Taj (also known as Amy)
speaker
46 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Taj (also known as Amy)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Yes, it's so good to meet you guys.
My real name is Amy. Oh, okay. I have a very common last name. And about 10 years ago, I decided, you know, there's too many in the world. So I'm just going to pick a different name. Oh, I love this.
My brother and I both have done this.
Well, I live in Portland, Oregon, where everybody changes their name.
But my mom, who at the time was still living in New Jersey, she has passed since then, she freaked out because she was a therapist and the only person that she knew who had changed their name was a schizophrenic patient.
She thought that was a bad omen. She thought that her kids were going cuckoo over here. You know, the topic I would love to briefly touch on with you, Dax, is improv.
So I used to be painfully shy. And that comes out in the story because it happened just after college. And improv has really changed my life. And it's not that I was ever interested in being in front of the camera, but it's a mindfulness practice and also for helping you be a better human. So I just wondered if you had ever come across that approach to improv.
I actually came across that myself. When I was living in Flagstaff, my next door neighbor was a meditation teacher. I was a lapsed meditator. And you know that old Reese's commercial where two people bump into each other? One has peanut butter and one has chocolate.
So it was like, you got meditation in my improv. No, you got improv in my meditation. So during the pandemic, we started teaching mindful improv and meditation using improv games.
listening. Yeah. And you have to let go of your idea because let's say you start a scene with somebody and you think you're in a barn and they say, nurse, hand me the scalpel, something like that. And you have to just let go right away or else it's going to be like tug of war and just be present with what is and let go of ego.
And the less you try to be funny, I know you guys know if you're trying to put in the crazy things, it doesn't work.
They can be culty. I wouldn't call them cults. My experience was not with an improv cult. So this takes place in 94 when I was in my mid-20s. I was vulnerable to this because I had just gotten out of college a couple years before. I was just lost. I had been really successful in the structure of college. I was so shy. I just had no idea how the world worked.
So I was looking for something to latch on to. So one day I saw a sign at a bookstore saying they were having a meditation class. And I went and it was in this little room above the bookstore. And it turned out I was the only student. It was me and this teacher. We did the meditation for a bit. And then he turned into my therapist for that day. And that was very attractive.
Someone would listen to me. And he told me about his teacher who was going to be giving this free vegetarian dinner at a fancy restaurant in downtown Boston.
No, you run. He said his teacher was named Rama. To describe Rama a little bit, he's this tall guy with a jufro, as we say in my background, blondish hair, very kind of awkward, but also very, very confident. That pulls people in.
Well, his chosen name was Rama. And I think I can share the real name because it's all over the Internet. The story has come out about him. It was Dr. Frederick Lenz. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of him.
He had a Ph.D. in literature, and then he chose from then on to call himself Doctor, which is already a little shady. Sure.
He believed he was a reincarnation of St. Thomas More and Indian teachers and all kinds of people. It's never like I'm a reincarnation of a field worker. Right. I went and he gave a little talk. He was very into Carlos Castaneda and he wanted us to read those books.
I'd say a hundred.
The thing that grabbed me was that we meditated with him and he was sitting on a little stage in front of everyone and he asked us to keep our eyes open and look at him while we were meditating. When we started meditating with him, I started almost immediately seeing light coming out of him and his face started morphing into an old man and then a child and then a woman.
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