Hilaria Baldwin, the 30-year-old wife of actor Alec Baldwin (who is 55), is apparently a yoga fanatic.

Most of the pictures and captions on the gorgeous brunettes official Twitter and Instagram accounts prove just that.

On Valentines Day, however, Baldwin took fanatic to a whole new level with her Yoga Posture of the Day shot, in which she is kissing Alec on their bed while doing a handstand!

The image captured shows hubby Alec lying on his back with his wife doing a handstand over him; all while giving each other a sweet Saint Valentines Day peck.

Hilaria tweeted, I used to hate Valentines Day. Then I thought: a day to celebrate lovewhat a wonderful idea! Enjoy any kind of love u [sic] have in your life.

Baldwin, who is a yoga teacher and self-described namastater has taken to some strange places for her 365-day yoga posture challenge. The Extra correspondent says she made a New Years resolution to post a new yoga pose every day for the year. Some of her craziest poses have been on the train, while blowing out a candle on a cupcake (or so it appears, anyway), and even on aconference table?

Baldwins adorable train pose shows she and her super-cute daughter Carmen doing a matching yoga posture in their seats, captioning the shot, And now weve done train yoga

Apparently Baldwin isnt even afraid to blow out a birthday candle while doing one of her yoga handstands, as this pose of the day says, Birthday Baksana, meaning Birthday Crane Pose.

Baldwin captioned her table-handstand Instagram photo Thanks @themarkmullett & #WME for a great meeting #yogapostureoftheday.

Hilaria Baldwins Twitter page and Instagram pictures are filled with fans messages of thanks, as Baldwin has apparently inspired many followers to begin an exercise and meditation program that incorporates yoga.

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Hilaria Baldwins Yoga Pose of the Day: Handstand Kiss

When you walk into the new We'ar Ponsonby store it looks much the same as many others on the Auckland retailing strip - varnished wood floors, trendy clothes, good-looking sales people.

But Jyoti Morningstar, founder and designer of the yoga and off-duty fashion brand, has a business model that differs to most.

It's based on yogic principles of authenticity and truth and is focused on conscious consumerism. With four stores in Bali and Auckland and an e-commerce site, Morningstar aims to run a holistic business using sustainable production methods including organic and fair trade fabrics where possible and ethical practises. A yoga devotee and former teacher, Morningstar runs the business on the ten living principles - yamas and niyamas - of yoga. The yamas are concerned with how you use your energy in relation to others - not stealing or being violent, that sort of thing. Niyamas relates to living in a way that fosters your soulfulness, being the best you can be and achieving your potential.

"It can be a complex process and there are much simpler ways of doing things," she said. "I'm not interested in making money alone. It's important for the sustainability of the company to be profitable, but making money for its own sake is not particularly alluring."

The business was founded in Bali in 2008 mainly because Morningstar wanted somewhere where she could provide work to those living in poverty through small scale ethical manufacturing. "It's a benign place to incubate an idea," she said.

We'ar started making clothes in Ubud in Bali in a family-run manufacturing house and now provides work to around 150 Balinese in a number of small home workshops and factories in the Chang Gu area.

Morningstar divides her time between New Zealand and Bali, ensuring the work is to the required quality and design brief. While the home-based workers were chosen for their sewing and cutting skills, the We'ar team has had to upskill them on other areas of business including transparent financial accounting. "This can be a challenge in Indonesia which is a very corrupt country," she said.

One of the world's endemic disasters, in her view, is poverty and inequality and yet many of us feel remote from the problem.

"I understand why people feel like that if they're not engaging in those communities, it can feel very remote like when your mother told you to eat all your dinner because there are starving kids in Africa'."

But educated consumers can make a difference by their shopping choices, she said. She wants consumers to question "who really profits from this?" before they buy.

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Yoga ethic behind new store

Feature Article of Sunday, 16 February 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less (Vaclav Havel, Czech playwright).

Havel sets the analytic tone for us. That brings us to the important work of the Brazilian thinker, Paulo Freire, a brilliant scholar whose influential theories on grassroots conscientization has enormously impacted the creative development of critical pedagogy. Granted, his theoretical formulations follow directly from Fanons provocative theories on grassroots conscientization, a radical orchestration meant to depose the hegemony of social injustice and classism, among other variables, in order to restore dignity and respect to the human person, these, via the psychological activation of a people. Admittedly, his powerful thesis, advanced in the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, must be used in every teacher training school in the African world. Besides, although his radical methodological approach to education is essentially Marxist, an ideological strain antithetical to Afrocentricity, yet, like other progressive ideas with immense transformative value, there exist important theoretical overlaps with Afrocentric pedagogy.

That is, his critique of the so-called banking model of education, a foundational philosophy of Eurocentric pedagogy, frees studentship from the hegemonic endometrium of cranial emptiness as well as from the intimidating guillotine of teacherhood, which, in theory, is considered superior to studentship. This poses a serious problem for us because a teacher, like a student, learns along as he or she impacts knowledge. This also implies simultaneous functionality between teacher and student. Technically, Freire believed, very strongly, that interpreting a learner in exclusive symbolic terms as empty vessel, a theoretical borehole demanding that a teacher, supposedly the more knowledgeable one, fills it up, made a learner a necessary object in a relationship of unequal dichotomy with his or her teacher. Certainly, this ideological confluence accommodates Afrocentric pedagogy and Freirean critical pedagogy in many respects. This makes more sense in another context.

Lets stress here that no unlettered individual walks around bearing the zero-weight of cranial emptiness, because, sensory perception, involving taste, smell, sight, touch, hearing, and umami, alone, could potentially flood the human brain with useful information without the instructional benefit of teacher-learner relationship. On the contrary, the tabula rasa of Thomas Aquinas, John Locke, and Sigmund Freud has come under serious scientific revision (See Fiona Macraes article Babies Remember Music They Heard in the Wound up To Four Months after They Are Born, published on MailOnline, Jan 30, 2014). Still, the Eurocentric theory on empty vessel, is, essentially, antithetical to Afrocentricity, this, in another creative context. Which is that it also potentially distorts the ideological fulcrum of Allan Blooms influentially controversial work The Closing Of The American Mind, a book which sees relativism, or multiculturalism, as a didactic concept detrimental to the social health of intellectual openness and psychological development?

That is, Blooms theory makes no room for critical thinking in the American educational system! This is exactly what our newly-proposed educational system in Africa should strive to avoid, as stifling critical thinking spells disaster for growth and development. Then again, Prof. Arthur M. Schlesinger, advisor to and biographer of John F. Kennedy, one of the serious critics of Afrocentricity, alongside the classicist Prof. Mary Lefkowitz, writes: But the division of society into fixed ethnic ethnicities nourishes a culture of victimization and a contagion of inflammable sensitivities. And when a vocal and visible minority pledges primary allegiance to their groups, whether ethnic, sexual, religious, or, in rare cases, political, it presents a threat to the brittle bonds of national identity that hold this diverse and fractious society together (See The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multinational Society, p. 113). This observation is an important one though it represents one of those deceptively reductionist circumventions of broader sociological questions.

Put another way, no American ethnic, religious, or racial group willingly submits to social delimitation or declassed exclusivism if not actually pushed by combined forces of history, racism, minoritized conditionalities, politico-economic subjection, intellectual devaluation, and electoral ostracism. As we noted elsewhere, Afrocentricity is not about separatism. Summarily, its about psychological decolonization of the African mind, self-determination (political, economic), self-knowledge, victorious consciousness, self-respect, prioritizing Africas strategic interests above others, etc. The moral connotation is that the pursuit of self-autonomy by a minority constitutes a political prerequisite to social integration. Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Kwame Nkrumah preached this philosophy of self-reliance. Yet minority demographics are what American conservatives like Pat Buchannan dont want to hear. Neither do they approve of multiculturalism (See The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Culture and Civilization).

Buchannans theory unambiguously excludes non-Whites from partaking of the cake of Western civilization. Meanwhile, syndicated television host Tony Brown, author of Black Lies, White Lies, argues forcefully in this book that the blatant failure on the part of Black America to realize economic self-sufficiency before boarding the integrationist bandwagon may have contributed to some of the structural problems in Black America today. This situation is generally applicable to the African condition. In other words, Africa has joined the integrationist bandwagon of globalism without the moral benefits of full self-determination. Theoretically, its like forcing ones gangrenous toes into tight-fitting shoes, rather than through open-toe house slippers, when no prior attempts have been to secure their healing. Critical thinking favors this line of reasoning, in which self-autonomy affirmatively asserts precedence over facile integrationism. This does not mean Africas variegated ethnicities should not strive for integrationist nationalism. This is why Freirean critical pedagogy and Afrocentric didactics matter to the discourse on psychological and cultural independence (we shall later discuss Paulo Freire in some detail).

More importantly, majority status, in and of itself, does not always represent truth, righteousness, or collective wisdom, a conditionality which necessarily imposes the political gavel of dictatorial tendencies on the larger society, squeezing minorities through the birth canal of social and political tangentiality. In principle, moral totalitarianism is what majoritarian politics has chosen to become. That said, Schlesinger seems to also accept the moral paradox of ethnic individuation in the larger framework of integration as a psychological necessity, writing: Now there is a reasonable argument in the black case for a measure of regrouping and self-reliance as part of the preparation for entry into an integrated society on an equal basis.Affirmation of racial and cultural pride is thus essential to true integration (ibid., p. 102). Yet Schlesinger equivocates on the didactic and moral importance of multiculturalism in the American educational system as a critical perusal of his book evidently shows. In fact, there are serious questions his book does not raise, let alone address, if at all. For instance, he does not understand why African Americans should re-Africanize themselves after three hundred years of their Americanization,

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The Power of Critical Thinking(lll)

Many so-called beautiful relationships go wrong and a lot of people dismiss them as irreconcilable differences. Some get so hurt they swear not to go into another relationship ever again. Others immediately jump into another relationship, hoping this time it would be better.

How does one avoid such circumstances? Here are a few pointers that have worked for many. I trust that they would work for you as well.

Getting along with you

First and foremost, you must develop a relationship with yourself. You have to be able to get along with you. When you are so discombobulated within your self, please, please, it isnt the right time to get into a relationship thinking that it is what will settle your within and bring you joy.

I guarantee you its not going to happen. You cant even relate to yourself harmoniously, how will you now relate to another human being who just might be as confused as yourself? Please be reminded that we do attract like-minds.

Yes, there is chemistry, yes there is attraction, but they are not a guarantee for a happy relationship. Sure, the sex is great, but what happens after that?

Do you really like you? Can you be alone with yourself, or do you always have to have people around you? If not, do you have a blaring radio or television on? Let me repeat, what is your relationship with yourself really like?

Pain-body

Your state of mind is also just as important. The number of people you havent forgiven matters. And that includes having forgiven yourself for all the so-called mistakes you have made. Be aware that all these you are bringing to the relationship you have decided to enter.

Secondly, you must consider the pain-body of the person you are about to share your life with. Pain-body is defined by Eckhart Tolle as the body of pain that we have built in our consciousness from the time we were conceived. Take into account what your mother was going through when you were in her womband after you were born, add all the pain you went through physically, mentally and emotionally.

Read this article:
Why relationships go wrong