More yoga

I mean it about the yoga, that's ALL I want to be doing. I feel like I'm pulling my psychospiritual programming fibers out by the roots and re-planting them where they should have been all along, where, I can barely remember, they USED to be.

To waste time, which I have too much of, I have just been reading political blogs. This will upset most, probably all, of my friends, but such things don't make me angry any more. Why don't they make me angry? Well--

1) I'm just too tired. Anger is painful, destabilizing, makes you feel powerful in the short run but in the long run it makes you helpless, knawing yourself up from the inside.

2) it becomes increasingly clear to me, the more I live on this planet, that everybody involved in any conflict is responding, not just to the situation at hand, but to acres and acres of their own personal baggage. Lesson 7, A Course in Miracles: "I see only the past." Shit, yeah.

3) Getting angry over someone's dumb comments in a blog give that person, with all of her blindness, weakness, confusion and misplaced anger, power over you. Getting angry over something strengthens that thing; it acknowledges and reinforces notions of power and helplessness. There's no such thing as bad publicity.

I don't get involved (much) in politics because I no longer believe the problem is Out There. What's Out There is a projection of my own mind. It makes no sense to fuss with it, lash out at it, manipulate, plot and construct it. It's Not There. Manipulating external events is like trying to change the plot of a movie by swatting at the space in front of the screen while it's playing. The source of the movie, the projector, is the MIND. Change your mind, change the movie. Or even leave the theatre.

One of the younger yoga teachers at the studio has been going on and on about karma, and planting seeds of good thoughts, and helping others. She thinks we're being 'resistant' to the notion; my suspicion is that we're being polite. I, at least, refrained from telling her, "Thanks, I've thought about this already, like, more or less continuously for the last 20 years or so, since you were in elementary school." She's a sweetie really, and her class kicks my butt, enough so that I will tolerate being patronized.

Just at the moment I don't want to get into a discussion with her about what it MEANS to 'help others.' Just at the moment it seems clear to me that I will never help others properly or effectively until I radically help myself. Just at the moment I need to let go of both past and future, and this is easier to do while trying to align my hips while bent double in a lunge and twisting to one side, sweating profusely.