Your only right is to the action, and never to its results. You may never act for the sake of the results; but neither may you ever become attracted to deciding not to act.-
Bhagavad Gita 11.47
It’s Tuesday morning in New York. It’s beautiful, the sun is shining, and I don’t have any “work” to do besides attending a Mixology Seminar, which is as close to Disneyland-without-lines for me as life gets. Thing is, I can barely move. I’m coming down from three days of intense yoga with master teacher Simon Park. I’m pretty new to Yoga, and my friends are still a little weirded out by how intense I’ve been about it. I was asked what it’s like to do three hours or more of yoga without stopping. I never really know how to answer that. The truth is that things just start to fade after a while. Poses blend into one another. Your shoulders burn, your legs burn, you sweat, you go through moments of caring and not caring. You try things, you succeed, you fail, you fail a little better. It’s a grind, repetition and basics, but it’s also an adventure. And sometimes, something breaks through. There’s an opening somewhere, a crack in the carefully laid foundation, and suddenly you can do something, or feel something you couldn’t before.
And at that moment, it’s like flying. It doesn’t last, and you can’t control when it happens. But that moment, that feeling, makes it all worth it. And then you come down. The pain sets in, the soreness. Particularly after a hard yoga session. I have a routine to offset it. Eat to bursting as soon as possible, lots of veggies and protein, take some whiskey for the pleasure and pain of it (all those civil war doctors were on to something), sleep 10 hours, and get ready for the next day. It helps, but intense yoga for three days takes its toll. I brought my yoga mat with me last night, and almost eked out a practice session, before collapsing into bed.
That’s it. No more yoga today. Today is about drinking.
Your most important job as a bartender is to think about how you can make a cocktail that the guest will think is great. Never forget this. This is fundamental if you want to master the way of the cocktail.” -
Kazuo Ueda, Cocktail Techniques
We’re late, but the staff at the W is effortlessly accommodating. It’s difficult to be self conscious at a gathering of Mixologists, because we have such a bizarre style, rockstar convention would be closer to the truth. White jackets and immaculate fingernails, tattoos and handlebar moustaches, skinny ties and dress shirts that fade into worn denim and chains. And yet, the prevailing attitude is one of serious politeness. Truth is, we’re not really rockstars, we have the look, but not the swagger.
Presiding over this merry band is Sir Gary Regan-or Gaz-dressed in a faded Indian kurta, of all things. Regan is the Willie Nelson of the cocktail world, he’s seen it all, his dad owned three pubs, he cut his teeth in New York, his “Joy of Mixology” is a key seminal work on the subject, and he travels around sharing his love for drinking, and making friends. He runs a free newsletter from ardent spirits. He swears like a pirate, and smiles like a saint. In response to the frequent praise, acknowledgements, and thank yous that flow in his direction, he smiles shyly and his hands form the anjali mudra.
Some of the best Mixologists in New York are gathered together, we straighten our spines, align the pranic flow of our chakras, and try to keep up as Regan leads us through a guided meditation.
“So. Hum”
He tells us.
“It means I am that.”
I tried to escape yoga today. As Gaz would say, not fucking likely.
Gary Regan on Mindfulness Bartending, three practices to immediately boost your effectiveness:
- Show up early- Regan started bartending in England at a very young age, but when he moved to New York and started bartending in his early 20s, he was extremely intimidated by the crowd, the caliber of the bar, and the drinks. One of the things he would do is show up early, and just be at the bar. He would polish the glassware, he would talk to the rest of the staff. What he didn’t realize at the time, but became clear to him later, was that he was actually meditating, preparing himself for the chaos and bustle of the day.
- Talk to someone invisible- In any social setting, there are the people we notice immediately. The attractive, powerful, talkative ones. Go to any bar in the world, and look at most people, they are constantly scanning the room for someone “worth” talking to. All the while, the busboy flits back and forth between the tables, invisible and unacknowledged. Talk to him. Ask him his name and how he is, where he goes to school.
- Ask “how you’re doing?” And actually mean it, with eye contact, and wait for a response- This last one was huge with me. The attitude of “How are you” being the same as “Hi” is so pervasive in our culture that when I was a runner, cyclists would pass me going the other way on the Schuylkill loop, and say “How are you?” It was insane, by the time I heard them, they were already gone. Most of us do this without even thinking, we gloss over communication with each other. Instead, ask someone, and really listen to what they have to say.
Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity.-
Buddha
The guy above is Dushan Zaric. Master bartender at the helm of Employees Only and Macao Trading Company. He’s also a yoga teacher. Yeah. He was presenting with Aisha Sharp of Contemporary Cocktails.
In line with Regan’s talk, Dushan and Aisha presented a program called The Mastery of Service. The gist of it was that as people, and as bartenders, we have to put up with a lot of shit. Unruly guests, impossible drink orders, know-it-all servers, guys hitting on the boss’ girlfriend, the list goes on and on. Or does it?
What followed was a cocktail of Eastern Thought, Neuro Linguisting Programming, Mindfulness Meditation, and Jungian principles about the nature of reality. The gist was not simply to react, but to observe yourself as you react. One of the tenets of NLP is that there are no unresourceful people, only unresourceful mental states, and that we all make what we feel is the best choice available to us at the time, according to our perceptions and interpretations of the world around us.
They also said something really interesting, that the best bartender has three sides, perfectly balanced:
- The Mixologist- This is the technical aspect of our profession. The walking drink encyclopedia. The whiskey repository, the citrus maven, and the shaking virtuoso. This is the easiest to develop, and the easiest to see. It is the “gross body,” the surface layer. Technical skill is incredibly important, but ultimately, every bartender knows that nobody goes out just to get a great drink at a restaurant. There is something they’re chasing, a feeling, or a dream that they have. The Mixologist, the technical layer, is an excuse for them to go there. A yoga class to get a tighter ass or better abs is the same, it’s our excuse, what we’re chasing is possibility, a feeling, a dream. And so from the Mixologist we move onto the more subtle aspect of…
- The Sage- The sage is the part of us that is always there, that knows the impermanence of things, that pierces the veil of reality, that is not fooled. The sage is the opening inside us that occurs when we relinquish judgement and start to see things around us as they really are. When people are open to you, when your jaw is relaxed, when your gaze is steady and soft, when insults and the inevitable stresses of work seem to pass through you like you’re a ghost, you are accessing the sage aspect of your personality. The sage is what allows you to be all things to all people, while still remaining yourself. It is detachment, it is permanence, it is peace. Sourced in this peace is the third aspect of…
- The Rockstar- Neil Strauss, pickup artist and writer of “The Game,” says that when you are engaged with a group of people, you must have a level of energy that is equal to or greater than theirs or they will slowly lose interest in you and the conversation. Because the bartender deals in dreams, because she engages people, she must be a rockstar. This is the aspect of your personality that embodies the possibility of the ultimate experience of the present moment. How hard can you laugh? How sexy can you be? How confident can you be? When the eyes of others are drawn to you, when the members of the opposite sex lick their lips and play with their hair, when you move fluidly from service to conversation to action, you are accessing the rockstar aspect of your personality.
If one of these is out of alignment with the others, it shows. Standoffish bartenders who endlessly stir mechanically perfect drinks without eye contact. Disconnected aloof guys who yawn like they’d rather be at home reading ascetic philosophy than out with their fellow human beings. Girls who push their breasts forward while smiling plastic smiles and improperly shaking martinis.
Balance. Balance is the key.
Aren’t you sick of these quotes already? Be honest.-
Me
It is an unfortunate fact that as soon as a universal truth is realized, it is the nature of the ego to re-read, dissect, analyze, and organize it. It is the nature of the ego to slowly and gently beat truth to death until all that’s left are the words. And then we take the words, and form heuristics, or mental shortcuts, because who wants to remember all the words, really? We can always google them again. The first half hour I was riveted. But after two hours of talking about enlightenment, spirituality, and equanimity behind the bar, my eyes started to glaze over. I started to source all of the literature we were reading: That’s from Tony Robbins, that’s Tao Te Ching, that’s classic NLP anchoring. I started to look around the room, I started to doodle, I started to feel smug. This stuff is cake, I know all this.
If only there was a way, in both Bartending and Yoga, to cut through what my friend and former Tony Robbins trainer Ralf calls “The Higher Ego.” Fortunately, there is:
The Practice.
On the table in front of me are a handful of nondescript glasses with a sheet of paper marked “Do not touch.” I figured it was some kind of locally sourced organic potato vodka tasting for the table, and quickly wrote it off. I was wrong.
They gave a command for the people on the aisle (shit, that’s me) to mix the ingredients together in the shaker provided, and to pour it out into a glass. A Negroni is a hard drink to mess up, especially with the ingredients pre-measured:
1 ¼ oz. Plymouth Gin
1 ¼ oz. Campari
1 ¼ oz. Sweet Vermouth
I reach down and try to pry a bar spoon from our complementary bar kit, only to be admonished by a Barsmarts rep who tells me just to slosh the ingredients around. This annoys me. I slosh the ingredients around anyway because I’m quietly terrified of looking stupid in front of my immensely qualified peers, a handful of which have volunteered to taste the finished product.
I hand mine over, and it passes inspection. I feel silly for being nervous. All the drinks taste the same, of course they would, we used the same ingredients.
The second command comes. In front of us, we have another set of identical pre-measured ingredients, and the same tools to mix them. But the instruction is different:
“Make the drink for the person you love the most in the world.”
Fortunately, my mom is right next to me. I don’t feel particularly loving, because we were fighting that morning about something, but I give it a go anyway. I take the ingredients, and maybe slosh an extra few times, maybe put a little extra care into it, but otherwise, I’m inclined to believe it’s bullshit.
We taste the drinks. I taste the difference right away, but pretend I don’t.
The drink is passed round the table. The second one tastes smoother, lighter, gentler. It shouldn’t be possible. It shouldn’t be true. But it is. Words are one thing, practice is another.
At the end of the exercise, Dushan tells us to have a way of accessing that state, that loving meditative state. He uses a marble that he keeps in his pocket. A tray of marbles is passed around. I take the striped orange one, in honor of the second chakra of creativity and sexuality, and my yoga studio, Dhyana Yoga.
I still have it. Congratulations Aisha, Dushan, and Gary. I’m a believer.
Cheers.
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