W.A.I.T. – anagram for Why Am I Talking? My favorite expression of the year.
I have been in the company of a few non-stop talkers this year. I think I have listened reasonably well, although perhaps not made enough boundaries at times. Politesse is so ingrained.
At the end of a week of good listening and being polite a while back, I found myself complaining to my mate and then dissolving in tears. […]
I am 65 and 3/4 years old and my artificial hips are 7 months old.
If you were wanting a city to road test new hips, you couldn’t do batter than Manhattan. […]
The yoga class I took Yesterday paled next to the offerings we saw at the Museum of Modern Art.
It was an interesting class, though, as much as I hate using that dull adjective. The decor of the Hatha Yoga studio was amazing; it was like doing yoga in a temple, with dark wood wall panels, Hindu statues, altars and icons everywhere, floor to ceiling.
The guru Ramakrishnaanamda is the galvanizing energy behind this studio. […]
Yoga practice is a portable affair as we travel to different towns, mainly one night per hotel. So delicious to start the day getting grounded and centred.
Especially as war has featured rather largely though accidentally in our visits to different towns.
I can say that the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC is one of the most remarkable exhibitions I’ve ever seen. It’s an intensely evocative experience and I would go again. […]
On the road in the US, on the fly on my iPhone, is not the best way to post to Yoga Suits Her.
Sadly my yesterday post vanished into the ether. I’m I undeterred; no, I am too prosaic to be discouraged. So here I go again.
(I want you to know though that I’m
I’m surprised that the flavor of our travels have centered around national parks and military movements. Daniel and didn’t overplan and these are just directions we meandered.
I fell in love with Yosemite & the giant sequoias & Shenandoah Park. […]
Over the last month of traveling in the U.S.. Eek, it really is a whole month. Yes, I have squeezed in a few poses here and there, but most posing has been done in front of a camera.
Daniel and I have seen some wondrous sights on this trip: the giant granite monoliths of Yosemite, the monstrous and ancient sequoia trees, the iconic monuments of Washington DC, and most recently, the beautiful blue ridge mountains of Shenandoah park.
It’s fascinating being a tourist in one’s own country. This place is so vast and varied. […]
My yoga practice is in tatters at the moment. And somehow I’m surviving and I can still hold my head high as a yoga teacher.
Maybe there is a category, a branch of yoga, if you will, which is practicing being in relationship with your family. […]
There’s a lot of positive press these days about the effectiveness of doing crossword puzzles and sudukos to help ward off dementia and Alzheimers.
There was the story a while back about a certain order of nuns who achieved longevity and mental acuity greater than that of the general population by dint of practicing daily mental activities.
So now, many of us emulate the Sisters of Perpetual Brain Gymnastics by doing
our quotidian exercises, ever hopeful….
I saw some good evidence when made recent retirement community visits to Sara Weinstein, my mother-in-law, age 91,.
Self-confessed book-a-day reader, veteran of […]
Crystal balls are not really a necessity. Not at all. To see your future look to the folks in the retirement villages and nursing homes.
Even though fifty is the new forty, sixty is the new fifty, and so on, one day if you live long enough you will get to be an 80, 90, 100 year old. […]
A very dear and rather acerbic friend of mine described one of the early yoga classes that he attended as “singing hymns around the piano.”
He didn’t go back, and he eventually discovered and practised Iyengar yoga, which, by contrast, can be described as rigorous, meticulous and strict. […]
Happily, a few years ago on another trip to San Francisco, I discovered a yoga school, would you believe based Iyengar-style, nearby.
I can walk there from Cousin Merle’s on 8th Avenue, which I did this morning. Much better using the studio instead of the small floor space of our visitor’s accommodation.
I did a Level one (read “beginner-ish) class with a very good beginner-ish (read 1 year) teacher. […]
On the road today, it’s still today although I’ve travelled from Sydney to LA to San Francisco in 17 hours.
My early morning yoga routine went skewiff when I was nursing a cold, and then preparing for this long trip.
I pride myself (uh-oh) on being disciplined and now, while traveling, i notice it’s darned inconvenient to reImpose a yoga practice routine.
I know I will, nevertheless, partly for you the reader; […]
It’s been almost 7 months since I had bi-lateral hip replacements and I thought it was time to have a look at how my yoga poses were coming along. Through the eye of a camera.
Daniel was kind enough to take some photos of me posing 😉
Now, you probably know that I would have deleted the not-so-hot images. […]
Most times I love words (you might have guessed). I enjoy good writing in film or in a book. I adore going with a writer when they arabesque a metaphor and it flies like Baryshnikov or Nureyev and they take you along in their leap of imagination.
I don’t like words when they roll around in my head like the empty bottles on my car’s back floor, especially when I’m supposed to be sleeping.
I’m describing last night. My before-holidays to-do list ran in a continuous loop on my frontal brain screen until about 1:30 am. […]
I may be way wrong on this observation, but I’ve been detecting a growing penchant for micro versions of stuff.
An obvious example is a Tweet. I think of it as a kind of micro blog limited to 120 characters. That’s characters, not words. Is it possible to write anything meaningful in such a constrained environment? Well, it would seem yes. Twitter is meaningful to millions of people around the world in all nations and all races, judging by so many little Tweets whizzing around the planet. […]
When I first moved to Australia from the U.S., I was much more of a free spirit than I am now. I was a flight attendant for T.W.A. for three years before landing in Oz and I didn’t even quit the job; I just took a leave of absence in case I wanted to move back “home”.
I would say that I didn’t have a sense of place, not even my birthplace, Chicago. I’d lived in N.Y., several suburbs in L.A., and Tucson, Arizona. […]
…no. If anything my cold is worse (mucous, hard to write that without the “yuk”) and now something else is happening, a sort of southerly movement of scratchiness down into my chest. I found myself apologising to Daniel this morning for my libido suffering from this cold, too. Sigh. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot.
Nevertheless somethings are under control: my yoga practice, for one, and I even managed to teach a class tonight, for another.
Also, I have an unblunted appreciation for the signs of spring that appearing all around our garden and our neighbourhood…. […]
A yoga teacher trainee whom I was working with asked a smart question: What should I practice when?
If you do the same sequence of poses every single day, as in Astanga Vinyasa Yoga, it’s not a problem. However, what do you do if your practices are more flexible?
Well, it depends on quite a lot of factors – season, age, menstruation, pregnancy, menopause (male or female), time of day, day of the week, etc.
To help my trainee, I sat down and worked out the attached scheme. […]
When I woke up this morning completely blocked and breathing from my mouth, I thought of the only thing that would help – yoga practice.
So here I am in the Shed, writing to you, occasionally lifting my head to look out at the view – dewy, green grass with birds swooping in and out. Given this is Australia, the birds are not ordinary: king parrots, eastern rosellas, and kookaburras, for instance. (The magpies have been having sex this week, right before our eyes.)
I have faith that my practice will pull me together on all levels. […]
What a great word to umbrella over many minor-ish complaints. Crook conjures up bent over or not going ahead in a straight line or something that’s broken.
Oddly, my iPhone WordBook doesn’t feature the “sick” or “ill” definition of the word, commonly used in Australia. But neither does it include that wonderfully descriptive word “lurgi”, which one of my wordmonger friends says came into language via the Goons. Seems reasonable.
Anyway, I’m digressing, possibly because of my weakened condition, that is, being crook.
I started developing the dreaded lurgi on Saturday night when we were out on the town. […]