17 hours ago

Yogachelan

Lynda Kennedy of Yogachelan demonstrates a "sun" pose to a group of snowshoers in Chelan, Wash.

Forget the yoga mats, bare feet and rooms heated to 95 degrees.

Think snowshoes or skis, breathable layers and "studios'' covered in white powder.

It's snowga the practice of combining the breathing techniques and postures of yoga with winter sports.

Hand stands are not recommended, says Lynda Kennedy, owner of Yogachelan, a yoga studio in eastern Washington state where winter temperatures often hover in the 20s. But there are many other traditional poses that can be adapted to the movement, with the goal of calming the mind, preparing the body for a mountain experience or simply being present with nature.

Kennedy, who also leads summer classes combining yoga with ziplining, river rafting and paddleboarding, takes groups out on snowshoes for three-hour sessions that start with mild stretching, progress to standing poses and end with a half-hour practice at her snowga "studio,'' a flat piece of land overlooking a valley and a 50-mile-long mountain lake.

Along the way they might try the "lotus'' pose, a posture that involves sitting cross-legged in the snow, or experiment with synchronized movements that call for everyone to lie on on their backs, alternating between drawing their legs together and extending them.

Kennedy packs along hot tea and extra scarves and mittens. Later in January, she plans an outing that will combine a yoga practice with a snowshoe walk and wine-tasting at a local vineyard.

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Trade yoga mats for skis and you've got... snowga

OKLAHOMA CITY -Nearly 20 yoga studios around Oklahoma City, Edmond and Norman are holding donation-based classes to benefit the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma through the third annual Strike a Pose for Hunger on Saturday, Jan. 11.

The class starts at 9 a.m. and ends at 10 a.m.

Participating studios include:

The Bend Yoga Studio in Bethany; Third Street Yoga and You Power in Edmond; Beyond Yoga, Hidden Dragon Yoga, Ignite Yoga, The Mats Edge, Soul Yoga, Spirit House Yoga, This Pose Yoga, Yoga at Tiffanys (OKC), Yoga Nest and Yoga Room in Oklahoma City; Ashtanga Yoga Studio, Fusion Fitness, Yoga At Tiffanys Norman and Yoga Life in Norman.

One in six Oklahomans struggles with hunger every day.

The majority of those served by the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma are children, seniors living on fixed incomes, and working families who cannot make ends meet.

The Regional Food Bank provides enough food to feed more than 90,000 people each week in 53 central and western Oklahoma counties.

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Local Yoga Studios Raise Donations for Hungry Oklahomans

Truth be told, I was planning on keeping my New Years resolution to myself, but just 11 days into 2014, I find myself wanting to share. I think its part of the new me.

The resolution is this, and Im pretty sure its a quote but Im not sure who to attribute it to: Let it go to the universe.

Thats it. Let it go. Understand that most things are beyond my control, and that I need to step out of the way and let the universe take over.

There are many websites devoted exclusively to this idea and they have been my guide. Many of them quote Eckhart Tolle and feature mystical, Hobbit-inspired design and graphics. Thank you to the many enlightened people who have written on the subject.

Of course, like all resolutions, declaring it (even in public) is very different than acting upon it. Which is why I have taken action.

On the first morning of the brand new year, I awoke and deleted 311 and the Vancouver Police non-emergency number from my cellphone. I will have no more need for them. Nor will I have any need for the various city engineering and park board direct numbers I have collected over the years. Ill miss you guys.

Dogs may bark. They may run amok, off leash, in the park, crapping where they please, their owners oblivious. With zero enforcement, and me no longer making the call to the city, they may grow in numbers until the city park is no more than yellowed grass and garbage bins overflowing with colourful plastic bags of reeking dog feces. I will let it go. I will let it fall from me, like dog urine trickling from plastic playground equipment.

Leashless dogs may trail far behind their helmetless masters who ride their bicycles on the sidewalk while talking on cellphones, and somehow smoking a joint at the same time. Cyclists who do use the road may blow through the red light, narrowly missing small children.

I will step out of the way and let the universe handle it.

When the speeding drivers who notice the red light in the 30 kilometre-per-hour school zone screech to a halt at the last minute, I will not bang on their hoods. Nor will I scream obscenities at them through the drivers-side window and record their licence plate numbers. I will no longer photograph their stunned expressions. Instead I will put the fate of my children in the hands of the universe. It is what it wants to be, I will tell them, with a wink.

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New Year’s resolution: Let the universe take the reins

Feature Article of Saturday, 11 January 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

To a certain extent, in the first installment of this series, we touched on various subjects, including such sensitive ideas as skin bleaching, cultural amnesia, politics of language in preserving cultural memory, internalization of inferiority complex, cultural appropriation, and, more generally, sociology of knowledge. Principally, though, we broached some of these topics in the generalized context of white standards of beauty, in other words, as part of the social framework of cultural critique that has become normative aesthetics in the African world. What is more, anorexia and bulimia are two other key Western cultural imports, invisible and invisible, which are greatly impacting, if negatively, the architectonics of female anatomy. We do also know how modernized diet narrows the hips of growing females and makes childbirth an obstetric nightmare.

Why should a public figure, Apostle Kojo Safo, founding evangelist-entrepreneur of Kristo Asafo (Christ Reformed Church), come across as Michael Jackson, 50 Cents, and Rev. Al Sharpton, in one complete package, bearing the conked hair of Al Sharpton, the blanched skin of Michael Jackson, and the chains of 50 Cents? What are our music and movie industries doing to reverse these stiflingly negative trends? What has become of the directorial and production adroitness of Spike Lee, Kwaw Ansah, Ousmane Sembene, Manthia Diawara, Haile Gerima, Molefi Kete Asante, Jr., and Safi Faye in the global African community? Anyway, lets briefly shift the focus of our discourse to another equally important matter: Mr. Barack Obamas epochal election to the executive office may not have signaled the advent of post-racial America yet, as Tim Wise forcefully argues in Colorblind and Between Barack and a Hard Place, nevertheless, the knowledge of Mr. Barack Obamas as part African, specifically, a Luo, alone, may eliminate, by all odds, his being considered a hopeful presidential material in Kenya.

Thats how far America has come after the emotionally-long journey of slavery and of the Doll Experiments, the latter to which we devoted some considerable analytic and explanatory space in the prequel. Therefore, in general, Kenya and Africa should learn from the American precedent, because our invoked exemplars on political equalitarianism and social justice, both of which we have explored elsewhere, directly work into the political economy of national development. That said, lets set our digression aside and quickly proceed to matters of topical relevancy as well as of contextual immediacy: What makes it so easy for the African-born child in America to reject his culture timorously while the American child accepts his or hers courageously? For instance, why does Michael Kofi Tenkorang refuse to answer to Kofi in the presence of his American friends, preferring to be called Michael instead? Otherwise, why does he dutifully answer to Kofi in his friends absence? Could cultural disorientation or shock be the explanation?

Barring any comprehensive response of a satisfactory nature, lets proceed to look at the questions another way: What has the biracial presidency of Mr. Obama, for instance, got to do with Afrocentric psychosocialization, health of African psychology, reinforcement or elevation of confidence in the African soul, or cultural conscientization of the youth? Actually, we invoke these examples to illustrate how a triangle of relationship, defined by three apical variables, the impressionable minds of children, of culture, and of ethnicity/race, thats, multiculturalism, should function within the analytic locale of theoretical constraints. This is not only a pragmatic recourse, but a developmentally-appropriate query, an essential fact, as well. So, now, failing inclusion of additional sociocultural variables, for reasons of analytic simplicity, we may necessarily have to agree, going by the standards of our earlier arguments, that unfamiliar cultural and linguistic conventions may induce a potentialization of investigational disinterest as far as a Childs growing curiosity of a certain subject, mathematics or science, say, is concerned.

Consequently, in the best interest of national and personal development, what do we do, as a nation, in terms of bettering the mind of the African child through Afrocentric pedagogization? Elsewhere, we have alluded to some social variables, namely political elitism, leadership crisis, intellectual inertia, and political incompetence (corruption), as four notable retrogressive spokes embedded in the wheel of national development. Again, in a way, we believe, as elsewhere, that these four constitutive parameters sever the umbilical fluidity shared between the head of society, leadership, and the moral conscience of society, the people. In other words, we are quick to dismiss the political economy of grassroots participation in the social equation of national development. It is no news that this kind of arrogance and of elitist intellectualism is typical of a segment of our intelligentsia. In fact, no nation has had lasting success with development without populist, if active, involution of its citizens.

Structural functionalism holds that every human being is important in the social matrix of national development. A criminal, for instance, has a positive role, direct or indirect, to play in society. That is to say, debriefing a criminal, say, may yield useful information for combating crime in society. Alternatively, a law-abiding citizen may serve as a positive model for the criminal in society. In fact, the theorizing of Ama Mazama, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah, Maulana Karenga, Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela, and Molefi Kete Asante, to name but seven, on the affirmative allocation of grassroots conscientization in a labyrinth of national forwardism cannot replace political convenience and ethnic trivialities, granted that grassroots conscientization, a political exchange rate, is itself manifestly powereconomic, political, and socialand respect.

The activist politics of the Dalai Lama, Gabriel Prosser, Gustavo Gutierrez, Sojourner Truth, Cesar Chavez, Paul Bogle, Javier Sicilia, Harriet Tubman, Thich Nhat Hanh, Jeremiah Wright, Camilo Torres Restrepo, Dedan Kimathi, Toussaint LOuverture, Denmark Vessey, Walter Sisulu, Malcolm X, Nat Turner, and Julius Malema underscores our point. Obviously, these analytic trajectories should naturally lead us to the social relevance of Afrocentric theory in pedagogy. Lest we be misunderstood, Afrocentricity does not necessarily connote a rejection of the non-African world, as its ill-informed detractors are wont to imply. Fundamentally, it means centering or rooting African Personality in the fertile soil of African historical, spiritual, material, and cultural consciousness. This is not Senghorian Negritude, however. Afrocentricity is a theory firmly grounded in scientific objectivity. Among other useful observations, cultural critics note that contradictions in African societies are typical of non-African societies, too. Dambisa Moyos How the West Lost, Amartye Sens Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, and Yasheng Huangs The China Growth Fantasy instantiates this view.

Moreover, Cornel West and Tavis Smiley have demonstrated how poverty constitutes a major problem for the American republic (See The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto). That aside, superstitious systems like witchcraft are not exclusively African, either. One of the most serious problems in the late-sixthteen-century country-side was the increase in witch-hunting, which was l
argely a phenomenon of the villages and small towns, not the citiesand most of the victims were from the lower classes, but most lower-class people were quick to cooperate with the judges and denounce others as witches, Prof. Frederic J. Baumgartner writes in France in the Sixteenth Century, p.269, adding: The extensive use of torture in witch trials intensified the witch craze by producing long lists of alleged accomplices, but there were other powerful elements as well. One was the bitter religious strife, in which each side denounced the other as doing the work of the devil.

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The Best Educational Formula(ll)

Though a death certificate has been issued for Jahi McMath, many of the 13-year-old Oakland girls classmates still believe the quiet leader who laughed at jokes that weren't funny will one day return to school if they just pray hard enough.

The school told us that shes not officially dead yet, said Dymond Allen, one of Jahi's friends at EC Reems Academy of Technology and Arts in East Oakland. And we should keep her in our prayers. I still hope. And God has the last say-so.

The academy's chief operating officer Lisa Blair said she has tried to honor Jahi's family's wishes by telling students that their classmate may still be alive, even though doctors say she is legally and clinically dead.

The students responded with an outpouring of faith.

Most kids are Christian here, Blair said, and they believe that if you continue praying, theres always a possibility. The students understand the debate. Theyre just choosing spirituality over science.

Blair visited Children's Hospital Oakland on Jan. 5, just after Jahi's family won a court battle to keep the girl on life support and transfer her elsewhere. Blair said she "saw something on that visit that made her believe Jahi, a quiet student who was recently elected to be a judge on student council, was not truly dead.

On Thursday, about 250 of Blair's students donned purple T-shirts emblazoned with the words #TeamJahi and Keep Calm, Pray On.

Parents were given the opportunity to have their child "opt out" of the event, but the vast majority did not, because most of them know her, Blair added.

Jahi has been part of the school's extended family for more than a decade. Jahis older sister, Jabria Milsap, now 20, graduated in 2009 as valedictorian. Her brother, Jose Llamas, is now in fourth grade at the school. Jahi's younger sister, Jordyn Johnson, is in kindergarten.

MORE: Catholic Group Says Jahi McMath "With Jesus Christ"

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Friends say they believe brain-dead girl is alive