Aspirations Around Town


For those students who live within a few blocks, have power, and are not needed for such emergency assistance that can be provided before the trains are running and the roads reopened, what better than to come out and practice yoga as usual? (Or if the storm has made it impossible to get out, it’s a great time for your home practice).
The yoga practices are such a healthy way to channel the energy from having been cooped up by the storm and to revive and enhance one’s flexibility, adaptability, balance, and strength. It has been my experience that steady practice invites us to be ever more capable to address what confronts and engages us on our path (whether we like it or not). Sending loving energy to all who have been challenged hard by Sandy’s path or otherwise.
The guy in the Apple store in Georgetown who showed me why I really wanted to walk out of the store with the IPad 2 had never heard the song “New Toy.” The year it came out, I was in London studying and being tragically hip; he was a year old give or take a few months. I suggested he find it on ITunes.
Three days of Ipad 2 ownership later, “New Toy” kept running through my head. Oh my god, and then I started hearing Nina Hagen infiltrating from the past. Was I really in New York when this song came out and kind of out of my mind? Yes I was. Does anything we experience ever completely fade away? Probably not, which is why the great yoga masters advise us to be careful what we bring into our consciousness, lest we establish new samskaras that draw us away from the light.
The other day, a friend who is starting to teach in the evenings asked me how I make the shift from stressful work day to being in a good space to teach.
Without hesitation, I said: “meditation.” I then qualified that by saying it is anything that gets you quickly and effectively connected, centered, and grounded. I don’t know anything that would be consistently effective than meditation.