Posts Tagged ‘yoga and business’
couldn’t pazzzz this one up
kim on 10:14 am February 14th, 2007 / 3 Comments »
this article caught my eye because it speaks to what we’re trying to teach in a yoga class. i wonder who would win if researchers pitted siesta and savasana (corpse pose) head-to-head.
in a joking way but half seriously at jpmorgan and merrill lynch, where i used to work, i lobbied for siesta rooms so that you could rest in the afternoon, at 3 pm, when you were falling asleep at your desk anyway.
alas, we just drank more coffee.
email to teachers: trust and safety
kim on 4:52 pm February 4th, 2007 / 5 Comments »
so we (boundless teachers and staff) are finalizing our agreement on boundless’s values. we’ve got the mission down (see right if you are reading this on the home page), but we have been debating and discussing the values. they will be up this week.
if you can vote or give me info on this piece; i think it’s an important thing to reflect on:
• honoring the body as our first home, and trusting it at all times
versus
• honoring the body as our first home, and keeping it safe at all times
because sometimes we need to feel a little unsafe in order to effect
change, right? surely a butterfly emerging from its cocoon doesn’t feel
totally SAFE, but i would suggest that it feels TRUST. when we are facing
our demons in meditation, or handstand, or in a deep backbend, playing the
edge of safety is, in effect, deepening your TRUST in the fact that it’s
all good.the purpose of this bullet is to identify the importance of rooting into
the first chakra, or (in a combined first/second chakra) MOTHER EARTH. i
don’t think we feel SAFE in a hailstorm, but we have to TRUST that she’s
throwing ice down on us for a reason.
punch drunk yoga
kim on 10:44 am December 19th, 2006 / 42 Comments »
several people forwarded this new york times‘ article to me over the weekend titled, “the days of wine and yoga.” the article is about yoga-and-wine retreats planned to be held in sonoma county starting in 2007.
to her credit, the journalist explores two opposing views. “‘yoga can be very serious, sure, but why not have it be really fun?’” this, the question posed by the woman whose idea it is to launch an alcohol-assisted yoga practice. “yoga purists,” apparently, take the opposite view, which is to say that “‘drinking and [yoga] don’t go well together.”‘
i’m not sure how these two views are opposite each other, because the basic problem with calling sober-yoga serious, and wine-yoga fun, is to say that drinking makes yoga more fun. or less serious.
Seriously? another proponent of wine-and-yoga asked where we draw the line: is it at “‘tylenol? refined sugar? caffeine?”’ though this question is exactly where we could stay for a while, this woman’s question also misses the point.
the point is that yoga is about purifying the body. we practice hatha yoga, and indeed all forms of yoga, to cleanse the body’s meridian (or, in sanskrit, nadi) pathways in order to give it more opportunity to absorb and utilize prana, or chi. we breathe through a pose, a yoga class, a meditation, in an effort to stay mindful of how the body operates, as a channel, in space and time.
no matter what country, vineyard, or social custom wine is associated with, it is a toxin. the body recognizes alcohol of any kind as poison. furthermore, wine does not “relax” the body; it temporarily deadens it. wine is a beautiful, delicious, and seductive poison, but a poison it is.
another downside of drinking wine (and don’t get me wrong: we just served wine at our holiday party) is lack of proper sleep. anyone who has suffered from insomnia knows that even one glass of wine up to four hours before bed can disrupt sleep.
like yoga, sleep is designed to help the body clean and heal. therefore, the yoga teacher leading these sonoma retreats, rosemary garrison, is simply wrong when she says, “‘have a glass of wine, enjoy your night, get a good night’s sleep and come to a really cleansing, vigorous practice the next morning [at the wine-and-yoga retreat].’” it’s unlikely that, since the practitioners are at a winery that has many selections of palate-stimulating wines, anyone will drink just one glass.
it isn’t that we drink wine and do yoga, or that that we take tylenol for whatever pain we have, it’s the intention to combine the two. one is a cleansing practice designed to help the person discover her/his union with the higher self; the other is a thousands-year-old invention designed a) to achieve the effect we still desire today, and/or b) to drink in place of fetid water that otherwise killed people.
one last thing. i decided that i really couldn’t comment on a wine-and-yoga practice unless i had a direct experience doing it. so, in preparation for my practice last night, i had a glass of wine. it was a nice glass of red wine.
What I noticed in my practice was how tired I was. I stayed in poses longer, without being as interested as i usually am. I found my mind wandering, particularly to topics, and relationships, that currently leave me feeling sad. I also didn’t have much focus: I usually start my practice with some idea of what my body is wanting, and in this case I couldn’t quite get to it. So I wound up relying on poses I normally do when I can’t think of anything else. in short, for me, it was a less mindful practice than normal.
free-market healing
kim on 2:18 pm December 8th, 2006 / 5 Comments »
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.
