Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc)
Found Exhortation
Arjuna’s project?
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Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc)
On Being Anxious About The Election
As one who has long been intimate with anxiety, my best remedy is to take Krishna’s advice to Arjuna to heart and get up and do something.
If you don’t get the hoped for results, at least you tried. If there’s success, you’ll be a part of it. If you do nothing, all you have is your anxiety.
Second batch of postcards about to arrive. I don’t know if it will get out enough of the vote, but it feels like it helps create positive momentum.
May you be happy, healthy, and inspired.
And remember to pause for beauty.
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Yoga Is Skill In Action
I’m spending the weekend via Zoom with Michelle Johnson, for a “Skill in Action” retreat, where she is creating and holding the space for exploring how we individually and collectively can act to bring more communal justice, through anti-racist action, in our own lives, in the yoga community, and in society. She has been doing anti-racism work for 20 years, and has been practicing yoga and teaching since 2009. She published “Skill in Action,” in 2018. I read it several months ago. She said that she was flooded with orders the weekend after George Floyd was murdered.
What changed? Was it the confluence with the pandemic? Will we engage enough to make this an opportunity for lasting change or will those who are least impacted get weary or bored? What can would be allies do to help make it the former and not the latter?
I’m up late writing this after having spent a couple of hours dancing around and getting ready for tomorrow and contemplating and, of course, playing with Maitri.
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The Importance of Paying Attention and Acting as Needed in Response
We’re all fine, and the problem is definitely outside of the house, but this is the gas company’s immediate response to the phone call saying, “I smell gas.”
With your body and home, do you know what needs prompt intervention, what might go away on its own, and what can wait?
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Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Quaker
A Cookie and a Note
Last week, a co-worker stopped by my office to chat. Not surprisingly, the conversation turned to current affairs, and I voiced my every day growing anger and grief and disgust and commitment to seek more ways to have positive impact. My co-worker essentially responded that as a yoga teacher, she thought I ought to know that I shouldn’t get so upset, things weren’t so bad.
As should not be surprising to those who know me or practice yoga with me or read what I post on social media that I explained that my yoga calls for lucid and engaged citizenship and not escape from challenges and difficult emotions. My co-worker demurred, still wanting her own comfortable silence.
The fateful weekend passed. When I returned to the office this week, I found a note and a cookie on my desk. The note basically said, wow, Charlottesville, I hope you’re feeling ok, I thought you might like a cookie. Without addressing the substance of the note, (my own conflict aversion coming to the fore or perhaps my sense that in this case there was little point in pursuing the conversation further and my co-worker has been a pleasant colleague ), when emailing about another matter, I said merely thank you for the cookie.
I’d thought that would be the end of it, but my co-worker then stopped by to thank me for saying thanks for the cookie, I no longer restrained myself from passionately though tolerably politely articulating what I really thought, including what a privilege it is to be able to have a bakery cookie whether for hunger or comfort.
I can relate to wanting everything to be ok, and I’m really glad I have plenty of food and a comfortable home, but I also believe that with my privilege comes great responsibility, now even more than ever. I seek to be more aware not less. What about you?
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Found Quotations
When I was out at lunchtime to run an errand, I crossed paths with the neighbor (or visitor) wearing this shirt. I asked if I could photograph him. He seemed a bit taken aback, but posed for me when I said that I would only photograph the quote. After all, anyone who would walk around Capitol Hill with a Bayard Ruskin quote on his chest would likely want to motivate as many people as possible to think about that quote and act accordingly.
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Yoga is Skill in Action?
Somehow I managed
To get where I was going
Between deluges.