Many cultures around the world take a day or few to acknowledge the reality of death. Many people believe that you will always live on as long as someone in the living world remembers you.
Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, is a happy day about celebrating a deceased loved one or ones and remembering them by making bread of the dead, their favorite foods and playing their favorite music. People build altars, ofrendas, in their homes or at the graves and fill them with their deceased loved ones’ favorite things, tissue paper decorations, and sugar skulls.
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What are you going to be for Halloween?
This week, I challenge you to consider the following concepts as they relate to yoga and costumes. 1. You Always Have Choices In a yoga class, we have options. We can stay in Downward Facing Dog, or come down to Child’s Pose if we need to rest. We can lower through Charturanga with our knees up or down. Further, we can reach our arms all the way up to the sky or bring our arms into Cactus if we have tight shoulders in tree or High Lunge. These choices help us to stay present and aware of our bodies. We want to find a place of tension and ease in each pose. We want to challenge ourselves to build a little sweat and see what we are capable of, yet also listen carefully to our body and not lead ourselves to sharp pain or injury. Swami Rama teaches, “You are the architect of your spiritual life. Be brave. The brave alone enjoy the world.” I think she’s down for her afternoon nap. She’s not in any of her usual places, the bed, table, dining chairs, bathroom rug, kitchen tiles. She must be deep in the dark depths of the closet where it is cool and quiet.
Yes!!! I’ll get to practice alone this time! I pull out my yoga mat and press play on my Spotify Playlist. As I adjust myself into Virasana and close my eyes, I bring attention to my breath. Then I flicker my eyes open and Boom! There she is sprawling out on my notes in front of me. She just couldn’t resist an opportunity to do yoga with me. Okay, I compromise, let’s do a seated forward fold together. Preparing to visit Rome in January of 2010, I was flipping through the Italy Guidebook. Suddenly, my gaze was halted as I noticed an image of a foot statue in a sandal, resting on a pedestal. This looks strangely familiar, I thought. I remembered an episode of LOST, that I had recently watched, in which the characters came across a similar statue on the mysterious island with an enormous foot, in a sandal, resting on a pedestal. The creators of LOST must have been inspired by this mysterious piece of art history.
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Hannah Faulkner
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