Our Budding World: Yoga With Inner City Kids

In the capoeira class I attended today, I met a woman named Emily who teaches yoga to high school students at Emiliano Zapato Street Academy in downtown Oakland. According to Emily, the students carry some emotional challenges, and she teaches them techniques to deal with these through yoga. How beautiful! Another bright spot of hope in Oakland, and in our budding world.

Emily's work at the academy is organized by the Niroga Institute, which is a nonprofit local organization teaching what they call "Transformative Life Skills to students, vulnerable youth, cancer survivors, seniors and people battling addiction." By Transformative Life Skills they mean yoga, breathing techniques, and meditation. They cite research that teaching these techniques helps increase self-control and resilience. The Niroga Institute has an interesting "pay-it-forward" model, in which they invest in training yoga teachers with the idea that they will then offer their skills through community service to communities in need of it.

What a breath of fresh air. As someone who has attended yoga classes for years, I love the idea of that yoga is not a skill for the elite only, but is meant to be shared with all in need.

According to the Institute:

Niroga has trained over 200 Yoga Teachers, including many of color, to serve vulnerable populations with cultural congruence and linguistic sensitivity. We have also trained over 100 adult providers, such as educators and mental health professionals, who work with youth in structured settings such as schools and juvenile halls. In a few hours, we can train anyone in these transformative skills, which can be used for personal stress management and self-care, as well in professional settings with students and clients.

Our programs are part of a cost-effective front-line prevention and intervention strategy for violence reduction, education and mental health, and positive youth development. Niroga also trains minority young adults to become Certified Yoga teachers, prepared to serve their own communities with cultural competence and linguistic sensitivity.

See a video on Niroga's amazing work with inner city kids (I cried!)

If Walmart Were A Country: Playing Monopoly

Here is some accidental poetry from Christopher Petrella in Nation of Change (comparisons via Business Insider's June 2011 report):

If Wal-Mart were a country
Its revenues would exceed the GDP of Norway,
World's 25th largest economy.
Yahoo is bigger than Mongolia,
Visa is bigger than Zimbabwe,
Nike is bigger than Paraguay,
McDonalds is bigger than Latvia,
Amazon.com is bigger than Kenya,
Apple is bigger than Ecuador,
Ford is bigger than Morocco,
Bank of America is bigger than Vietnam,
General Electric is bigger than New Zealand,
Exxon- Mobil is bigger than Thailand,
Chevron is bigger than the Czech Republic.

Though capitalism seems to be based on a foundation of free competition, Petrella argues that it quickly leads to monopoly, which has negative effects on democratic functioning. And how quickly monopoly has risen in the financial section just in the past twenty years! He states, "In 1990, the ten largest domestic financial institutions held only 10% of total financial assets. Today they own 70%. The largest five U.S. banks now hold $11 trillion in assets."

His suggestion? We ought to divide up big banks, taking as our model the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which divided up the railroad companies not only to diminish their economic might, but also to prevent companies from "becoming so large that their political power would undermine the democratic process."
Read Christopher's article here

Protest at Belo Monte Dam Site in Brazil

On Nov. 1, a collaboration of 500 indigenous leaders, fishermen, and residents gathered to protest at the site of the Belo Monte Dam, where machinery is continuing to arrive to construct the world's largest proposed dam. The group had vowed to sit on the site permanently, but officials from the building corporation presented legal papers which effectively cleared the group off. Nonetheless, this unprecedented alliance of indigenous leaders and fishermen sat in together for 15 hours. Read more here

Not Just Climate Change: 3 Other Challenges

I love how the Wildlife Conservation Society goes beyond the glaring challenge of climate change to look at three other challenges to the trio of environment, animals, and humans. According to them, WCS:

focus[es] on four global challenges: Emerging wildlife diseases, climate change, the increasing harvest of natural resources by local communities, and the expansion of extractive industries. As part of our mission to save wildlife and wild places, we support local human interests by fostering sustainable livelihoods—a balance that is essential to the success of long-term conservation.

For example, the WCS fosters an organic "conservation cotton" clothing initiative in Zambia in those very regions with the highest biodiversity.
Read more here

Good News! Heal Main Street, Tax Wall Street

You know, it's all good news these days. California nurses recently got together on a SF street and gave out free food to the hungry--whom they, as nurses, have been seeing a lot more of these days. More people are flooding into hospitals as basic government services are cut. As nurses, they're trained to heal people. So, they say, shouldn't we be getting in on healing the good 'ol US of A?

Here's their plan: pass a Financial Transaction Tax. The tax will help finance public services to prevent the cutting of the safety net that keeps the moderately-okay folks from slipping out to become the poor folks.

The National Nurses Union proposes a “Main Street Contract for the American People” that would raise $350 billion dollars by charging “a tiny tax on Wall Street trading of 0.5% on transactions like stocks, bonds, foreign currency bets and derivatives.”

I know, you're thinking, how could this be good news, this tax hasn't been passed yet!
Yet: We are transformed in acts of the imagination. Right now, the imagination of nurses across the United States has me reeling...for the better. Thanks, nurses, for beginning the healing.

Read more here

Are Sea Levels Really Rising? Yes, We Can See Them. Waiting on the Island of Tuvalu

Are Tides Rising? A fascinating web site, World View of Global Warming, documents before and after photos of shores to show that, yes indeed, the waters are rising. Somehow, it makes a difference to see it with your own eyes.

Above, we see kids sitting on their porch on the Pacific island of Tuvalu. Ten years ago, a student in one of my college classes, a lovely young woman, reported that she hailed from the island of Tuvalu. A recent immigrant, she missed it terribly, she said. So why then had she come? I asked. She had been sent by the elders to leave the island, because the island soon would be underwater. She smiled broadly as she said it. Among us two, it was perhaps only I who felt bitter that the actions of high carbon producing nations such as ours were driving her and her people from their island home. Since then, I have heard that many from Tuvalu have emigrated to Australia in a program. As you can imagine, many of the departees are young people, while their elders remain as the waters rise, nothing able to convince them to loosen their grasp on the land to which their souls, and the souls of their ancestors, have clung.

See photos of sea shore rise here

Cement (Once Living Stone)

At home today, I pulled off the shelf a maroon-colored spiral bound journal dated 2003 and began reading. I came upon this poem. So dramatic I was!

What Lives In Me

Though I bear no progeny
What lives in me
Will live on in the flowers
In the rocks and in the altars
In the drops of the sea;
In the cement of the plazas,
Once living stone,
And in your heart, eternally.
Let the tombstone read:
I was human with all my griefs
I was blasted with the winter of hope.

Above is my photo of a friend walking.