i found this blog post on the wall street journal today describing several methods scientists could potentially use to control the climate. why not install huge solar mirrors to divert solar radiation, some are asking? please, yes, let’s spend money to send thousands of crop-dusting airplanes to blanket the arctic with engineed “particles,” others say.

the salient issue in any yoga or meditation class always comes back to control: what is in your sphere of influence, and what is not. one of the practices of raja yoga (the yoga we do in studios, the yoga of the mind) is to consider all possibilities. maybe crop-dusting planes in the artic is actually the answer. perhaps the long view is that this practice will save the earth.

i’ll be honest, though: it’s when i get to this level of justification–save the earth–that i have to stop and ask myself what we’re really considering here. what are we doing, and what are we reacting to?

the sudden hype over global climate change is obviously justified; only the diehards at this point are calling the rest of us chicken littles. but the question is: what are we trying to change and why? does anyone seriously think that a 4.5 billion year old rock won’t balance itself out, even if that means destroying everything on the planet that we–its squatters, effectively–call life?

crop-dusting the arctic is like taping the sprained ankle of a basketball player and telling him to get back on the court. as any fan has watched, this star might still be able to play and, position depending, will block, defend, and/or shoot for the rest of the game. but playing will in fact make that ankle worse, which in turn will lengthen the icing, xrays, and rehab when the game is over.

it isn’t even that our short-term, scientific solutions won’t help–the player with the sprained ankle might win the game. it’s rather that these scientific forays, and indeed the money and resources backing them, run the risk of diverting the attention from the real issue, which is where we actually are now. as a collective group of 5 billion people, and certainly the billions before us, we have created this.

the questions, then, are: what human practices have directly caused this problem? how do we stop them? how do we all accept responsibility for the fact that “developing” to this point has necessarily been derived of selfish, greedy, short-sighted, and in fact quite brilliant behavior and decisions? most important, is it possible for us to let go of the hubris of control, and to recognize that the 100 years we’re here, and any decision we make during that time, is not really going to impact the 4.5 billion more years this rock might keep spinning around the sun?

the point i’m making is that looking outward and upward is not always the place to go. the weather problems we are experiencing, and will continue to “suffer through,” are nothing more than a slap from earth, like any of our moms disciplining us as children because we reached for too many cookies at once. mom had a point: eat too many cookies, and you’ll get sick.

“CAM,” or Complementary and Alternative Modalities, is a healthcare movement trying to get your attention. Lobbyists and other interested parties are right now encouraging the submission of comments to the FDA regarding a “guidance” that the FDA will use, effectively, to make herbs, vitamins, and minerals “medicine.” from what i can tell on first glance, this means that our access to these earth-based (as in, naturally occurring) materials will be significantly restricted (and drive the price higher). a full copy of the proposal from the FDA is here.

i don’t understand the issue completely, but several of the emails i’ve received in the last 24 hours point to this site as an important read if you are interested in whether or not pharmaceutical companies exert a strong level of control over the FDA.

there’s also a lot on this site, including the option to send your signature on a petition to stop the FDA. to comment to the FDA directly, go here.

if you know anything more about this issue and care to explain it on this site, i am very interested. i will do more reading and post the same.

i find it most difficult to practice yoga in relationships and moving vehicles. this is perhaps because at these times, i feel the least stable.

over the weekend, i flew home to visit my family. when the flight landed in louisville, i experienced an immediate sense of relief–not necessarily because i would be seeing family, but specifically because as soon as we landed we were at the gate. as soon as we left the gate we were at the bag check. and as soon as i got my bag, i was on my way home.

it occurred to me during this process that organizing society is not a small task. comparing the project of organizing a “louisville” versus organizing a “dc metropolitan area” is almost unfair. but here it is:

the reason my (literally grounding) experience in louisville felt so good was because it was uncomplicated, quiet, and quick. landing at any airport in dc, i can feel the tension increasing, not just among the people on the plane, but also in the airport employees, people picking people up, cab drivers, etc. i nearly always find myself tense when i land in DC, or as i fly out of it.

of course i am, to some degree, projecting this tension. however, i wonder exactly how we do it over here on the east coast. i drove a lot in louisville, and i caught myself anxiously looking in the rear view mirror if i was going too slow, or wasn’t sure where to turn, because i have grown used to the impatience of drivers around me, and often of myself, in this time-stretched city. sure enough, in my home town, no one seemed to care so much if i was impeding their progress forward.

my reaction to this experience was a little bit of sadness, and longing for an experience that does not include so much compression, confusion, and impatience. perhaps the anger is differently placed in the smaller of these two cities, and by definition, i guess, there is less of it. but damn, the beltway and its road rage are deep. i’m not sure there are many other places like it in the world.

i will work on this for myself. but i wonder how we all, as a community of people who barely know each other, could cooperate differently in this huge metropolitan area so that things didn’t feel so tense.

i think of this as another description for my job.

there was a nice quote sold on blank note cards a few years ago; i’ve seen it around a lot, so you may have also already seen it. it was an all white, sqare card that read:

peace.

it does not mean to be in a place

where there is no noise, trouble

or hard work. it means to be in

the midst of those things and still

be calm in your heart

.

the author is unknown. i personally would choose the word “still” over “calm,” but i enjoy her/his word choice. from dictionary.com, this etymology of the word:

[Origin: 1350–1400; (n., adj.) ME calm(e) < It calma (n.), calmo (adj.) < LL cauma summer heat (with l perh. from L calére to be hot) < Gk kaûma (s. kaumat-) burning heat; akin to kaíein to burn (see caustic); (v.) ME calmen < It calmare, deriv. of the n.]

so the sensation of calm points to the sensation of burning. if we were to take this unknown author’s description, peace, then, is equivalent to the sensation of burning in the heart.

last week i said i’d be posting until the end of the month on which classes were right for you. i’ve elected to cancel tonight’s challenge class because george bush is giving his annual state of the union; the other time i canceled this class was in 2003, the night he announced our invasion of iraq. as i reconnect with my own physical practice, which i lost for much of 2006, i’ve remembered an important lesson from yoga. doing the asanas (poses), especially the basic ones once you’ve done them repetitively for a while, is like riding a bike. going through the motions is easy; your body has muscular memory associated with triangle poses, tree pose, and so on.

what’s difficult to to do, when you’re actively involved in deepening your practice, is to walk that fine line between physical and mental challenge. as the boundless teachers and i discussed at a staff meeting over the weekend, physical and mental challenge are often inversely correlated. in other words, to feel physically challenged is sometimes to be mentally checked out of what the body is really experiencing–and that’s actually very natural, since the brain deals with pain and discomfort in myriad ways. ask anyone who works in an ER: the variations between people’s perception of their own pain is astonishingly great.

therefore, as you introduce what the mind considers “pain” or “discomfort” to the body, the brain, trying to be a good muscle like all the others, assists the situation in the best way it knows how. the trick is to use your own powers of observation–this process of seeing, sensing, experiencing the moment is not the brain, but the greater awareness we all have access to, all the time. it is a much larger picture than the brain is actually capable of giving you.

so in my challenge yoga class, which i’m converting April 3 to an intensive evening class every tuesday 7-930 p, i ask the students to perform more “challenging” poses, but with a deepening knowledge of their own body in space and time. that means that the poses are just the means through which the students observe their mind. this is difficult at the end of a 10-minute headstand. it’s challenging when attempting to observe the finer details of triangle pose. it’s particularly tough in savasana (corpse pose).

but yet, there we are, taking it up a notch through the spirit of the practice, and not because we’ve become better gymnasts. flexibility and strength in a yoga pose are nothing more than a reflection of a flexible and strong mind. to be sure, i entered yoga in 1995 so inflexible that teachers would pull me off to the side during forward folds. today, i have grown so flexible that i need to get some of that unbending-ness back! it is the practice of yoga to accept that my body can swing dramatically from one extreme to the other if i let it go. then, it is my duty, and very much in my own self interest, to manage those vacillations with equanimity.

in practical terms, for challenge yoga, you need to be able to turn upside down with little fear. that means headstand, handstand, shoulderstand, forearm balance. and wheel pose. though these poses are external metaphors of internal energy, they are also practical applications of a deepening practice.

in day-to-day terms, i am canceling tonight’s class because it is the job of the yogini to observe her mind at all times. tonight’s speech, and the energy in the country (or at least in DC), is an opportunity to experience social behavior observation (yamas) and self-reflection (niyamas) that buttress the practice of yoga. if you plan on watching the state of the union as a yoga practitioner, reflect on these words before, during, and after: non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, moderation, non-hoarding, purity, contentment, discipline, self-education, surrender to god.

as arbitrary as time is, the beginning of a new year causes reflection. to envision a more positive 2007 for your self and community is a helpful act. envisioning reality, as both quantum physics and yoga teach, is at least half the reality occurring outside you. in other words, being clear about what you want, how you want it, and what you do with it once it happens, helps to influence the events in your immediate vicinity, if not also those farther away.

that’s why i can’t help but mention the hanging of saddam hussein. it could just be me, fascinated by the immediacy of my experience of his murder. it’s everywhere, all over the web, in hard-copy newspapers, on radio, on TV. most people i know have participated on some level in his death. thanks to modern media, everyone has witnessed this event in a place, or in a way, intimate to them.

it is difficult to answer this question: how do we pursue joy when there is this much suffering? when yoga is the science of uniting the ego self with the larger, uninterrupted, universal self (in other words: saddam is in all of us), it is yogic to honor, if not also mourn, the death of this murderous dictator. and those he killed. and those still dying and suffering.

so here we are (or at least i am, and you reading this blog), contemplating self-improvement for the new year. there is joy in life, but how do we experience it? as the adage goes, happiness is not the goal, but the path. to set your own expecations and visions for a new year, which is nothing more than a mental label for a new chapter of your own experience, you dig in, look at your response to the world around you, and decide how you want to change it.

this is what dr. nile gardner of the heritage foundation said this morning, speaking on the diane rehm show, at around 10:25 am.

in this context, he was criticizing kofi annan for too much pacifism during the past decade. specifically, he backed up his comments on the annan’s slow reaction to darfur.

i try to listen to information like this through the lens of a yogini (i love this article describing the word yogini. and this is a new book on the identity). to that end, my response is served up as yogically as possible, with a dash of feminism and a sprinkling of forgiveness.

many in the decades before us would have said that pacifism is the only way. though i wasn’t alive for it, the 60’s sounds like it was an encouraging time for peace-seekers. the teachings of the buddha, and gandhi, are rooted in non-violence. there have been voices, in other words, in the recent past that honor pacifism instead of criticize it.

to dr. gardiner’s point, these days we hear a lot about how violent things are. what i’m trying to work out is whether things are different or the same. one difference is that we have more access to the information (read: suffering) of people around the globe. and losing 3,000 people on 9/11 wasn’t a small experience. on the other hand, nick nolte says something to one of his reports in the thin red line about how nature is always warring with itself. car bombs in baghdad are of a piece, according to him, and obviously according to dr. gardiner.

so, here we find ourselves. if quantum physics is in fact a sound way to consider reality (this docu-drama does a great job explaining how), then when we meditate or do yoga, we are serving society by envisioning peace. watching the thin red line the other night, i wondered with the narrator what it is inside us that creates man-on-man violence–when there is so much beauty, and so much peace.

i posit, perhaps, that we need to know violence, really stare it in the face, before we can deeply know peace. and, as many wisdom teachers offer, to discover our true nature is to discover a reality beyond even the pedestrian definition of peace. rather, it is to know unadulterated bliss, that of true consciousness.

there is a fundamental flaw in the job drug companies have to sell us drugs.

publicly-traded drug companies are necessarily beholden to their stockholders, who have loaned a certain sum of money to the company with the expectation that they will get more money back at a later date.

because the first (and many would suggest only) job of a company is to make money, drug companies have to make money selling drugs. A big way a publicly-traded company increases its value and pays off its debt is by developing an economy of scale, i.e., the lipitor market, the celebrex market.

this means any drug company can’t make a drug that is only right for me. rather, that company has to know that the millions of dollars it spends on R&D, thus taking money away from the bottom line that gets paid out to stockholders, will be recovered and a profit made.

So it is in pfizer’s, and its shareholders’ interest, to sell you lipitor and celebrex. Whether you actually need these drugs is not, necessarily, a concern of Pfizer because the more lipitor Pfizer sells, the happier its employees (year-end bonuses), and the more gratified the stockholders (increased stock price, more money in junior’s college fund). It is only natural that the leaders of this company would want more money than employees, and, possibly, shareholders, because they are the ones steering the ship, paying the bills on time, and keeping their own little corner of the free market churning.

the answers to this issue are not easy, but we have to talk about them. to start, several ideas come to my mind:

1) you are the only person who will ever know what you need. Knowing what you need, including exactly what you need to heal (it could be relearning the breath, it could be celebrex), is power.

you need to work with trained people whose single intention is to help you, to determine what you need to heal, because you cannot do it alone. to this end, pfizer (eg) can be viewed as a helper, but not, i would argue, an advisor in any way.

2) The relationship that you, as a consumer, have with a publicly-traded drug company is inherently disempowering. Desire for more money in the free market is arguably insatiable, and the expectation of pfizer’s stockholders for more money is driving that company’s efforts to sell you drugs. From a yogic point of view, it is important to have this information when you make a decision to take any prescribed drug.

3) There was a time when individual communities, small ones all over the globe, had local healers who worked in service of healing the ailments of that community. At this time people were not living past 40 years of age. It is clear we will never go back to that time, but we all could stand an increase in community-based healers to balance the “power” of free-market drug peddling, which is our reality today.

after yesterday’s post, i decided it’s a good idea to distinguish in these posts between the yoga of the internal world, and that of the external experience. discussions on politics, society, living in dc or wherever, is an exploration of yoga, the uniting of the lower and higher selves, outside of us. the yoga that takes place in the classroom, on your own mat, and, inside you in any situation really, is an exploration of the inner world of yoga.

i believe we will see that the two are the same, but depending on who and where you are spiritually, physically, and emotionally, you might be more interested in one or the other.

in other news, following are good poses for a hangover:

1) child’s pose, laying on several blankets to support the belly and increase attention to breath in that area

2) pigeon pose, ditto on blankets

3) exhaling through mouth. it takes the heat out of the system and, as i’ve been taught, 70% of the body’s toxicity (i want to do more research on this because i’ve learned this 70% business in the yoga world but haven’t seen it anywhere else).

4) a lot of corpse pose, savasana

i have to comment on pelosi v. bush, democrats v. republicans, and what we’re doing in iraq. many of my yoga teachers over the past 13 years have, here and there, and especially at moments like this, politicized the yoga class, because yoga is about freedom and liberals are more interested in freedom than are republicans or kim jong il or putin or terrorists.

um, or not. political views are important because they set up necessary boundaries between the person and her society. everyone gets emotional about them because they represent a personal projected reality. politics represent how we think everyone else should live, how our society should work, and not necessarily how we are living, interpersonally, day to day. in many respects political debates are rooted in the denial of the fact that we are all one, and that everyone’s beliefs are also ours. this is what yoga teaches.

on the other hand, or at least fodder for this blog, there is a beautiful sutra in the first chapter of the yoga sutras of patanjali recommending that we disregard the wicked. i am very interested in who is wicked on the modern socio-political stage. i don’t know the answer.

i’m not quite sure why i want to write about this today instead of about an excellent question one of my teacher trainees asked me tuesday night about the breath, or about energy lines in shoulderstand, or the conversation i had yesterday with a boundless teacher about learning vs. luxury vs. addiction in a yoga class.

what i am reminded of instead, as i find myself clicking my way through the pelosi/bush photo ops (my favorite sentence from this article off of drudge report was: “‘When you win, you have a responsibility to do the best you can for the country,” Bush said, with Vice President Dick Cheney sitting glumly on a couch to his left.’” is cheney really “glum,” and is it really journalism to project that onto him?), is the story of the baghavad gita.

the story is one of the main texts of yoga. we are actually teaching it in a workshop this weekend at the studio. arjuna is the main character, he has been commissioned to kill his family, and he’s freaking out because of the obvious ethical dilemma with which he is faced.

krisha, a macdaddy god in hinduism and yoga, is his consort, the guy/god that big god (brahman) decides to provide to give arjuna the skinny on how it isn’t really his job to question what he’s doing. he needs to “know” what he’s doing, and then it is his “job” to do his dharma, or duty, to the best of his ability, because it’s in support of the universe, or in this case, brahman. it is not arjuna’s “job” to assume he is bad if he kills his family, because he can’t see the whole picture and what, possibly, these murders at his own bloody hands might represent in the long run.

it’s a tough text to read, because the poor guy has to kill the people he loves. obvious analogies have been made between this “family” and the many “selves” within arjuna. according to this analysis, the path of yoga is the path of warring with, and slaying, our own various ego selves to then unite them with god. the word yoga comes from the sanskrit “yug,” which means to yoke or unite. what else are you going to unite with than god (asks the gita)?

what relationship do our warriors in iraq have with arjuna?

is that it’s an identity shift for some in washington and, depending on a few thousand people in virginia and montana, a bigger one than most of us expected a few weeks ago.

it reminds me of a conversation i had last night watching results in a bar filled with periodic outbursts of applause and cheering when one or the other team scored a point. the cnn set, i noticed, was set up like a sports show and jeopardy combined.

over the noise, i was talk-shouting with a former washingtonian who observed that my living here longer than a few years was atypical, since most people don’t want to do it. he said that, to him, dc had no soul, that it was unclear which neighborhood you were ever in (as compared with new york city, where he lives now), and that’s why he couldn’t live here for very long. my inference is that he felt dis-identified here, unincluded and a little lost, wandering around and wondering, on some level, where his peeps, his real community, actually were.

my conversation with this nice guy, whose intention wasn’t to slam dc, got me thinking. my first reaction in that moment in the bar was to feel a pit in my stomach, as though i were dc and also have no soul. i felt terrible then, because i desperately want to believe i have a soul, and i don’t want to acknowledge a soulless reality in myself.

in that moment of reaction, i allowed the objective experience of dc (dc is just a thing, a concept in our minds) to influence my subjective experience of it. i thought, oh, you’re right, dc has no soul and i therefore have no soul because i live here and the soullessness of dc has become part of me. as important, my yucky feeling smacked of my own denial that his observation, in fact, does have some truth. in yoga, all observations have truth, and it was damn difficult yogic work to feel a connection not just with him but with all experiences of soullessness in dc. Or anywhere.

in the light of a rainy day, i thought about three things:

1) holy (indian) cow! i have self-confidence issues!

2) my free-radical theory of dc. i believe there are pockets of very interesting, soulful, and mindful people floating all over town, but their groups either aren’t big enough, or soulfully connected enough (!), or something, which prevents them from finding each other and discovering and believing in their own ability to gather some girth and influence as it does in fact happen in culture and community all over the world. Many people remain free-radicals blobbing around in an extremely interesting, educated, and well-meaning small, east-coast town. And then they move.

3) black residents of dc. i wondered what they would say about this soulless business.

Talk about perspective, right?

so i’m not sure what to say about today. i’m not sure how i feel about it as a yogini (the name of a female yoga practitioner. a yogi is a male yoga practitioner). along the lines of satya, i know that this article was pretty freakish to me, and i also know that at times i can’t quite figure out where we’re going here.

i believe that the yoga mindset would look at it as all love, and that we’d celebrate whatever results today because, um, well, because it’s all love.

in other news, i am resuscitating the boundless book club. it will be the first monday of every month, and it will take place at my house. i am slogging through several texts right now, and i don’t want to recommend any one them because i’m having a hard enough time reading them myself: intuitive thinking as a spiritual path, by rudolf steiner; theories of the chakras, by hiroshi motoyama; and the anusara teacher training manual, by john friend. i’m reading this last manual because i’m trying to understand what i learned this weekend on ganesha from the intellectual power behind anusara, doug brooks.

people magazine anyone?

this is one of my favorite modest mouse songs. modest mouse is one of my favorite bands. on election eve, i feel the need to mention it.

and, i’m not quite sure what i learned about ganesha, named ganapati by shiva, this weekend. i do know that i learned i don’t know much.

i’ll be the first to say that though i love the sounds of sanskrit and prefer to use the few words i know in class to describe poses and concepts, i am no Sanskrit scholar.

that’s why i could be wrong in breaking down the word “satya,” which means truth and is one of the main tenets of yoga.

sat
being, existence; Pure Existence; the thing that truly is; the right, the highest or best or real good.

ya
production

as i understand it, then, when a human being the produces truth, s/he is practicing satya. when you speak, write, or otherwise communicate, on a basic energetic level, the idea is not to lie or hide the thing that truly is. that’s why i’ve been confused and a little disturbed this morning to be reading information, or lack of it, on the bombing of camp falcon, south of baghdad, october 10-11.

this link from a friend is what got me trolling through sites originally, and per my naive post two days ago, it could be that i’m so pollyanna as to be dismayed that even my heroes at google appear to be complicit with this un-satya-like attempt to keep the information about 300 dead u.s. soldiers under wraps.