Image found via LOVELY goldlionaz

'Brogis need to recognize...'

J.Brown's latest blog post is a smart, kind and much needed reflection on men, women, sex, yoga, teaching and more...read it in full here.

"There is a lot of conversation in the yoga world these day about the “yoga body” and the empowerment of women through yoga. And then there is a backlash of “Broga” classes being marketed where men can be men and do their yoga without having all those empowered women around. We must bridge this gap. Both men and women need to abandon these unhealthy notions of beauty and gender. Both men and women need to learn how to have genuinely mutual relationship to one another.

But lets be clear, men are more to blame. As Holland so eloquently states: “For we are the inheritors of an ancient tradition, going back to the origins of the great civilizations of the past which have so profoundly shaped our consciousness and fashioned the dualism that lies behind our efforts to dehumanize half the human race.”  It’s up to us to either continue carrying the torch for hurt and dysfunction or be courageous enough to forge a better way."

-- J. Brown

The House on Coco Road

For this years International Women's Day I am doing something each day this week to honor and recognise the women that help move humanity forward.

Today I backed 'The House on Coco Road' by Damani Baker through kickstarter. I am all for people telling their families female history!

Making Space

Making space, friends and peace with how they feel. Love this...

 "I don't know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes- it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, 'Well, if I'd known better I'd have done better,' that's all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, 'I'm sorry,' and then you say to yourself, 'I'm sorry.' If we all hold on to the mistake, we can't see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can't see what we're capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one's own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that's rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don't have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach." 

— Maya Angelou

Veronica Ryan

Veronica Ryan

"For most of history, Anonymous was a woman."

— Virginia Woolf

Claire Curneen

Works by Claire Curneen

I choose, just a crown

I’m ceded—I’ve stopped being Theirs—
The name They dropped upon my face
With water, in the country church
Is finished using, now,
And They can put it with my Dolls,
My childhood, and the string of spools,
I’ve finished threading—too—
Baptized, before, without the choice,
But this time, consciously, of Grace—
Unto supremest name—
Called to my Full—
The Crescent dropped—
 Existence’s whole Arc, filled up,
With one small Diadem.
My second Rank—
too small the first—
Crowned—Crowing—on my Father’s breast—
A half unconscious Queen—
But this time—
Adequate—
Erect, With Will to choose, or to reject,
And I choose, just a Crown

-- Emily Dickinson 

The Bolivian grandmothers' handball league

“There are days my knees hurt from rheumatism, but when I play it goes away,”

-   Rosa Lima (second picture), 77, during a game.

images from aljazeera

On a Columnar Self

On a Columnar Self—
How ample to rely In Tumult—
or Extremity—
How good the Certainty That Lever cannot pry—
 And Wedge cannot divide Conviction—
That Granitic Base—
Though none be on our side—
Suffice Us—
 for a Crowd—
 Ourself—
and Rectitude—
And that Assembly—
not far off From furthest Spirit—God—

-- Emily Dickinson.

Found via Esther Gokhale musing on the posture of Emily Dickinson and a young mother from Burkina Faso.

New Websites!

Click HERE if you want to know all about happy movement shindigs...

Click HERE for if you would like to see my art offerings...

Click HERE if you would like to take part in an epic movement survey. It is still in it's infancy, but with your help I think it could be something very special. Take a look around and watch this space for more information.

Now, I was feeling very pleased with my website building self, until I read this: Web sites are obsolete. Hmmmm, so if you click through I guess your mere presence on may page will render you a technological dinosaur. It’s okay. I’m one, too. This man is not.

New Websites!

Click HERE if you want to know all about happy movement shindigs...

Click HERE for if you would like to see my art offerings...

Click HERE if you would like to take part in an epic movement survey. It is still in it's infancy, but with your help I think it could be something very special. Take a look around and watch this space for more information.

Now, I was feeling very pleased with my website building self, until I read this: Web sites are obsolete. Hmmmm, so if you click through I guess your mere presence on may page will render you a technological dinosaur. It’s okay. I’m one, too. This man is not.

 

Sunday Tune

Sunday Tune

Saturday Cartoon

Saturday Poem

Dream Dust

Gather out of star-dust
Earth-dust,
Cloud-dust,
Storm-dust,
And splinters of hail,
One handful of dream-dust
Not for sale.

--  Langston Hughes

Le Weekend!

Enjoy! (gif found here)

listen

Illustration by Yumi Sakugawa

learn your details with pride

Whoever first said "The Devil is in the details" must not have liked details. And I doubt that he was an economic botanist. Because when it comes to edible wild plants, the miracle is in the details. It is the details that give one the power not only to identify plants, but also to select the best specimens among them...So do not shy away from the details: an don't resent Nature for being so replete with complexity. That is its glory, not its downfall. We owe our very intelligence to this miraculous complexity. It is not the burden of the naturalist to learn this complexity: it is the awesome reality. More then anything else, which of these attitudes you chose will determine your success. So learn your details with pride and experience them with gratitude. Let the details excite you - for there are enough of them to excite you for the rest of your life.

-- Samuel Thayer: Nature's Garden: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild plants

This applies to every application of biological principle...i.e. your movement practice too!

single leg squat progression

Love these preparations and progressions.

The Epic Everest

"investigated in all directions"

During the preparation stage, the problem is “investigated in all directions” as the thinker readies the mental soil for the sowing of the seeds. It’s the accumulation of intellectual resources out of which to construct the new ideas. It is fully conscious and entails part research, part planning, part entering the right frame of mind and attention. Wallas writes:

"The educated man has, again, learnt, and can, in the Preparation stage, voluntarily or habitually follow out, rules as to the order in which he shall direct his attention to successive elements."

-- Graham Wallas on the Four Stages of Creativity, 1926, via brainpickings.
(the other three are Incubation,  Illumination, Verification)

Preparations

Aaron Hegert

Aaron Hegert

Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

- Bill Viola

“Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.”

― Thomas Henry Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley 

(found here)

wrist preparation

Wrist preparations.
 These are golden!