What Did T. Read in 2022?

 




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Sūrya - Sun

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                                                    The Sanskrit word for sun is sūrya. Sūrya Namaskāra A is "Sun Salutation A" and Sūrya Namaskāra B is "Sun Salutation B." If sūrya were a human being, she would be my friend Abbie. She has been many different people in her life: coach, stylist, Lululemon drone. But for me, Abbie is a ball of sunlight challenging me to think differently.      Two weeks ago, after my ankle had mostly healed and before my milkweed hunt ended in poison ivy welts, I went to one of Abbie's yoga classes in the city. Afterward, we went to the TG Farmer's Market and talked life and philosophy.      Abbie is really big on manifesting things... like just  believing  things into being. If you've read  The Secret by Rhonda Byrne,  you know all about manifesting thi...
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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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īkṣaṇa - Look

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A look back at something that haunts me. I've been living in denial about my immediate future. Rather than using the summer to prep for teaching 7th grade, I've been hoping that something else will open up last minute in, say, Greece, and I will be able to leave 7th grade 4,000 miles behind me and relocate to a place that has no 7th grade. Or that at least I'd be on Corfu teaching 7th grade. The curriculum where I'm supposed to teach is...confounding. I told Stella I don't know what I'm teaching. Since she works in Clayton and is the best teacher I know, I trusted her to tell me where to start and then kick my ass into gear. Stella opened her computer, spent 7 minutes examining the curriculum published for my district, then slammed the computer shut and said, "Yeah, good luck with that; that's a mess. Sorry, T." So I refuse to look. I refuse to check my school email. I refuse to set up my classroom. I refuse to remove "high school English...
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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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Vācā - Word

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    In the preface to Night, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explains that after liberation, he did not know how to write his account of surviving Nazi horrors, of turning his back on his own father, of becoming one of the walking wounded, because words had ceased meaning what they used to mean. There were so many words -- chimney, gas, smoke, selection -- whose meanings he'd understood differently before. But how do you function in a post-apocalyptic world where the words that other people know mean something so catastrophically different to you now? And how do you communicate your experiences to people who cannot begin to fathom the atrocities those words might hold for you? I would not have had the strength or courage to survive what Wiesel experienced. But when I read that about the failure of words, I understood it. Words are my life -- reading them, writing them, teaching students to use them more effectively, how to manipulate words to win arguments and persuade audience...
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Svādhyāya - Self-study

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   Here is a riddle: Without putting too much thought into it, write down 5 words to describe the world. Go on, I'll wait. Do it quickly before you forget. Now, pause and look at the words. Each is more a projection of yourself than a true indicator of the what the world is like. Alarming, isn't it? I spoiled this exercise for some of the women in my yoga course by telling them all about it a week before they were supposed to read the chapter on s vadyaya . It turns out that a downside of reading a million books is that you can't remember what you read where, so you excitedly tell everyone half of everything in an effort to make connections. Even so, here are my words: broken, beautiful, tainted, complex, natural Freud would have a field day. I got to the chapter on self-study and thought, "If there is one thing I do not need help with, it is self-analysis." The 29 journals piled up on my bookshelf can attest to the fact that I am very familiar with myself. This i...
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Karma - Memory + Action

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I hung out with a friend recently at Oktoberfest. I realized exactly how long it had been since I'd seen him when he informed me that he'd been living in the Pacific Northwest for over a year already (which I had failed to notice prior to the request to hang out while he was "in town.") This very drunk guy came up to us in the beer hall tent and asked us if we knew that Jesus and God are the answer to everything that ails the entire world? (I'm not going to lie, it reminded me a teeny tiny bit of several experiences in my yoga class.) "Only in this area," I told the man soberly. Then he wandered off. Appropos of nothing, Theo told me that in his dating adventures, he has discovered that FOBO is a real thing. I had never even heard of this. I'm familiar with FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out. But apparently, FOBO (Fear of Better Options) is a malady that particularly affects the newly divorced. Having never been newly divorced, I'd apparently missed out ...
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