After I was assaulted and hospitalized in 2012, I became something of a media spectacle. We needed money for my surgery (titanium plates run about 14k a pop, and I needed a few), and my community rallied around me. From yogis to drag queens, so many people gave that we had to tell folks to stop. It was pretty amazing. There were even lots of news articles. I shouldn’t have read the comments in those articles. I know a lot about victim blaming now. Shortly after my recovery period, the non-profit activist group Collective Action for Safe Spaces (formerly: Hollaback!) approached me to raise some awareness for their cause: stopping street harassment. It should be a no brainer: you should be able to walk home without getting…

Talking about ashtanga can make you crazy. Or not. Or both. “Whenever we practice, we quickly run into paradox… this is what happens when we start to cling to any one formula or any one technique. We quickly run into this sense that it isn’t complete– when we run into another viewpoint coming up in the background–  there is this sense of paradox.  And, whenever this happens, we know that the yoga is starting to work. Its considered to be a very auspicipous sign. “ — Richard Freeman “The Self-Reference Paradox” With the right google search, you can find someone confirming any belief you’ve been kicking around. Confirmation bias takes us out of our present moment. It sets paramaters for our capacity to feel. And, I…

[su_quote]”This practice, its different. It doesn’t ask you to *give up* anything. A house holder practice, and all that.” I laughed, and responded “except dinner.” — a dialouge with a good friend, on ashtanga yoga. also: bullshit 🙂 [/su_quote] Every Sunday afternoon in Mysore, Sharath holds a conference. It’s a little bit of Q&A time, a little bit of lecture, and a whole lot of Ashtanga Family Time. The Boss’s kids often interrupt. It’s generally very crowded. And, its always really nice. Sharath has done enough of these now that he sometimes finds a deeper question hiding inside the banal. Conference would be much shorter, some might say for the better, if the bit of Q & A were to be removed. But. every so often…

I couldn’t have been more frustrated. More people in India have mobile phones than running water– and yet, here we were stopped in front of Sandesh the Prince — another palace cum hotel, not a one of us with an address or telephone number for Sandhya’s. Did I mention that this was a group of people who, in general, didn’t much care for groups of people? Figuratively and literally, we’d been down this road before. A week prior, we had ended up at Sandesh, our driver having misheard our request for Sandhya’s. This time, we had made SURE that the driver knew where we were going, asking repeatedly and determinedly if he knew that we meant the yellow house near the park. You know, the…