog and our morning power snuggle sessions on the couch.

2.

I am grateful for books – the inspiration and the worlds that they show me. Almost everything I have ever done started in some way from something I read in a book. And now I get to write them, too.

3.
I am grateful for my husband, Joseph, for all that he is and does to see me, love me and support me, impossible me, in pulling off the impossible things that I pull off.

4.
I am grateful for my consistent daily meditation practice, the people and books who taught me how and all of the meditators around the world who know the most elegant way to be in this world is to breathe your way through it.

5.
I am grateful for my work. Every day, I get to fulfill my mission in life, which is to learn, grow and inspire people to live their lives fully and bring beauty into this world. As a writer, not only do I get to lead by example in doing what I love, but I also get the opportunity to share stories about places and people who are living their truths with great integrity. As a web person and search engine optimization and online marketing specialist, I get to help people grow their businesses, be seen and achieve abundance. As a life coach, I get to guide and support people toward living their best lives. As a sculptor, I get to bring beauty into the world, tap the power of creation, and share my vision with others in a very pure way. And as a professional viking, I get to be loud, obnoxious, and fully self-expressed.

If you’re down in the dumps or feel the ‘not enough’s’ creeping up on you, I challenge you to try writing a daily gratitude list – set down 5 things a day, for a week, that you are grateful for. See if you don’t find yourself in a genuine space of joyful gratitude and peace for your deeply abundant life. It’s the best proof that you live in a world that wants to support you I know. Then let me know how it goes!

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Love Kat

Here’s the math: For every pitch that generates a go ahead, I get 10 to 20 rejections. It takes me at least an hour or two to research a new publication, find out if they’ve done my story idea before, find the editor’s contact information, put together a targeted pitch in a voice that is both uniquely mine and hopefully, appealing to them. For every lovingly crafted pitch I send out in a hopeful little hot air balloon of an email, I actually hear back from about 20% of them. That’s a response rate of 1 out of 5 pitches. Sadly, 50 – 75% of those responses are a thanks but no thanks. Which kind of makes me feel hopeful but kind of makes me want to set myself on fire.

All of this rejection is enough to make a person feel bad about themselves! That’s why I started Whoosh! The Zine for Whale Lovers. So that I could have a place to put the stories about whales that I wanted to write. A place where I got to be the cover story, feature story, star interviewer and head photographer. Whoosh! The Zine for Whale Lovers is very healing for me, but today my application for a press pass got rejected by the American Cetacean Society for their annual conference because they have better, more influential, more real writers and photographers attending who will be covering the event as volunteers, so are not giving out press passes to media serfs like me. In the past five days, publications I have been rejected by or didn’t hear back from include: Outside Magazine, Outside Online, Western Living, Budget Travel, Sunset Magazine, and Family Fun.

All of this rejection is starting to make me cross.

Or maybe it’s just the fertility drugs talking.

Anyway. I decided to interview myself as a way to boost my spirits, since little makes me as cheerful as the opportunity to talk about myself. So, here is an interview with me by me about what it is like to be me:

Me: Hi Katherina. Thanks for agreeing to this interview today.

Me: No problem, Katherina. I’m actually busy procrastinating right now so the timing works out well.

Me: Oh? What are you procrastinating about today?

Me: Some story about birds in Eastern Oregon and a website that I’m having a hard time finalizing the content and design on. I’ve been avoiding meditating for two days now. Also, I have to go to the bathroom, but have been putting that off for a while, too.

Me: It sounds like you’ve got a lot of interesting stuff going on.

Me: Oh, you don’t know the half of it! I’m also working on two neat sculptures that are still in the secret stages, a story about walruses, a book about my year as a go go dancer in Greece and a zine about my body hair problems. And you ought to hear the pitches I’ve been sending out. So many great story ideas, all dressed up and nowhere to go!

Me: How did you get to be so fascinating?

Me: Oh stop. I blame my genes, actually. My mom told me I was supposed to be born with severe health and or mental problems. Instead, I just came out like me. Since I didn’t get born with severe developmental problems, every morning, I wake up relieved down to my bones every day that I am healthy and smart and not in pain and have an unavoidable compulsion to celebrate my good fortune by making and doing cool shit. Also, I am pretty sure that my angels or guides or saints or god or the universe or whatever you want to call it would be pretty disappointed when I am come to the end of it all again and we are having our post mortem review if I spent my whole life avoiding my bliss for the safe route.

Me: So what’s the walrus story about?

Me: It’s not ready yet. But here’s a picture I took of a walrus moments before it began abusing itself:

Me: How about those secret sculptures?

Me: Mum’s the word. Want to hear about my body hair problems?

Me: Not really.

Me: Oh. I guess you don’t want to hear about the fertility drugs either then, huh. My husband told me yesterday that they are making me an average of 15 – 20% more impatient and cranky than usual. And then I bit his head off and ate it! But later, upon further reflection, I realized, that’s a whole lot of cranky!

Me: Yeah. Thanks. No. How about you tell us about the go go dancing memoir? A lot of the meat in that story has already been published.

Me: Oh, that. Well, that’s going to be a book about the time I went to Crete, fresh out of college with a degree in Ancient Religion, and spent a year learning as much as I possibly could from this little village while working as an illegal immigrant in a variety of jobs. I had two jobs as a bar girl, where I had to dress up in tight sexy clothes and stand in the middle of the bar as bait so that men would come in and buy drinks. Most nights, it took 3 Amstels to get me onto the bar top and dancing.

Me: So you weren’t naked?

Me: Nope. I wore clothes the whole time.

Me: What was your favorite part about being a bar girl?

Me: Throwing empty champagne glasses onto the floor from the bar top. I’ve always loved breaking things and it was a real relief to live in a place where smashing your plate on the ground was a culturally acceptable alternative to an exclamation point at the end of a sentence.

Me: Yeah, I can see how you would like that.

Me: Okay. I’ve got to go now. The story is calling.

Me: Great. Thanks for your time. Maybe we can continue this interview another day.

Me: Maybe. Okay goodbye.

Forget weird. The word rubs me the wrong way in the first place. It’s overused and there are too many cities (which aren’t even that weird in the first place) contending for the title.

We push our weirdness via bumper sticker and call ourselves quirky. Maybe we are and maybe we aren’t, but a lot of the things that we call weird and quirky are much more accurately called creepy.  Zombies attacks? Shanghai Tunnels? Super creepy! Get out of Portland and into the woods, the dark, loamy forest that invites you to cooooome in and lie down in the moist cool mossy quiet. Totally creepy. Stop in at any gas station in an out of the way town. Chances are, they’ll be selling scary looking weapons that maybe shouldn’t be so easily accessible next to those energy pills and dusty snacks. Head over to eastern Oregon and learn about about cowboy country, the mining days, educate yourself via the many many strange dioramas on offer throughout the state. Want to sleep with a ghost? Take your pick of city, coast, mountains or prairies – the old hotels and historic houses in this state pride themselves on their population of active ghosts in a way that is more than a little creepy. Gaze into the eyes of a painstakingly assembled life sized mannequin doll representing the neglected wife of a dickhead ‘renaissance’ man who called himself the Poet of the Sierras but was more than anything, just an asshole who couldn’t get along. Notice her real fucking teeth. Goosebumps? Not the good kind? Right. Nuf said.

Here’s what I did.

I went to Google Images

https://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en&tab=ii

and clicked on the little camera icon

It invited me to search for things by image instead of word.

And so I uploaded a picture of my old orange 1969 F100 and got these results:

Well yes! My truck IS like a big brown horse and a train and a bulldozer. How clever is Google?!

So then I tried uploading some flamingos flying over a lagoon and got this:

Okay. I was hoping for a lagoon flying over a flamingo, but I love the butterfly swimmer analogy!

I wanted to see what it would do with a person, so uploaded a picture of my dad.

NEAT! I, too, think my dad is similar to red race cars, machines with red in them, and there’s that train theme again! He also likes water, sailboats, trains and machines. Good job, Google Images!

So then I uploaded the headshot I use for my author bios the most. It’s also the picture I used when I was trolling for a boyfriend on Craigslist and got Joseph. That clever clever Google KNEW that picture and matched it to five other times it has been on the web.

Fine. But below that, Google also found me similar to these people:

Mostly Asian men, a few Asian babies, a short haired professional type and a saucy girl doing the flattering bird’s eye view camera shot. I didn’t like that result. And so I went back to work.

http://www.cooklikeaviking.com

And here are the two photos I had the hardest time deciding between! (Judging criteria are funny, creative and most viking.)

My friend, Patrick Weishampel took the pictures. He’s a super good photographer, huh? Kevin Ward kept the flames leaping, Misty Post managed props, Joseph wrangled the dog. And then we ate a lot of really good meat and strawberries, chased down with buckets of wine.

These will be in the entryway to the exhibition, and are meant to depict the immense variety that exists between human bodies and how all of them are beautiful in their own way.

I cast 3 women and 3 men for this project with very different body types to achieve this end. The molds were made from plaster of paris and silicon rubber. The casts are made from Smooth On’s Shell Shock – a rigid, paintable polyurethane resin that is light weight and durable.

If you are reading this post, you probably are.

Stop it. You’re being creepy.

***

1.) Bird’s eye view aka the God View.

If you want to feel good about yourself, next time you’re in an elevator with mirrors on the ceiling, look up! See? Instant image boost!

This angle works extra well with suggestion of cleavage and casual or surprised facial expressions.

2.) Baby blocking. Use a baby (dogs work, too) to block out most of your body. Not only does this hide parts of yourself you may not feel so good about, it tells the world that you are too busy focusing on another being to worry about such superficial things as keeping your rack perky and bum tight.

Note: If you don’t have access to a baby or a dog, you can always use a glass of wine.

Or a cake.

3. Use framing to carefully accentuate your best features and draw attention away from those you feel less positive about.

3.) Contrast helps! Also, do purse your lips. It makes it look like you have cheek bones and reminds you to stick your chin out.

5.) Remember, lift that neck UP and OUT! No timid turtles around here!

6.) Focus on your best feature. Like your eye. Or maybe your ear.

4.) If all else fails, you can always steal a picture of a Hawaiian sunset from the web. By doing so you are telling your friends, screw you, I am too busy enjoying the beautiful sunset and looking outward to concern myself with petty things such as my many chins.

I hope this tutorial was helpful. Any additional tips and suggestions are welcome. Love Kat

My first yoga teacher was a woman named Patricia. She was probably in her mid-50s. She was a kind of dippy, fading blonde woman with big droopy blue eyes and a soft voice. She’d have us move our bodies into all kinds of interesting shapes and then while we were standing there holding it, she’d say something like, “Feel your skin,” or, “We’re all stardust, you know,” or, “Relax your tongue.”

Her yoga poses were far from perfect and in the plebian setting of the Y, trying to balance on one foot or touch my toes felt safe.

It took me about 3 weeks to be able to touch my toes and a little bit longer to be able to hold tree pose for as long as I wanted without falling over.

In the past 15 years, yoga as an industry has really taken off. It is no longer thought of as a kooky, new age-y practice outside of California and everyone I know thinks they ’should do some yoga.’

I decided to become a yoga teacher last year because I have found that it is an easy way to check in with the best, most true parts of who I am. I don’t know how or why this is so. Somehow, by paying attention to my inhalations and exhalations for about an hour while I move my body into this shape and that, I am a better person for the rest of the day. I wish more people had access to this simple, accessible magic.

Most of my yoga teachers have had lithe bodies and incredible flexibility and strength. I have a strong, healthy body, but I have never been lithe, or particularly flexible. I have cried over my weight and bulk when trying to twist my legs around each other during garudasana (eagle pose), to rest my 185 lbs on my head during tripod headstands, or to do poses that require a lot of floating. But then I look at old pictures of yogis in India, from before yoga was fashionable. Many old yogis were pot bellied Indian guys with short stringy arms and legs. And I think of Iyengar, the founder of the Iyengar method of yoga. He was born sickly and survived malaria, tuberculosis and typhoid together with malnutrition during his childhood. This is the man who brings us one of the main forms of yoga.

Yoga is for everybody, and I want to teach yoga to people who ‘don’t do yoga’, who ‘don’t have the right body for yoga’. To those who are afraid of yoga and afraid of going a yoga class, I want to be their Patricia, their gateway teacher.

Nothing lights me up more in life than helping people get access to their greatest, truest selves and learn to live from that place. Yoga is a great, dogma free tool to get into that space.

And so, I’ll be a freshly minted Yoga Alliance trained teacher with 200 hours of teacher training under my belt at the end of January. I’ve been practicing on my neighbors and will be ramping up the schedule in the coming year.

Namaste!

I plugged Google Ads into my Baby Elephant Takes a Bath video after National Geographic Wild and Web Soup picked it up for one of their shows and now I’m making, like, 50 cents a day on it.

If this kind of action keeps up, shooting that little video will have paid for my plane ticket to Thailand in just five years!