still in sirsasana

2012 Personal Mission Statement

2012-01-13T08:29:00.000-06:00

I am here on the planet to heal myself on every level of being, so that I can encourage and inspire others to heal themselves. I am here to participate in the healing of my ancestors, my progeny, and members of my communities, as well as communities themselves. I am here to be teacher, student, and collaborator in the process of healing.

In order to fulfill this mission my goals are:
1. To live increasingly independent of societies and livelihoods based on exploitation and oppression of the earth and its people, especially people of color.

2. To live in voluntary simplicity requiring a minimum of earthly resources, while cultivating a sense of inner abundance.

3. To cultivate clarity of consciousness and continually increase my capacity for loving kindness through practices such as yoga, meditation, the arts, and deep conversation.

4. To build healthy communities by participating in cooperatives and other structures free from exploitation and oppression on every level.

5. To live cooperatively with people of color and others committed to healing themselves and their communities, sharing resources, inspiration, and healing practices. These resources may include time, energy, space, food, and knowledge.

6. To strengthen cooperative communities by practicing clear, compassionate communication through deep listening, and frameworks such as Nonviolent Communication, Circle work, Clearness Committees, and more.

as it is

2011-08-29T08:00:00.000-05:00

reflections on a vipassana 10-day intensive

imaginary facebook status update:
work out the terms of your own damned salvation
save yourself from your own misery

i wake up to 4am bell and walk out to dome of stars
every morning the moon is in a different place in the sky

WPEG radio
all peggy all the time
full slate of programming from gospel music to sutra chants to call-in talk shows
over days the volume diminishes

day 5: is this what silence sounds like?
as soon as the thought materializes the silence is gone

goenka's gravelly voice
anitya
anitya
anitya
changing
changing
changing

he instructs me even in my sleep
in equanimous dreams

no keys phones pens notebooks money ID to carry around
how do we know who we are?
we cling to our water bottles
eager to make fetishes out of anything
guzzle water and burp through 1-hour sittings

adhitthana
1-hour sittings of strong determination
don't open legs or hands or eyes
my body eager for drama churns in empty-stomached digestion and hyperventilation
the dhamma hall full of sneezing and burping and the occasional fart

this too shall pass

avarice and addiction come out at lunch
food our only comfort
we weep in silent appreciation on day 8 when warm chocolate chip cookies are presented
just when we thought we were over our cravings

confession: breaking my vow to abstain from killing any being i swat 4 mosquitos over the 10 days
still trying to practice indifference
in adhitthana i feel one land on my neck
feel the sting and itching
then forget about it

sensation
respiration
respiration
sensation
anitya
anitya
anitya

every thought every emotion
manifests somewhere as a sensation
can i feel it?
where does it arise?
watch it come up and disappear
sensations arise to vanish
between sittings i watch bubbles come up through the algae in the pond
then pop

stop your ego-dependent psychoanalysis
the incessant inner narration
come back to sensation
come back to the body
only the body contains the truth
the body itself the healer

bring out your dead
a la monty python
i clean out all my closets and coffins
let it all pass

Electoral Politics as Usual

2011-08-11T15:56:00.001-05:00

As disappointing as the loss of Sandy Pasch to Alberta Darling may be, we are once again reminded that electoral politics is not on the side of the common good. The system has been corrupted to the point of serious dysfunction. Many would argue that it was never set up in the first place to serve the common good, thus the restrictions both historic and present on women, blacks, felons, not to mention the electoral college, voter ID bill, and many other restrictions.

How many times do we have to be abused before we pursue an alternative path? The first election to demoralize me was the 2000 Presidential election, decided by the Supreme Court. Then again the 2004 Presidential, and most recently with the "irregularities" in the Kloppenburg/Prosser election.

Not that we should abjure the responsibility of voting (although I completely understand why some marginalized people have given up on it completely), but that voting should be only one of a myriad other actions. Don't put all your food into a broken refrigerator. Everything will get spoiled. And don't spend thousands of dollars trying to fix that refrigerator. Instead, create alternative ways to preserve food without refrigeration.

So many friends invested all their hope into the recalls, and were left devastated in the wake, besieged with dozens of "if only's": If only I had given more money, if only I had spent another weekend canvassing, if only I could have convinced so-and-so to volunteer....

It's conceivable we could with tremendous effort and expense fix that damned refrigerator. But isn't our energy better spent elsewhere? What if we had spent the millions of dollars generated by the recalls and given it directly to the poor?

Because electoral politics is inextricably part of the system of white supremacy, to invest all our hope and energy in it is to support continued racism. As Jimmy Boggs points out, "Democracy to white people is fascism to black people." Democracy via electoral politics only works for a percentage of the population: the (shrinking) middle class and above. The poor and people of color have been excluded by both Democrats and Republicans throughout our history, and regardless of the party in charge, white supremacy has remained intact. Thus, the subtext of the "I Voted" sticker proudly worn on election day is, "I benefit from and uphold the system of white supremacy."

The fact is anyone benefiting from banks, media, stores, and elections upholds white supremacy. Our focus on electoral politics feeds our delusional conviction that equality is possible in our current system. As plummeting stocks and recent rebellions in Milwaukee, London, Philadelphia and elsewhere reveal, we have nothing close to justice in the USA nor abroad. Our global system of white supremacy maintains oppression and exploitation, and elected officials from both parties all too often vote in the interests of banks and multinational corporations, and are funded by them.

What are the alternatives to our dependence on electoral politics? This is a profound question addressing every single aspect of our lives. I'm building housing cooperatives. What else?
- Stop shopping. Make it, trade it, grow it, forage it.
- Band together with your neighbors to grow food, potluck, share childcare and eldercare, car-share, and keep trouble away so the police are unnecessary.
- Move your money to a local credit union.
- Stop driving. Walk or bike. If you have to use fossil fuels, carpool or bus it.
- Stop consumption of media: TV, radio, internet, phone, newspapers. All mainstream media is owned and operated through the system of white supremacy. Even much alternative media is funded by the same sources, and depends on fossil fuels for transmission. Reduce your consumption by having one or more days a week with everything turned off. Soon you won't want to turn back on.
- Learn how to be healthy. Stop going to the doctor. Learn homeopathics, naturopathy, yoga, nutritional healing, meditation, etc.
- Quit your job. I'm serious. Then you can stop or at least reduce coffee consumption, stop eating out, stop buying clothes, reduce your stress and medical bills, reduce fossil fuel consumption, and have time to do the stuff above.

A ridiculous if not impossible list? That's why we are stuck and at the mercy of our elected officials. But they will not save us, our health insurance, or our retirement accounts. Even a temporary "save" will soon come crashing down, for we no longer have the global resources to sustain a 20th century lifestyle. We have to band together and save ourselves, step by step.

My Terribly Ironic Friends: Reconciling Cognitive Dissonance Through Art

2011-07-30T08:57:00.000-05:00

I had a group of friends in college, virtually all white men, who were, and still are, as far as I can tell, terribly ironic, sarcastic, clever, irreverent guys. They made fun of everything. Bascially they were my drinking buddies. On some level, I'm still drawn to people like that: it's the Jon Stewart syndrome. But it's been decades since I've gone out drinking, and now I recognize this attitude as something more than fun, but rather as an attempt to reconcile cognitive dissonance through irony and humor.

My ironic friends are educated enough and moral enough to recognize their unearned privileges. They never use the term "white supremacy" and rarely discuss or recognize race. They have gripes with capitalism but accept it as inevitable. But deep down, my ironic friends feel conflicted about the suffering of others: crippling poverty, failing schools, foreclosures, prisons, endless war.... And they're smart enough to connect the dots and understand that the extreme disparities between rich and poor are due to a global system of oppression, intended and designed to benefit a few. They understand that this global system is one of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. They oppose this system, yet recognize they benefit from it. Yikes!

So Irony and Art come in. We use these practices to let just enough air out of the white supremacist/patriarchal/capitalist bubble to relieve our anxiety and allow us to sleep at night, but don't release enough air to actually burst it. We stand outside the bubble and question it, poke it, make fun of it, and talktalktalk about it, but don't actually change it. In this way, art and humor become palliatives, Marx's opiate for the masses, which is why we can't get enough of Stewart and Colbert.

So instead, can we actually use art and humor to change our lives and our behaviors? Can we use art for the revolution? Instead of retreating into the palliative of art, we have to make our lives the work of art itself. It's not enough to create art, to BE an artist. That's so 20th century. We actually have to LIVE it.

How do we daily live outside the white supremacist/capitalist paradigm? How do we daily refrain from buying anything produced through exploitation, using unrenewable energy, ingesting corporate media, supporting big pharma, depending on corrupt banking systems, and participating in racism/classism/sexism/heterosexism/ageism? These are the only ways to overcome cognitive dissonance. Irony is only a first step, a harmless little poke to the bubble of white supremacy.

Revolutionary Diary, Entry 3

2011-07-29T08:57:00.000-05:00

A while back, a friend made an observation that we have a natural resistance to things that are good for us. She was referring to people who know they would feel better doing yoga, but they just can't get themselves to do it. I'm thinking about this in light of Grace's first chapter in her new book, "Growing Our Souls."

The observation points out that deep down, most of us know what we need to be healthy. We see this in healthy animals who know what to eat and when. It's a physical rather than intellectual knowledge, this feeling of "hmmm, I need something crunchy and green," or "I've overworked my legs today, I need to raise them up," etc.

So why do we resist these things that are good for us? Perhaps we also have a deep-seated resistance to change, which is connected to instability, which is connected to survival. I would surmise that the higher our level of privilege, the more we resist change, for we could compromise our very privilege.

This is the disservice unions in the late 20th century have wrought: replicating the system of privileges which they were created to resist. Unions, dependent on an economy based on exploitation and abuse, contributed to a growing middle class which has despoiled the earth, and made us unfit for survival in a post-oil world.

To do what is good for us will require us to renounce our privileges. The goal of leveling the playing field by "bringing people up" is a 20th century concept. Now we all must come "down" to the same level. Yvette Mitchell pointed out last night that "privilege is a disease." Unfortunately it's a disease few want to be cured of, ie an addiction. Growing our souls means overcoming the resistance to do what is good for us. What do you do to overcome that resistance?

Revolutionary Diary, Day 2

2011-07-23T08:29:00.000-05:00

In this interview, a Palestinian American anthropologist describes her privileges in Israel, and she says she appreciates where she can go etc, but also these privileges make her very uncomfortable.

As awake and aware revolutionaries, are there any privileges that do NOT make us uncomfortable? Is it possible to accept privileges without what I think of as a nagging, divine discomfort? Can you think of any privileges you have that you are indeed comfortable with? It seems like much of the political rhetoric of national pride is a weak attempt at justifying American privilege, thus continuing our delusion of American exceptionalism.

At the same, we are deeply attached, and even addicted to our privileges, and we long to keep them. Transition Milwaukee is discussing whether a 12-Step group for those trying to break away from a fossil fuel lifestyle might be appropriate.

On another note, in my iCalendar, I changed the category of "political events" to "community building." Thus the GLB study group is now a "community building" event. I have been deleting emails from Obama, Barbara Boxer, Harry Reid, and others. My focus is on Eight Limbs Housing Coop, gardening and foraging, yoga and singing and certain podcasts to grow my soul, community-building events like hosting potlucks, and naming and renouncing (to my capacity) my privileges.

Revolutionary Diary

2011-07-22T06:26:00.000-05:00

[Last night we had our first study group for Grace Lee Boggs's new book, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Action for the 21st Century. It was an extremely productive session, bursting with ideas and questions. As an accompaniment to the discussion, I will blog a bit between meetings.]

In the 21st century we will no longer be defined by work. There simply are not enough jobs to go around, and few resources left to exploit to grow our economy to create more jobs. What does this mean as we try to get our physical needs met? How do we survive without a paycheck? GLB emphasizes that marginalization brings liberation. Can we be liberated from our jobs and still live?

God knows millions in America are in deadening, stressful, energy-draining jobs. Are all jobs by definition hegemonic? What about unpaid jobs? GLB continually asks "what does it mean to be human?" Part of being human, I think, is contributing to the common good through labor, whether growing food, raising children, making baskets, building shelter, creating art .... Can we fulfill such responsibilities of being human without oppression or hegemony? This takes sensitivity, an inner drive, seeing the big picture, trust... what else?

How do we proceed through our daily responsibilities while engaging in the revolutionary struggle? For instance, I have to order tshirts today for Riverwest Yogashala members. Why do I need to do this and how does this strengthen or detract from the necessary revolution?
- I contracted with members of RY that they would receive a member shirt. This is a gesture of thanks and exchange for supporting us.
- Why is membership encouraged? To help RY pay for its free and reduced classes and make yoga accessible to all.
- I'm ordering organic cotton shirts from a local print shop. Is even growing organic cotton harmful to the environment? What is the toll on the land? Where is it grown and what are the conditions for workers? How are the shirts produced and by whom? How do the shirts arrive here? What is involved in the printing process and how does it affect the workers and the environment? Finally, do any of our members really need another shirt?
- As GLB says, we need to grow our souls. Is this shirt more soulful because it has a Sanskrit excerpt from Patanjali's yoga sutras? Does this make it a work of art? Are some works of art more useful for the revolution than others?

On another matter, I am sitting at my laptop this morning, blogging, instead of doing pranayama. I am using fossil fuel to charge my computer. My laptop contains precious metals which are causing wars in the Congo and elsewhere. Is the internet inherently oppressive and corrupt because it depends on commerce, is exploitive and addictive, and violates privacy? Does blogging accomplish anything for the revolution?

So you see where I am going.... Please contribute your thoughts here or in person at our next meeting, 28 July, at People's Books, 2122 E Locust, 7pm. Discussing Intro and Chapter 1 next week.

THE KINGIAN LEGACY

2011-01-10T10:44:00.000-06:00

To celebrate the relief of completing my last yoga assessment in Atlanta this weekend, I decided to sojourn to the King Center. I wanted to lay my eyes upon the landmark Ebenezer Baptist Church, see the King archives, and more.

I got on MARTA in Midtown, and watched the passengers shift from white to black as I transferred to the east-west lines. When I exited at King Center station, I walked into a cavernous, run-down station in a neighborhood alongside the interstate, and we know what interstates do to do neighborhoods. I’ve seen it in Buffalo, Detroit, and Milwaukee where I live now. Wealthy neighborhoods don’t have highways running through the middle of them, but they often break up working-class communities and create urban decay. In contrast to the lively, well-kept Midtown neighborhood where I was renting an apartment, the ¾ mile walk to the King Center was desolate, marked by vacant lots, houses needing some stimulus, and a mega-church.

As I experience all over the nation, the 2 people I passed on my walk, both African American, met my eyes and nodded hello. Rarely do white people do this. Instead, typically they assiduously avoid eye contact. Anyone else experience this? In my Milwaukee neighborhood, on the east side of Holton (primarily white), we don’t say hello, and on the west side of Holton (primarily black) we do: a topic for another essay.

I felt a surge of complex emotions as I spotted Ebenezer and became teary, recalling all its historic events and sermons. The entire region had been turned into a campus honoring MLK, with sculptures, a rose garden, community center, crypts for MLK and Coretta Scott King, an eternal fire, and a reflecting pool.

However, after spending an hour or so in the museum, I felt quite agitated and exasperated. It seemed that the radical message of Dr. King had been co-opted by foundations, the middle class, and the dominant culture. I sat down on a bench to jot some notes. An African American woman about my age sat down next to me, casually asking, “How are you doing?” Instead of exchanging pleasantries, I poured out my heart to her.

I shared my frustration with her and tried to briefly explain my impressions. All the exhibits were about historic racism, and largely focused on racist acts of individuals. Exhibits like these give the wrong impression that racism is part of our past, and that since Jim Crow is over, white supremacy is also over. Displaying images of hooded KKK members implies that white supremacists comprise a fringe group, and not that it’s a mainstream political/economical/educational/social/cultural system that continues to dominate our country to this day. I was angry that the language of systemic, institutional racism/white supremacy was not used at all in the Center. I felt there needed to be an exhibit of why Dr. King’s work is still necessary today, as evidenced by our failing public schools, overflowing prisons, rising poverty, unemployment, and more.

My patient benchmate listened and completely assented. Then she quickly let it go, and told me she was here with a children’s gospel choir from Savannah, who was going to sing at the capitol the next day. We went on to some pleasant small talk, and bid farewell.

The Center, in fact, was bustling with children and teenagers, many of them enjoying each other more than the exhibits, joking and goofing like normal kids. In this light I was particularly interested in a 15-minute film about the role of children in the Civil Rights Movement, a film funded by Coca-Cola. The famous opening quote about children not being judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, had some disturbing resonances in this context.

The fact of the matter is, white children and adults are constantly judged by the color of their skin. The color of your skin makes an impression at job interviews, getting an apartment, school admissions, how authority figures like teachers and police officers perceive and treat you, and how store clerks and neighbors and others respond to you. White people routinely benefit from the color of their skin as evidenced by statistics on every measurement, from social to economic.

What King really meant was,
“May black children NOT be judged harshly for the color of their skin,”
which implies,
“May race be invisible so as not to hurt my children,”
which prompts conservative whites to say,
“Now race doesn’t matter anymore, Dr. King’s message has come true,”
as a justification to cut social programs and render white privilege even more invisible.

I’m afraid Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy has become a message of color-blindness rather than a message of radical social transformation to uplift the oppressed.

Color-blindness is race-negating rather than race-affirming. Rather than celebrating our differences, people of color are literally being white-washed. This makes complete sense if we are being hurt for our differences. Although Asians are sometimes upheld as successful examples of the American dream, in reality, this is a result of strict immigration limitations, in which only doctors and professionals were given access. Now that we have more working-class Asian Americans, including refugees, our statistics more closely reflect the strains of all marginalized groups.

Recently a Filipina friend was admiring a t-shirt I was wearing. I told her I had more shirts like it that I had brought back from India, and that I would bring her one. The following week, I presented her with a half dozen shirts for her to choose from, ranging in colors and designs. She was immediately attracted to a shirt with the figure of Ganesh, the elephant god of beginnings who removes obstacles and bestows good luck. But she rejected it because the shirt was a bright, vibrant yellow.

How many times have Asian women been advised not to wear yellow because it brings out our sallow, olive skin tones? We’re supposed to look more like the dominant ideal: white and rosy. “Yellow is a beautiful color,” I told her. “It’s good to be yellow!” I insisted, feeling a little like Kermit the Frog. “Yellow skin is beautiful! Wear the yellow shirt!”

A white friend who was in the room went on to comment on her yellowish skin as well and we looked at her slightly puzzled, but she explained that next to her husband who was kind of pinkish, she was much more olive, and she seemed rather proud of herself. My Filipina friend tried on the shirt and took it after all, but not only until her skin color had been affirmed as beautiful by the white person in the room. We are still under the thumb of the dominant culture of white supremacy.

This is just a small example of how presumed colorblindness as a function of white supremacy damages us. More serious damage can be seen daily in schools, in the media, the legal system, and most recently in the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords in Tucson, Arizona.

The emphasis of the film and the exhibits at the King Center was on personal indignities, like the rude store clerk, rather than widespread, socially sanctioned oppression. It strikes me that poor whites resort to physical attacks when they have no other tools to defend white supremacy. Bankers, teachers, judges, and government officials have multiple means other than physical violence to defend the status quo. They are not morally superior to working-class whites when it comes to racism, they can just be less overt.

Later on my King Center tour, I perused the archival rooms of the Kings and Gandhi. The Kings’ room had all the marks of middle class life and high accomplishment: Dr. King’s elegant shoes, a photo of him tuxedoed and Mrs. King in a ballgown at the Nobel laureates ceremony, photos of his house.

The Gandhi room, by contrast, was marked by simplicity: images of Gandhi at the spinning wheel; his personal artifacts of wooden bowl, spoon, and sandals. Gandhi understood that as a spiritual and political leader, his power lay in his identification with the poor. He recognized the need for solidarity, and he renounced his economic and class status in order to serve the nation.

King was headed in this direction, especially in his later years, recognizing that the real problem in the nation was poverty, created by militarism, and fueled by racism. He became an increasing threat to the nation as he organized the Poor People’s March on Washington. Our government was able to contain the damage of the Civil Rights Movement to some degree, but uplifting the poor meant an attack on capitalism itself, which is as sacred as anything gets in the USA.

I’m further concerned that King’s message has been about idealizing, embracing, and uplifting a few to, the middle class, instead of dismantling the crippling system of capitalism. Certainly, better distribution of resources is central in uplifting the oppressed, but an emphasis on building wealth takes the focus from society and systems, to individual success which does not alter white supremacy. King’s message is one that particularly assuages the liberal class. Liberals can feel good that civil rights legislation passed, Jim Crow ended, and blacks and whites can go to school and work together. And white supremacy is still in place.

Personally, I believe the trajectory of King’s life indicates that he would have embraced Gandhi’s, and of course Jesus’s, principles even further, regarding the poor, had he lived beyond his 39 years. It’s up to us now, to complete the work he started. What does the Kingian legacy mean? The holiday is just a token. We need to reform our schools, make our government leaders listen to us, invest in local communities, eradicate poverty, and end wars. Are we willing, as Martin Luther King, Jr. did, to lay our lives on the line? Can we put our self-interest, careers, and comfort aside to continue his work? May we fearlessly confront systems of oppression. May we speak truth to power. May Dr. King not have died in vain.

David Foster Wallace on Life and Work

2010-11-25T06:54:00.000-06:00

Please read this in thanksgiving, love, and community. peggy

Adapted from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If at this moment, you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -- but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense.

A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real -- you get the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues." This is not a matter of virtue -- it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self.

People who can adjust their natural default-setting this way are often described as being "well adjusted," which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphal academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default-setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what's going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what's going on inside me. As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about "the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master." This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger. And I submit that this is what the real, no-bull-value of your liberal-arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.

That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in, day out" really means. There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.

By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no food at home -- you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your challenging job -- and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get in and quickly out: You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etcetera, etcetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all these stupid g-d- people.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth...

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do -- except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital, and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am -- it is actually I who am in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder, more tedious or painful lives than I do, overall.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the checkout line -- maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor Vehicles Dept. who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible -- it just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things. Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship...

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some intangible set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things -- if they are where you tap real meaning in life -- then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already -- it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power -- you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart -- you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122178211966454607.html

A VOW TO END SUFFERING: Sermon delivered on 26 September 2010 at Unitarian Universalist Church West, Brookfield, WI

2010-09-29T14:57:00.000-05:00

When students first come to my Iyengar yoga classes, it’s often for pain relief. They have chronic back pain, or their knees ache, or they have painful menstrual periods, or they have carpal tunnel pain in their wrists, and so forth. The physical pain is often accompanied by fatigue, or mild depression, or anxiety.

My first task as a yoga teacher is to relieve the pain. Pain is a red flag that things are out of balance, something is out of alignment. So we traction the back and bring the spinal vertebrae back into place, we release tightness from the shoulders so the length of the neck can be restored, we bring the ligaments of the knee into symmetry, and so forth.

Even after the pain is relieved, students usually keep coming to class. Why? Finally there is spaciousness in the body, the cells are oxygenated, the mind quiets, and emotions stabilize. As students benefit further from the practice of yoga, they often want to share their enthusiasm and appreciation with others. They start volunteering at our nonprofit yoga school, they join committees and help out with events. In other words, they shift from the one who is suffering to the one who relieves the suffering of others. This is the spiritual practice we are all called towards: the vow to end suffering.

On one hand this comes very naturally to all of us. You can see it in toddlers who become concerned when someone is crying, or even in our pets who slip their heads under our hands when they see us upset. On the other hand, we evade eye contact with the homeless vet panhandling at the gas station. We tolerate the 25% poverty rate in our city. We may donate to the food pantry but resign ourselves to the injustice that created the hunger.

There are periods in our lives when we need to avert our eyes from suffering. Our own wounds are still so tender that to come too close to the suffering of others drowns us, overwhelms us in anxiety and depression. There are periods when we have to take a media fast. The news of the world—floods, wars, famines—is too much for us to hold. We have to honor those self-protective periods, just like we have to place the oxygen mask over our own faces before we pass them to our children.

In the beginning of our practice, and during these vulnerable times, we must surround ourselves with love and warmth and joy and comfort. We breathe in joy, breathe out pain. Breathe in love, breathe out hatred. Breathe in happiness, breathe out sadness. Breathe in light, breathe out dark. In the beginning of our practice we fill our baskets. We pile up information, and teachings, and treats.

But at a certain point we are called to do the opposite. We are called to empty our baskets. We are called to breathe in pain, breathe out joy. Breathe in hatred, breathe out love, Breathe in sadness, breathe out happiness, Breathe in darkness, breathe out light.

At a certain point we are called not to flee suffering but to walk toward it. What does it mean to take a vow to end suffering? It means we have to go toward it.

As we mature in our spiritual practice, we are called to the edge, we are drawn to the periphery, the precipice. When we have enough inner stability to stand at the precipice without fear, and without losing our footing, that’s where we need to go.

Ironically the only way to end suffering is to go through it. Like going on a bear hunt, can’t get under it, can’t get over it, gotta go through it.

The trick is to not think of suffering as negative. It just is. We needn’t put a charge on it. Can we practice acceptance and equanimity toward both joy and suffering?

It just is. Light just is. Darkness just is. One is not better than the other. Think of the racialized overtones of labeling darkness as evil and lightness as good. This paradigm has created untold damage on so many levels. Our psyches operate through symbol and image, and so symbolizing God as light and the Devil as darkness is a terrible problem. Unconsciously we assign literal meaning to this, and it carries over into our daily dealings. To many people God is a white man. How many images of white Jesus have you seen, when historically we know he came from a part of the world where people are brown-skinned?

You’re probably familiar with the doll experiment where young children are presented 2 identical dolls, one with white skin, one with brown skin. Recently the classic 1939 experiment was conducted again by young filmmaker Kiri Davis, and in 2009 a variation by ABC News. The recent experiments demonstrated that internalized racism still grips us, most children selecting the white doll as the “nice one,” “the pretty one,” the one they want to play with. Go to youtube and type in “A Girl Like Me,” to view the 7 minute film about African American girls and self-image which includes footage of the doll experiment. And if you think you are exempt from the grip of internalized biases, that perhaps you have transcended internal racism, that the archetypes of light and dark no longer apply to your psyche, go to implicit.harvard.edu to take some simple tests. You may be surprised.

I ask you to reconsider the use of the term “fair,” as in “a fair deal” or even FAIR Wisconsin, which works for LGBT rights. One of the meanings of the word “fair” is Iight-skinned. I actually wrote to FAIR Wisconsin and asked them to reconsider their name and what it implies. What does it create within us and within society to equate justice with whiteness? This is the level to which we must become conscious.

Darkness is just as necessary and beautiful as lightness. Night is as wonderful as day. The depth of the cave, the darkness at the bottom of the ocean, the blackness deep in the earth, these are all important and necessary.

And death itself is beautiful and good, just as life is. I believe our fear of the dark, and of suffering, and of pain, ultimately stems from our fear of death. No one is afraid of the state before birth. Why are we afraid of the state after death? It’s the same place, We come from the garden, we return to the garden. We come from the mystery, we return to the mystery.

I’m a huge fan of compost and vermiculture. I’ve instructed my children that when I die, I want to be dropped in a burlap sack into the earth, and have a tree planted over my body. I love the idea of returning to the soil, and being composted and consumed. It’s just my body anyway, my vessel. We come from the garden, we return to the garden. The body decomposes, and the spirit returns to that place of generative and regenerative mystery.

Why run away?

Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron reminds us, “Gloriousness and wretchedness are both necessary. One inspires us, the other softens us.” That’s what suffering does to us: it softens us. And why do we need softening? To teach us compassion and forgiveness so that we become appropriate vehicles for healing.

So taking a vow to end suffering is also a vow to embrace suffering, or at least to accept it, not push it away. Remember, we attract what we resist. The more I try to run from suffering, the more comes my way.

It’s easy to see in yogasana. Let’s say my hamstrings are tight, so I avoid bending forward, because it hurts. But the more I avoid bending forward, the tighter my hips get, the shorter my hamstrings become, the more I strain my back. So avoiding pain is increasing my suffering in the long run. The only way to relieve my suffering permanently is to move into the discomfort with awareness and discernment, and slowly, lovingly, create more length in the hamstrings, more flexion in the hips, and more space between the vertebrae. I have to go through it, not around it.

The other day "Pan’s Labyrinth" filmmaker Guillermo del Toro was on the radio. He was saying how he tells his daughters that if you find anything difficult, face it and vanquish it, because every time you avoid a difficult situation, life sends you one twice the size two years later, and if you avoid that, you get another difficult situation twice that size. We attract what we resist. What is that thing you have been avoiding? That conversation you have been delaying? Do it today.

This law of resistance, so to speak, happens on a literal as well as figurative level. How did one dirty dish turn into 20? Take 30 seconds to wash it now to avoid spending 30 minutes cleaning up later, Keep the sink empty. Empty your basket.

To end suffering we must go through the threshold of pain, but as we stop resisting pain, it ceases to be suffering.

I tell my students that the difference between pain and suffering is the emotional charge we place on it: the judgment and resistance. Instead can we just observe the pain, say, ah, there it is, and accept it. In fact Pema Chodron says, welcome it, because here is yet another opportunity to learn compassion, to practice lovingkindness, to transform ourselves, and become more centered.

What does it mean to be centered? I think it means to be able to stand in the midst of strong sensation, stimulation, turmoil, without being overwhelmed. In yoga, we practice Tadasana, the mountain pose, and I instruct my students in how to align their bones and muscles so they can stand with stability and symmetry so that even if a hurricane blew through the room, they would still be standing, stable as a mountain.

To be centered does not equate being cold or passionless. In fact as we walk toward pain, we become more feeling, more sympathetic, more sensitive. Just as when you stop smoking, smells and tastes become sharper, when you stop resisting pain, you experience both pain and joy with a new intensity. But you are no longer afraid of pain. It can no longer crush you.

Joanna Macy was on Krista Tippett’s radio show with the new title, Being. pointed out that pain and joy are 2 sides of the same coin, and when we really love something or someone, we gladly walk toward the pain. It’s our intense love for the earth that compels us to examine ecological harm. It’s our intense love for our child that compels us to nurture them through illness. We don’t turn our backs on the suffering of the planet, the suffering of the child. When we love deeply, our hearts break deeply. Suffering breaks our hearts open more and more so that we can love even more deeply. And so the cycle goes: we love, we suffer, we open up, we love, we suffer, we open up.

This summer I began practicing a Tibetan Buddhist meditation called tonglen, which means giving and taking. In this meditation we practice being with someone in their suffering, or being with ourselves in our suffering, then committing ourselves to taking away the suffering and replacing it with well-being.

We open our hearts wide to transform the suffering. We merge the suffering with the grace of the divine within us, that largeness of the eternal and universal that we all contain, that wellspring of compassion and forgiveness within. This merging transforms the suffering into a healing force.

To end this talk, please join me in a brief tonglen meditation.
Place both feet on the floor, sit upright, pull your shoulders back, and balance your head at the top of your spine. From here close your eyes. Take a slow soft inhale, opening your chest, and as you exhale, keep that heart center open as you release tension. Listen to your breath become soft and steady.

Allow someone who is suffering to come to min d. It could be a friend or family member, it could be someone from your community that you don’t know very well, it could be someone in this room. Picture this person before you.

First sit quietly with this person and open your heart. Invite this person to share their suffering with you. It might be a physical ailment or injury. It might be emotional or mental pain. It might be a long-term chronic condition or an acute short-term condition.

With each inhale, draw this person’s suffering out as a dense heavy cloud that hangs between the two of you. With each breath, you pull the pain out, and the cloud becomes denser, heavier. Take a series of soft breaths to draw the suffering out.

Now, take a vow to end this person’s suffering, to transform their pain. You long to alleviate this person’s pain. Some trepidation is normal, but know that you have the compassion needed to help this person. Now you will take a series of inhales to draw this cloud of their suffering into yourself. Hold this cloud of pain in your heart center.

Now draw this cloud in to the back of your chest where a small flame burns. This flame is your protective self-centeredness. On your next inhale, touch the cloud of pain to this flame, and watch the flame of your selfishness transform into compassion, which turns the cloud of suffering into a golden, effulgent light. Let this light fill your entire being, from your head all the way into your fingertips and toes.

On a series of soft exhales, breathe this golden light out to your friend. Bathe this person in this glow of lovingkindness. Let this light fill them and surround them, and picture them completely free of suffering. Bathe them in the glow of wellness.

Before we come out of this meditation, dedicate the good karma generated here to someone else who needs support. Pass it forward.

Let your eyes open and continue to sit quietly.
Namaste and amen.

TRANSFORMING INSTINCT TO INTUITION

2010-07-25T07:52:00.002-05:00

“Don’t be so cocky-sure, young lady!” my father used to reprimand me as a rebellious teenager when I dismissed his concerns and tried to do things my way. I thought of him this week as I endured a short bout of digestive illness. Just when I thought I would get through my India trip without getting sick….

My first trip to Pune I got sick the final week when I accepted a meal of delicious wheat dishes at my landlady’s brunch. I had been off gluten for a year and thought I might be able to indulge this once. But alas, I spent 24 hours in bed and in the bathroom, and weakly made my way back to class for restorative and pranayama.

My second trip I succumbed to the winter “Pune cough.” You can hear the hack from the dust and pollution in the recordings of the classes, as students and teachers cough their way through the dry Januarys.

This time, I was feeling great, cooking delicious and healthy meals at home, doing 5 hours of asana and Pranayama each day. The only thing I missed were my fresh raw greens that I gorge on each summer. I saw some nice palak (spinach) on the vegetable lady’s cart for sale and bought 2 bunches. I knew enough not to eat it raw, but I cooked it very gently just until it wilted, dressed it Korean style in soy sauce, vinegar, a bit of oil, and hot sauce, tossed in some cashews, and ate it cold. Yum.

But the microorganisms here, that foreigners do not have the flora for, got the best of me. My mistake was not cooking the spinach to death. So I spent a day at home, reading, practicing Supta Baddha Konasana, listening to music, and purging. Just when I was feeling so smug! I’m better now, and humbled, once again, by India, and what this experience may bring.

One thing I had to do during this short bout of illness was tune into my body ever more sharply. My body told me what I could eat and what I could not. I would touch my fork to a brownie I bought as a special indulgence. Unh-unh, my stomach would say. How about some fresh fruit? No, my body said. Some plain rice and dollop of dahi (curds/yogurt)? My stomach did not turn at this suggestion, so I lived on this for a day.

BKS Iyengar addressed a similar aspect of listening to our bodies in class today. He invited us to turn instinctive knowledge into intuitive knowledge. He insisted that just applying action upon action to our bodies in asana is a beginner method. Instead, he chided us, how can we increase our intelligence and apply what we observe through instinctive behavior and make it intuitive?

For instance, in Prasarita Padottanasana (look it up in Light on Yoga if you need to), the back calves instinctively roll out. Try it a few times and notice that they almost automatically do this. But do our back thighs do the same? Due to hip and/or hamstring tightness, they do not. But can we apply the instinctive intelligence of the calves and make it intuitive intelligence in the thighs?

Guruji has been teaching largely through this Socratic method, continually asking us questions and making us probe deeper into our own bodies, observing the most minute details. This is not to make us “physiocrats,” (as Prashant Iyengar would say), but to draw us deeper into the organic (physiologic) body and into the mind.

Now when yoga practitioners talk about the mind, they’re really talking about the consciousness and all its components of brain, nervous system, ego, soul, spirit, and more. So as we probe these actions in asana, we are supposed to be probing the responses in our minds.

“Dual mind or single mind?” Guruji asks us, when we are deep in asana. Hopefully we can answer, calmly, silently, and humbly, as we merge our instinctive intelligence with our intuitive intelligence, “Single mind.”

[I’m heading into my final week of study, so this will be my final Pune blog. Thanks for reading, and accompanying me on this journey! See you in Milwaukee and in class soon.]

PAST THE HALFWAY MARK

2010-07-19T03:21:00.001-05:00

It’s taken me three trips to India to figure out the mosquitoes. I was getting most of my mosquito bites inside my little bungalow instead of outside where you think they would be, usually in my sleep. But recently in the morning I noticed several mosquitoes sleeping on the nets (screens, in the USA). I slid open the net and closed the glass windows, and sure enough they eventually flew off into the nice outdoors. You see, they were stuck inside because I was trying to keep the house snugly closed up and protected.

Instead, in India you’re supposed to keep the air flowing without screens during the day, then close up at dusk when the mosquitoes like to come inside. If you don’t air out, the bugs get stuck inside for days at a time, and they get ornery, and they bite you, because you’re their only source of food. You have to learn the rhythms and go with the flow.

Everything in India is this way. Tonight in class it was time to set up for Salamba Sarvangasana, which is quite an ordeal for 120 students. We go and get a stack of thick mats and line up in threes. But tonight I was at a mat with two other foreign women who insisted they already had a third person for their mat, a friend of theirs. Now, trying to protect your spot in a crowded yoga class just makes things unnecessarily complicated, IMHO. The Indians know this, and will take any spot willy-nilly, and expect us foreigners to do the same.

But the Euro-American ethic is quite different. We are acculturated with a strong sense of individuality and territoriality, thus the “mine” attitude, which makes living in India quite stressful. There’s one American woman here who has become quite attached to a particular yoga mat, and insists on using it, digging through the stacks at the Institute, or asking you for it if you happen to have it under your feet.

I find that I have more energy for asana and pranayama and study if I am willing to let go of my little quirks and preferences,, and especially if I consciously and joyfully relinquish my American privilege. Lucky for me in some respects, I am not recognized as an American. There are quite a few Korean university students here in Pune, and although we are treated as foreigners, we are free from the baggage and stereotypes of white Americans—you know—big spenders, loud, demanding, etc. So, except for my sun hat, I sort of blend in, eating Indian food with my fingers, and moving from yoga mat to mat as the class requires.

Guruji also visits this theme over and over in his teachings. “This is not a health club!” he insists. “This is a health education center. You must all come here to learn, to be students,” not, he implies, come here to exercise privilege. He continues, “You come here to use my name, to get a certiicate. You make money from my name, and write books. But you must be humble to learn. Are you really here to listen, to learn?” he asks, evoking the old themes of colonialism and empire that still impact India.

Yesterday, a film crew came into the practice hall, with massive lights and cameras. Some Germans are making a documentary about BKS Iyengar. We lifted our heads from Adho Mukha Svanasana, as extension cords were being pulled across our hands, and a stream of people filied in. They wanted to film him practicing and coaching granddaughter Abhijata. At nearly 92, he is quite the presenter, so we all gathered round as he gave Abhi some jewels of instruction in Sirsasana, Trkonasana, Tadasana, and Urdhva Dhanurasana. At her young age (mid 20s), Abhi has accepted the circumstances of her public life. As long as her grandfather is in the spotlight, so is she, there at his side.

All the students at the Institute were invited to her engagement party and puja (religious blessing) this week. We skipped class and flooded the hall behind the post office in our nicest Indian clothes, along with the extended families and all the expected dignitaries. Then we were fed a feast of 10-12 traditional dishes, and this only the engagement.

“Stop thinking!” Guruji roared in class recently. “Receive the instruction in your body. You are all thinking about superficialities.” So now back to the simplicity of breathe in, breathe out, asana and pranayama, taking the learning into my body, making the most of my study here for the remaining 2 weeks.

SETTLING IN

2010-07-11T06:48:00.002-05:00

You know you’re turning Indian when:

- You prefer the squatting toilets.

- You walk into the middle of the street slowly and calmly to cross, knowing the motorcycles and rickshaws will go around you.

- You start doing the head bobble.

- You slooooow down. No rushing anywhere. Allot double to triple the time it would take to complete a task in the States.

- You start bargaining at the fruit cart.

I’m settling into my routine here, and the simplicity is beautiful. Each morning I awake with the birds before dawn and do some Pranayama. Then boil some water and drink it hot with a quarter of a tiny lemon. I eat some fruit—today it was a salad of papaya, banana, pomegranate, and orange. Then off to either practice or class.

I come home around noon and eat a simple lunch of rice, dal, and vegetable subji (Indian stew/stir fry). Every 2-3 days I cook a little something from veggies I pick up at the green market. Eggplant, green beans, cabbage, cauliflower… Yesterday I bought 3 potatoes, 3 lemons, and 2 tomatoes for 12 rupees (about 25 cents). All the veggies are about half the size of what you see in the States. So if I take the time to cook, I can eat very inexpensively. Just some mustard and cumin seeds in oil, some garam masala and turmeric, toss in some vegetables and a hot meal is ready in 10 minutes.

After lunch I write some notes on class or practice, check email, maybe get dinner started, do a bit of reading or take a nap. At 3pm the library at the Iyengar Institute opens so I walk down the street and go on over.

The basement library is a happening place. Guruji, BKS Iyengar, is always at his desk there, going over manuscripts or answering letters. At a long table at the center of the library sit yoga students from all over the world, our noses buried in amazing archival material and books on every aspect of yoga, from therapeutics to anatomy to philosophy to spirituality. We sit quietly and read and study, and every once in a while Guruji pipes up with a comment or question or request.

A few days ago I went down to the library and everyone was gathered around a laptop playing a new educational film about Iyengar yoga for children. The project leaders came to consult with Guruji about it. He made no bones about it: it’s too serious he said, there is no humor. With children there needs to be lightness and quickness and humor. This film made yoga a serious subject when it should be fun for children. The filmmakers went back to Mumbai with some major feedback from the guru.

After an hour or so in the library, I go back upstairs to the yoga hall for the medical class. Here you find 30 or so students with every condition from heart disease to scoliosis to sore knees and hips.

Today I spotted a little girl I remembered from my last visit in 2008. She had traveled with her parents from Delhi with scoliosis so severe she couldn’t walk straight. Today she is performing her sequence on her own, tall, and healthy. Her scoliosis is still visible but so much less severe I hardly recognized her.

I decided to take the risk and begin assisting in the medical class. It’s a little scary because it’s a circus, with people running about with every manner of yoga prop, and Guruji overseeing it all, imperious and fierce. It’s easy to get tripped up and get a set-up wrong or misunderstand an instruction from one of the teachers. The other day I had an absolutely mortifying moment when I started to take apart someone’s setup because we were finishing up the class. What I learned is that you never touch a setup done by Guruji, who stormed up to me and demanded to know why I was moving things without asking him. It was like being in a hurricane with no shelter, and all I could do was be humble and apologize.

I was flooded with doubt. Maybe I shouldn’t be assisting. Maybe I’m being presumptuous. However I decided to sublimate my wounded ego and go back the next day. If everyone who has ever been yelled at gave up, we would have few students and teachers indeed. I decided I had to go back to the medical class for the sake of my students with aching backs and knees and necks and hips, to learn whatever I can to bring back. Never mind my little hurt feelings, that’s just asmita, ego.

After the medical class is evening class of asana or if it’s Thursdays, Pranayama. I get home around 8:15pm and eat leftovers, take a shower, more notes, and early to bed. It’s a beautiful life.

My first time in Pune I was fascinated by the marketplaces, beautiful clothing, textiles, housewares, and so much more. I spent many an afternoon shopping through various neighborhoods. My second time in Pune I brought my family and we traveled to southern India, and to caves of Maharastra. This time all I am doing is studying, practicing, learning. Absorbing all I can in the short time I have….

Here are a few more tidbits of wisdom from our classes during forward bends week:

Prashant: The nostrils are the gateway of the breath. How can we awaken different parts of the nostrils as we breathe? He defined the parts as the opening, the floor, the septum, the outer membrane, the roof, and the very center which doesn’t touch anywhere.

Raya: If Parsvottanasana is Uttanasana with the partner leg gone, don’t cheat on your partner. Apply all your knowledge of Uttanasana into the one-legged Parsvottanasana.

Abhi, Guruji: In Uttanasana, draw the lateral buttocks down and the tailbone down as you draw up through the backs of the legs. This creates a compactness to lengthen the spine forward and down.

WORD FROM PUNE

2010-07-04T04:29:00.002-05:00

Perhaps where I feel most at home is in international terminals of airports. Born in Korea and raised in Hawaii, I’ve never felt quite at home on “the mainland.” Ever the outsider, at the Air India gate at O’Hare I am nevertheless quite comfortable, sitting on the floor and eating my pesto and avocado and sliced mango with bamboo chopsticks (brought from home, not purchased in the terminal). I feel at ease with brown people speaking languages other than English, their clothes and shoes and behavior a bit out of the American mainstream.

Since the Mumbai bombing, India has been trying to impose order on its innate chaos. Before 2009 I rarely saw queues of Indian people, only mobs. The lack of queues bothered me until I realized the mob was a feminine use of time and space, a sort of resistance to the Protestant ethic. Instead of taking your turn and earning your right, the person most in need got her way, and the crowd allowed it. But now at the gate, the airport staff insists on lining us up single-file.

Our connecting flight is delayed out of uber-efficient Frankfort, and we arrive in the Mumbai rain near midnight. The airport, undergoing remodeling since at least my first trip to India in July 2005, is finally complete and unrecognizable. Gone are the Gandhi posters in baggage claim. But just as always, as soon as I step out, my glasses fog up from the heat and humidity. Ahhhh, India.

I’m determined to stay awake on the car ride to Pune so I can get a solid night’s sleep and get over the jet lag. This is no problem since my driver passes trucks from every which direction, including the shoulder, honking away. I arrive at my apartment and settle into bed around 3am, only to be awakened at dawn with the most raucous bird songs imaginable. I wish I could tell you all the parts comprising this celebratory, orchestral cacophony.

I arrive at the Iyengar Institute and learn that Geeta Iyengar, the grand matriarch of the Iyengar tradition (daughter of BKS) will not be teaching this month, for health reasons. This is quite troubling, but inevitable, as she has been threatening to retire for some time now. Send positive and healing thoughts and prayers to Geetaji! To compensate for her absence, we international students are invited to take all of Prashant Iyengar’s (son of BKS) classes in addition to Geetaji’s subbed classes.

So far I have taken 4 classes, asana with Prashant, Pranayama with Prashant, asana with Raya, and asana with Abhijata (BKS’s granddaughter). Here are a few tidbits from these very good classes:

Abhi, with Guruji (BKS Iyengar) practicing on the side and feeding her instructions: Tadasana is Adho Mukha Sirsasana (upside down head balance). Just as we take care of our necks in Sirsasana, we must be as mindful of our necks in Tadasana. Draw the cervical spine toward the throat without hardening the throat or thrusting the chin.

Prashant: Viloma exhales can be from any part of the body. What happens when you take Viloma exhales all from the abdomen? What happens if you exhales from bottom to top instead of top to bottom? What about bottom, top, then middle, etc? We must be seekers and not simply repeaters of what is given to us.

Raya: Drop the trapezium down in Tadasana as if you’re throwing it off a cliff. In the beginning we must use effort to do this, but eventually it has to happen effortlessly, otherwise we simply harden. Same with releasing the head down in Uttanasana.

More next week.

AN EASTER HEART TRANSPLANT

2010-04-04T06:19:00.000-05:00

Ezekiel 36:26-28 A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will take out of your flesh the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.

Now that 30 million more of us are guaranteed health care, are we any closer to receiving those brand new hearts, new knees, healthy new bodies? Will we then have renewed spirits, and walk in God’s statutes and ordinances?

I like to think that physical well-being does contribute to spiritual well-being. As a yoga teacher, that’s what I live by: that as we alleviate our aches and pains, become stronger and more limber, improve the healthy functioning of our organs, and train our minds, we improve our spiritual health.

But is physical health the same as spiritual health? What does it take to really get a new heart, not just a mechanically transplanted one?

And why would we want one? We’re fine just the way we are, aren’t we? We have decent jobs, nice homes, our kids turned out well, life is pretty pleasant all in all. Why rock the boat?

And besides our hearts are not made of stone. Don’t we tithe, and volunteer, buy fair trade, and use our own shopping bags? Isn’t that enough? If we gave any more we wouldn’t be able to pay for college, or travel, or buy Christmas presents. And isn’t it patronizing of me to try to change someone? And isn’t it enabling to help someone who should be helping themselves?

All of us content ourselves to some degree with our hearts of stone. How else would we get through our days? If I responded to every one of my email and phone solicitations with a donation, no matter how worthy the cause, I would be penniless. There are too many needs in the world for little me to meet. So I shut it off.

Recently, I got an email from an old college friend, encouraging Ed and me to go to the university reunion, because the Glee Club, where Ed and I met almost 30 years ago, would be reuniting and singing. This friend encouraged us to join the Facebook group for the Glee Club. I went to peek at the page, and found that instead of making me feel warm and nostalgic, it made me slightly nauseous. Why?

Were your young adulthood years your happiest? Who really wants to peak that early? To me, college was full of growing pains and hard-earned lessons. At that time I invested heavily in learning about and conforming to the dominant culture, studying European classics, reading literature authored by men, and adopting the privileged point of view of the white patriarchy. In the men’s Glee Club we women sang first tenor and wore tuxedoes for performances just like the men. It wasn’t so much a feminist statement as it was being “one of the boys.” Our director was a talented 40-something Juilliard grad with a wife and baby daughter. He acted like one of us, partying and carrying on. At the time we thought his heavy-drinking, philandering antics distasteful but somewhat amusing, but now, at age 67, he’s in prison for sexual assault of one of his 15 year-old students.

When I read this news, I thought about all the girls and women harmed by this person since we failed to report him back in the 70s and 80s. I thought about this 15 year-old girl and how the rest of her life might be affected, and what his own daughter might be feeling. Hundreds of us over the years knew our director was an alcoholic and sexual predator, and we acquiesced; that is, we stayed quiet. This is only one example of how, so often, we harden our hearts; decline to look at a difficult, painful, or confusing situation; and fail to change it.

Another reason why this situation bothers me is because this happened at an Ivy league school, at Columbia Unviersity, in the bastions of privilege. So often, the people who are the most privileged are the ones most likely to acquiesce. That is, the people who enjoy high status, who have financial stability and are well-connected, are the least likely to shake things up. They are rewarded by the status quo; why disrupt it? At the same time, they are the people most capable of making a difference because they have the educational, cultural, and economic capital required to effect change.

Just as a medical heart transplant is painful and risky, so is a spiritual heart transplant. We don’t want to be rude, presumptuous, or hurtful. Our hierarchical society tells us to stay in line and not speak out of turn. No one will want to be our friend, no one will like us. If we point out racism, we make someone feel bad. If we object to sexism, we’re told we’re being overly sensitive. We may lose friends. What we used to find acceptable we may now find intolerable. How much easier and safer it is to acquiesce, to laugh it off, to have another drink.

But that’s not the job description of a Christian. As Christians we are called to stand with the oppressed, not to identify with the oppressor. As Christians we don’t uphold the status quo, we challenge it. The famous aphorism of journalism also applies to Christians: we are here to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

For those many occasions when we fall short of our job description, we forgive ourselves and each other. Otherwise, how can we move on? How can we grow new hearts? The Easter message is that, although we are the very ones who crucified Jesus, we are also fully forgiven. As Christ forgives us, we must forgive ourselves and each other. As we practice forgiveness, our hearts soften, and become hearts of flesh.

When we have our new hearts, what happens? According to Ezekiel, we “walk in [God’s] statutes and [we are] careful to observe [God’s] ordinances.” Having a rebellious personality, my first reaction is, “Um, no thanks.” Yet another reason to avoid that spiritual heart transplant—my life will become even more boring. But upon further reflection, I see God’s statutes and ordinances not as restrictions, but as justice itself. We could consider God’s justice in the same light as the law of karma. My first yoga teacher, whose primary language was Spanish, explained karma with extreme simplicity: you get what you deserve. I might rephrase it as: eventually, the most just outcome for all prevails. Or as Martin Luther King Jr phrased it, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” With our new hearts of flesh, we have the power and courage to bend that arc of the moral universe more and more toward justice.

May we let Christ’s love and resurrection cleanse us, renew us, and turn our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, hearts of compassion. May we stand courageously with the oppressed. May we use our privilege not to protect ourselves from change, but as leverage for change. When Mary the mother of James, Mary Magdalene, and Salome come to Jesus’s tomb on Easter morning, the stone has been rolled away. The stone is gone! May we forgive ourselves and each other so that the stone of our hearts may also be removed. This Easter, may our hearts of stone indeed be transformed into hearts of flesh. Amen.

Race Diary: Randomish Thoughts on Race

2010-02-10T07:07:00.000-06:00

About to embark on a trip to Costa Rica, I feel a mix of eagerness and dread. Eagerness to bask in warm weather and stimulate my vitamin D factory, see my daughter who is meeting me there from her current home in Martinique, and take yoga classes with my friend and teacher extraordinaire, Carolyn Christie. And dread, coming into a developing nation as a tourist and all that implies.

Yes, I know Costa Rica loves its tourists and depends on them to keep their economy going. Costa Rica pioneers the concept of ecotourism, which supposedly helps the environment instead of harms it. But I still feel conflicted.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Hawaii, where locals cultivated a love/hate relationship with tourists, who fueled the economy, yet made residents feel sort of like servants. Behind their backs, we made fun of their easily-burned skin and their big cameras, because we knew we had to be polite to their faces. After all, we were colonized people. Hawaii had lost its independence and the white people on the island felt like the bosses.

I don’t know if I can go to Costa Rica and not be that obnoxious tourist that the locals have to revolve around. All over the internet are beautiful bed and breakfast inns owned by white people, just like white people who came and dominated Hawaii. When levels of privilege are so disparate, what is my role as a visitor?

When Americans visit France and complain about the unfriendly French, the subtext is: why aren’t they catering to my needs, including my need to speak English? Why aren’t they being obsequious? Instead they act as our equals, or even superiors. How dare they?

I was telling friends at my food co-op about my upcoming trip to Costa Rica, noting that I wanted to learn at least a bit of Spanish to get around. “Oh no, you don’t have to do that,” they said. In other words, the center doesn’t have to cater to the periphery. Their response indicated that the Costa Ricans revolve around me, not the other way around.

It’s disingenuous for me to pretend to shed my privilege as I travel to a developing nation. I can hide a little behind my ethnicity and perhaps not stand out as much as a white person, but I will always have economic privilege. I’m too old and middle class for couch surfing and youth hostels, but at the same time, dislike the wasteful extravagance of resorts and hotels. That is, I’m too self-conscious to be slumming or exploiting. In my mind, I identify with the native workers. In reality, I’m a privileged interloper.

In the end, I didn’t have enough time to teach myself Spanish. I booked a b and b in a woman’s home for $20/night. Then I will move on to a small resort on the coast for an Iyengar yoga retreat. I am still torn, as only the highly privileged can be. This is the true cost of vitamin D, and the old story of the colder climates needing the resources of the warmer climates.

A TRIBUTE FOR KATE MCGARRIGLE, 1946-2010

2010-01-23T20:25:00.003-06:00

How could I have survived college without the McGarrigle sisters? Their records are nearly worn smooth, and the needle jumps around them as I listen now, 5 days after Kate’s passing.

Who else but Kate and Anna could have matched the torrent of my coming-of-age in the early 1980s, the emotional rollercoaster, the heartbreaks, the longing, the search for self and the search for a voice? Their music was large enough to contain all the passion of a twenty year-old living in New York City, asking all the big questions with nothing close to an answer.

It was pre-AIDS and post-sexual revolution, and I thought feminism was passé. In their plaintive voices and sweet harmonies, they sang of love, loss, and longing, the raw material of a young woman’s life. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fcBEGjK3cM

I lost track of the McGarrigle sisters for a while as I went through the throes of motherhood, but reconnected with them when I discovered Rufus Wainwright, and a little later, Martha Wainwright. In their music, I could hear some of the strains of Kate. I loved the McGarrigle Hour album, and I pored over the family photos as if they were my own.

I put up photos and clippings of Kate and Anna and Rufus on my bulletin board, and my kids teased me about being “obsessed with that family.” The McGarrigle-Wainwrights serve as a mirror for me of my own aging, my own journey through family, where I’ve come from, where I may be going, and my own work as an artist.

Like me, Kate put her kids before her career. She could have made dozens of albums over her 40 year career, but only made 12. Just yesterday, gazing at her first album cover, I noticed the note on the bottom corner of the back, thanking someone for looking after “Little Rufus” while they were in the studio. NPR cited a story of Kate standing up a promoter to take her kids to a puppet show. I found a great clip of a documentary featuring young Kate and Anna and little toddling Martha and big brother Rufus.

She stuck close to home and did her own thing. She made music on her own terms, She wasn’t at all trendy. She just kept her own vibe strong and clear and we came to her.

And we still come to her, the music fresh as ever. For three nights now, I’ve been listening to her records and weeping. It’s as if each song was preparing us for her death, opening us up to her big heart, bringing us in, only to tell us she has to go. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5OiMfM3txk&feature=fvw.

May Kate McGarrigle always live on through her music. May her children soar and sing on her wings. Bless your heart and your music, Kate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xzwJVNTNKs

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Better Late Than Never Irreverent Holiday Letter 2009

2010-01-07T16:27:00.003-06:00

Our friend Tina in Connecticut is giving us one final chance to get back on her Christmas card mailing list. We were banished years ago for lack of reciprocation, and she was pretty pissed off when we saw her this summer and she heard about the birth of our third child (19 years ago).

So here is our lame attempt to stay in touch with friends far and wide. Originally I intended to make a 60-second home video and email it to you all. You know, kind of like a commercial for the Hong/Krishoks with some quirky camera angles and an indie-rock soundtrack. But I didn’t have enough parental capital to coerce my kids into shooting it, and after all, at age 46, I have no idea how to make and edit digital video.

My next idea was to use what would have been an award-winning photo of Ed cleaning our bathtub and make cards out of it. See, I made a sweet deal with Ed back in August when Malachi, our youngest, moved out to Los Angeles to attend Occidental College. “This is the best offer you will ever get in your whole life,” I told him. I would clean toilets and sinks of both bathrooms, if he cleaned the bathtub. Ed totally agreed that indeed he had never had a better offer, and he readily accepted. This is what our lives have come to.

September passes, then October. The toilets and sinks are spotless. The bathtub? Well, I never use it. I belong to a hot tub co-op in the basement of my yoga studio and I use the showers and big cedar tub there. Meanwhile, Ed is in survival mode, Harley-Davidson hit hard by the recession and negotiating lay-offs and major restructuring.

Ahem, remember that deal we made?

So a few days before Christmas, Ed decides the time is finally right to clean the tub. After he showers, he dons rubber gloves, grabs the Tilex and a scrub brush and gets to work. Now you all know that when Ed commits himself to a cause, his Virgo self takes over and he devotes heart and soul to the task. He squatted naked in the tub (why mess up your clothes?) and got every molecule of mildew scrubbed out. The image was particularly Christmas-y because the tub and tiles white as snow, Ed shiny pink as Santa Claus, and the scrub brush, holly berry red.

Alas, we have no camera. The kids have requisitioned all that stuff and Meiko is flung way out in the Caribbean on the island of Martinique, Katja tucked away in her East Williamsburg apartment, and Malachi in LA. Otherwise I would no doubt be sending you a photo of our clean bathtub for Christmas.

Even though Katja and Malachi are here in Milwaukee for the holidays, camera-less, I had to ask them to email me a photo of themselves, cut and pasted here. See? They are real. Katja is 21, a junior at the Gallatin School of NYU, and Malachi, a first-year at one of Obama’s alma maters. We have adequately brainwashed them in leftist ideology and Katja is doing an interdisciplinary concentration in post-colonial theory, gender studies, and creative writing. Mal is thinking about majoring in Diplomacy and World Affairs and is playing baseball at Occidental. Meiko graduated from Barnard in May with a degree in Comparative Literature and is employed(!!) by the French government teaching English in Fort de France, Martinique. She didn’t come home but instead chose to camp out on the beach Christmas night. The nerve.

And me and Ed? Empty nesters after 23 years of attachment parenting, homebirths, breastfeeding forever, a parent always home with the kids, then years upon years of cheering for them at basketball games, cross country meets, orchestra concerts, spending every last cent on education, and, and, and…. Now we go to movies. We take walks along the Milwaukee River. We might even take a trip together one of these days. We’re building up to it.

Don’t worry, these are not yet ketchup years. Maybe not quite Sriracha, but certainly we’ve got quite a bit of kick. In fact, we’re just getting started in this next stage of our lives. Come and visit us. Last year we downsized into a brick bungalow along the river, but we still have space for guests.

So, we have no video, no photo of naked Ed in the tub, no family photo by our nonexistent Christmas tree, and this greeting, which contains surprisingly little news, is not in time for Chanukah, solstice, Christmas, Kwanzaa, or New Year’s. BUT just know that we are thinking of you and wishing you all a wonderful year to come, full of surprise and revelation and transformation and love. Maybe even a year of health care and human rights and employment. Why not reach high? 2010 is going to be BIG.

"Our wishes foretell the capacities within ourselves: they are harbingers of what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours, in secret. Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is already possible into dreamt-for reality." ––Goethe

Love and blessings, Peggy and family

FOR ANN-MARIE CLARK, 30 DECEMBER 2009

2009-12-30T21:25:00.002-06:00

When I came home from the hospice I loaded up the dishwasher as I heated up a meal of leftovers: some paella from Christmas day, alu gobi from Sunday dinner, roasted turnips and yams from Monday, and a bit of leftover Chinese take-out.

I listened to NPR as I ate: stories about the attempted bombing on the Northwestern flight, the new health care proposal, WWII conscientious objectors, and more. I scrubbed the stovetop as I listened. “It’s your turn to clean the stove,” I told Ed days ago. After heavy use over Christmas, with the kids home, and lots of friends over, the stovetop was greasy and crusty. I’d spent half an hour scrubbing it after Ed’s department party at our house, and didn’t want to do it again. But now Ed was in New York visiting his parents, and the stove still dirty.

I gave in and cleaned the damn stove, not willing to hold out for ideology any longer. I gave the stovetop my all, wiping away not only the most recent grease, but even old stains from months past. I took out a metal spatula and scraped away at the ceramic top.

I held you in my mind, Ann-Marie, as I scrubbed. After a year battling melanoma, and a remission I cavalierly assumed was permanent, your body broke out in cancer again, no longer responsive to treatments. Slowly, you let go, and after you came home from the hospital for Christmas, it became clear you were ready for hospice.

When I visited you today, you were well along the path. Unconscious in your bed, even my cold hands coming in from the December frost didn’t startle you. Head back, mouth open, one hand rested on your chest. Several of us gathered and sang for you, songs you knew well from the song circles you’d been attending and hosting for years.

Be like a bird
who halting in her flight
on a limb too slight feels it give way beneath her
yet sings, sings, knowing she has wings

Members of your meditation group came and chanted prayers. I offered a eurythmy Halleluiah. We shared Ann-Marie stories, talking about how much you love to laugh, how good a friend you are, what a compassionate therapist. Where would I start? After 20 years of friendship, what story would I tell? I chose to stay in a deep, rich silence, standing beside your bed, imagining where your inner work was leading you.

Driving home, however, I remembered an incident you were part of. It was at another hospice, where a student of mine lay dying, and several of us from the song circle gathered to sing for her. However, when we walked into the patient’s room, I realized this was not my student, and that in fact, I didn’t know this person at all. After a few confused minutes, we decided to sing for her anyway. Some friends and family members were in the room, and they encouraged us to stay. We realized that it really didn’t matter that we didn’t know this person, and in fact, we could’ve walked into any room of the hospice and offered to sing. On the way home, we laughed heartily over my blunder, while appreciating the magic that had transpired. Her family was so appreciative, and the patient responded to us in her own way, by raising her arm and turning her head.

And now we are singing for you. After all your years mothering, dancing, singing, cooking, healing, now you are still. You are leaving this earthly plane, you are leaving your young adult children and your husband, and hundreds of people who love you. You are on a journey we can only observe from a great distance, wishing you well, singing you songs, and chanting prayers.

Back at home, I keep scrubbing the stove, a privilege and burden of the living. Your hand, Ann-Marie, that I held as I sang, will never wield a spatula or kitchen sponge again. In your hospice bed, you have completely transcended dirty stovetops, unread emails, difficult clients, floods, and earthquakes. You are finished with walking along the Milwaukee River, dancing in the kitchen, writing poems. But death, too, is a good place. For you, my friend, my soul-sister, I scrub the stove spotless.

RETHINKING CHRISTMAS

2009-12-26T22:20:00.000-06:00

How do you take the most commercialized, commodified holiday of the year and truly make it meaningful for yourself, your family, and your community? This Christmas I am especially struck by the Christian message of humility contrasted with the secular message of consumption.

In Christian liberation theology, we are invited to identify with a Jesus who is poor, oppressed, and alienated. We see Jesus as a figure who enters suffering willingly and transcends it. At Plymouth UCC we recently watched an interview of black liberation theologist Dr. James Cone with Bill Moyers.

Do we identify with the oppressed or with the oppressor? James Cone asks. Do we identify with those in power or with the powerless? Our answer may affect how we choose to commemorate Christmas.

A Facebook friend recently mentioned how much she loves Christmas in Manhattan, and several people chimed in with “thumbs up” and agreement about the beautiful shop windows on Fifth Avenue. I couldn’t help bursting the bubble. “Seriously?” I commented, “I try to stay away from all that.”

Didn’t we have our crash? Aren’t lavish window displays soooo 2008? Do we still identify with the wealthy and powerful, having suffered at their hands, losing jobs and houses and health care and more? Do we still long for luxury, knowing how fleeting it all is, and knowing that the environment or developing nations have been exploited to produce many such goods? Remember GW Bush’s “haves and have-mores”? Surely we are over all that.

If we take Jesus’s suffering to heart, how does that affect the celebration of Christmas? Thankfully my kids, young adults, have matured beyond the hunger for new toys that used to dominate the holiday, and we have been able to keep the gift exchange low-key.

So how do we honor the holiday without the commercial trappings? How do we celebrate Christmas as common people, working people, simple people, honoring Jesus, who was born in a shed, for God’s sake?

As soon as my teaching obligations ended for the year, I went into a sewing frenzy. I set up my sewing machine in the dining room, went through my piles of scrap fabric, and sewed: 2 pairs of yoga bloomers, 6 yoga mat bags, 5 pranayama bolsters, and 1 one grocery shopping bag, so far. When the kids were little we used to make dozens of candles to give to friends. I find that making things serves as a wonderful foil to consuming, which can often feel more like destroying. Instead of destroying we are creating. We also used to make handmade Christmas cards, loving inscribed with personal messages. Since the kids have gotten older, this tradition fell by the wayside, but I’m determined to send cards again this year. I also made quite a few cds of my favorite podcasts over the past year, from favorite public radio programs such as Speaking of Faith and Radiolab.

We celebrated Christmas day with our second annual film festival, with each member of the family selecting a film. I invited my whole local email list of 200 friends, and quite a few came by, including Jews and atheists, those without family in town, and several members of my favorite demographic—older single women.

Not only at Christmas, but throughout the year, can we take on the point of view of the oppressed rather than the oppressor? Can we live like Jesus each day? Can we identify more with those who suffer than those who inflict suffering? Can we stop imposing suffering on others and instead be willing to take it on ourselves? What about people of color and women, who are already at a lower level of privilege, can we still embrace suffering? Is it appropriate to do so? Please consider all these questions with me, and examine them through these Holy Nights, and let me know what you come up with.

EMBRACING THE OTHER: A talk given at Unitarian Universalist Church West on 25 Oct 2009

2009-10-26T16:12:00.000-05:00

Like all of you I am a seeker of truth. I don’t have all the answers but I have a lot of good questions. So the question I pose today is: how do we embrace “otherness” within ourselves, our families, neighborhoods, schools, cities, nation, and planet? How do we honor difference while recognizing our inherent unity?

As social beings we are trained to look for allies, build coalitions, and come into community. Our development and survival as complex social animals depends on this skill. Like other primates like chimpanzees and bonobos, we become more independent as adolescents and at that critical time, go off to find our communities. I have 3 young adult children, ranging from first year college to recent college graduate, so I have been observing and trying to support from afar this rite of passage of moving out of the parent home and establishing community elsewhere.

The dark side of socialization is that we are trained, some might argue “hard-wired,” to be wary of “the other”—the people the next town over, the Minnesota Vikings, the rival high school. We may even dislike the grocery store across the street from the one we usually go to—“the staff there is not as nice” or “their vegetables look old.” In a consumer culture and economy, we’re even trained to cultivate such judgments about products. “Oh, I only drink such and such water”; “I will only use this brand of toothpaste.” These preferences or judgments are often more or less harmless.

Especially in times of duress we cling to community. We may hunker down, and surround ourselves with the familiar and comfortable. If you are of European ancestry (white) and you grew up in a town or city of people who look like you—your teachers, your banker, your pastor, your grocer, your doctor—a Lake Wobegon of racial homogeneity—and now your town is unrecognizable—perhaps there’s a bodega on Main Street, and next to that a Chinese restaurant, and the grocery is run by an East Indian family, and your doctor has a foreign accent and a name you have difficulty pronouncing, your high school alma mater is now ¾ African American, and worst of all your job has been shipped overseas to Mexico or China—your growing discomfort makes complete sense. Like I’ve said, we are social beings, and if our colony is shrinking because jobs are moving away and peers are aging or dying, then we have strong reason for concern.

But when this growing discomfort turns into fear, when our amygdalae fire up and we click into reactive, emotional brain mode instead of analytical frontal lobe brain function, then things can get ugly. This is when fear of the other kicks in. And all too often, the other has brown skin, may be an immigrant, may worship differently from you, and is poor. Take one look at the health care debate, at the “tea parties,” the conservative backlash that was all over the media this summer to see how fear of the other manifests in mainstream culture.

The message on my telephone answering machine quotes Laura Ingalls Wilder, who said, “Persons appear to us according to the light we throw upon them from our own minds.” If the light from my mind that I throw to you is distrusting, you will look suspicious to me—maybe like that image of Obama in white-face painted like “The Joker.” If the light from my mind is fearful, you will look threatening to me, like suspecting any man of Middle Eastern descent a terrorist.

That is, our prejudices shape the way we view and experience the world. Our prejudices can be conflated with intuition or the sixth sense or “energy” and can contribute to our survival and well-being. But they can also be overactive or oversensitive, like an overactive immune system that results in chronic allergies. We can develop an “allergy” to the other, especially if we have been hurt repeatedly. “I’m never going to that store again.—they overcharged me,” we may say, or “I never take that street—there are always people running across it.” We may feel rejected or endangered or exploited by the other.

But if “the light we throw upon them from our own minds” is loving and trusting, we will not fear difference. Thus there are many white people who are not attending anti-Obama rallies. Why are they not concerned about, as conservative protesters vaguely attest, “the direction our country is going”?

For instance, I would guess that not many of you have attended the anti-Obama rallies and have little anxiety about a black man running our country. Why is this? I attest that it’s because you have learned, and are learning, to embrace the other. Of course this is a path, not an action. We have to practice embracing otherness over and over again, more and more deeply.

Now political and social progressives may ask, why even accept the distinction of otherness? Aren’t we all the same underneath superficial differences? On a biological/genetic level, race does not even exist. And class is utterly malleable. Why even acknowledge difference or otherness? Aren’t we perpetuating stereotypes and separation? Aren’t we post-everything now? Post-colonial, post-modern, post-racial, post-feminist?

True, race has no biological basis, but as a social construct, we see its effects in the US and all over the world expressed through status, rights, and differing levels of privilege. We have to acknowledge these differences in order to dismantle them. To say we’re post-racial is to live on a street where there are 5000 square foot mansions mixed with 500 square foot trailer homes and to claim they are the same. Deep down inside, they are all houses, one and all. But of course they are not the same, otherwise the residents of the mansions would gladly trade with the trailer home residents. The residents of both types of homes are equal in human worth, but not equal in social, cultural, and economic privilege.

Studies among macaques and baboons indicate that lower status monkeys have more cortisol in their bloodstream—that is they experience more stress than higher status animals. It’s easy to understand why this may be if we stop and think about it: they have less access to food, their offspring get bullied more, they get swatted, they get food pulled away from them, they have little choice in mating, they have to sleep in uncomfortable vulnerable spots.

But I’m not here to convince you of white privilege and the racial gap in the US. That data is straightforward and readily available. You can just GTS: “Google that shit.” (One excellent website: United for a Fair Economy, faireconomy.org)

As an Iyengar yoga teacher, my job is to help people become more aware. Aware of our bodies, actions, thoughts, feelings, and perceptions. Aware even of our organs, our breathing, to make the unconscious more fully conscious.. If we are really observant and honest with ourselves, we will notice that we experience different comfort levels in various settings. For instance compare your response to driving on North Avenue at 130th Street in Brookfield to North Avenue and 27th Street in Milwaukee. On N. 27th Street do you check your locks? Do you roll up your windows? Does your heart beat just a tad faster? Does your breathing subtly alter? This is our bodies experiencing otherness, experiencing difference. Of course if you drive here everyday, you don’t experience otherness here. My friend Young Kim is at Fondy Market and I’m sure he feels at home in the neighborhood. But this takes practice, repeated effort, trust and relationship-building.

I believe our task as evolving social beings is to make ourselves more comfortable with discomfort. I believe we should deliberately place ourselves in situations out of our comfort zone. Once that becomes comfortable, go to a new place and push the envelope further.

For instance, if you are white, place yourself in situations where you are the racial minority. Go to a black church, shop in a black or Latino neighborhood, ride the city bus, go to a foreign country and stay in a hostel or a 2-star hotel instead of a 5-star resort, work for an organization run by people of color, move into the central city where thousands of beautiful houses wait for refurbishing, teach for MPS.

But go not to convert, but to be converted. Go not to lead, but to follow. Go to educate yourself, not to educate others. Go in humility, not in pride. Go not to be loved, but to love.

The only way to dissolve the fear of difference is to immerse yourself in it. We have to acknowledge difference before we can dissolve it. I cannot stress this step in healing enough, especially to well-meaning liberals so eager for unity that huge, glaring differences in privilege are overlooked.

In order to embrace the other, we must embrace the other within. What does it mean to embrace the other within ourselves? In the film “Traces of the Trade,” a white family is in Ghana, researching their family’s legacy in the slave trade. They meet with a group of school children and engage in frank discussion with them about their ancestors’ role in slavery. A girl asks one of the white men, “Are you not ashamed?” Meaning, aren’t you ashamed to show your face here after what your family has done to our people? He is speechless for a moment, and then responds to the child, “Yes, yes, I am ashamed.” For that moment he has come face to face with the other within.

Can we be present with our own shadow without indulging in defensiveness or self-flagellation? Can we witness ourselves with discernment but without judgment? At Alverno College, we have “Love Your Body” week. Often I will ask my students to try, for our entire 2 hour class, to not pass judgment on themselves, to not harbor a single negative thought about themselves. As women, it’s practically a social obligation to publicly criticize ourselves.

Can we just be present with compassion? Not even forgiveness, not yet, we mustn’t rush to resolve and put a bandage on wounds that have not yet been cleaned. Can we just be there, standing in our own shadow, standing before the mirror, seeing what we see with utter honesty?

As we practice embracing the other inside we can also practice embracing the other outside. These inner and outer practices are necessary and complementary. Rudolf Steiner writes,
In search of yourself,
The world contains the answer.
In search of the world,
The answer lies in you.

In order to embrace the other, we have to allow ourselves to be vulnerable, humble, and contrite. We have to make ourselves servants, and not expect to be leaders. If we accept leadership, it’s as servant-leaders.

One white artist friend commented that she wants to move into Milwaukee’s north side where she can have space for her art studio and keep living expenses low, but when she drives through those neighborhoods, kids throw empty cans at her car and she feels unwelcome. Another white friend who is married to a Palestinian Christian says that although she converted to Eastern Orthodox to marry him, she feels unwelcome in their church. One white teenage boy felt hurt at summer camp with Mexican boys who spoke Spanish to each other whenever they wanted to exclude the white kids.

All these are stories of white people experiencing resistance to the dominant culture, which they represent. In the US and arguably around the world, the people on top, although changing, still tends to be white. It makes us extremely uncomfortable to admit it, but we live in a white supremacy. White privilege continues to pervade every institution.

Not to justify the kids throwing cans, or the Palestinian Christians who didn’t notice the girl sitting by herself, or the Mexican kids talking only to themselves, but I say, “welcome to my world.” In the US, and quite sharply in Milwaukee, people of color routinely, daily, constantly put themselves into contexts where they are the only, or one of few brown people in a white society. I’ve had many a metaphoric can thrown at me since childhood from white people. I’ve had many white people ignore me, afraid I might not speak their language or have anything in common with them. I’ve had many occasions when white people speak in coded, idiomatic, colloquial language I did not grow up with and do not understand. But when the tables are turned onto white people, it’s such a new experience that white people may feel extremely discomfited, threatened, and even angry.

Instead, I beseech you, be there in that discomfort. Soften your heart, soften your breath, let tears come. Welcome this discomfort, be humble. In this place you are in solidarity with Palestinians in refugee camps, in solidarity with occupied Iraqis, with Native Americans in impoverished reservations, with generations in poverty in our own cities with no jobs, no health care, no way out. Be there. When I teach yoga, I coach my students to stay in that asana with discernment, with compassion, with steadiness, without judgment, with integrity. Be there. Stay there. Feel what you feel.

Only to the degree that we can feel what the other is feeling can we heal. That crumpled can thrown at the car can be viewed as an energy projectile. Instead of interpreting its meaning as “F- you,” can we instead understand it as, “I dare you to feel what I am feeling. I invite you to feel what I am feeling. I beg you to feel what I am feeling.” Only to the degree that we can empathize with another can we heal.

Otherwise we just pass the pain around, like a virus. I have a friend who works in MPS high schools teaching restorative justice. She told me an absolutely heart breaking story. A boy assaulted a teacher and the police were called in. A skillful and compassionate teacher was able to talk with him and calm him down. The police were able to escort the boy out of school without handcuffs. However on the way out of the building he ran into a girl, 9 months pregnant, whom he knew. He went up to her and punched her in the stomach. She began having contractions and an ambulance was called. The boy was handcuffed and taken away in the squad car.

Whatever the boy was experiencing that day, he passed on to the teacher. He was able to calm down but not to fully process the pain, because then he passed it on to the girl and her baby. The baby will bear trauma, and where will that pain go? The pain of the boy is also our pain.

We must stop the cycle. We must stop, witness, and hold the pain, process it, then transform it. We transform it into philanthropy, political action, vegetable gardens, artwork, blogs, and so forth. In this manner, we are all called to be bodhisattvas. We are here to heal. It is that simple. As we heal ourselves we heal the other, as we heal the other we heal ourselves.

To close I have a prayer by Rabbi Harold Schulweis:

God is not in me nor in you but between us.
God is not me or mine nor you or yours but ours.
God is known not alone but in relationship.
Not as a separate, lonely power, but through our kinship, our friendship. through our healing and binding and raising up of each other.
To know God is to know others, to love God is to love others, to hear God is to hear others.
More than meditation, more than insight, more than feeling, between us are claims, obligations, commandments: to act, to do, to behave our beliefs.
I seek God not as if God were alone, an isolated person. He or She, a process, a power, a being, a thing. I seek God not as if I were alone, a thinker, a mediator, a discrete entity.
I seek God in connection, in the nexus of community. I pray and celebrate the betweeness which binds and holds us together.
And even when I am left alone, I am sustained by my memory of our betweeness and the promise of our betweeness.
God is not in me, or in you, or in God’s self, but in betweeness and it is there we find the evidence of God’s reality and our own.

May it be so.

CROWS, GATES, AND WHITE PRIVILEGE

2009-07-28T16:17:00.000-05:00

Recently on NPR, Robert Krulwich did a piece on crows and their ability to recognize humans. The story featured two researchers who band baby crows, then undergo outright hostility from the crow community. The crows yell at the men even if they’re on the other side of town or playing tennis, circling overhead and scolding.

One researcher decided to wear a caveman mask when he banded crows, and noticed that every time he wore the mask the crows would find him and scold him. So he tried getting others of different sizes and gender to wear the mask, and sure enough the crows scolded them too. He tried a Dick Cheney mask, but the crows didn’t respond to it. He even tried wearing the caveman mask upside down. The crows would twist their heads around to peer at the face then start scolding again.

The researchers concluded that the reason why crows recognize humans is because their survival depends on it. Crows have to learn who the friendly and unfriendly people are. One person might feed them, another shoot them. Humans, on the other hand, have a difficult time telling crows apart. On NPR they created a crow lineup of photos and sure enough Steve Innskeep couldn’t tell them apart.

As a person of color I’ve learned to size up people pretty quickly, and to gravitate toward some and stay clear of others. You could say, like the crows, that my survival depends on this evolutionary skill. As an Asian woman, my survival may not be staked as high as an African American man’s survival. However in a white-dominant society, those who do not fit the mold have learned to watch their backs.

But white privilege means that Caucasians don’t have to recognize me. I can be just one of those nice/smart/sweet/petite Asian girls. After all, unless I’m their surgeon, the survival of whites in America doesn’t depend on my being friendly to them. In a white supremacy, whites can pretty much go where they want, avoid neighborhoods that make them uncomfortable, and say and do what they want without having to expend effort getting to know people of color.

How many times have I not been recognized? Once I taught a poetry workshop and afterwards a white student told me there was another Peggy Hong in Milwaukee who was also a poet. He saw her perform a few weeks ago and thought I should meet her. No, I gently corrected him, there is not another poet named Peggy Hong in Milwaukee. Yes, he insisted, indeed there is, what a wild coincidence, and on and on. Even though he’d just spent two hours looking at my face he could not recognize that I was the same person he’d seen previously, OR he was assigning my name to another Asian woman poet, thus conflating us.

Another time, I said hello to a white neighbor at my child’s school event. We’d lived across the street from him for six years and he stared completely blankly at me. Even after I explained to him how we knew each other—I’m Meiko’s mom, I live at 4061—he drew a blank. In fact we teach at the same college and I’ve seen him around campus, but I didn’t even try to explain this to him: too much work.

Many people in their most honest moments admit they have difficulty telling people of other races apart. One needs continuous exposure and lots of practice. Why bother if you don’t have to?

And finally we arrive at Skip Gates at his home in Cambridge, where his neighbor failed to recognize him entering his own house. Lucia Whalen was walking down the street from her workplace at Harvard Magazine at 7 Ware Street. An elderly woman stopped her, concerned about the men on the porch of 17 Ware pushing on the front door. Lucia Whalen decided to call the police to let them know of this unusual occurrence. Apparently neither woman recognized Dr. Gates, neither as a public figure nor as a neighbor.

Many such incidents, taken in isolation, seem unrelated to race. But after the 5th, 10th, or 20th similar event, one would be in denial not to see a pattern.

Every Asian American child has had the experience in school of kids or teachers mistaking them for someone else, or of being lumped together with the other Asians. Teachers can often get away with not really knowing their students individually, but students must know their teachers. Just as students have to know their teachers and their pet peeves and predilections, people of color have to know the white people around them.

Gates stated in an interview that when he moved to Lexington, MA, he marched himself down to the police station to introduce himself. I live at this address, I drive a Mercedes, I work at Harvard… to make sure the police would recognize him. He admitted he had not introduced himself to the Cambridge Police and that he should have. But should that really be necessary?

I also went down to my local police precinct to introduce myself. On an ordinary Saturday evening a few months after we moved into a new neighborhood, a neighbor called 911 on us for a “suspicious vehicle,” a front storm door ajar, and a blinking light at the door (installed by the previous owner, it has been blinking for years, perhaps decades). My 18 year-old son was home alone and luckily found a bank statement to prove he hadn’t broken into his own house (his driver’s license didn’t have our new address). Lucky too he didn’t have friends over, especially, God forbid, black male friends.

After a series of frustrating phone calls with the police about this incident, I wrote a letter to them, explaining that I was an artist and activist who often hosted large gatherings of diverse friends. I also explained that we are a mixed-race family and that my young adult son lives with us. I delivered the letter in person and had a meeting with the captain of the precinct for a full hour. How many white people have to hold meetings with their local police department in order to avoid arrest or harassment?

Just as crows recognize us, can we also recognize our human brothers and sisters? Dismantling white privilege means giving everyone the same right to be truly seen, truly recognized.

A POST INAUGURAL VISIT TO GRACE LEE BOGGS: URBAN GARDENING AS RESISTANCE

2009-01-23T14:17:00.000-06:00

At Bush’s 2004 Inauguration, the city was packed with protestors. There was a carnival atmosphere with street theatre, marches, gigantic puppets, musicians, and constant call and response chanting. We stood packed in line for hours to be allowed to view the parade from a tiny section. (The rest of the parade route was virtually vacant.) Despite the hours waiting, there was never a dull moment.

This year, I wondered what we would do in line all those hours if the city wasn’t filled with protestors. Would we chant, or sing, or dance, or just stand there like cows? What was our role, now that “our guy” was in office?

I went to DC with a hope to bring attention to the plight of the Palestinians and pressure the new administration to change their policies toward the region. I expected demonstrations and rallies and vigils to protect the children of Gaza. Instead I found a city too busy celebrating. Everyone from Asian Americans for Progress to Democracy Now! to the SCLC was preparing for their $100-$1000/person galas. The left was in party mode.

Sure enough, on the morning of inauguration, thousands of folks stood patiently, obediently, and quietly in line waiting for our gates to open, clutching our precious purple tickets. Every once in a while someone would start a chant of “O-BA-MA!” or “Fire it up, ready to go!” But the chants would die out in 10-20 seconds from lack of response.

Instead what we found in our section was a sense of entitlement. “I’ve been here since 5am and you cannot cut in front of me”…..”I’m going to call my brother about this….he’s an agent!” Some people started to get claustrophobic and paranoid: “I gotta get out of here…what if someone does something crazy?” By 10am people began complaining. Little did we know that the reason we were stuck was because the purple gate had been closed due to a nebulous “security breach.”

But also, out of this chaos, community began to emerge. A young guy from California discovered that the logjam of people emerging from the metro was trying to get past us but getting stuck. He suggested we open a channel for them to pass through so we could also move. He enlisted help and 8 or 10 of us coached a line of pedestrians past our section. “Come on through! Watch your step…Single file….Keep moving!” we urged. This spontaneous grassroots effort shifted the energy and made it flow, made us active instead of passive, and helped others in need.

Gradually the cork popped and we broke through, only to find out we had to walk another half mile to the yellow gate. Many of those who’d stuck it out to this point became discouraged and left. It was already after 11am, and many had been there since before dawn.

Later that night we packed up to drive all night to Detroit, to make our pilgrimage to the legendary activist Grace Lee Boggs. The Boggs Center that day turned out to be a hive of activity, filled with activists and artists from far and near. Grace engaged us all in conversation, eager to hear reflections on the inauguration and how it related to our other projects and activities. At 94, she remains incredibly sharp, curious, deeply engaged, and attentive. She took notes on our comments for her column, for god’s sakes, as if what we had to say was as significant as her own opinions. I shared with her my question and concern about the left getting comfy if we’re not in protest mode. What can we do now?

Grace described how in the 1960s, civil rights workers went door to door asking people what their grievances were. “That’s old school,” she said, “Now we have to ask: what does our community need? And build from there.” She showed us the stack of books she’s working through which have to do with education, and shared with us that more and more she’s concerned about healing: healing ourselves and healing our communities. Grace summarized her own work as building community out of chaos.

We talked extensively about urban renewal through agriculture. How growing our own food and composting our own waste could lead to self-reliance, greater well-being, and vibrant communities. Gardening is the new protesting! Composting is the new resistance!

Where do we plan to go from here? Will we stand like cows at the inauguration gate, comfortable in our privilege and level of entitlement while getting nowhere? Will we watch Obama from afar and criticize him for not enough change fast enough? Will we withdraw into our cocoons, hypnotizing ourselves with cable TV and Facebook, smug in our electoral success?

The Obamas are in the (White) house. What will we create together? How will we transform chaos into community? Who dares to stop us now?

WHY INAUGURATION?

2009-01-22T21:43:00.001-06:00

On Saturday evening, we loaded up 2 cars with folks ranging from 13-45 years old and drove through the night to Washington DC. It snowed from Wisconsin to Maryland and we braved whiteouts in mountainous Pennsylvania, crawling at 25 mph, to finally get to my cousin’s house in Bethesda at noon on Sunday.

The 4 high school and college kids crammed into a guest room, tucked into sleeping bags. I slept on the living room floor, and Yvette and her son, Ramsey slept in another guest room.

During the 3-day whirlwind of inauguration and related events, we barely slept and barely ate. I barely did my yoga practice, early one morning before we left for the Civil Rights Prayer Breakfast. We had no time to read, no time for the kids to study for their upcoming final exams, no time to cook a decent meal, no time to check email. Meanwhile, my son Malachi got kicked off the Shorewood High School varsity basketball team for missing 2 practices, according to a text message from his coach.

Let me tell you, we sacrificed a lot to get to Washington for January 20, 2009. Why bother?

I’d never been tempted to attend an inauguration. I went to DC in January 2004 as a civic duty to protest the results of the election made controversial by Diebold et al, and to demonstrate with tens of thousands to declare, “Not my president! Not my war!” But I’d never gone to celebrate a presidency. When friends asked why I’d want to be at such a mob scene for a centrist politician, I answered that I just wanted to be there to breathe the air.

The buzz could be felt as far north as the swing state of Ohio. Stopping to buy gas around midnight outside Cleveland, I asked a woman in line, an African American in her 30s, if she was headed to inauguration. Now, I’m not the type to start up conversations with strangers in public places. I’ve watched my father-in-law chat up strangers in restaurants and such, and have attributed it to a certain level of coziness and familiarity, which comes with being a white man in a patriarchal white supremacy. But in that moment at the rest stop, I spontaneously reached out to this woman.

“Yeah, I’m headed down to DC,” she answered, with 5 children in her mini-van, ranging from 3 months to 7 years, driving by herself through the night to her mother’s in Baltimore while the kids slept.

I talked to other strangers at other rest stops, which became more crowded as we got closer to DC. We met folks from all the midwestern swing states, running on adrenaline just like us, to get a glimpse of the man we’d elected. We all shared a mission, as if we were all, hundreds of thousands of us, attending the same national convention. We shared an intimacy as well as a sense of national solidarity, honking at the cars with Obama signs in the windows and giving a thumbs-up on the highway.

I experienced a sense of belonging, which was new to me. As an immigrant, a person of color, and a woman, I’ve sometimes felt triply marginalized, a consummate outsider. This time, I felt I was attending my own party. No longer outside looking in, but an integral part of a national milestone.

In the car, we researched how many degrees of separation were between each of us and Obama, and learned that almost all of us knew someone who knew Obama, so only 1-3 degrees divided us. My brother was in his 7th grade class at Punahou, Yvette know someone who worked closely with him during the campaign, Cindy’s hairdresser’s friend coordinated locations for his campaign, and so forth. Somehow we all felt we had a piece of him, that he was our brother, our friend, our neighbor.

At inauguration itself, the moment that moved me to tears was not Obama’s speech, Alexander’s poem, nor Lowry’s prayer. The moment that moved me the most came at the least expected time. As the event was closing, Ramsey and I walked downhill into the crowd during the singing of the national anthem. I watched thousands of people with their hands on their hearts singing the song I typically ignore, the same way I try to tune out the flight attendant’s seat belt instructions so I can read my magazine. Who even likes the Star Spangled Banner, with its militaristic imagery and valorizing of battle? Plus, as an immigrant and Asian American I’ve always been “other,” never completely at home in the USA.

But looking into the faces of the multi-racial crowd, their eyes glued to the jumbo-tron, and lips moving in unison, I felt at that moment for the first time ever, that maybe this IS my nation, my home. It was frankly shocking to see Asian Americans so earnestly singing this vexing song, but I, too, as my tears flowed, engaged in that moment of belief that the promise of America just might include people like me. Can we be the land of the free?

Let’s get to work, friends.

More later….

A New Year’s Resolution

2009-01-12T15:11:00.000-06:00

Is it possible to feel, to truly experience and understand, the suffering in the world today? Even though I lead a protected life in an American city, can I go right out to the psychic knife edge of existence and put myself into the shoes of someone in pain, in trouble, in crisis? If we are one in spirit, how much can we feel each other? How far can we go with empathy?

And as I increase my capacity for empathy, can I hold someone’s pain without being swallowed up by it? Is it possible or ethical to hold someone and simultaneously keep them at arm’s length?

In the past I’ve allowed myself to become ill by taking on the suffering, trauma, and unresolved pain of others. In 2009, am I ready to go back out to the edge and not fall over, be overwhelmed, drowned, or ungrounded? Can I be with someone, near or far, named or unnamed, and be a friend or midwife through the pain instead of an enabler or rescuer? Can I experience this oneness as celebration rather than struggle? As lightness rather than heaviness?

These are my questions for 2009: my hesitant resolution.

“You’re brave,” my friend Marcia said, when I told her my resolution, “’cause you’re asking for suffering. And you’re going to get it if you ask for it.”

Well, we’re going to get it even if we don’t ask for it. But by asking for it, I’m making it conscious and willful. Unconscious suffering gets masked as shopping, partying, workaholism, and numbing out in front of the TV or internet. Unconscious suffering gets passed over and passed on, endlessly returning as part of a cycle. Unconscious suffering allows me to stay the same, and the world stays the same. Conscious suffering means I take on the questions and experiences that remove me from my comfort zone of the knowable and familiar, venture into new terrain, and hopefully come out transformed. Through conscious suffering we wrestle, dance, gestate, transform, and mold an experience into something completely different. We process it.

This is the key to changing society and the troubles of the world: to take the trauma which is ancestral and global (here in America we all carry the trauma of genocide of the indigenous people and the enslavement of Africans and much more) and to process it and heal it. As my friend Susan Winecki says, “I must bring forth into the light what lies dangerously hidden behind me in order to take the venom out of it and make it human, just like me. I believe this must be done with every living being–trees, toads, lichen, etc. All must be seen and touched and brought into relational awareness–and then we realize that we are the world, that the world is us and our duty to life is to heal that part of ourselves that we project onto others, to heal that part of ourselves that is our own darkness begging to be seen and touched and brought into light. As I heal myself, as I love myself, the world is healed.”

If I hold someone’s suffering I also hold their joy. Maybe this is what will sustain me in 2009. Certainly we can all increase our capacities for joy. Certainly we can celebrate with one another!

Here is a message from the Hopi Elders back in December, 1999, which could not be more relevant now:

"There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift, that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has its destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open, and our heads above the water. And I say, see who is in there with you and celebrate.

"At this time in history, we are to take nothing personally. Least of all, ourselves. For the moment that we do, our spiritual growth and journey comes to a halt.

"The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves!

"Banish the word "struggle" from your attitude and your vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration.

"WE ARE THE ONES WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR."

Oraibi, Arizona
Hopi Nation

PRAYER FOR GAZA: NO MORE VICTIMS

2008-12-30T15:06:00.000-06:00

How do we respond to human suffering and devastation? What do we do in the face of hundreds dying in Gaza, and over a thousand injured?

When I encounter suffering, it naturally brings up—mostly unconscious–memories of my own suffering. This is the root of empathy: connecting my pain to yours, and understanding that we bear pain for each other. But how do I respond next?

When I see photos of bombing victims, I may want to retreat to the litany of my own victim stories. I joined a Facebook group which suggests we turn our profile photos black to protest the current assault on Gaza, and I invited all my Facebook friends to participate. Not surprisingly, an acquaintance questioned this group, asking whether they also protest violence against non-Arabs, listing numerous Arab offenses over the years.

She’s completely right to question all forms of violence. But if I give in to the hobgoblin of equivalence when it comes to suffering and violence, I come that much closer to the mindset of tit for tat, eye for an eye. If I engulf myself in my own stories of victimhood, it enables the cycle of violence to continue.

It’s tempting to chant the mantra of victimhood. We have all been traumatized, to different degrees. While some have suffered far more than others, others may carry the legacy of trauma through stories told, retold, or denied and buried by parents and grandparents. When I bury myself in my own suffering, I close myself off to the suffering of others. I buy into my own victim stories, I invest myself in them, and I seek balance and redress. I justify revenge.

The respective victim stories dominate Israel/Palestine. Over the past few generations, the Palestinians, after living under occupation for decades, now identify with their victimhood to the same degree as the Israelis, which creates desperation, hatred, and hunger for revenge, promoting conditions ripe for suicide bombers and recruitment into militant groups. Not until we can lay down our own suffering and attend to the suffering of others will violence stop. Compassion and love are big enough to swallow up pain. Compassion for the other needs to outweigh our own victim stories.

Gandhi taught his followers to bear pain, to not run away from it, and above all not to retaliate in the face of pain. I cannot wait for the other to lay down their arms or for the tally to even out; I have to set the precedent. Through the path of nonviolent resistance, I strive to evoke empathy rather than anger.

Will I suffer? Likely. Will I be killed? Maybe. But since January, 2000, when the current Intifada began, 1173 Palestinian children have been killed, as well as 123 Israeli youth. How can we ask children to offer their lives if we’re not willing to offer our own? The path of nonviolence is not painless.

However, in addition to changing the circumstances that provoke violence–dismantling the settlements, restoring all rights–nonviolence is the only way to create lasting harmony. We continually work for justice, but even if justice is slow to come, we can apply the principles of nonviolence and strive to live them out.

I use my practice of yoga asanas to learn how to relate to pain. Without abdicating awareness, I learn to be dispassionate toward the temporary sensations of muscles stretching and contracting. I learn to be with pain and not fear it, taking homeopathic doses of pain. Through this work, I break down the layers of trauma, personal and ancestral.

What is my victim story anyway? As a victim, I identify with a part of myself which is illusory, temporary, and superficial. I mistake myself for the actor playing me on stage. In reality, I constantly shift, evolve, and transform as iterations and expressions of a universal spirit. I am the Korean American woman in Milwaukee, and I am the Israeli child, the Palestinian child.

Meanwhile, I sit cozily at my desk in my heated room. My belly is full, no bombs land near my riverside bungalow. I send emails and make phone calls to our president and State Department, but I’m not on a plane to Gaza to serve as a human shield or bandage wounds. And what of the suffering in Congo, Afghanistan, Darfur, Iraq? Not to mention the homeless in my own city, gun violence and the overwhelming violence of poverty? All I have this moment are these few words, my yoga practice and a constant prayer: open, open open my eyes, open my heart.

Racial Getting Married

2008-12-09T14:06:00.000-06:00

We took a family outing to the Downer Theatre on Thanksgiving weekend to see “Rachel Getting Married.” While I loved many things about the film, it also troubled me. My response has nothing to do with the much-discussed style of the Dogma 95 film-making, but with its little-discussed portrayal of race.

Here are some things I’m wondering:
Did Jenny Lumet write Sidney as black?
Were the black characters meant to be stereotypes?
Why is there no acknowledgement of race in any of the dialogue?
How might this film be different if it was directed by a black filmmaker?
Or a woman filmmaker?
Why samba dancers?
Finally, what’s with the saris?

It turns out screenwriter Jenny Lumet did not write Sidney as black. As a mixed race woman (the granddaughter of Lena Horne), she said “the only time I ever thought about the race issue when writing the script was when I thought about making the characters of Rachel and Kym the children of an interracial couple. But I decided not to because I was afraid people would say that that was the reason Kym became a crazy drug person.” (http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2008/10/04/in_family_screenwriter_sees_true_colors_of_connection)

Her only consideration of race was her fear of it being used as an unflattering stereotype. The casting choices were made by director Jonathan Demme. He initially chose a white actor to play Sidney, but that actor declined because of another project. Demme says he chose Tunde Adebimpe for being likable, for his “rock and roll allure….[and] I was excited by the fact that it made for an interracial marriage because that moves me.”

Now, ask any person of color if they’ve ever been selected for these reasons. We all know certain people of color are “likable,” cool with a “rock and roll allure,” and others are scary or geeky or too “ethnic.” One of the most common ways to describe Asian women is “nice,” as in “Oh, I know so and so. She’s soooo nice.” We are prized for our likability. That’s why we make such good nannies and maids and concubines. People of color can also be ingenious and daring and complex, but those movie roles are fewer.

And how many times have we been chosen because it makes the white people around us “excited” and moved? At one conference on multiculturalism, one well-meaning white friend approached me, her eyes nearly welling with tears, to thank me, with heart-felt sincerity, for being part of her community. OK, you’re welcome, but why do I feel vaguely colonized?

The casting of Adebimpe pleased me, except the script didn’t refer to his race at all, the same way the saris worn by the bride and bridesmaids was never explained or addressed. I did notice that all the really grounded characters, the caretakers, the organizers, the kind but firm rehab nurse, the soldier, were people of color. Even the toasts to Sidney were about how dependable and stable he was. Which is to say that the brown characters were idealized, not three-dimensional. Even flattering stereotypes diminish us. “I thought all Koreans were smart,” someone commented when I did something goofy. Demme could afford to make Sidney black, because he was flat. Basically they were all bit roles to give the movie a certain look and feel, like we see in advertising.

The filmmaker and writer claim the interracial marriage is not worthy of mention. They have friends of every race and know interracial couples and they don’t sit around talking about race. Does this remind you of the Obama campaign? After Obama’s lauded speech encouraging us to have a national dialogue on race, his campaign made no more mention of race until the acceptance speech. The only voices on the media addressing race were ones insisting that it didn’t matter at all. But to me it all felt like denial.

It’s OK to be colored, runs the subtext; it’s even super cool and desirable to be colored, as long as we can pretend not to notice. As long as we don’t have to, God forbid, talk about it.

Not noticing stuff and living in denial is after all a theme of “Rachel Getting Married,” a movie about a dysfunctional family. The problem is the filmmakers didn’t see their multi-culti paste-ons that way. The filmmakers created the film in a cloud of denial like the one their characters live in.

Demme set out to portray “the best, best, best wedding ever.” At the altar, Sidney sings a worshipful love-at-first-sight Neil Young song to Rachel. That felt odd to me, until I realized, oh yeah, Sidney was written as white. Lumet commented that the song in the script was by AC/DC but the rights to the song were outrageously expensive. Demme called on his friend, Neil Young, who accepted a pittance for the use of his song. In fact, Demme invited all his musician friends to the backyard barbeque. The party was a checklist of cultural appropriation and exoticizing. Those black people, aren’t they fabulous entertainers? Oh, look, a token Asian couple! But just one is plenty. And aren’t those dark-skinned dancers in their thongs gorgeous!

Where is the boundary between appropriation and assimilation? When can I wear a sari without being Indian? Not long ago in America, Italians were considered people of color, and Italian food was spicy and exotic. Now, we all eat Italian food weekly if not daily, while Italian-Americans are included in every sector of mainstream society. But Italians are European, and many are fair-skinned. Have Mexicans benefitted from the same process of assimilation? Have the Chinese or other Asians?

Do we live in the world that Lumet and Demme have created? Are we welcome at this wedding party? Are we beyond race? Am I a racist for asking these questions?

Let’s repair the racial harm we’ve done, stop profiting from exploitation of people of color, give immigrants rights, create real equality, and then and only then, can we dance samba in our saris.

2008-12-03T12:56:00.000-06:00

Here is a new recipe we tried out at Thanksgiving. Unfortunately we baked it last minute and didn't get to refrigerate it. However, the next day, it was fabulous. It's vegan if you use dairy-free chocolate chips, sugar-free, and can be gluten-free as well. Everyone can eat it!

Chocolate-Pecan Pudding Pie with Nut Crust
adapted from Bryant Terry’s recipe at http://www.theroot.com/id/48938

Crust:
1 cup almonds
1 cup pecans
1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour or gluten-free flour
1/8 teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 cup dry unsweetened coconut
8 large dates, pitted and chopped
1/4 cup coconut oil

· Preheat oven to 325°F.
· Combine the almonds, pecans, flour and salt in a food processor with a fitted metal blade, and grind to a fine meal. Transfer to a large mixing bowl and add the coconut. Place the dates and coconut oil in the food processor and mix until the dates form into a gooey mass, about 1 minute. Add the dry ingredients back into the food processor and process until all ingredients are mixed well and starts to form into dough.
· Transfer the dough to a 9-inch pie tin. With clean hands, knead for a minute or so to ensure that the oil is evenly distributed. Press the dough into the pan, making sure that the bottom, sides and rim are covered. (The sides should be slightly thicker than the rest of the tin.) With a fork, prick several holes into the bottom of the crust. Set aside.

For the filling:
3/4 cup soy milk
1/4 cup arrowroot
1/2 banana
3/4 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup coconut oil
1 1/2 cups pecans, chopped
1/2 cup dry unsweetened coconut

· In a blender, combine the soy milk and arrowroot and purée for 30 seconds. Add the banana and purée for 15 seconds. Set aside.
· Place a mixing bowl over a small pot of simmering water to melt the chocolate chips and coconut oil (solid under 76 degrees). Pour in the blender contents, maple syrup, vanilla, pecans and coconut. Mix well. Scrape into the crust with a rubber spatula and spread evenly.
· Place the pie on a cookie sheet. Bake for 25-30 minutes, until filling jiggles only slightly. Cool, then refrigerate at least two hours.

Generosity in an Age of Uncertainty

2008-11-26T14:37:00.001-06:00

(I wrote this for the December 2008 newsletter of my church, Plymouth UCC.)

I have everything
Nothing do I lack
All I give comes back
--sung to the tune of “Ego Sum Pauper”

I learned these alternative lyrics from a woman steeped in feminist, Earth-centered spirituality. I sing it to myself as a reminder of our interconnection and interdependence with other beings. I sing it to remember that nothing is ever lost or gained, but part of an infinite cycle of regeneration.

But do I really believe it? Can I truly give as the Earth does, ever recycling and renewing? Can I give as Jesus does, confident that there will be enough loaves and fishes for all? Can I give as Jesus asks us to in Matthew 25: clothing, feeding, and nurturing all those in need?

Too often, I proceed from a sense of scarcity rather than abundance. I want to hunker down and protect my own rather than share my resources. After all, how can I be sure my own needs and the needs of my family will be met if I don’t hoard and scrimp? Can I continue to pledge to the church, keep up community donations, and do volunteer work? Perhaps this is the year to cut back on both spending money and giving time.

I pray that, in economically troubled times like these, God will imbue me with the assurance that I can indeed give. I pray for a security that goes deeper than human ability.

Some part of me recognizes that operating from a paradigm of lack only reinforces it. After all, money is meant to circulate—that’s why it’s called currency. It’s meant to flow through me, into action, into the world. What happens if I build a dam of fear instead?

In these times, we are tested in our resolve and faith. The urge to clutch is the signal to let go. I remind myself that generosity is a description of generating, of creating. What can I create if I am tight-fisted? What garden can I grow, what poem can I write, whom can I befriend without a spirit of sharing? “Closed hands: closed minds,” observes my yoga teacher in India, Geeta Iyengar. Closed hearts, as well.

Sometimes I will not have the money to give. But what other resources do I have? An extra room to house someone? Extra clothes? Can I still give my time and energy? Perhaps these gestures mean even more than money. Can I act in a spirit of abundance and share my small loaf of bread and can of tuna?

Divine security manifests as a beloved community. If we recognize our interconnection, giving to another is equivalent to giving to ourselves. Generosity results from the assurance that I will be cared for just as I care for others. Perhaps most importantly, a practice of generosity teaches us how to be gracious recipients. May we all give and receive generously.

PROTECTING OBAMA FROM HARM THROUGH THE PRACTICE OF YOGA

2008-10-31T06:42:00.001-05:00

Yoga is a practice of identifying more with the eternal than the ephemeral.

We begin with the physical body, becoming more aware of the weight on our feet, the asymmetries between right and left sides, and the tightness in our shoulders. We refine ourselves, becoming stronger, more flexible, and more balanced.

We notice our minds, and the chatter it's so difficult to slow down. We start to observe our lapses into negativity and cynicism. We notice how often we become judgmental, and how hard it is to stay in the present moment, as we dig up old hurts or plan for a better future. We take note of our fears and anxieties and deep-rooted insecurities. As we observe ourselves with compassion and detachment, these tendencies loosen their hold on us.

As we work on ourselves, we recognize that who we think we are is ever-changing and, frankly, inconsequential. Angry one second, happy the next; confident one day, the next day crushed. What does it matter? As we practice yoga we identify more with the eternal, universal Self than the temporary, costumed self.

We become more interconnected with the Eternal in all sentient beings as well. We recognize the divine in all life forms, and realize that we are all One. If we are all One, then we are each other. We are manifestations of each other, co-creating the world in which we live.

When we encounter ugliness, hatred, racism, and violence in society, we need to recognize that the perpetrators are basically manifestations of the consciousness we are creating. We ARE the white supremacists fantasizing about assassination. We ARE the young people feeling so disenfranchised they don't bother to form an opinion and vote. We ARE the neglected elderly voting out of fear and lack of information. We have formed them out of our consciousness. We conveniently place them outside of ourselves so we can criticize them and feel smug.

Let me tell you a story. One day, when our kids were tiny, my husband Ed and I were bickering in the kitchen. It was not an extraordinary argument, just a run-of-the-mill disagreement that couples often have, especially under the stress of caring for little ones, etc. We were engrossed in heatedly trying to convince the other that we were right when I looked over at Meiko, who was 3. She reached over to 1 year-old Katja with her hands around her neck. Meiko wasn't actually choking Katja, but she was enacting what she was feeling and witnessing in the kitchen at that moment. Ed and I stopped in our tracks, immediately getting the message.

In the brilliance and spontaneity that children embody, Meiko showed us exactly how youth, being the most emotionally vulnerable in society, will manifest the tension and violence of their environments. Certain people are more sensitive and susceptible than others. We need to thank them, for being the canary in the coalmine, and have compassion for the important roles they are playing in society as our teachers, as we provide means to help them heal from the trauma they are working through.

When we encounter these situations, we must look at ourselves. We have to be brutally honest with ourselves, as yoga teaches us to be. What racial fear or hatred have I buried in myself? What pain am I harboring? What am I afraid of? The more we can work through our own trauma, the less our children and most emotionally vulnerable in our society will act out on our behalf. We must embrace and look at our own shadows, with compassion, nonjudgment, and objectivity.

To protect Barack Obama from harm, each of us must take on this inner work. We are simply microcosms of the macrocosm of society. To create a truly blessed community, we work through the community which is our own body, for the body is an ingenious processor of trauma. By transforming the trauma in our bodies into compassion and love, we will change society. Patanjali states in the yoga sutras that around one who is truly nonviolent, hostilities evaporate.

More love, more Adho Mukha Svanasana.

Pay-to-Behave

2008-10-31T06:22:00.000-05:00

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95949912&sc=emaf
Did you hear this story on NPR?
The fact is that middle and upper class folks have always rewarded their children for doing well, with allowance, gifts, privileges, and more. And these kids have always understood that doing well in school = college = skills and opportunities = meaningful career. If you come from a family that does not embrace that value system because it was never accessible to them, should you be shortchanged? If you have an overworked, overwhelmed single mom who never had the chance to go to college and is in debt, who's going to reward you for that hard-earned A? Who's going to take you out to dinner? I say let's give the program a try. Give a sliver of that $12,000/kid that goes to school systems to the kid.
I teach in a women’s college with many nontraditional students who are working full-time, single parenting, and going to school. They should get paid for the huge sacrifice they are making! On the other hand, my 2 college student daughters can focus exclusively on school, because my husband and I are paying their tuitions. Essentially we “pay” them for concentrating on their studies.
On another level, paying kids for performance in school is a form of reparations. This NPR story is about a predominantly African American school. As a nation, we are in debt to populations who were historically and institutionally deprived of rights. We can't pay the victims, but what if we gave that money to their children? Too late to do this? Give it to the current generation.
This reminds me of the debate on the current government bail-out of Wall Street. What if instead of 700 billion to the banks, we gave that money to the people in foreclosure themselves? What if we gave it to those who have the least instead of those who have the most, as Howard Zinn suggests? (http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081027/zinn)
What if we paid the kids instead of throwing more money at the system? What if we paid the slaves instead of the foremen and plantation owners? Of course we need to support the public school administrators and teachers, and not just "bribe" kids. But why not do both? The "bribe" is basically a way of developing will and establishing new habits.
If parents are not teaching these skills for whatever reasons, the school needs to step in. Geoffrey Canada demonstrates at Harlem Children's Zone that if poor kids are given the same opportunities middle class kids have always had, they can succeed as well. Listen to the interview with him on This American Life at http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=364.
I am frankly tired of people of privilege denying poor people the rights the middle and upper classes have always had.

REVITALIZED BUFFALO

2008-05-14T22:31:00.000-05:00

I just want to correct my prior assumption that the city of Buffalo was a relic. I drove around yesterday and visited Hallwalls in their new building on Delaware Avenue, popped in at Righteous Babe records, and found an amazing used bookstore on Allen Street, off of Elmwood, called Rust Belt Books. I could've spent all day tromping up and down Elmwood Avenue. It's good to see the young people on their bikes, and lots of rehabbed turn-of-the-century houses, fliers for concerts and plays and poetry readings, and other signs of a vital community. It was like Williamsburg, except lots cheaper. Glad to see people are still moving into Buffalo!

2008-05-12T21:38:00.000-05:00

I'm writing this from a motel room in Amherst, NY, where I've come for my dad's memorial lecture by some guy from Harvard (title: "A History of Vasopressin-Induced Water Flow in Transporting Epithelia"--I have to attend but I'm bringing a book). I just got back from a so-so Indian dinner by myself in a strip mall, and after that I went for a drive to see our old digs.

I feel very tenderly toward suburban Buffalo now, as conflicted as I was growing up here. Nine years after my dad's death, and seven years after my mom, practically every street holds memories. I feel like I'm surrounded by ghosts: images of my mom and dad and brother John (who died at 25), memories of growing up here, and even my kids as babies and little ones are here. I parked the car near Mom's house and walked around the neighborhood. Everyone had those awful yellow pesticide signs on their weed-free lawns. Like Milwaukee, everyone was out, eager to take advantage of the 60s temperature.

When I look at Mom's and Dad's old house on Deer Ridge, I remember all those summers we drove up. I remember my mom ingratiating herself to her neighbor with the swimming pool so that our kids could swim over there. I remember my dad in his dementia letting himself into the house next door and sitting down to watch the Buffalo Bills. I actually walked up to my parents' house and rang the bell. The house was dark and I suspected no one was home, which was why I had the courage to go up and ring. From inside a dog barked, but no one answered. Knowing no one was home, I felt a little freer to walk around the house, peek into the back yard, etc. So many stories and memories flooded back. One year we had a clown birthday party for Meiko in the back yard. My mom met her at some church meeting or something, an older white lady, who it turned out did clowning on the side.

I drove up to the middle school and high school, then to the house on Robinhill where we grew up. I tried to find my best friends' houses but I could not recognize them. All the old people have moved out, and it's a whole new slew of young families in these houses. The houses have been re-sided and remodeled beyond recognition.

I sort of understand why people stay in Shorewood for so long and even come back. Especially when your loved ones pass away, geography takes on a resonance that is almost unbearably tender. Who would think those subdivisions could elicit real emotion even in me?

Also, at our last two salons, we've been discussing race, and I'm having all these flashbacks about my racial coming-of-age, so to speak, when we moved to Buffalo and became minorities for the first time. There's Jane L's house, the only other Asian girl at Heim Middle, whose mother, it was rumored, was a Jehovah's witness and crazy. There's Linda W's house, where I went for the birthday party and gave her a green rubber statue of a Chinaman with the caption, "I rov you rots and rots." Which reminds me of the joke Jie-L told in yoga class with the cross-country team: How do Chinese people name their kids? They throw silverware at a wall and name their kid after whatever sound it makes. How easily we take on the attitudes of the dominant culture, or is it a pretense in order to protect ourselves?

What's weird about Buffalo is that now it seems that the suburbs have become Buffalo, and the city itself is a relic. Amherst, Williamsville, Getzville, and Tonawanda ARE Buffalo now. Everyone lives out here. Which is a shame because it's a completely car-dependent culture, and the landscape chemically-dependent. There are tons of malls with gigantic, sprawling, largely empty parking lots. On the positive side, it's become quite racially diverse. Far more people of color everywhere than I remember growing up.

I went to the cemetery today where we have 4 family graves: my brother John, mom and dad, and Caleb, who was my brother's stillborn son. It was maybe the first time I've visited the graves alone, and it took me a little while to find them. There was only 1 other person at the cemetery and I was trying to give her space, but it turned out that she was visiting and tending the grave immediately adjacent our family plot. It seemed a bit intrusive and oddly coincidental to be right next to her as she was weeding and trimming the hedges, so I took a little walk around the cemetery (which also had just been sprayed). I saw and heard robins and red-winged blackbirds, and many other birds I don't know yet. The trees have tiny little leaves--picture little 2-inch oak leaves, so it was relatively easy to spot the birds. After the other visitor left, I sat on John's stone, sang songs, and left stones on each grave, a Jewish tradition, I'm told. It was wonderful to just hang out at the cemetery. Whenever I'm there with others we only stay a few minutes. This time I was able to just be there, feel, remember, and pray.

Tomorrow I see my uncle Waun-ki and brother Robert and go to the university for the festivities.

Basking in the shadows of our former selves,
pkh

MY PLAY IS FINALLY OPENING

2008-05-08T07:26:00.001-05:00

COME AND SEE OUR PLAY!!!! RECEPTION OPENING NIGHT AT THE THEATRE! You all know Deb and I have been toiling away on this project for 3 years. It's finally going to be up. Come and see what we've been developing. I hope you will find it edifying, moving, and inspiring. Tell friends! We also invite community groups to table in the lobby, and groups of 10 or more get a 20% discount. Contact Jackie for details. much love and thanks for your continued support--peggy

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 7, 2008

Contact Jacqueline Lalley
847-345-4823
smallpieces@invitingpositivechange.com

Women's Voices Bring Iraq War Home in "Small Pieces Fly to Heaven"

MILWAUKEE, WI--In "Small Pieces Fly to Heaven," running June 5-8 at Off-Broadway Theatre, 342 N. Water Street, an ensemble led by Peggy Hong and Deborah Clifton shares the anguish, beauty, humor, and common ground of women in the face of the current Iraq war.

Based on Iraqi women's blogs, memoirs by US military women, and interviews with American civilian women, "Small Pieces Fly to Heaven" uses poetry, movement, and performance to explore the Iraq war from the "back lines," where women keep life going. What is the effect of war, on the ground, for ordinary citizens, whether Iraqi or American? How are women in America impacted, far from the battlegrounds of Iraq? Do Americans even remember that we are at war? In a drawn-out war with no end in sight, how do Americans and Iraqis move forward? "Small Pieces Fly to Heaven" makes a distant war personal and immediate.

"Small Pieces Fly to Heaven" is an ensemble project led by Deborah Clifton of Theatre X and Peggy Hong, Milwaukee Poet Laureate 2006-2007. The ensemble developed material through an ongoing salon of local women artists meeting for over a year. Contributors and performers include Alexa Bradley, Grace DeWolf, Yvette Mitchell, Rachel Raven Lily Sophia, Mary Lou Lamonda, Dena Aronson, Libby Amato, Maggie Arndt, Megan Kaminski, and Erin DeYoung. Sets by visual artist Fahimeh Vahdat draw attention to social and spiritual issues and draw on her personal experience as an Iranian refugee. Clifton directs the production.

"War dehumanizes us, but this play brings us into intimate contact with full human beings: women living through the war, both civilian and military," says Hong. "Through their stories, we find beauty, humor, anguish and common ground. As we realize our interconnection, we can hopefully move forward."

"Small Pieces Fly to Heaven" plays June 5-8, Thursday and Friday at 7:30 pm, Saturday at 8 pm and Sunday at 2 pm, at Off-Broadway Theatre, 342 N. Water St. Tickets are $20 or $16 for students and groups of 10 or more. To purchase, call 414-278-0765. Previews are June 2-4 at 7:30 pm and are open to the public.

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Interviews and photos are available; call 847-345-4823 or email: smallpieces@invitingpositivechange.com.

WRIGHT, OBAMA, AND YOU AND ME

2008-04-30T16:35:00.000-05:00

I cried yesterday, as I heard Obama denounce his pastor. His story seems to be unfolding like an epic Greek drama.

For this man who was abandoned by his Kenyan father to be forced to throw his spiritual father under the bus (as they most unpleasantly say) broke my heart. And for Wright, who loves Obama, to be pushed under, hurts as well.

Even more so, Obama’s press conference on Tuesday, April 29, sounded to me like a rejection of the progressive social justice platform altogether. Frankly, I felt personally rejected, as a woman of color with radical leanings, tossed under the bus along with Wright. Bounce, thud.

What does it take for a black man to be elected president of the US? What must he compromise? Is it worth the price? How can he assuage the mainstream while sincerely working for change? Can he have it both ways?

Now I am under no illusion that Barack Obama is a progressive. His voting record in the Senate is to the right of Hillary Clinton’s. Still, I voted for him because he represents the strongest potential for changing politics-as-usual.

The fact is, Jeremiah Wright, Jr. speaks my mind more closely than Obama does. I will do my own research on HIV on African Americans, but aside from this comment, I agree 100% with everything I’ve heard over the past years, months, and days.

None of our major 3 candidates addresses the elephant in the living room: the American empire. None address the problem of the corporate-run media, not to mention the corporate-run war and the corporate-run US Congress. None challenge the basic power structure of this nation.

We need both the Jeremiahs and the Obamas. We need to acknowledge the dark: the reality of racism, sexism, and oppression still alive in America. And we need to embrace the light: to believe in change, to have something to hope for, and to work tirelessly toward our brightest potential.

John Nichols wrote the most refreshing commentary on the topic at http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/316575 . He blames the mainstream media for creating this debacle and for victimizing Wright. But I would go a step further. The MSM is only one result of our nation concentrating wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands.

We are in the waning days of capitalism. The great experiment found fruitful ground in the USA, and we’ve carried it to an unprecedented extreme, making profit from everything from education to water to airwaves to health care, and most painfully, war.

So where do we go from here? I’m a yoga practitioner—I have to practice optimism!

Howard Zinn reminds us that electoral politics is only a fraction of our responsibility as citizens at http://www.progressive.org/mag_zinn0308. Jesse Jackson reminds us that real change comes from a combination of litigation, legislation, and demonstration. [http://www.wpr.org/book/080427a.html] He retells a story of Harry Belafonte’s, about civil rights leaders in the 1940s meeting with President Roosevelt, laying out their agenda for equality. FDR told them that he basically agreed with everything they said, and instructed them, “now go out and make me do it.” Real change has to come from the people. We fortify and center ourselves through yoga practice so that we can creatively and effectively speak truth to power.

We can’t wait around for Obama or any other candidate to catch up with us. We can’t ask a retired pastor to be our bull-horn. We have to agitate, motivate, push and pull, and stand up for justice. Individually we can turn off our TVs, dig in our gardens, ride our bikes, reduce consumption, and increase community. I’m with Wright: whomever is elected, on November 5th, we have to be right there, demanding justice.

Now let me get out from under this bus….enough already.

Asana sequence, week 9, level 2-3

2008-04-01T07:42:00.000-05:00

pys II.6
amv/ams/uttan
paryankasana, 2 blocks
supta virasana/rope 1-2
ams
sirsasana
standing backbend, head to wall
standing bhujangasana to wall
viparita dandasana, chair
urdhva dhanurasana, seated on chair, hands to wall
urdhva dhanurasana, chair
dwipada viparita dandasana, chair, belt
urdhva dhanurasana/dwipada viparita dandasana
uttanasana, parsva
sarvangasana, ardha halasana
savasana

Asana sequence, week 8, level 2-3

2008-03-26T07:54:00.000-05:00

virasana, PYS II.4
amv/ams/uttanasana
supta padangusthasana, parivrtta
adho mukha vrksasana
sirsasana
ams/plank/chaturanga
vasisthasana
malasana
ekahasta bhujasana
akarna dhanurasana
paschimottanasana
salamba sarvangasana, halasana, ekapada, supta konasana
savasana

UU Podcast and Jeremiah Wright

2008-03-22T07:10:00.001-05:00

Apparently the First Unitarian Church records all their sermons. My talk last week can be heard at http://www.uumilwaukee.org/postings/category/guest-speakers

By the way, since Jeremiah Wright is so much in the press these days and has caused such intense controversy, the least people of open minds can do is give this man a chance to be heard. After all he has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates and many other mainstream accolades , which is to say, he's no David Duke (a comparison I have heard). I heard him speak at New York's Riverside Church and he is brilliant and compassionate. Here is a link to his 9/11 sermon in its entirety. I found it powerful and truthful and listened to it twice.
http://essence.typepad.com/news/2008/03/listen-to-rev-j.html

Asana sequence, week 7, level 2-3

2008-03-22T07:04:00.000-05:00

adho mukha virasana/adho mukha svanasana/uttanasana
adho mukha vrksasana
sirsasana, ekapada
ams to parsvottanasana
ams to parivrtta trikonasana
prasarita padottanasana
uttanasana
wall utthita parsva hasta padangusthasana
parivrtta upavishta konasana
parivrtta janu sirsasana
janu sirsasana
paschimottanasana
salamba sarvangasana, ekapada, halasana, supta konasana, urdhva mukha paschimottanasana
savasana

Asana sequence, Level 1, Week 6

2008-03-22T06:43:00.000-05:00

adho mukha virasana/adho mukha svanasana
ardha uttanasana, wall to virabhadrasana iii
supta padangusthasana i
vinyasa: tadasana, urdhva hastasana, virabhadrasana iii to chair, urdhva prasarita ekapadasana
adho mukha svanasana
upavishtha konasana
parsva uvk
janu sirsasana
paschimottanasana
salamba sarvangasana, ekapada, parsvaikapada, halasana, supta konasana
savasana

THE ARTS, PERSONAL PRACTICE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE

2008-03-18T06:29:00.000-05:00

Some of you suggested I post the sermon I gave at First Unitarian Church on 16 March. Here it is:

When I was invited to serve as Milwaukee poet laureate by the public library two years ago, I had some misgivings. I sort of tried to talk my way out of it. You see, after 9/11, the deaths of my parents, and the intensity of graduate school, I’d made a conscious decision to put poetry on the back burner. I felt, frankly, that there were more important tasks at hand. The nation and the planet were in crisis and all hands were needed to elect a progressive president, fix the voting machines, counter fundamentalism, prevent war, and so much more. I didn’t want to isolate myself at my desk for 3 hours, slaving away at a poem, which IF I managed to get it published, might be read by 200 people, then forgotten. I wanted to be out on the street, with my people, making change from the ground up.

Of course we can argue that the making of art in and of itself is a radical act. But I wanted to be radical like Gandhi, like Emma Goldman, like Angela Davis. I wanted to participate in civil disobedience and get arrested with Code Pink. Not just write about it.

So what actually IS the relationship between the arts and social change? Can a song or a poem or a dance change society, change the world?

I believe the bridge between art and social change is personal practice. With those activities we engage in daily to challenge ourselves and to grow. Your personal practice might be a daily, mindful walk through your neighborhood or a park. It might be “morning pages,” writing in a journal upon waking. It might be meditation or prayer. It might be playing a musical instrument or singing. It might take 10 minutes or 2 hours. It almost doesn’t matter what the practice is, only that we do it consciously and commit ourselves to it. A personal practice takes us from the known to the unknown, the finite to the infinite, the secular to the sacred, the individual to the universal.

I love the notion of practice. Not accomplishment. Not performance, not publication, but just practice. One of my mentors, senior Iyengar yoga teacher Chris Saudek, tells us that in yoga class, there are 2 things one never needs to say. One is “thank you,” and the other is “I’m sorry.” You see, we’re just practicing. Of course all our attempts will be imperfect. There’s no place for pride nor shame. We’re just practicing, putting forth our best effort moment by moment, trying to stay alert and responsive.

Novelist Eudora Welty described how she approached her writing each day with neither hope nor dread. When we come to our practice freed from expectations and judgment, we enter the open realm of possibility. Here, then, is the fertile, generative place of personal transformation. Persian poet Rumi says,

"Out beyond wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about."

The field: that is our place of practice.

But how can my little practice: a few minutes of meditation, some breathing, doing a series of yoga postures, create social change?

Let me tell you a story. One of my favorite public radio programs, Radiolab, produced at WNYC, did a show on music. They told a story that may be familiar to you about Igor Stravinsky. When “The Rite of Spring” premiered in 1913 in Paris, the dissonance and polyrhythms, and the very modern choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky suggesting fertility rites literally drove the audience crazy. They actually had shouting matches and fistfights in the aisles and the performance degenerated into a riot. I’d heard this story many times as an example of how powerful and iconoclastic art can be.

What I hadn’t known was the follow-up to the story, which was that “The Rite of Spring” was performed one year later, again in Paris, and this time it was met with adulation, and Stravinsky was carried off on the shoulders of his adoring audience. What happened in a single year?

According to the neuroscientists interviewed on Radiolab, the auditory cortex, within that tumultuous year, had acclimated to dissonance. You see, when we experience something completely new and unexpected, the brain, which is essentially a conservative organ, doesn’t know how to process it, how to contextualize it. The brain “abhors the new,” as one scientist put it. When the neurons of the auditory cortex are overwhelmed, they start releasing dopamine. Dopamine in small quantities makes us happy. But too much dopamine will lead to schizophrenia. In that theater in Paris in 1913, the audience members had become biochemically insane. But within a year, the brain had learned this pattern, had begun to make sense of dissonance and asymmetric rhythms, had begun to appreciate and even enjoy it.

So from the perspective of the brain, the role of the artist is to disrupt the known, subvert the status quo, and stimulate us into new patterns of perception and understanding. We need art to jolt us, to startle us out of complacency, even to shock us. Art is far more than a place to rest the eyes or lull the ear. If we want our brains to continue developing, we need to expose ourselves to art that confuses us, that we may not find pleasant at first. Beauty is non-essentialist. That is to say, beauty cannot be taken out of context; beauty creates its own context. What is chaos and noise in 1913 is groundbreaking, beautiful music in 1914. By 1940, it’s children’s music, used in Disney’s Fantasia.

“That music is just noise.” “I could make a painting like that.” “Those dancers, they were just jumping around up there, I don’t know what they were doing.” Or in a yoga class, “That pose hurts. I don’t know what the purpose of that is,” or “Lift the kneecaps? What does that even mean, I don’t get it at all.” My friend and eurythmy teacher Mary Ruud advises us to savor those moments of feeling lost and confused. But if we stick with the new experience, the brain gets to work.

The brain starts to sort and analyze and understand the new pattern. Soon the brain leads us to experience the new art differently: “Hmmm, I kind of like how MIA layers different kinds of found sound and sings over that.” “When I sit in front of this Rothko painting, I can really experience the color and notice all its gradations.” Or in a yoga pose, “When I really turned my right thigh out and pressed my foot down I was able to balance and create quietness in my breath and in my mind.”

Isn’t this what it really means to be “open-minded”? On a neurological level, when we are engaged in our personal practice, when we challenge our brains with new experiences, when we expose ourselves to even disruptive or painful experiences like attending Stravinsky’s premier of “The Rite of Spring,” we educate our neurons and create new patterns and thus new understandings. As we literally and biochemically open our minds, don’t we open our hearts as well? We become more attentive and more aware and thus more sensitive to each other. A society comprised of such individuals would surely not leave anyone out in the cold, without adequate food or housing or healthcare. A society comprised of such individuals would not leave the important task of governing to corporations and the wealthy.

If you want a population you can manipulate, withdraw support for artists. Demolish social programs, don’t pay a living wage, deprive people of basic needs like healthcare. Eliminate all safety nets. Make people work overtime, 2 or more jobs, limit their free time. Without free time, we’re deprived of our practices. We don’t take walks, we don’t make music, we don’t do yoga, we don’t write poems, we don’t go to church.

When we are stressed-out, our practices dry up. In that state we seek the familiar and comfortable. We want predictable experiences because we’re already juggling so much. But this is when we need our personal practices the most, and when society needs art the most.

So let us make time everyday to engage in a meaningful personal practice. May we approach our lives as artists, ever growing and evolving. May our work as artists expand outward to build a healthier more compassionate society. May it be so.

Asana sequence, week 6, level 2-3

2008-03-18T06:25:00.000-05:00

adho mukha virasana/adho mukha svanasana/uttanasana
adho mukha svanasana to parsvottanasana, parivrtta trikonasana
prasarita padottanasana
uttanasana
sirsasana, ekapada
upavista konasana
parsva uvk
parivrtta uvk
baddha konasana
parivrtta janu sirsasana
janu sirsasana
paschimottanasana
malasana
kurmasana
setubandha, block
sarvangasana, ekapada, halasana, supta konasana, urdhva mukha paschimottanasana
savasana

Asana sequence, Monday, Level 2-3, 10 March

2008-03-12T06:29:00.000-05:00

Patanjali yoga sutra II.2
adho mukha virasana/adho mukha svanasana/uttanasana
adho mukha vrksasana
sirsasana
supta padangusthasana i, parivrtta
adho mukha svanasana, heels wall, ekapada
virabhadrasana iii to urdhva prasarita ekapadasana, fingers to wall
utthita hasta padangusthasana, foot to wall
uhp, high rope
uhp, side to wall, holding foot
uttanasana
sarvangasana, ekapada, halasana
savasana

Asana sequence, Saturday, 8 March Level 1, Week 4

2008-03-08T18:43:00.000-06:00

adho mukha virasana
adho mukha svanasana, hands to wall
ams, hands on blocks, wall
urdhva mukha svanasana, as above
rope 1
rope standing backbend
standing backbend, head to wall
urdhva mukha svanasana
bhujangasana
salabhasana
makarasana
adho mukha virasana, parsva
ardha matsyendrasana
salamba sarvangasana, halasana
savasana

Wednesday's asana sequence

2008-03-08T07:15:00.000-06:00

7pm Level 1, 5 March, Week 4

adho mukha virasana/adho mukha svanasana/uttanasana
urdhva hastasana
trikonasana
ardha chandrasana
adho mukha svanasana/urdhva mukha svanasana
salabhasana
makarasana
ustrasana, ropes
adho mukha virasana, parsva
sarvangasana, halasana
savasana

Asana sequences, Friday, 7 March

2008-03-08T07:07:00.000-06:00

9am Level 1, Week 5

adho mukha virasana
adho mukha svanasana
adho mukha svanasana/uttanasana low rope
trikonasana, wall, chair
parsvakonasana, wall chair
uttanasana, hips to wall
prasarita padottanasana, chair
supta baddha konasana
chair sarvangasana/setubandha bench menstr
viparita karani
savasana

Same for 11am Gentle Level 1, Week 5, except standing poses were with ropes.

Dhyana and spring

2008-03-04T21:47:00.000-06:00

Most mornings, when I don't feel the pressure of the day bearing down on me, I sit down for a 23 minute meditation as soon as I arise. Chilly in the house, I keep my bathrobe on and slip into the warmest corner of the house and kneel on my balance cushion. I set the timer. Why 23 minutes? My watch has the annoying habit of beeping at the 3-minutes-remaining mark, and every 30 seconds thereafter. I figure 20 minutes of stillness is about what I can currently handle, and I use the remaining 3 minutes as transition time.

The past couple of weeks have brought some changes to my developing dhyana practice. It's always been cold and dark and silent as I sit, but now the sun is making its way through the clouds earlier, around 6:30am or so, instead of after 7am when I'm making my breakfast. Even more notable, our neighborhood cardinal is back, and I can hear his (I think the males sing this song) chirping accompanying my quiet breathing. Birds and sunlight, yes, spring is indeed coming, what a relief!

As my watch counts down its last 3 minutes, I switch from watching my breath or using a mantra to a more active "social" practice of meditation. I began this in India, sending pure unadulterated love and benevolence to my teacher, Geeta Iyengar. Since then I've added my family members to my "list" and I send them love, unconditional, infinite, benevolent. Malachi and Ed, still asleep. Katja in New York City in her triple dorm room on 5th Avenue. Meiko all the way in Bamako, Mali. It's a form of prayer, of holding someone in the light, as the Quakers say. I tack on others whom I know are needing support. By now my feet are starting to fall asleep and I know my sitting time is just about up. So is the sun now, and the cardinal has already moved on.

Asana sequence, Monday, Level 2-3, 3 March

2008-03-04T21:44:00.000-06:00

PYS II.I
adho mukha svanasana, head support
uttanasana
rope sirsasana/supta virasana (small groups)
chair sarvangasana
viparita karani/viparita dandasana/bench setubandha (small groups)
savasana, bolster, ujjayi, viloma inhales
seated ujjayi with shoulder harness
seated ujjayi, digital closing inhales and exhales
savasana

Asana sequences, Friday, 29 Feb 9am and 11am

2008-02-29T15:36:00.000-06:00

9am Level 1
swastikasana, twist
adho mukha svanasana
ams, plank, partner
garudasana
tadasana, gomukhasana
surya namaskar w/trikonasana, parsvakonasana, virabhadrasana I
virabhadrasana I, wall
urdhva mukha svanasana, chair
ums
bhugangasana
salabhasana
adho mukha virasana, parsva
sarvangasana, ardha halasana

11am Gentle level 1
adho mukha svanasana, rope
trikonasana, rope
parsvakonasana, rope
ardha chandrasana, rope
rope gomukhasana
rope 1, pubis to chair
rope urdhva hastasana
standing backbend, ropes
urdhva mukha svanasana, chair
chair viparita dandasana (alternate chair purvottanasana)
chair sarvangasana
savasana

Asana sequence, Thursday, 9am, Level 3, 28 Feb

2008-02-28T12:30:00.000-06:00

Oops, I spied an error on the Monday night sequence in which Supta Virasana came AFTER Pincha, and was followed by Paryankasana. We did a similar sequence on Th, adding:

Standing backbend, head/hands to wall
Kapotasana after Ustrasana, hands to wall
Urdhva Dhanurasana dropping back hands to wall
Ardha Matsyendrasana after Uttanasana

Asana sequence, Wednesday, 27 Feb, Level 1, 7pm

2008-02-28T07:02:00.001-06:00

Adho Mukha Virasana/Adho Mukha Svanasana
Trikonasana
Ardha Chandrasana
Adho Mukha Svanasana, plank
Vasisthasana I
Urdhva Prasarita Padasana, 90-60-30 degrees
Paripurna Navasana
Ardha Navasana
Jathara Parivartanasana, legs bent
Chatush Padasana
Salamba Sarvangasana, Halasana
Savasana

Asana sequences

2008-02-26T08:08:00.000-06:00

As a learning tool for my yoga students, I will post the week's sequences on my blog. This is what we did on Monday, February 25, 2008.

Level 2-3, Week 4
Virasana, Patanjali yoga sutra II.45
Adho Mukha Virasana/Adho Mukha Svanasana
Adho Mukha Svanasana/hands up wall
AMS, elbows to floor
Sirsasana, belt around sacrum (rest of class)
Adho Mukha Vrksasana
Supta Virasana
Pincha Mayurasana
Matsyasana
Ustrasana, holding ropes
Ustrasana, forehead to wall
Adho Mukha Virasana, Parsva
Uttanasana, Parsva
Sarvangasana, Ardha Halasana
Savasana

Coming Home

2008-02-22T18:25:00.000-06:00

It’s been rough to return to Wisconsin winter after 6 weeks in India, traveling with my family for 2 weeks and studying in Pune at the Ramamani Iyengar Memorial Yoga Institute for 4 weeks. Not only have I left the wonderful teachings of the Iyengar family behind, but also the glorious tropical fruit (papayas, pineapples, figs, the peach/apple-like chikku), the lack of responsibility, the collegiality , and the warm sunshine.

On the other hand, tap water I can drink is nice, hot water at the turn of any spigot, plumbing pipes wide enough for toilet paper, no garbage incineration on the streets, the absence of jostling and crowds, and the company of my sweet son and husband. I’ll be back in India soon enough.

The main thing I’ve brought back with me from India is good health. In fact, I feel healthier than I have in 15 years. Even though Pune is ranked 5th in the world in terms of air pollution, my sinus and breathing issues completely cleared up. My digestion improved and I was able to eat just about anything. My eczema completely disappeared. And these symptoms have stayed away. It’s a miracle!

What happened? I can think of several factors:

1. 5 hours of yoga each day: we had a daily 2-hour class, and a 3-hour practice period. I had nothing else I was responsible for to stop me from devoting myself to as much practice as possible. Most mornings I spent in meditation followed by pranayama. Then breakfast and morning practice, and class in the evening. Believe me, these were full, rigorous, well-rounded classes taught by the brilliant Geetaji and Prashantji.

2. I found a wonderful homeopath, Dr. (Mrs.) Nileema Dhoble, whose office was just up the street from me. I chose her blindly out of convenience, and it turned out she’s an excellent diagnostician and prescriber. 2 days after I began the constitutional treatment I fell quite ill with a bad cough. The cough cleared up in a few days and took away with it all my other symptoms. Before I left Pune, I saw her again, and she gave me enough remedies to last me until my friend Debra Johnson returns to India in July 2009, when she can refresh my supply, if I still need it.

3. No stress. No classes to teach, no family nor household to tend to, no meals to cook for anyone except for myself. No driving, no telephone, no television, no computer.

4. Saladmaster. OK, I spent a fortune on cookware back in December. My anxiety about this indulgence vanished however, when I received the pots and pans and started using them. I promise I won’t go on and on about them. Suffice to say for now, that for the first time in my life, I am aluminum and Teflon-free, because the pots are lined with 316L surgical steel, the most non-porous, non-reactive metal available. My health up-turn began around the time I started using Saladmaster. (And I brought the pots to India!) Coincidence? I’m starting to wonder.

I came home to a crashed, demolished, totally crumbled hard drive. On one hand, what could be worse for a writer than to lose 5 years of material?

On the other hand, what could be better? All those unfinished drafts, all that accumulated sludge.

Yours, starting fresh in Wisconsin,
pkh