“
One group, the Hindu American Foundation, has launched a “Take Back Yoga” campaign to address what they see as a fundamental disconnect between yoga and Hinduism.
Sheetal Shah, senior director at the foundation, says the group started the campaign when it noticed that while “Vedic,” “tantric” and many other words appeared regularly in yoga magazines, the word “Hindu” was never mentioned.
So, the foundation called up one of the country’s most popular magazines to ask why.
“They said the word ‘Hinduism’ has a lot of baggage,” Shah says. “And we were like, ‘Excuse me?’ “
Shah says she understands why some people have a problem with linking yoga and Hinduism. Many American practitioners associate the practice with something pure and serene, she says. But when they think of Hinduism, she says, they think of “multiple gods, with multiple heads and multiple arms. Colorful [and] ritualistic.”
It may be difficult for people to see how these things fit together, Shah says.
With the Take Back Yoga campaign, the Hindu American Foundation is hoping for broader acknowledgment that yoga has Hindu philosophical roots — while also emphasizing that it is universal and appropriate for everyone.
“What we’re trying to say is that the holistic practice of yoga goes beyond just a couple of asanas [postures] on a mat. It is a lifestyle, and it’s a philosophy,” Shah says.
“How do you lead your life in terms of truthfulness? And nonviolence? And purity? The lifestyle aspect of yoga,” Shah says, “has been lost.”
” —To Some Hindus, Modern Yoga Has Lost Its Way (via love-resist)
I’m so happy to see this and I fully support them. I stopped doing yoga — as much as it was benefitting me physically — because it started feeling really disrespectful to just be using it for exercise when I knew it was part of a serious, longstanding spiritual tradition.
(via queerbrownxx)
(via crunkfeministcollective)
“And at the end I said something about my current dilemma, summarised in the title quote above (which was said to me by a curator quitting her job), that opinions are no longer a useful or appropriate organising principle, that reckoning is no longer a scarcity, that the network now so obviously and explicitly extends beyond the bounds of any individual being able to say anything useful or conclusive on or about it in isolation, that telling someone your opinion is like telling them about your dreams.” —
James Bridle, Opinions are non-contemporary | booktwo.org (via dayofthedreamweavers)
Great quote dump on the click-thru.
(via dayofthedreamweavers)
Right now, all of our development is inwardly focused. We are exerting a tremendous amount of energy and minds to creating our technological central nervous system. There’s barely any interest in the space outside of our planet, and slightly more modest interest in the biological space outside of our persons but only to the extent that we are interested in managing our impact on it. Most of our energy is spent exploring and enhancing the beginning of our new collective mind, the internet. We’re sort of suspended for the moment while this process completes itself. What happens after this part finishes? When animals develop a more mature nervous system it is generally a large leap in terms of its capabilities. What will we be capable of?
Tale of Two Cities : Sawt Al Niswa صوت النسوة -
Dima Karam
It’s a hot Saturday afternoon, an early summer warmth too ripe for April.
Passersby on this side of the new waterfront are dressed up in fancy clothes; no place for improvisations, bags shoes and hair are on exhibit. People come here to see and be seen. It’s a people’s watching spot.
Photo by Lynn Darwich
Signs caution: no eating, singing, cycling or musical devices allowed on the sidewalks; words written in English explain to you standing there that you are on private property. Security guards are on watch closely for effect.
Beirut’s bourgeoisie nonchalantly parks its cars in the newly built underground—(or undersea?) parking. Carefully landscaped with tree gardens, they brim with busy tables. Waiters are abuzz, as are the insides of restaurants. Cafés and restaurants tightly line up one after the next. You look for the signs to distinguish one from the other and acquaint yourself with the names of this new urban set-up.
Soon, there will be the promised promenade, reaching to the roof of the marina residential building. We will, it seems, also walk on concrete.
Meanwhile, Saint George’s beach on the other side is busy waging its war on Solidere again, with small declared states of belligerence. With the aid of chairs and the ever handy security personnel of a stateless state. The chairs, facing the path, are empty, turned backwards; while the latter defy anyone to trespass or walk out.
Here, it seems like we are in another state.
I wonder who it is, who is in prison. The people walking in this older alternative bay, the people outside those “barricades” on the other side, or those watching this open display of political animosity, helpless or amused.
While others wander around, looking a little less fixated on the pier of the posh Zaytuna bay, a picture perfect Lebanon gears into its best pre-summer season.
100 meters ahead. The handicapped flower seller with polio is back again trying his luck on the Corniche. Every flower seller you see there is always peculiarly tidied up. Hair combed back, with all the effort to appear one’s best amidst all the poverty held silent underneath.
A fisherman with a small fellow (probably his son), holding a fishing rod too, are standing on the underpass edge below. Close to the sewage pipe.
One of them once said, I remember puzzlingly, more fish could be found next to the sewage. Who would deny that, even with humor, to those accepting so little with so much?
Here is the real Beirut. Here is the mass of people you will never see in the sterile columns of Western newspapers, like the most recent piece in the New York Times (again). They like us this much, selling on their pages advertisements for local real estate companies, busy troubling what’s left of the landscape. The difference is that staggering, that you’d think yourself transported to another state, to a much poorer forgotten hurdled assembly of people, on this sole public promenade provided in Beirut.
Here, places for leisure are illegal infringements on public property and largely “organically put up”, with trappings added over what a past season had damaged.Here is what you do not see in wannabe Hamra pubs, Gemmayzeh joints, rooftop cafes or boutiques in “Solidere places for life” and its Zaytuna bay. An older oud player with glasses and a tarbush hat is playing, here where singing is allowed, nudging to small cash people leave aside. You start noticing too more and more older people begging on the streets, like those conspicuous grandmothers holding medications for alibis. Migrant workers breaking off shift hours walk next to joggers, tourists and small mobs of wasted unemployed youths and dreamers. What you are seeing here is the 40% that official social studies statistics inform you about sanitarily –through research aided by funding money from foreign donor agencies, who are living below the poverty belt of 400$ a month per family.
A brand name is fabricated. Forget satirical stories of Hommos in Guinness books and flashy Lebanese fashion designers going to Hollywood. Lebanon, with no resources of its own, is more and more a label for an entertainment playground in the Middle East, something more deviant than Dubai, and now more foreigner-friendly than Cairo…“Ahlan wa sahlan” with open desperate broken arms, amenable also to nests of spies, glad to bow for anyone for the mighty dollar. While fuel tank prices reach the equivalent of days of food stipends, and social anger about uninhibited living costs reach levels similar to the 1958 small choked-trial -of -a- revolution.
Read all about it in a loaf of bread, the corruption of those in power revealed in every deal made with every cartel for every ingredient used to make 3aysh –Egyptian for bread— an Arabic equivalent to the word life: fuel and basic elements, flour and sugar. 3aysh in Lebanon.
The lottery seller goes back and forth looking for buyers on the Corniche.
If you are unsatisfied with this fabricated Lebanon; if this Lebanon strikes a dissonant tone with your notions of happiness; if you always find yourself here yearning to live somewhere else other than your country, if you stand behind people who are striving for fairer social security, adjustment of wages and costs of living, make your voice heard. Join the movement for secularism and oppose what’s being imposed on you.
“Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins and will raise up the age-old foundations; you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.” —
Isaiah 58:12
For when you live in the South and need to market the built environment to others.
“Ed has passions for his opinions, and so that comes across as being opinionated,” Lisa Pawlowski said. “He tends to think out loud. He’s listening to everybody around him, but he doesn’t always give off the impression that he’s listening and incorporating the things he is learning.” — This is the best quote about someone else that is about me.
(Source: articles.mcall.com)
“When most people think of vehicle emissions, they assume cars do most of the damage, but it’s actually commercial trucks that are largely to blame. Freight transportation on U.S. roadways is expected to double by 2050, and by 2030, carbon dioxide emissions are forecasted to jump 30 percent due to freight transport alone.” — Daryl Dulaney, Siemens infrastructure chief (via lifeonfoot)
(Source: theatlanticcities.com, via secretrepublic)
“
In the US many cities have homerule status, meaning they can do whatever they want as long as it doesn’t conflict with state or federal law.
In Canada city government is an extension of the province and must ask for provincial permission when it wants to expand its powers beyond land use planning (like adding a new form of taxation beyond property tax).
The result is that US cities don’t have to count on intensification to grow their revenue streams. They can just add a tax, like a sales tax, hotel tax, income tax, personal property tax, etc. Canadian cities don’t have those options (at least not without a huge challenge to the province). They grow their revenue streams by adding value to the land under their control. That means subdividing plots, allowing for basement rental apartments in homes, encouraging high-rise residential, and basically getting more people to use the land.
” —globalurbanist’s post over at Cyburbia
This is an important insight into a way for North Carolina’s cities to achieve emancipation from the state. My understanding of how the state works leads me to believe that it’s extremely similar to the Canadian provincial model.
(by Chris Woebken)
When Occupy got Occupied.
Israeli lookout tower on the Annexation Wall.
(photo of the wall from here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barwick/4199690512/)
