Just as I by complete coincidence was making ghee, the mail carrier misdelivered my neighbor’s Time magazine.
The debates will no doubt continue. We hunger for simplistic rules that apply equally to all. So much easier than conscious and responsible moderation.
If you can tell me where I was standing when I took this picture (street corner–that’s a hint–is sufficient; latitude and longitude not needed), your next Tuesday night yoga class is free. Please email rather than comment so you don’t spoil the fun for others. If you posts the answer no one else gets to play and that would not be sharing the yoga love.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Thanks to the farmers who come in to town, I know the people who gather the eggs and milk the goats to make cheese. Thanks to my friend Jess, who left a tub of sourdough starter on my porch Friday morning, and my inspiration to make dough to rise overnight between dinner with neighbors and going to bed, I have homemade sourdough bread. With such a fairly wet and very active chef, it was pretty successful to do a sort of hybrid of the New York Times’ no knead bread, which I kneaded, but not for 10-15 minutes, and Martha Rose Shulman’s no-yeast sourdough country bread (in Great Breads).
The New York Times just published a blog entry on the perils of faking happiness. The first problem with the article was that I could not get to the study to see if I agreed that the actual premise was that “faking a smile” was what led to a deterioration in mood or feeling unduly pressured by a need to do so regardless of what was going on inside was the problem. The second is the definitional problem of what it means to “fake” a smile. I think it not unlikely that contorting the face into a fake smile (i.e., grimacing) because one feels one has to do so does not improve mood when one is in physical or emotional pain. According to the little cover blog, though, those that made an attempt to smile from the inside by thinking a positive though–even though it was a conscious effort– did experience an improvement in their mood.
Any good method actor will tell you that to make an outer expression believable, one has to cultivate inner thoughts to go with it (though that is still “acting”). Having been taught by my mother by age six in preparation for my first school play performance, that to act I should try to “be an apple” a la Stanislovski, I disagree that intentionally putting a smile on your face cannot help improve your mood. It’s all in how you fake it ’til you make it. I have long advocated to my yoga students, based on my personal experience with the practice of smiling whether I think I mean it or not, to try smiling on the outside improve mood. Even leaving aside the inner experience, just walk down the street with an open posture and a smile on your face and see how people respond, though I caution to do this at your peril in New York. When you smile at people and be polite, they generally respond in kind. You are then much more likely to feel good than if you are scowling and rude and people respond back in kind.
What on earth (or in heaven’s name) does faking a smile until you feel one have to do with satcitananda, you may find yourself asking yourself at this point. The second line of the Anusara invocation is “satcitananda murtaye.” Murtaye, from the same verbal root as murti or statue, here is usually translated as saying that Siva (from the first line) embodies the characteristics of satcitananda, being (what I like to call is-ness), absolute consciousness, and bliss.
Another way of looking at this phrase, though, is that when we open to the possibility of discovering our siva nature, which is the reason we practice yoga, and when we use the principles of alignment to help do so, then we discover how to be, if even for a moment, simply present, fully conscious, and blissful with the consciousness of the ultimacy of being. In a word, when we soften and look within, using the knowledge and experience of our teachers and our practices, a smile of recognition lights us up. If we start out having a bad day, feeling stressed or anxious or in pain, or just plain grumpy from reading the news, we just have to practice with more depth and sincerity to find the smile and not beat ourselves up if we are struggling to find the smile despite our desire and the intensity of our practice.
Is that faking a smile or being the smile? Does trying to smile when we are feeling blue really make us more unhappy? I think it is all in how we do it.
Yesterday’s inaugural concert spurred all sorts of memories from me. When I was a child, we went a number of times to the Clearwater Revival Festival and other folk festivals where Pete Seeger was a headline. He is just ten years older than my Dad, and though my parents were not among those who became famous, they were hanging around the Village and my Dad was doing activist things at the same time. James Taylor’s “Shower the People” was a favorite when I was in junior high school. There was a boy from camp who played the guitar who I remember saying that “a little James Taylor goes a long way [towards getting a girl’s attention].” Bruce Springsteen, John Cougar Mellenkamp, U2, Bob Marley, Aaron Copeland, and the great oldies (played at the concert and listed as Obama’s top ten ipod songs), are part of the music of my high school, college, and law school years.
Not needing music or advertising to help me decide to vote, I didn’t pay much attention to how music was being used in the campaign. But here was the music, and it was mostly my music, too. The concert was very clever, designed to appeal to black and white, young and old, and populist — they were careful to have the performers whose oevre might not appeal to an older or younger crowd stick to songs with mass appeal.
Interestingly, it gave me an insight to those conservative guys from the middle of the country who said they liked W because he was the kind of guy they could hang with and have a beer. The concert was a concert I might have attended when I was in high school or college or law school. I had an insight about what it feels like to feel comfortable with the education and background of the President, but only up to a point. I enjoyed this trip down memory lane, but it did not impact my politics or how I would view the Presidency. There is a fine line between relating and agreeing, appreciating and accepting without question.
