Voltaire's advice:

"The most important decision we make each day is to be in a good mood."

And Power Yoga instructor, Baron Baptiste says:

"Mediation sets my mood. Usually upon arising, my mind calls me to immediately launch into my day, getting my kids off to school, getting dressed, checking messages, and making calls. At this point in my life, I know that this energetic pattern only contributes to mental chaos. If I've taken no steps toward establishing a change of heart within myself, then it will be no wonder that I'm feeling crazy and disconnected by midday.

"The flip side is that if I set aside twenty to thirty minutes each morning for meditation and prayer and just quietly sit with myself, my experience of life becomes very different, because I'm different. By sitting still my mind is renewed, and I anchor to something in me that can shine a light into my life. So before I do anything else, I've learned to commit to putting first things first. I anchor to myself. I make the connection to conscience, putting on my spiritual armor before I head off into my day. Before I even take a step outside my door, I set myself right." - from "40 Days to Personal Transformation"

For me, like Gabrielle Roth, I find that 'mine is a dancing path'. Once I appease my internal demons with movement, they will sit still. My little demons are hyper-active five-year-olds. I've been watching videos of Gabrielle Roth's 5Rhythms, and noting the parallels with not only Saul David Raye's style of teaching that I follow now, but with my own background in modern dance: Isadora Duncan and Martha Graham, and my dance teacher at G.P.S. - Peggy Thomas, who studied with Martha Graham. I love to dance!!!!!!! It makes me smile. It sets my mood to...

Albinoni's Adagio and 'Shopping Cart Rage'..

My day started out way better than it ended, yesterday. I'd finished "The Cellist of Sarajevo" and had a release of something terribly painful, to then find a great silence and deep peace. I went to Kim's class at D's Yoga Home, and she opened my heart and shoulders a little deeper for me, the way Keith has been doing the same thing for me in his classes. I was happy. Peaceful. Calm. I felt blessed to be alive and live in this country, where people aren't living under war or war-like conditions. And then I went grocery shopping. Something, an intuition, said inside for me to do it later, but I went anyway. Toward the end of moving through the aisles, this tall, angry African-American woman with a nasty scowl on her face looked at me so hatefully as she said "Excuse me," but pushed her cart into me on purpose. There were several people blocking the way in front of me, and rather than choose to wait patiently, as I was doing, she took out her aggression and selfishness on me. She said she didn't have all day and had to get back to work.

Finally someone ahead of us moved, just as I told her that I was waiting too. She then proceeded to ram her cart over my heels three times. I couldn't move any faster because there were people ahead of me. I told her she was running over my heels, and she responded: "Well good!!! Maybe that will make you move faster!!!!!!!" She behaved like a slave-driver, and I can't help thinking that not only was she in a hurry, but that she simply hated me because I was white. Inside I was like, "Oh my God! She's a bigot AND a slave-driver!"

I told her that she needed to change her attitude, and that she was being very rude. Other people stared. I wonder how many saw what she did, or heard what she said; but, no one stood up for what was right except me. It was demeaning to be treated that way... I felt alone, very small, and I felt dehumanized by her hatred. And then I took on her anger and carried it with me for the rest of the day, just like the people in the book I was reading began to hate their oppressors. I hated her for treating me like an animal, and practically cracking her whip. The rest of the day I hated her. I am still trying to let it go...and wonder if listening to 'Albinoni's Adagio' will help?

After all, music does effect change, and it affects emotional endurance. I'd definitely never be able to do Bound Lotus for 31 minutes a day without listening to the Ray Man Shabd. Nor the meditation I do to "Aadays Tisai Aadays".

Today Bound Lotus was ver hard to hold. And it wasn't just because of the anger - which does adversely affect the ease with which I can hold it - but also because my chiropractor and physical therapist are putting my spine back together again after losing some of the benefits of their work while I was gone to Florida. The therapist taught me exercises to open the shoulders, which are not like anything I've ever done, and to help realign my scapulae. It is interesting that the very exercise Mahan Kirn told me that I should do for 40 days also has the same effect of adjusting the placement of the scapulae. It opens not only the heart, but the lungs! And it, in essence, repairs my broken wing. My right scapula wings out like a broken wing. It has for years....I thought my wing would be broken forever. So long stardust!

Finishing "The Cellist of Sarajevo"

What was it Jesus said about how it doesn't merit a man to gain the whole world if he loses his soul? I never understood that, really, until I read this book. The characters who hear the cellist's music are transformed. It gives them endurance and energy to do the right thing: to not hate others when they try to project their hatred onto you. I've heard some special pieces of music in my life, and the piece the cellist played is called "Albinoni's Adagio", and it is truly beautiful! From 1945 to 1957, an Italian musicologist worked to try to recreate 17th century Venetian composer, Tomaso Albinoni's Adagio, from the four bars of the sonata's baseline that he found in the remnants of the firebombed Dresden Music Library. Though it is not the original piece, it is extraordinarily beautiful!

As author Steven Galloway writes: " That something could be almost erased from existence in the landscape of a ruined city, and then rebuilt until it is new and worthwhile, gives him hope."

The city is besieged, as my soul was besieged by one man's efforts to destroy it, purely, in this case, for the fun of doing it. That man always wanted me to write about him, and I will, but I will do it in my way, telling the truth, where his story intersects with mine. I have no need to mention his name, and cause slander. On the contrary, if he chooses not to disconnect his name from mine, he will reveal himself. I won't have need of that.

So this entry is about recreating something beautiful out of something terribly damaged. Otherwise titled: "Difficult people are your greatest teachers."

Some people make it really hard to love them, but who wants easy when you're looking for spiritual growth? Growing always takes effort. It is just so painful to realize that when you want to give up on someone you are also, in effect, giving up on yourself. Take one of my bosses for instance. She reminds me of me on both my worst and best days. I'd like to think that my bad days of being testy, touchy and unable to hear what people are truly saying, or responding kindly to people are in the past. They aren't. It is just that those days are fewer in number, whereas for this particular boss, it is every other day. Truly being around her is like walking on hot coals.

People used to say that about me. I hope it isn't true anymore. I may vent, or pour things out on paper, here on my blog, or too trusted loved ones, but I hope the people in my life don't perceive me as having several personalities - a few of them quite mean and very passive/aggressive - as this boss seems to. The hard part, is everyone eventually abandons her, and no one wants to tell her. But every time I want to walk away, I see myself distinctly in her shoes. How much can I take of her behavior, when increasingly, the damage she does emotionally and professionally doesn't get outweighed by her good days?

Seems not too long ago, people were kind enough, and willing to risk enough to tell me I needed to change or else I'd continue to be a very lonely person. Many people just gave up on me. They'd say: "She's 35. She'll never change." At 42, I'd like to think I have. I have a LOT farther to go...

Mozart's Piano Concerto in G Major

Yes. I did Bound Lotus today, and I do have more to say...

I've listened to the Ray Man Shabd. I've listened to Jacqueline du Pre's playing of Camille Saint-Saens "The Swan", and "Albinoni's Adagio". I think of Krystof Kozlowski's movie "Blue", from the Three Colors Trilogy. The flute player playing the remnant lines of a grieving woman's husband's piano composition on the street outside her window, and how it heals her soul. The movie was made around the time of the Siege of Sarajevo. The movie is a favorite of mine, and is deeply uplifting IF you watch it all the way through, and pay attention. IF.

Music can heal deep wounds. It can inspire, in a way that spoken language, and even comforting words cannot. This is what the cellist of Sarajevo was doing:

"When Kenan was told of what the cellist was doing, he didn't say anything but thought it was a bit silly, a bit maudlin. What could the man possibly hope to accomplish by playing music in the street? It wouldn't bring anyone back from the dead, wouldn't feed anyone, wouldn't replace one brick. It was a foolish gesture, he thought, a pointless exercise in futility.

"None of this matters to Kenan anymore. He stares at the cellist, and feels himself relax as the music seeps into him. He watches as the cellist's hair smoothes itself out, his beard disappears. A dirty tuxedo becomes clean, shoes polished bright as mirrors. Kenan hasn't heard the cellist's tune before, but he knows it anyway, its notes familiar and full of pride, a young boy in a new coat holding his father's hand as he walks down a winter street.

"The building behind the cellist repairs itself. The scars of bullets and shrapnel are covered by plaster and paint, and windows reassemble, clarify, and sparkle as the sun reflects off glass. The cobblestones of the road set themselves straight. Around him people stand up taller, their faces put on weight and color. Clothes gain lost thread, brighten, smooth out their wrinkles.

"Kenan watches as his city heals itself around him. The cellist continues to play, and Kenan knows what he will do now. He will walk up the street to his apartment. He'll take the stairs two at a time, not even breathing fast, and throw open his door. Amila will be surprised to see him, and he'll grab her and kiss her, like he used to do when they were much younger. He'll run his fingers through her hair, thick and the color of honey." (pps 186-187)

There is, as Temple Grandin states in "Animals in Translation", a connection between music and language. Music is a way of communicating beyond what language can say...the naad, the sound current, is universal. It is a universal language. The aborigines believe the universe was sung into being. In C.S. Lewis' "The Narnia Stories", Aslan the lion sings the world into being. Even in Winter, I hear the birds singing from my rooftop in the early morning, and I smile. Birds, speaking in the language of music, sing each day into being.

Maybe animals know more about how to be 'human' than we do.

In her chapter on 'How Animals Think', Temple Grandin reflects:

"Animals are the originators of music and the true instructors. Humans probably learned music from animals, most likely from birds. More evidence that humans copied music from birds, rather than reinventing it for themselves: only 11 percent of all primate species sing songs.

"Mozart was definitely influenced by birdsong. He owned a pet starling, and in his notebooks he recorded a passage from the Piano Concerto in G Major as he had written it, and as his pet starling had revised it. The bird had changed the sharps to flats. Mozart wrote, "That was beautiful" next to the starling's version. When his starling died, Mozart sang hymns beside it's grave and read a poem he had written for the bird. His next composition, "A Musical Joke," has a starling style. If a musical genius like Mozart admired and learned from a bird, it seems extremely likely early humans learned from birds when they were inventing the first human music.

"...Birds compose songs that use the same variation in rhythms and pitch relationships as human musicians, and can also transpose their songs into a different musical key. Birds use accelerandos, crescendos, and diminuendos, as well as many of the same scales composers use all over the world.

"...Ordinary song sparrows compose and sing sonatas," she says.

"Luis Baptista, curator and chairman of the Department of Ornithology and Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences until his death in 2002, has a tape of a white-breasted wood wren in Mexico singing the exact opening notes of Beethoven's Fifth." (pps 278-279)

Music is created through intelligence, but has the capacity to transcend the limitations of intelligence and move us into our hearts and out of our heads. While I struggle through winter, I find myself deciding not to be angry with the birds left in St. Louis for pooping on my car, and to smile when I hear them sing. Their voices foresee the coming of Spring, and are part of what gives me hope that I will finish 90 days of Bound Lotus, and the 40 days to process White Tantric. On Groundhog's Day, will there be another six weeks filled with sounds heal my soul?

Slowly letting go of Hatred and Fear

Last night, along with Bound Lotus and the Moon Kriya, I did all of the meditations we'd done in the Sat Nam Rasayan sequence with Mahan Kirn Kaur at Solstice. I also did a meditation to "Aadays Tisai Aadays" for releasing fear and balancing the emotions, one to "Aakan Jor" for releasing fear as well, and a short for creating security and balance. I felt like a million bucks!

Today, teaching class, I felt myself lose the flow, and dip into anxiety several times, but each time the balance came back. In the past, if I slipped into anxiety, it would be more like falling headlong with no way back up. Today, I was blown away by how much I could see happening with my students. I used to flounder around in anxiety about how to best assist someone, and I just seemed today to intuit where I needed to be to be of help. With a student's headstand, I knew instinctively when I could move my arms and place a hand above their feet to press into... This is mind-blowing! It is like someone other than the person I know as Phoenix is teaching the class.

At home, reading "Dibs in Search of Self" again, I find this:

"Dibs was certainly on his way but I wouldn't say that he had found hmself yet. He still had a way to go. His search for self was a tedious, troubled experience that brought him increasing awareness of his feelings and attitudes and relationships with those around him. There were no doubt many feelings that Dibs had not dug out of his past and flung out in his play to know and understand and control better. I hoped that he would find experiences in the playroom that would help him know and feel the emotions within him in such a way that any hatred and fear he might have within him would be brought out in the open and diminished."

I'd say the 'hatred part' is getting addressed too...

It is hard being different. It is hard being treated as crazy and sometimes stupid just because you are high-anxiety and have poor social skills, as well as major difficulty functioning in the average person's world because it feels so strange. It is, again, interesting that doing Bound Lotus eases my anxiety in ways that other postures, and other things do not. I feel like the discovery of so much about myself being in keeping with what is true about the world for those with Asperger's is tremendously calming. I think of that movie from the 70s: "Return to Witch Mountain", and I feel like the kids who are from another planet. People have made fun of me for years, saying I'm lost in my own little world, but I think, like most autistics, high and low functioning, my world is so much more rich with detail, that it is overwhelming. I think I've resorted to talking so much as a way to 'filter' what comes through, so it doesn't overwhelm me. Language is definitely a filter.

In Temple Grandin's book "Animals in Translation", the section entiltled 'Words Get in the Way', explains much, for my world was visually richer in both color and visual detail when I was a child who barely spoke, and also the year recently where I kept mostly silent, and spoke to very few people. What Temple has to say I think is very important. Very relevant.

"Research shows that language suppresses visual memory. This is called 'verbal overshadowing' and is a well-established phenomenon..."

Temple explains that a group of test subjects were required to view a videotape of a bank robbery, and then some participants were asked to write descriptions of the bank robber, while others did not. Fewer people who wrote verbal descriptions could pick out the robber in a photograph. But that isn't all!

"These studies have also found that language doesn't erase visual memories for good; it just suppresses them. When the researchers asked the people who wrote descriptions to do something nonverbal for a while, like work a puzzle or listen to music, their visual memories came back, and they could identify the bank robber's face as well as the people who hadn't written descriptions in the first place.

"I think for normal people language is probably a kind of filter. One of the biggest challenges for an animal or an autistic person is dealing with the barrage of details from the environment. Normal people with language don't have to see all those details consciously. But I see them, and animals do too."

During some months in 2007 when I spoke and interracted very little with people, but walked in the park and listened to the birds alot, I saw the most glorious detail in insects, leaves and flowers. A rich tapestry of color, detail sharperthan HDTV, dragonflies like stained-glass and exquisite filigree, birds singing absolutely beautiful compositions with melodies, trills and baselines from other birds. But also, sirens were excruciatingly loud, and I felt the pain of people in their voices and expressions. I literally cried with the trees in the park when some of them had to be cut down because of an ice storm. The birds, I swear, were singing dirges.

Phoenix Dan Cong oolong tea? Lei Zu?

The spiritual name I chose for myself: Phoenix Amira Lei, produces some interesting results upon googling. One is a female Hip-Hop vocalist in Raleigh, NC, and another is a website: www.tea-obsession.blogspot.com, which appears because of a post about a Chinese tribe called the Lei Zu, who lived on Phoenix mountain, and cultivated Phoenix Dan Cong oolong tea, a favorite of many dynastys, and also of this blogger and traditional Chinese tea shop owner in Los Angeles. Apparently, also, the Lei originally lived in Eastern Guang Dong province (where Phoenix mountain is located), but moved to the Fujian province after an earthquake during the Sui caused forest fires to destroy almost everything except maybe the top of Phoenix mountain.

Now, I'm not Chinese, but I learned to cook traditional Chinese food from the wife of my accupuncturist in Chicago, who helped me while recovering from mono, strep, and a debilitating bout of CFS in 2001- 2002. Quin Deng, as her name was then, allowed me to stay in her home, and fed me delicious green-onion pancakes with honey and oranges, rice soup, rice balls with veal, bitter melon, stir-fried eggplant and many dishes with tofu. Asian pears cooked with honey were also on the menu. Quin left to go back to Beijing one day and never came back. She didn't say so, but I knew she was leaving for good, and I refused to say goodbye. I've regretted it ever since. Her ex-husband sent me a letter less than a year ago, but I've never responded. I should have. I miss Quinn and her wonderful food, and have always felt a strong connection to China, as well as Japan and India.

I've spent most of my life denying my emotions, particularly grief, anger and sadness. I keep feeling drawn to do a Kundalini meditation for Emotional Balance, but am still doing this darned Moon Kriya, until Groundhog's Day, my mother's birthday. Maybe I'll start this other one then, also after 90 days of Bound?

Playing the Cello...

No, seriously, I don't, but I wish I did.

Anyway, I was thinking of Jaqueline du Pre and her version of "The Swan" that I heard in the movie:"My Summer of Love" several years ago. The idea for a home movie called "My Winter Solstice of Love" just popped into my head, and I think that pretty much expresses the sad state of affairs surrounding my mental constructs. In other breaking news, I ate lots of chocolate. And marzipan. I'm squirreling away oranges, which I love too, and worried about the Frozen Floridian Iguanas.

Some guy apparently went around collecting frozen iguanas and putting them in the back of his car, until they sprung to life from the warm air, like little gremlins and crawled on his back. This amazingly did not cause a traffic accident. What do iguanas have to do with Bound Lotus? Everything! I feel like a frozen iguana today. There is no temperature outside! It's zero. I've been looking at penguin videos. They are so graceful in the water...so goofy on land.

So, I have to ask, would Bound Lotus be easier under water? I mean I am deathly afraid of water, so I'm not planning on pulling a Houdini at the Y, but...just curious. Like Alice. Speaking of Alice, I feel like 'Alice in KundaliniYogaLand'. Know what Red Queen said besides "Off with her head!?" She said: "I always like to do six impossible things before breakfast!"

Here's my list -

(1) Full Bound Lotus
(2) Stand outside in a bikini doing Tumo
(3) Lick orange marmalade off of Jimmy Page's thumb
(4) Read "The Cellist of Sarajevo" in it's entirety [this could be done if I put off breakfast until midnight]
(5) Bend spoons with my mind
(6) Forgive the man who took my name, tried to destroy me, and stalked me...

This is hard. The layers of hatred run deep. I think I've found the last, and there lies another like a gaping, festering wound

Maybe the Sikh name fits: Victory of Saints, but do I have to be a saint to forgive this man? No. I don't even have to be saintly. I just have to let it go and dwell deeply in my humanity and love of life. I think of the way he told me that art was a useless frivolity, to just focus on surviving. He's wrong. Without creativity nothing lives. I think of the way he snickered at the words engraved above the back entrance to the St. Louis Art Museum: 'Art still has meaning. Take refuge here.'

Music heals the soul. Poetry. Literature. The Ray Man soothes my grief. Jacqueline du Pre soothes my soul. "Invictus", the movie and the poem, soothe my soul. "Grave of Fireflies" soothes me. "The Cellist of Sarajevo" soothes. The young sniper, Arrow, assigned to protect the Cellist, has taken a new name to give her courage for the task at hand, and to keep her precious true identity safe from harm, or so she thinks. But in doing so, she dissasociates from herself in a way.

It is so important to not lose one's soul, one's humanity. Three passages in the book have wrenched me from complacency over the grief and unresolved rage I am reexperiencing in the wake of White Tantric, also hearing the words of Yogi Bhajan, that those who dwell in the past have no future. And yet, like Inanna in the Sumerian myth, and like Dragan in the book, I must go back to heal the lost parts of my soul. In the book about Sarajevo and the Cellist playing Albinoni's Adagio I see:

"Although she has nearly completely lost sight of the person she was, she still knows who she wants to be, and as far as she can see, the only path leading her to this person is back through her former self."

I've grown and changed and healed so much before I ever took White Tantric, and I'm tired. I want to rest. But the forces of entropy don't stop. To certain people, if I give up, I'm an example to others who struggle that it might be too hard. Too hard to learn to love those who have caused unbearable pain. And here the book's words come again, reiterating the point:

"And he suspects this is what the men on the hill want most. They would, of course, like to kill them all, but if they can't, they would like to make them forget how they used to be, how civilized people act."

The Cellist of Sarajevo played for 22 days, on the site of the spot where a mortar shell killed 22 people waiting in line for bread. One day devoted the honoring of each person's life that passed. I feel as if the following words are just like Yogi Bhajan saying that when anyone holds a posture such as Bound Lotus for any length of time, the Universe will come to help that person. I feel that one of the things this pose is accomplishing, and that White Tantric has done is removing the crippling and numbing fear of having been under someone's thumb for so long, afraid to use my name, afraid to breathe, afraid to live:

"Nermin is looking at her.
'We need you to keep this man alive,' he says.
'I don't understand.' She's barely heard what he said and struggles to bring herself back into her situation.
"Nermin removes his hat and wipes his sleeve across his brow. 'He has said that he will do this for twenty-two days. This is his eighth. People see him. The world has seen him. We cannot allow him to be killed."

Today is Day 67 of Bound Lotus. Tomorrow is Day 68. Then 22 more days before I reach the 90-day milestone to create a new habit. I've never done this before...coincidence that I pick up this book today and it inspires me? I won't allow the inspiration to die. I'll make it to 90, and then 1,000. I feel it in my bones, along with the pain.