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by Nina

Just a quick announcement that Yoga U will be hosting an interview with Baxter Bell called “Yoga And Healthy Aging: The Evidence And The Promise” this coming Sunday, December 29, 2013 as part of their Sadhana Sundays series. Timothy is also participating in the series with his talk “Yoga And Healing: Building The Body's Innate Ability To Heal,” along with many other well-known yoga teachers. If you’re interested, head on over to http://yogauonline.com/yogaspirit/sadhana-Sundays to register for free!

Autumn Light Festival by Melina Meza

Outside KPJAYI

"It would be easier to roll up the entire sky into a small cloth than it would be to obtain true happiness without knowing the Self."  

(Upanishads)

I'm in Mysore. In the mist of rounding out my 3rd week today. My 7th trip and as always feels as if I'm coming into something new. I like to be in a space of discovery and exploration within the practice. It takes the edge off. It is important to touch, taste and feel every part of the experience. Even those challenging bits we find ourselves in on occasion. At this point settling in happens with ease but the practice in the shala is always full of surprises. Whether pleasant or unpleasant, witnessing the process of unfolding allows me to sit in a place of neutrality and observation. Understanding what is in and out of my control I can then ride the wave of energy that no matter what courses strong in the room like a steady march.

There have been so many things I have been contemplating lately. The process we all go through from time to time most certainly ebbs and flows in life and recently I have been feeling a flow. So many impressions and mental processes have come to light that sometimes it has been overwhelming. Within all of this I continue to place my heart in the center of it all. With countless hours of practice and study under my belt I am beginning to realize and lean on the simplicity of what it all culminates to. Can I love more openly? Can I live more open heartedly? How often do I rest on my fears and close? Do I extend a hand to the unfamiliar? Am I kind? Because it doesn't matter how many trips I make to Mysore and it doesn't matter how may complicated asanas I can do, if I don't open to the truth it is pointless.

I desire to push myself inside the unknowingness of it all. To look at everything with new eyes. To even come to my mat with a new perspective and curiosity. Because if I place too much importance on structure and the familiar I'm as good as dead, and ultimately building my spiritual home on sand. It isn't easy and sometimes you are stricken for it, but then again, everyone who has done anything of significance came to realize these challenges. Sometimes the path we take isn't accepted by the masses. The truth speaks ever so clearly and the courage to rise up to it can show itself in a myriad of ways. With this realization I can honor various paths and experiences and see the beauty in it all. No matter what differences that stand between, when understanding the truth, all walls tend to crumble.  

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

It's Christmas at Unity Farm and the temperature outside is 12F.   All 100 animals are fed, watered, and their living quarters are cleaned.

by Baxter

Lelu by Melina Meza

by Ram

Yoga for Healthy Aging authors have written extensively on the power of meditation (dhyana) and its beneficial effects on so many aspects of life, including, but not limited to, disease and pain, sleep management, control of emotions, stress reduction, depression and weight-reduction goals. In all the above cases it seemed that meditation changed behavioral patterns and enhanced emotional stability. Articles by Baxter (How to Meditate, Thoughts On Dhyana ), Timothy (Starting a Meditation Practice), Brad (Stressed Mind, Stressed Cells), Nina (Meditation and Compassion)  and yours truly (Achieving Stillness in Turbulent Situations, Memory Loss: Meditation to the Rescue) have all provided lucid explanations of ways to meditate, the science of meditation and the effects of meditation on body and mind.

Vine and Wall by Melina Meza

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At a party a couple of days ago, I got into a verbal/intellectual sparring match with a colleague from political science. I'm not going to bore you here with the intellectual/philosophical details of the exchange: Suffice to say that he is a postmodernist, and I'm not (if you really want the details, email me, and I'll try my best to reconstruct our exchange).

The exchange did not last more than 15 minutes, but given the passion with which he and I both held our respective views, plus the lateness of the hour and the effects of a few drinks, the whole thing quickly became intense, in a not-so-good kind of way. From the beginning of the conversation, I sensed that he was pushing my buttons, and my grad-school training kicked in. Grad School 101: When somebody pushes your buttons, push back, and find a way to draw some intellectual blood. As you can well imagine, passions flared quickly. Objectively speaking, I was way out of my depth; the last time I read postmodernism was in grad school, when I read a little Deleuze, and maybe a little Derrida, so I am not exactly in the best position to go into a debate with somebody who actually wrote his doctoral dissertation on these guys.

But I wouldn't give in without a good fight. So I tried to play a game of intellectual aikido/taichi with him; whatever I didn't understand (which was a lot), I simply rephrased in terms of what I do understand (phenomenology/existentialism), and then threw back at him as intellectual projectiles. And whatever I couldn't convert into intellectual projectiles, I simply dismissed with a stockphrase like, "Well, it is all very well to talk about this, that or whatever, but you really don't understand that such-and-such-and-such..." and then quickly moved the exchange back to familiar terrain.  

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"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer."

Albert Camus

A few days ago, I learned that the local mechanic to whom I usually bring my car for oil changes and other routine repairs had died; he had taken his own life. Yesterday, I got together with a few friends who also were his customers, and discussed the circumstances surrounding his suicide. One of them told me that she had heard that his business had not been doing well lately, and suggested that as a driving reason behind his suicide. I didn't say much in response to this, but mulled over this for a little while. For some reason, this just didn't strike me as a satisfactory reason. I mean, sure, many people have taken their own lives because of financial or business problems, but there are also many others who have suffered similar problems in life, who have nevertheless found ways of coping and finding reasons to continue living on this earth. So looking to external circumstances to try to explain why somebody would decide that continuing to take the trouble to stay alive simply isn't worth it anymore simply doesn't shed light on this issue. I believe that Camus is expressing a similar sentiment when he remarks on the act of suicide:

"An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had lost his daughter five years before, that he had greatly changed since, and that the experience had “undermined” him. A more exact word cannot be imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man’s heart. That is where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.

There are many causes for a suicide, and generally the most obvious ones were not the most powerful. Rarely is suicide committed (yet the hypothesis is not excluded) through reflection. What sets off the crisis is almost always unverifiable. Newspapers often speak of “personal sorrows” or of “incurable illness.” These explanations are plausible. But one would have to know whether a friend of the desperate man had not that very day addressed him indifferently. He is the guilty one. For that is enough to precipitate all the rancors and all the boredom still in suspension.

But if it is hard to fix the precise instant, the subtle step when the mind opted for death, it is easier to deduce from the act itself the consequences it implies. In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it... It is merely confessing that that “is not worth the trouble.” Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, the uselessness of suffering."

I think Camus expresses a whole bunch of things about this topic in a much more eloquent fashion than I ever could (at least in the foreseeable future), so I shall not offer too much commentary on his words, but allow them to speak for themselves. But I would like to relate something else that happened last night. Last night, I got together with some colleagues for some drinks. For some reason or other, the topic turned to suicide (there is no correlation here with my earlier conversation with my other friends; besides myself, there is no overlap between these two groups of people). It turns out that among the group of us (there were five of us in the group), everybody except me had thought of taking their own life at some point or other in the past. When I raised the only "dissenting" view, and said that I have honestly never contemplated killing myself before, even in my darkest moments, everybody else was really surprised.

After a brief silence, somebody in the group who knew his Camus quoted the above passage about suicide being the one truly serious philosophical problem, and not-so-subtly suggested that perhaps the reason why I hadn't thought of killing myself was because I hadn't thought seriously enough about my own life. I responded by biting the bullet (no pun intended), "Yeah, maybe that means that I haven't been taking my life seriously enough (big fucking deal!)..." I think the group was rather stunned by my non-attempt to rise to this challenge, because there was yet another brief silence. After about thirty seconds or so, another person (probably for lack of something else to say) simply blurted, "It must all the yoga you are doing!"

Well, honestly, I do not think that yoga practice is an automatic suicidal-thought-suppressant: If you want to kill yourself, you probably will, whether or not you do yoga. I can only say that, so far, I have been fortunate (?), in that even in my darkest hours, there is always this strong undercurrent of something (survival instinct?) that moves me along, so that the thought that living is more trouble than it is worth has never crossed my mind; or if it did, I only entertained it as a hypothetical intellectual possibility, and never with the existential force of a real life possibility.

 But then again, maybe I really shouldn't be jinxing myself by talking about such things so cavalierly. For all I know, tomorrow, or even the very next hour, may be the first time I ever seriously think of killing myself. Ah, morbid thoughts, morbid thoughts... There must be something about this time of year that brings such thoughts into the minds of so many. Well, but I can at least say that this is probably more authentic and less shallow than all that forced holiday cheer that is so prevalent in so many other quarters...

Anyway....       

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Q: Every year I seem to get a couple of months of chronic bronchitis.  I have a regular gentle yoga practice, am 63, and am frustrated that when I get a winter cold it seems to settle into my lungs. I am wondering if you have any thoughts on what yoga to practice to strengthen and help heal my lungs.  I looked at your list of topics, but did not see anything that addressed this specific issue. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

A: I happen to be working on this post as I fly home from co-leading a yoga retreat in Mexico, which would have been all well and good except for the fact that I had a cold when I left over a week ago, and now I am still battling with a persistent, non-productive cough that feels like it is in my chest and not my throat. When I slip my doctor hat on, I can’t help but be suspicious that I may have gone from having a typical winter cold to possibly having an acute bronchitis. Bronchitis is an inflammation of the bronchial tree, that part of the lung architecture just down stream from your trachea, which is the biggest part of the tubes that allow air to move from the outside down into the deepest parts of the lungs, the alveoli, where our breathing gases get exchanged. Bronchitis, especially the acute kind, usually implies an infection of some sort, typically a virus or a bacteria, the latter for which antibiotics might be needed to eliminate.

Bronchial Tree

1. Improve overall lung capacity by very gradually working to lengthen your inhalation and exhalation. For example, if you find it easy now to do a two second inhalation and a two-second exhalation for a series of six breaths, begin to work towards four-second inhale and four-second exhale (4:4 breath). And when that gets easy, to for 6:6, and so on. Always work in a gentle way and avoid getting short of breath or shaky. If you do get short of breath or shaky, take a break, go down to a lower time ratio and proceed more gradually.
2. Increase muscular strength of the accessory muscles of breathing that are often called into action in breathing conditions like chronic bronchitis by practicing either Kapalabhati, Skull Brightening Breath, or Bastrika, the Bellows breath. By improving the strength and endurance of the accessory muscles of breathing such as the four layers of your superficial abdominal muscles (to mention only a few), you will be improving the stamina of your breathing musculature.  I’ll describe these techniques in a future post. But in the meantime, you can find good descriptions in Richard Rosen’s second book on pranayama, Pranayama Beyond the Fundamentals. And take your time with these techniques by initially doing only 15-30 seconds at a time. Take many days to gradually add more time to your practice.

by Nina

The December HIT Standards Committee focused on patient generated data, image sharing, patient matching, and the 2014 work plan, ensuring we select the necessary standards to support Meaningful Use stage 3 policy goals.

We began the meeting with a discussion by Leslie Kelly-Hall of patient generated healthcare data - structured and unstructured questionnaires plus patient provided medical history such as medications, allergies, and problems.      The key discussion was an evaluation of the standards maturity and the level of adoption of the standards suggested for patient generated data exchange.  Recommendations included Direct for data transport, CCDA for content capture, LOINC/SNOMED for vocabulary capture, and Continua implementation guides for devices.   As a followup the Consumer Technology Workgroup will list examples of CCDA templates that can be used to support patient generated data use cases.   Continua will provide us a list of the named standards so that we can validate the maturity and adoption of Continua's implementation guides.  We will also ensure that the CCDA templates include the appropriate vocabularies that will  enable incorporation of patient generated data into EHRs.

Next, Jamie Ferguson presented an overview of the standards selected for radiology and non-radiology image exchange, including associated reports.  Our challenge was to provide a parsimonious collection of constrained standards for consumer and professional applications in tightly coupled (modality to PACS), and loosely coupled (web-based, cloud hosted image exchange) architectures.   We all agreed that we need to be very careful when writing certification criteria to avoid optionality such that vendors will be forced to implement many different standards (the "OR" of meaningful use becomes the "AND" of certification).

Next, Lee Stevens presented the work done to date on Patient Matching. We all look forward to ONC's final recommendations for optimizing data quality, selecting matching algorithms (deterministic or probabilistic), and choosing data elements that will provide reasonable sensitivity and specificity.

Finally Doug Fridsma a straw man plan for reorganizing the HITSC workgroups, spreading the work ahead across more people to enhance our agility and reduce volunteer burn out.   All thought  the reorganization and work plans were reasonable but suggested two additions.  First, we'll need another workgroup that focuses on research/creating a learning healthcare system.   Second, we need to ensure that each workgroup reserves time for future planning and does not limit its scope to selection of incremental standards to solve today's urgent needs.  We'll implement future planning by adding it to each workgroup's agenda and implementing a matrixed management approach for communication and coordination of future planning among the workgroups.

The FY14 work ahead looks well prioritized and categorized.   Our next meeting will be in February when we'll be joined by the new National Coordinator for Healthcare IT, Karen DeSalvo