Just MakeItBetter

Photo by: Tony George

Over at my 84 Things to Live By post, Leimrod commented that he didn’t see how yoga is essential to life.

I suppose he has a point. Yoga’s recent travels into the westernized world has definitely poo-poohed yoga’s authenticity. There are hoards of Lululemon adorned people lugging mats to studios hoping to find divinity or at the very least, a good workout. Many of these people are just posers, bending into pretzels, feeling hip and trendy with every stretch. These components (as others) could make one wonder, as Leimrod has, why is this essential to life?

because once you remove the fads, the egocentric instructors and the foreign oddities all that is left is what life is meant to be, ready to be wrapped in your own version of perfect.

There are big ‘ol mirrors

Life can be an interesting struggle at times. Experiences can take us to places we thought we left in our past. People can bring out our worst. We can feel lost, bitter and sad.  The practice and awareness it takes to remove ourselves from these speedbumps, bad eggs and otherwise ” life lessons” is not an easy task to master.

Yoga forces physical exploration and mental stillness to collaborate. Working congruently, imbalance and distraction are one in the same. Bluntly put, it’s a place that if you choose to, will force you to face your own self (ahem, the mirror) and therefore help you get over your bullshit.

Shake it Off

Yoga forces people to practice patience (with yourself, with the child screaming outside the studio, with the endless to-do list scanning through your head). Flowing through a class helps awareness heighten and stillness find you .

And if you do it enough, you can do the same thing the next time your boss decides to splatter his or her ego all over your desk.

It’s totally weird

My favorite yoga instructor smells like petrulli oil. When she walks into the room you know she’s there. Not just from the scent that carries with her, but the undeniable calmness that comes with her presence. She’s a petite caramel colored woman from some island the British once colonized.  She has awesome, long black dreads that when hitting the wood floor drum a few melodic notes. She says things most don’t initial understand and often plays music most do not know.  She’s warm, inviting and definitely not “normal”. She is accepting and generous; a promoter of non-judgment.

Being around her is like drinking peace.

(Imagine getting to spend a few hours a week with THAT).

Move fatty

Yoga is hard. You sweat, your heart rate goes up and you’ll wake up sore. It can be difficult, but unlike the leg press there’s no grunting. Instead, you’re expected to breathe through it with a controlled and rhythmic flow. (Don’t worry - you’ll have the energy of the entire class to assist you through it.)

Working out is extremely valuable to our health. As is stretching and stress relief. Introducing yoga into a workout regime is a healthy way to balance what the human body needs.

On the mat/in life

Many instructors will say: “What happens in this room, on your yoga mat, is a reflection of what happens in your own life.”

Dropping all the flowery crap, it’s kinda true. As a practitioner, I’ll say it takes some time to really see how the two align. With each class, I am given an opportunity to move ahead, allowing myself to find new modifications, or I can continue to plateau. That decision usually parallels my decisions off the mat too.

Are you afraid of failing? Try a headstand, without the wall to support you. See how it feels to fall. See how it feels to fear a headstand. The mat is your space to do with whatever you want too.

(Kinda like your life.)

Yoga is a powerful, amazing practice that may not appear to be for everyone, yet it’s core intentions are the basic principles to a prosperous life.  I do encourage experiencing it before deciding whether it is essential to YOUR life. It can feel goofy, it can be exhausting, but oh it can be so good.

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For more reading:

Wikipedia - History of Yoga

Medicine.net’s list of health benefits

Washington Post - Yoga’s Power to Heal

Forums on how yoga impacted lives

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It’s silly and slightly melodramatic: I wish that people could just stop being hurt so much. I’m an ENFJ and one of the things that it says about me is that I pretty much see the potential greatness in everything.  I can quickly and meticulously identify where something or someone exemplifies space for improvement. In essence, I long to make things better. (Go figure.)

I’m always thinking about the women in Congo. People who are losing their homes. Children whose genius is being ruined with poor instruction, malnutrition and unkind direction. I hate knowing everyday civilians in Iraq experience massive devastation.

They’re all people too. Christian, Buddhist, Black or Brown. Mostly innocent.

I don’t worry about some guy mugging me on my way to work. I worry about what’s being untold. About when current children turn fifty and there’s a brain cancer epidemic. About medication that could save us but doesn’t receive funding because someone can’t turn a profit. I think about all that is being told and then feel terrified by what isn’t.

I worry more about this than some young inner city teen. Because for every uneducated homeowner who should accept individual responsibility, there is a manipulative broker waiting in the bushes to pounce on their ignorance.

I want to expose why, in this opulence, could anyone go hungry in the first place. I want to understand how entire communities become dilapidated by decades of neglect, when clearly others (sometimes steps away) are saved from such destruction.  I want to get to the heart of the matter, as they say, and pull out the root.

I don’t want us to feed the poor. That just keeps real change from succeeding. Instead, I want to show them how to start pulling weeds.

Is it idealistically ignorant of me to believe that the root of the cause could actually be remedied?

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This is for all you country girls and small town boys. And for anyone who is somewhere dreaming they could take the leap to make a change. If you dream of getting out from where you are but don’t believe you can, this post is for you.

I was raised in upstate New York, in a small town with two stoplights. The place consists of very little: mainly obese townies, neglected property and a large amount of livestock. It’s a safe, sheltered place to keep your kids simple and out of as much trouble as possible.

It’s also a huge sandbox in which to stick ones head into.

Now that I’ve escaped, I look back with appreciation, but when I was there I thought I’d never get out. I was terrified of becoming a local, in a dead-end job, squandering my dreams because of fear of what I’d never been shown.

It wasn’t until I left that I saw it was that very environment which made me aware I had the strength to get out.

Growing up in a secluded environment offers young minds a limited view of what makes up the world. These malleable children are disillusioned about what they could do, who they could be and what possibility lies before them. Similar to children raised in an inner city, information isn’t handed out like Halloween candy, with mentors offering up direction for misguided youth. The unknown is manipulated by media or parental driven portrayals. Growth and open-mindedness is then stifled, shortening an individual’s confidence to head out into the world. And with this brings a adulthood wrought with a mere existence.

Despite this, if you’re smart enough to dream bigger than where you are, then you’re strong enough to take it on.

If a person dreams of something bigger than where or what they are, they must believe that is something that exists for them. I don’t dream of becoming a man, because frankly I have no interest in it, but women that really do want a penis sure will find a way to get one.

When I was small I wished for culture and diversity and by doing so, I was creating that future for myself. Leaving my town of two thousand people wasn’t hard work. Years later, now being where I had dreamed I’d be, I understand dreaming it was all it took.

If you want to get out of your situation, whatever it may be, the fact that you have the strength to even wish for it is proof enough to know you’re smart enough to overcome it. Recognizing inferiority is enough evidence it can and should change.

Just do it.

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photo by Sir Merv’s

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Earlier this week, after finding bread poorly wrapped, I asked my lover to please make sure he put the English Muffin’s away properly or else they will go stale.

Three days later I made breakfast and went to work. Later on, I came home to a picture he’d taken that day:

6/16/08 Edit: After I posted this, I saw that I may not have been so clear. To sum it up: I gave him grief over not wrapping up the bread and a few days later I did the same thing. To point out my hypocritical behavior he took a picture of it (see above) and showed it to me. No words, no judgment.

You can’t argue with that.

Sorry guys, this post may have sucked. Good idea, bad execution.

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Someone shared this amazing idea with me today. It’s a TED Talks video and it’s an intelligent, original idea. In the video, Joshua Klein talks about how we could use a crow’s superior intelligence to benefit society rather then extinguish them.

He explains how the these animals and others like it withstand human development by adapting to the surroundings we’ve created.

Klein goes on to show surprising research that demonstrates a crow’s swift thinking skills while making their living. His intention with this was to show an alternative to population control.

Oddly, this got me thinking about our resistance and judgment of other cultures.

We snarl at crows, but it is only our skewed perception that finds their existence unnecessary.

Similarly, to us, Koreans eating dog is a big taboo, as is people eating horses. Again, this is only how we see it. Perhaps, like with the crows, it is what we don’t know rather than what we do know, that determines our points of view.

And that doesn’t seem very smart, now does it?

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Over at Copyblogger, a blunt marketer tells the truth.

Ms. Trunk breaks down my dreams a manager’s purpose.

At a time when it’s easy to hate America, Hunter pulls this out.

Muddled transparency of life with in-laws over at A Good Husband.

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Years and years ago man was only concerned with his survival.

His day to day consisted of clubbing wild beasts and avoiding being eaten. He wasn’t intellectually advanced enough to know the impact he could make on this world. Man’s purpose was simply to be for as long as he could. It was with evolution and developing societies that we become aware of our own mortality. And with this mortality came an unjust fear of the unknown.

What was to come upon our deaths, and with that, what stamp could we make for ourself while our short existence ran its course?

If even today we settled into survival alone (as many still do), the simplicity of our lives would most likely bring us happiness we’d only dreamed of. It is our obsessions with “perfection” and “success” that takes away from our human experience. These ideas of what we should be hang over our heads like unreachable meat to a starving animal. We are plagued by them and we will die wishing to obtain them.

It is our awareness of our impending demise that leads us to wish for a remarkable life. Shouldn’t knowing that we have this great opportunity be enough to appreciate it?

Doesn’t that alone make it remarkable?

We live in a time when we could (literally) be whomever and whatever we choose to be because our society has become so wonderful that we can become prosperous doing things we love. Our basic needs can be supplied with much less work and more efficiency than our ancestors could have ever known. Yet, still we squander resources and whine about circumstance.

Knowing the limitation time brings us shouldn’t create fears of mediocrity and failure, it should further illustrate the gift of life. To exist and know of it is our most valued treasure.

Evolution was a such a thoughtful present. It gave humans mortality. Perhaps it is best we honor every moment of it.

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psst - Have you stimulated someone else today?

photo by Emuisphere Peliculas

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I recently received my stimulus check.

I originally intended to save the entire $600 bucks for my first vacation in seven years.

But I’ve given it some thought, and since I don’t really NEED the money (as in the real definition of neediness), I’ve decided to use a portion of it to help stimulate someone else.

I am going to donate $100 of my check to Kiva.org and I hope I can get other people to do the same.

Now if you’d rather donate it to another organization or individual, so be it. If you didn’t receive a stimulus or aren’t an American getting fed a few hundred bucks in hush money, I still encourage you to consider the idea.

I could give the speel about giving rather than receiving, but you’ve been fed that line before.

This is an easy way to do something for somebody else with money we otherwise wouldn’t have had in the first place.

Any attempt to Just MakeItBetter is one worth doing.

I’m gonna try to get other bloggers in on the action. So do harass your favorites about it and/or please click on the links below to attract my blogger friends’ attention as well.

Thanks all, I appreciate your support.

White on Rice

Retire Syd

In My Heels

Millionaire Mommy

Frugal in the Fruitlands

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