Author: Lia Yaranon Hall

Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
Forcing a project to completion, you ruin what was almost ripe.
Therefore the Master takes action by letting things take their course.
Lao Tzu

This is what we are referring to when talking about a breath-centered yoga practice. Often a yoga instructor’s cadence becomes, “inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale…” until it becomes ambient sound and our ears habituate as we no longer pay attention. And at any given point you will hear the instruction: “coordinate the movement with the breath.”
Yadi yadi. Yada yada.
It’s plenty easy for your mind to convince you and your body to do a lot of things. The converse is true too– you may convince yourself that you have no control and you are possessed by your body by addiction or greed or whatever other deadly sin you might think up. These two things are true (and not just because I’m trying to promote the concept of non-duality either).

Try this: cat/cow vinyasa
inhale, cow
exhale, cat

Fair enough. Now breathe normally. Let the cow happen as the breath comes. As though the transition is in fact a function of the breathing mechanism. It is.

We are being breathed. The atmospheric pressure outside of the lungs and the pressure within the lungs is what causes the diaphragm to move up and down. Respiration is an autonomic function. You do it while you sleep.

And cat comes because you exhale. Bring your mind into your breath. The song is the breath and your movement is the dance. Freedom within choreography. Moving and breathing in a yoga practice is a celebration of being alive and capable–
bringing your mind into your experience
and being there
with yourself
the whole time
to witness,
to act,
and give thanks
just for that.

Now, try this:cat/cow vinyasa
(do this simultaneously)
inhale=cow
exhale = cat
(let the postures and transitions become synonymous with the word “breathe”)

The movement is fluid and the breath is like a river…always flowing…. Sometimes it settles
as in a lake
and the breath suspends
and the mind stops.

If we try to force our bodies to do things without first giving ourselves space to breathe, we will never be able to live in a place of ease and stability. If we fight against the currents around us, we end up defeating ourselves. If we try to hold on to all of our possessions, they will possess us. If we strain, we restrain. If we take shortcuts, we don’t understand where we are.

Practicing restraint in yoga is not about denial, it is about transformation. There is no need to bottle up. To be frozen in our emotion. Become a Master by moving with the energies that nourish you. Support yourself without gripping. Trust yourself. Use self-authority by receiving guidance from all that you are and can be. Pain and pleasure follow the same rules of nature–they each will come and go. Inhale. Exhale. Birth. Death. And the spaces in between. Before and after. Let’s take more time and find more space and live a little now and then.

Thanks to individuals with video cameras, like this tourist in Times Square last summer, we can bear witness to the world.

You don’t even have to be on a bike in NYC to see this kind of unrighteousness. I was shocked when I first moved here, but now I know that you ALWAYS have to advocate for yourself. One cop stopped me on Houston for no reason. He just saw me on a bike and wanted to ask me where I was going. I felt like he was going to ask me out on a date. Another common thing I’ve witnessed constantly: cops spittin’ game to flirty girls.

I also have a summons now for riding about 10 ft on the sidewalk in front of my apartment. I live on a busy one way, but the cops still suggested that instead of riding on the sidewalk, I should ride against traffic. Yeah. What’s more baffling is that there were about four of them posted right there in front of the bodega, “on patrol,” and I’m thinking, “YO, you’re across the street from Marcy Projects and you don’t have anything better to do than to give me a petty summons for cruisin on an empty sidewalk? I guarantee someone’s there’s a carjack happening right now.” Sure enough, one week later my neighbor is jumped and beat down near Myrtle-Willoughby by 6 guys, knocked out for nearly half an hour, bleeding internally, while they walk right in to my building and steal all their valuables right across the hall. Where were you then Mr. Officer? I know–mere chance, indeed. But when the kid finally came to take the report, my confidence in his competence rapidly deflated.

Most of the cops that I’ve seen (like those directing traffic) hate their job so much that you can clearly see an emotional recklessness unleashed in their gestures and yelling throughout the day. Many of them are just kids, yet they don’t have to be in order to show their insecurities. They are no different from your average worn unstable and aggravated New Yorker, they just tend to have a more destructive outlet of power when they put on their cowboy costumes.

The point is not to arbitrarily hate on cops or just anyone of authority. Rather, it is to require accountability of injustice. I believe there are people in power with integrity, self-control, and a decent set of ethics. Even though we can answer “Obama” to every drama as much as we like, we know that it is our responsibility to advocate for ourselves and each other. We are all we’ve got. And you don’t need to pick up a gun to start a revolution. The only piece you need is your voice. You’ve heard before that “your word is your weapon.” But your every action is your affirmation. Let it be known.

In the city of Fabiola, the armature alternately dissolves and integrates. Its light evaporates as a rope soaks up kerosene to burn within the lamp’s bulbous chimney glass. It brightens with the food of more rope.

The sky is a blueprint that dangles contrails. They seamlessly disintegrate into the solid blue that masks the stars. The funeral pyres remain for mulch. No cars run off the pipeline. Can’t you see? Not through the particulate matter, like that which covers the nightness.

In this particular matter, in the township of Fabs, light switches remain a mystery–dissociated from their antiquated uses. Historians and archaeologists sit around the conversation pit; drinking hot clover madhu; playing with “Scrabble” tiles on a “Monopoly” board. None of the original intentions or rules that govern, like that of the light switch, were retained, recorded, or deciphered. The principal spirit or goal, however, has been preserved: to play a game. As long as these professionals have something on the table with which they could occupy their eyes and many dexterous fingers while employing the muscles attached to their fine lips, then they could keep the criticism of outsiders at bay for a time. After all, there are no other inhabitants of Fabiola, who express any expertise on the origins of monopoly, much less the meaning of scrabble letters with numbers on them. Some have a faint notion that they might pertain to something called the “Periodic Table.” But periods, whether related to time and punctuation, or elements and chemistry, are generally beyond the concerns of common folk. They would rather enforce their faith that the conversation pit figures are engaged in crafting important plans for Fabiola’s future. Perhaps literacy and cultivation practices will be taught or ways to detect mines in the “no-colonization field.”

Fabiola is rich. She lacks a lot of the elements typical to a traditional city. Most notably, she lacks hatred. Her inhabitants know neither the meaning of this word, nor the implications it has in alternate dimensions. For the reader, examples might include: rape, diseased blankets, starvation of nutrients, decimation of species, and ego hunger. Due to the absence of hate, there is also little comprehension of fear. Many outsiders might accuse this township to be of little consequence–accomplishing nothing. On the contrary, they manage to maintain healthy levels of body heat, fat, and water.
They survive on little food and darkness. Their chief nutrients hail from clean air and stillness. They use and revere their legs so highly that artisans sculpted and dedicated public sites to pieces of substantial and muscularly articulated columns of legs. One popular site is located at the center of the town square where the townsfolk surround the celebrated appendages and dance before sunrise every morning. Then they stretch out on the cobblestones to roll around massaging their fleshy and fabulously-used proteins. Shortly after, they soak their feet in a nearby stream and gaze at the continuous morphing of their faces reflected. The deeper they peer, the more rocks appear and the sense of cold and wet passes and charges the electricity of their skins. Thus, forgetting all about their limbs.