Found Quotations 

Last night I was thinking about what that phrase means.  I was talking with a friend who has a similar enthusiasm for studying, practicing, and teaching yoga, who also has a full-time job/career.  At some point in describing the number of hours I have spent studying with John Friend and other Anusara teachers, it came out of my mouth that I have been able to pursue this passionate engagement with yoga because, as others have said to me, “I don’t have a life.”  My friend, being in the same society after all, initially went right along with that statement as if it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

Then we started questioning it.  It is not as though we do not both have rich, full, engaged, active lives.  How did the vernacular come up with a phrase  that says we do not “have a life,” if we are not so occupied with the things that society would have us do (for the “modern” woman I think this means high-powered career, husband, children, nice house) that we have enough time and flexibility to deeply pursue and explore beyond what we are supposed to do?

A year or two before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released, I went to a panel discussion and film (alas, I cannot remember the title of the film) about global climate change.  One of the speakers was a Nepalese attorney who was working on a case in the World Court that sought to address the impact of various corporate practices on the Himalayan snow cap.

One of the things this man said continues to resonate with me:  “Why is it,” he asked, “that Americans are always turning on lights in the day time?  Do you ever think about how much energy we could save and dangerous, climate-changing emissions we could stop, if we just relied on day light during the day instead of adding unnecessary electric lights?”