I read Julia Child's My Life in France

After reading Foer's latest "Eating Animals" for some reason, I was drawn to reading a book that was about just that: eating animals. Julia Child's book "My Life in France" kind of jumped up and opened up in my hands while I was housesitting last month.

It is kind of a bizarre shift to go from reading books that inspire one to drop all animal products from the diet to another book that almost heralds eating animals and butter and dairy and animals stuffed inside of other animals coated with butter and basted in milk (and sometimes stewed in blood) and then (obviously) topped off with cheese. But Foer's book about the atrocities of the meat industry definitely gave me a new lens to view Child's book with.

And here's the thing...I really like Julia Child. I think if we were kicking it in France, we'd probably become good friends and I'd tell how great it is to be a lesbian and she'd cook me some food and we'd be pen pals for life. I really got behind her when she wrote:

"This is the kind of food I had fallen in love with. Not trendy, souped up fantasies, just something very good to eat. It was classic French cooking, where the ingredients have been carefully selected and beautifully and knowingly prepared. Or...'food that tastes of what it is'"

I think that Foer and Child could agree on this point. Food should taste of what it is.

I struggled with vegan "alternatives" (fake cheese, fake meat, processed soy...) and whether they were really better for me than the "natural" choices available...until I read Foer's book and realized how processed most animals actually are. Factory farmed chickens do not taste like "chicken" - a lot of that flavour has to get added in after the chicken is killed in order to keep the people eating it happy. It's actually quite weird and twisted and very far from this idea of "good" food. I wonder if we just let factory farmed chickens taste of what they actually were (ie; gross), how soon it would take people to revolt and demand a change.

Truth be told, I love food. I love cooking, I love trying fancy new recipies, I love watching my friends' faces when they eat something I made that tastes incredible (and then I love telling them it's vegan...that's my favourite). I also have this weird desire to always "do the right thing" (thank mom?) - so once you are armed with knowledge about the meat industry, it's hard to look back. This being said, I think if Julia Child were my peer, she'd be one kick ass, dynamite vegan chef! It blows my mind how incredible vegan food can taste and makes me wonder how we are still so married to our traditions of meat and dairy.

I think there is something of a revolution in the works and it's pretty exciting to see it starting.

The Bad Guys

My partner and I should have gone to bed last night, but instead we were sitting around the kitchen table and talking about her job. We were talking about something in regards to "snitching" - apparently this is a bit of an issue with the population that she works with and in particular understanding that sometimes it is actually GOOD to tell an authority figure about what is up and when someone may be in danger.

Anyway, this went around and around until finally we came to an important realization: we have to learn how to see the world in non-absolutes, in non black and white dichotomies.

And then I thought about the movie Crash (we just re-watched it the other day...go watch it if you haven't done so already).

Watch This Scene (to set it up, you have to know that the woman in the car crash was sexually harassed / molested a few days earlier by the cop who tries to save her)

The entire movie plays off this theme of there being no such thing as "a bad guy": the police are good and they are bad, the people who are heros do some terrible things, the people who you think are bad are really pretty decent, and all of us are suffering incredibly at the end of the day.

Usually when I think of themes for my yoga practice, I start with the small picture (what happens to me on my mat) and then zoom out to think about how this is true in my everyday life. But this kind of worked the other way around...I started to notice how easy it is to see my left or right side as the "bad" side, or how this one pose is "the devil pose" or how much I wish this pose would just disappear because clearly it was the span of satan (not naming any names).

All of the stuff that comes up in our practice is neither good nor is it bad, it just IS...we decide to put those labels on and thus frame our experience with the poses, our teachers, the person practicing next to us, our family, the police, our worlds...and consequently, we might be missing out on something because we have already decided what something is. And like in the movie, Crash, that something might just save your life...

On discipline and Einstein

While practicing, I am often thinking of the Pattabhi Jois quote: "Yoga is 99% practice and 1% theory". I like to remember this when I think that my legs are too long to properly do bhujapindasana or a decent jump through and then I remember that those people who actually have a strong, clear, and clean practice, had to work on it to get it.

And then sometimes I get a little self-congratulatory while in practice (inner monologue goes something like: Yes! I AM awesome! Look at me practicing. Pattabhi would be so so so proud of me. It doesn't matter if I suck at this pose, and that pose, and the one after that, I am freaking PRACTICING!"). And while I totally can sympathize with this expression of my own ego, I think I also have to remember that sometimes I stop "practicing" in a pose.

I'll be doing bhujapindasana, and always give up when my toes graze the floor and think to myself "well, that's all I can do today, whatever, it's over...NEXT POSE!" and quickly stop trying to "practice" getting the asana.

Practicing is as much about coming onto your mat everyday as it is being PRESENT on your mat everyday and actually trying to improve yourself, rather than just show up.

I think Albert E. would make a great yoga student. I think he kind of gets things about life that take a lot of us a long time to figure out. I love this quote...Einstein said "It's not that I'm so smart, I just stay with problems longer". 

So maybe having a strong practice is not about having a super bendy or super-human strength, but just having the willingness to stick with problems that come up a little longer.