Posts Tagged ‘the community of yoga’
it always happens in the car
kim on 10:58 pm November 28th, 2006 / 8 Comments »
so i was driving to the studio today to meet a client, and i was wending with the car through side streets in order to avoid any major traffic lights. love that about dc.
suddenly, as i hit the gas and drove away from a four-way stop i had just paused at (one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two), a car came barreling down the street perpendicular to mine, the driver oblivious to the stop sign she was about to run. there i was, suddenly in her line of vision and right in the middle of the crossing. she slammed on her brakes, already through her stop sign she’d just run, inches from hitting my car.
the whole thing was lucky: having my barely-accelerating car hit by another one going 30+ miles an hour would probably have sucked. i am grateful for the fact that she looked up! so, in the mini-moments i spend processing — “oh my god, what is she doing? oh my god, she is going to hit me! oh my god! she is such an idiot for driving so fast and ignoring basic traffic rules!” — i find it fascinating that i arrived at the conclusion that she was an idiot.
just before the moment that her car’s nose stopped at my car’s side, i had thrown my hand up in the air as through to stop her with my special yogic superpowers. as i began to process my anger toward her, which arose from the fear i experienced at nearly being side-swiped, i used that upraised hand to gesture at her and mouth, “what are you doing?! that’s a stop sign!” i pointed to the stop sign, reminding her of what she’d obviously already figured out; my face was in a scowl, and i’m sure i looked as afraid and angry as i felt. her face scowled back, as though it was my fault the stop sign was there.
in all, the situation was great because neither of us was physically hurt, but sucky because we both drove away with no contact, pissed at the other. how many of us have forgotten about a stop sign or nearly side-swiped someone? all of us. how many of us have almost been hit, or almost hit someone? all of us. but there this woman and i were, looking all mean at each other in a moment that arose from mindlessness, fear, and therefore anger. i drove on, and she drove on, both of us feeling bad, not least because we’d put that energy out there.
my question is: how could i have processed my fear and anger, using my powers of observation and clarity, and actually forgiven her in that moment instead of shaking an angry fist at an unwitting stop sign, and giving her the frowny-face that, at that moment, i felt sure she deserved? surely there is a better way than the character assassination that inevitably follows commuter situations such as these.
to consume
kim on 10:48 am November 20th, 2006 / 1 Comment »
[Origin: 1350–1400; ME (< MF consumer) < L cons?mere, equiv. to con- con- + s?mere to take up (perh. < *suzm- < *subzm- < *subs-(e)m-, equiv. to subs-, var. of sub- sub- + emere to take, buy)]
—Synonyms 1. exhaust, deplete. 4. squander, dissipate.
i am more interested in dictionary.com’s synonyms than etymology. it sounds like “to consume” is not good. is it or not? particulary for this week ahead of us, i humbly suggest we contemplate this question.
book club book
kim on 9:15 am November 13th, 2006 / 2 Comments »
so we’re going to restart the boundless book club with the bloody chamber, a book of fairy tales rewritten by brit angela carter. we’ll meet the first monday of december. email me directly to get more information and address.
yoga internal and external
kim on 4:04 pm November 10th, 2006 / 2 Comments »
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
so the thing with today, part 1
kim on 10:26 am November 8th, 2006 / 8 Comments »
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?
