Happy Thanksgiving!

Good morning everyone! Happy Turkey Day!!!!

I must admit, I used to use this phrase freely, without thought, for much of my life. And when I became vegetarian and learned more about the treatment of the turkeys, I abhorred the usage, somewhat sadistic, of the phrase "Happy Turkey Day". How twisted, considering the atrocities that occur to these beautiful creatures. However, I have recently learned more about the wonderful things being done by animal rights activists to rescue turkeys, and have come to see how this phrase could become a rallying cry.......on this day of thanks, let's not forget to save the turkeys! Make it a happy day for them as well as you! Give them a holiday!!!!!

In Some Households, Everyday is Turkey Day

 

 

Karen Oeh and her husband, Mike Balistreri, with two new members of the family. "I am like a new parent," Ms. Oeh said.

It is one thing for the president of the United States to pardon a pair of turkeys every year and then send them off to live out their days in Florida. It's quite another to save a turkey from the Thanksgiving table by inviting it to live with you.  Two weeks ago, Karen Oeh and her husband, Mike Balistreri, who live not far from Santa Cruz, Calif., adopted two turkeys that had been rescued after an airline shipping misfortune in Las Vegas. "I am like a new parent," said Ms. Oeh, 39. "I instantly, totally fell in love, and now I just want to stay home with them."

[...]   (But the sad reality of our factory farms means even those turkeys that are saved, often don't live very long......)

Whether the turkeys come from a shelter or the White House, they don't live very long. Most adopted turkeys are commercially bred broad-breasted whites, genetically disposed to grow to a marketable size in about four months. Even on a diet of only a couple of cups of turkey feed a day, they become obese. They usually develop leg problems, congestive heart failure and arthritis. "One just couldn't get up, so I had to have her euthanized," Ms. Lane said. "Another one just dropped dead one evening."

Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/22/dining/22turkey.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Friends......becoming family among new generation

For some Gen-Yers, holidays back home are passe

It's becoming increasingly popular for young people to host Thanksgiving for their friends.

By Jenna Fisher | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

It had all the premeal buzz of a typical family Thanksgiving, except that the 20 or so guests were not related. The 20-somethings who gathered in Washington, D.C., last Saturday were friends, holding their third annual Thanksgiving together.

Increasingly, America's young adults appear to be spending traditional family holidays with friends rather than – or in addition to – their relatives. Chalk it up to the high cost of travel or the increasing time young people spend on their own between the end of college and marriage. For whatever reason, people in their 20s appear to be blurring the distinction between family bonding and friendship.

As more and more young people organize holiday rituals with their friends, it may lead them to redefine holidays as less family-based and defined more by friendship and community.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1121/p01s03-usgn.html?page=1

Pretty piglet given another chance to live

photograph of a piglet nicknamed Andrex who is recovering after being found in the back of a lorry full of toilet paper at a supermarket.......

Stowaway piglet survives loo roll ordeal
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071120/od_uk_nm/oukoe_uk_britain_piglet

President Lincoln creating the Thanksgiving holiday

The first religious day of thanksgiving at Plymouth may actually have been in 1623—and not in autumn, but in late summer—when the colonists offered up their thanks to God after a six-week drought. Occasional days of thanksgiving were declared throughout the colonial era and into the years of the early republic. But it wasn't until Abraham Lincoln called for late-November Thanksgivings in 1863 and 1864—and used explicitly religious language to do so—that the day became an annual, permanent fixture.

The first observance of the national holiday came one week after the dedication of the Soldiers National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The language of the proclamation by President Lincoln is beautiful and marked by a rare felicity of expression:  (excerpts)

The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the everwatchful providence of almighty God.  [...]

No human counsel hath devised, nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the most high God, who while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy. [...]

It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently, and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and one voice by the whole American people. I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a day of thanksgiving and praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens. And I recommend to them that, while offering up the ascriptions justly due to him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners, or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the almighty hand to heal the wounds of the nation, and to restore it, as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes, to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity, and union.  [...]

PRESIDENT LINCOLN'S THANKSGIVING DAY PROCLAMATION, OCTOBER 3, 1863.

Rethinking how to end hunger in the US

Th co-founders of Jivamukti Yoga, David and Sharon, always talk about yogis being "radical" - radical in the sense of getting to the root (which is the origin of the word radical) causes of issues. Not just blindly swallowing the prevailing notions of society but really analyzing the driving factors behind everything. For this Thanksgiving season, an important issue to consider is the ongoing food poverty in the US. The way we have been handling it for years has been through food banks.......but this provocative article below challenges that notion. Read it and decide for yourself!

When Handouts Keep Coming, the Food Line Never Ends

By Mark Winne

Sunday, November 18, 2007; Page B01

excerpts:
My experience of 25 years in food banking has led me to conclude that co-dependency within the system is multifaceted and frankly troubling. As a system that depends on donated goods, it must curry favor with the nation's food industry, which often regards food banks as a waste-management tool. As an operation that must sort through billions of pounds of damaged and partially salvageable food, it requires an army of volunteers who themselves are dependent on the carefully nurtured belief that they are "doing good" by "feeding the hungry."  C
[...]
While none of this is inherently wrong, it does distract the public and policymakers from the task of harnessing the political will needed to end hunger in the United States. The risk is that the multibillion-dollar system of food banking has become such a pervasive force in the anti-hunger world, and so tied to its donors and its volunteers, that it cannot step back and ask if this is the best way to end hunger, food insecurity and their root cause, poverty. During my tenure in Hartford, I often wondered what would happen if the collective energy that went into soliciting and distributing food were put into ending hunger and poverty instead.

Mark Winne is the former director of Connecticut's Hartford Food System and the author of the forthcoming "Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty."

Svaha

I finally did it - I got a tattoo. And I happened to find an amazing tattoo artist in DC to work on me..........totally random, no less. Although - nothing is really EVER random..........

I had the Sanskrit word "svaha" tattooed onto my forearm. Originating in ancient times, the word "Svaha" was originally said when making sacrifices into the sacred fire ("Agni"). Another interpretation is to think of "Svaha" as the personification of an "oblation" or sacrifice. In this way, Svaha is regarded as the female goddess, consort to the Fire God, Agni.

Over the years, and certainly in Jivamukti tradition (thanks to Manorama!), "Svaha" has come to mean making of oneself a sacrifice into the sacred fire, or for God. In other words, it means a total and complete self-offering to God.

My tattoo artist, Tony was awesome and the tattoo place (Jinx Proof) is featured all over in magazines and whatnot. If you feel inspired, go here for your tattoo!

  Jinx Proof was mentioned in the June 2007 issue of Alternative Press (#227) as a place to visit while in Washington D.C.

"Started in 1996 by Tim Corun and Karl Hedgepath, Jinx Proof is the place to get tattooed in D.C. It was the first tattoo shop to open in Georgetown, which proved to be a good idea. With an internationally recognized team of artists, you are sure to get exactly what you want, whether it's the Chinese symbol for t-shirt or a full backpiece of your favorite member of Fall Out Boy."

Quite the endorsement indeed.

Brad and Angelina buy island to showcase green issues

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have bought a man-made island in the shape of Ethiopia that is part of an ambitious luxury development off the coast of Dubai, a newspaper reported Wednesday. The Hollywood couple intend to use the reclaimed piece of land to showcase environmental issues and encourage people to live a greener life, the Emirates Today newspaper said. The couple's purchase is part of cluster of 300 islands, shaped like a world map, that is gradually surfacing in waters off the booming Gulf emirate.

ADOPT-A-TURKEY PROGRAM

Cartoon used with
ADOPT-A-TURKEY PROGRAM

ONLY $20! NOW UNTIL THANKSGIVING
adoptaturkey.com
ADOPT 'EM! DON'T EAT 'EM!

 For only $20, you provide a safe haven for a turkey that was once slated for a certain death on a Thanksgiving dinner table. In our age we are more likely to refer to Thanksgiving as "Turkey Day" forgetting the true sentiment behind this gracious holiday. Every year countless numbers of birds are slaughtered in conditions you would not wish on your worse enemy. Turkeys were once considered to be our National Bird and also were not even a part of the menu on our Founding Fathers' Thanksgiving tables!

So, educate yourself and make a compassionate choice... this year put your neck out for a good cause and help shed the incredible ignorance surrounding these majestic birds... please read more

Getting closer to ending the death penalty

During my one-year Americorps service, I worked at the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP). I continue to be haunted by how sadistic our death penalty protocol remains. Simply unacceptable...........especially for a country claiming to be the moral example for the rest of the world. And yet - it was sooo hard getting people to acknowledge this because simply nobody wants to know the big, bad, ugly truth. However, things are changing, and finally the issue is making headway.......

Die Hardest
Why the states are standing by their outdated, messy lethal-injection protocols.

It's unofficial: The country is in the throes of a de facto moratorium on the death penalty. In the wake of a Supreme Court decision in September to take a case testing the constitutionality of Kentucky's lethal-injection protocol, and after a series of stays granted by state courts and the Supreme Court, prosecutors in Texas and elsewhere announced they will stop seeking execution dates. This past October was the first month in three years in which nobody was executed in the United States.
[....]
The prevalent three-drug protocol consists of an anesthetic rendering the victim unconscious, a paralytic that stops his breathing, and a drug that stops his heart. Mounting evidence suggests some prisoners may be suffering horribly. As Justice John Paul Stevens tartly pointed out at oral argument on a related question, the lethal-injection procedure we use "would be prohibited if applied to dogs and cats." (The American Veterinary Medical Association issued guidelines in 2002 saying the mix of drugs is unacceptable for putting animals to sleep.)
[...]
If academics, doctors, and prisoners—as well as death-penalty supporters and the guy who invented the protocol—have been criticizing the three-drug protocol for years, why haven't the states switched methods? [...] The reason the states haven't acted is one part strategic and one part inertia. As the appellants' brief in Baze  points out, most of the states have persistently stood by their protocols with the argument that everyone else is doing it. Kentucky adopted Chapman's cocktail without "any independent or scientific studies" because "other states were doing it … on a regular basis."
[...]
The reason our death-penalty methods are old and rickety is that they were cobbled together on the fly and broadly adopted without care. They are being defended for political and strategic reasons, as opposed to pragmatic ones. And the whole argument is a bad proxy for a larger fight about capital punishment. If carelessness, raw politics, and inertia should be driving policy, the current lethal-injection system is a penalogical grand slam. One shouldn't have to be opposed to the death penalty, be soft on criminals, or be a liberal crybaby to insist that procedures that are hopelessly outdated and medically suspect should be fixed.

Read full article here: http://www.slate.com/id/2176196/

Clean out those catalogs!

The mission of Catalog Choice is to reduce the number of repeat and unsolicited catalog mailings, and to promote the adoption of sustainable industry best practices. We aim to accomplish this by freely providing the Catalog Choice services to both consumers and businesses. Consumers can indicate which catalogs they no longer wish to receive, and businesses can receive a list of consumers no longer wanting to receive their catalogs.

http://www.catalogchoice.org/

stunning pics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://www.philborges.com/index.html

"Some day, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love. Then, for the second time, man will have discovered fire." -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

another reason for inversions - brain boosting

Exercise on the Brain

One form of training has been shown to maintain and improve brain health — physical exercise. In humans, exercise improves what scientists call "executive function," the set of abilities that allows you to select behavior that's appropriate to the situation, inhibit inappropriate behavior and focus on the job at hand in spite of distractions. Executive function includes basic functions like processing speed, response speed and working memory, the type used to remember a house number while walking from the car to a party.
[...]
How might exercise help the brain? In people, fitness training slows the age-related shrinkage of the frontal cortex, which is important for executive function. In rodents, exercise increases the number of capillaries in the brain, which should improve blood flow, and therefore the availability of energy, to neurons. Exercise may also help the brain by improving cardiovascular health, preventing heart attacks and strokes that can cause brain damage. Finally, exercise causes the release of growth factors, proteins that increase the number of connections between neurons, and the birth of neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region important for memory. Any of these effects might improve cognitive performance, though it's not known which ones are most important.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/opinion/08aamodt.html?ex=1195275600&en=50a8406c0b37f16a&ei=5070

At a Slaughterhouse......

At a Slaughterhouse, Some Things Never Die

Who Kills, Who Cuts, Who Bosses Can Depend on Race

 

TAR HEEL, N.C. -- It must have been 1 o'clock. That's when the white man usually comes out of his glass office and stands on the scaffolding above the factory floor. He stood with his palms on the rails, his elbows out. He looked like a tower guard up there or a border patrol agent. He stood with his head cocked.

[......]

Who Gets the Dirty Jobs

At shift change the black man walked away, hosed himself down and turned in his knives. Then he let go. He threatened to murder the boss. He promised to quit. He said he was losing his mind, which made for good comedy since he was standing near a conveyor chain of severed hogs' heads, their mouths yoked open.

[......]

Blood and Burnout

Slaughtering swine is repetitive, brutish work, so grueling that three weeks on the factory floor leave no doubt in your mind about why the turnover is 100 percent. Five thousand quit and five thousand are hired every year. You hear people say, They don't kill pigs in the plant, they kill people. So desperate is the company for workers, its recruiters comb the streets of New York's immigrant communities, personnel staff members say, and word of mouth has reached Mexico and beyond.

http://www.nytimes.com/library/national/race/061600leduff-meat.html

 

  

Sermon on the Mount

Mount of Beatitudes - where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount...actually it was delivered from the bottom of the mountain...where the bananna fields are now.

 

 

In honor of the Jivamukti Focus of the Month being Ahimsa, and given that one of my good friends recently returned from a trip to Israel where he saw the place where one of the greatest teachings on Ahimsa was given, here is the beautiful message of Christ on nonviolence:

 

Matthew 5-7:27 (New International Version)

 

 Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2and he began to teach them saying: 
 Blessed are the poor in spirit,
      for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. 
 Blessed are those who mourn,
      for they will be comforted. 
 Blessed are the meek,
      for they will inherit the earth. 
 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
      for they will be filled. 
 Blessed are the merciful,
      for they will be shown mercy. 
 Blessed are the pure in heart,
      for they will see God. 
 Blessed are the peacemakers,
      for they will be called sons of God. 
 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
      for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

An Eye for an Eye

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

Love for Enemies

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

FLOW is famous!

Check it out - FLOW yoga studio was featured in the news!

http://video.nbc4.com/player/?id=179435

NOVEMBER Jivamukti Focus of the Month - Ahimsa

Ahimsa, Nonviolence, अहिंसा
 

This month's Jivamukti Focus is Ahimsa. Read Sharonji's message here:
Ahimsa: The Foundation of the Yoga Practice

And since we are living in DC, here is a more "political" approach to ahimsa, or nonviolence, as it has been used and can be used to affect change on a tactical level: 

 

How Nonviolence Works
Nonviolence rejects the use of physical violence in efforts to attain social, economic or political change. It rejects both passive acceptance of oppression and armed struggle against it, instead offering a number of other tactics for popular struggle such as:

• education
• persuasion
• civil disobedience (it could be said that it is compassion in the form of respectful disagreement)
• noncooperation with political, economic or social authorities
• nonviolent direct action (NVDA) - "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored." --Martin Luther King Jr.

Central to any understanding of nonviolent strategic theory is the idea that the power of rulers depends upon the consent of the populace. Without a bureaucracy, an army or a police force to carry out his or her wishes and the compliance of key sectors of the population, the ruler is powerless. Power, therefore, depends largely on the co-operation of others. Nonviolence seeks to undermine the power of rulers through the deliberate withdrawal of this consent and co-operation.

Also of primary significance is the notion that just means are the most likely to lead to just ends. Gandhi said that "the means may be likened to the seed, the end to a tree." Proponents of nonviolence reason that the actions taken in the present inevitably re-shape the social order in like form. They would argue, for instance, that it is fundamentally irrational to use violence to achieve a peaceful society.

 

Nonviolent action generally comprises three categories.

1. The first, Acts of Protest and Persuasion , which include protest marches, vigils, public meetings and tools such as banners, placards, candles, flowers and the like;
2. secondly, Noncooperation, the deliberate and strategic refusal to co-operate with an injustice;
3. and thirdly, Nonviolent Intervention, the deliberate and often physical intervention into a perceived unjust event, such as blockades, occupations, sit-ins, tree sitting, truck cavalcades to name a few.

A useful source of inspiration, for those seeking the best nonviolent tactics to deploy, is Gene Sharp's list of 198 methods of nonviolent action, which includes symbolic, political, economic and physical actions.
 

Great nonviolence leaders and theorists who have thought deeply about the spiritual and practical aspects of nonviolence: Leo Tolstoy, Lech Wałęsa, Petra Kelly, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dorothy Day, Ammon Hennacy, Albert Einstein, John Howard Yoder, Stanley Hauerwas, David McReynolds , Johan Galtung, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Ida Ford, Daniel Berrigan,Bacha Khan, Mario Rodriguez Cobos and César Chávez.