Journaling is therapeutic, whether we sit and write our thoughts on a blog or keep a notebook hidden away for no one to see. It's a way of processing our thoughts and emotions and allowing them to flow through us. When writing, we can use our non-dominant hand, let the words flow out in a stream of consciousness style, we can even make squiggles while we wait for thoughts to form themselves into words (which they may not do). In a way, our nightly dreams are our personal journals of our daily journey. While we rest our bodies, our minds stay very busy, exploding with chemical reactions and the electrical firing of countless neurons. We seek to understand the complexities of everyday life on many levels. It is in our nature to know our ourselves and our world.
I was sitting at the local AT and T franchise store awaiting my turn in line when an elderly lady came rushing into the store in a state of great frustration and breathlessness. "I hate this phone," she said, with a deep Southern accent, looking directly at me. "It's given me nothing but problems. I don't want all this high tech stuff, I just want a phone to be a phone, and I want it to work." I told her I understood. "You know Obama is not Black," she said to me, out of the blue. "People who voted for him just because he was Black, with the thought that he would end racism, were misguided," she said. I immediately retorted that I disagreed with her, and asked if she was of the idea that he wasn't a USA citizen. "Of course he's a citizen," she replied, "he was born in Hawaii. But his father was from Kenya, and was a Muslim, not a Black. His father was an Arab." She apparently had this fixed idea that all Muslims were Arabs, and Arabs were not Black. I explained to her that many peoples in Africa, who were Black, were Muslims, just as many white people were also Muslims. And so began a long discussion on a variety of topics ranging from cell phones to her childhood in Mississippi, her black nanny who wasn't allowed to eat at the table with the family to her own maid that helped raise her children. "It was all wrong," she said, "the way we treated them. But, it was all we knew." Sometimes what we learn to be right is very wrong. It's helps to ask ourselves: do our actions harms others? I had recently finishing reading The Help, a great book that I recommended she read. I understand a movie based on the book will be released in a few days.
In a recent dramatization of an Agatha Christie story set in a Middle Eastern country, a Englishwoman waiting to board a boat was traumatized when she suddenly found herself watching a local woman being stoned to death by a mob composed of community and family members, mostly male. "It is best to not interfere with local customs," Hercule told her. In other words, look away and ignore. I practice regularly with a young Iranian woman. She fussed at me for mentioning a movie I'd recently seen that was a docudrama about the stoning to death of a woman in Iran. It doesn't happen, she informed me, and they made that movie many years after the documented event. The next day there was news of a stoning in an Iranian village. Atrocities abound in our world.
Much of the world's cardamom comes from Guatemala. I like to grind the pods to flavor my coffee--it enhances the taste very nicely and has health benefits to boot. Yesterday when I lifted the top of the Rubbermaid box by the gate to retrieve a much awaited package of soaps, teas, and cardamom pods, a big red wasp glared back at me menacingly from his nest as he hung upside down and sideways from the bottom of the lid I held in my hand. I could tell he was ready to attack if necessary. Gingerly, I lowered the lid and warned my partner of the nest; like so many others, he's highly allergic to wasp and bee stings and can go into anaphylactic shock.
One morning I went to Devon's 7:30 a.m. Iyengar class at Clear Spring Studio, which I thoroughly enjoyed--I love hip and groin openers and hamstring stretching which we found in variations of supta padangustasana, which was also taught that same morning by Anne (subbing for Christina) and Clayton. Funny how often that happens. I love early morning. Anyway, before leaving the studio I reached into a wall mounted mail box of printed schedules and instantly felt an intense burning pain in my middle finger. I quickly pulled away and caught sight of a big red wasp staring back at me as she stood guard of her nest that hung from the metal lid. Deja vu but this time I realized the power such seemingly small insects can yield. In an airing of Life, narrated by Oprah, the world of insects (and mammals and reptiles) informs us that there are more insects on the planet than mammals, birds, reptiles and fish combined. They have evolved and adapted unique survival attributes. Pretty amazing stuff. They can quickly put us in our place. They can easily command respect. Scorpions suddenly appear walking across our tile floors at home, often attracting the attention of the cats, who seem to know instinctively to protect their tender noses. I stepped on a scorpion the other day and cannot recall ever having felt such intense pain from an insect. My tongue was numb the rest of the day. My partner had a scorpion on his pillow the other night and it stung him on his hand. Carpenter ants march in and out of the ac copper coil outside my bedroom, and the movement in the nest in the wall can be heard as I sit at my desk. Cicadas sing so loudly at night it's almost deafening. Long lines of ants form along the rafters as they take their share of sugar water from the hummingbird feeder.
I have truly been disappointed in myself at the way I have handled my reactions to events surrounding a current project, as well as my reactions to some of the people I've had to work with. Instead of being understanding and compassionate at the errors of others, I've been angry and judgmental. I find my mind caught up in the drama, making the drama, living the drama, lost to detachment and empathy. My emotional reactions beg to be processed and dealt with before I can move forward. I know in my heart that these are doors of opportunity knocking, and I can ignore them or walk through and learn about truth. My mind says, but I've had enough knocks for a while!
I chatted briefly with Mandy last summer about injuries, and how they help open us up to so many things, and how they can help us deepen within ourselves, deepen our practice. No wonder I keep injuring myself! Christina Sell wrote in her blog today:
"...staying close to our own goodness, radically affirming the presence of Grace no matter what is happening and living our authentic truth in a community of others who are doing the same."...
This really struck a chord with me as does so much of what she writes. It resonates loud and clear like a hammer hitting the sky, permeating the heavens and ringing like John Henry's hammer on cold steel. Is it going to be the death of me or will I rise up and be transformed, even in some minuscule way? Will I walk on in self-pity or genuine humbleness at the astonishing forces at work in our lives? Many of us have to both live and work outside the "community of others who are doing the same," and this can be quite a challenge. Along comes struggle and it feels like drowning, when in reality if we just breathe in the sweet, cool water, relax into the moment, we are offered the blessing of death to old ways and birth to new ways. It is in this that time and time again, I drown.
Gioconda writes:
"In daily life we see people who are happier than we are, people who are less happy. Some might be doing praiseworthy things and others causing problems. Whatever may be our usual attitude toward such people and their actions, if we can be pleased with others who are happier than ourselves, compassionate toward those who are unhappy, joyful with those doing praiseworthy things, and remain undisturbed by the errors of others, our mind will be very tranquil." TKV Desikachar's interpretation of Yoga Sutra 1:33
This too rings with truth. My mind has not been tranquil because I have not remained undisturbed by the errors of others. So I need to do a lot of work, and be grateful for all the time I'm afforded to be around people in the yoga community, and learn to also be grateful for the lessons to be learned from others who challenge us to seek that inner tranquility that comes when we practice a sense of empathetic detachment.
This is the hottest and driest summer on record, but I do prefer the heat to the cold. Dale and I have been taking long walks down the road in the early evenings. I pulled my gracilis muscle a couple of months ago and just finished several weeks of physical therapy. It was suggested that I needed some strength training to avoid future injuries in my yoga practice, so I joined a local gym and am working with a personal trainer. I need to balance strength with flexibility. Jeff W. recommended a massage therapist to me, Paul F., and I've been seeing him now for a little while, and he is one of the best I've ever worked with.
Again this summer I find myself involved in a project, this time with my partner and his family, and suddenly finding myself dealing with a person who challenges me on so many levels. It really hurts to have false accusations thrown our way, and I have had to simply give up explaining the details of how a particular contract works to someone who's emotional issues come to the forefront of all objectivity and throws a wrench into the whole business. There is a certain blindness going on, an attachment to something that keeps one totally in one's comfort zone, a choice is made to reside out of the realm of facts and reality, but to stay in that place of unreality for fear that the admission of a mistake will cause all the walls of self worth to come crumbling down--the crumbling of such walls of delusion can be very difficult, but it is a rich experience that can bring one deeper into an understanding of oneself. And so I recall how we--especially me--must learn to find a balance within ourselves when we are confronted with the errors of others, when we are confronted with false accusations and attacks on our intentions and integrity. It's important to stay open to the feelings so they can move through us and not get stuck within us by our own repression of them. I find myself extremely angry, and subsequent to that, a tenderness arises in which I see that the errors we all make are often the result of a life unexamined, emotions that remain repressed and unprocessed. Stephen Cope writes in his book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self about the suffering that comes about as we reside in our false self. We are asked to move from the unreal into the real, which can be quite a difficult task. He refers to this as the reality project, in which we move out of the false, delusional self into the real, authentic self. The twin pillars of this reality project is clear seeing and calm abiding. I highly recommend this book.
We watched as a baby raccoon was abandoned (hopefully temporarily) by his mother. He could barely walk. I made sure he had plenty of water. It is sad to see how the heat and drought will cause so many animals to not survive. There is a famine going on in Africa right now that I believe is the worst in recorded history with tens of thousands of children dying from starvation.
I was sitting at the local AT and T franchise store awaiting my turn in line when an elderly lady came rushing into the store in a state of great frustration and breathlessness. "I hate this phone," she said, with a deep Southern accent, looking directly at me. "It's given me nothing but problems. I don't want all this high tech stuff, I just want a phone to be a phone, and I want it to work." I told her I understood. "You know Obama is not Black," she said to me, out of the blue. "People who voted for him just because he was Black, with the thought that he would end racism, were misguided," she said. I immediately retorted that I disagreed with her, and asked if she was of the idea that he wasn't a USA citizen. "Of course he's a citizen," she replied, "he was born in Hawaii. But his father was from Kenya, and was a Muslim, not a Black. His father was an Arab." She apparently had this fixed idea that all Muslims were Arabs, and Arabs were not Black. I explained to her that many peoples in Africa, who were Black, were Muslims, just as many white people were also Muslims. And so began a long discussion on a variety of topics ranging from cell phones to her childhood in Mississippi, her black nanny who wasn't allowed to eat at the table with the family to her own maid that helped raise her children. "It was all wrong," she said, "the way we treated them. But, it was all we knew." Sometimes what we learn to be right is very wrong. It's helps to ask ourselves: do our actions harms others? I had recently finishing reading The Help, a great book that I recommended she read. I understand a movie based on the book will be released in a few days.
In a recent dramatization of an Agatha Christie story set in a Middle Eastern country, a Englishwoman waiting to board a boat was traumatized when she suddenly found herself watching a local woman being stoned to death by a mob composed of community and family members, mostly male. "It is best to not interfere with local customs," Hercule told her. In other words, look away and ignore. I practice regularly with a young Iranian woman. She fussed at me for mentioning a movie I'd recently seen that was a docudrama about the stoning to death of a woman in Iran. It doesn't happen, she informed me, and they made that movie many years after the documented event. The next day there was news of a stoning in an Iranian village. Atrocities abound in our world.
Much of the world's cardamom comes from Guatemala. I like to grind the pods to flavor my coffee--it enhances the taste very nicely and has health benefits to boot. Yesterday when I lifted the top of the Rubbermaid box by the gate to retrieve a much awaited package of soaps, teas, and cardamom pods, a big red wasp glared back at me menacingly from his nest as he hung upside down and sideways from the bottom of the lid I held in my hand. I could tell he was ready to attack if necessary. Gingerly, I lowered the lid and warned my partner of the nest; like so many others, he's highly allergic to wasp and bee stings and can go into anaphylactic shock.
One morning I went to Devon's 7:30 a.m. Iyengar class at Clear Spring Studio, which I thoroughly enjoyed--I love hip and groin openers and hamstring stretching which we found in variations of supta padangustasana, which was also taught that same morning by Anne (subbing for Christina) and Clayton. Funny how often that happens. I love early morning. Anyway, before leaving the studio I reached into a wall mounted mail box of printed schedules and instantly felt an intense burning pain in my middle finger. I quickly pulled away and caught sight of a big red wasp staring back at me as she stood guard of her nest that hung from the metal lid. Deja vu but this time I realized the power such seemingly small insects can yield. In an airing of Life, narrated by Oprah, the world of insects (and mammals and reptiles) informs us that there are more insects on the planet than mammals, birds, reptiles and fish combined. They have evolved and adapted unique survival attributes. Pretty amazing stuff. They can quickly put us in our place. They can easily command respect. Scorpions suddenly appear walking across our tile floors at home, often attracting the attention of the cats, who seem to know instinctively to protect their tender noses. I stepped on a scorpion the other day and cannot recall ever having felt such intense pain from an insect. My tongue was numb the rest of the day. My partner had a scorpion on his pillow the other night and it stung him on his hand. Carpenter ants march in and out of the ac copper coil outside my bedroom, and the movement in the nest in the wall can be heard as I sit at my desk. Cicadas sing so loudly at night it's almost deafening. Long lines of ants form along the rafters as they take their share of sugar water from the hummingbird feeder.
I have truly been disappointed in myself at the way I have handled my reactions to events surrounding a current project, as well as my reactions to some of the people I've had to work with. Instead of being understanding and compassionate at the errors of others, I've been angry and judgmental. I find my mind caught up in the drama, making the drama, living the drama, lost to detachment and empathy. My emotional reactions beg to be processed and dealt with before I can move forward. I know in my heart that these are doors of opportunity knocking, and I can ignore them or walk through and learn about truth. My mind says, but I've had enough knocks for a while!
I chatted briefly with Mandy last summer about injuries, and how they help open us up to so many things, and how they can help us deepen within ourselves, deepen our practice. No wonder I keep injuring myself! Christina Sell wrote in her blog today:
"...staying close to our own goodness, radically affirming the presence of Grace no matter what is happening and living our authentic truth in a community of others who are doing the same."...
This really struck a chord with me as does so much of what she writes. It resonates loud and clear like a hammer hitting the sky, permeating the heavens and ringing like John Henry's hammer on cold steel. Is it going to be the death of me or will I rise up and be transformed, even in some minuscule way? Will I walk on in self-pity or genuine humbleness at the astonishing forces at work in our lives? Many of us have to both live and work outside the "community of others who are doing the same," and this can be quite a challenge. Along comes struggle and it feels like drowning, when in reality if we just breathe in the sweet, cool water, relax into the moment, we are offered the blessing of death to old ways and birth to new ways. It is in this that time and time again, I drown.
Gioconda writes:
"In daily life we see people who are happier than we are, people who are less happy. Some might be doing praiseworthy things and others causing problems. Whatever may be our usual attitude toward such people and their actions, if we can be pleased with others who are happier than ourselves, compassionate toward those who are unhappy, joyful with those doing praiseworthy things, and remain undisturbed by the errors of others, our mind will be very tranquil." TKV Desikachar's interpretation of Yoga Sutra 1:33
This too rings with truth. My mind has not been tranquil because I have not remained undisturbed by the errors of others. So I need to do a lot of work, and be grateful for all the time I'm afforded to be around people in the yoga community, and learn to also be grateful for the lessons to be learned from others who challenge us to seek that inner tranquility that comes when we practice a sense of empathetic detachment.
This is the hottest and driest summer on record, but I do prefer the heat to the cold. Dale and I have been taking long walks down the road in the early evenings. I pulled my gracilis muscle a couple of months ago and just finished several weeks of physical therapy. It was suggested that I needed some strength training to avoid future injuries in my yoga practice, so I joined a local gym and am working with a personal trainer. I need to balance strength with flexibility. Jeff W. recommended a massage therapist to me, Paul F., and I've been seeing him now for a little while, and he is one of the best I've ever worked with.
Again this summer I find myself involved in a project, this time with my partner and his family, and suddenly finding myself dealing with a person who challenges me on so many levels. It really hurts to have false accusations thrown our way, and I have had to simply give up explaining the details of how a particular contract works to someone who's emotional issues come to the forefront of all objectivity and throws a wrench into the whole business. There is a certain blindness going on, an attachment to something that keeps one totally in one's comfort zone, a choice is made to reside out of the realm of facts and reality, but to stay in that place of unreality for fear that the admission of a mistake will cause all the walls of self worth to come crumbling down--the crumbling of such walls of delusion can be very difficult, but it is a rich experience that can bring one deeper into an understanding of oneself. And so I recall how we--especially me--must learn to find a balance within ourselves when we are confronted with the errors of others, when we are confronted with false accusations and attacks on our intentions and integrity. It's important to stay open to the feelings so they can move through us and not get stuck within us by our own repression of them. I find myself extremely angry, and subsequent to that, a tenderness arises in which I see that the errors we all make are often the result of a life unexamined, emotions that remain repressed and unprocessed. Stephen Cope writes in his book Yoga and the Quest for the True Self about the suffering that comes about as we reside in our false self. We are asked to move from the unreal into the real, which can be quite a difficult task. He refers to this as the reality project, in which we move out of the false, delusional self into the real, authentic self. The twin pillars of this reality project is clear seeing and calm abiding. I highly recommend this book.
We watched as a baby raccoon was abandoned (hopefully temporarily) by his mother. He could barely walk. I made sure he had plenty of water. It is sad to see how the heat and drought will cause so many animals to not survive. There is a famine going on in Africa right now that I believe is the worst in recorded history with tens of thousands of children dying from starvation.
