The Budding Optimist

  In Bittersweet, readers are introduced to Min, an extraordinarily gifted violin protege. Min spent years training under the best violinist in the world -- who instructed her for free because he said he would learn just as much from her as she learned from him. Then, miracle of miracles, when Min turned 21, a 300-year-old Stradivarius violin came up for sale at auction. She took out a second mortgage on her apartment to buy the instrument that became the Great Love of her life. In what I cannot fully comprehend, it was apparently the only one in the world that really fit her. (Harry Potter? Wands? Anyone?) Then it was stolen and sold somewhere in the art underworld. Min went into a deep depression that lasted for years. When she finally emerged, it was to write a memoir. "The moment my violin was stolen, something in me died... I thought for a very long time that it would recover. But it never did. I have to accept that the person I was...with the violin is gone." Author Sus

  I just finished reading Dr. Anna Lembke's book, Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence . One of the things that stood out to me in this book is that pleasure and pain always seek equilibrium. When you experience too much pleasure, your body stops responding and you tilt toward the side of pain. When your body receives pain -- as in, say, a prolonged ice bath -- it responds by feeling pleasure afterward. As humans, it seems we are hardwired for stasis. We do not handle extremes well. The 4th yama of yoga is  brahmacharya . It was understood by the original (all male) practitioners to mean living an esoteric life of chastity. Now it is more about living without excess. I think it is a pillar of yoga because yoga is about balance -- the dark and the light, the strength and the softness, the difficulty and the ease. To live in or with  brahmacharya  requires notice and intention. It does not happen accidentally. Here's another fact I learned from Dr. Lembke'

This year I taught my most challenging group in the city, where I volunteer: about a dozen souls who had just been rescued from a human trafficking ring and didn’t speak a word of English.  To be honest, I don’t think the organization I volunteer with even realized what these people had been through  -- how could they, when communication was nearly impossible? By the time I taught the group, some of them were under federal protection. I don't even know their names. Sweatshops are now personal for me. Now that I’ve looked in the eyeballs of people that have been part of a human trafficking ring and lain my hands on theirs while I teach them the English QWERTY system, sweatshops are not just theoretical.  As my English class booted up their Chrome books one day to diagram a sentence I explained to them, "A sweatshop is a place where people — even children — are forced to work, like, 18 hours a day.” “Yep. Children, got it. 18 hours. No one cares. Like, literally, no one cares, s

Here is a confession: I dislike one of my yoga textbooks so much that I decided the only thing to be done would be to read the entire thing as quickly as possible, so as not to drag out the misery for another 6 months as homework is assigned incrementally. I love books, but this one is making me feel dumb. I don't get it. There's only so much of "Let your eyes blossom like flowers" that I can handle. I keep falling asleep while reading, which I feel is the opposite of eye-blossoming. So because I'm a couple hundred pages further than everyone else, I've already gotten to the part on  samskara . (For those who are interested, B. K. S. Iyengar includes a multi-page conversation between the mind, the memory, and the intelligence about vanilla ice cream. You read that correctly.) (look at his eyes blossoming like flowers) Samskaras are grooves or patterns into which our minds fall. These contribute to our overall patterns of behavior. For a long time now, my patte