The Integrity of Speaking Truth to Power, Part 1 – The Part Where We Observe, Speak, & Move Like Thunder February 15, 2023

Posted by ajoyfulpractice in "Impossible" People, Art, Books, Buddhism, Changing Perspectives, Depression, Faith, Food, Gratitude, Healing Stories, Hope, Life, Loss, Love, Music, Mysticism, Pain, Peace, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Suffering, Tragedy, Wisdom, Women, Writing, Yoga.
Tags: 14th Amendment, 19th Amendment, Anna Shaw, Bill T. Jones, bloomers, Dale Carnegie, Elisabeth Griffith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Galileo Galilei, Grand Duchess Christina, Ida Husted Harper, Seneca Falls Convention, Susan B. Anthony, Vipassana
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Peace and ease to all during this “Season of Non-violence” and all other seasons!

For Those Who Missed It: This is an abridged version of a 2022 post, which included information about the Lantern Festival. “Part 2” will be a special Black History note.

“The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow in our souls. Every truth we see is ours to give the world, not to keep to ourselves along, for in so doing we cheat humanity out of their rights and check our own development.”

– quoted from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speech at the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention (and birthday celebration for Susan B. Anthony), February 18, 1890

Philosophically speaking, part of our yoga practice is about bring awareness to what we know – or what we think we know – about ourselves and the world around us. Once we do that, we have begun the process of recognizing how what we know or think we know determines our actions, our thoughts, our words, our deeds. Our beliefs influence the we interact with ourselves, with others, and with our environment. Once we really get into it, we also start to notice when – or if – we incorporate new information into our belief system; thereby adjusting our actions as we grow and mature.

At some point, we may start to notice how our experiences shape our beliefs and how our experiences and beliefs determine what we chose to do on any given day. Hopefully, we also recognize that other people make other choices based on the their beliefs and experiences. If we can see that, be open to the reality of that, and maybe dig a little deeper into that reality, we gain better understanding of ourselves (and maybe of the world). In other words, we gain insight.

Vipassanā is a Buddhist meditation technique that has also become a tradition. It literally means “to see in a special way” and can also be translated as “special, super seeing.” In English, however, it is usually translated as “insight.” This insight is achieved by sitting, breathing, and watching the mind-body without judging the mind-body. Part of the practice is even to recognize when you are judging and, therefore, recognizing when you are getting in your own way. It is a practice of observation – which is also part of our yoga practice.

“You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him to find it within himself.”

– Galileo Galilei, as quoted in How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

Born February 15,1564, in Pisa, Duchy of Florence, Tuscany, Italy, Galileo Galilei is remembered as the Father of observational astronomy, modern physics, the scientific method, and modern science. The Indigo Girls even called him “the King of Insight,” which makes sense given the aforementioned definition of insight. Galileo was able to see things others had not seen thanks to advancements in telescope technology and also because he was willing to pay attention. He was open to new information and to how that information supported or did not support his understanding of what had previously been observed by himself and others.

Galileo was an astronomer, a physicists, an engineer, and a polymath who studied all aspects of physical science and invented the thermoscope and a variety of military compasses. He used the telescope to track and identify the moons of Jupiter; the phases of Venus (which are similar to moon phases); and the rings of Saturn. He also analyzed lunar craters and sunspots and supported Copernican heliocentrism (the idea that the Earth rotated on it’s axis and also rotated around the Sun). In fact, his observations became the basis of his book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) – which was banned in Italy for a while and resulted in Galileo being convicted of heresy by the Catholic Church.

Despite the fact that the ban extended to the publication of his future books, Galileo wrote Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences while he was under house arrest. This latter work, which was basically a summation of thirty years worth of physics, could not find a publisher in France, Germany, or Poland. It was ultimately published in Leiden, South Holland and featured the same characters who were conversing in his Dialogue. There was one notable change in the characters, however, the “simple-minded” one that had previously been viewed as a caricature of the pope was not as foolish or stubborn. When the text made its way to Roman bookstores, it quickly sold out.

“But I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.”

– quoted from the 1615 letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (mother of Cosimo II de ’Medici) by Galileo Galilei

Susan B. Anthony, who was born February 15, 1820, in Adams, Massachusetts, was also considered quite controversial by the establishment of her time. Like Galileo Galilei, she was an observer. Her primary observations, however, were related to the social interactions of humans. She was a suffragist as well as an abolitionist and is remembered for her great friendship and collaborations with Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The two women had different backgrounds made different life choices, but they were firmly united in the quest for equal rights.

The second-oldest of seven, Susan B. Anthony was born into a liberal Quaker household despite the fact that her mother (Lucy Read Anthony) was Methodist and her father (Daniel Anthony) was shunned (for marrying outside his religion) and disowned (for allowing dancing in his home). The Anthony children were taught Quaker values, as well as the importance of self-sufficiency and social responsibility. At least three of her siblings were activists. Ms. Anthony herself, attended a Quaker boarding school in Philadelphia until 1837 when the Anthony’s, like so many, faced financial ruin and depression. She left school for a bit, but ultimately became a teacher at a different Quaker boarding school. By this time, the family had moved to New York and eventually joined what would become the Congregational Friends, and offshoot of the Quakers.

The Congregational Friends were active social reformers and many attended services at First Unitarian Church of Rochester, which was also socially active. Around the late 1840’s, the Anthony farm in Rochester had become a favorite place for activists to come together. One of those activists was Frederick Douglass, with whom both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony would develop a friendship.

“I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.”

– quoted from the end of Susan B. Anthony’s “Power of the Ballot” speech (probably on July 12, 1871) as printed in “Chapter XXIII: First Trip to the Pacific Coast (1871)” from The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Complete Illustrated Edition – Volumes 1&2): The Only Authorized Biography containing Letters, Memoirs and Vignettes of the life of the World Renowned Suffragist, Abolitionist and Author and Friend of Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Ida Husted Harper

In 1846, Susan B. Anthony accepted a position as headmistress of the girls’ department at Canajoharie Academy in Canajoharie, Montgomery County, New York. A year or two later, she was offered the position of superintendent or director of the women’s department. She was in Canajoharie, almost 173 miles away from her family, during the Seneca Falls Convention (July 19-20, 1948) and the Rochester Women’s Rights Convention of 1848 (on August 2nd), but at some point she was aware that her parents and her sister (Mary Stafford Anthony) had (at least) attended the latter.

The Seneca Falls Convention was the first women’s rights convention organized by women (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Coffin Mott, and Martha Coffin Wright) and it produced the Declaration of Sentiments. One hundred of the approximately 300 attendees to the conference signed the declaration, which Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with assistance from Mary Ann M’Clintock, had modeled after the Declaration of Independence. Mrs. Cady Stanton (and her sister, Harriet Cady Eaton), Mrs. M’Clintock (plus her daughters Elizabeth W. and Mary M’Clintock and her half-sister, Margaret Pryor), Mrs. Mott, and and Mrs. Wright were among the 68 female signers; Frederick Douglass, Thomas M’Clintock, and James Mott were among the the 32 male signers.

Several online sources indicate that the three Anthony’s signed the declaration; however, they are not listed by the National Parks Service (NPS) and their names do not appear on the original document preserved by NPS. According to a media report included in The History of Women Suffrage, edited by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (published in 1902), no attendees at the National-American Convention of 1898 (February 13^th – 19^th, in Washington, D. C.) attended the Seneca Falls Convention. However, the report indicated that Mary W. Anthony stated that she had attended the Rochester convention and signed the declaration at that time.

Between her unhappy experiences as a student and the observations she made as a teacher, Susan B. Anthony found herself more and more disenchanted with the disenfranchisement of women and enslaved people. She didn’t have the same agenda as her parents and siblings, but she wanted to be paid the same as her male counterparts – for doing the same work. When she left the Canajoharie Academy around 1849/1850, she went home and found herself feeling more and more at home with the radical ideas around her. She even started to dress less and less like a traditional Quaker woman and more and more like a radical feminist. She even wore started wearing the pantaloons associated with the publisher and editor Amelia Jenks Bloomer. In fact, it was the erudite and entre Mrs. Bloomer that introduced Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1851.

“It is often said, by those who know Miss Anthony best, that she has been my good angel, always pushing and goading me to work, and that but for her pertinacity I should never have accomplished the little I have. On the other hand it has been said that I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them. Perhaps all this is, in a measure, true.”

– quoted from “X. Susan B. Anthony” in Eighty Years and More (1815 – 1897): Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a writer; Susan B. Anthony was an organizer; and their friendship was the ultimate collaboration. By the time the dynamic duo met, Mrs. Cady Stanton was a proud wife and mother of four and would eventually be the mother of seven. Contrary to the social norms of the time, she believed women should control a couple’s sexual relationships and that a woman should absolutely have domain over her body when it came to childbearing. She was equally as bold about declaring her motherhood (when others were more ~~demure~~ silent) and would raise a red or white flag in front of her house depending on the sex of her newborn child. Of course, her “voluntary motherhood” required a compromise when it came to social reform and that compromise required her to be at home when her husband was away. Henry Brewster Stanton was a lawyer and a politician, who was traveling ten months out of the year in the 1850’s. So, Elizabeth Cady Stanton felt she was “a caged lioness.” Her partnership with Ms. Anthony made the compromise less restrictive.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote; Susan B. Anthony organized and spoke.

This relationship, too, required compromise – and not only because the ladies had different personalities and working styles. Susan B. Anthony stopped wearing bloomers so people would listen to her rather than get distracted by her clothes. And the whole Stanton family made room for “Miss Anthony.”

When the Stanton family moved to New York City in 1861, the women had established a finely tuned system. Sometimes they would write together, sometimes Ms. Anthony would take care of the kids while Mrs. Cady Stanton wrote – but both methods required the pair to be in the same place. So, whenever the Stanton’s moved, the set up a room for Susan B. Anthony and she became part of the family.

“Eventually Anthony supplanted Henry in Elizabeth’s affections. Both Henry and Susan moved in and out of her life and her household, but overall, Stanton probably spent more hours and days with Anthony than any other adult.”

– quoted from the “Methodological Note: Stanton in Psychological Perspective” section of In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Elisabeth Griffith

The collaboration between Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was not restricted to speeches. They co-founded the New York Women’s State Temperance Society – after Anthony was prevented from speaking at a temperance conference because she was female – and the Women’s Loyal National League in 1863. The league, which used different iterations of the name, was specifically formed to lobby for the abolition of slavery. At one time they collected almost 40,000 signatures in support of abolition, which was the largest petition drive in United States history at that time. They also initiated the American Equal Rights Association (1866) and founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (1869).

On January 8, 1868, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton started publishing the weekly paper The Revolution. The paper’s motto was “Men, their rights and nothing more; Women, their rights and nothing less.” In addition to women’s rights and the suffrage movement, the paper covered general politics, the labor movement, and finance. Ms. Anthony ran the business end of things. Mrs. Cady Stanton co-edited the newspaper with the abolitionist minister Parker Pillsbury. The initially received funding from the transportation entrepreneur George Francis Train – who shared their views on women’s rights, but not on abolition – but eventually transferred control of the paper to the wealthy writer and activist Laura Curtis Bullard, who toned “the revolution” down a bit.

The ladies that started it, however, did not tone down at all.

“Miss [Anna] Shaw said: ‘On Sunday, about two hours before she became unconscious, I talked with Miss Anthony and she said: “To think I have had more than sixty years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel!”’”

“I replied: ‘Your legacy will be freedom for all womankind after you are gone. your splendid struggle has changed life for women everywhere.’”

– quoted from the obituary “Susan B. Anthony” in the Union Labor Advocate (Vol. VII. May, 1906, No. 9)

Anna Shaw was correct: Susan B. Anthony’s legacy includes the 19th amendment to the United States constitution, which was ratified fourteen years after the Miss Anthony’s death. That legacy also includes United States v. Susan B. Anthony, a very public and very publicized 1873 criminal trial that changed the fight and helped change laws that had nothing to do with the suffrage movement.

In 1872, Susan B. Anthony was arrested, indicted, “tried,” and convicted after she and fourteen other women attempted to vote in Rochester, New York. The judge over the circuit court was the newly appointed Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) Associate Justice Ward Hunt. The election official, a Mr. Beverly W. Jones, testified that when he said he wasn’t sure if he could register her, she asked him if he was “acquainted with the 14^th amendment.” He also testified that when said that he was, and she asked if he would consider her a citizen, the Supervisor of Elections said there was no getting around her argument. After establishing that “the defendant was, on the 5^th of November, 1872, a woman,” the judge instructed the all male jury – all male because women were prohibited from serving on juries – to find the defendant guilty without discussion or deliberation, which they did. Ms. Anthony was instructed to pay a fine, of $100 plus court cases, which she did not.

Because the judge refused to jail her (for refusing to pay the fine), she was unable to take the case to the Supreme Court. The other women, who also registered and voted in that election, were arrested, but never tried. On the other hand, the election inspectors who allowed them to vote were arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed (for not paying their fines). President Ulysses S. Grant eventually pardoned the inspectors and all of the attention from the trials pushed suffrage to the front of the women’s rights movement. Justice Hunt’s controversial actions during Susan B. Anthony’s trial resulted in years of legal debate and, in Sparf v. United States, 156 U.S. 51 (1895), or Sparf and Hansen v. United States, the SCOTUS decision that a jury must apply the law based on the facts of the case; the court may not direct the jury to return a guilty verdict; a jury may convict a defendant of a lesser crime if that is part of the case (in some cases); and that juries can – but do not have the explicit right to – dispute the law.

Over the years, Susan B. Anthony gave hundreds and hundreds of speeches. In addition to giving up the “bloomers” she considered more sensible and reasonable, she was subjected to yelling mobs that would throw rotten eggs and sometimes even furniture at her. People would brandish guns and knives and, of course (I say sarcastically) she had to continuously contend with questions about why she wasn’t married. Her answers to the questions changed depending on her mood, or perhaps, who was asking the question. My personal favorite answer was when she said that she had never wanted to spend the majority of her life as “a housekeeper and a drudge [which she would have been had she married someone poor]” and neither had she ever wanted to be “a pet and a doll [which she would have have been had she married someone rich].” But, all that being said, she believed in a woman’s right to choose… whether she got married or not.

“Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life.”

– quoted from the speech “Social Purity” by Susan B. Anthony

I will update this space with a link to Part 2.

Please join me today (Wednesday, February 15^th) at 4:30 PM or 7:15 PM for a yoga practice on Zoom. Use the link from the “Class Schedules” calendar if you run into any problems checking into the class. You will need to register for the 7:15 PM class if you have not already done so. You can request an audio recording of this practice via a comment below or by emailing myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com.

The Wednesday playlist that we used on Zoom is available on YouTube and Spotify. [Look for “11122022 Having A Say, redux”]

The Wednesday playlist that I remixed after the practices is available on YouTube and Spotify.

NOTE: It felt off not to have music more directly the third birthday person, so I remixed the playlist. The timing for most of the practice will be pretty close to the recording. Both YouTube playlists feature several extra videos that are not available on Spotify. Some are speeches worth hearing. Some are music videos worth seeing. To make up the difference, the Spotify playlist has its own Easter egg.

In the spirit of generosity (“dana”), the Zoom classes, playlists, and blog posts are freely given and freely received. If you are able to support these teachings, please do so as your heart moves you. (NOTE: You can donate even if you are “attending” a practice that is not designated as a “Common Ground Meditation Center” practice, or you can purchase class(es). Donations to Common Ground are tax deductible; class purchases are not necessarily deductible.)

### Speak! ###

The Fire We Desire & The Fire(s) We Need (a Tuesday post & a special Black History note) February 14, 2023

Posted by ajoyfulpractice in "Impossible" People, Books, Changing Perspectives, Dharma, Faith, Gratitude, Healing Stories, Hope, Life, Loss, Love, Music, Mysticism, One Hoop, Pain, Philosophy, Poetry, Religion, Science, Suffering, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Tragedy, Wisdom, Writing, Yin Yoga, Yoga.
Tags: A. S. Klein, Anna Murray Douglass, Ayurveda, Black History Month, CBS Sunday Morning, David Hogg, Declaration of Sentiments, Frederick Douglass, Geoffrey Chaucer, George L. Ruffin, Helen Piitts Douglass, Jamie Woon, kabbalah, Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, Martin Luther King Jr, Oscar Wilde, Parkland, Peter Cook, Rita Braver, Robert Pirsig, Saint Valentine, Seneca Falls Convention, shabda, siddhis, Underground Railroad, Webster's 1828, William Goldman
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Peace and ease to all during this “Season of Non-violence” and all other seasons!

This is the post for Tuesday, February 14^th and (technically) the 14^th special Black History note. Today’s word is gratitude and I am grateful for you. Some parts of the following were originally posted in 2021 and 2022. Some context, class details, and links have been added or updated. My apologies for not posting before the Noon class.

In the spirit of generosity (“dana”), the Zoom classes, recordings, and blog posts are freely given and freely received. If you are able to support these teachings, please do so as your heart moves you. (NOTE: You can donate even if you are “attending” a practice that is not designated as a “Common Ground Meditation Center” practice, or you can purchase class(es). Donations are tax deductible; class purchases are not necessarily deductible.)

“And, [L]ove – True [L]ove – will follow you forever.”

– “The Impressive Clergyman” (Peter Cook) in the movie The Princess Bride by William Goldman

No one can be surprised that “words” are one of my favorite supernormal powers. In fact, śabda (or shabda), ranks as one of my top six siddhis or “powers.” Yet, there’s also no denying that words are not only one of our super powers, they are also a form of kryptonite – especially when we’re dealing with English. The English language seems to have as many rules as exceptions and as many homonyms that are homographs as homophones. And if the homonyms that sound the same but have different meanings and/or spellings (homophones) and the homonyms that are spelled the same but have different meanings and/or pronunciation (homographs) aren’t confusing enough, there are words that just have different meanings to different people – or different meanings based on the context. The word “love” is a prime example of a word that can mean different things to different people and at different times.

If you mention love on February 14^th, a lot of people in the West will automatically think of “romantic love” – which is kind of ironic since Valentine’s Day started as a Catholic saint’s feast day and that saint may or may not have had anything to do with romantic love. Neither does romantic love have anything to do with the fact that the African American abolitionist, writer, and statesman Frederick Douglass celebrated his birthday on this date is – although, his reasons for doing so are, loosely, connected to it being Saint Valentine’s Day.

“The Greek language comes out with another word for love. It is the word agape, and agape is more than eros. Agape is more than philia. Agape is something of the understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. It is a love that seeks nothing in return. It is an overflowing love; it’s what theologians would call the love of God working in the lives of men. And when you rise to love on this level, you begin to love men, not because they are likeable, but because God loves them. You look at every man, and you love him because you know God loves him. And he might be the worst person you’ve ever seen.”

– quoted from “Loving Your Enemies” sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (11/17/1957)

In the song “Gravity,” Jamie Woon sings of loving “a girl who loves synchronicity” and who “confided that love, it is an energy.” We humans (in general) have a tendency to block and/or limit that energy instead of “passing it on,” as the girl in the song does. And, we often use words to limit that energy. Some languages have different words for different kinds of love. Ancient Greek, for example, has érōs for sensual or passionate “love” or “desire;” storgḗ instinctual “love,” “affection,” or familial love (which can also extend to friends and pets); philía, which can be translated as “friendship” or brotherly love and was considered by some to be the “highest form of love;” and agápē, which is also described as unconditional love and “the highest form of love.”

Early Christians co-opted the Greek agápē and added to it their own understanding of the Hebrew chesed, which is sometimes translated into modern English as loving-kindness and stems from the root word (chasad) meaning “eager and ardent desire;” and includes a sense of “zeal” (especially as related to God). However, even in the Hebrew Bible (and the Christian Old Testament), chesed has been translated (in different places) as “mercy,” “kindness,” “lovingkindness,” “goodness,” “kindly” “merciful,” “favour,” “good,” “goodliness,” “pity,” and even “steadfast love.” There’s also a couple of places where it is used with a negative connotation. Judaism (and, particularly Jewish mysticism) also have words like devekut (which might be described as an emotional state and/or an action that cultivates a state related to “cleaving” or clinging to the Divine). Additionally, there is an understanding of a fear/awe of God (that also migrated into Christianity).

In English, we have a tendency to just use the same word for multiple things. Sometimes we add qualifiers like “brotherly” or “romantic;” but, sometimes we just use “love” – which, again, comes with different meanings and associations. During a Monday night in 2022, when I asked people for a word or phrase that they associate with love, I got some really phenomenal answers: acceptance and compassion, bravery (specifically as it relates to social change), trust, all the people that [one] cares about, and giving. To this list, I added earnest.

The “Valentine’s Day” portion of the following is partially excerpted from a 2021 post about “Being Red,” which includes a story about red and the Lunar New Year, as well as how this all ties into the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the upcoming Lenten observations.

“EARNEST, adjective

Ardent in the pursuit of an object; eager to obtain; having a longing desire; warmly engaged or incited.

They are never more earnest to disturb us, than when they see us most earnest in this duty.

Ardent; warm; eager; zealous; animated; importunate; as earnest in love; earnest in prayer.
Intent; fixed.

On that prospect strange

Their earnest eyes were fixed.

Serious; important; that is, really intent or engaged; whence the phrase, in earnest To be in earnest is to be really urging or stretching towards an object; intent on a pursuit. Hence, from fixed attention, comes the sense of seriousness in the pursuit, as opposed to trifling or jest. Are you in earnest or in jest?”

– quoted from Webster’s Dictionary 1828: American Dictionary of the English Language

Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People premiered on February 14, 1895, at the Saint James Theatre in London. It is a love story (or love stories) of sorts, but it is also a comedy of errors and a social satire full of love, love triangles, double entendres, double lives, mistaken identities, the dichotomy of public versus private life in Victorian society, and so many trivialities that one can hardly be blamed for questioning that about which one should be serious… or earnest. Like his other plays, Earnest was well received and marked a professional high point in Wilde’s life. However, it also marked a personal low point: Wilde’s trial, conviction, and imprisonment for homosexuality – which was illegal in Victorian England. Earnest would be the last play written by Oscar Wilde and, some would argue, his most popular.

While English speakers around the world might not come up with the same definition of “earnest” that was known in Victorian England, I would expect there would be some consensus around it meaning “serious” and “true.” On the flip side, the color red means something different to everyone. Webster’s 1828 dictionary clearly defines it as “a simple or primary color, but of several different shades or hues, as scarlet, crimson, vermilion, orange red etc.” – but even that doesn’t begin to address the fact that, on any given Sunday, the color signifies different things to different people all over the world. I say, “on any given Sunday,” but just consider Sunday the 14^thin 2021 [see link above], when red was associated with Valentine’s Day, The Lunar New Year celebrations (in some countries), and even the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

Many people associate Valentine’s Day with red hearts, cards, chocolates, flowers, romantic dates, and romantic love – a very commercial endeavor – but it didn’t start out that way. The day actually started as (and to some still is) the Feast Day of Saint Valentine, according to the Western Christian tradition. There are actually two Christian martyrs remembered as Saint Valentine, but the most well-known is the 3^rd-century Roman saint (who is honored on July 6^th and 30^th in the Eastern Christian tradition). According to the legends, Valentine was imprisoned for practicing Christianity during a time when Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire. Before and during his incarceration, Saint Valentine had several conversations with the Roman Emperor Claudius II. Throughout these discussions, the emperor tried to convert the priest to the Roman pagan religion (ostensibly to save the priest’s life) and the priest tried to convert the emperor to Catholicism (theoretically to save the emperor’s soul, and the souls of all that followed him and his decrees).

Around this same time, Valentine had multiple interactions and conversations with the daughter of his jailer. Julia, the daughter, was blind and one of the last acts Valentine reportedly committed (before he was executed) was to heal Julia’s sight. After he was martyred (around 269 A. D.), Julia and her household converted to Catholicism in honor of Valentine. His feast day was established in 496 A.D.; however, around the 18^th century, many additional details of the story started cropping up. One such detail was that Valentine married Christian soldiers who had been forbidden to marry (possibly because it would divide their focus and loyalty). Another detail was that he left Julia a letter and signed it “Your Valentine.”

“For this was on Seynt Velentynes day,

Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make,”

“For this was on Saint Valentine’s day,

When every fowl comes there his mate to take,”

– quoted from the poem “The Parliament of Fowls” by Geoffrey Chaucer, translation by A. S. Klein

As to why red became associated with Valentine’s Day, there are lots of theories and they all come back to those embellishments which focused on Saint Valentine as the patron saint of lovers. Some of those embellishments are attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer’s works about love – and love was associated with the heart, which people associated with red. Additionally, a red stain is traditionally viewed in the Western world as the sign that a woman came to her marital bed as a virgin – a view that is not scientifically factual. Still, the idea persists and there’s some very suggestive, subliminal messaging going on there.

But, let’s go back to the idea of the heart being red. Yoga and Ayurveda, as they come to us from India, use green to symbolize the heart chakra (i.e., the energetic or spiritual heart), but of course, these systems also recognize that the physical heart is red when exposed to the air – or it’s being depicted by an artist, which is why the Sacred Heart of Jesus is depicted as red.

Speaking of the energetic or spiritual heart: Swami Rama of the Himalayan tradition taught that we all have three hearts: a physical heart, which for most of us is on the left; an emotional heart, which for most of us is on the left; and that energetic or spiritual heart of the middle. That “heart center” includes the arms (also fingers and hands) and connects the hearts within us and also connects our hearts with all the hearts around us. Chinese Medicine and their sister sciences of movement, including Yin Yoga, also map the vital energy of the heart through the arms.

Going back to Jewish mysticism: In the Kabbalah, the sefira (or Divine “attribute”) of chesed is related to the right arm. It is balanced by gevurah (“strength”), which is the left arm, and tiferet (“balance”), which is the upper torso and includes the physical heart. These energetic paradigms really reinforce Robert Pirsig’s statement that “The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.”

“Indeed, some have called me a traitor…. Two things are necessary to make a traitor. One is he shall have a country. [Laughter and applause] I believe if I had a country, I should be a patriot. I think I have all the feelings necessary — all the moral material, to say nothing about the intellectual. But when I remember that the blood of four sisters and one brother, is making fat the soil of Maryland and Virginia,—when I remember that an aged grandmother who has reared twelve children for the Southern market, and these one after another as they arrived at the most interesting age, were torn from her bosom,—when I remember that when she became too much racked for toil, she was turned out by a professed Christian master to grope her way in the darkness of old age, literally to die with none to help her, and the institutions of this country sanctioning and sanctifying this crime, I have no words of eulogy, I have no patriotism.[…]

No, I make no pretension to patriotism. So long as my voice can be heard, on this or the other side of the Atlantic, I will hold up America to the lightening scorn of moral indignation. In doing this, I shall feel myself discharging the duty of a true patriot; for he is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.”

– quoted from the 1847 speech “If I Had a Country, I Should Be a Patriot” by Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass was born somewhere in Eastern Maryland in 1817 or 1818. If you’re wondering why I can name the exact time and place that Oscar Wilde’s play premiered a few years later (not to mention the exact time and place of that illustrious playwright’s birth), but cannot specify the time and place of one of the greatest speakers and writers of the 19th Century, it’s because Frederick Douglass was born into slavery. So, there is no heritage birth site you can visit (Covid not withstanding) in the way you can visit 21 Westland Row (the home of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre in Dublin). You could visit Cedar Hill, the Washington, D. C. house that Mr. Douglass bought about forty years after he escaped from slavery. But, the historical marker related to his birth is at least four miles from where it is assumed he was born.

By all accounts, he was born on the Holme (or Holmes) Hill Farm and most likely in the cabin of his grandmother, Betsey Bailey – which is basically where he lived for the first part of his life. His mother, on the other hand, lived twelve miles away and died when he was about seven years old. Some of his vague memories, as he recounted in his third autobiography, included his mother calling him her “Little Valentine.” Ergo, he celebrated his birthday on February 14^th.

Most of what we know about the abolitionist, statesman, and activist, comes from his speeches and his writings, including three autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave; My Bondage and My Freedom, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. In some ways, each book is an expansion of the previous books, with the third being the most detailed about his escape and activism*. As he explained in his the final book, he left certain details and facts out of the first two books in order to protect himself, the people who helped him escape, and some of the people associated with him.

Since slavery was still active in the United States when his first book was published on May 1, 1845, Mr. Douglass also relocated to England and Ireland for two years in order to ensure he would not be recaptured. While he was in Europe, his supporters paid ($710.96) for his emancipation. That’s about $26,300.66, in today’s economy, that went to the person who had enslaved him.

“This is American slavery; no marriage—no education—the light of the gospel shut out from the dark mind of the bondman—and he forbidden by law to learn to read. If a mother shall teach her children to read, the law in Louisiana proclaims that she may be hanged by the neck. If the father attempt to give his son a knowledge of letters, he may be punished by the whip in one instance, and in another be killed, at the discretion of the court. Three millions of people shut out from the light of knowledge! It is easy for you to conceive the evil that must result from such a state of things.”

– quoted from “APPENDIX, CONTAINING EXTRACTS FROM SPEECHES, ETC – RECEPTION SPEECH AT FINSBURY CHAPEL, MOORFIELDS, ENGLAND, MAY 12, 1846.” in My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass

According to his first autobiography, the wife of his second owner, Mrs. Sophia Auld, started teaching a young Frederick Douglass the alphabet. When the lessons were discovered and forbidden, he overheard Mrs. Auld’s husband telling her that an educated slave would be unfit for slavery. This motivated Mr. Douglass to teach himself to read and write. The more he learned, the more he was motivated to be free. He was further motivated to escape when he fell in love with a free Black woman named Anna Murray, who was also a member of the Underground Railroad.

The success of his autobiographies changed the way some people – specifically, white abolitionists – viewed him and treated him. It expanded his audience and also uplifted his platform. While some pro-slavery advocates still saw him as a puppet and a parrot, abolitionists realized that he was actually an intellectual capable of giving very vivid (and compelling) first-hand accounts of the atrocities of slavery. Critics persisted in doubting him, but again and again, he dismantled their doubts and defamation. Furthermore, as he advocated for the civil rights of Africans in America, their descendants, and for all women, he lived a life that had been previously denied him.

“The marriage institution cannot exist among slaves, and one-sixth of the population of democratic America is denied its privileges by the law of the land. What is to be thought of a nation boasting of its liberty, boasting of its humanity, boasting of its christianity, boasting of its love of justice and purity, and yet having within its own borders three millions of persons denied by law the right of marriage?—what must be the condition of that people? I need not lift up the veil by giving you any experience of my own. Every one that can put two ideas together, must see the most fearful results from such a state of things as I have just mentioned.”

– quoted from “APPENDIX, CONTAINING EXTRACTS FROM SPEECHES, ETC – RECEPTION SPEECH AT FINSBURY CHAPEL, MOORFIELDS, ENGLAND, MAY 12, 1846.” in My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray married on September 15, 1838 – just twelve days after his escape from slavery. For a while, they lived under an assumed surname. Frederick Douglass made a living as a public speaker, writer, and publisher. He traveled the world, served as a diplomat, and also served as an Army recruiter. Throughout his lifetime, he influenced people like Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison. He was the first African American to be nominated for vice president (in 1872); the first African American person to receive a vote for president during a a major parties roll call (in 1888); and, if we want to get technical, one of the first people to publicly protest Civil War era statues. (He specifically objected to the way former slaves were depicted.)

Frederick Douglass started the first abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, whose motto was “Right is of no Sex – Truth is of no Color – God is the Father of us all, and we are all brethren.” He was also the only Black person to (officially) attend the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention and the only Black signer of the Declaration of Sentiments.

“Believing that one of the best means of emancipating the slaves of the south is to improve and elevate the character of the free colored people of the north, I shall labor in the future, as I have labored in the past, to promote the moral, social, religious, and intellectual elevation of the free colored people; never forgetting my own humble origin, nor refusing, while Heaven lends me ability, to use my voice, my pen, or my vote, to advocate the great and primary work of the universal and unconditional emancipation of my entire race.”

– quoted from “CHAPTER XXV. VARIOUS INCIDENTS. NEWSPAPER ENTERPRISE—UNEXPECTED OPPOSITION—THE OBJECTIONS TO IT—THEIR PLAUSIBILITY ADMITTED—MOTIVES FOR COMING TO ROCHESTER—DISCIPLE OF MR. GARRISON—CHANGE OF OPINION—CAUSES LEADING TO IT—THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CHANGE—PREJUDICE AGAINST COLOR—AMUSING CONDESCENSION—”JIM CROW CARS”—COLLISIONS WITH CONDUCTORS AND BRAKEMEN—TRAINS ORDERED NOT TO STOP AT LYNN—AMUSING DOMESTIC SCENE—SEPARATE TABLES FOR MASTER AND MAN—PREJUDICE UNNATURAL—ILLUSTRATIONS—THE AUTHOR IN HIGH COMPANY—ELEVATION OF THE FREE PEOPLE OF COLOR—PLEDGE FOR THE FUTURE.” of My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass and Anna Murray-Douglass had five children. Rosetta Douglass worked on her father’s newspapers and eventually became a teacher, an activist, and a founding member of the National Association for Colored Women. Lewis Henry Douglass worked as a typesetter at The North Star and The Douglass’ Weekly before serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. Frederick Douglass Jr. was also an abolitionist and journalist and who, along with his father, recruited for the Union Army during the Civil War. (Lewis and the two Fredericks would also co-edit The New Era.) Charles Redmond Douglass, also a publisher, is remembered as the first African American to enlist in the Union Army in New York and was one of the first African Americans to serve as a clerk in the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (also known as the Freedmen’s Bureau). He also worked for the United States Treasury and served as a diplomat (as did his father). The fifth Douglass child, Annie, died as an adolescent.

Anna Murray-Douglass died in 1882 and, in 1884, Frederick Douglass married a white abolitionist and radical feminist who was two years his junior. Helen Pitts Douglass co-edited The Alpha and eventually worked as her husbands secretary. After her husband’s death in 1895, the second Mrs. Douglass purchased Cedar Hill from the Douglass children (because her husbands bequest to her was not upheld) and worked to establish the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association. After her death in 1903, the properties reduced mortgage was paid off by the National Association of Colored Women and is currently managed by the National Park Service.

“Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is passed.

At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”

– quoted from the “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech by Frederick Douglass (July 5, 1852)

Please join me today (Tuesday, February 14^th) at 12:00 PM or 7:15 PM for a yoga practice on Zoom. You can use the link from the “Class Schedules” calendar if you run into any problems checking into the class. You can request an audio recording of this practice via a comment below or (for a slightly faster reply) you can email me at myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com.

Tuesday’s playlist is available on YouTube and Spotify.

NOTE: After the Noon practice, I remixed some of the before/after music after the Noon practice – which is slight different on each medium. The Spotify playlist includes Frederick Douglass’s entire “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech, recited by Ossie Davis. The YouTube playlist features a portion of the speech recited by direct descendants of Frederick Douglass.

Practice Notes: This practice is all about heart opening – however, it may not be in the way you expect. There is also some unexpected ways to engage the hips.

“But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence. From my earliest recollection, I date the entertainment of a deep conviction that slavery would not always be able to hold me within its foul embrace; and in the darkest hours of my career in slavery, this living word of faith and spirit of hope departed not from me, but remained like ministering angels to cheer me through the gloom. This good spirit was from God, and to him I offer thanksgiving and praise.”

– quoted from “CHAPTER V.” of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

*NOTE: The full title of the third autobiography of Frederick Douglass is Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself. His Early Life as a Slave, His Escape from Bondage, and His Complete History to the Present Time, Including His Connection with the Anti-slavery Movement; His Labors in Great Britain as Well as in His Own Country; His Experience in the Conduct of an Influential Newspaper; His Connection with the Underground Railroad; His Relations with John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry Raid; His Recruiting the 54th and 55th Mass. Colored Regiments; His Interviews with Presidents Lincoln and Johnson; His Appointment by Gen. Grant to Accompany the Santo Domingo Commission–
Also to a Seat in the Council of the District of Columbia; His Appointment as United States Marshal by President R. B. Hayes; Also His Appointment to Be Recorder of Deeds in Washington by President J. A. Garfield; with Many Other Interesting and Important Events of His Most Eventful Life; With an Introduction by Mr. George L. Ruffin, of Boston.

We keep saying “Never again,” but how earnest are we? (Warning: This video briefly contains disturbing images and sounds.)

### “I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital importance of being Earnest.” ~ OW ###

From the Earth (a special Black History 2.5-for-1 note) February 11, 2023

Posted by ajoyfulpractice in "Impossible" People, Books, Changing Perspectives, Dharma, Faith, Healing Stories, Health, Hope, Life, One Hoop, Pain, Science, Suffering, Tragedy, Wisdom, Women, Writing, Yin Yoga, Yoga.
Tags: Bhagavad Gita, Black History Month, Dr. David Axelrod, Dr. David Jones Peck, Dr. James Derham, Dr. James Durham, Dr. James McCune Smith, Dr. Rebbeca J. Cole, Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, Dr. Robert Tanner Freeman, Eckardt C. Beck, environment, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jesse Jackson, Julian Cribb, Lisa Depaulo, Lisa Perez Jackson, Martin Buber, Oprah Winfrey, Yoga Sutra 2.36
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Peace and ease to all during this “Season of Non-violence” and all other seasons!

“You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!…. You get a car! You get a car! You get a car!”

– Oprah Winfrey on The Oprah Winfrey Show, original airdate: September 13, 2004

This is the “missing” Black History note for Wednesday, February 8^th. It’s later than usual, because I got misled, bamboozled, tricked – tricked, I say – into believing something that doesn’t appear to be true. The thing is, it would have been really cool if it had been true and here’s why: When The Oprah Winfrey Show premiered on September 8, 1986, Oprah Winfrey became the first African American to host a nationally syndicated daytime talk show. She was following in the footsteps of Della Reese, Pearl Bailey, and Barbara McNair – whose talk shows were not aired nationally and did not last nearly as long as Oprah’s 25 seasons – and her show was one of the most popular, most watched, and most awarded daytime talk show in television history. Whether you are (or were) a fan or not, there’s no denying that Oprah and The Oprah Winfrey Show changed the way people interact and interrelate. It would also be hard to dispute the fact that the show (and it’s spin-offs) created more opportunities for people to have real encounters and true meetings, like the ones Martin Buber described, rather than purely transactional interactions. Since one of the most popular segments on the show was “Oprah’s Favorite Things,” I thought it would be cool to explain that one of my favorite things is having Ich-und-Du moments and then I could do my best Oprah impersonation.

At this point, you might be wondering why in the world I would even make such a random connection. Well, you see, as I mentioned before, I got misled, bamboozled, tricked – tricked, I say – into believing the show premiered on a certain day in February (which, clearly, it did not) and I got excited about the tie-in before I did my due diligence and fact checked the fact checker. That’s what I do, and what I encourage others to day: check, double check, and cross check – which is why I use 5 to 8 translations when I’m doing my sūtra studies. Normally, I do my cross-checks before I put pen to paper or fingers to keys. But, I was running late as I got ready for Wednesday practices, and left my fact checking to the last minute.

Double checking the facts (as you know them) doesn’t mean you won’t make mistakes, it just means that you are practicing that dedication to the truth – and the truth was very important to two women born on February 8^th in two different eras.

Yoga Sūtra 2.36: satyapratişţhāyām kriyāphalāśrayatvam

– “When a yogi is established in truthfulness, actions begin to bear fruit. [Truth is the foundation for fruitful action.]”

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: When and where (and under what circumstances) a person is born matters. Those factors play a part in what opportunities a person has, how hard or easy it is to take advantage of those opportunities, how a person envisions their goals and desires, and who supports them – or gets in their way – as they make their dreams come true. Many people born in the last few decades have had the advantage of the times, what with the internet and other technology giving people access to information and experiences they may not have been able to imagine in an earlier era. If those same people were born in certain countries and grew up in certain socioeconomic circumstances, they also may have had the advantages of location. On the flip side, someone born in the next few years – especially in certain parts of the world, including the United States – may find their access to knowledge is limited and therefore their opportunities are limited. That’s a theoretical scenario, based on current events. What is not theoretical, however, is that that exact scenario has played out several times throughout the history of the United States. It was definitely at play when Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler (née Davis) was born on February 8, 1831.

So, how on Earth did she become the first African American woman to earn a medical degree in the United States back in 1864?

Dr. Crumpler, herself, said that a lot of it came down to timing and location.

“It may be well to state here that, having been reared by a kind aunt in Pennsylvania, whose usefulness with the sick was continually sought, I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to relieve the sufferings of others. Later in life I devoted my time, when best I could, to nursing as a business, serving under different doctors for a period of eight years (from 1852 to 1860); most of the time at my adopted home in Charlestown, Middlesex County, Massachusetts.”

– quoted from the Introduction to A Book of Medical Discourses, In Two Parts by Rebecca Crumpler, M. D.

As far as I can tell, Rebecca Davis was born a freewoman in Christiana, Delaware. I am unclear about the status of her parents, Matilda Webber and Absolum Davis, but I do know that Delaware was still a slave state when the future doctor was born and that, for some reason, her parents sent her to live with an aunt in Pennsylvania. Again, I don’t know why she was sent to Pennsylvania at a very young age, but it could have had something to do with the fact that Pennsylvania had abolished slavery in 1780 and the family had the means to send their daughter away. (There is another, slightly scandalous, possibility for why she was sent away, but I haven’t been able to cross check certain court records.) The aunt’s primary occupation was caring for the sick and young Rebecca grew up learning the trade of being a caregiver.

When she was twenty, she married a formerly enslaved man from Virginia named Wyatt Lee and they moved to Charleston, Massachusetts where she started working as a nurse. Mr. Lee’s young son, from a previous marriage, died within a year of their move. This could have sharpened Rebecca Lee’s interest in medicine, especially as it related to children, and it is an event that could have contributed to her interest in medical school. Keep in mind that this was long before anyone could earn a nursing degree in the United States. This was also at a time when white medical schools typically turned Black students away and long before there were any Black medical schools. Don’t get me wrong, there had been Black physicians practicing Western medicine – like Dr. James Durham (or Derham), who was enslaved in Louisiana and learned the medical arts from his slave owners; however, the first African American M. D. and pharmacy owner in the United States, Dr. James McCune Smith, actually earned his medical degree at the University of Glasgow (Scotland, 1837). Exactly ten years later, Dr. David Jones Peck became the first African American to earn an M. D. in the US.

In the 1850’s, the different doctors with which Rebecca Lee worked might have had different expectations about the roles and responsibilities of their nurses. Yet, she distinguished herself and several doctors recommended that she go to medical school. Now, it is possible that this was just something they said and they wrote recommendation letters without actually believing she would be accepted. Remember, at the time, 1860, most medical schools were white-only and less than 1% of M.D.s in the United States were women… white women. It is also highly probable that the suggestion was for her to go to medical school to become an even more phenomenal nurse. It is also possible that the physician(s) who recommended her had some pull with the medical school board. Whatever the case, she was accepted by the New England Female Medical College and received a tuition award from the Wade Scholarship Fund. She was the only African American student in the school.

Her husband died of tuberculosis in the Spring of 1863. Almost a year later, on February 24, 1864, having completed her coursework, written her thesis, and paid her graduation fees, she and two of her classmates faced the medical school faculty for their final, oral exams. Although, the board expressed some concern about her preparedness (to be a doctor), Rebecca Davis Lee and her two classmates were recommended to the board of trustees. On March 1, 1864, she was declared a “Doctress of Medicine.” She would be the New England Female Medical College’s first and only Black graduate. Dr. Rebecca J. Cole become the second African American woman to earn a medical degree in the U. S. when she graduated from Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania in 1867. That same year, Robert Tanner Freeman graduated from Harvard University, becoming the first African American to receive a degree in dentistry from an American university. Howard University (established in 1867), where my father earned his Ph.D., opened it’s medical school in 1868.

“Her later writings give no indication that she was aware of her status as the first black woman MD in the United States; indeed, until the later twentieth century, scholars had assigned that distinction to Rebecca Cole….”

– quoted from the profile entitled “Crumpler, Rebecca Davis Lee” in African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

In May of 1865, Dr. Rebecca Lee married Arthur Crumpler, another Virginia-born man who had escaped slavery and was determined to buy the freedom of his family members, and became Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler. Records show that they had a daughter (born in 1870), but it appears she died before reaching adolescence. While Arthur Crumpler worked as a blacksmith for the Union Army, Dr. Crumpler stayed in Boston, where she continued her training and cared for (often poor) women and children. When the Civil War ended, she re-joined Mr. Crumpler in Virginia, where she not only tended to veterans, but also treated formerly enslaved people and trained them on how to care for others. A lot of what she called her “real missionary work” encouraged other African Americans to seek formal training as healthcare practitioners – even though she knew, first hand, that Black physicians and nurses were not always welcomed by others in the field. The Crumplers eventually returned to Boston, where Dr. Crumpler established her practice at 67 Joy Street. Throughout her career, she focused on preventative measures and what might be considered “alternative medicine.” She strongly believed that people would be healthier if they had a better understanding of their bodies.

Around 1880, the Crumplers moved to Hyde Park, Massachusetts and it appears that Dr. Crumpler stopped actively practicing medicine. Three years later, however, she published A Book of Medical Discourses, In Two Parts. Dedicated to mothers and nurses, the book featured notes from her years of practice and offered guidance in the care and tending of women and children. The first part of the book focused on “treating of the cause, prevention, and cure of infantile bowel complaints, from birth to the close of the teething period, or until after the fifth year.” The second part “[contained] miscellaneous information concerning the life and growth of beings; the beginning of womanhood; also, the cause, prevention, and cure of many of the most distressing complaints of women, and youth, of both sexes.” She covered everything from “How to Marry” (the first chapter) to “Artificial Nursing” (chapter nine) to “Teething made easy” (chapter seventeen) and it is one of the first medical publications authored by an African American.

While there are lots of little historical breadcrumbs related to Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler’s life, there’s very little known about what kinds of obstacles she faced. In addition to the concerns expressed by the medical school faculty after her final exam – which may been purely a concern about her abilities or could have been related to race – there are records of male doctors snubbing her, pharmacists refusing to fill her prescriptions, and some people saying that, in her case, M. D. stood for “Mule Driver.” She did not, however, let any of that stop her from healing or from helping other people heal themselves.

“Let us strive to know more about ourselves, –it is human, it is Christian-like to do so. Then there will be minds from which to select students for the college, that may come forth to the community graduates in Pharmacy, Surgery, Dentistry, and Medicine. It is well known that many noble-minded women have graced the chambers of the sick with good service, in different conditions of need, too; but at the present women appear to shrink from any responsibilities demanding patience and sacrifice, or rather seem not to rely on the union of their strength with that of our great Creator, in time of need.

What we need o-day in every community, is, not a shrinking or flagging of womanly usefulness in this field of labor, but renewed and courageous readiness to do when and whatever duty calls.”

– quoted from “Chapter XIX. General Remarks.” in A Book of Medical Discourses, In Two Parts by Rebecca Crumpler, M. D.

According to the Bhagavad Gitā (2.31), everyone has a sva-dharma (personal duty) that “should be viewed as one’s responsibility to his or her highest Self, the Atma.” To answer the call would mean being the kind of person Dr. Crumpler said the world needed – “[someone not] shrinking or flagging of womanly usefulness in this field of labor, but renewed and courageous readiness to do when and whatever duty calls.” – a person like Lisa Perez Jackson, who was born February 8, 1962. Rather than a healthcare practitioner, however, she is a chemical engineer who served as Commissioner of Environmental Protection of New Jersey (2/2006 – 11/2008) and Chief of Staff to the Governor of New Jersey (12/2008). In January of 2009, President Barack Obama named her as the 12^th Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), making her the agency’s first African American director, a position she held until she resigned in February 2013. She currently works as the environmental director of Apple. Interestingly, some aspects of her background are similar to Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler’s background.

Like Dr. Crumpler, Ms. Jackson (née Perez) was adopted; developed her scholarly interest because of a crisis she saw around her; and accomplished much while married and raising a family. In Ms. Jackson’s case, she was born in Philadelphia and then adopted at 2 weeks old (by Benjamin and Marie Perez). She was raised in Pontchartrain Park, a predominantly African American neighborhood in the 9^thward of New Orleans, Louisiana and graduated valedictorian from St. Mary’s Dominican High School, an all-girls private Catholic high school. She was a National Merit Scholar and received scholarships from National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering & Science and Shell Oil Company in order to attend Tulane University, where she graduated summa cum laude (1983) before earning her Master of Science from Princeton University in 1986.

Knowing that she drove her mother out her flooding hometown in 2005, one might think that her interest in the environment started because of Hurricane Katrina. However, her interest actually started in the late 1970s when she, and so many others around the world, followed the coverage of the disaster that unfolded in Love Canal, a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York that was built on top of a landfill that leaked toxic waste. On August 7, 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared that the site posed a federal health emergency and, for the first time in U. S. history, requested emergency federal funds to clean up damage from something other than a natural disaster. Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), also known as the Superfund Act, which would be administered by the EPA. But the damage was already done: a disproportionate number of residents were dead, dying, and/or living with birth defects.

“After a startling increase in [cancer,] skin rashes, miscarriages and birth defects, President Carter declared a State of Emergency over the site. [Eckardt C. Beck, an EPA scientist] warned that the ironically named Love Canal was far from an isolated case and there were probably hundreds of similar ‘“ticking time bombs”’ all over the USA. State health commissioner David Axelrod^[*] presciently described the event as a ‘“national symbol of a failure to exercise a sense of concern for future generations.”’”

– quoted from “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” in “2 – Poisoning A Planet” of Earth Detox: How and Why We Must Clean Up Our Planet by Julian Cribb

*NOTE: Dr. David Axelrod, who is quoted here, is not to be confused with the political strategist and advisor who worked in the Obama administration.

In addition to working for Shell Oil during the summers when she was at Tulane, Lisa Perez Jackson worked for a non-profit organization that advocated for the timely cleanup of contaminated areas while she was at Princeton. So, she got to see the environmental issues from two different professional perspectives. Not long after joining the EPA’s Washington, D. C, office as an engineer in 1987, she moved to the New York office and worked on the team administering the Superfund. She met her second husband, Kenneth Jackson, towards the beginning of her 16-year tenure at the New York office of the EPA and they had two children within the first four years of their marriage.

Lisa P. Jackson had enough experience to know that when she became the first African American to head up the EPA she was going to be in sticky, icky, controversial situations. She had to know that one side of the aisle would almost always say the agency was overreaching and moving too fast, while the other side would simultaneously say that the agency was moving too slow and not reaching/doing enough. However, she had no way of knowing that an oil rig (Deepwater Horizon) would explode in the Gulf of Mexico, mere meters from her childhood hometown, a little over a year after her appointment. She had no way of knowing the disaster would lead directly to the House of Representatives passing a bill to cut the EPA’s funding or that she would be called to testify in Congressional hearings at least seven times in one month. Nor did she have any way of knowing that, before she stepped down (in 2013), she would be accused of mishandling private emails. All she knew, back in 2009, was that she was determined to make a difference – and make a difference she did.

Under her leadership, the EPA developed stricter fuel efficiency standards; recognized carbon dioxide and and five other gases as greenhouse emissions that create public health threats; and proposed limits on the amount of mercury, arsenic, nickel, and other toxic by-products power plants could routinely release into the environment. To this day, she especially works to make a difference in the lives of those disproportionately affected by environmental issues – those who, it turns out, are often found in the same groups that Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler was serving back in the 1800s: poor people, minorities, veterans, women, and children.

“The first girls to attend [the Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy] were previously at the city’s lowest-ranked middle school. This year the school’s eighth graders earned one of the highest scores of all public schools in Atlanta on a state exam.

They’re Jackson’s sweet spot, these kids. African-American girls, who, like her, may have faced obstacles but are full of promise. ‘Listen,’ she says, ‘if these young women don’t grow up strong and talented and committed to our environment, then our country’s gonna suffer, not just them.’

Her speech hits home: ‘You have a right to clean air and clean water,’ she tells the girls, touching on one of her core initiatives, environmental justice—that is, to give a voice to the people, usually poor minorities, who are most severely affected by environmental hazards and calamities. ‘You have a right to have a healthy school to learn in.’ But such heady rights come with responsibility. The girls must be willing to do their part, she tells them—to blow past the wheezing stereotypes that only young men wearing pocket protectors are good at math and science, and that black women don’t set policy or lead. ‘You will bring clean air to your community,’ she tells them. ‘Which you can’t do if you don’t have the education.’”

– quoted from the O, The Oprah Magazine (June 2011) article “Clean Power: Lisa Jackson Fights for Our Right to Healthy Air, Water and Land: Somebody has to do it. We’re lucky it’s her.” by Lisa Depaulo

PRACTICE NOTES: Similar to a practice I would lead on Earth Day, this sequence would be grounded… but also have some groove to it. I’d probably lean towards a “detox flow” with a good number of seated poses and twists (if I was going to stick with a straight-forward vinyāsa practice) or a Yin/Yang fusion with something for the meridians associated with digestion. Of course, I would throw in Vṛkṣāsana (“Tree Pose”) and emphasize prāṇāyāma (extension and awareness of the breath).

“Jackson’s to-do list is ambitious, particularly given how much time she could be spending defending herself. But that’s not her style. She’d rather stay focused on the things that matter. ‘Our challenges are serious,’ she says. ‘The longer we wait to deal with our deteriorating atmosphere, the harder and more expensive it may get to address it. I am also a woman of faith, so I believe that we have a moral obligation to care for creation and future generations.

‘The conundrum is that the richer and more prosperous we become, the more we think that the environment is all taken care of,’ Jackson says. It’s simply not the case. ‘I have seen land completely ravaged by pollution. Environmental protection is not a spectator sport.’”

– quoted from the O, The Oprah Magazine (June 2011) article “Clean Power: Lisa Jackson Fights for Our Right to Healthy Air, Water and Land: Somebody has to do it. We’re lucky it’s her.” by Lisa Depaulo

### “If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.” ~ Jesse Jackson ###

Being Human, the prequel (the “missing” Wednesday post) February 9, 2023

Posted by ajoyfulpractice in Bhakti, Books, Buddhism, Changing Perspectives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Faith, Healing Stories, Hope, Kirtan, Life, Loss, Love, Mantra, Music, Mysticism, One Hoop, Pain, Peace, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Suffering, Swami Vivekananda, Tragedy, Wisdom, Writing, Yoga.
Tags: Amir Locke, Martin Buber, mythology, Rev. Ed Trevors, Ronald Gregor Smith, siddhis, Swami Vivekananda, Thomas Merton, Walter Kaufmann, Yoga Sutras 3.1-3.3, Zulu
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Peace and ease to all during this “Season of Non-violence” and all other seasons!

For Those Who Missed It: This is the “missing” post for Wednesday, February 8^th. Most of the following information was originally included in (longer) Lunar Year celebration posts in 2021 and 2022. Some context has been edited or added and all music links have been updated. You can request a related recording via a comment below or (for a slightly faster reply) you can email me at myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com.

In the spirit of generosity (“dana”), the Zoom classes, recordings, and blog posts are freely given and freely received. If you are able to support these teachings, please do so as your heart moves you. (NOTE: You can donate even if you are “attending” a practice that is not designated as a “Common Ground Meditation Center” practice, or you can purchase class(es). Donations are tax deductible; class purchases are not necessarily deductible.)

Check the “Class Schedules” calendar for upcoming practices.

“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”

– Martin Buber

Martin Buber, born in Vienna on February 8, 1878, did not consider himself a philosopher or a theologian (because, he said, he “was not interested in ideas, only personal experience, and could not discuss God, but only relationships with God”). Yet, he is remembered as one of the greatest existentialist in the modern era. He was, specifically, a Jewish existentialist and professor of Chasidic mysticism who grew up speaking Yiddish and German at home and would partially earn a reputation as a translator (even translating the Hebrew Bible into German) and for his thoughts on religious consciousness, modernity, the concept of evil, ethics, education, and Biblical hermeneutics.

Known for his philosophy of dialogue, he was concerned with all the questions of existential philosophy – Who am I? Why am I here? What is the meaning / purpose of my life? – but, he came at the questions from a distinctly theist point of view. To Buber we could exist in a purely transactional manner, without any real connection – or we could live, really live, which required another…a “du.”

In his seminal work, Ich und Du, Buber described a state of being that relies on relationship to have meaning and purpose. However, said relationship must be based on an equal meeting; one that requires authenticity and acceptance rather than projection and conditions. The relationship must be real and perceivable, as opposed to being something created in the mind. The classic examples of this type of encounter are two lovers, an observer and a cat, the author and a tree, or two strangers on a train. In light of the recent Lunar New Year celebrations, we can even consider a person and their in-laws or a rich person and a beggar.

In all of the aforementioned cases, there is the possibility of engaging with other individuals, inanimate objects, and all of reality in a purely transactional manner that relies on mental projection and representation – which Buber would describe as “Ich und Es” (I-and-It). However, there is also the possibility of true dialogue, encounter, or meeting whereby the two entities connect and merge – which Buber described as “Ich und Du.” The difference between the two experiences or states, however, is not always obvious on the surface.

Martin Buber’s concept of “Ich und Du” is a particularly tricky for an English reader because there is no single English word that carries all the connotations found in the German “Du.” Translators can, as Ronald Gregor Smith did, use “Thou” to represent the kind of reverence one would have towards God. Or, translators can, as Walter Kaufmann did, use “You;” because it is personal, colloquial, and intimate. The translation by Ronald Gregor Smith was the one that completed during Buber’s lifetime (and under his supervision) – and it would have been the one on the mind Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as a he wrote his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and at least one of his sermons. However, either translation is still tricky for English readers; because the “Du” Martin Buber intended is simultaneously personal, colloquial, intimate, and reverent.

“Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung.”

“All real life is meeting.”

“All actual life is encounter.”

– quoted from Ich und Du by Martin Buber (English translations by Ronald Gregor Smith and Walter Kaufmann, respectively)

Consider that we can clearly see how falling in love with a stranger on a train – one to who we have never actually spoken – is not the same as falling in love with someone we have known all our lives. Yet, it is possible to grow up with someone and not actually know them. It is possible to live next door to someone for years and be surprised by their actions. So, it is clearly possible to marry someone and know as much about them (or as little about them) as the person who sits silently across from you during a meditation retreat – in that, we know some of their preferences and values, but we layer our impressions on top of that without knowing the inner workings of their heart and mind. Similarly, someone can marry into our family (or we can marry into theirs) and there can be an invisible barrier which prevents them from truly being family – or, we can love and accept them (be loved and accepted by them) in much the same way we love and accept someone to whom we are related by blood.

Another example would be how a parent feels about a child they adopt versus a child born from their body versus a child born to their spouse. Sure, there are less than ideal situations where there is always separation and distinction. Ideally, however, the difference a parent feels is based on personality not legality – and even then, ideally, there is love and acceptance.

Keep in mind that my examples are oversimplified. There is more to truly knowing another than time and space. We could still objectify someone and be objectified by them, no matter the time or proximity. According to Buber, moving from an “Ich und Es” relationship (to “Ich und Du”) cannot be forced. According to Buber, the change in relationship requires grace and a willingness to open to the possibility of a seamless merging, an absorption, of sorts.

And grace, which we are exploring in 2023, is often associated with faith – which is today’s point of focus for “Season of Non-violence.”

Yoga Sūtra 3.1: deśabandhah cittasya dhāranā

– “Dhāranā is the process of holding, focusing, or fixing the attention of mind onto one object or place.”

Yoga Sūtra 3.2: tatra pratyaya-ikatānatā dhyānam

– “Dhyāna is the repeated continuation, or unbroken flow of thought, toward that one object or place.”

Yoga Sūtra 3.3: tadeva-artha-mātra-nirbhāsaṁ svarūpa-śūnyam-iva-samādhiḥ

– “Samadhi [meditation in its highest form] is the state when only the essence of that object, place, or point shines forth in the mind, as if devoid even of its own form.”

Samādhi, the eighth limb of the Yoga Philosophy, is sometimes translated into English as “meditation” or “perfect meditation.” However, many traditions refer to the previous limb (dhyāna) as “mediation.” Additionally, throughout the sūtras, a distinction is made between different levels of consciousness, which Patanjali also referred to as (lower) samādhi. To distinguish the different experiences in English, some teachers will describe (higher) Samādhi as “Spiritual Absorption” or “Union with Dvine.”

No matter how it is translated, the final limb is not something that can be forced. It comes from a steady and consistent progression through the other limbs and especially through the preceding five – in that mastery of āsana (“seat” or pose) prepares one to practice prāņāyāma (awareness and control of the breath) which, over time, leads to pratyāhāra (“pulling the mind-senses from every direction to a single point”) which becomes dhāranā (“focus” or “concentration”) which, over time, becomes dhyāna (“concentration” or “meditation”) which ultimately can become Samādhi: a seamless merging of the seer and the seen.

This union between the seer and seen, is the similar to – if not exactly the same as – Martin Buber’s “Ich und Du” experience. According to Buber, life is holy and to really know one’s Self requires really knowing another and, in that knowing, one can know God / the Divine (whatever that means to you at this moment).

More often than not, to better understand the “Ich und Du” relationship, I think of Nara and Narayana, identical twins in Hindu mythology. Nara and Narayana are almost always depicted together and are identical – except that one is in a physical body and one is in a spiritual body. Nara-Narayana is referred to as “the spirit that lives on the water” or “the resting place of all living beings;” it is the ultimate goal of existence. However, until the twins become Nara-Narayana, it is Nara (in the physical body) who does the earthly work that allows for the spiritual connection. Once that connection is made, the soul is liberated and no longer burdened by the ignorance (avidyā) that leads to suffering.

“The basic word I-Thou can only be spoken with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You/Thou to become; becoming I, I say you.”

– quoted from Ich und Du by Martin Buber (English translation by Walter Kaufmann)

Wednesday’s playlist is available on YouTube and Spotify.

Here’s another example, straight from the 2022 headlines, that illustrates one of the many reasons why we need to stop objectifying each other!

“We find, in studying history, one fact held in common by all the great teachers of religion the world ever had. They all claim to have got their truths from beyond, only many of them did not know where they got them from. For instance, one would say that an angel came down in the form of a human being, with wings, and said to him, ‘Hear, O man, this is the message.’ Another says that a Deva, a bright being, appeared to him. A third says he dreamed that his ancestor came and told him certain things. He did not know anything beyond that. But this is common that all claim that this knowledge has come to them from beyond, not through their reasoning power. What does the science of Yoga teach? It teaches that they were right in claiming that all this knowledge came to them from beyond reasoning, but that it came from within themselves.

The Yogi teaches that the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond reason, a superconscious state, and when the mind gets to that higher state, then this knowledge, beyond reasoning, comes to man. Metaphysical and transcendental knowledge comes to that man.”

– quoted from “Chapter VII: Dhyana and Samadhi” in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 1, Raja-Yoga by Swami Vivekananda

“Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.”

– quoted from Chapter 1, “Love Can Be Kept Only by Being Given Away” in No Man Is An Island by Thomas Merton

### As they say in Zulu, “Sawubona!” [“I see you!”] and “Yebo, sawubona!” [“I see you seeing me.”] ###

### I See Du ###

Space and the Power of Hearing(s) (a special Black History note, w/a Tuesday link) February 8, 2023

Posted by ajoyfulpractice in "Impossible" People, Art, Books, Buddhism, Changing Perspectives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Faith, Gandhi, Gratitude, Healing Stories, Hope, Life, Men, Minnesota, Music, One Hoop, Pain, Peace, Poetry, Suffering, Tragedy, Wisdom, Women, Writing, Yoga.
Tags: Alabama Supreme Court, Andy Wright, Beth Birmingham, Bhamwiki.com, birthdays on February 7, Black History Month, Charlie Weems, Christopher Isherwood, Civil Rights Movement, Clarence Norris, Countee Cullen, Creed Conyers, dreaming, Dred Scot, Eeva Sallinen, Ella Virginia Eaton Adams, Emily Sarmiento, Eugene Williams, Frank “Doc” Adams, Garth Brooks, Hallie Rubenhold, Haywood Patterson, HBCUs, James Baker, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mann Act, Myal Greene, niyamas, Olin Montgomery, Oscar William Adams Jr., Oscar William Adams Sr., Ralph D. Cook, Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Roy Wright, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, santosha, santoşā, Scottsboro Boys, SCOTUS, Season of Non-violence, Season of Nonviolence, Sinclair Lewis, Supreme Court, Swami Prabhavananda, Tom Gordon, U. W. Clemon, Willie Roberson, yamas
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Peace and ease to all during this “Season of Non-violence” and all other seasons!

This is a special post for Tuesday, February 7^th. Please note that only the Tuesday evening practice references this profile. You can request a recording of the Tuesday practice via a comment below or (for a slightly faster reply) you can email me at myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com.

WARNING: The following includes a recounting of the Scottsboro Boys trials.

Post revised March 2024.

“It’s a bad habit we have: We tell the tale of the murder and not the murdered.”

“I’ll also explain why my research has enraged so many people who claim to be experts in the Ripper case.”

“If you want to know how we got the Ripper story so wrong, what those mistakes tell us about ourselves, and why putting the record straight makes some people so very angry, join me, Hallie Rubenhold for Bad Women: The Ripper Retold.”

— quoted from the podcast trailer for Season 1of Bad Women: The Ripper Retold, hosted by Hallie Rubenhold

How we tell a story, especially a story about real life and real events, says a lot about how we feel about our circumstances. Same goes for what we read (if we are in the habit of reading for pleasure) and/or what other kinds of media we consume. On a certain level, it is all about escape. But, are we “escaping” because we need to decompress and give our brains a rest? Or are we “escaping” because we’re not satisfied with our lot in life? If it’s the latter, what would it take to be content, satisfied — happy even — with our lot?

These are the kinds of questions I pose during classes on February 7^th. They’re questions that serve as entryways into the practice of santoşā (“contentment”), which is the second niyama (“internal observation”) in the Yoga Philosophy. (Of course, for today, you can think of it as Number 7 in the philosophy’s list of ethics.) Answering the question requires turning inward and doing a little svādhyāya (“self study”), which is the fourth niyama. One way to turn inward and take a look at yourself is to reflect on what you would do and how you would feel in certain situations. Classically, it might be understood that such reflection would be done in the context of sacred text; however, it is also possible to simply put yourself in someone else’s shoes.

For example, would you be content, satisfied — happy even, if you were a girl born in “a little house on the prairie” — or, would you dream of something more? Would you stay on the prairie, unsatisfied, like “a hard luck woman” waiting for your man? Or, would you be like Laura Ingalls Wilder (b. 02/07/1867, in Pepin Country, Wisconsin) and make your dreams come true by writing about your experiences (and all the people you knew)? Even then, how many of your dreams would need to come true for you to be grateful and, therefore, satisfied?

Or, perhaps, like Sinclair Lewis (b. 02/07/1885, in Sauk Centre, Minnesota) you were born in a northern town with “one light blinking off and on.” Would you be content, satisfied — happy even — or, would you dream of something more? Would you be the one in the song who never does the things they thought they would and never knew they could leave? Or, would you be the one, like Mr. Lewis, who left for the big city, wrote about your experiences (and all the people you knew), and became what everyone’s talking about down on Main Street? Even then, would you be grateful (and, therefore, satisfied) or would you be like Carol Milford and want to change everything?

The thing is, there is nothing wrong with dreaming, hoping, and praying for change. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to improve your situation and/or the situations of others. Nor is there anything wrong with wanting to change injustice laws and breakdown systems of inequity. You could be a common man, a simple man, a sweet man born in Tornado Alley — like Troyal Garth Brooks (b. 02/07/1962, in Tulsa, Oklahoma) — and dream of sharing your storytelling gifts with the world. But would you be satisfied? Would you be “happy in this modern world? Or do you need more?” And when would the “more” be enough for you to be grateful and, therefore, satisfied?

Take a moment to consider being yourself in one of those other people’s circumstances. Then, let’s go a little deeper.

Click here to read my 2021 post about practicing santoşā on the 7^th.

On Monday, I referenced the daily contemplation elements offered by the Mahatma Gandhi Canadian Foundation for World Peace during this Season for Nonviolence. Remember, these are elements found in the teachings of both Mahatma Gandhi and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The element for February 7^th is dreaming and it brings to mind the fact that MLK (as well as Gandhi) dreamed of better worlds, more just worlds, more equitable worlds. They were committed to practicing non-violence and passive resistance, but they were not satisfied. They were not content (with the social status quo). Nor should they have been. Some things, after all, are unacceptable.

To practice santoşā, however, we must accept what is (i.e., what exists as it exists in the moment — or as we understand it to exist). Acceptance, in this case, does not mean that we just casually throw our hands up and accept violence, injustice, and inequity as basic staples of life. Neither does it mean that we ignore what is happening around us. Instead, the practice requires us to be truthful about the situation, our roles in the situation, and what we can do to change the situation. The practice also requires us to proceed with clear-minded awareness of how we are connected to everything and everybody and to be dedicated and disciplined in our practice of non-violence and non-harming. Finally, the practice requires that we practice non-attachment; meaning that we do all we can do and then let go with a kind of trustful surrender. This is basically a summary of 9 of the 10 elements that make up the ethics of the Yoga Philosophy.

The elements that make up the corner stone of the Yoga Philosophy overlap commandments found in the Abrahamic religions, precepts found in Buddhism, and values found in philosophies and indigenous religions around the world. These are shared values that stretch back into eons and yet we still have problems… big problems — which means we still need leaders, thinkers, and speakers who can hear what is needed in the world and respond wisely, safely, and justly. Such a man was born in Alabama, during the period of violence that directly preceded the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. His life and his legacy are yet another illustration of a dreamer who was not satisfied, yet made choices for which we can all be grateful.

“Editorials expressed hope that through participation in war, black citizens would gain opportunities at home. Among the outrages that the Reporter chronicled were frequent lynchings across the South, a topic that led [Oscar William Adams, Sr.] to write, ‘It is a shame before the living God and man that we should continue to preach democracy and permit such autocracy and savagery within our own borders.’”

— quoted from Bhamwiki.com (citing Gordon, Tom (May 2, 2018) “Civil decency. Human honesty.” B-Metro

Born in Birmingham, Alabama on February 7, 1925, Oscar William Adams, Jr. was the oldest of two sons born to Oscar William Adams, Sr. and Ella Virginia Adams (née Eaton). His brother, Frank “Doc” Adams became a great jazz clarinetist, saxophonist and bandleader, who was inducted into the Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame. Meanwhile, Oscar, Jr. became the first African American member of Birmingham Bar Association (in 1966) and co-founded Birmingham’s first integrated law firm and its first African American law firm. He also litigated a variety of civil rights cases before becoming the first African American to serve on an Alabama appellate court and a well respected member of the Alabama Supreme Court.

Just like with the other dreamers born on this date, to understand the story of Judge Adams, we have to look back at the causes and conditions of his circumstances — which means going a little deeper into history. And, if we are going a little deeper into Alabama history that informed the dreams of the Adams brothers, we can start with their father, Oscar William Adams, Sr., a journalist and publisher who founded The Birmingham Reporter in 1906.

Unlike Black newspapers published in the North at the time, southern media outlets like The Birmingham Reporter had to tread carefully and be circumspect in it’s coverage of race-related news. To be too critical in opinion pieces or — in many cases — too honest about the facts of certain news stories, might mean that the newspaper, the journalists, and their families could be physically attacked. By all accounts, Oscar William Adams, Sr. had a real knack for creating layouts and crafting articles that told the whole story without explicitly telling the whole story. He couldn’t always tell his readers what happened, but he could show them. He could juxtapose articles about 9 Black kids being tried for rape with articles about almost twice as many white teenagers being exonerated before a trial. His readers had to perfect the skill of reading between the lines. It was like his readers understood the practice of focusing, concentrating, and meditating on the space between the ears and the process of hearing.

“In this state of withdrawal, ‘Great Disincarnation’ the mental coverings composed of rajas and tamas dwindle away and the light of sattwa is revealed.”

— quoted from How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali (3:42), translated and with commentary by Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood

That aforementioned example is not random; it is one of the ways Oscar William Adams, Sr. covered the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine African Americans teenagers (age 12 – 19 years old) who were accused of raping two white women on a train full of “hoboes.” Nowadays, people might think of hoboes, tramps, and bums as one and the same. During the Great Depression, however, people very clearly understood that a hobo was someone who was traveling in order to work (but didn’t have the means to pay for their travel). On March 25, 1931, a fight broke out (in Tennessee) on a Southbound train full of Black and white hobos, because a group of white teenagers declared the train “whites only.” Even though there were reportedly the same number of hoboes of each race on the train, the white teenagers ended up leaving the train. Defeated and angry, they told the local sheriff that they had been attacked by the Black teenagers. The sheriff — plus some local residents that he deputized — intercepted the train in Paint Rock, Alabama, and arrested the Black teenagers.

They also arrested two young white women (age 17 and 21 years old).

Now, if you know anything about “bad women,” you know that two unaccompanied white women traveling in the presence of men — especially Black men — didn’t have a lot of choices. They could be labeled as prostitutes — which, in this case (because they crossed state lines) would mean they had violated The White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, also called the Mann Act, and could face lengthy prison terms. The other option was to say they were raped. Unlike most of the men, the two women knew each other and were actually traveling together. They decided (or, possibly the older one convinced the younger one) that it was in their best interest to say they were raped. A doctor was called in to examine them, but could find no signs of rape or trauma. It would later turn out that no one could truthfully confirm if the women and the teenagers were ever even in the same car. But, none of that mattered: it was 1931; the teenagers would go to court in Scottsboro, Alabama.

At the end of three speedy trials, all eight of the nine teenagers — including one who was almost blind and another who was so disabled that he could barely walk — were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries. The youngest of the nine was convicted, but his trial ended in a hung jury, because they couldn’t agree on the penalty: some wanted him to receive the death penalty, despite his age. All of the cases were appealed to the Alabama Supreme Court and then the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), which overturned the convictions and sent the cases back down to Alabama. A change of venue was granted and all nine headed to court in rural Decatur, Alabama in the Spring of 1933.

Despite the decision for the cases to be re-tried, all nine were under heavy guard and the eight previously sentenced to death were in prison garb. Despite arguments from the defense attorneys (Samuel Leibowitz and Joseph Brodsky, who had also served as second chair on the earlier trials), the trials again had all-white juries. Despite the fact that the youngest of the alleged victims recanted, the defendants were again convicted. The first of the nine was convicted despite the fact that many of the jurors knew he was innocent. But, Decatur was Klan country and the Ku Klux Klan made it very clear what they thought the outcome of the trials should be and what would happen to any juror who didn’t convict and recommend the death penalty. Judge James Edwin Horton set the verdict aside and indefinitely postponed the other trials. He did this, knowing it would end his political career. He also considered a change of venue, but, in the end, the first of the Scottsboro Boys faced his third trial in Decatur.

With a new judge, but no National Guard protection, the second set of retrials took place in Winter 1933. They resulted in two more convictions. Appeals to SCOTUS, in 1935, resulted in the convictions being overturned and the Scottsboro 9 were back in court. This time, however, there was one African American juror: Creed Conyers, the first Black person to serve on an Alabama grand jury since 1877. The newly elected Attorney General served as the prosecuting attorney and the trials lasted from January of 1936 until the summer of 1937. After spending over six years in prison (as adults on death row), the legal fate of the Scottsboro Boys was as follows:

After 4 trials, Haywood Patterson (18 when arrested) was convicted and sentenced to 75 years in prison. This was the first time a Black man in Alabama had been convicted of raping a white woman and had not received the death penalty. He escaped in 1949; end up in Michigan; but then went back to prison on a different case in 1951.
After 3 trials, Clarence Norris (19 when arrested) was convicted and given the death penalty. His sentence was commuted in 1938; he was paroled (and jumped parole) in 1946. He was pardoned in 1976.
After 2 trials, Charlie Weems (19 when arrested) was convicted and sentenced to 105 years. He was paroled in 1943.
After 2 trials, Andrew “Andy” Wright (19 when arrested) was convicted and sentenced to 99 years. He was paroled; violated his parole; and then was placed on parole again (in New York) in 1950.
During his 2nd trial, Ozie Powell (16 when arrested) was shot by a sheriff and suffered brain damage. Somehow, he pleaded guilty to assaulting an officer and received 20 years. The initial rape charges were dropped as part of his plea agreement. He was paroled in 1946.
After 2 trials, the final prosecutor declared Olin Montgomery (17 when arrested) “not guilty” and dropped all charges.
After 2 trials, the final prosecutor declared Willie Roberson (16 when arrested) “not guilty” and dropped all charges.
After 2 trials, Roy Wright (12 when arrested) was deemed “too young” to be convicted and all charges were dropped.
After 2 trials, Eugene Williams (13 when arrested) was deemed “too young” to be convicted and all charges were dropped.

NOTE: The number of trials (noted above) does not count appeals or the fact that the defendants were often in the courtroom when others were being tried. Nor does it reflect the fact that sometimes jurors were swapped (like school kids moving between classrooms). Several of the aforementioned had additional legal issues, but I have not listed them all.

In 1938, the Governor of Alabama (Bibb Graves) made plans to pardon those who were imprisoned, but changed his mind because he didn’t like their attitude and the fact that they continued to declare themselves innocent. In 2013, 82 years after they were arrested, the state of Alabama issued posthumous pardons for Haywood Patterson, Charlie Weems, and Andy Wright.

“Remembering their sharp and pretty
Tunes for Sacco and Vanzetti,
I said:
Here too’s a cause divinely spun
For those whose eyes are on the sun,
Here in epitome
Is all disgrace
And epic wrong.
Like wine to brace
The minstrel heart, and blare it into song.

Surely, I said,
Now will the poets sing.
But they have raised no cry.
I wonder why.”

— quoted from the poem “Scottsboro, Too, Is, Worth Its Song” by Countee Cullen

The trials and tribulations of the Scottsboro Boys inspired a plethora of writers, including Langston Hughes (Scottsboro Limited), Harper Lee (To Kill A Mockingbird), Ellen Feldman (Scottsboro: A Novel), Richard Wright (Native Son), Allen Ginsberg (America), Countee Cullen (“Scottsboro, Too, Is, Worth Its Song”), Jean-Paul Sartre (The Respectful Prostitute [La Putain respectueuse]), Utpal Dutta (মানুষের অধিকারে [The Rights of Man]); as well as creators of the musicals The Scottsboro Boys and Direct from Death Row The Scottsboro Boys; musicians like Lead Belly (“The Scottsboro Boys”) and Rage Against the Machine (“Scottsboro, Too, Is, Worth Its Song”); and filmmakers and political cartoonists.

The events also, inevitably, shaped the thoughts and desires of Oscar William Adams, Jr. — who would have turned 6 years old shortly before the teenagers were arrested and his father started covering the story. He was 12 (the same age the youngest had been when arrested) when the final trials concluded and around 18 (the same age the first to be convicted was when arrested) when the first man was paroled. Can you imagine what it would have been like to grow up in the Birmingham at that time? Regardless of if you visualize yourself as you are, in that situation or if you see yourself as the junior Mr. Adams, can you imagine how this situation might have informed your opinions — of yourself, of people who look like you, as well as of people who don’t look like you? Can you imagine how this situation would have informed your dreams and your decisions about the world?

And, this is all without considering “The Talk.”

I can’t imagine any Black child being satisfied with these circumstances. I can’t imagine any Black kid being content with these circumstances. I can’t imagine any Black teenager not dreaming about a better world; a more just, equitable, and peaceful world.

“The black man does not wish to be the pet of the law. The more blacks become enmeshed in meaningful positions in our society, then the more that society will be come non-discriminatory. His goals and ideals will become identical with goals and ideals of the rest of society. To insist on special treatment, and demand and get integration in other aspects of society is to pursue inconsistent approaches. If a black man is allowed to go as far as his talents will carry him, he will not need special protection from the courts. If he is not, the courts will once again be asked for special protection.”

— quoted from the special concurrence opinion for Beck v. State, 396 So. 2d 645 (1980) by Alabama Supreme Court Justice Oscar W. Adams

We can never know what dreams he would have had and decisions he would have made if Oscar William Adams, Jr. had been someone else’s son and/or had experienced Birmingham in the mid-20th century through someone else’s circumstances. What we do know is that after he graduated from high school, Mr. Adams, Jr. attended two historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs): Talladega College, Alabama’s oldest private HBCU, where he earned a degree in philosophy (1944) and Howard University, where he earned a law degree (1947). We also know that he came back to Alabama to practice.

Soon after he graduated, Mr. Adams, Jr. was admitted to the Alabama State Bar and opened up his own private practice, where he specialized in civil rights cases. He worked very closely with the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, founder of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which was instrumental in organizing the Selma-to-Montgomery marches in 1965. He became the first African American member of Birmingham Bar Association (1966) and, in 1967, he and Harvey Burg co-founded the first integrated law firm in Alabama. Two years later, in 1969, he co-founded Birmingham’s first African American law firm with James Baker, an Ivy League lawyer from Philadelphia. The firm became known as Adams, Baker & Clemon, when the original partners were joined by U.W. Clemon, who would become a lot of notable firsts (including Alabama’s first African American federal judge).

Throughout his career as an attorney in private practice, Oscar William Adams, Jr. litigated various kinds of cases on behalf of Martin Luther King Jr. and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as well as cases focused on school desegregation (e.g., Armstrong v. Board of Education of City of Birmingham, Ala., 220 F. Supp. 217 (N.D. Ala. 1963)); discrimination cases (e.g., Terry v. Elmwood Cemetery, 307 F. Supp. 369 (N.D. Ala. 1969) and Pettway v. AMERICAN CAST IRON PIPE COMPANY, 332 F. Supp. 811 (N.D. Ala. 1970)); and voting rights cases.

He became the first African American to serve on an Alabama appellate court on October 10, 1980, when an Alabama Supreme Court justice retired due to health issues. Eleven days before he was sworn in, the court heard arguments for Beck v. State, 396 So. 2d 645 (1980), a case about the death penalty and how it was applied. The court’s decision would include a history of the death penalty in Alabama and highlight a period of injustices. However, the court’s statement that “during part of Alabama’s history, [what offenses authorized the imposition of death] reflected the interaction and relative position of the races, especially during the period prior to the Civil War, when slaves and free Negroes were admittedly singled out for special treatment insofar as capital punishment was concerned. Nevertheless, with that one exception…” made it sound as if the death penalty was rarely applied to innocent people purely based on their race — completely negating the fact that (in their lifetimes) it had been thusly applied multiple times. Mr. Adams, Jr. was sworn in on December 17^th, listened to a recording of the argument and, two days later, wrote a special concurrence. It was his first official statement from the bench.

“In the early seventies, blacks argued for bifurcated jury trials, and this Court today has mandated such for the State of Alabama. In the seventies, blacks asked that sentences for rape and other offenses be not discriminatorily and freakishly imposed.”

— quoted from the special concurrence opinion for Beck v. State, 396 So. 2d 645 (1980) by Alabama Supreme Court Justice Oscar W. Adams

After completing the remaining two years of the unexpired term he had assumed, he decided to run for the office. The largest bar associations endorsed him, rather than his white counterparts, and in 1982, he became the first African American to be elected (by popular vote) to a statewide constitutional office in Alabama. He served on the Alabama Supreme Court until October 31, 1994, when retired from the bench. After his retirement from being behind the bench, he returned to the front: working with the Birmingham law firm of White, Dunn & Booker (now White, Arnold & Dowd). He also served as co-chairman of the Second Citizens’ Conference on Judicial Elections and Campaigns.

Oscar William Adams Jr. was replaced with the state’s second African American Supreme Court Justice, Ralph D. Cook. It would make for a great story if, in the intervening years — between 1980 and 1994 and between 1994 and today — more African American lawyers had become judges who became justices in the state of Alabama. That would be super satisfying.

Unfortunately, I can’t truthfully tell that story.

Associate Justice Cook retired from the bench in 2001. John H. England Jr served as a justice on the Alabama Supreme Court justice from 1999 until 2001. (His son, John H. England, III is one of a handful of African American judges serving in Alabama’s federal courts.) According to the Brennan Center for Justice’s 2022 update, Alabama is currently one of 28 states with no Black justices. Furthermore, it is one of six states where Black residents make up at least 10% of the population. Specifically, 35% of Alabama’s population is classified as people of color and 27% of the total population identifies as Black. Yet, all nine of the Supreme Court justices, all five members of the Court of Criminal Appeals, and all five of the Court of Civil Appeals are white.

Quite often, when statistics like these are presented, some people will say representation doesn’t matter as much as education and experience. Well, I am just grateful that more and more people are getting the education and the experience that puts them in the pipeline. That appreciation for the way things are changing is part of the practice of santoşā. If you ask me if I am actually satisfied and content to wait, I can honestly say that I have no choice; because I can’t (directly) do anything about it. And that acceptance (and awareness of what is and is not in my control) is the non-attachment part of the practice.

Of course, the next logical question is: Well, when will you be satisfied? When will you be content? When posed with a similar question, SCOTUS associate justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg had a pretty succinct answer. I’m not sure if it would be my answer; but it is worth considering what the country would be like — what the world would be like — if the tables turned.

“Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said, ‘I’m sometimes asked, “When will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court]?” And I say when there are nine. People are shocked. But there’d been nine men, and nobody’s ever raised a question about that.’

Asking, ‘How diverse is diverse enough?’ still represents a tick–the–box mentality rather than embracing the types of cultural, innovation, and bottom–line changes we have described here. When organizations start to embrace the breakthrough diversity can represent, we can move beyond thinking about quotas and targets. The real change we are talking about takes us far past ‘the one/the few’ to as many hires as it takes to create a culture of belonging and move our sector into the future.”

— quoted from “What Is Diverse Enough” in “Chapter 4. A Clear Case” of Creating Cultures of Belonging: Cultivating Organization where Women and Men Thrive by Beth Birmingham and Eeva Sallinen Simard (forward by Myal Greene and Emily Sarmiento)

PRACTICE NOTES: I don’t necessarily have a standard sequence for a February 7^th practice, but it is a practice that leans towards having a fair amount of balance. Sometimes, after completing a portion of the practice, I pose the questions, “Would you be satisfied if this was the end of the practice? Would you grateful (if you got what you needed), or would you still be wishing, hoping, praying for what you wanted? What would cause you to be more grateful and, therefore, more joyful?”

Every once in a while, I’ll even throw in a tolāsana (scale pose).

### 7 of 9 (1857) ###

Salt of the Earth (a special Black History note for Monday) February 7, 2023

Posted by ajoyfulpractice in "Impossible" People, Books, Buddhism, Changing Perspectives, Dharma, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Faith, Food, Gandhi, Healing Stories, Health, Hope, Life, Lorraine Hansberry, Music, New Year, One Hoop, Pain, Peace, Pema Chodron, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Suffering, Tragedy, Wisdom, Women, Writing, Yin Yoga, Yoga.
Tags: Ahiṃsā, Ahimsa, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Arun Gandhi, birthdays on February 6, Black History Month, commandments, Constance Allen Pitter Thomas, Edward A. Pitter, Female Genital Mutilation, FGM, Great Depression, HBCUs, Howard University, Inez Maxine Pitter Haynes, International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation, Juana Racquel Royster Horn, King Abdullah II of Jordan, Lincoln School of Nursing, Marjorie Allen Pitter, Marjorie Allen Pitter King, Mary T. Henry, nursing, precepts, salt, Salt Satyagraha, Season of Non-violence, Season of Nonviolence, Seattle Washington, The Gospel According to Matthew, United Nations, United Nations General Assembly, University of California LA, University of Washington, World Interfaith Harmony Week, yamas, Yoga Sutra 2.35
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Peace and ease to all during this “Season of Non-violence” and all other seasons!

This is a special post for Monday, February 6^th. You can request a recording of the Monday practice via a comment below or (for a slightly faster reply) you can email me at myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com.

WARNING: A portion of this post refers to Female Genital Mutilation (FGM), but there is an opportunity to skip that section.

In the spirit of generosity (“dana”), the Zoom classes, recordings, and blog posts are freely given and freely received. If you are able to support these teachings, please do so as your heart moves you. (NOTE: You can donate even if you are “attending” a practice that is not designated as a “Common Ground Meditation Center” practice. Donations are tax deductible.

Check out the “Class Schedules” calendar for upcoming classes.

“Next to air and water, salt is perhaps the greatest necessity of life. It is the only condiment of the poor. Cattle cannot live without salt. Salt is a necessary article in many manufactures. it is also a rich manure.

There is no article like salt, outside water, by taxing which the State can reach even the starving millions, the sick, the maimed and the utterly helpless. The salt tax constitutes the most inhuman poll tax that the ingenuity of man can devise.”

– quoted from a letter by M. K. Gandhi, printed in Young India, Vol. XII, Ahmedabad: February 27, 1930

Some people laughed when Mohandas Karamchanda Gandhi decided salt would be the focus of a direct action, non-violent mass protest. People who are world leaders today scoffed, because they didn’t get it and they didn’t have his insight and vision. However, Gandhi wasn’t the first radical leader to emphasize the importance of salt. Jesus did it, in the Gospel According to Matthew (5:13 – 14), when he referred to his disciples as “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world.” In both cases, the teacher whose name would become synonymous with a worldwide religious movement indicated that there was a purpose, a usefulness, to the disciples and their roles (as salt and as light). I think it’s important to remember that Jesus was speaking to fishermen, farmers, and shepherds – people who were intimately familiar with the importance of salt (and light). They knew that (different kinds of) salt can be used for flavoring, preservation, fertilization, cleansing, and destroying, and that it could be offered as a sacrifice. They knew, as Gandhi would later point out, that people in hot, tropical climates needed salt for almost everything – including healing.

Gandhi’s “audience” was different. He was living in a time of industrialization and the beginnings of these modern times in which we find ourselves. He knew that people laughed and scoffed, because they didn’t completely understand the usefulness and vitalness of salt. He understood that some people took salt for granted and, even within the pages,, he debated with experts about the benefits and risks of salt consumption. He also knew that some people – inside and outside of British-ruled India – just didn’t get the inhumanity of charging people a tax for something that they could obtain (literally) outside their front door; something that was part of the very fiber of their being.

Remember, the human body is 60 – 75% water… and most of that water is saturated with salt.

“Such a universal force [Satyagraha] necessarily makes no distinction between kinsmen and strangers, young and old, man and woman, friend and foe. The force to be so applied can never be physical. There is in it no room for violence. The only force of universal application can, therefore, be that of ahimsa or love. In other words it is soul force.

Love does not burn others, it burns itself.”

– quoted from “Some Rules of Satyagraha” by M. K. Gandhi, printed in Young India, Vol. XII, Ahmedabad: February 27, 1930

(NOTE: The general explanation and rules were followed by a section of rules of conduct for various situations, including for “an Individual” and for “a Prisoner.”)

As I mentioned last week, Gandhi’s grandson (Arun Gandhi) established the “Season for Nonviolence” (January 30^th through April 4^th) in 1998. The Mahatma Gandhi Canadian Foundation for World Peace offers daily practices based on principles of nonviolence advocated by Mahatma Gandhi (who was assassinated on January 30, 1948) and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (who was assassinated on April 4, 1968). We could think of these principles as little bits of salt, sprinkled throughout the days, but the thing to remember is that these principles are not unique to one culture, one philosophy, or one religion. Neither did these two great leaders/teachers invent these ideas. Ahiṃsā (non-violence or “non-harming”) is the very first yama (external “restraint” or universal commandment) in the Yoga Philosophy and one of the Ten Commandments according the Abrahamic religions. It is also one of the Buddhist precepts. Courage, smiling, appreciation, caring, believing, simplicity, education – the principles of the first week of the “Season for Nonviolence” – all predate Gandhi and MLK; they also predate Jesus. So, too, does today’s principle: Healing.

Healing is also the focus of people who are wrapping up World Interfaith Harmony Week (WIHW), which was first proposed by King Abdullah II of Jordan in 2010. The United Nations (UN) General Assembly adopted Resolution 65/5 on October 10, 2010, and designated the first week of February as a time to promote a culture of peace and nonviolence “between all religions, faiths, and beliefs.” This year’s theme is “Harmony in a World in Crisis: Working together to achieve peace, gender equality, mental health and wellbeing, and environmental preservation” and it stresses the fact that we are all better equipped to deal with future pandemics and natural catastrophes when we come together and work together.

Of course, future pandemics and natural catastrophes are not the only things that plague the world. We also have human-made disasters and catastrophic events. We’re still dealing with some of the same things Gandhi and MLK – even Jesus – fought: people who who would take away another person’s ability to be a healthy, thriving, human being. Again, we could look back at salt… or basic civil rights… or we could look at what it (sometimes) means to be like August Wilson’s Risa, “a woman in the world.”

While I do not go into explicit details, you may skip to the next big banner quote if needed.

In addition to being the penultimate day of World Interfaith Harmony Week (WIHW), February 6th is also International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation. Designated by the UN in 2012, this annual day of events aims to amplify and direct the efforts on the elimination of the practice of FGM, which is defined by the UN as “all procedures that involve altering or injuring the female genitalia for non-medical reasons and is recognized internationally as a violation of the human rights, the health and the integrity of girls and women.” People who endure FGM face short-term complications such as severe pain, shock, excessive bleeding, infections, and difficulty in passing urine, as well as long-term consequences for their sexual and reproductive health and mental health. According to the UN, 4.32 million girls around the world who are at risk of undergoing FGM and approximately 1 in 4, or 52 million worldwide, experience FGM at the hands of a medical professional.

This is not a new practice. In fact, when I was in college (about 30 years ago) I had an argument with a male student who insisted there was no such thing as FGM. He was white, from America, and (to my knowledge) had not experienced much outside of his lived experience. He only knew what it was like to be him. If I could go back, and have that discussion again, I might dig a little deeper into why he was in such denial about something that (to date) has been experienced by at least 200 million living people. NOTE: That statistic only refers to survivors.

While the UN acknowledges that cultures are different and that all are in “constant flux,” the General Assembly also recognizes that, in order for cultures to survive, the people within a society must be able to thrive, enjoy basic human rights, and have the physical and mental wellness to reach their potential. Any one of us can think of this as someone else’s problem, but the truth is that (on some level) this is everyone’s problem to solve. In fact, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called, “on men and boys everywhere to join me in speaking out and stepping forward to end female genital mutilation, for the benefit of all.”

The good news is that FGM has declined, globally, over the last 25 years and a girl is one-third less likely to experience FGM than 30 years ago. All the good news category: more awareness means that healthcare professionals are in a better position to help FGM survivors heal from the physical, mental, and/or emotional trauma.

Yoga Sūtra 2.35: ahimsāpratişţhāyām tatsannidhau vairatyāgah

– “In the company of a yogi established in non-violence, animosity disappears.”

Healing begins with people. I’ve seen this up close and personal all of my life, because I grew up around healers. My father taught in medical schools and ran research labs. My mother was a hospital administrator. Her mother went to nursing school with at least one of her sister-in-laws and a couple of her future neighbors. For the most part, they all went to HBCUs (Historically Black Universities and Colleges) in the South, because the times – and the laws at the time – didn’t give them a whole lot of other options. In some ways, my grandmother and her peers would have had very similar experiences as Black nursing students before and after them. In some ways, however, their experiences would have been very different – again, because of the opportunities that were available (or not available to them) based on the color of their skin. For instance, the nurses in my family definitely had to overcome obstacles, but (maybe) not the same walls that Inez Maxine Pitter Haynes had scale in order to become a nurse.

Born February 6, 1919, in Seattle, Washington, Inez Maxine Pitter Haynes was the second of three girls born to Edward A. Pitter and Marjorie Allen Pitter. Mr. Pitter was born in Jamaica (like Bob Marley, who was born 2/6/1945) and came to the United States in as a captain’s steward during the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. After leaving his position on the passenger ship, he became a King County Clerk and then a book editor and publisher. He also worked with the Democratic Party (the Colored Democratic Association of Washington). Mrs. Pitter was a direct descendent of Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, and she knew how to protect her family against the hostilities they encountered. Their daughters (Constance, Maxine, and Marjorie) grew up in the tightknit household that emphasized elegance and education.

“Marjorie Pitter King remembered, ‘Politics opened doors for us and was very helpful. During the Christmas vacations, we were able to work at the post office and earn money to help with our schooling. It also helped my father obtain his job because he had been working on WPA (Works Progress Administration) projects. Then he went from there to deputy sheriff.’ (Horn)”

– quoted from “King, Marjorie Edwina Pitter (1921-1996)” by Mary T. Henry, posted on historylink.org (Juana Racquel Royster Horn cited)

All three of the Pitter girls graduated from high school and made their way to the University of Washington. Like a lot of students, especially during the Great Depression, the sisters had financial struggles. To alleviate their economic problems, the youngest of the three (Marjorie) proposed that they go into business together doing things they had learned how to do at home: typing, printing, and writing speeches. They called their business “Tres Hermanas” or “Three Sisters” – and it would have been nice if all of their troubles could have been resolved through hard work. Unfortunately, -isms and -phobias don’t work that way.

All three of the sisters had to deal with racism that manifested as name-calling and teachers ignoring them. Then, they each had their individual crosses to bear. Constance Allen Pitter Thomas, the oldest of the sisters, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in theatre and became a student teacher in the Seattle School District, but was not offered a permanent position for many years. When she was finally offered a regular position by the school district, it was as a speech therapist. She worked with students with special needs for 18 years.

Marjorie Edwina Pitter King, the youngest of the three sisters, struggled academically and then struggled because there weren’t very many women in accounting – let alone Black women. She ended up transferring to Howard University in 1942, for her senior year; but then dropped out of school and went to work for the Pentagon (during World War II). Eventually, she got married, started a family and moved back to Seattle, where she started a successful tax company. M and M Tax and Consultant Services worked with clients all along the continental coast and Mrs. Pitter King’s support extended to language translation and letter writing. She also became the first African American to be appointed to the Washington State Legislature (in 1965); served as Chair of the 37th District Democratic Party; Vice President of the King County Democratic Party; and Treasurer of the Washington State Federation of Democratic Women, Inc. While attending the 1972 Democratic National Convention, she helped draft the National Democratic Party Platform.

Then there was Maxine… the darkest-skinned of the three sisters… who wanted to be a nurse.

“It was 1939 in Seattle, and although the city had none of the formal ‘Jim Crow’ segregation laws common in the South, the result was often the same.

Being black and finding a job often meant menial work and a lower standard of living. For some black people, discrimination crushed any hope of working at all.”

– quoted from the article in The Seattle Times entitled “Seattle In The Old Days: No ‘Jim Crow’ Laws, But Blacks Were Held Back Just The Same” by Daryl Strickland (dated Jun 27, 1994)

Like her sisters, Inez Maxine Pitter Haynes enrolled at the University of Washington. She enrolled as a pre-nursing student, but then she was rejected by the the Nursing School, because the degree required nursing students to be housed in Harborview Hall – and the Dean of Nursing would not allow an African American student to live with the white students. The future Mrs. Pitter Haynes had no choice, but to change her major during her junior year. She ended up graduating from the University of Washington, in 1941, with a degree in sociology. Then, she moved to New York City and enrolled at Lincoln School of Nursing where she earned the first of two degrees in nursing. She earned her second degree, a masters in nursing, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and worked in the city of angels before moving back to Seattle.

Maxine Pitter Haynes become the first African American nurse at Providence Hospital (now Swedish Medical Center/Providence Campus). She also served as education director for the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic and taught at Seattle Pacific University, from 1976, until she retired in 1981 as professor emeritus.

But, in the middle of all of that, in 1971, she went back to the University of Washington… as an assistant professor at the same nursing school that had turned her away because of her skin color.

We can look at that as progress and/or we can flip the coin and look at that as healing.

“Wounding and healing are not opposites. They’re part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to find other people or to even know they’re alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of. ”

– Rachel Naomi Remen (b. 2/8/1938) as quoted in At Your Service: Living the Lessons of Servant Leadership by Charles E. Wheaton

PRACTICE NOTES: I decided to focus this practice on the ways the body naturally heals: with a little yin and a little yang; a little action/resistance and passive/resting. There was some dynamic motion (to engage the sympathetic nervous system) and also moments of resting and relaxing (to engage the parasympathetic nervous system). In a practice like this, I also highlighted ahimsa (as I did above) and different techniques for relaxing and getting “unhooked,” including the practice of cultivating the opposites.

I have several playlists related to Gandhi, MLK, and ahiṃsā. However, if I were going to put together a playlist specifically for today, I would throw in a little Bob Marley (see reference above) plus some Schumann played by Claudio Arrau (b. 2/6/1903), something by Natalie Cole (b. 2/6/1950), and – if I had the time – I’d look for something appropriate from the soundtracks of one of Robert Townsend’s movies (b. 2/6/1957). Also, cause I’m silly (and I could make it work), I might throw in the Guns N’ Roses cover of “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” (cause, Axl Rose, b. 2/6/1962); however, I might toss it into the before/after music along with this little ditty on YouTube, by an artist born 2/6/1966.

### “Unforgettable / That’s what you are” ~ Nat King Cole & Natalie Cole ###

The Black Cyclone (a special Black History note) February 4, 2023

Posted by ajoyfulpractice in "Impossible" People, Abhyasa, Baseball, Changing Perspectives, Dharma, Fitness, Healing Stories, Health, Hope, Life, Loss, Men, Minnesota, Music, One Hoop, Pain, Philosophy, Suffering, Tragedy, Vairagya, Wisdom, Yoga.
Tags: 42, Albert Von Tilzer, Beau of the Fifth Column, Black History Month, Black Sports, Branch Rickey, Buddy Holly, Charles Follis, Charles Follis Foundation, David Vergun, Dr. Mike Miller, God of War, Gus Greenlee, J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, Jack Norworth, Jackie Robinson, John M. Smith, Lunar New Year, Milt Roberts, Professional Football Researchers Association, Ritchie Valens, Roger Peterson, Val Willingham, Year of the Cat, Year of the Rabbit
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Happy Spring Festival! Happy Carnival! Peace and ease to all during this “Season of Non-violence” and all other seasons!

This is a special post for Friday, February 3^nd, which is also known as “The Day the Music Died. In 2023, it was also the 13^th day of the Spring Festival, which is one of the days when people eat “clean” (more on that in the Friday post). In addition to all of that (and more) it is the anniversary of the birth of a man who (partially) inspired a big, barrier breaking, change in history – a change many people celebrate without ever knowing this particular man’s name.

“Rule 303: If you have the means at hand, you have the responsibility to act.”

“Do what you can, when you can, as much as you can, for as long as you can.”

– the t-shirt and (a paraphrased version of) common refrains on the YouTube channel “Beau of the Fifth Column”

Normally, on Day 13 of the Lunar New Year, I focus on what it means to be clean and practice some kind of “detox” sequence that highlights how the body naturally eliminates waste and how it is just as important for us to let go of things we don’t need physically as it is for us to let go of things that no longer serve us mentally, emotionally, energetically, and/or spiritually. This is also a day when some people celebrate the birthday of the “God of War” – who is associated with empathy and “brotherhood” – and so it can be a good day to reflect on how letting something go can actually bring us closer together.

Sometimes, however, we are not ready to let go. Sometimes, circumstances force us to figure out how to deal with the loss of a friend, a family member, a “brother” or “sister” – even someone we have never (physically) met and will never meet. Just as their is an inhale, a literal “inspiration,” there is an exhale – a literal “expiration” – and part of being alive is dealing with death. The big difference is that when we consciously bring our awareness to our breath, we can consciously and peaceful engage the concept of beginnings and endings.

Unfortunately, everyone isn’t promised peaceful beginnings and endings. Unfortunately, everyone doesn’t get to live long lives and pass peacefully in their sleep, surrounded by people who love them and who treated them well. Like so many recent years, this is one of those years when Lunar New Year celebrations here in the United States have been marred by horrible tragedies and losses that are beyond comprehension. Yet, people continue to come together to figure out how to move forward as a community. People keep connecting in order to honor rituals and traditions despite (or sometimes because of) the fear, anger, frustration, anxiety, grief, and dismay that arises.

People continue to live… and laugh and love… and play music – even though, as I mentioned before, today is the day the music died.

“For years, [Dr. Mike Miller], a research cardiologist, has been studying the effects of happiness — or things that make people happy — on our hearts. He began his research with laughter, and found watching funny movies and laughing at them could actually open up blood vessels, allowing blood to circulate more freely.

Miller thought, if laughter can do that, why not music? So, he tested the effects of music on the cardiovascular system. ‘Turns out music may be one of the best de-stressors — either by playing or even listening to music,’ said Miller.”

– quoted from a 2009 CNN Health segment entitled, “The power of music: It’s a real heart opener” by Val Willingham, CNN Medical Producer

Normally, on this date on the Gregorian calendar, I tell the story of the disastrous “Winter Dance Party” tour and how a plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson crashed just outside of Clear Lake, Iowa, today in 1959. The tragic loss of the the three stars and the pilot, Roger Peterson, as they were traveling to Moorhead, MN, is compounded by the fact that they were all so young, that they were all really started to live their lives as husbands and fathers, and that the three musicians were right on the precipice of making sure their names would never be forgotten simply because of their music. Over the years, as I have recounted this story, I have encountered people who were directly connected to the events of 1959, people who remembered when it happened, people who only know the story because of the music the events inspired, and people who realized they only knew the music of the three legends because a popular musician had covered one of their hit singles.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, it is not uncommon for people to hear one of these stories and realize they knew the big picture, but not all of the details. What happens, however, when you realize that for all the details that you know, there’s a missing piece of history that no one ever mentioned?

“‘Follis was a natural hitter and he had an ease about him and a confident smile that always seemed to worry opposing pitchers,’ one report said. ‘As a football player and as a baseball player he gained the respect of his associates and opponents as well by his clean tactics and his gameness,’ said another.”

– quoted from “Charles Follis” by Milt Roberts (originally in Black Sports, Nov. 1975), reproduced in THE COFFIN CORNER: Vol. 2, No. 1 (1980)

Charles W. Follis was born February 3, 1879, in Cloverdale, Virginia. One of nine children born to Catherine Matilda Anderson Follis and James Henry Follis, who worked on a farm, Charles had fours sisters and four brothers (one of whom died from an football-related injury when he was about 19 years old). In 1885, the family moved to Wooster, Ohio, and the eldest Follis son started attending Wooster High School, where he helped establish a football team (on which his brothers would also eventually play). With Charles Follis as it’s captain and lead player, the mostly-white Wooster High School football team was unbeatable and, for the first year of it’s existence, no one could even score against them.

When he graduated from high school, in 1901, Charles Follis enrolled at the University of Wooster (now known as the College of Wooster), a private liberal arts college founded by the Presbyterian Church. While he ended up playing baseball for his university team, he decided to play football with the Wooster Athletic Association. It was while playing football that Charles Follis earned the nickname “The Black Cyclone.” He also earned a reputation an amazingly formidable competitor. He was so good, in fact, that after he played against the all-white Shelby Blues (part of the “Ohio League” that competed for the Ohio Independent Championship (OIC) and would evolve into the National Football League (NFL)), the manager of the Shelby Blues convinced Charles Follis to sign a contract – making Charles “The Black Cyclone” Follis the first African American to play professional football on an integrated team. Frank C. Schiffer, the manager of the Shelby Blues, also got Mr. Follis a job at a hardware store that would accommodate his practice and playing schedule.

About a year after the Shelby Blues signed Charles Follis as a halfback, a young student from Ohio Wesleyan University started playing for pay. That student has a name that will forever be enshrined in sports history and even in the minds of lay sports historians: Branch Rickey.

“Rickey later said: ‘I may not be able to do something about racism in every field, but I can sure do something about it in baseball.’”

– quoted from the “Sports Heroes Who Served: WWI Soldier Helped Desegregate Baseball” by David Vergun, DOD News (dated July 7, 2020, U. S. Department of Defense website)

Charles Follis and Branch Rickey not only played football together as Shelby Blues, they also play against each other when Mr. Rickey coached the Ohio Wesleyan University football team. So, Branch Rickey had a front row seat to witness the athletic ability of Charles Follis as well as the way “The Black Cyclone” handled the adversity of dealing with racism on and off the field. That racism not only caused Mr. Follis to be isolated and separated from team functions – even in his hometown of Wooster – it also lead to insults and (actually, physical) injuries during the games. One of those injuries, or the culmination of those injuries, ended Charles Follis’s football career.

However, Charles Follis wasn’t finished with sports and football wasn’t the only place where ran into Branch Rickey. The two athletes also found themselves in direct competition when they started playing as catchers for Ohio college baseball teams. Even though they were rivals, they seemed to share mutual respect and friendship with each other. Charles Follis became the first African American catcher to move from the college leagues to the Negro League. Meanwhile, Branch Rickey coached college baseball at Ohio Wesleyan – where he coached another African American catcher, Charles Thomas – and then signed a contract with the Terre Haute Hottentots of the Class B Central League, making his professional Major League Baseball (MLB) debut on June 20, 1903.

“In a 1975 Akron Beacon Journal story, the late John M. Smith of Shelby was interviewed a year before his death. As a teenager, Smith watched Follis star for the Shelby Blues.

‘Could he run?’ Smith asked incredulously, ‘Lord almighty! The man was the best I’ve ever seen. Could he run!’”

– quoted from the Akron Beacon Journal clip posted on the Charles Follis Foundation website

In 1905, Charles Follis was fast becoming the superstar of the Cuban Giants, the first fully salaried African American professional baseball team. He was an all-around all star who stole bases, made double and triple plays, and was known as a power hitter as well as one of the most popular and well-liked players on the team. He made headlines during every game and forced other teams to pull out all the stops in an effort to best him. A rival team from Elyria, Ohio, thought they could beat biggest “giant” by bringing in a ringer: Herbert “Buttons” Briggs, a former Chicago Cubs pitcher. On May 16, 1906, the MLB pitcher faced the “cyclone”… and lost, big time. As the first batter, in the first inning, against the first pitch, Charles Follis hit a home run. He literally hit it out of the park and would end the game four-for-six against the pitcher who had previously won 20 games in one MLB season.

Within a few years of that 1906 season opener, three of the biggest names on the field that day had all passed away at young ages: John Bright, the Cuban Giants pitcher died in 1909 or 1908; Herbert Theodore “Buttons” Briggs caught pneumonia in 1910 and died of tuberculosis in 1911; Charles Follis caught pneumonia during a game in 1910 and died April 5, 1910.

“The [old-timers] in Wooster, Shelby, and Cleveland still talk about him today… but historians forget him… young sports fans probably never heard of him before. In Wooster [Cemetery], a thin, weathered headstone, slightly tilted by the winds and snow of more than 65 years, marks his final resting place. Today it is viewed as a local historical site.”

– quoted from “Charles Follis” by Milt Roberts (originally in Black Sports, Nov. 1975), reproduced in THE COFFIN CORNER: Vol. 2, No. 1 (1980)

Around the same time Charles Follis was besting MLB players, his college teammate and rival was moving up to the majors. The only problem was that Branch Rickey’s stats were lacking. Two years into his contract, the St. Louis Browns (formerly the Wisconsin Brewers) became the New York Highlanders (later the New York Yankees). On June 28, 1907, Mr. Rickey, the backup catcher, was forced to play a game while injured. It was a disaster. He couldn’t throw, he struck out three times, and the opposing team (the Washington Senators) stole a whopping 13 bases. Not surprisingly, that was his one and only season with the Highlanders.

Branch Rickey would go back to coaching college football, make another go as a baseball player (1914) and as a baseball manager with the reconstructed St. Louis Browns (1913–1915, 1919). Then, after serving in the United States Army during World War I and spending that final year in the front office of the St. Louis Browns, he became General Manager of the St. Louis Cardinals (which had been the St. Louis Browns née St. Louis Brown Stockings, before the Brewers used the name). The MLB catcher some described as lackluster, excelled as a manager. He was an innovator, especially when dealing with conflict and controversy. He became General Manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1943 and immediately started laying groundwork for some groundbreaking.

In 1945, Branch Rickey and Gus Greenlee, founder and president of the second National Negro League, created the United States League. Mr. Rickey interviewed Jackie Robinson and then signed him to a minor league contract. A good number of people in the United States – even if they don’t know much about baseball – know that Jackie Robinson, #42, broke the color line in major league baseball on April 15, 1947. What people may not know is why Branch Rickey was so determined to make that change. Why he so determined to do what he could – in theory, for people who were perceived as being so different from him.

Even though he would later talk about his experiences as a coach of a Black player and as a member of the military (before the U. S. military integrated), what many people may not know is that, before that, he had a rival, a teammate, a peer, a friend – someone he admired: a man named Charles W. Follis, a man who just happened to be Black.

“On October 17, 1903, Rickey felt the ‘Black Cyclone’s’ full power when he ran their ends dizzy for 20, 25, 35 and 70 yard gains, the last being a touchdown. After that game Rickey praised Follis, calling him ‘a wonder.’ It was the power of his example, his character, and his grace that convinced Rickey, that color could not belie his greatness. The rest is history….”

– quoted from the “Background” section of the Charles Follis Foundation website

PRACTICE NOTES: I actually have several baseball-related sequences and themes in my notebooks. They range from (sort of) silly to (very) serious, from meditative Restorative and Yin Yoga to “slow flow” and vigorous vinyasas. Philosophically, what the all have in common is a focus on teamwork, on doing one’s best and then letting go, and on an awareness of what happens when we become part of something bigger than our individual selves. Physically, what they all have in common is asymmetrically, unilateral poses with special awareness of the feet, hips, core/midsection, and shoulder girdle.

Of course, we can’t have a practice about baseball without a seventh-inning stretch and the wave.

### “Take Me Out To The Ballgame” ~ Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer ###

FTWMI: Focus+Concentrate+Meditate = Sweet Heaven (w/expansion) January 30, 2023

Posted by ajoyfulpractice in Bhakti, Changing Perspectives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Faith, Gandhi, Gratitude, Healing Stories, Hope, Lent / Great Lent, Life, Meditation, Mysticism, New Year, Pain, Peace, Philosophy, Religion, Suffering, Swami Vivekananda, Tragedy, Wisdom, Yoga.
Tags: Ahimsa, Arun Gandhi, Banlam, Bogside Massacre, Datuk Teh Kim Teh, Grace Chen, Hokkien, Hoklo, Jade Emperor, Lunar New Year, Martyrs' Day, Minnan, Mohandas Gandhi, Patanjali, Samyama, School Day of Non-violence and Peace, Season of Nonviolence, Shi Fa Zhuo, Yoga Sutra 3.4, Yoga Sutras 3.1-3.3
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Happy New Year! Happy Carnival! Many blessings to those celebrating the Jade Emperor’s birthday! Peace and ease to all during this “Season of Non-violence” and all other seasons!

For Those Who Missed It: A version of the following was originally posted in February of 2021. Even though this was posted first, it is a continuation of yesterday’s “Getting Ready & Being Ready” post. Class details have been updated and a slight expansion has been added with regard to Martyrs’ Day / School Day of Non-violence and Peace.

“The Indriyas, the organs of the senses, are acting outwards and coming in contact with external objects. Bringing them under the control of the will is what is called Pratyahara or gathering towards oneself. Fixing the mind on the lotus of the heart, or on the centre of the head, is what is called Dharana. Limited to one spot, making that spot the base, a particular kind of mental waves rises; these are not swallowed up by other kinds of waves, but by degrees become prominent, while all the others recede and finally disappear. Next the multiplicity of these waves gives place to unity and one wave only is left in the mind. This is Dhyana, meditation. When no basis is necessary, when the whole of the mind has become one wave, one-formedness, it is called Samadhi. Bereft of all help from places and centres, only the meaning of the thought is present. If the mind can be fixed on the centre for twelve seconds it will be a Dharana, twelve such Dharanas will be a Dhyana, and twelve such Dhyanas will be a Samadhi.”

– quoted from “Chapter VIII: Raja-Yoga in Brief” in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 1, Raja-Yoga by Swami Vivekananda

Take a moment to consider where you put your energy, resources, effort, and focus. How much time, money, effort, or awareness do you put into loving someone? Or, actively disliking someone? How much energy do you spend dealing with fear or grief, anger or doubt? How much on joy or gratitude? It is generally understood that what you get out of a situation or your life is partially based on what you put into a situation or life. A more nuanced understanding of such an equation would highlight the fact that our energy, resources, effort, and focus/awareness all combine to produce a certain outcome – and this is in keeping with Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion. It is also consistent with text in Ecclesiastes and with what Rod Stryker refers to as the Creation Equation.

The problem many of us run into isn’t that we don’t know or understand the formula. The problem is that we don’t pay attention to what we are putting into the equation. Our time, energy, efforts, and resources get pulled in different directions, because our attention is distracted – that is to say, our focus/awareness is pulled into different directions. But, what happens if/when we sharpen our focus? What happens when we pull all our awareness and senses in and focus/concentrate/meditate in such a way that we become completely absorbed in one direction? Consider the power of that kind of engagement.

Yoga Sūtra 3.1: deśabandhah cittasya dhāranā

– “Dhāranā is the process of holding, focusing, or fixing the attention of mind onto one object or place.”

Yoga Sūtra 3.2: tatra pratyaya-ikatānatā dhyānam

– “Dhyāna is the repeated continuation, or unbroken flow of thought, toward that one object or place.”

Yoga Sūtra 3.3: tadeva-artha-mātra-nirbhāsaṁ svarūpa-śūnyam-iva-samādhiḥ

– “Samadhi [meditation in its highest form] is the state when only the essence of that object, place, or point shines forth in the mind, as if devoid even of its own form.”

Yoga Sūtra 3.4: trayam-ekatra samyama

– “Samyama is [the practice or integration of] the three together.”

In the third section of the Yoga Sūtras, Patanjali outlined the last three limbs of the Yoga Philosophy and then, just as he did with the other elements, he broke down the benefits of practicing these final limbs. Similar to sūtra 2.1, there is a thread that highlights the power of three elements when practiced together. What is different about the final limbs, however, is that Patanjali devoted the majority of a whole chapter – “The Chapter (or Foundation) on Progressing” – to breaking down the benefits of integrating dhāranā (“focus” or concentration”), dhyāna (“concentration” or “meditation”), and Samādhi (“meditation” or “absorption”).

We can unintentionally find ourselves in a state of absorption, just as we can consciously progress into the state. We may think of it as being “in the zone” and it is something our minds are completely capable of experiencing. Even people with different types of ADHD can find themselves in this state of absorption. However, what Patanjali described, as it relates to the practice, is a very deliberate engagement of the mind – and, therefore, a very deliberate engagement of the mind-body-spirit.

There are, of course, times, when as individuals or groups we truly harness the power of our awareness and engage the mind-body-spirit in a way that could come under the heading of Samyama. Consider people coming together to raise a barn or to support a family in need. Think about grass roots efforts to register people to vote or change unjust laws. Think about how people raise money for a cause, an individual, or a community. Contemplate how someone’s focus shifts when they give something up for Lent. Although it is an extreme example, another example of a time when every fiber of someone’s being is focused on a single goal is when that goal is survival. One might do multiple tasks during such a period, but each task has the intention of ensuring survival. This is true of an individual and it can also be true of groups of people. In fact, throughout history there have been stories of individuals and groups of people who found themselves in such a situation.

One of those situations – where everyone focused every fiber of their being on survival is remembered and commemorated on the ninth and tenth days of the Lunar New Year. Legend has it that the Hokkien people (also known as Hoklo, Banlam, and Minnan people) found themselves under attack. The Hokkien were not warriors, but they came in close proximity with warriors because they were known for building great ships. One version of their story states that the events occurred during the Song Dynasty (between 960 and 1279 CE), while they were being hunted and killed; another indicates that they were caught between warring factions. Ultimately, to escape the carnage, they decided to hide in a sugar cane field – which, in some versions of the story, just miraculously appeared. They hid until there were no more sounds of horses, warriors, or battle. Legend has it that they emerged on the ninth day of the Lunar New Year, which is the Jade Emperor’s Birthday.

This year (2023), the Jade Emperor’s birthday falls on January 30^th, which is one of six days designated as “Martyrs’ Day” in India. This Martyrs’ Day is the one observed on a national level, as it is the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. Today is also the day, in 1956, when the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s house was bombed and the day, in 1972, that became known as “Bloody Sunday” in Northern Ireland. Since 1964, when it was first established in Spain, some school children around the world observe today as a “School Day of Non-violence and Peace.” In 1998, Gandhi’s grandson (Arun Gandhi) established today as the beginning of the “Season for Nonviolence” (which ends on April 4^th, the anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination in 1968. All of these remembrances and observations, just like the observation of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, are dedicated to the goal of honoring the lives of the victims (or martyrs) of past injustices and eradicating the violent tendencies that create more tragedies, crimes against humanity, and overall suffering. Today’s observations are also based on the foundation of ahimsā, one of the guiding principles of Gandhi, King, and those unarmed protesters in Northern Ireland. Click here to read more about these events and about how focusing on non-violence is part of the practice.

“‘From this story, we learn that unity, solidarity and the active participation of the community is necessary when it comes to facing challenges,’ said [Klang Hokkien Association president Datuk Teh Kim] Teh.”

– quoted from The Star article (about a version of the story where only some hide) entitled “Legend Behind Hokkien New Year emphasizes unity and solidarity” by Grace Chen (2/24/2018)

The Jade Emperor is sometimes referred to as “Heavenly Grandfather” and “Heavenly Duke.” He is recognized as the ruler of heaven and earth in some Chinese religion and mythology. In Taoism, he is one of the Three Pure Ones or the Three Divine Teachers. Fujian province (in China), Penang (in Malayasia), and Taiwan are three areas where there is a large concentration of Hokkien people and, therefore, places where the ninth day of the Lunar New Year is a large celebration. In some places the celebrations begin at 11 PM on the eighth night and can be so large that they eclipse the celebrations of the first day of the Lunar New Year (in those areas). In fact, the ninth day is actually called “Hokkien New Year.”

Those who are religious will go to a temple and engage in a ritual involving prostration, kneeling, bowing, incense, and offerings. For many there is a great feast full of fruits, vegetables, noodles, and (of course) sugar cane. The sugar cane is an important element of the Jade Emperor’s birthday celebrations and rituals – not only because of the aforementioned story of survival, but also because the Hokkien word for “sugarcane” (kam-chià, 甘蔗) is a homonym for (or sounds like) a Hokkien word for “thank you” (kamsiā, 感谢), which literally means “feeling thankful.”

Every version of the Hokkien people’s survival story is a great reminder that we can give thanks no matter how hard, how challenging, how infuriating, and/or how tragic our situation. Take last year – or the last few years, for instance: When we look back at all the hard stuff, all the grief, all the fear, all the anger, all the disappointment, and all of the trauma, we can get distracted and forget that there were moments of sweetness. Over the last few years, there were moments of kindness, moments of love, moments of birth and rebirth, moments of compassion, moments of hope, and moments of joy.

In other words, in spite of all the hard stuff, there were moments of sweetness. Take a moment to remember one of those moments; and feel thankful.

“‘Although we may not have an image of this deity in our temple, as long as devotees have the Jade Emperor in their hearts, their prayers will be heard,’ said [the Kwan Imm Temple’s] principal Shi Fa Zhuo.”

– quoted from The Star article entitled “Legend Behind Hokkien New Year emphasizes unity and solidarity” by Grace Chen (2/24/2018)

Please join me on the virtual mat today (Monday, January 30^th) at 5:30 PM for a 75-minute virtual yoga practice. You can use the link from the “Class Schedules” calendar if you run into any problems checking into the class. You can request an audio recording of this practice via a comment below.

This is a 75-minute Common Ground Meditation Center practice that, in the spirit of generosity (dana), is freely given and freely received. If you are able to support the center and its teachings, please do so as your heart moves you. (NOTE: You can donate even if you are “attending” my other practices. Donations are tax deductible)

There is no playlist for the Common Ground practices.

The Lunar New Year Day 9 playlist is available on YouTube and Spotify. [Look for “Lunar New Year Day 9 2022”]

The Martys’ Day playlist is also available on YouTube and Spotify. [Look for “01302021 Peace for the Martyrs”]

### DON’T BE GREEDY, BE GRATEFUL ###

A Kitchen Story (or 2) on Day 4 (the “missing” Wednesday post) January 26, 2023

Posted by ajoyfulpractice in Books, Changing Perspectives, Confessions, Depression, Healing Stories, Hope, Life, Loss, Meditation, Movies, Music, New Year, One Hoop, Pain, Philosophy, Suffering, Tragedy, Vipassana, Wisdom, Women, Writing, Yoga.
Tags: asana, Dr. Toya Webb, hatha yoga, Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Kitchen God, Lunar New Year, Metta, Michael Cunningham, Pancham Sinh, Patanjali, priviledge, Spring Festival, Virginia Woolf, Year of the Cat, Year of the Rabbit, Yoga Sutras 2.51-2.52
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“Happy (Lunar) New Year!” and “Happy Carnival!” to those who are celebrating.

This is the missing post for Wednesday, January 25^th. Like the playlist, this is a remix of 2022 posts (one of which was a remix from 2021). If you click on the link in the “CODA, redux,” please note that the beginning is similar (but the posts are different).

You can request an audio recording of this practice via a comment below or (for a slightly faster reply) you can email me at myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com.

In the spirit of generosity (“dana”), the Zoom classes, recordings, and blog posts are freely given and freely received. If you are able to support these teachings, please do so as your heart moves you. (NOTE: You can donate even if you are “attending” a practice that is not designated as a “Common Ground Meditation Center” practice\. Donations are tax deductible.

Check out the “Class Schedules” calendar for upcoming classes.

CODA, redux

Do you ever think about what yoga and Virginia Woolf have in common? No? Just me? Ok, that’s fine; it’s not the first time – and will not be the last time that I make what, on the surface, appears to be a really random connection. It’s not even the first (and probably won’t be the last) time this week. However, whenever I circle back to this practice and this theme, I found myself thinking about different similarities. Last year, I found myself thinking a little more about mental health and the implications of having space, time, and the other resources to focus, concentrate, contemplate, and meditate. This year, I find myself thinking more about what it takes to tell our stories and the vantage point(s) from which we tell our stories – especially the stories we tell about our defining moments.

“A writer is a person who sits at a desk and keeps his eye fixed, as intently as he can, upon a certain object—that figure of speech may help to keep us steady on our path if we look at it for a moment. He is an artist who sits with a sheet of paper in front of him trying to copy what he sees. What is his object—his model?”

“A writer has to keep his eye upon a model that moves, that changes, upon an object that is not one object but innumerable objects. Two words alone cover all that a writer looks at—they are, human life.”

– quoted from the essay “The Leaning Tower (A paper read to the Workers’ Educational Association, Brighton, May 1940.)” as it appears in The Moment and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf

We all have defining moments in our lives. These may be moments that we use to describe the trajectory of our lives or maybe moments that we use to describe ourselves. Either way, when a single moment plays a big part in who we are and what’s important to us, we sometimes forget that that single moment – as important as it may be – is part of a sequence of moments. It is the culmination of what’s happened before and the beginning of what happens next; it’s just a single part of our ever-changing story. Even when – or especially when – that moment is the story, we have to be careful about how we frame it. It doesn’t matter if we are telling our story or someone else’s story; how we tell the story matters.

For a lot of people who are celebrating the Lunar New Year, the fourth day is the day when things start going back to normal (whatever that is these days). People go back to work and back to school. People who were able to travel to see family start heading back home (or are already home). Even though those celebrating the Spring Festival for 15 days, will reign in the festivities a bit. However, each day still has significance and special rituals. For instance, the fourth day of the Lunar New Year is not only the birthday of all sheep (in some Chinese traditions), it is also the day when the Kitchen God returns to the hearth.

According to one set of stories, the Kitchen God was at one time a man who, after gaining a certain amount of power and wealth, abandoned his first wife and married a younger woman. Years after the original couple divorced, the man fell on hard times. He lost his wealth, his power, his second wife, and his eyesight. He became a beggar on the streets. One day, the stories tell us, the man’s first wife saw her former husband begging in the streets. She was a woman of great kindness and compassion and so she invited him to her simple home and offered him a shower, some food, and a moment of warmth by the fire.

Remember, the old man could no longer see and didn’t know that this generous woman was the same woman he had treated so poorly. Full, clean, and sitting by the fire, however, he started to talk about his first wife. He lamented about his first marriage and the life they could have had if he hadn’t dumped her. In the process of soothing her now sobbing former husband, the woman revealed her identity and said that she forgave him. Miraculously, the man was suddenly able to see; but he was so distraught that he threw himself into the kitchen stove.

Legend has it, the woman could only save his leg – which became the fireplace poker – and the man became the “Kitchen God,” who leaves the kitchen alter just before the New Year and returns to heaven in order to give the Jade Emperor an accounting of each household’s activities during the previous year. In the final days of the old year, people will clean up their homes – so the alter(s) will be ready for the return of the gods and ancestors – and, sometimes, smear honey on the lips of the Kitchen God so that his report is extra sweet. Then the Kitchen God and other household gods return on the fourth day of the New Year.

I always imagine that some years the Kitchen God’s report is really, really, wild. Can you imagine? Seriously, imagine what he would say about the way we have treated each other over the last few years. Sure, some of us might not be portrayed too badly; but others of us….

More to the point, consider what happens when the Kitchen God’s report includes an update about someone’s defining moment(s). Just imagine a report from the beginning of 1882 (which would have been the end of the year of the snake); the fall of 1928 (year of the dragon); Spring of 1940 (year of the dragon); and the beginning of 2008 (the year of the boar). Imagine, even, the report from 1941 (another year of the dragon). What hard truths would have been in those reports?

“But the leaning-tower writers wrote about themselves honestly, therefore creatively. They told the unpleasant truths, not only the flattering truths. That is why their autobiography is so much better than their fiction or their poetry. Consider how difficult it is to tell the truth about oneself—the unpleasant truth; to admit that one is petty, vain, mean, frustrated, tortured, unfaithful, and unsuccessful. The nineteenth-century writers never told that kind of truth, and that is why so much of the nineteenth-century writing is worthless; why, for all their genius, Dickens and Thackeray seem so often to write about dolls and puppets, not about full-grown men and women; why they are forced to evade the main themes and make do with diversions instead. If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”

– quoted from the essay “The Leaning Tower (A paper read to the Workers’ Educational Association, Brighton, May 1940.)” as it appears in The Moment and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf

Born Virginia Stephen in Kensington, England, on January 25, 1882, Virginia Woolf wrote nine novels (including one published shortly after her death), five short story collections (most of which were published after her death), a hybrid novel (part fiction, part non-fiction), three book-length essays, a biography, and hundreds of articles, reviews, and essays. Some of her most famous essays and speeches addressed the labor of writing – telling stories – and why (in the Western canon) there were so few accomplished female writers. For instance, In October 1928, she gave two speeches to two different student societies at Newnham College and Girton College, which at the time were two of the all-women colleges at the University of Cambridge. (NOTE: Newnham is still an all-women’s college. Girton started accepting men in 1971 and started allowing men to be “Mistress,” or head of the college, in 1976.)

These speeches about women and fiction specifically detailed why there were so few women writers who had earned acclaimed (and, to certain degree, why those that did often did so anonymously or with “male” names). She highlighted the absurd trichotomy between the two wildly archetypical ways women are portrayed in literature and the reality of the very different types of women in the room, let alone in the world. She also speculated about the works that might have come from a woman (say, in Shakespeare’s time) who had a helpmate to take care of the cooking, cleaning, children, and other household business. In addition to talking about the social constraints that prevented a woman from devoting copious time to the practical application of her craft – writing, she also discussed the social constraints and inequalities that could result in what would amount to writer’s block. All this, she detailed, even before she addressed the issue of a market place predisposed to highlight male writers. All this, she detailed, as she highlighted two (really three) of the things a woman would need to overcome the obstacles of society: (time), space, and money.

“… a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction…”

– quoted from the essay “A Room of One’s Own,” as it appears in A Room of One’s Own And, Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

“surājye dhārmike deśe subhikṣhe nirupadrave |
dhanuḥ pramāṇa-paryantaṃ śilāghni-jala-varjite |
ekānte maṭhikā-madhye sthātavyaṃ haṭha-yoghinā || 12 ||

The Yogī should practise [sic] Haṭha Yoga in a small room, situated in a solitary place, being 4 cubits square, and free from stones, fire, water, disturbances of all kinds, and in a country where justice is properly administered, where good people live, and food can be obtained easily and plentifully.”

– quoted from “Chapter 1. On Āsanas” of the Haţha Yoga Pradipika, translated by Pancham Sinh (1914)

When I first started going deeper into my physical practice of yoga, I looked into some of the classic texts within the tradition. One of those texts was the Haţha Yoga Pradipika (Light on the Physical Practice of Yoga), a 15^th Century text that focuses on āsanas (“seats” or poses), prāņāyāma (breath awareness and control), mudrās (“seals” or “gestures”), and Samādhi (that ultimate form of “meditation” that is absorption). Throughout the text, and in particular in the chapter on mudrās, there is a breakdown of how energy, power, or vitality moves through the body and the benefits of harnessing that power.

I would eventually appreciate how the text is almost a summary of the earlier Yoga Sūtras, but (as an English lit major), what first struck me was how similar Virginia Woolf’s advice to women writers were to these early instructions about a practice that can be used to cultivate clarity and harness the power of the mind. Additionally, the practice requires – nay demands – that we sit and turn inward (in order to consider our perspectives and vantage points), just as Ms. Woolf’s essays highlighted the importance of noticing a writer’s seat.

“But before we go on with the story of what happened after 1914, let us look more closely for a moment, not at the writer himself; nor at his model; but at his chair. A chair is a very important part of a writer’s outfit. It is the chair that gives him his attitude towards his model; that decides what he sees of human life; that profoundly affects his power of telling us what he sees. By his chair we mean his upbringing, his education. It is a fact, not a theory, that all writers from Chaucer to the present day, with so few exceptions that one hand can count them, have sat upon the same kind of chair—a raised chair. They have all come from the middle class; they have had good, at least expensive, educations. They have all been raised above the mass of people upon a tower of stucco—that is their middle-class birth; and of gold—that is their expensive education…. Those are some of them; and all, with the exception of D. H. Lawrence, came of the middle class, and were educated at public schools and universities. There is another fact, equally indisputable: the books that they wrote were among the best books written between 1910 and 1925. Now let us ask, is there any connection between those facts? Is there a connection between the excellence of their work and the fact that they came of families rich enough to send them to public schools and universities?”

– quoted from the essay “The Leaning Tower (A paper read to the Workers’ Educational Association, Brighton, May 1940.)” as it appears in The Moment and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf

According to Virginia Woolf, there was an undeniable connection between wealth, the education that wealth, and the success of [male] English writers in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. She saw that common thread of privilege as the very foundation of (and secret to) these writers’ success and described it as a tower, stating, “He sits upon a tower raised above the rest of us; a tower built first on his parents’ station, then on his parents’ gold. It is a tower of the utmost importance; it decides his angle of vision; it affects his power of communication.” She also saw it as a blind spot (for such writers and society) and noted that the tower stood strong well into the twentieth century. While the writers supported by this metaphorical tower sometimes had empathy for those less fortunate than them, she observed that they had no desire to dismantle the tower or descend from it’s heights. Furthermore, the tower (and lack of awareness about it) perpetuated misconceptions about women and about why there were not more women – nor more people from lower income brackets – in the ranks of acclaimed authors.

Here is where I see another similarity between yoga and Virginia Woolf’s work, because some people have misconceptions about what it means to practice yoga, what happens when you practice yoga, who practices yoga, and why people practice yoga. For instance, while the instruction for the Haţha Yoga Pradipika instructed a person to practice when they were “free from…disturbances of all kinds” (HYP 1.12); “free from dirt, filth and insects” (HYP 1.13); and “free from all anxieties” (HYP 1.14), the vast majority of people practicing in the modern world do so in order to free themselves from the various maladies that plague them. More often than not, these types of misconceptions stem from a lack of knowledge about the history and practice of yoga. Unfortunately, that lack of knowledge often causes people to not practice and/or to judge people for practicing.

Just as Virginia Woolf addressed misconceptions about women in her essays and fiction, the translator Pancham Sinh addressed some misconceptions about people who practice yoga and the practice of prāņāyāma in an introduction to the Haţha Yoga Pradipika. Part of the introduction is an admonishment to people who would study the practice, but do not practice it, stating, “People put their faith implicitly in the stories told them about the dangers attending the practice, without ever taking the trouble of ascertaining the fact themselves. We have been inspiring and expiring air from our birth, and will continue to do so till death; and this is done without the help of any teacher. Prāņāyāma is nothing but a properly regulated form of the otherwise irregular and hurried flow of air, without using much force or undue restraint; and if this is accomplished by patiently keeping the flow slow and steady, there can be no danger. It is the impatience for the Siddhis which cause undue pressure on the organs and thereby causes pains in the ears, the eyes, the chest, etc. If the three bandhas be carefully performed while practicing [sic] the Prāņāyāma, there is no possibility of any danger.”

Siddhis are the powers or “accomplishments” achieved from continuous practice. They range from being able to extend peace out into the world and understanding all languages; to being able to levitate and know the inner workings of another’s heart and mind; to the six “powers unique to being human.” Bandhas are “locks” and refer to internal engagements used to seal sections of the body in order to control the flow of prāņā. The three major bandhas referred to in the text are the same engagements I encourage when I tell people to “zip up” and engage the pelvic floor and lower abdominal cavity (mūla bandha), the mid and upper abdominal cavity (uḍḍīyana bandha), and the throat (jālandhara bandha). I typically refer to a fourth – pada bandha – which is a seal for the feet; however, in classical texts the fourth bandha is the engagement of the three major bandhas (root, abdominal, and throat) at the same time.

Before anyone gets it twisted, let’s be clear that this introduction is not advice to grab a book and follow instructions without the guidance of a teacher. In fact, Pancham Sinh specifically advised people to find a teacher who practiced and indicated that while one could follow the directions from a (sacred) book, there are some things that cannot be expressed in words. There are some things that can only be felt.

This is consistent with Patanjali’s explanation that the elements and senses that make up the “objective world” can be “divided into four categories: specific, unspecific, barely describable, and absolutely indescribable.” (YS 2.19) That is to say, there are some things that have specific sense-related reference points; some things that can be referred back to the senses, but only on a personal level; some things that have no reference points, but can be understood through “a sign” or comprehension of sacred text; and some things which cannot be described, because there is no tangible reference point and/or “sign” – there is only essence. To bring awareness to all of these things, we “sit and breathe” (even when we are moving).

“athāsane dṝdhe yoghī vaśī hita-mitāśanaḥ |
ghurūpadiṣhṭa-mārgheṇa prāṇāyāmānsamabhyaset || 1 ||

Posture becoming established, a Yogî, master of himself, eating salutary and moderate food, should practise [sic] Prâṇâyâma, as instructed by his guru.”

– quoted from “Chapter 2. On Prāņāyāma” of the Haţha Yoga Pradipika, translated by Pancham Sinh (1914)

Yoga Sūtra 2.51: bāhyābhyantaravişayākşepī caturthah

– “The fourth [prāņāyāma] goes beyond, or transcends, the internal and external objects.”

Yoga Sūtra 2.52: tatah kşīyate prakāśāvaraņam

– “Then the veil over the [Inner] Light deteriorates.”

“Unconsciousness, which means presumably that the under-mind, works at top speed while the upper-mind drowses, is a state we all know. We all have experience of the work done by unconsciousness in our own daily lives. You have had a crowded day, let us suppose, sightseeing in London. Could you say what you had seen and done when you came back? Was it not all a blur, a confusion? But after what seemed a rest, a chance to turn aside and look at something different, the sights and sounds and sayings that had been of most interest to you swam to the surface, apparently of their own accord; and remained in memory; what was unimportant sank into forgetfulness. S it is with the writer. After a hard day’s work, trudging round, seeing all he can, feeling all he can, taking in the book of his mind innumerable notes, the writer becomes—if he can—unconscious. In fact, his under-mind works at top speed while his upper-mind drowses. Then, after a pause the veil lifts; and there is the thing—the thing he wants to write about—simplified, composed. Do we strain Wordsworth’s famous saying about emotion recollected in [tranquility] when we infer that by [tranquility] he meant that the writer needs to become unconscious before he can create?”

– quoted from the essay “The Leaning Tower (A paper read to the Workers’ Educational Association, Brighton, May 1940.)” as it appears in The Moment and Other Essays by Virginia Woolf

When we “sit and breathe” a lot of things bubble up: thoughts, emotions, sensations, memories. Part of the practice is noticing what comes up and part of the practice is remaining the witness to what comes up (rather than engaging every little fluctuation of the mind). Contrary to some popular misconceptions, people who practice feel a lot – they’re just not always distracted by every thing they feel. Instead, they allow the different thoughts, emotions, sensations, and memories to pass back and forth between their conscious, subconscious, and unconscious mind until the busy brain rests. They are not constantly cataloging what is specific, what is unspecific, what is barely describable, and what is absolutely indescribable; however, they are aware of all of these categories as they experience them.

One of the things we can feel, but not touch, is emotion. Emotions can come with visceral experiences and, in that way, can fall into the “unspecific” category. More often than not, however, what we feel is “barely describable” (or even indescribable) – and yet, writers are always trying to describe or capture the essence of what is felt. Virginia Woolf constantly endeavored to describe what she felt and what she felt she saw others feeling. Even more salient, she often focused on the disconnection between what her characters felt and what they could describe about what they felt. The author’s efforts were hindered, or aided (depending on one’s viewpoint), by the fact that she experienced so much trauma and heartbreak; much of which led to emotional despair.

“I feel a thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy by turns. I am rooted, but I flow.”

– quoted from “Susan” in The Waves by Virginia Woolf

Click here if you want to read the 2022 post that details some of Virginia Woolf’s trauma and heartbreak.

“vapuḥ kṝśatvaṃ vadane prasannatā
nāda-sphuṭatvaṃ nayane sunirmale |
aroghatā bindu-jayo|aghni-dīpanaṃ
nāḍī-viśuddhirhaṭha-siddhi-lakṣhaṇam || 78 ||

When the body becomes lean, the face glows with delight, Anâhatanâda manifests, and eyes are clear, body is healthy, bindu under control, and appetite increases, then one should know that the Nâdîs are purified and success in Haṭha Yoga is approaching.”

– quoted from “Chapter 1. On Āsanas” of the Haţha Yoga Pradipika, translated by Pancham Sinh (1914)

“The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”

– quoted from the essay “A Room of One’s Own,” as it appears in A Room of One’s Own And, Three Guineas by Virginia Woolf

The Air I Breathe, one of my favorite movies, was released in the United States January 25, 2008. Inspired by the idea that emotions are like fingers on a hand, the main characters are known to the audience as Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, Love, and Fingers – and their stories are interconnected, even though they don’t necessarily realize it. In fact, some of the most desperate actions in the movie are motivated by fear and a sense of isolation. Promotional materials for the movie proclaimed, “We are all strangers / We are all living in fear / We are all ready to change” and in the movie Happiness asks, “So where does change come from? And how do we recognize it when it happens?” Happiness also says, “I always wondered, when a butterfly leaves the safety of its cocoon, does it realize how beautiful it has become? or does it still just see itself as a caterpillar? I think both the statement and the questions could be applied to so many, if not all, of Virginia Woolf’s characters. They could also be applied to all of us in the world right now.

This time of year, the statements and the questions also remind us that change happens every time we inhale, every time we exhale – and we can make that change happen.

“‘For,’ the outsider will say, ‘in fact as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.’ And if, when reason has had its say, still some obstinate emotion remains, some love of England dropped into a child’s ears… this drop of pure, if irrational, emotion she will make serve her to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.”

– quoted from the novel-essay “Three Guineas,” as it appears in The Selected Works of Virginia Woolf by Virginia Woolf

As I have mentioned before, I consider the 8-Limbed Yoga Philosophy to have very real-time, practical applications and I normally think of the physical practice as an opportunity to practice, explore, and play with the various elements of the philosophy. I will even sometimes use aspects of alignment as a metaphor for situations in our lives off the mat. Given ~~this last year~~ the last few years, however, I have really started to consider how āsana instructions from classic texts like The Yoga Sūtras of Patanjali and the Haţha Yoga Pradipika, can be more practically applied to the most basic aspects of everyday life.

For instance, if we spend our time on the mat cultivating a “steady/stable, comfortable/easy/joyful” foundation in order to breathe easier and more deeply, doesn’t it make sense to spend some time cultivating the same type of foundation in our lives?
Going out a little more, if we do not have the luxury or privilege of practicing “in a country where justice is properly administered, where good people live, and food can be obtained easily and plentifully,” doesn’t it behoove us to create that land?
Finally, what happens if we (to paraphrase yoga sūtras 2.46-47) establish a baseline for stability and then loosen up a little bit and focus on the infinite? Patanjali and the authors of the other sacred texts told us we would become more of who we are: leaner in body, healthier, brighter, more joyful, “clearer, stronger, and more intuitive.” In other words: peaceful and blissful.

“lōkāḥ samastāḥ sukhinōbhavantu”

– A mettā (loving-kindness) chant that translates to “May all-beings, everywhere, be happy and be free.”

Wednesday’s playlist is available on YouTube and Spotify.

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”

– quoted from The Hours: a novel by Michael Cunningham

If you are thinking about suicide, worried about a friend or loved one, or would like emotional support, you can dial 988 (in the US) or call 1-800-273-TALK (8255). You can also call the TALK line if you are struggling with addiction or involved in an abusive relationship. The Lifeline network is free, confidential, and available to all 24/7. YOU CAN TALK ABOUT ANYTHING.

If you are a young person in crisis, feeling suicidal, or in need of a safe and judgement-free place to talk, you can also click here to contact the TrevorLifeline (which is staffed 24/7 with trained counselors).

“Realize that there is freedom in telling your story and that there is power in your words.”

– quoted from the November 2018 TedxDelthorneWomen talk entitled, “Change Your Perspective and Change Your Story” by Dr. Toya Webb

### BRING AWARENESS TO YOUR SEAT! ###

Here’s To Beginning A New Year (a Monday post)! January 23, 2023

Posted by ajoyfulpractice in "Impossible" People, Books, Buddhism, California, Changing Perspectives, Faith, Healing Stories, Hope, Life, Love, New Year, Pain, Philosophy, Religion, Science, Suffering, Tragedy, Wisdom, Yoga.
Tags: Che Kung, Ed Roberts, God of Wealth, Harry Reasoner, Lee Roberts, Lunar New Year, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, Rolling Quads, Sam Hui, Spring Festival, svadyaya, Year of the Cat, Year of the Rabbit, Zona Roberts
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“Happy New Year!” to those who are celebrating.

The following post related to the practice on Monday, January 23^rd is compiled from information posted in 2021 and 2022. You can request an audio recording of this practice via a comment below or (for a slightly faster reply) you can email me at myra (at) ajoyfulpractice.com.

In the spirit of generosity (“dana”), the Zoom classes, recordings, and blog posts are freely given and freely received. If you are able to support these teachings, please do so as your heart moves you. (NOTE: You can donate even if you are “attending” a practice that is not designated as a “Common Ground Meditation Center” practice\. Donations are tax deductible.

Check out the “Class Schedules” calendar for upcoming classes.

“财神到财神到
Caishen dao caishen dao [The god of wealth has come! The god of wealth has come!]

好心得好报
Hao xinde hao bao [Good news]

财神话财神话
Caishenhua caishenhua [Myth of money, myth of money]

揾钱依正路
wen qian yi zhenglu [if you follow the right path]”

– quoted from the song “Cai Shen Dao” [“The God of Wealth Has Come!” by Sam Hui, lyrics in Hanzi [Chinese characters], pīnyīn [“spelled sounds”], and English

Today (Monday) was the second day of the Lunar New Year and, in parts of China and the diaspora, it was the second day of the Spring Festival, a fifteen day celebration that culminates with the Lantern Festival. As I mentioned yesterday, while most people consider this the beginning of the year of the (water) Rabbit/Hare, people in and from Vietnam consider this the beginning of the year of the Cat. Each region that celebrates the Lunar New Year, places special significance on each day and highlights that significance with different stories and traditions.

Some people honor the god of land on the second day, while others celebrate the birthday of all dogs. Traditionally, the second day is a day when daughters who had married and moved away from home would return to visit their birth families – which meant their families would welcome the son-in-laws. So, in some places, today is a day dedicated to the son-in-laws.

For some (particularly Cantonese people), the second day is known as “beginning of the year” and it marks the beginning of a new business year. As such, there are blessings and prayers for a prosperous new year. From 221 B. C. until 1912 A. D., it was common for beggars and the unemployed in China to spend today carrying around a picture of the God of Wealth and shouting, “Cai Shen Dao” ! [“The God of Wealth has come!” in Mandarin] In exchange for their pronouncement, they would receive “lucky money” from families and businesses.

In some parts of China, people celebrate the birthday of Che Kung on his “actual” birthday (the second), while others celebrate on the third day of the year. A military general of the Southern Song Dynasty, Che Kung is believed to have been capable of suppressing rebellions and plagues. Some even consider him “God of Protection.” Hong Kong and Guangdung Province are two of the places where people traditionally have a procession and visit a temple dedicated to Che Kung. Despite the pandemic, thousands of people visited the temple in Sha Tin in 2021; however, masks, temperature checks, and a health registration were required. In 2022, vaccinations were encouraged and people were required to use the “Leave Home Safe” app, which is a free digital contract tracing app launched by the Hong Kong government. This year, some media outlets reported a few less people than normal, while others reported more people than last year – both scenarios could be true, but in either case, most people are hoping, praying, and wishing for a better business year.

People who travel to the temple on the second and third days of the new year give thanks, light red candles and incense sticks, and present offerings. Some will spin a golden pinwheel outside of the temple to maintain good luck from the previous year or to change their fortune in the New Year. Some will even buy a personal pinwheel. There is also a big ceremony around drawing fortune sticks, which people believe offers guidance for the coming year and can be interpreted by a fortune teller. Of course, this year (like the last two years), a lot of people are seeking guidance about the pandemic – and how to proceed in a way that eliminates suffering.

A version of the following was originally posted in 2021 and 2022. Click here for that philosophical 2021 post in it’s entirety.

“From a practical standpoint then, svadyaya is the process of employing the power of discernment and maintaining a constant awareness of who we are, what we are trying to become, and how the objective world can help us accomplish our goal.”

– commentary on Yoga Sūtra 2.1 from The Practice of the Yoga Sūtra: Sadhana Pada by Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, PhD

The Yoga Sutras offer a detailed explanation of the dysfunctional/afflicted thought patterns that create suffering. Patanjali described those thought patterns as ignorance, the false sense of self, attachment (rooted in pleasure), aversion (which is attachment rooted in pain), and a fear of loss/death. He established ignorance (avidyā) as the root of the other four and stated that this groundwork is established no matter if the ignorance is dormant, attenuated, disjointed, or active. He then broke down the different ways avidyā manifests in the world – which basically goes back to the ways in which we misunderstand the nature of things – and how the other four afflicted thought patterns rise up.

We can find examples of how avidyā and the other four dysfunctional/afflicted thought patterns manifest all around us. There are, therefore, also examples of how the sources of our ignorance can be the path towards freedom, fulfillment, and more clarity. One example of this is how some people view those that are not considered “able bodied.” Think about the activist Edward V. Roberts, for example.

“I fell in love, like many people do. We do that as well. And it became ridiculously inconvenient to have my attendant pushing me around in my wheelchair with my girlfriend. It was an extra person that I didn’t need to be more intimate. I learned how to drive a power wheelchair in one day. I was so motivated to learn something that it changed in many ways my perception of my disability and of myself. She jumped on my lap and we rode off into the sunset or to the closest motel.”

– Ed Roberts (b. 01/23/1939) in a 60 Minutes interview with Harry Reasoner

Known as the “Father of the Independent Living” movement, Mr. Roberts was born January 23,1939 (almost a month before the year of the earth Rabbit/Hare began). By all accounts, he spent his formative years as a “regular” boy. Then, at the age of fourteen, he contracted polio – this was in 1953, two years before the vaccine ended the polio epidemic. The virus left the active, “sports-loving” teenager paralyzed from the neck down, with mobility only in two fingers and a few toes. It also (temporarily) crushed his spirit. He initially spent most of his days and all of his nights in an 800-pound iron lung. When he wasn’t in the iron lung, he used “frog breathing” – a technique that uses the facial and neck muscles to pump air into the lungs.

Now, if you have not interacted with someone with a disability, you might think – as Ed Roberts initially thought of himself – that he was a “helpless cripple.” You might, like him and one of his early doctors, back in 1953, think that there was no point to his life. You might think that he couldn’t do yoga; couldn’t get married (and divorced); couldn’t have a child; and definitely couldn’t do anything to change the world. You might think that he wouldn’t be celebrated on the second day of the Lunar New Year or on any day.

But, if you think any of that – just as he initially thought that – you would be wrong.

“And I literally went from like 120 pounds to 50 pounds. I also discovered how powerful the mind is, when you make up your mind.”

– Ed Roberts in a 60 Minutes interview with Harry Reason

Just to be clear, to my knowledge Ed Roberts didn’t practice yoga. However, he did practice Shotokan karate. Also, it is interesting to note that (a) the glottis (which includes the true vocal chords and the rima glottidis or empty space at the back of the throat) that we engage to practice Ujjayi prāņāyāma, is the same area he would engage to breathe without the iron lung and (b) once he changed his understanding of himself – let go of his “false sense of self” – he was able to change the world.

Even though he could attend school by telephone, Zona Roberts, Ed Roberts’s mother, insisted that he attend school in-person one day a week. for at least a few hours. She also encouraged him to think of himself as a “star” and to advocate for his own needs. So, when he was in danger of not graduating from high school, because he hadn’t completed driver’s education or physical education, he pushed back on those who would limit him.

“There are very few people even with the most severe disabilities who can’t take control of their own life. The problem is that the people around us don’t expect us to.”

– Ed Roberts in a 60 Minutes interview with Harry Reasoner

After graduating from high school, he attended the College of San Mateo and the University of California Berkeley – even though one of the UC Berkeley deans wanted to reject him because someone else had had an unsuccessful bid at college and the dean viewed all people with disabilities as a monolith. At Berkeley, Mr. Roberts pushed to have on-campus housing that would accommodate his needs and, once that was established, pushed the university to admit and provide the dormitory experience to other people with “severe disabilities.” The Cowell Residence Program became a model for universities around the world.

Mr. Roberts and some of the other students in the Cowell Residence Program referred to themselves as the “Rolling Quads.” They were very active in changing people’s perceptions and understandings and, therefore, they were able to change policy and infrastructure. “Curb cuts,” the ramped opening between a sidewalk and street, are one of the changes that resulted from their activism. After Ed Roberts graduated with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Political Science, he went on to teach at an “alternative college.” He also served as Director of the state organization that had once labeled him too disabled to work and eventually co-founded the World Institute on Disability (at Berkeley). His activism – including protesting at the San Francisco offices of the Carter Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and testifying before Congress – led to the creation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA, 1990).

While Ed Roberts may not have actually been celebrated by his in-laws on the second day of the Lunar New Year, he is remembered and celebrated for the work he did in the world. A Google Doodle was posted in his honor today in 2017. Furthermore, his legacy provides a lot of reminders about how to move through the year in a way that brings change that makes the world better than we found it.

“My bottom walk-away experience that I believe I carry with me every day is that my father never settled for anything and always fought for everything. And he always, always followed his gut, followed his passion, went with it no matter who was against him, and oftentimes there was more people against him than it was for him.

So I’ve always followed my gut and followed my passion. And in so many different speeches, he would always encourage that person to look within themselves, find their passion, follow it. You can’t… You can’t go wrong with your gut. You can’t go wrong with your passion. Don’t ever settle. He never settled. I’ll never settle. I carry that with me every day, and if there’s anything he loved to pass on, it’s just go for it.”

– quoted from “A Day in the Life of Ed Roberts: Lee Roberts Talks About His Father, Ed Roberts” by Lee Roberts

There is no playlist for the Common Ground Meditation practice.

Errata: This post has been updated to more accurately describe the anatomy related to “frog breathing.”

### Wake Up Your Mind & Just Go For It! ###

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A Joyful Practice

The Integrity of Speaking Truth to Power, Part 1 – The Part Where We Observe, Speak, & Move Like Thunder February 15, 2023

– quoted from Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s speech at the National American Woman Suffrage Association convention (and birthday celebration for Susan B. Anthony), February 18, 1890

“You cannot teach a man anything. You can only help him to find it within himself.”

– Galileo Galilei, as quoted in How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

– quoted from the 1615 letter to the Grand Duchess Christina of Tuscany (mother of Cosimo II de ’Medici) by Galileo Galilei

“I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.”

– quoted from “X. Susan B. Anthony” in Eighty Years and More (1815 – 1897): Reminiscences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“Eventually Anthony supplanted Henry in Elizabeth’s affections. Both Henry and Susan moved in and out of her life and her household, but overall, Stanton probably spent more hours and days with Anthony than any other adult.”

– quoted from the “Methodological Note: Stanton in Psychological Perspective” section of In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Elisabeth Griffith

“Miss [Anna] Shaw said: ‘On Sunday, about two hours before she became unconscious, I talked with Miss Anthony and she said: “To think I have had more than sixty years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel!”’”

“I replied: ‘Your legacy will be freedom for all womankind after you are gone. your splendid struggle has changed life for women everywhere.’”

– quoted from the obituary “Susan B. Anthony” in the Union Labor Advocate (Vol. VII. May, 1906, No. 9)

“Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life.”

– quoted from the speech “Social Purity” by Susan B. Anthony

### Speak! ###

The Fire We Desire & The Fire(s) We Need (a Tuesday post & a special Black History note) February 14, 2023

“And, [L]ove – True [L]ove – will follow you forever.”

– “The Impressive Clergyman” (Peter Cook) in the movie The Princess Bride by William Goldman

– quoted from “Loving Your Enemies” sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (11/17/1957)

“EARNEST, adjective

Ardent in the pursuit of an object; eager to obtain; having a longing desire; warmly engaged or incited.

They are never more earnest to disturb us, than when they see us most earnest in this duty.

Ardent; warm; eager; zealous; animated; importunate; as earnest in love; earnest in prayer.

Intent; fixed.

On that prospect strange

Their earnest eyes were fixed.

– quoted from Webster’s Dictionary 1828: American Dictionary of the English Language

“For this was on Seynt Velentynes day,

Whan every foul cometh ther to chese his make,”

“For this was on Saint Valentine’s day,

When every fowl comes there his mate to take,”

– quoted from the poem “The Parliament of Fowls” by Geoffrey Chaucer, translation by A. S. Klein

– quoted from the 1847 speech “If I Had a Country, I Should Be a Patriot” by Frederick Douglass

– quoted from “APPENDIX, CONTAINING EXTRACTS FROM SPEECHES, ETC – RECEPTION SPEECH AT FINSBURY CHAPEL, MOORFIELDS, ENGLAND, MAY 12, 1846.” in My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass

– quoted from “APPENDIX, CONTAINING EXTRACTS FROM SPEECHES, ETC – RECEPTION SPEECH AT FINSBURY CHAPEL, MOORFIELDS, ENGLAND, MAY 12, 1846.” in My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass

“Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employment for my time and strength than such arguments would imply.

– quoted from the “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech by Frederick Douglass (July 5, 1852)

– quoted from “CHAPTER V.” of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass

### “I’ve now realized for the first time in my life the vital importance of being Earnest.” ~ OW ###

From the Earth (a special Black History 2.5-for-1 note) February 11, 2023

“You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! You get a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car! Everybody gets a car!…. You get a car! You get a car! You get a car!”

– Oprah Winfrey on The Oprah Winfrey Show, original airdate: September 13, 2004

Yoga Sūtra 2.36: satyapratişţhāyām kriyāphalāśrayatvam

– “When a yogi is established in truthfulness, actions begin to bear fruit. [Truth is the foundation for fruitful action.]”

– quoted from the Introduction to A Book of Medical Discourses, In Two Parts by Rebecca Crumpler, M. D.

“Her later writings give no indication that she was aware of her status as the first black woman MD in the United States; indeed, until the later twentieth century, scholars had assigned that distinction to Rebecca Cole….”

– quoted from the profile entitled “Crumpler, Rebecca Davis Lee” in African American Lives, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

What we need o-day in every community, is, not a shrinking or flagging of womanly usefulness in this field of labor, but renewed and courageous readiness to do when and whatever duty calls.”

– quoted from “Chapter XIX. General Remarks.” in A Book of Medical Discourses, In Two Parts by Rebecca Crumpler, M. D.

– quoted from “Out of Sight, Out of Mind” in “2 – Poisoning A Planet” of Earth Detox: How and Why We Must Clean Up Our Planet by Julian Cribb

“The first girls to attend [the Coretta Scott King Young Women’s Leadership Academy] were previously at the city’s lowest-ranked middle school. This year the school’s eighth graders earned one of the highest scores of all public schools in Atlanta on a state exam.

– quoted from the O, The Oprah Magazine (June 2011) article “Clean Power: Lisa Jackson Fights for Our Right to Healthy Air, Water and Land: Somebody has to do it. We’re lucky it’s her.” by Lisa Depaulo

‘The conundrum is that the richer and more prosperous we become, the more we think that the environment is all taken care of,’ Jackson says. It’s simply not the case. ‘I have seen land completely ravaged by pollution. Environmental protection is not a spectator sport.’”

– quoted from the O, The Oprah Magazine (June 2011) article “Clean Power: Lisa Jackson Fights for Our Right to Healthy Air, Water and Land: Somebody has to do it. We’re lucky it’s her.” by Lisa Depaulo

### “If my mind can conceive it, and my heart can believe it, I know I can achieve it.” ~ Jesse Jackson ###

Being Human, the prequel (the “missing” Wednesday post) February 9, 2023

“The world is not comprehensible, but it is embraceable: through the embracing of one of its beings.”

– Martin Buber

“Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung.”

“All real life is meeting.”

“All actual life is encounter.”

– quoted from Ich und Du by Martin Buber (English translations by Ronald Gregor Smith and Walter Kaufmann, respectively)

Yoga Sūtra 3.1: deśabandhah cittasya dhāranā

– “Dhāranā is the process of holding, focusing, or fixing the attention of mind onto one object or place.”

Yoga Sūtra 3.2: tatra pratyaya-ikatānatā dhyānam

– “Dhyāna is the repeated continuation, or unbroken flow of thought, toward that one object or place.”

Yoga Sūtra 3.3: tadeva-artha-mātra-nirbhāsaṁ svarūpa-śūnyam-iva-samādhiḥ

– “Samadhi [meditation in its highest form] is the state when only the essence of that object, place, or point shines forth in the mind, as if devoid even of its own form.”

“The basic word I-Thou can only be spoken with one’s whole being. The concentration and fusion into a whole being can never be accomplished by me, can never be accomplished without me. I require a You/Thou to become; becoming I, I say you.”

– quoted from Ich und Du by Martin Buber (English translation by Walter Kaufmann)

The Yogi teaches that the mind itself has a higher state of existence, beyond reason, a superconscious state, and when the mind gets to that higher state, then this knowledge, beyond reasoning, comes to man. Metaphysical and transcendental knowledge comes to that man.”

– quoted from “Chapter VII: Dhyana and Samadhi” in The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 1, Raja-Yoga by Swami Vivekananda

“Love seeks one thing only: the good of the one loved. It leaves all the other secondary effects to take care of themselves. Love, therefore, is its own reward.”

– quoted from Chapter 1, “Love Can Be Kept Only by Being Given Away” in No Man Is An Island by Thomas Merton

### As they say in Zulu, “Sawubona!” [“I see you!”] and “Yebo, sawubona!” [“I see you seeing me.”] ###

Space and the Power of Hearing(s) (a special Black History note, w/a Tuesday link) February 8, 2023

“It’s a bad habit we have: We tell the tale of the murder and not the murdered.”

“I’ll also explain why my research has enraged so many people who claim to be experts in the Ripper case.”

“If you want to know how we got the Ripper story so wrong, what those mistakes tell us about ourselves, and why putting the record straight makes some people so very angry, join me, Hallie Rubenhold for Bad Women: The Ripper Retold.”

Click here to read my 2021 post about practicing santoşā on the 7^th.

“Remembering their sharp and pretty
Tunes for Sacco and Vanzetti,
I said:
Here too’s a cause divinely spun
For those whose eyes are on the sun,
Here in epitome
Is all disgrace
And epic wrong.
Like wine to brace
The minstrel heart, and blare it into song.

Surely, I said,
Now will the poets sing.
But they have raised no cry.
I wonder why.”