There has been a lot in the news lately about the whole Bikram yoga controversy. Is Bikram Choudhury wonderful or is he a scumbag. Because I am a yoga instructor, people often ask me my thoughts on the matter. I can honestly say that I don't know. I've never done Bikram, yoga or ever met him. He used to be pretty handsome and his skimpy yoga outfits don't leave much to the imagination. You would know if he was interested in you from afar.
Thanda Yoga is something completely different. Some might say that it is the purest form of yoga. It originates in the Himalayan Mountains next to the Spring of All Eternity, or so the story goes. The Spring was frozen so the people couldn't drink from it and be saved from their thirst. Swami Bhaji was said to have had his followers do their yoga next to the Spring. The followers were able to thaw the Spring enough just from their yoga to drink from its life giving waters. Ever since, the practitioners of Thanda Yoga have celebrated the cold in the cold.
I tell this story to my children when they ask why I never buy them winter coats. Winter coats are for those who are unable to warm themselves internally. Just as one must find happiness within, according to Swami Bhaji, one must find warmth, the warmth of love and one's body from within.
Wednesday, February 25, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
Guns Can Protect You From Your Family and Friends
There is a lot of talk lately about people having guns for protection. There was an article in the news this week about letting women on college campuses have guns to protect themselves from rape. I don't think this is a good idea. From my own college days, there are several people who I would have shot if I was drunk and had a gun, not that I was ever raped.
If guns can protect you from dangerous people, who is more dangerous than your friends and family? Everyone knows that you are more likely to be murdered by someone you know than by a stranger, unless you are unlucky enough to be around when a terrorist attacks. What the NRA should propose next is arming people at Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, Christmas, potlucks, Silvester (I still think of it as Silvester and not New Year's Eve) parties. Those are the times when you are most likely to be with your friends and family and therefore when you are most in danger.
If guns can protect you from dangerous people, who is more dangerous than your friends and family? Everyone knows that you are more likely to be murdered by someone you know than by a stranger, unless you are unlucky enough to be around when a terrorist attacks. What the NRA should propose next is arming people at Thanksgiving, the Fourth of July, Christmas, potlucks, Silvester (I still think of it as Silvester and not New Year's Eve) parties. Those are the times when you are most likely to be with your friends and family and therefore when you are most in danger.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
The Day After a Snow Day - School Delay
Yesterday was a snow day, today there was a two-hour delay for schools in Arlington County. Honestly, the kids don't get any recess time as it is. They should just have the kids go to school. School doesn't even have to open. My dad's experience at the Battle of the Bulge shows that people can be outside in the cold and in the snow for hours. Sure, he was seriously wounded but he always said that he enjoyed that more than he did his time after the war in a prisoner of war camp. They had to do all these rebuilding projects and they used to talk about how they never thought about how they had to rebuild everything after the blew it up. Anyway, with the kids, even if their shoes get cold because they didn't listen to me and wore flip flops and stepped in an icy puddle will not end their lives. What will end their lives is if they don't stop asking me to do things for them that they can do for themselves.
Monday, February 16, 2015
President's Day 2
The morning yoga class went well. Keeping the windows open was a good idea because even though it was 12 degrees Fahrenheit, it wasn't windy. Stretching is really important when you do yoga, Thanda Yoga. My husband is home with the kids. I burned the pancakes, mostly because I wasn't paying enough attention. Joachim, my oldest son, should have worked on his science project but instead his girlfriend spent the night. At one point, I asked my husband to go tell them to be quieter because we were trying to sleep and his brother and sister were also probably trying to sleep.
Tonight there is supposed to be a snow storm, so I have to remember to close the windows of my yoga studio. I'm sure I won't forget. Later, my daughter and I are supposed to have a mother-daughter night. She wants to go see 50 Shades of Gray, which she says is her favorite book of all time. You know how kids are. Last year, her favorite book whatever Harry Potter book she was reading, but once kids, and especially girls, get into high school, their tastes begin to change. I suppose the one area we are different from American parents, is our attitudes towards sex. I like sex and so why shouldn't my children, after they go through puberty of course. As they say, you can take the German out of Germany but never the German out of the German.
Tonight there is supposed to be a snow storm, so I have to remember to close the windows of my yoga studio. I'm sure I won't forget. Later, my daughter and I are supposed to have a mother-daughter night. She wants to go see 50 Shades of Gray, which she says is her favorite book of all time. You know how kids are. Last year, her favorite book whatever Harry Potter book she was reading, but once kids, and especially girls, get into high school, their tastes begin to change. I suppose the one area we are different from American parents, is our attitudes towards sex. I like sex and so why shouldn't my children, after they go through puberty of course. As they say, you can take the German out of Germany but never the German out of the German.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
President's Day
President's Day is one of the few National Holidays in America. Americans are very much oriented towards work and so have few holidays. Some might say that Americans like work so much that every day is a holiday, which is why many choose to go into their office on the weekends.
There really isn't much of a guide as to how Americans are supposed to each of their holidays, except for the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. From what I understand, President's Day is sort of like the official birthday for the Presidents, starting with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. So, what does that mean on a practical level? Are you supposed to bake a birthday cake or eat some special food? Honestly, I don't know.
I plan on making another batch of the cocoa Martin Luther King Junior pancakes in celebration of President Barack Obama's birthday. Why not? Also, since it is particularly cold. Today it may have gotten up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, which sounds warm to a European used to the Metric System. Tomorrow, President's Day, it is supposed to be similarly cold. My yoga studio will be open in the afternoon, so, I think I will save money, and help save the planet, by turning off the cooling system and just opening up the windows. Usually, I try to keep the place at just above freezing, but sometimes it does the body good to experience nature in a natural way. We are natural beings and so we should not be afraid of the bounty that nature gives us. Swami Anand tells us that what is natural is nurturing. Just as sometimes a mother can be angry, so to can nature. It is for us to accept nature as it is, without complaint. We should accept nature with joy, for nature has bred us just as our mothers bore us. Without them, we would be as much nothing as the emptiest empty place in space.
There really isn't much of a guide as to how Americans are supposed to each of their holidays, except for the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving. From what I understand, President's Day is sort of like the official birthday for the Presidents, starting with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. So, what does that mean on a practical level? Are you supposed to bake a birthday cake or eat some special food? Honestly, I don't know.
I plan on making another batch of the cocoa Martin Luther King Junior pancakes in celebration of President Barack Obama's birthday. Why not? Also, since it is particularly cold. Today it may have gotten up to 20 degrees Fahrenheit, which sounds warm to a European used to the Metric System. Tomorrow, President's Day, it is supposed to be similarly cold. My yoga studio will be open in the afternoon, so, I think I will save money, and help save the planet, by turning off the cooling system and just opening up the windows. Usually, I try to keep the place at just above freezing, but sometimes it does the body good to experience nature in a natural way. We are natural beings and so we should not be afraid of the bounty that nature gives us. Swami Anand tells us that what is natural is nurturing. Just as sometimes a mother can be angry, so to can nature. It is for us to accept nature as it is, without complaint. We should accept nature with joy, for nature has bred us just as our mothers bore us. Without them, we would be as much nothing as the emptiest empty place in space.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
Car Trip Tips
The summer after we first arrived in American, and soon after Charles, my youngest, was born, we went on the first in a series of what Americans call car trips. The common definition of a car trip, which is an idiomatic expression you will not find in any English-German dictionary, is a vacation wherein a group of Americans, most typically a family but also sometimes friends or extended family, travel long distances by car and then drive back, sometimes by another route, to their original starting location. A regional, dialectical variation on the term car trip is road trip. If you hear car or road trip, understand that they have the same definition and can be used interchangeably.
Our first car trip was to Memphis in Tennessee, to see the birthplace of Elvis Presley. The drive, which took slightly more than 14 hours, was accomplished in one day. We drove south from Northern Virginia, through the Shenandoah River Valley, crossing the Great Smokey Mountains and driving across the state of Tennessee to reach Memphis on the banks of the fabled Mississippi river, making it in one day. We spent two days in Memphis then drove back via Lexington in Kentucky, which took nearly two hours longer than the drive out. During this trip, we were not able to sing songs with our children, since they only knew American songs and Joachim and Renate claimed not to remember or like any German songs. We solved the problem by having them watch videos documentaries on America’s wonderful national parks. They were entranced by the beauty of the parks, especially the bears of Yellowstone, until the Diphenhydramine, known in America as Benadryl; we’d given them after lunch began to take effect. We had heard from several of our neighbors that giving children dosages of Benadryl on car trips was quite common and generally recommended. I can report that it worked quite well, for hours there were no complaints and when the effects wore off, we fed them dinner, restarted the national park documentaries and gave them each another dosage.
On subsequent car trips, to Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks and to the Grand Canyon and back, which, remarkably, took us nearly a week, our children happily watched every single episode of the National Park documentaries many times over. We supplemented those videos with other instructive documentaries on subjects like weather, rivers and geology. When the outside light was too glaring for the DVD screen to be easily visible, particularly when we were not travelling at night, we purchased and used car window blinds.
My children have not been harmed by the time they have spent in the car. They are not less active or fit than they otherwise would have been. Joachim, for example, is fit enough to have been selected to play on an exclusive travel soccer team. They have learned a lot from the videos they have watched during drives. They know some of the information the videos so well that they have memorized the scripts. Renate is the first to ask us to turn on a video whenever we get in the car. They are often so eager, that they rush to ask for their personal favorites. Depending on the length of the drive, we usually have the children take turns by order of age. None of them has gotten car sick as they might have done if they were reading.
Our first car trip was to Memphis in Tennessee, to see the birthplace of Elvis Presley. The drive, which took slightly more than 14 hours, was accomplished in one day. We drove south from Northern Virginia, through the Shenandoah River Valley, crossing the Great Smokey Mountains and driving across the state of Tennessee to reach Memphis on the banks of the fabled Mississippi river, making it in one day. We spent two days in Memphis then drove back via Lexington in Kentucky, which took nearly two hours longer than the drive out. During this trip, we were not able to sing songs with our children, since they only knew American songs and Joachim and Renate claimed not to remember or like any German songs. We solved the problem by having them watch videos documentaries on America’s wonderful national parks. They were entranced by the beauty of the parks, especially the bears of Yellowstone, until the Diphenhydramine, known in America as Benadryl; we’d given them after lunch began to take effect. We had heard from several of our neighbors that giving children dosages of Benadryl on car trips was quite common and generally recommended. I can report that it worked quite well, for hours there were no complaints and when the effects wore off, we fed them dinner, restarted the national park documentaries and gave them each another dosage.
On subsequent car trips, to Niagara Falls, the Adirondacks and to the Grand Canyon and back, which, remarkably, took us nearly a week, our children happily watched every single episode of the National Park documentaries many times over. We supplemented those videos with other instructive documentaries on subjects like weather, rivers and geology. When the outside light was too glaring for the DVD screen to be easily visible, particularly when we were not travelling at night, we purchased and used car window blinds.
My children have not been harmed by the time they have spent in the car. They are not less active or fit than they otherwise would have been. Joachim, for example, is fit enough to have been selected to play on an exclusive travel soccer team. They have learned a lot from the videos they have watched during drives. They know some of the information the videos so well that they have memorized the scripts. Renate is the first to ask us to turn on a video whenever we get in the car. They are often so eager, that they rush to ask for their personal favorites. Depending on the length of the drive, we usually have the children take turns by order of age. None of them has gotten car sick as they might have done if they were reading.
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