What Did T. Read in 2022?

 




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Advaita - Non-duality

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  I am teaching a weekly yoga class this month. The problem with this is that I have ZERO spacial awareness and am full of an impending sense of doom. In addition to the millions of hours I spend on lesson plans, I am now also spending evening hours writing sequences and studying yoga manuals.  Jade thinks this is a wonderful opportunity during which I will grow as a human being. That is why I am doing it. I want to grow as a human being. I've never been comfortable being bad at things.  Therapy Elsa insists I stop saying "bad" and instead say "imperfect." More than any other thing she has repeated over the last 4 years is the sentence, "I don't think it's as black and white as all that." She (and Jade) says that I am a perfectionist and that my idea of "bad" is anything at which I do not excel. The black-and-whiteness in me says that if I am not excellent at it, I am bad at it. No one likes to be imperfect at things, but I feel like ...
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Tamas - Spiritual Inertia

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When I first met my former therapist (Therapy Elsa), I eyeballed her with a great deal of distrust. I had finally been in therapy enough years to understand that the client, too, gets a say in whether or not the fit is right. "Are you one of those therapists who talk about sin a lot and how it's wrong to be gay?" I asked. Therapy Elsa smiled. "That's an interesting question. Why do you ask?" I assumed she was mentally writing down some kind of note like, "Prospective client probably gay." "Because you have diplomas hanging on your wall and one of them is from a seminary," I said. "Also, I know many Christians, and they care a LOT about whether people are gay." "Ah, I see," she said. "Well, to answer your concerns, the seminary I went to was quite open-minded." She went on to tell me how they used gender-neutral references for God, which basically made my head explode. Then I worried maybe she was too liberal ...
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Storge - Familial Love

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According to the ancient Greeks, there are 7 basic types of love. There's love that encompasses general goodwill to all of humanity ( agape ); love that is rooted in duty ( pragma ); love that is based on friendship ( philia) ... There's also love that is familial - storge . I find myself wondering how the Greeks would characterize love of family members that is also rooted in duty?                                                                 Yesterday, we celebrated my Dad's 78th birthday. He asked for the same thing he asks for every birthday and every Father's Day: for the family to watch a video of his choosing together.  One year, it might be a video about how the earth is only 5,000 years old.  The next year, it might be one about how the complexity of the human eyeball proves uneq...
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Häni—loss

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I rarely re-read books, but I'm re-reading The Midnight Library. It's about a woman who tries to kill herself after her cat dies and her job goes south (did I mention that's in trouble, too?) and she realizes she's alone. She winds up in the in-between, not quite alive, not quite dead, in a place called the Midnight Library, where all the decisions she's ever made are housed in a multiverse that looks like a library. By choosing to rescind any given choice, she can open a book and be transported to another universe to see how her life would be different there. I wish I could do that. I'm not doing very well. In the first week of November, Mocha died. In the second week, I gave Graysee to a neighbor and didn't even get to tell her goodbye. I tried texting the neighbor, asking if I could keep her for a few more weeks until I settled from Mocha's death, but didn't get a response. Yesterday, I had to leave school because I wasn't functioning well fro...
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Asteya - Non-stealing

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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 car...
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Choice

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When I used to teach The Giver, I asked students to create their own utopias. What would it look like? How would order be maintained? What would you eradicate that is present in our current world, and what would you add? How would you do it? It was an interesting exercise. It kind of made me wonder what a utopia would look like for me. I think it would be a world without decisions. I fkking hate decisions. I guess that's pretty ironic, given that the lack of choices in The Giver is what makes it a dystopia and what the protagonist works to overcome. It's weird how one man's dystopia is another man's utopia. I guess it's like John Milton said: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." Today, I had a 2nd interview for a position teaching high school English in my SEVENTH district. Instead of preparing, I did the following things: * scrolled through friends' Goodreads updates * shopped for eye shadow, then dec...
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Adhikāra - The Right to Have

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   "Yoga Elsa told me it would be okay if I quit training, that no one would think less of me. "But I thought you said it's normal for it to be this hard and for everyone to get injured and for us all to feel like we're dying right now!" I wailed. "It is. But you have to think it's worth it. There has to be something worth it in this for you. If you are just miserable the whole way through, it's okay to stop." Yoga Elsa is pretty badass. I am not sure why this training seems to be so much harder for me than for the others in my class. I'm sure part of it is the failure to rise above my job situation. I think part of it is also that most of the others have someone supporting them -- a partner, or a spouse, or even a studio. I'm climbing Mount Everest on my own here and hoping my oxygen holds out." I wrote that weeks ago now when I was afraid I would quit. It hadn't even occurred to me to quit until Yoga Elsa said that I could, an...
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