I’m setting aside a few minutes every day for documented that juggling can grow brain cells in quantities [...]]]> All the years of our lives are made up of seconds. Some seconds take us closer to our goals, some seconds can take years off our lives. A second marks our birth, a second will mark our death.

I’m setting aside a few minutes every day for documented that juggling can grow brain cells in quantities that are detectable by medical imaging. The same study went on to find that when you stop juggling, the neurons created will disappear again if they are not maintained. But I’m not doing it for some abstract benefit, like jogging because some doctor told me it would be good for my heart. Juggling Yoga is my spiritual cultivation practice.

Juggling Yoga as spiritual cultivation practice may be new, but the seconds of our lives don’t really know from new or old, traditional or radical. Hatha Yoga, Qi Gong, and many exercise practices have become very popular because they bridge a gap between the physical world, and individual spiritual experience. They do not insist that one set of movements is “spiritual” while our “normal” activities are less spiritually significant. Rather, they mark a set of movements which we take the time to infuse with conscious spiritual significance. The difference is not in the world, not in our bodies, but in the union we establish between the movement, the world, and our conscious effort.

Juggling cannot be faked. You are either juggling, or you’re not. Wherever you are, with three sacks to throw around, you are faced with a challenge. When you know how to juggle, you can start juggling, and in so doing reach a known state of mind through the physical activity of juggling. Juggling Yoga extends the juggling challenge. Engaging that challenge on a daily basis establishes a new baseline. Juggling Yoga becomes part of the emotional landscape of your consciousness. The world is filled with excuses for becoming angry, confused, depressed, afraid. It’s filled with distractions, emotional drama of all sorts. Juggling Yoga is a clearing. It is an engagement with the most natural force that exists (gravity) in even the most unnatural of places. A daily practice in Juggling Yoga grounds me.

All day long, week after week, year after year, I walk a path through my life in response to a world filled with distractions, adversity, responsibilities. Juggling Yoga gives me valuable seconds each day to declare a break from a reactive life, and establish a deliberate spiritual path. One that shows me progress. One which requires exacting attention, and one which demands more than lip service.

Juggling Yoga: A Daily Practice for Health and Well Being is available.

There will be a Juggling Yoga workshop at the OM Factory in New York City June 19th. Click for more information, and to register.

Physical activities are also brain exercises. Connecting our brains to our bodies in new ways helps to stimulate growth in nerves in our bodies, and in our brains.

Check out Juggling Yoga, a new book available now!

JugglingYoga.com [...]]]> We need ways to exercise our brains. We can read, we can solve puzzles, we can study the stock market.

Physical activities are also brain exercises. Connecting our brains to our bodies in new ways helps to stimulate growth in nerves in our bodies, and in our brains.

Check out Juggling Yoga, a new book available now!

JugglingYoga.com – The Official Web Home of Juggling Yoga!

Some of these things we do will serve you [...]]]> Human activity tends towards habits. How we drive a car, The order of activities in the morning or at night, when we eat our meals, what exactly we select, prepare, and consume. These habits to a large degree define the fabric and pace of our lives.

Some of these things we do will serve you for years and years. If you are in the habit of checking behind you twice before you change lanes, you will be more likely to notice that a speeding vehicle is approaching you faster than you first thought. Just this could save your life someday.

There are other habits, habits of mind and frequent activities, which may not be good to us. We all engage in activities regularly which we know are not so good. That doesn’t mean we are engaging in the activity because it is unhealthy or ill-advised, but rather for one reason or other we are prioritizing doing the activity in spite of the future detriment. We may be talking about drinking alcohol, smoking, driving tired, eating fatty foods, or drinking soda.

We have control of our selves as long as we can control what we are doing, those activities we invest our time in, food that we eat and drink, people we associate with, places we go. In moments of reflection, we can step back and think about what we are doing, instead of constantly simply acting in our habitual ways. But it is easy to get discouraged if in those moments of reflection we notice too many areas that seem to need work.

I’m advocating a reasonable, step-by-step approach. Be practical in identifying changes. Find a single habit, a single regular (preferably daily) activity that you can change from an unhealthy one to a healthy one. It may seem difficult the first day, you may find yourself forgetting your healthy change a few times in the first week. But there is no one else judging you. This is a change that may only be known to you, and the reason is to lengthen your life, or improve your quality of life. When doing it, thank yourself. Feel good about the change. Remind yourself the big picture, then get on with whatever you are doing. Make the new action as much a part of who you are, your favorite image of yourself, that if you forget and go back to the old habit, you will feel it right away. Soon thinking about falling back into the old habit will remind you how much more you want to change your life, and how much better your new action is.

So pick a change. Stop smoking. Start reading food ingredients and stop eating food containing hydrogenated oils and other trans-fats. Stop drinking soda pop and beverages with added sugar. Stop putting milk into your tea or coffee (since the milk protein interferes with the absorption of antioxidants). Make the room that you sleep in absolutely dark to aid melatonin production. Start a Yoga or Tai Chi practice every morning. Laugh every day for five minutes.

There are many small changes that you can make that will add up to big health benefits over time. Be creative. Be brutally honest. Then make the change. See how easy it is to establish a new habit that works into a positive for your health and your life. Regardless of the effect of the act, just making this one change will make it easier to make further changes later, because now you have a model for making that kind of progress. Your image of yourself will include this new key activity, one of deliberately stepping into a healthier future.

There is a moment that you awaken in the morning. It is a moment of presence. You notice, that you are awake. My question is, after that, getting your feet on the floor and moving into the day, where are you in time? Are you [...]]]>

Clock and Flat Iron Building, 24th St & Broadway NYC

There is a moment that you awaken in the morning. It is a moment of presence. You notice, that you are awake. My question is, after that, getting your feet on the floor and moving into the day, where are you in time? Are you in the past, are you in the future, or are you in the presence of the world?

When I awaken, I pass some threshold. If I remember the precise movement from sleeping to waking, it is on the timescale of a dream that I manage to hold onto. An imaginary timescale that can encompass years or seconds over the course of a night. But when I am awake, a new day begins. Whether heartbeats, breaths, or brain pulses, my waking hours are full of the cycles of life, periodic tasks that are done in regular intervals. These days of wakefulness punctuated by the imaginary timescapes of dreams measure my life.

To wonder about the quality of those moments is the crucial question of our life. If the phrases “Happy Life” and “Sad Life” are to have any meaning, then they describe a lifetime of the moments of mind. In this way, it is for your health and well being that we bring the consciousness of moments to the foreground, because time is all we have. What we are thinking about, and what we think about ourselves is the fabric of our life.

Are you thinking about the past? Are you thinking about choices that you made yesterday? Do the things you see remind you of events in the past week? Events in the past month? Are you reminded about events that happened years ago.

Are you thinking about meeting someone later today? Are you thinking about how you will pay the rent next month? Are you thinking about where you will be working in a year?

Do you see the ground under your feet? Do you see then many types of stones? Are you aware of all the people around you? Are you aware of any animals? What are the sounds that you can hear? Where are they coming from? Was there a sound you couldn’t hear before you were quiet enough, and started to pay attention? What are the scents in the air? Can you identify their sources?

How are you feeling? Literally, are you sitting in a chair? Where on your butt and back is the material of the chair touching you? How does your back feel? How does your stomach feel?

Senses evoke feelings, and feelings evoke memories. Memories are more than just memories of sensual moments, but also memory of previous times remembering. Here is where human languages have started to unbalance the equations. Common experiences can evoke memories of memories, and we are lead to use our conscious moments more and more to recall the same stories of the past, hopes or fears of the future.

Time sense like everything else requires a balance. To be a functioning human being in the modern civilization, we must maintain a sense of past, future, and the present moment. To be the best that we can be, to take the humanizer approach, it is the present moment that informs and orients our perspective on the past and the future.

The experience of the present moment is different from the others. It is not conceptual, it is visceral. Words to describe what is happening must always come later, reflecting on a moment which has passed and may now be commented on. The present moment has simply two halves, which are conjoined with each other. The sensual experience, and the emotional reaction.

The senses define the present moment. They are locked into it. Even if all we have is a sense of touch, there is input from a world of life, a world of bodies and beings. It is through the senses that we begin to make a model of the world. Then, when we see a car, when we hear an airplane, we “know” what it is. We no longer think “Oh, I am seeing light reflected off of something that looks rather like a car”, We just know, as we receive the light into our eye, “there’s a car, ” and even further, “I am a person who needs to be aware of the cars around them, and there’s one right now.”

In the same way, we recognize the people and objects which are important in our life. The sense and the recognition is one, as I see my mother, my wife, my son, my father. And in that recognition, the model of our world carries with it all of the shared experiences, good and bad, simple and complex. We are not even as conscious of the sense impression, as we are the meaning of that sense impression. We feel even as we recognize what we see.

When I was a child, I was deathly afraid of street cleaners.  When I opened the car door on the street side once, a street cleaner was right there, just passing. After that for months I had nightmares, and would always run inside when I heard a street cleaner coming.

Today, I still think about it. But I got over my fear. I now know these big awkward machines are not there to attack me. They are part of the world. They are as dangerous as any other vehicle on the road, with the added adventure that the metal bristles that it uses to scrub the gutters  do occasionally come flying off. I have a friend who had one such brush bristle go right through his ear. But the childish fear, the irrational fear, the fear without knowing what the consequences might be is gone.

I overcame that fear partially by starting to collect the bristles when I find them. Many people don’t know what they are, these thin metals strips which are occasionally shed. I’ve found a few, and it is my way of turning this habit of mind, being thrown into this past consciousness with special regard to street cleaners, and bring myself present, to search the ground for what is in front of me.

In our media rich environment, it is often not our own past and future which we are focused and thinking. We learn about, become interested in, and talk about celebrities, news, and many events which we become aware of second or third hand. Being immersed in the media playground is creating your niche as an observer, catching up on someone else’s past, and ever waiting for the fullfillment of endless previews.

This becomes compelling, because the media shows us many people who are interested in what they are showing. They show us images which confound and co opt our natural characteristics of recognition. They play on our natural concerns, and encourage behavior which supports attention on the past and future.

Being a humanizer is not about saying what is wrong. First we have to observe how things are. And it is this critical sense of time that is implicitly part of every moment’s awareness. It is at the key to self awareness, and therefore self identity.

To understand humanity in general, and ourselves in particular, we have to be willing to see the world in a fresh way. To do this, we  need to explore the limits of our identity, and that is directly connected to our time orientation. Lessons from the past can be learned, and goals in the future reached only through the subtle balance of the actor in your present moment. To fulfill our potential, we can take back the power by first being aware of time.

Look, it's really a big slab!

I happened to be in Manhattan during the August 2003 blackout. Of the different things I saw and took pictures of, the most striking to me are those of Times Square dark. The massive moving billboards now appearing suddenly just as they are, big black slabs of plastic, metal [...]]]>

Look, it's really a big slab!

I happened to be in Manhattan during the August 2003 blackout. Of the different things I saw and took pictures of, the most striking to me are those of Times Square dark. The massive moving billboards now appearing suddenly just as they are, big black slabs of plastic, metal and glass. We always know this is what they are, but we see this slab as a portal, when the lights flicker across the surface, dazzling us with their resemblance to scenes of our own life.

Every once in a while, there is that dose of humility, that dose of reality. The world we think we understand shows itself to be more complex, more challenging, more indifferent to the whims of one species or other.

A humanizer is one who seeks to make others and themselves more human. More completely human, more involved in what the potential of the human body is, more aware and in touch with what the human mind and human spirit are capable of.

Civilization can no longer be trusted to find the best solution to any problems.

Civilization has become a single, self-sustaining organism. We are its protoplasm. Our institutions are its organelles. It propagates like a mold, with spores and viruses that communicate back to the mother colony. Some great amoebic blob.

It’s where we are. Every word we see is understood against the backdrop of 21st Century Man. We have stepped into the shadow of our own imagination, and from the looks of what we usually see, we have made it. The number of shiny things is absolutely stunning here in the future.

But Earth to Humans, Earth to Humans, there are some problems. There’s a species that has created this new thing, this thing we may as well call “civilization”.

There are a lot of implications, there may be solutions, but first look at yourself, look at your health. You cannot simply trust that modern medicine will fix you when you are broken. Even if you can afford it, what makes you trust it?

When I was in college I began questioning my diet and started becoming aware of what is natural and what is synthetic in food. I learned to cook in a variety of vegetarian and vegan styles, and eliminated dairy from my diet. Over the years, I have tried many different ways of eating and other health regemins. And, they have not fixed all of my body’s challenges. But I’ve learned a great deal both about claims, and about how they can pan out in the end.

Robert Heinlein, the science fiction writer, had a saying, “Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.” Indeed, that sums up what I hope to cover in this Humanizer blog. When I read my first book on diet and health, I couldn’t believe how concise and insightful it was. I believed it all. Then when I read my second book, it agreed with 80% of that first book, but it contradicted other parts. So, now I wasn’t so sure what to believe. Then I read another book, and it also agreed in many ways, but disagreed in different ways than either of the other books.

I realized I was on my own. It IS important to read a variety of books, check a variety of schools of thought, but ultimately decisions about your time, your health, and your life are up to you. When you take responsibility for that, and make decisions for yourself, then you are humanizing yourself. You are reaching for your potential. Power or no power, flashing lights or the stark powerless slab. When we can open our minds to notice what our eyes are really seeing rather than what we’ve been told to expect, that’s when we will know more than any other person can tell us. Taking responsibility for health at that level and seeing your body directly rather than through the mediation of another expert is healing.

I am recasting Humanizer.com to be my general Culture Critic Blog. And there are many things to be critical of in this culture. I have other internet outlets for my music, video, and textual output. The goal of many of my other [...]]]>

What is it that I can do right now to help the world?

I am recasting Humanizer.com to be my general Culture Critic Blog. And there are many things to be critical of in this culture. I have other internet outlets for my music, video, and textual output. The goal of many of my other projects is to build a new way of educating people about ways to be that are lighter on ourselves even as they are lighter on the planet. I am convinced that you cannot legislate a bunch of miserable people to be good to the earth. People must be good to themselves first, and helping their fellow people, their fellow living beings, and the planet will follow naturally.

In the fields of Health, Diet, Environmental Toxins, Science Education, Spirituality, Motivation and Self-Improvement to name a few, I will add my perspective. The rule of thumb is to get out of your own way, understand as much as you can about the subject, and understand how it relates to everything else you know. Watch for details. Follow-up hunches with searches. Don’t believe anything, even if it works. Don’t discount anything, just because it doesn’t work in a given case.