“Don’t force yourself to get rid of a bad habit. Forcing yourself is something like beating the darkness with sticks. You can walk into a totally dark room with some friends and begin beating the darkness with sticks shouting at it to leave. Hundreds of people can beat the darkness for hours and it will still remain.The sensible man will just light a candle and bring it into the room. Yoga is that candle. Bring it into your life and all your unwanted habits will leave. You need not bother yourself about them. When the mind and body are strong, they will just drop away.”

~Sri Swami Satchidananda, Master of Yoga

“Great religions are the Ships
Poets the life Boats.
Every sane person I know has jumped Overboard.
That is good for business
Isn’t it Hafiz?”

~Hafiz, 14th century poet

I’m so excited for my hot springs excursion tomorrow north of San Francisco to Harbin Hot Springs

If you read my New Year’s resolutions (the About Me) page, you will have noticed it is my goal to go to some hot springs 4 times this year. First quarter will be covered, come rain or shine (and rain is usually more fun for hot springs)!

I decided to go out to a gathering of Barack Obama supporters and cheer him on in the Iowa caucus last night–something I’ve never done before. I had a blast! I liked the crowd of people gathered there at Tosca Cafe, and I got to talk to a few of the organizers of Obama’s San Francisco, San Mateo, and Oakland campaign headquarters. It was a great learning experience and I got excited about potentially helping out with the campaign.

I have always been interested in politics, but never have been moved to participate until Obama showed up like a rock star in Texas on the television last year. I was skeptical, until I looked into his campaign more on his website (barackobama.com) and learned more about him.

My overall opinion is that Mr. Obama is the kind of politician and change-agent that Americans dream its politicians can be, but knowing that not every politician has his integrity, courage, savvy, or intellect. He is the kind of person you want in office, but are kind of afraid to put into office, because people with good will and strong vision are the type that get assasinated due to the shadows they cast over cowards (Think JFK or Abraham Lincoln). Obama is the kind of leader we need right now, and I wish him the best.

Yes, I’ve been a bad girl. I made an illegal U-Turn in buisness neighborhood and had to spend 5 hours in online traffic school. As Dr. Richard Carlson noted, how many U-Turns do you have to do in the sake of “saving time” to justify 5-8 hours in traffic school? (Not to mention the time working to pay off the fine).

However, I learned some cool things and thought I’d share a couple:

What causes aggressive driving behavior? Health professionals generally attribute it to:
1) Increasing congestion on the roads.
2) Increasingly fast-paced lives (e.g., dual-income families).
3) Longer commutes.
4) Day-to-day stresses.

Wow! Yet another argument for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle (no congestion, ample leisure time, no such thing as a commute, no day-to-day stresses!)

Automobile collisions are the leading cause of death for people between the ages of one and twenty-nine.

Concentration Tricks:
“The mind will reel from one thing that interests it, to another that is suddenly more interesting. It must be disciplined to stay with what is important, not to what is suddenly shinier and brighter.”

“Good drivers know that concentration often flees from efforts to evoke it. They know it prefers to be attracted, rather than forced to the task, and so they find something different in the habitualness of driving that draws interest to keep them involved in the process of driving. “

“Another useful exercise is to train your attention to flick back and forth quickly from one focus to another. Do not let it stick to one thing, no matter how interesting it might be. “

Who would have guessed traffic school would teach you about meditation? (Only in California!)

I passed with a 92% and now I can move on with my less-aggressive life.

I worked on my New Year’s resolutions yesterday. I think I’ve got a good start.

Last night’s sunset over the bay really punctuated the end of a passionate, powerful, busy, and productive year.

Wishing you health, happiness, peace & prosperity in your world this year.

Walking along Ocean Beach today, I wasn’t paying attention to where I was walking and caught the edge of my sneaker on the lip of an asphalt cliff. BAM!! My ankle gave out, I was flattened, my camera, phone and change flew out of my purse, and I just layed there with my cheek against the cold asphalt with pain signals and chemicals exploding through my body like a screaming orgasm.

But instead of doing what I did the last time that happened (get up and run limping through the pain back to my car), I just took some deep breaths, slowly sat up, and just sat there until the throbbing had all but disappeared (about 15 minutes or so) and just watched the waves come in and the birds fly by. I think there is a lesson there, and I do think I handled it more effectively than the last time that happened, when afterward it swelled like a softball and I couldn’t walk without a limp for 2 weeks.

Let’s hope that slowing down and not always having to go to the next beach without paying attention to where I’m at, was a lesson learned.

Maps of War:

http://www.ciembronowicz.com/2007/12/maps-of-war.html

Notable how many countries in the middle east and east asia have so recently gained independence. Look how many wars the US fought after acheiving its independence, in order to define itself in the world.

Radioactive material decayed into the more recognizable element iron. The early earth consisted of green water and lava 4.5 billion years ago. Granite rock & stable land mass appeared as a clump at the south pole. The earth covered with ice. Ice melted. Volcanic activity drove the land mass apart. Early algae created oxygen for the seas and the air. The earth covered with jungle. More complex creatures evolved. Dinosaurs evolved. Major volcanoes and a massive comet 7 miles wide killed the dinosaurs. Mammals evolved. Erosion and plate techtonics continued to change the face of the earth. 2 Million years ago, the earth went back into a huge ice age. Humans survived.

The last wave of glaciers began to receed 10,000 years ago.

Kind of puts things into perspective, that we’re all just surviving on a planet with an impressive history, with a future unimaginable.

It’s predicted we will follow the current trend of ice age cooling & warming until the land masses eventually collide, setting off new atmospheric and geologic changes until eventually the earth’s heat energy is completely dissipated and the earth once again becomes uninhabitable. If life still exists as we know it, we will be wise to jump ship, maybe head for Mercury…by then it could perhaps be habitable?

So what is our connection, our purpose? Just to exist! We ARE those initial radioactive elements, rearranged and recombined millions of times over. We are stardust, crudely and patiently changing name and form through the eons. So just enjoy the drama, and soak in our history.

Makes all my restlessness about my goals in life, or the ideas brought by others that I should guide a few hundred million humans for a few short years seem awful foolish. I can be a light in the world, no more, no less. And from what I know about Chemistry light will never ever die, just change vibration frequncy and color.

I am humbled by my dumb human brain which is so large yet cannot conceive of its smallest part. Are the miracle stories true? If so, do we weild the power collectively or individually to collapse the universe into itself? To prove what? Or, do we fool each other with our hopes to be special in our skins?

The cat perceives the same water I do, so it is not my illusion alone that the water exists as our brains are of the same stuff.

(I was hoping to go to bed early.)

Chaos and order are one and the same in the cosmic dance of Christmas lights.

(My eyes are drooping.)

Just concentrate and it will come to you. The road is not paved for you and no one will hand you a map. No one, for 2 million years has left a shiny pearl for me to trample upon today.

No more thoughts.

I asked my mind to solve a poblem before I went to bed. I gave it 5 or 6 variables I could think of, then turned out the light and went straight to sleep. When I awoke before dawn to the sound of another's alarm clock, I had an answer that perfectly solved the problem. The answer happened to include a variable I hadn't considered consciously.

Cool.