Wrestling, Yoga, and That Touchy-Feely Loving Kindness Shit...

the race is long, and in the end it is only against ourselves
Baz Luhrman

...have a terrible tendency to treat the yoga asana thing kinda like a wrestling match...I mean, I get that whole loving-kindness-toward-yourself thing...in theory...and yet...there I am again telling my knee to get down on the goddamn floor...whether it’s actually good for said knee to go all the way to the floor or not...

...and that’s not even mentioning calling my tendencies terrible...

...these things get complicated...

...especially since, even as I begin to see that vicious circle of recrimination clearly, that voice in my head keeps up...jeezus christ, yer the only person in the damn room can’t do a goddamn crow pose without fuckin’ fallin’ over...yes, the Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitor even finds his way into yoga class... that’s the thing about the yoga crowd—so open and accepting they even let the Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitors in...so long as they take their shoes off...

...for that matter, he even sometimes makes his way into this blog...yer usin’ that lame-ass Spanish Inquisition metaphor again?...jeezus , yer stretchin’ it ’til it breaks...kinda like torturin’ your readers on the rack...how fitting...this post suuuuucks...and, actually, I was wrestling with this post until three A.M. last night, and, this morning, deleted most of it...

...the truth is, sometimes the Inquisitor’s criticisms are valid...I mean, that stuff I cut out really did mostly suck....I just wish he’d be nicer about it...

...a person who’s likely encountered some actual flesh-and-blood grand inquisitors, Aung San Suu Kyi, wrote kindness is in a sense the courage to care...which, I think, means something other than the courage to beat one’s opponent into submission in a wrestling match...whether that opponent is a leg, a blog, or a Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitor...

...since, in the end, what is a Foul Mouthed Grand Inquisitor but a badly wounded part of oneself, desperately trying to look tough...and, as such, as much in need of that touchy-feely loving kindness shit as anybody?

The World's Only Imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

...read a book by this guy named Alan Clements about, among other things, his experiences as a Buddhist monk in Burma/Myanmar, being expelled by the government a bunch of times, then returning covertly after many of his fellow monks had been murdered, along with countless others, by the military junta that had seized control of the country...finding his Buddhist concepts of pacifism and enlightenment challenged as he met ex-monks fighting on both sides of the conflict...as well as the Burmese people’s legitimate leader, and apostle of nonviolence, Aung San Suu Kyi...

Freedom must be separated from the packaging and additives our consumer culture has manufactured around it.
Alan Clements

...I vaguely remember reading about Aung San Suu Kyi some time ago...how she won the Nobel Peace Prize but couldn’t fly to Scandinavia to accept it, as she was under house arrest...it was probably somewhere in the middle of the Sunday New York Times...and I probably thought bummer before moving on to the next section, looking forward to the Ethicist column and perhaps a particularly nasty book review or two...

Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions, courage that could be described as 'grace under pressure' - grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.
Aung San Suu Kyi

...more recently, as I probably read somewhere in Salon or the Huffington Post, Aung San Suu Kyi has been imprisoned, as the result of a visit from a foreigner...apparently some Western spiritual seeker who swam across a lake to meet her...no doubt, like Led Zeppelin singing about magical mystical Kashmir, failing to grasp the sociopolitical realities of his mystical southeast Asian spiritual destination...my shangri la beneath the summer moon, I will return again...

...Burma, alas, despite lots of orange robed monks and trippy scenery is not exactly shangri la....it’s ruled by a military junta, which renamed the country Myanmar and has no qualms about slaughtering nonviolent protesters and wiping out entire villages by the thousand...in 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the country’s nonviolent pro-democracy movement was, while under house arrest, elected prime minister by 82% of Burma’s population...a result ignored by the junta which has continued to brutalize its people, recruiting over seventy thousand child soldiers, engaging in ethnic cleansing and systematic rape, even refusing international aid following natural disasters...and, now, they’ve locked up Aung San Suu Kyi because a guy visited her house...

The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success.
Aung San Suu Kyi

...by this point, I’ve already quite badly violated Yoga for Cynics' most sacred rules against being in any way informative, or overly serious, and have even come close to appearing almost but not quite poised to make some kind of a call for action...shudder...so, instead of saying anything more, I’ll simply suggest that readers might visit here or here...namaste, folks...