Practical Gods

                         It must be troubling for the god who loves you
                       To ponder how much happier you'd  be today
                       Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
                                   -- Carl Dennis, The God Who Loves You
   

 Awakening & Epiphany
               Our poet friend Dennis presented us with a copy of one his favorite books last year, Practical Gods, the Pulitzer Prize winning volume of poems by Carl Dennis (www.poetryfoundation.org). The book's publisher notes that many of his poems "involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate this into secular terms." These  are  poems, the publisher says, meant to help us name the everyday, available gods that are easy to ignore, both those that frustrate and those that sustain life and make it rewarding.  I think I would agree that this poet's work stands apart because it nudges us gently but firmly beyond accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving. Which is of course, why I am a writer and probably why you are too. Or why you want to be a writer. What's the point of poetry and prose after all, if we aren't nudging our readers and ourselves into some kind of awakening and epiphany?

Befriending The Gods
               Dennis (our friend, not the Pulitzer Prize winner Dennis) is about 68 years now and he used to be a hotshot healthcare exec in New York at a prestigious hospital/medical school. It was science by the book for him every day. Then he had a massive brain hemorrhage, had to retire to Arizona and relearn how to do everything from scratch. That's when he got into poetry. He began writing poems and joined a writer's organization that every year holds a national writing contest. So far he's taken several first prize awards and garnered seconds and honorable mentions too. His poetry is delightful and he himself is a very fine guy to be around, slower and not as steady as before but probably lots more compassionate and observant than he was in his high flying NYC days. He has a couple of parrots now that he dotes on and he can always be counted on to try something new and expansive. Dennis is one of those people who, despite a major health setback, is aging gracefully and well because he's learned to befriend the gods who sustain life and make it rewarding. Today I'm sharing with you one of my favorite poems from the book Dennis gave us and maybe you'll be as intrigued and moved as I was the first time I read it. Maybe you will seize upon one small but luminous thought and, like Dennis, maybe you will begin to open the door to your own epiphany today. I hope so.


 The God Who Loves You 
It must be troubling for the god who loves you
To ponder how much happier you'd be today
Had you been able to glimpse your many futures.
It must be painful for him to watch you on Friday evenings
Driving home from the office, content with your week--
Three fine houses sold to deserving families--
Knowing as he does exactly what would have happened
Had you gone to your second choice for college,
Knowing the roommate you'd have been allotted
Whose ardent opinions on painting and music
Would have kindled in you a lifelong passion.
A life thirty points above the life you're living
On any scale of satisfaction. And every point
A thorn in the side of the god who loves you.
You don't want that, a large-souled man like you
Who tries to withhold from your wife the day's disappointments
So she can save her empathy for the children.
And would you want this god to compare your wife
With the woman you were destined to meet on the other campus?
It hurts you to think of him ranking the conversation
You'd have enjoyed over there higher in insight
Than the conversation you're used to.
And think how this loving god would feel
Knowing that the man next in line for your wife
Would have pleased her more than you ever will
Even on your best days, when you really try.
Can you sleep at night believing a god like that
Is pacing his cloudy bedroom, harassed by alternatives
You're spared by ignorance? The difference between what is
And what could have been will remain alive for him
Even after you cease existing, after you catch a chill
Running out in the snow for the morning paper,
Losing eleven years that the god who loves you
Will feel compelled to imagine scene by scene
Unless you come to the rescue by imagining him
No wiser than you are, no god at all, only a friend
No closer than the actual friend you made at college,
The one you haven't written in months. Sit down tonight
And write him about the life you can talk about
With a claim to authority, the life you've witnessed,
Which for all you know is the life you've chosen.

    

In The Journal

            It is superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one’s private, secret thoughts—like a confidante who is deaf, dumb and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person: I create myself.    
                                                               -- Susan Sontag, On Keeping a Journal

Author and literary icon Susan Sontag believed that an organic flow of thought, feeling and ideas emerging over time meant that an individual life can be viewed as a path with a creative, cyclic nature. She wrote that who you are today may  very well be a different self from the you of tomorrow, and you have only to consult your journal over a period of time to affirm that this is indeed so. Sontag's notion is echoed in Mary Catherine Bateson’s  belief (Composing a Life) that our lives are at essence raw material, both past and present, which is being continually shaped and reshaped over time. The older I get the less fanciful this notion seems to be. In fact, it adds a whole new dimension of hope and inspiration because it shows me the way back home, to center, every time I think about it.  I know for sure that the life I'm living now holds the promise of a time and place wider, deeper, friendlier and fuller than anything I thought possible in the first half of life. And I'm open to the unexpected and unfamiliar in a way I never could have been before.

A Friendly Owl 
             For instance, after dabbling around with watercolors for a few years, I took up making art in earnest recently, just drawing and painting whatever came into my head on any particular day. I found myself becoming obsessed with birds and among other efforts, produced a somber but friendly looking owl who had in tow a perky turtle compadre sporting a multicolored shell who just kind of appeared at the bottom of the painting as if to say, "OK Boss, where do we go from here?" Why do I tell you this and what does it mean? I believe composing our new stories is a process not dissimilar to how that painting took shape. I didn't know that owl was in there when I started with an old unfinished abstract orange and purple watercolor sketch that had languished in a drawer for a couple of years. I just began to add details with charcoal pencil, livened the whole thing up with a rainbow of pastels dashed here and there and then added whatever else seemed to be calling to be made use of. My finished painting was, in the end, not that different from our second life stories: Composed of  bits and pieces of things gone missing in the relative wilderness of a previous existence (the drawer/the first half of life), we shape memories of people, places, things which are recovered, transformed and made new and whole again. I have grown to love this owl and I call it Wisdom. It is my muse and holds a regal place of  great honor as the only painting on the wall in my new writing studio. 

Speak Your Truth

Honing a heightened awareness and finding a new composition and meaning is possible by harvesting seemingly unrelated pieces and pages of the personal diary or journal.  Like the way I found a new shape, form, texture and meaning for what was in its first life an original, unfinished abstract watercolor painting. Distilling past and present,  you can honor future by paying attention in a very focused way so you can see the stuff of what your life really is, right now. With the pieces from your journal and diary, whenever you encounter even a small bit of awareness and intention, you can be sure you are embracing a singleness of eye, a purity of intention and a return to center.  To get to this new sense of meaning from seemingly unrelated bits and pieces, try the process of Reflective Journaling. It's a practice influenced by writers Dorothea Brandt, Brenda Ueland, Ira Progoff, Peter Elbow, Natalie Goldberg and Julia Cameron and especially Linda Metcalf and Toby Simon (Writing the Mind Alive: The Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice).  Putting it all out there in a journal without anxiety or judgment becomes pretty easy because you know this isn't a formal or finished piece of writing. At the same time it's not a sloppy, splashy, messy yadayada either. Rather it's a accessible but methodical way to befriend your writing as your muse, one you respect and listen to deeply and authentically.  To journal the way I am describing below is a sincere personal and intimate engagement with your own soul. The intention is to establish self trust, to find your voice an in the end, polish the glowing center, the essence of who you are and what you think. When you free yourself from the pressure of performance you naturally listen to our inner writer and that's how you get the connection between head and heart, thought and feeling. Which is just another way to say that's how you get to wisdom's edge.


What Do I Mean By?
              1. Light a candle, turn on a classical music piece of your choice and use clean, white, soft writing paper with a steady, clear pen. Have a timer handy, a digital clock is good. Now.

2. Write fast. Clean. Raw and open. Take 25 minutes. Don’t ask yourself to do more, this isn’t a competition.

 3. Now read it over and pick a word or phrase that jumps out at you. Follow it by playing with its meaning. See where it leads you. Ask the crucial question “What do I mean by?” as you write and read without any sense of censorship, analysis or intent. This is an encounter with authentic center.

4. You’ll begin to see that your thoughts have a direction, a life of their own, a purpose you can trust. This is your true writer’s voice. This is your center. This is your muse speaking to you. Later when you begin to write the essay, memoir or autobiography , you will know what it really feels like and what it sounds like to write from  this place.

5. Read your piece again, this time scouring for remembrance of things past or intimations of immortality (thank you Marcel Proust and William Wordsworth). Any indications that you are a creature living here, there and yonder all at once? That the veil between past, present and future a  little less clear than we typically believe? Notice and write. Your muse will thank you.

Greeting Yourself Again

          The time will come When, with elation, You will greet yourself arriving At your own Door, in your own mirror, And each will smile at the other’s welcome. And say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, the stranger who has loved you. All your life, whom you ignored, For another who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, The photographs, the desperate notes, Peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

                                           -- Derek Walcott,  Love After Love

           There will come a time for you as a writer when you will finally and deeply look inward and draw upon your own experience and wisdom to create a bevy of characters. You'll find some likable and some not so likable. Villains maybe. Really bad guys. Or heroines. Really great gals. Whatever. You’ll be asked (by yourself) to come up with perspectives, characteristics and qualities that are perhaps  1. eminently believable, 2.  incredibly naïve 3. beyond the pale,  4. embarrasingly irrational, 5. almost divine, 6. captivatingly witty, 7. wickedly fascinating… the list goes on.  How will you do this? How well will you do this?

You may, at this moment, have no idea how it will all fall into place. 

Hello In There

           Here’s a hint: All those characters?  Hello! Strangely enough, they are all parts of you. And even more strange, you know it. But you forget it. So reminders of this verity can always be useful, especially when tempted to fall into stereotypical descriptions with all the attendant stock clichés and boring behavioral quirks. One way to keep the characters fresh, alive and believable is to observe yourself as you set about engaging in a behavior that you’ve done a million times, oblivious and unconscious. In other words, observe yourself minutely as you do something very ordinary in a new way that may or may not make any sense. This might sound as if you have to participate in a sort of split personality experiment for a time. Maybe so.

 Practice Being Strange

         Jill Jepson in her insightful book Writing As a Sacred Path moves through a series of writing exercises designed to create a strange and unfamiliar milieu which in turn results in an altered perspective. Think about this: Could the act of writing in a physical position that is unusual, maybe even uncomfortable, spur a certain approach to perspective that comes only by observing  and doing simultaneously? Try this:

·       Stand up. Write a short a description of a beautiful stranger, standing up. You, not them. Or not.

·       Use a different surface. If you are usually at the table, try a reclining chair or a folding chair, or a sofa. Get down and dirty on the floor maybe as you write a 10 minute description of a charming villain who appears at a dinner party for a select group of friends you’ve known since fifth grade.

·       Other possibilities? Simple changes feel strange and awkward, as you can see. To take it to the extreme edges of strangeness, go into the bathroom, kitchen or bedroom and find a surface you would never think to use for writing upon. Now write about how you feel about writing in this way.

 Greet Yourself Anew

               I like the advice novelist Henry James once gave to an aspiring writer, "Try to be a person on whom nothing is lost."  What I think that means is that you must learn to do it and then learn to watch yourself doing it at the same time. While observing everything everyone else is doing as well. It’s all perspective, all the time, isn't it?  In the end, don't take anything too seriously, not even all this stuff about how to be a better writer. No, in the end what really matters is just to get up every day, greet your sweet self anew and give back your heart to itself saying, 'sit here, eat, I love you.' Today,  please feast on your own life. Thank you.

Well Why Not

     
            I said to myself, I have things in my head that are not like what anyone has taught me -- shapes and ideas so near to me -- so natural to my way of being and thinking that it hasn't occurred to me to put them down. I decided to start anew, to strip away what I had been taught.To create one's own world, in any of the arts, takes courage. Making your unknown known is the important thing
                                                                                                    -- Georgia O'Keeffe


            I encountered a true original the other day at the annual artist studio tour in Scottsdale, artist Mary Larue Wells. Here's one woman who has found the courage to create her own world (www.marylaruewells.com),  a world filled with things in her head not like anyone has taught her. Wells is a surrealist, painting from an inner landscape with artistic perspective that offers a decidedly whimsical twist on reality.  She's shown in prestigious venues across the country Including NYC, Washington D.C. and Hilton Head. She's also has had numerous one-person shows including The National Wildlife Federation and The U.S. Geological Survey. One of her neighbors, an art critic, said about her work: "Take one perspective, turn it upside down or inside out and there might be something this witty artist sees worth wrapping her brush around. Her mind's been working this way for 70 years and she still is feisty as ever. When asked why a girl riding a pig in her painting is holding a stick with a matching pig on it, she replied, "Well why not?"
  
A Vision Unique

            When I saw a copy of her Meerkats Descending inspired by Marcel Duchamp's Nudes Descending a Staircase (the original painting had been bought, she said, by a man who collected meerkats...I know!... where on earth did he keep them?) I laughed out loud, loving the quaint, unexpected, tongue-in-cheek interactive play of images she'd conjured up. Most of the art I saw at her studio had that same quality of surprising freshness and fearlessness. I was captivated and told her I was writing about the absolute necessity of continuing to embrace creativity as we move on in life. She knew right away what I was talking about.  Forthright and refreshingly modest about her considerable talents and successful professional career, she says matter-of-factly that at 70 she's still working but now dealing with macular degeneration and she might not recognize me if I came to visit her again. I was taken aback when she told me this but thought immediately of other instances of creative artistic genius that bloomed anew despite incipient health challenges in later years: Matisse at 72 said he'd found une seconde vie (a second life) when he switched from painting to cutouts after he became confined to a wheelchair. Renoir, in his mid seventies and  almost crippled with rheumatoid arthritis, tied brushes to his hands and proclaimed he had just begun to learn to paint. Painter Georgia O'Keeffe kept on working by switching to  clay, watercolor and charcoal when she experienced macular degeneration in her eighties. Other artists like Monet, Degas and Rembrandt also spring to mind as examples of artists who adapted to health challenges, finding new ways to express their visionary sensibilities.

Courage To Create

         Mary Wells' website features a selection of images, all interesting and accessible, like the artist herself. But it's hard to digitally capture the sometimes shocking originality, the sense of other worldliness and appealing oddity so in evidence when you visit her studio and see her original work all together in one place. She published her book From an Inner Landscape in 2010 and her surrealistic paintings with a twist present ageless, magical and wise creatures living out their lives in dramas that are born in her imagination, her 'inner landscape'. The same kind of landscape Georgia O'Keeffe talked about  when she said that to create one's own world takes courage and that making your unknown known is the important thing.  The take away here, if you're looking for messages in your art, is that moving on in life, digging in and growing older asks you to ponder the question of what you can do different and maybe even better with age. It's not really about 'How much have I lost'  it's about 'How much do I have yet to experience and share and contribute.' Well why not? At wisdom's edge how could it be otherwise.




           

       

        

 
     

An Optimal Experience

    

         When I see works that come close to my heart, that I think are really fine, I have the strangest reaction, sort of like being hit in the stomach.…What comes to you after looking at it calmly, after you’ve really digested every nuance and every little thread, is the total impact. When you encounter a very great work of art, you just know it and it thrills you in all your senses, not just visually, but sensually and intellectually.

            --  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience 

          The idea that we're all engaged in reinventing ourselves and creating new stories (you could also just call it  your personal mythology if you don't like the word story) is a given these days. How could it be otherwise as every day we wake up to find that the world as we knew it yesterday, is no longer?  Your developing story reflects your current state of consciousness leavened and shaped by ancestral lineage and beliefs about an erstwhile younger version of yourself.  Not just a kind of  mentally constructed envisioning of the future, this new narrative is something much more earthy, integrated and sensual. One way you'll know it is through the actual daily writing it down as you are living it. And as you begin to notice, become aware, wake up and inhabit this  story, you'll find new meaning emerging from what you see, hear, smell, taste, feel, think. From meaning comes story. And from story comes meaning.

Spiritual Transcendence

          When I started writing again after a long hiatus, I decided to focus on acknowledging a daily optimal experience with Beauty as the integrating theme. What I discovered is this: Every day, by deliberately finding and focusing on the beautiful in any given experience, I am able to consciously move my self to a new level of peace and joy, something I would define as an optimal experience. Now maybe some of you wouldn't use this terminology but for me this combined result of absorption of the senses, concentrated focus of mind and controlled exertion of body feels like what might justifiably be called spiritual transcendence. I know that moments like this are routinely a part of the heightened creative experience characterizing the lives of the great masters of art, music and literature, but most of us only experience moments like this in more limited ways. Still, when such a moment occurs it's almost always remembered as one of the most intense, pleasurable and memorable experiences of our lives. I live in the state of Arizona where the natural beauty abounding can literally take your breath away.

 Beholding Beauty

             I see this beauty every night on my evening walk through the desert. True, beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder and the desert is not everyone's idea of beauty but for those whose senses are simpatico, nature's charms are incomparable. I am reminded of John Loring, design director emeritus for New York City's world renowned jeweler Tiffany & Co. (www.tiffany.com). Loring grew up on a ranch in Cave Creek, Arizona and has said he couldn't help but be inspired by seeing beauty like this. He said much of the inspiration for his designs came from the shapes, textures, smells, sounds and tastes of nature he'd experienced during his boyhood years. (http://sagedillon.wordpress.com/writing-samples/silver-tea/). Nature here in Arizona is a very great work of art indeed, from those odd and appealing desert sentinels called saguaro cactus, the soul stirring, socko sunsets, the charming and friendly hummingbird population, the magnificent Grand Canyon and the magnetic red rocks of Sedona...it's not hard to awaken here to Beauty. It's everywhere.

A Conscious Awareness

      The truth is that as thinking, feeling, moving beings we all have the capacity to learn how to create such moments of optimal experience for ourselves. Maybe we need only to come to conscious awareness of such moments, recognizing and honoring them for what they are and finding within ourselves the courage to create each day anew, believing it is awash with possibilities for the sacred experience of integration and transcendence. Here's one way to start:

Write for 15 minutes, taking five minutes for each of these writing experiences:

1)    Describe a moment when you encountered something through your senses so artistically beautiful and touching that it brought you close to tears with its near-perfection. Nature? Art? Music? Write this in all its sensual glory!

2)    Create a short tribute to an inspirational person you admired in your life (a real person or fictional character) who first gave you a sense of what optimal experience is, the possibility of integrating body/mind/spirit so that life might be experienced on a higher, more creative and fulfilling plane of existence.

3)    Recall and write about a piece of writing (could be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essay) that was so viscerally powerful that, after you’d finished reading it,  your life was changed forever in a positive way

The Body Never Lies

Consciousness is always in rapid change....
It is the continuous readjustment of self and the world in experience.
                                          -- John Dewey, Art as Experience,  1934


          My artist friend Kris was raving a couple of weeks ago about The Five Senses, a wonderfully provocative show now through May 4, 2014 at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (www.smoca.org).  I took my visiting NYC daughter and grandson to see what all the fuss was about. Delightful! It's much  more than just a viewing experience, it's a fun and engaging romp through the realms of sight, smell, sound, touch and taste. Not only that, it's also a dynamic demonstration of how we really can learn to experience mindfulness and expanded awareness by abandoning ordinary cognition and listening to the wisdom of the body.

 See, Smell, Hear, Taste, Touch
           We entered the exhibit excited by the promise of encountering a cascade of sensation courtesy of an inextricable aggregate of biology, physics, neurology and chemistry. Stepping first into Soul City, a colorful pyramid of 6,000 oranges, we activated taste, sight, smell and touch. Everyone got an orange to take home. Next we sidled over to the fabulously sensual and smelly charms of an aromatic hanging spice tree. Our noses thanked us. Then we sat on benches as we opened our eager ears to a swelling symphony of very loud, very inspiring choral music. Moving to the next room, we stood for a few moments, lost among a swirling forest of electric fans synchronized to reflect the experience of Thoreau at Walden Pond (trust me, you would be impressed with this.) Finally, we fell into welcome enchantment as we made our way into an eerie twilight chamber filled with damp, misty air. Taken together these odd and intriguing sensualities created an exhibit that places the visitor starkly in the center of a world awash in the aliveness of visceral sensation. If you're somebody who's composing a new narrative based on the truth of mindfulness and expanded consciousness, this exhibit might be your gift from the gods. Awake and alive, your body as a sensing device will never lie to you. Rather, it will completely enliven you and empower you if you are ready to hear, see, smell, taste and touch the truth of life.

Writing Without Teachers
         I was reminded of the time I put together a writing group using material from Peter Elbow's classic primer Writing Without Teachers. Participants were supposed to look inward to access their five senses in order to respond imaginatively and creatively to questions like what colors and what shapes did you see in the piece? If  the piece was a musical instrument which one would it be and how would it sound? If it were an animal how would it look and how would it act? How did it taste to you -- sour, tart, salty, sweet? And texture? On your skin would it have been hot, cold, soft, scratchy, silky? How about smell...was it strong, musty, spicy, sweet...what? This was all great fun and the group of creative, lively, intelligent women did pretty well with sharing authentic bodily responses even though it was a little awkward at first.

Or Not
             As the weeks went by and the initial intriguing novelty wore off, so did a certain comfort level with the process. Maybe I was pushing too hard, the way I used to push myself when I was hot on the trail of a truth, dropping ever deeper to get to the guts of it, to the raw, visceral, sensuality that an authentic writing process demands. Didn't work with these gals. The whole thing fell apart and I finally just walked away with a terse goodbye. The group chose a no pressure coffee and conversation format and I admit I had mild regrets that they hadn't wanted to stick it out, even if it was a little uncomfortable encountering the raw and the real of the inner world. Unveiling an unlived life can be a pretty rude awakening if you're not prepared for it. And who really knowingly invites this kind of awareness, fraught as it is? Surprisingly, many do. When I taught in Santa Fe, dedicated writers fully expected and wholly embraced the rigors of such an experiment. But that was then, we were all younger and maybe more ready and able to take this inner journey. Timing is everything, right?


Congratulations
         The truth is our students (and our children!) are our very best teachers after all. Don't ignore feelings, look at what is happening with the body, and accept that chaos is a necessary part of becoming conscious as you wake up by attending to the five senses. Just look out and get ready. Thumb the nose at terror, hysteria, retreat, blaming or defensiveness; instead, give yourself a congratulatory slap on the back with accompanying cries of  hooray, hosanna and hallelujah. Long into the night.Wisdom's Edge? Look no further, you're there.

Healthy Aging & Yoga

    
           Sometimes reliable, considered, first hand information is hard to come by, especially with the proliferation of hype about yoga out there. When I began writing this blog my intent and promise was to share with you some of the life changing teachers I've encountered  as I write my own new story about (that phrase again!) 'aging gracefully.'
            One of these teachers is Tim McCall, M.D. ( www.drmccall.com) whose book Yoga As Medicine has offered inspiration for a number of yoga workshops I've taught. McCall writes a periodic, free, electronic newsletter and I'm re-posting his most recent one for you. I find his (writer's) voice trustworthy and accounts of his healing experience with yoga and a willingness to share information commendable as he pushes boundaries in his quest for health and well being.

 

Rebuilding Immunity with Yoga and Ayurveda

Hi Everybody,

Greetings from Kerala, India, the birthplace of Ayurveda. I'm back to continue my studies of this ancient holistic medical system -- an amazing complement to yoga therapy -- and to get treatments myself. One consequence of all the teaching and traveling I do is that it's tiring and tends to run down my immunity. Correcting the latter is the main thing this year's treatments are designed to do.

 

In Ayurveda, the loss of resistance to illness -- from colds to more serious maladies -- correlates with the concept of Ojas depletion. Ojas [pronounced OH jus] is the healing side of Kapha, the dosha associated with the "water element." Besides healthy immune function, Ojas is associated with stability and groundedness, love and contentment. All the work I've been doing drives up my Pitta, associated with fire in Ayurvedic thinking. All the traveling and talking that goes with teaching increases Vata, associated with wind, or the air element. An excess of heat and wind, as in nature, tends to dry things up, thus depleting the nectar-like Ojas.

So now I'm resting, doing restorative yoga, gentle pranayama and meditation, getting daily oil massages, and eating beautiful vegetarian food, lovingly prepared by the family whose home I'm staying in. It's in the middle of lush countryside, surrounded by coconut palms, banana, papaya and jack fruit trees, and full of the sounds of birds and goats and other animals. Love, rest, time in nature, oil massages, and sattvic food all help restore Ojas, and my Ayurvedic doctor, Chandukutty Vaidyar has other tricks up his sleeve, which I'll be experiencing in the weeks to come. In addition, there's no internet access here without a 45 minute bus ride into town, which is a good thing as frittering away time in cyberspace is another way many of us lose precious Ojas.

 

​ Most of the herbs and oils that Chandukutty employs are homemade, made in the old-fashioned ways. Here, a number of freshly picked herbs are being dried in the sun by Krishna Dasan, my Ayurvedic therapist, who was first taught these techniques by Chandukutty as a teenager, and is extrarodinary at what he does. I'm already really feeling the results, and even better, they say the benefits continue to accrue for two to three months after you complete the treatments.   

***

Before I left for India, I was happy to take part in the Medical Yoga Symposium at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC, along with Dr. Dean Ornish, Harvard Medical School's Dr. Sat Bir Khalsa, and a handful of the country's leading yoga researchers and therapists. The event sold out early and was enthusiastically received and, most importantly, is a testament to the growing acceptance of yoga and yoga therapy in governmental and health care settings. If you'd like to read more about the event, I recently wrote about it for the Yoga For Healthy Aging blog.

Dean Ornish's fabulous keynote detailed his work investigating the benefits of a yoga-based program for people with heart disease, which Medicare and some private insurers will now pay for. More recently, he's been studying the same kind of yogic lifestyle intervention on men with prostate cancer, again with very encouraging results. I wrote more on his work in the blog post cited above, as well as in an article for Yoga Journal called Straight to the Heart.
 

I recently did a long interview with Integral Yoga Magazine on yoga therapy that you may be interested in. In addition, you can check out a blog post I did on Keeping Yoga Safe for People with High Blood Pressure. It's also still possible to purchase the recording of the full teleseminar I recently led on Yoga U on working with students with high blood pressure.

When I'm finished with my Ayurvedic treatments in early March, I'll be heading to England where I'll teach Yoga as Medicine (YAM) Level 1 at TriYoga in London. In June, for the first time, I'll be teaching in my hometown of Milwaukee (YAM Level 1), and in July I'll be heading to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to teach both YAM Level 1 and the Level 2 YAM course on Yoga Therapy for the Nervous System. Look for more YAM Seminars in Boston, Austin, Rochester and Copenhagen in the months ahead, and in Summit, New Jersey in early 2015.

I hope to see you all sometime soon …Namaste,  Timothy