Yoga and "ethnic-baiting"

"I didn't pass rules for seduction to my daughter--I have to
be honest and admit that I love the line from EdTV: 'Men are the gas. Women are the brakes.'"
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OTOH, people can have more control over their lives and ensure their happiness better when they
don't rely on someone else to be the brakes to their gas. Even if they're male. :)
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True. But a guy without a certain drive to get laid in his youthful days would worry me a bit. The art of control requires time to gather wisdom.


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"OTOH, does masturbation count as "messing with sexual energy" too? Should a kid wait until moving out for *that*?"

Nope. Self-pleasuring is one of the great good things in life. I feel very sorry for anyone who is too guilty or ashamed to explore their own bodies.
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Zoho.com's word processor actually looks pretty good. Microsoft is still lagging behind, and overall Google documents interests me most...although they have a
ways to go. Can't WAIT until I can create a collaborative novel in such a venue.
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The question of Barack Obama's middle name "Hussein" came up again. Is it race baiting to use it? Maybe...but "ethnic baiting" or "religious baiting" (if such a term exists) yes. And it is definitely a play to trigger negative responses from racists, which is just as bad. Here's how it works: Imagine 1950, ahalf half Japanese-American was running for office. His name is James Asako Powell. His opponents continually refer to him as "J.A.P." Then they roll their eye innocently and say: "what's the problem? Those are his initials, aren't they..?" This is a very similar game to what I see here.
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Yoga. Dan and others are experimenting with it. Here are a few thoughts:
1) Yoga isn't a "fitness" activity. It is a HEALTH activity, of greater primacy. Consider it recovery work. In other words, work out HARD and then go to a yoga class to re-align the joints, sweat out the toxins, etc.
2) Yoga is not a stretching exercise. However, flexibility is the first challenge faced by most who practice, just because the flexibility of the typical American is in the crapper. It is, however, an exercise in relaxation and focus--the qualities necessary to produce the result called "stretching."
3) The most important thing to focus on is your BREATHING. More important than everything else, combined. Begin your class by centering your breathing (imagine your breath coming to a point just below the navel). Then...as you begin moving, treat the entire class as if you are practicing cursive writing: stretch out the breath, twist it, invert it, squeeze it: BUT NEVER BREAK THE THREAD OF YOUR BREATH. If you ever went a 90 minute class without once breaking your "thread" you would have a quality of concentration rare in the human species.
4) Five times a day, at every hour divisible by three, stop and breathe for sixty seconds. As you do, relax.
5) The single most important pose is the last pose, Savasana..."corpse" or "resting" pose. Everything else is designed to teach you to go deeply into this space, utterly relaxed, but still aware. It is the doorway to the "Yoga Nidra," the yogic sleep state, where your body is asleep but your mind is awake. This is STRANGE, dudes and dudettes. Until you have laid there listening to your body snore, you don't know what weird really is.
6)Every pose has a slightly different "tone." An inner "sound" which, if you find it, makes an apparently difficult pose far easier. Search for it. There is an "easy" way to do each pose. You will only find it through experimentation.
7) Keep the lower abdominal muscles slightly tensed, and the same with the anal sphincter.
8) Bikram "hot room" yoga adds another level--heat/humidity. Relax deeply and you won't feel the heat at all. The experience of heat is a measure of your resistance to it.
9) Remember: stress does not hurt you. It is STRAIN that hurts you: stress warping your body and mind. Use the yoga as a chance to move into "stressful" experiences without experiencing "strain." It is a fabulous working metaphor.
10) Kareem Abdul Jabbar once told me that yoga was the perfect foundation for sports, and had given him extra years in his career. If you can't trust Kareem, who can you trust?
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Always go to a yoga class seeking to learn something. It is not "exercise" in the western sense (making your body "do" something.) It is exploring the CONNECTION between mind and body. Eventually, you will begin to glimpse the illusion of physicality. Move beyond the twitches and itches. Go deeper, deeper, piercing skin, muscle, and finally bone, until there is nothing but breath.

Even if we were nothing but meat, this process is insanely productive. But if we are more than this (which I deeply hold), in the moments of greatest concentration and surrender, out of the corner of your eye, you will glimpse Truth.