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Rainbows, Puppies and the Plough

2/27/2015

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There's nothing warm and cuddly about the plough. If you're looking for rainbows, puppy dogs and being in a perpetually sunny-skied state, you'll have to find that in other yoga classes and other poses.

In this inverted asana, we experience a state of tension that can be absolutely unbearable when we first start out as beginners or even after many years, when in the opening moments of entering this pose, we sense that constriction in the chest and breath. The name says it all: the plough, with our body taking on the shape of that piece of equipment used either on farms to till the soil or on our streets to remove the snow.

After a plough has churned through the soil or swept down our road, our space is transformed. It's a loud, tense, rumbling affair, ploughing, but the results are expansion and transformation. There is a relief and release once it's barreled past us, and done its job. We can get down the road again, a new seed can take root.

There is perhaps no other pose in which to experience this rolling, churning sense of restriction followed by release. If you can bear observing your breath through the tension and wait for the calmness, then you'll experience this sense of pure relief, your midsection opening up as smoothly as a flower blossom. It's a pretty fun way to experience the spiritual truth that rewards come once you pass the test. It brings this truth alive in an immediate, real, everyday way. You can vary the pose by spreading feet apart but try to maintain uprightness through the belly-button and solar plexus region. When coming out of it, you can air-dance your way down and end up in bridge pose, which we'll look at next.

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Masala Chai

2/19/2015

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What's a girl to do when it's minus 10 degrees outside and she needs a work break? Make tea!

My friend Sanjukta Moorthy first gave me this recipe for masala chai ages ago when we worked side-by-side in Canary Wharf in London. It's both delicious and medicinal. Medilicious? Delidicinal? Chai tea is a redundancy. Chai means tea. It's the masala that makes it 'chai' as we know it. Masala means, in the technical words of Sanjukta, "with spices and nice things".

What are those 'nice things'? Cinnamon sticks, whole fennel seeds and cloves, cardamom pods, and ginger. Roast lightly. Then add water, tea bags and let simmer. Don't boil! A mistake commonly made, she says. Then the most important step: making it creamy and, of course, sweet. The Sanjukta-way is lots of whole milk and white sugar. The Stephanie-way is lots of almond milk and agave syrup.

Check out more of Sanjukta's recipes at Things I Like To Cook at https://thingsiliketocook.wordpress.com/author/sanjuktam/ and her blogs and opinions (and she has lots!) on ethical consumerism and current events at The Soapbox at http://sanjuktamoorthy.com/to-absent-friends-a-mini-bio/
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Sounds Like Love

2/14/2015

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Not the look of love. Not the smell, or the touch. The sound of love gets overlooked these days -- when was the last time you heard a love song on the radio? But sound catalyzes and sparks feelings, too. Sounds from a human voice tell us so much. Tones don't lie, even if words do sometimes. It is no accident that hearing is the last sense to leave us when we die. It is the tones in the sound from another that can convey that flowing state of being we call 'love' more powerfully than anything else. For your Valentine's Day, here's pure tone and melody, no words to get in the way, in this slow grooving instrumental from the late, great J Dilla , "Sounds Like Love".

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The Myth of Moral Authority

2/8/2015

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The Brian Williams saga reveals the smoke-and-mirrors of the news and broadcasting industry. Hand-ringers ask who, oh who, could possibly, possibly replace Brian Williams because as NBC's main product -- the 'moral authority' behind The-Serious-Issues-Of-The-Day -- he brings in millions of advertising dollars. He's a good sport, too, a willing product NBC can cross-place in its other shows. His popularity as human-product placement in late-night TV guest slots, comedy routines, and gags has no doubt brought in even more money.

So it's a Big Deal to Big Business and Big Media, the fate of the talking image of a man we call Brian Williams. But it really doesn't matter what happens to this human product, whether he stays or leaves the network. The whole unraveling of an image is yet another nail in the coffin of broadcasting, mainstream news, and the 'moral authority' it supposedly carries. 'Moral authority' is a concept that The Age of Manipulation exploits in our minds and beings, but pierce the image, unravel the brand, and you can see that moral authority just doesn't exist. Did it ever?

Up 'til recently it's been easy to manipulate the masses, to manufacture these halos around Talking Heads so that anything they say is treated as Gospel. Again, we get back to the throat center, the 5th chakra. We all lie from time to time -- we can't help it (see "Talking People Say The Least" Jan 2015). Until we slay our ego, then lying is a constant by-product, a residue in our communication. Ego, not in the Freudian sense, but as that imaginary 'pretend-me' who is so insecure and fearful that it needs to control the story-lines of its Life, and insist on certainty, reassurance, and validation as it blathers away. Yet we 'believe' that broadcasters are somehow magically qualified to speak truth, be objective, and stick to facts all the time. That these people get paid tens of millions of year is a testament to how strong these beliefs are.

I'm not just talking about journalists, by the way, but politicians, 'leaders', fashion gurus, financial gurus, gurus and authorities on everything from what wallpaper to decorate your bedroom to what to feed your kids. It feels safer that way, easier somehow, to sit back and just allow ourselves to be influenced by the safe, 'expert' opinion. It's the lazy way out. But it is your Life after all. Sense it, feel it, experience it. Breathe by breathe discover what you really need and want.

Those who did see the discrepancies in Williams' reportage spoke up years ago, but their voices couldn't penetrate through the matrix of manufactured media manipulation. Until Now. Now, it's a Big News Story. A controversy. We shouldn't wait for these controversies to emerge, but to use our individual powers of discernment with everything the supposed authorities are telling us, all the time; to stay present and awake and have a healthy relationship between the outside world's influences and what we are feeling, processing, making sense of within.

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Bent But Not Broken

2/6/2015

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PictureSomerset, N.J., Feb 2015
One of the bamboo trees in the back garden bent to the ground after last weekend's snowfall. The heavy, wet snow pushed the tips of its branches right to the ground and formed this arch. The tree has a strong, stable base rooted in earth which frees its branches and trunk to be as flexible as possible to endure nature's tests. And it has been tested so far this winter. It is a beautiful, real, everyday of suppleness; this combo of stability and flexibility. It's strength without brittleness, the ability to bend to extremes without breaking.

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Ksama in the Camel

2/4/2015

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The camel is the symbol of devotion. But instead of bowing forwards, forehead-to-earth, face planting into the ground, we see the opposite. We are bowing backwards. Not simply a backwards bend, the camel is a backwards-bow,  with the spine rounded, daring to be open, exposed. The head hangs back, our sense-organs open into space, our thinking powers brought into quiescence. To fully experience this back-bow, to experience the spine rounding almost of its own accord, you have to give yourself into the space and allow feelings of being untethered, unprotected. Living in this state of openness in Life -- with its messes, its uncertainties, pain, not just the pleasurable parts --  is devotion or ksama.

The rounded spine of the camel begins with the arms, in the preparatory phase. In general in this type of yoga, we spend time preparing as it helps bring an order to our bodies and our soul capacities - thinking, feeling, willing -- for the main event, the end pose.

So, begin by gliding one arm after another from an upright kneeling stance. One arm lifts in front and overhead, and as it circles back we experience a further openness into space but with a twist in the spine. The arm moves out in a big curve to work through the spine in the heart or thoracic region. You could simply move the arms in flowing, circular alternation, if that's enough for you.

To reach the end pose though, you land one hand after another on your heels, but do not lean back from the knees or waist. Do not put all your weight on your hands. That's a common error. Instead, guide your body forwards, over the hips. The hips remain stable. So, actually we are not as unmoored as we mightfeel in the pose.
We are actually in a safer place than we might feel when all the contours of Life hits us. We are able to indeed bear our consciousness through all of it -- not just the happy, pleasurable parts of life but all of it -- ksama.
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