PEOPLE ARE OFTEN SHOCKED when I tell them about my daily meditation practice: I sit on the couch and meditate while the coffee is brewing. If you’re not on a hard bench with a completely clear mind sitting rod straight for three hours at a time with discipline, they assume, it must not be meditation.
Women often struggle with feeling like they are not enough: not thin enough, not pretty enough, not a good enough mother. How could we be good enough at meditating if we’re not suffering for it on some level?
If yoga and meditation are spiritual, they must be outside of the realms of gender, class, race, and so on, right? Religions all over the world tend to preach equality and love for all beings. In practice, however, religious institutions generally award certain men with a lot of power. It’s very difficult to separate spiritual ideals from the norms, values, and realities of the cultures they came from.
Yoga and its associated practices originated in India, where the discriminatory caste system, which separates groups of people into specific hierarchies, has existed for centuries (and still exists to an extent today). The Hindu pantheon is filled with powerful, independent female deities, but in reality, women in India have less power, and less privilege, and are sometimes badly abused in deeply gendered ways. Despite the beauty and compassion of any religion, the way human beings interpret spiritual ideals has historically been, to put it mildly, imperfect.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July/August 2020-Ausgabe von Spirituality & Health.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der July/August 2020-Ausgabe von Spirituality & Health.
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ONE WORD TO BEAT WINTER BLUES: BIOMIMICRY
CREATURELY REFLECTIONS
THINKING ABOUT RESTITUTION
THE HEART OF HAPPINESS
WAITING IN LINE
OUR WALK IN THE WORLD
ENTER THE SAUNA
Journalist Emily O’Kelly shares some uplifting research on the benefits of sweat bathing, a global healing practice not just limited to Northern climes.
the trail of ATONEMENT
One Ashkenazi Jewish family escaped pogroms in Russia and then flourished in South Dakota, but the “free land” of their new homestead had been unfairly taken from the Lakota by the United States. Generations later, a celebrated investigative journalist set out to tell the truth of the Lakota and her family, calculate The Cost of Free Land—and pay it back.
STALKING YOUR Mind
Stalking the Mind is part of an ancient Indigenous American Medicine Way to tame your guilt, fears, and shame. What we’re “stalking” are our thought patterns and beliefs that seem to create the opposite of happiness and wellbeing. It’s a powerful psychotherapeutic journey of healing without the diagnosis or labels.
LEAVING MESA VERDE
After 21 years of service at Mesa Verde National Park, RANGER DAVID FRANKS recently guided his last tour of the pueblos and cliff dwellings. He says he was fortunate to assist the archeologists with a variety of work and never lost his amazement with their ability to figure out how and when things happened. The question he still wrestles with is much deeper: Why they left?
BECOMING YOUR OWN LEAD RESEARCHER IN HEALTHCARE
PEGGY LA CERRA, PHD, downloaded a health app to aggregate her medical records and was stunned to see the phrase \"aortic atherosclerosis.\" What she did next is a helpful model for all of us.
ARCHETYPAL ASTROLOGY
\"Is astrology true?\" is the wrong question, writes RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO. He suggests that the truth is out there, but out there is really in here.
WELLNESS IN THE WILD
Spa aficionado MARY BEMIS takes the [cold] plunge at Mohonk Mountain House.