The Secret Power of Yoga

After reading Yoga Bitch, I thought I might want to read a more serious book on yoga. My local library doesn't have a whole lot of yoga books readily available and so I ended up picking The Secret Power of Yoga: A Woman's Guide to the Heart and Spirit of the Yoga Sutras by Nischala Joy Devi.

The book seemed very accessible to someone who has not read the yoga sutras before. Chapters ended with suggested exercises and meditation guides to reinforce the general message.

What I took away from it was two interesting thoughts. One, the idea that emotions are like weather that goes over our mental landscape, and, like clouds and storms, they will pass on and return in cycles. Two, I have often been taught breathing exercises for my anxiety and usually think about breathing in good energy and breathing out bad energy. Devi encourages complete focus on the positive; that by focusing on releasing negative energy you are giving more power to the negative force in your mind. Instead she suggests both breathing in a positive thought and exhaling positivity out into the world. I found this to be extremely helpful and use it all of the time.

Some of the exercises felt really silly. It's a little hard to explain to your partner why you are staring into a mirror chanting "I am divine" without feeling a bit ridiculous. And all it made me think of was Divine, which I don't think was the intention.

My big issues with the book were that it is clearly, clearly written for upper-middle class women who don't work. The examples were all about how to balance your motherhood and personal space or how to tell a friend that you don't like her dress (Devi says lie about it. Seriously.). None of the examples had to do with what I think of as actual life, at least as I know it. Not one example I can remember had to do with a woman working.

In the end I would not really recommend this book. I'm sure there are better books out there about connecting yoga to your life. Any suggestions?

The First Sex

Alright so, I found this book for a quarter and couldn't really find a reason not to buy it. A 70's feminist book about how women use to run the world written by a librarian  And boobs on the cover? Sign me up.

The First Sex by Elizabeth Gould Davis raised a lot of interesting thoughts, but you could really, really tell you were reading something written in the 1970's. Gould Davis often referred to the "American black" as below white people and seems to be a poster child for the Man-Hating-Feminist. She paints people and society in unbelievably broad strokes, and her message is that women are peaceful and wonderful rulers and men are basically shit-covered animals.

But, if you can get around that with a roll of your eyes and continue, she has more to say. Using a lot of references that I am certain are out-of-date, she posits that well before any record of our history, there was a society of highly evolved people and had already developed sea-faring ships and made scientific advances that would be forgotten from the world until our Galileo came around. This society was peaceful, environmentally friendly, and mostly vegetarian. It was pretty perfect, and all run by women. But those pesky men, dragging their knuckles outside of society came in and ruined everything and has, ever since, been doing his best to punish women for it.

Almost instantly I knew I could not take this book seriously. While I thought was she was saying was an interesting theory, and her reasoning seemed intriguing, I do not think that anything she says stands up on her account. I felt like she didn't fully explain her research a lot, not mentioning dates or just making blanket statements.

"It was brought law and order into a chaotic world by curbing and taming the beast in man and thus making civilization possible.'

The most interesting parts to me where were Gould Davis would get into evolution of the mythology and religion of the world. I was raised reading the Bible and I personally look at it as an interesting book that people wrote to make sense of the time they lived in, so my feelings were not hurt when Gould Davis tells us that Christianity was made up by women-haters. She expands on pagan mythology and how so many things line up with modern Christianity that for me was the best  part of the book.

The overall message I got from this book was that humanity doesn't seem to know even a fraction of anything, even about ourselves. There is so much out there we will never know, such as the mystery behind the Piri Reis map. The map is a very, very accurate coastline of Antarctic  that was copied from older maps. The problem with this is that parts of that coast line were suppose to be buried under ice sheets. How did those people make a map like that?What kind of ruins might be buried under the Antarctica soil? I've never even thought about Antarctica having soil under all of that ice, in my mind it was just one big ice cube and the Fortress of Solitude. Seriously though, it would be fascinating to know what those ruins (if they existed) could tell us. But that is just a small point in this very large book. And I do not really trust Davis Gould as a source on the matter.

If you are interested in reading about feminism's roots, as I clearly am, then read this one just so you can endeavor to never, ever sound like this. If not, then skip it.

Side note - it took me about half-way through the book to realize that the title must have been a response to Simone de Beauvoir's book, The Second Sex.

No thanks

I've been reading a lot of books on how to live more in tune with the earth and how to escape consumerism and saw this book at the library. The thought of living in a 12 by 12 house off the grid seemed just what I wanted to read and I picked it up and dove right in.

Talk abut a major let down. First of all, this guy Powers doesn't live in a 12 by 12 house, he just stays at one  for what seems like a couple of months. The house is owned by a lady who is a doctor yet chooses to take an extremely low salary to avoid taxes going to war and lives in this house full time. I would have loved to read about book about her. Powers doesn't have to worry about any income during this time and never satisfactorily addresses this point to me. Part of getting "beyond the american dream" seems to me to be getting past the debt and obligations that most Americans have accumulated.

I really liked the first few chapters of this book in spite of this, but then I started to really, really dislike Powers' writing style and frankly him. His choice of anecdotes about rural North Carolina seem only to encourage the racism that he claims to be against. He goes on about how much good he does in the world for people (while plugging his other books far too often) and yet doesn't seem to help those around him. His neighbor Jose makes beautiful furniture but is struggling to make ends met and Powers can't buy something as a gift for his mom? He clearly isn't hurting too bad if he can just up and not work for half a year.

While I certainly can stomach new age hippisms, Powers conversations with the gal he is in a "relationship" with made me roll my eyes constantly. He starts their conversations with questions like "What is sin?" or "What is the shape of the world?" and it just seems so pretentious. Then when he leaves the 12 by 12, despite jerking this girl around for half a year he leaves:

"And hour passed with Leah, in silence. We watched the creek's flow, and I knew that there's no greater gift to the world and to others than being true to your deepest self. So many times, out of fear of loneliness or other negative emotions, we form relationships that are good enough, but untrue to our uniqueness. Doing so risks flattening ourselves."

I'm pretty sure if a dude wrote that about me I would track him down and punch him.

And then, three-quarters of the way through the book, he reveals that he has a daughter in another country. Powers goes on and on from this point about how much he loves her and hurts at the distance between them BUT CHOOSES TO LIVE IN ANOTHER COUNTRY. No mention of how he is paying child support during his time at the 12 by 12.

All in all this guy sounds like a pretentious douche. The idea of this book was so interesting to me, but it did not come anywhere near what I wanted to learn. Maybe he does do a lot of good in the world (he certainly talks about doing so) but it is hard to get past the fact that he does so without walking the walk.

This is a problem I have found with a lot of this environmental back to the land memoirs. There is some point in many of them that they just fall flat and do not connect with me. I keep reading them because I want to learn something about how I want to live my life and how to get out from what society tells me, but I have yet to find it.