Who’s your perfect nemesis? Or conversely, whose perfect nemesis are you? It’s a question we might do well to ponder on both personal and an artistic levels – to understand ourselves as well as to understand what makes for great, relatable narrative. Our perfect nemeses aren’t necessarily the Big Bads in our lives – the…
doctor who
Turning off your Red Alert
How long have you been on red alert? You can call it “Fight or Flight” if you like, that physiological response to perceived threat that makes your heart pound. Or just “stressed out,” a state so common it hardly bears mentioning when someone asks you “how are you?” Whatever you call it, if you’re like…
Before & After Yoga
We’ve all seen the meme of the horse “before yoga” and the unicorn “after” – and appreciated the glorious, glittery truth of it, right? Here are a few fandom before & after’s – what would you add?!
Fandom Scenes for Meditation
It’s a crazy stressful reality out there – we need every tool at our disposal to deal with it, including yoga as well as breathing and meditation. Sometimes that includes going mentally to a sort of “happy place,” or maybe better put, a mental environment where we feel safe and calm. For those of us…
Cries that Compel; Tears that Transform (Camel Pose)
Emotions get a pretty bad rap, even amongst us non-Vulcans. Crying especially is looked at with some disdain. It’s like it’s not just your eye fluid leaking, but your inner untamed beast bleeding into civilized society. Those of us with our hearts on our sleeves often feel like a hot mess. We can’t hold it together, we…
Fandom’s best, bravest “Joie De Vivre”
“Joie de vivre” is such a funny, fascinating little phrase. The not-quite-so-fancy English translation is “joy of living.” But in any language, how strange it is to think of being joyful solely for living – not for lattes or tacos or sleeping late. How especially strange it is to be joyful when life can often…
Lunging from a Holmesian Fallacy to a Doctor’s Insight
It’s so rare one needs to disagree with Sherlock Holmes. Or Spock. And yet somehow I find myself doing both simultaneously. In the story “The Sign of the Four,” Holmes famously said “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” Later…
The Meditation Styles of Fandom – Which do you have?
Meditation is by no means exclusive to our reality. The heroes and villains of fandom know the value of a good meditation session for kinds of purposes… including plotting, deducing, and rejuvenating. And then there’s the Doctor… who is perhaps slightly *less* effective when it comes to NOT using his meditation time for well-digging and…
A Hero’s Journey Mega-Flow!
Our favorite heroes’ stories follow a common pattern – as do our lives, really! Joseph Conrad defined 12 steps in this pattern as the Hero’s Journey, outlining how every hero starts out in a dull, not-quite-right beginning, gradually gains allies and enemies and goes through ordeals, and finally emerges changed at the end. It rings…
