Colbert asks Broad "why write about yoga when he usually writes about infectious disease, nuclear jihad, the Challenger disaster? What? Slow news year?"
Colbert remarks and asks: "I see contortions looks like an exercise for people in coach on an airplane." "What is a yoga butt? Is that true?"What's good?
Broad answers: lifts mood, zips up your sex life, and great for health.
And then the interview takes off......
"Why didn't you name it 2 to 3 hour orgasm? Let's move some paper, sir!"
Yes, instead of moving paper and selling the book based on fear, just saying.
They also talk of Bikram and why physicians are not fans.
These are facts and subjects I wish had been highlighted about of his book.
A friend reminded me of another lovely poem about love Valentine's Day. (I posted an earlier one here)
i carry your heart by E.E. Cummings
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true
You can read the rest of it here at the Poetry Foundation (which is a terrific website by the way, which makes it very easy to find poems. )
That is Sharon Salzberg's base and she and others founded it today 36th years ago.
I am not absolutely sure about this but I think that's where one of my favorite political writers Robert Wright did a meditation retreat, which he hilariously wrote up for the New York Times in 2009 (it's really funny), and which I highlighted here. He recently landed a blog at The Atlantic. He hasn't written about meditation there. Yet.
The take on how to mindfully drink alcohol is worth the click over alone. Well, alright, I will highlight it here,
Rinzler gave me a crash-course in “right drinking” over a pot of Chrysanthemum tea. The first step is to know your intention: Is the drinking celebratory or to eliminate sorrow? Next, he says, taste the thing. You’ll drink better, he says, shirking the inferior sauce. As in silent meditation, he recommends observing your mind while consuming the beverage and labeling ideas or feelings that come up. And lastly, he advises knowing your limits, qualifying that he drinks less than he used to. “I try not to get to that point where I would say things that cause harm.”
Ethan Nichtern is mentioned in the piece and he is the founder of the Interdependence Project, which is also worth the click. I've never met Ethan, but I know his father David (whose Tuesday night Facebook Dharma Talks have been fantastic) and a dear friend of mine, Kim Stetz, teaches yoga there. And here is a podcast where Lodro and Ethan talk about Lodro's book. It's on my list to read now.
Carol Olmstead is the author of Feng Shui for Real Life. So if you can't afford to move the door to the entrance of your house, she offers some real life tips that you can implement.
If you are single, if you are divorced, if your love has gone stale - she has some doable suggestions for you. Check out her Feng Shui tips for Attracting Love.
My favorite is:
Add red accessories to your bedroom in shades of scarlet, crimson, and burgundy to activate the Fire Element and ignite your love life.
In honor of the upcoming holiday, I want to tell you about their Love Oil, which I used and love. Smells and feels just wonderful. Scent of cinnamon, clove and cardamon as well as rose, lavender and vanilla. You can use in the bath or as a massage oil. Her products have no preservatives so use it!
They were both written in India in Sanskrit about the same time and have the same word in the title. So genre, time, place, language are common to both texts, but as you would learn from listening to the recommended BBC interview on the Kāma Sutras - many other topics were written about in that time and place and language on a variety of subjects in sutras.
Sutra means thread or line that holds or threads ideas together. The Kāma Sutra's were written about 2000 years ago and is about sensual pleasures (among other lifestyle tips). Vatsyayana is thought to be the author. The Yoga Sutra is estimated to be written between 1900 and 2400 years ago and written or compiled from an oral tradition by Patanjali.
I briefly wrote about the Yoga Sutra a few months ago here. The Yoga Sutras offers four chapters, while the Kāma Sutras is seven chapters, so the Kāma Sutra is much longer. And sex comprises only the second of seven chapters. So there is much else there to explore and learn.
You might not think the Kama Sutra and “Downton Abbey,” the warmPBS soap operaabout intrigues on a large rural estate in England, would have a great deal of thematic overlap. You would be wrong. Both are to some degree investigations into the kind of life a gentleman (or gentlewoman) should aspire to lead.
And then this:
your partner might find this sleek new Penguin Classics edition an intellectual aphrodisiac, though it contains no erotic illustrations, except several sublime ones on its cover. (For a certain audience, all Penguin Classics are trance-inducing objects of lust.)
And then this:
There is an impressively esoteric list, for example, of varieties of moaning during sex. These include: “the whimper, the groan, the babble, the wail, the sigh, the shriek, the sob and words with meaning, such as ‘Mother!’ ‘Stop!’ ‘Let go!’ or ‘Enough!’ Cries like those of doves, cuckoos, green pigeons, parrots, bees, moorhens, geese, ducks and quails are important options for use in moaning.” America’s porn actors have clearly not made anywhere near a proper study of this sonic landscape.
See? Funny! I've had a tiger but not a green pigeon (?!) or a geese, quail or duck!
If you don't have time to read the book but are still curious about the origin and context of Kāma Sutra, I can very highly recommend this BBC4 Radio broadcast from the show In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. There I learned that the arts and culture of India was at a height. And how the Kama Sutra is part of a popular genre of the time. Not only the yoga and kāma sutras were recorded then but also on a wide range of topics including logic, astronomy, politics, aesthetics, medicine and social ethics.
The discussion about 42 minutes long, free and you can download from iTunes here. He interviews:
Julius Lipner, Professor of Hinduism and the Comparative Study of Religion at the University of Cambridge
Jessica Frazier, Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Kent and Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies
David Smith, Reader in South Asian Religions at the University of Lancaster.
Check it out. Or if you don't have 43 minutes, you can also download this eight minute free podcast from SoundsTrue on Taoist Sexual Secrets. At eight minutes, it's only a teaser but the entire series is about how to transform lovemaking into a spiritual practice informed by ancient and somewhat arcane material.
I finally saw The Descendants - a movie about families and love and forgiveness and death. I found the story thoughtful and real and funny. And religious - in the sense that it's about unity. As I note in my essay Is Yoga a Religion?, the term “religion” enjoys a similar etymology as yoga. Derived from the Latin word, “religare,” religion means “to bind back” or to reunify.
B.K.S. Iyengar notes the etymology: “The term yoga is derived from the Sanskrit root yuj meaning to bind, join, attach and yoke, to direct and concentrate one’s attention on, to use and apply.” Iyengar also conveys that in the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna defines yoga as, “a deliverance from contact with pain and sorrow.” Donna Farhi notes, “Yoga is a technology for removing the illusory veil that stands between us and the animating force of life.”
How to we bind back? Join? Attach? Through love and forgiveness. That practice can deliver us from pain and sorrow. It is a practice, none of us are perfect lover and forgivers. For me, that practice inherent on the yogic path and my spiritual practice. And those moments when death enters our lives crystalize the importance of this - how we love and forgive. And helpful to remember why we love and forgive.
Here is the trailer:
And then I saw this article, which is about love, really, and how we define meaning in our lives at the end and how and if God figures into it.
Kerry Egan, a hospice chaplain, and she wrote this thoughtful essay, My Faith: What People Talk about Before They Die for the CNN religion blog. I was interested too because a dear friend and fellow OM teacher trainee recently shared with me that she is exploring working
What do people who are sick and dying talk about with the chaplain? ...Mostly, they talk about their families: about their mothers and fathers, their sons and daughters. They talk about the love they felt, and the love they gave. Often they talk about love they did not receive, or the love they did not know how to offer, the love they withheld, or maybe felt for the ones they should have loved unconditionally.
They talk about how they learned what love is, and what it is not...people talk to the chaplain about their families because that is who we talk about God. that is how we talk about the meaning of our lives. That is how we talk about the big spiritual questions of human existence.
We don't live in our heads, in theology and theories. We live our lives in our families: the families we are born into, the families we create, the families we make through the people we choose as friends.
And concludes towards the end -
If God is love, and we believe that to be true, that we learn about God when we learn about Love. The first, and usually the last, classroom of love is the family. Sometimes that love is not only imperfect, it seems to be missing entirely.
Monstrous things can happen in families...Even in these cases, I am amazed at the strength of the human soul. People who did not know love in their families know that they should have been loved. They somehow know what was missing, and what they deserved as children and adults.
When love is imperfect, or a family destructive, something else can be learned: forgiveness. The spiritual work of being human is learning how to love and how to forgive.
I agree with that.
If you're looking for a book on forgiveness and Buddhism, check out Jack Kornfield's The Art of Forgiveness. If you're looking for a book on death and Buddhism, check out the Lotus in the Fire by Jim Bedard. I've read the latter.
UPDATE: Marianne Williamson tweeted on Thursday February 9: "Think of who you haven't forgiven, then close your eyes and see yourself washing their feet. Hold 2 minutes; you'll be 1,000 times lighter." Love that. We all have someone to forgive in our lives, sometimes ourselves.
Here's a great short article on how to head off a cold during this chilly season. How to Stop a Cold in it's Tracks. It also includes some Ayurvedic herb recommendations.
Do you feel like you are losing your new year resolve? Are you wondering about your "overriding purpose for being here?"
This article - Inspired Intention - by Kelly McGonigal is the best I have ever read that shows how yoga philosophy and ideas can inform our choices and our resolve. She teaches yoga, meditation and psychology at Stanford University and I've long appreciated her for her book Yoga for Pain Relief. She is making constructive contributions to the field of yoga and pain and the body/mind connection, and I very much hope one day to meet her.
She starts the article with a definition (a mind after my own heart!) ----
A sankalpa is a statement that does this for us. Stryker explains thatkalpa means vow, or “the rule to be followed above all other rules.”San, he says, refers to a connection with the highest truth. Sankalpa, then, is a vow and commitment we make to support our highest truth. “By definition, a sankalpa should honor the deeper meaning of our life. A sankalpa speaks to the larger arc of our lives, our dharma—our overriding purpose for being here.” The sankalpa becomes a statement you can call upon to remind you of your true nature and guide your choices.
She goes on to explain how sankalpa or resolve can take two forms - a goal/intention or a heartfelt desire. (that adjective is important). Then she describes how you uncover your heartfelt desire and goals, how best to state them, how to plant and nourish the seed and finally concludes with quoting Rod Stryker -
According to Rod Stryker, this apparent contradiction is the essence of both sankalpa practice and nondual teachings. “It all goes back to this idea that each of us is both being and becoming. There’s the part of us, para atman, that is transcendent, inherently one, and doesn’t need anything. We also have a jiva atman, that part of us that comes into life with a purpose and a destiny and is always becoming.” Stryker explains that to fulfill your dharma, you must find a way to integrate these two seemingly opposite aspects of being. “It’s vital for happiness that you walk both paths simultaneously. Direct your energy with intention, but be mindful that your nature is unchanged whether you achieve your goals or not. Live as contentedly as possible in between the goal and realizing the goal.”
The essay is long and full of content, but trust me, it's worth the click over. Or you can listen to or download an hour long public radio interview with her here on the subject.
This is awesome. Wah! discusses her creative process, how she took on the dark energy she felt during a concert and respected it by incorporating a blues scale, respecting how tough life can be.
And she then turned that into an offering of Ganesh, the remover of obstacles - and brought it up into a happier place. Singing the life force, prana into the body in order to honor and draw in Pranava, the holder of the life force (another word for Om, or God)
Her new album is out on February 7th. Enjoy this informative 5 minute video:
I love this guy - Leslie Kaminoff. Very knowledgable and funny. I met him in May at the Yoga Journal conference in New York City. I hope to study more with him. He runs The Breathing Project and also written a great book on Yoga Anatomy and teaching anatomy to yoga students through his Yoga Anatomy web site.
Here's a video - his "2 Cents About HowYoga Can Wreck Your Body."
Her main point is that at that moment - you really are in the present moment.
In pieces, in a pile on the floor, with no idea how to go forward, your expectations of the future are meaningless. Your stories about the past do not apply. You are in flux, you are changing, you are flowing in a new way, and this is an incredibly powerful opportunity to become new again: to choose how you want to put yourself back together.
Now that's spin a good lawyer could be proud of, but that characterization doesn't make it any less true. Mental gymnastics (or yoga twists) that help pry you off the floor and get you to get up and get up and get up again and keep you going - well, that better than still lying there, no?
This is a favorite Japanese proverb - "Fall seven times, stand up eight." At times, that is my mantra. To me, failure is only when we choose not to stand up or get up. Zen Habits is another favorite web site of mine and here's one on how to Flip Your Karma: 8 Trick to Turn the Bad into Awesome. Leo Babauta, the author of Zen Habits, quotes that proverb.
But if you're flipping out on your bedroom floor, think of Akhilandeshavari, suggests Julie Peter's. She is the "never not broken goddess" and she rides a crocodile (which represents fear). Akhilandeshavari doesn't reject fear and doesn't let fear control her - she rides on it and dips into the waves. I love that. It's takes courage to let the fear in never mind face it. Akhilandeshavari has no limitations. She is described as being like a fractured diamond and thereby she embodies a more diverse beauty.
We are made more beautiful by our brokenness that lets the cracks of light in.
I found her story (both Julie's and Akhilandeshavari's) both insightful and resonating. And next time I am on the floor of my bedroom broken I will think of her, riding a crocodile like a warrior princess. Thanks Julie, awesome piece.
Here's another one - Yoga Need Not Wreck Your Body written by Irin Carmom over at Salon.com. The subtitle made me laugh out loud - "An incendiary New York Times magazine excerpt doesn't tell the whole story" Incendiary indeed!
Here a taste, and she makes a very good point about teachers:
The biggest elisions were implied but never emphasized: the importance of good teaching and the wild divergence of practices under the umbrella of American yoga. Based on having practiced with (at least) dozens of different yoga teachers over the years around New York and occasionally globally, I’d argue those are the most important factors of all.
The worst teachers preen in the front of the room and pretend they’re alone. Slightly below them in my estimation are the ones who expect all bodies to be created the same. The ones who shouted at me to simply shove down my heels during downward dog in defiance of tight calves and hamstrings never got the chance to do so again. It took me longer to realize that the teachers who enthusiastically encouraged me to move deeper into existing flexibility – say, a deep lower-back arch theoretically ideal for upward facing dog, a hip turnout that made baddha kanasa effortless – were hurtling me toward injury. The ones who urged modifications to not exacerbate imbalances, or to change emphasis to strength over flexibility, were offering a more sensible path.
In other words, all bodies aren’t shaped the same way, nor do we use them uniformly, so why would we expect the same remedies and actions to work on all of them?
That’s one reason I’m deeply skeptical of practices like Bikram, which are the same sequence over and over again.
This is the best response to the William Broad article Yoga Can Wreck Your Body I've read - How the NYT Can Wreck Yoga by Rick Bartz.
Broad is a ‘senior science writer at The Times’, and though his article is heavy on anecdote and slim on science, I agree that the increasing occurrences of injuries in yoga should not be discounted or taken lightly. Still, the temptation to argue Broad’s article paragraph by paragraph is hard to resist: for example, yoga teacher Glenn Black’s repeated, incorrect use of the word ‘ego‘, or the need to go back to the 1970′s to find examples of strokes caused by yoga. The case of the college student who kneeled on his toes for hours ‘praying for world peace’, causing nerve damage, begs the questions: what was he more influenced by; yoga, or Christian penitence? And does one need to inflict suffering on oneself in order to bring about peace? The teachings of Yoga would claim just the opposite. There are a couple of obvious reasons why there are so many injuries in yoga (which we must acknowledge do on occasion occur, as they do in every physical activity). The nature of the injuries and the way that one responds to an injury also varies greatly. However, Broad did not address this issue, he addressed the most sensationalistic aspects of injury, and this is what I wish to respond to.
Read the whole response. Later he states his concern about "the lack of balance in a report of genuine importance—risk of injury while practicing yoga."
Me too. Maybe context and more balance will come from others over the next few weeks.
Sounds True is not only a great publisher but Tami Simon does these unbelievable great and meaty interviews with some of her authors and thinkers and writers.
The other week she interview Jon Kabat-Zinn, which you can listen to here or download from iTunes.
Here are some of my favorite passages....
I love this way of looking at "failure"
you can't imitate anybody else. You have to find your own way, and life being the teacher will show you every time you get caught, every time you get hung up, every time you get attached. All of the things that we most think might be failures are actually just lessons—just the way, I think, Thomas Edison said, after his thousandth try resulted in the light bulb, but [he had] 999 failures, he said, "Those weren't failures at all. I had 999 ways of knowing how not to make a light bulb." And so, in that sense, that again is a kind of generous way of looking at it.
Regarding brain research on the effects of meditation:
all this brain research that's coming out that's showing not only changes in the activity of the very important regions of the brain that have to do with learning, that have to do with memory, that have to do with executive function and decision-making and emotion regulation. [They're] not only finding changes in activation of various regions of the brain and the direction of what you might call great cognitive control or greater executive functioning and great emotional intelligence, but they are actually now seeing structural changes in many of these regions of both the neo-cortex and limbic system—the emotional domain of the brain. So in eight weeks, in MBSR, they're seeing thickening in various regions of the hippocampus and certain regions of the insula and the neocortex, and then the thinning of the amygdala. If these results turn out to be true, it is really demonstrating (and the irony is that it's through meditation research) that the human brain is really an organ of experience and it responds to experience by changing its own structure. And its structure is the most complex structure in the known universe, and consists of over a hundred billion neurons, and neurons are only half the population of the human brain. [Those] hundred billion neurons [have] so many connections that, for our purposes, the number of synaptic connections is infinite.
And another, regarding "affectionate attention":
Mindfulness is—you know, the way I define it operationally, is "the awareness that arises by paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally." And the "non-judgmentally" is the real kicker, because we have judgments and ideas and opinion about just about everything. But that's where the affectionate attending comes in. It's not some kind of cold clinical perspective [where] we're taking on things as you would if you were just thinking about things. It's actually experiencing a sense of being in relationship to everything that is being experienced because the reality is all relational. I mean, you can't touch without being touched, and by extension, all the senses are in some way relational. If you don't think that when you see that you're being seen by the world—well, you may not feel that way if you're living in New York City where everybody averts eye contact. But if you tried to spend the night in the rainforest in the Amazon, say, you'll have the feeling that you're being seen, not just that you're seeing. That you're being heard, that you're not just hearing. And you're being smelled and it's not just you smelling. And you could very well be being tasted, too, by small creatures, as well as potentially [be] lunch for big creatures.
