There comes a point in a child’s development when he or she will learn the concept of “object permanence.” This is the point when the game peek-a-boo is not as much fun, because the child understands that the world does not disappear when he or she closes her eyes. Buddhism can return people to that “perceptual simplicity” of childhood, according to Andrew Olendzki in Tricycle, by encouraging them to attend to merely what appears. He quotes the Bahiya, saying “in the seen there will be just the seen, in the heard just the heard, in the felt just the felt, and in the thought just the thought.”

Source: Tricycle (subscription required)

Image by  Yogi , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

With speculation swirling about which industries will weather the recession, and which will give way to a new economic order—there’s one that has a pair of writers at Vancouver Review mighty curious: the “yoga industrial complex,” worth an estimated $225 billion.

“In many ways, Western yoga can be seen as a subset of New Age culture, which is another way of saying ‘Don’t forget your wallet,’ ” Lalo Espejo and Patrick Pennefather write. “It’s no wonder that marketers covet the monied yoga demographic . . . which is unfortunate, because in India, yogis historically shared their knowledge free of charge. In our time and place, this spirit of humility has shifted from ‘free’ to ‘franchise,’ and ‘let’s follow that litigious asshole, Birkram Choudhury.’ ”

The popularity of teacher training has transformed the practice into “a kind of yoga Ponzi scheme,” the duo observes in their relentless roast.  But this is no heartless skewering. For “insta-gurus now feeling the blunt agnostic edge of a tanking economy,” Pennefather offers up some of his Patented Yoga Poses for the Newly Poor. The article isn't yet available online, so here’s a sample:

Down ’n’ out Dog™: Mainly a facial exercise, let the eyes and mouth droop, then pull everything tight. Repeat. Works the face in a way not previously possible with botoxed cheeks.

The Potato Bug™: Can be practiced in a small space, with or without a mat. Find your secret place, lie on your side, and curl up into a little ball. Most effective under a desk or table.

The Ostrich™: Similar to Downward Dog, just stick you head in the sand. To be practiced upon hearing rumors of job cuts. Helps achieve a peaceful state of denial while smoothing out neck wrinkles, and helps you look youthful when your spiritual ass is for sale.

Source: Vancouver Review

Image by j / f / photos, licensed under Creative Commons.

The Buddhist magazine Tricycle (a 2009 Utne Independent Press Award nominee) has unearthed something quite precious from their archives: a 1991 interview with the Dalai Lama conducted by the late writer and monologue master Spalding Gray. The conversation is colored by the kind of blunt truths Gray was famous for. It's a great exploration of the fundamental tenets of Tibeten Buddhism, and it's also hilarious:

Spalding Gray: We’ve both been traveling these last weeks and the most difficult thing that I find on the road is adjusting to each location, each different hotel. And I don’t have the centering habits you do. I have a tendency to want to drink the alcohol, which, as you said in an earlier interview, is the other way of coping with despair and confusion. I have a feeling that you have other methods for adjusting. Just what are some of your centering rituals and your habits when you come into a new hotel?

The Dalai Lama: I always first inquire to see “what is there.” Curiosity. What I can discover that is interesting or new. Then, I take a bath. And then I usually sit on the bed, crosslegged, and meditate. And sometimes sleep, lie down. One thing I myself noticed is the time-zone change. Although you change your clock time, your biological time still has to follow a certain pattern. But now I find that once I change the clock time, I’m tuned to the new time zone. When my watch says it’s eight o’clock in the evening, I feel sort of sleepy and need to retire and when it says four in the morning I wake up.

Spalding Gray: But you have to be looking at your clock all the time.

And then there is this gem:

The Dalai Lama: As a Buddhist monk, I usually have no solid meal after lunch, no dinner. So that is also a benefit.

Spalding Gray:  When I passed your room last night, I saw six empty ice-cream sundae dishes outside your door.

Translator (after much laughter): It was members of the entourage.

Source: Tricycle 

What is the appropriate space for prayer? Landscape Architecture—an accessible, engaging magazine published by the American Society of Landscape Architects—offers some points to chew on in its coverage of the Pope John Paul II Prayer Garden, which opened in Baltimore last October.

Situated next to a parking ramp, surrounded with a cage-like security fence, and locked up at night, the location prompted Landscape Architecture editor J. William Thompson to wonder back in February: “Who chose this site for the Prayer Garden, anyway?” Thompson points to Matthew 6:6, which calls for keeping prayer to private spaces.

Readers fired back in April’s letters: “What better place to bear witness than a busy street in downtown Baltimore, a city whose street corners are sometimes open-air drug markets or refuges for the homeless?” Catherine Mahan and Scott Rykiel write. (Baltimore landscape architecture firm Mahan Rykiel Associates, Inc. designed the garden.)

“Although the prayer garden in Baltimore may not be conducive to quiet meditation or contemplation, any venue is fitting for prayer,” another reader writes. A reader completing her master’s thesis on designing spiritual spaces emphatically disagrees: “Would I pray in this garden? The answer is NO.”

So, I’ve got to ask (nursery-rhyme style): Mary, Mary, quite contrary / from where does true prayer flow? Would you pray in a public garden? Even next to a parking ramp?

Source: Landscape Architecture 

For many people, yoga is like calisthenics: Do the poses, get your workout, and forget about it until the next class. This approach is flawed, according to Gary Kraftsow, founder of the American Viniyoga Institute. Kraftsow’s approach, Anna Dubrovsky writes for Yoga + Joyful Living, is that “yoga isn’t about getting to know the postures. It’s about getting to know yourself.” 

Rather than forcing people into the same poses, Kraftsow’s style adjusts the yoga to a person’s individual needs. The focus of instruction starts with breathing and chanting, with poses coming in later. Kraftsow calls it Viniyoga, a Sanskrit word referring to “adaptation,” according to Dubrovsky, while others call it “ugly yoga.” 

The low-impact, individualized method of Viniyoga makes it ideally suited for some types of therapy. Kraftsow had a tumor removed from his brain in 2004, and he credits yoga as fundamental in his recovery. He’s also assisted in studies on the benefits of yoga for chronic back pain, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, and generalized anxiety disorder.

Source: Yoga + Joyful Living

The intersection of spirituality and environmentalism is somewhere in Idaho—on a gravel road where a painted turtle is trudging across, making her way from one marsh to another. “My spirits soared,” Rick Bass writes in Shambhala Sun, “at the life-affirming tenacity of her journey, her crossing, as well at this most physical manifestation that indeed the back of winter was broken; for here, exhumed once again by the warm breath of the awakening earth, was the most primitive vertebrate still among us.”

Here’s to that awakening earth, and all the surging, ecstatic feelings it can conjure. For as much time as we might spend talking (and listening, reading, and thinking) about the need to protect the earth, to save our fragile, damaged world: We need to connect with it too. For Bass, it’s all in one: “For me, activism is a form of prayer, a way of paying back some small fraction of the blessing that the wilderness is to me.”

Source: Shambhala Sun

Image by Pvt. Pondscum, licensed under Creative Commons.

In such depressing economic times, the phrase “money can't buy happiness” is at once wishful and trite. But it's worth a shot to at least try to let go of our national money obsession and instead focus on quality of life, isn’t it? That's why Yes! magazine has devoted their entire Winter 2009 issue to “Sustainable Happiness,” the balance between happiness for humans and the planet they inhabit.

Articles include one family’s success with a “no-buy” Christmas and a list of “10 Things Science Says Will Make You Happy” with basic-but-true ideas like “Savor Everyday Moments” and “Avoid Comparisons.”

Image by Sabrina Campagna, licensed under Creative Commons.