Jenny Bloom About Page 2016
I believe who we are is a picture, always coming into more and more clarity. This is what I wrote about my self a couple of years ago, as a way of figuring myself out. It’s interesting to share it with you today. – Jenny of 2019
I live in New York City.
This is not a place where people slow down, and consider what is going on inside of us, with much regularity.
The morning commute can be like a war.
The evening commute can be like a clown car.
Between those two transits we are racing – full speed ahead –
We are raging – like warriors –
We are becoming like queens
Or we are shrinking like mice
Whatever we are doing, it is probably a reaction to what is happening in space around us.
But we don’t always notice this space.
Often it feels like there is no space at all.
This is why yoga is so important.
Yoga is space
Finding space within us,
Finding space around us
Being with ourselves in our own space.
That’s why I teach yoga and why I teach meditation, a key part of yoga.
Because it’s important for me to find myself.
Yoga has offered me the most powerful and effective tools to find myself,
To find my own inner wisdom,
To find my mentors and teachers,
and to love and accept myself,
all of me
the parts I think are fantastic,
and the parts I think are terrible
We can’t pick and choose everything about ourselves.
We can build new habits, and we can see our old habits.
What changes is half up to us, and half our karma.
—
My life story has involved being a student for a very long time.
Being a student of acting, ask me and I’ll tell you abut my life as a clown.
Being a student of philosophy, asking, is there even a point to all of this?
I was compelled to study this question, and to find an answer for this question.
At college, I studied all of the major thinkers of the Western metaphysical tradition.
Inquiry, dialogue, Existentialism, Post-Structuralist Theory, these were important paths of discovery for me.
I got my Bachelors degree with honors from SUNY Binghamton.
My honors thesis was an inquiry into the morality of human shields.
I asked the question – is there a morality where God is taken out of the picture?
My early life, ages 3-18 was a time of deep study of Jewish law, practice, custom, tradition
the Bible, the world of God, prayer, devotion, and so on …
When I turned 9 something started to change for me, and I started to become skeptical in a conscious way of religion, and the way that is was being imposed on us as children.
From there, I had a turning point, and became more and more distrustful of authority, religious observances, and of orthodoxy.
It didn’t make sense to me that I couldn’t lead the prayer, where the boys could,
what made them more skillful or qualified to lead the class, the group, the community?
I knew that something was way off about that,
And in the way I was being taught,
something didn’t work for me.
It continued to not work for me for another 9 years,
those were years where the pain of adolescence intensified more and more for me,
as a sought to escape,
where I sought a cognitive freedom,
a freedom from being told how to think, being told what I had to do, and being told who I was.
I knew deep down that something was rotten in the state of Denmark, and that the only way for me to get out of that tight restrictive funnel of my life was to keep moving full speed ahead to adulthood,
I could not wait,
its funny to me, that I looked so much older at 14 then I do now.
Once I turned 18 all I wanted was to be an actress.
When I acted and played with roles and personalities, I felt free
Free to escape the confining, self-denying reality I had matured in,
free to escape all voices of authority and control,
and free to escape the prison that had become my mind, filled with all of my wrongdoings, all of my just wrong-ness, my internalized self-hatered and disgust.
You see, though I resisted religion and its imposition on me as I grew,
Religion and all its forms resisted me with a violence and a cruelty that never made any sense to me.
Studying existentialist philosophy as an undergraduate, reading Nietzsche –
“ God is dead. And we killed him.”
My agency and autonomy were reclaimed.
I was finally permitted to fall back into myself, and become my own authority, to become my own God.
I spent the next 10 years vacillating between extreme self denial, and a totally overblown ego.
It takes honesty and vulnerability to admit that.
Both extremes lack a grounding in the realities of living, and both positions are reactive lack perspective.
Both self-states – come from thoughts, and from a spiraling action within self that happens hard and fast and has a life of its own.
Both are isolating.