Category Archives: mind

Repost from NY Times: Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

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A new field in health research is called “inactivity studies,” and this article reports on its findings.

Here’s one. Two people eat and exercise the same. One gains weight, the other doesn’t. Why?

If you fidget more and move more, but not necessarily work out, you can burn a lot of calories. People who are more sedentary put on more weight.

That seems like a no-brainer, but so much knowledge about this is based on self-reporting, which is simply unreliable. The study used “magic underwear” to track motion.

This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.

I’m curious. How much sitting is too much? More than six hours a day, some say; others say more than nine hours a day. Sitting is more lethal than age, sex, education, smoking, hypertension, BMI and other indicators.

And did you know that Steelcase, maker of file cabinets and office furniture, now makes treadmill desks?

That’s the ticket for health at sedentary jobs. That, or fidget and get up and walk around a lot.

“Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”

Is Sitting a Lethal Activity? – NYTimes.com.

Resentment and poison, failure and feedback

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Readers, I am processing something that happened this week, and I beg your indulgence as I move through my stuff. Maybe you find other people’s processing interesting. If not, skip reading this post.

Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die. – Malachy McCourt

Social work professor and authenticity researcher Brene Brown posted this quote on Facebook yesterday. (No, I don’t know her in person, but her work is pretty awesome, as are her TED Talks.) The timing for me to encounter this quote was perfect. On Monday night I had a meeting with someone who told me he has resented me for a year, since we both came onto the leadership team of a social and educational organization.

Suddenly I got insight into the tension I’d felt coming from him and how he related to me as if I were a bad employee to be corrected or micromanaged, his dissatisfaction and hypercritical attitude toward any mistakes I made, and a lack of support, gratitude, and appreciation for anything I did, even to the point of undermining me (which was why I wanted to meet with him, to tell him I didn’t like that a bit, you jerk).

It had the ring of truth to it. I also felt horrified. Frankly, it’s creepy to have someone tell you that they’ve resented you for a year. A year!

I left after about 20 minutes. Clear that I don’t want to work with him any more, I ended our “conversation” by resigning. I felt disappointed, but also that there was no real choice. Interest has tapered off. I don’t have hope that the organization will survive.

Later that evening, I found out another person on the leadership team had resigned that morning. And yet another person — also a supporter who has shared his gifts with this organization — soon decided after fruitless and frustrating conversations with this person to take his talents elsewhere. After learning this, I quit as a member.

I just wanna say this:

Hey, dude. Maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s you.

Maybe members sensed your hidden resentment and decided not to come back. You probably think that’s too woo-woo. But maybe there’s a whole field of awareness that you’ve been blind to.

You were a real pill to work with, and as much as I loved doing my role, even imperfectly, I’m okay with severing our association. Relieved. Let me get away from your poison. I came away with many new relationships with people I do like. I even liked you sometimes, but not as a leader.

Here’s a beef: You don’t use the skills this organization promotes to resolve problems! When I asked you what the outcome was that you wanted, you avoided answering my question. Others have noticed that you have difficulty answering a clear, direct request with a clear, direct answer. The meaning of communication is the response you get.

You went off on a tangent but actually got the outcome I think you wanted — my resignation — without ever directly asking for it.

So, um, you could have just asked for my resignation at any time without all the drama, you know. So why didn’t you?

Dude, where’s your well-formedness?

I don’t even think this has much to do with me. It’s more about his ego.

I understand that he’s working out something karmic in his life. This is not about what he thinks it’s about. It’s about self-revelation. He doesn’t seem to know himself very well or be effective in a leadership role. If people don’t trust him or have confidence in him as a leader, then he’s not a leader, no matter what title he has.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about what good leadership is. It seems clear to me that it’s situational. People talk about leadership style, but the style has to match the situation.

What works in an employer-employee relationship where you pay someone to fulfill your agenda will not work in an organization composed of volunteers. That is much more about relationship skills and consensus building, rapport and responsiveness, not command and control.

New awesomeness arises out of the ashes. I am free to pursue my best interests, and that’s already taking shape in a very satisfying way.

~~

Update a week later: Everything is perfect just the way it is. When this guy is my age and looks back on who he was at this current time in his life, he will have great perspective on how much richer his map of the world got. His identity, his role in creating this, his ability to be congruent, his skills in relating to people and in leading people will all be vastly more developed and nuanced.

Samadhi and the right brain

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I’m linking to an article published in Elephant Journal that has an interesting discussion about the right brain and mystical states. Jill Bolte Taylor wrote about having her left brain shut down during a cerebral hemorrhage in My Stroke of Insight.

This writer, a yogi and ayurvedist, wonders aloud if samadhi is actually experienced through shutting down big parts of the left brain.

Read on for a worthwhile discussion, and juicy tidbits about a few spiritual eminences.

Quote about teaching yoga

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Teaching yoga is the best job in the world because you get to do it barefoot and wearing your pajamas. 🙂 Celebrate!

From Judith Hanson Lasater on Facebook.

She’s got a point! I said that when I retired from my serious job where I was an employee and worked for a salary, I’d wear yoga clothes all the time.

Well, I’m not retired yet from that type of job (but soon, I hope), and I manage to wear yoga clothes to work (with jewelry, shawls, and jackets) nearly every day.

My favorite yoga pants that I’ve found so far come from Lucy.com (they come in lengths). They are so comfortable and durable.

Badshah Khan, leader of a nonviolent army in Afghanistan

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This is a little bit different from most of my blog posts, but I found this tale compelling and want to share. This little bit of history is new to me, and perhaps to you as well.

My friend Peggy Kelsey, who has a special place in her heart and photography for the women of Iraq and Afghanistan, posted this story on Facebook.

Who would have thought that a master of nonviolence would have come out of modern Afghanistan?

Badshah (a title meaning king) Khan lived to be nearly 100 years old, and he died in 1988.

One of his remarkable achievements is that he raised, uniformed, and disciplined an army of 100,000 Pashtun men, and it was a nonviolent army. That’s right, a  nonviolent army. An oxymoron? Let’s find out.

They faced down the British army, and the British came to fear them more than they feared armed Pashtuns. The Pashtuns had simply found the strongest weapon available: nonviolence.

Khan was a devout Muslim who would always remain a devout Muslim, one who thought his religion required nonviolence.

Did you even know there were devout Muslims who practice in nonviolence? I didn’t. Or maybe I did, but thought of them as Sufis.

Beginning in 1910, Khan opened schools in the mountainous region he grew up in. He opened schools for boys and for girls. He taught agriculture, sanitation, self-sufficiency, and nonviolent resistance to empire. Khan learned of Gandhi in 1915 and joined him in calling for nonviolent opposition to the British in 1919, for which Khan was locked up for 6 months.

Here’s a description of their nonviolent technique.

The British ordered troops to open fire with machine guns on the unarmed crowd, killing an estimated 200-250. The Khudai Khidmatgar [servants of God] members acted in accord with their training in non-violence under Ghaffar Khan, facing bullets as the troops fired on them.

“When those in front fell down wounded by the shots, those behind came forward with their breasts bared and exposed themselves to the fire, so much so that some people got as many as 21 bullet wounds in their bodies, and all the people stood their ground without getting into a panic.”

This continued for six hours. When an elite military unit called the Garhwal Rifles was ordered to fire on an unarmed crowd, its members refused and were themselves court-martialed and sent to prison.

When Badshah Khan died, the Soviets were fighting in Afghanistan. A ceasefire was declared and honored by both sides so he could be buried.

You can read more about Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan here on Wikipedia.

To relax, to improve health, to change the world, just breathe

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Last night I attended the monthly Austin NLP meetup. Katie Raver, who was raised by an NLP-trained mom and who is a co-founder of Austin NLP and who created Year of the Breath in 2009, presented on the topic Breathing Life into Rapport.

Note: Katie is my temporary roommate. And she loves my cat, Mango. I may be biased.

Katie drew on her experiences in Hawai’i (where ha means breath, thus Hawai’i, aloha, ha‘ole — without breath, ha prayer). When she returned, she noticed how shallow breathing negatively impacted a work-related meeting she was in, and she experimented with pacing and then leading the alpha person at the meeting (not the speaker, but the key decision maker) to breathe more deeply, thus changing the state of the meeting for all 17 people present. Only Katie — or as we call her, the instigator of love — was aware of how that shift occurred.

We had fun doing exercises like matching someone’s breathing while talking to them and matching their breathing while they’re talking to you. Sorry you missed it.

I must say, it’s a lovely experience to have a room full of people breathing in unison. It’s on a par with hearing a room full of people all chanting OM. Deep. Alive. Powerful. 

 Today an email led me to this NPR article dated Dec. 6, 2010, Just Breathe: Body Has a Built-In Stress Reliever.

As it turns out, deep breathing is not only relaxing, it’s been scientifically proven to affect the heart, the brain, digestion, the immune system — and maybe even the expression of genes.

Yogis and meditators know this. Breath is powerful.

But more importantly, [breathing exercises] can be used as a method to train the body’s reaction to stressful situations and dampen the production of harmful stress hormones.

Click the link to read up on the latest scientific findings about using breath to influence health and well-being.

You can also make meetings more satisfying. At least you won’t be bored.

Helping a healer heal with sound, Reiki, and presence

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I had a most remarkable experience last night. I was planning to go to the Saxon Pub to listen to The Resentments play on the last night of SXSW after teaching my restorative yoga class, and on the way, I took a detour to check out a nearby mobile home park. (Yes, I’m still looking, but just today discovered an online directory of MH parks in Texas with phone numbers! My next home is getting closer and closer.)

Just as I was leaving, my iPhone rang. It was my friend B. We’ve had a couple of bodywork/unblocking sessions, and I’ve enjoyed getting to know him. He’s a teacher for me, someone who knows a lot about healing.

B asked me to breathe with him, which we’ve done together before, in rebirthing. Curious but game, I did.

I discerned that he was in pain from his occasional moans and sobs, and I could tell the pain was pretty intense. I pulled the car over and breathed with him for a while, not knowing what had happened, unsure if it was physical or emotional pain, not that it really matters.

All he could tell me was “I was out riding bikes with my son and something happened.” Didn’t know if he was bleeding or if something happened to or with his son… I watched my mind try to make up a story and give up.

After about 10 minutes, he asked me if I could come to where he was. I said sure, thinking he was at home. No. He gave me directions to a little woods behind a grocery store several miles away. We stayed connected on the phone as I drove.

He asked if I had any blankets in the car. Yes, B, as a matter of fact, I happen to have a dozen or so yoga blankets in my car. Good thing, because he was wearing a sleeveless t-shirt, and it was dark and starting to get chilly.

As I drove, he asked me if I had any Reiki training. Technically I’m a third-level Reiki master, but I have only done Reiki on myself and distance healing on others. He told me:

You’re about to get initiated.

He asked me if I was ready. At first I said yes, and then I said no, I couldn’t know that. All I could know was that I was willing and open to it. He was satisfied with that.

From my car, I could barely see him, back in the woods. I parked and brought some blankets over to where he was. I covered his upper body, and we began to work together.

From there on, the sequence of events gets fuzzy. We spent a couple of hours together in that little woods behind a suburban grocery store, out of sight of the hustle and bustle, healing his foot. 

He’d dropped a board on top of his foot that morning, and he worked on it then, and it seemed fine, and then he and his son went on a late afternoon bike ride. When he got off his bike, he couldn’t bear weight on that foot. The pain was excruciating. The motion of pedalling had apparently further dislocated a bone that had been impacted by the earlier injury and not quite gone back into place. Anyway, that seems to be the likeliest story.

This man works on his feet, but he was uninterested in going to any kind of medical establishment. He could have called 911 at any time from his cell phone, or asked numerous people to take him home and give him painkillers. Instead, he sent his son home on his bike. His wife, D, was working and he couldn’t get hold of her.

So he called me. Not sure why; maybe I was the only person who picked up. But we have a good strong connection, and I was able and willing to help. I helped him text his wife so she would call when she got off work.

I mentally reviewed my preparations for giving Reiki to myself. At his direction, I wrapped my hands around his foot just so, and he occasionally directed me verbally and nonverbally where to apply pressure, where to ease off, how to elongate his foot.

After a little while, my hands felt really good. I had a really good, positive, loving energetic connection with his injured foot. I could feel the pulse in it, feel the life force. I felt plugged in and connected to the Source.

We breathed together. Fast, slow, loud, soft. Mostly he led and I paced him.

We moaned, toned, sang together. Some of the toning we did was amazingly powerful. I could hear the resonance between two notes becoming so much more than those two notes. They amplified the energetic connection, almost as if we were supported and held in place by sound.

I noticed that when I could be in a position where my body was symmetrical, my energy flowed better. My crown chakra opened wide, and I felt very present, engaged, and relaxed.

B was a marvel to me. Here was someone in pain who fully faced it. Now that’s a different approach. He was totally present with it. Sometimes it was overwhelming, and he just had to lie down. Sometimes he sobbed from the pain. He was so open to his experience, even though it was intensely painful.

Pain is just sensation without the story.

He reviewed the sequence of events and admitted he had made a mistake getting on the bike, but I never heard any self-castigation. He accepted that he had made a mistake, but it didn’t mean anything, as in “therefore, I am a failure.” Just facing what is, that he had made a mistake. End-of-story. I never heard any cursing — in fact, he chided me for using strong language at one point.

He was very clear what he wanted to use his attention and energy for. He said let’s not talk about that, or let’s talk about that later.

Over time, the pain abated somewhat, he said from about 8.5 or 9 to a 7 on a 1-10 scale. That’s still pretty intense.

Then D called, and she came, and all of us held his foot and toned together. D had some Young Living Essential Oils in her purse, and he slathered them on his foot and  put some on his head. He used a whole bottle of Pan-Away on his foot. That’s what it’s for. (And by the way, I’m selling this stuff now.)

After maybe 30 minutes, D said she was ready to go home. She took his bike with her. B crawled from the woods to my car, and I drove him home. It was 10 pm, and I’m currently a gal with a job.

Today B called twice and thanked me. It was actually an incredible honor to be called upon to help, and to witness this method of healing, and to let Reiki flow through me in the service of alleviating suffering.

This afternoon when B called, he said he could now bear weight on his foot. He had continued with someone else giving him Reiki, and D had applied comfrey leaves to his foot, but he gave me a lot of credit. Really, I just met his presence.

As amazed as I am at this way of healing an extremely painful injury, I am even more amazed at his valor, presence, and most of all to his commitment to and faith in the healing power that lies within each of us, that when combined with others, can work what seems like miracles.

Quote about karma

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My friend Thomas and I were talking yesterday, and he said:

Karma isn’t earned, it’s burned.

Immediately I knew that would have to be posted here!

Karma isn’t earned, it’s burned. It’s not so much that acts of goodness create good karma, although of course they put more goodness into the world and hopefully make you feel better at the same time.

It’s more that when you have been hooked into an untrue belief, that belief can warp your perspective and your behavior.

When you are able to release the belief and the distorted perspective that accompanied it, you are burning up karma.

It fundamentally liberates you.

Quote for today

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 I’m starting a new category, consisting of quotes from ordinary people. Famous people don not have a monopoly on wisdom!

Here is the first:

Life is what we do between our first and last breath. ~ Loping Buzzard

Why yogis don’t meditate

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Came across something else I wanted to repost tonight, this article from Elephant Journal on why yogis don’t meditate by Philip Goldberg.

Yep, asana is only one of the eight limbs of yoga, which is about quieting and calming the mind, or as some would say distancing from the mind. Patanjali had much to say about the mind, and little about asana.

After all, yoga is a philosophy with beliefs. It’s not just physical fitness.

My formerly daily meditation practice is in a slump right now. I miss it. Having the flu and then moving disrupted my life, although witness awareness has been keen through the many transitions.

I discovered Sunday that my meditation timer, which I was using to time long restorative yoga poses, seems to be broken.

However, I downloaded a timer app for my new iPhone that should serve well.

Now all I need to do is move the yoga blankets off my zafu and zabuton, and I’ll be meditating again.