Author: Danielle Levy

There’s a new trend. It’s called competitive yoga. Rajashree and Bikram Choudhury who are the owners of the Bikram yoga studios are also behind the movement, although the couple do not want the two confused and have begun heir own non-profit to promote the idea. Though right now there is a series of competitions which will hopefully go from local to regional to national, the goal is to make it to the Olympics, maybe by 2020.
I must admit that I am among those who doubt the whole idea, not because it isn’t doable, or that the Choudhurys will succeed, just that competitive yoga is an oxymoron. Yoga is an old Sanskrit word meaning union, union with the divine. That implies partaking of a world where cooperation reigns and competition does not. It speaks of values unifying the two aspects of who we are, the outer and the inner. It addresses how to bring the inner into the outer. For any one with knowledge of the inner-self, of the inner world of which it is a part, it is difficult to see how yoga can be made competitive without making it devoid of its spiritual underpinning.

I just read about a Somali truck driver who sold his land to pay for a journey out of his hopeless conditions. He traveled through Kenya and Tanzania to Mozambique. There he paid a trafficker $1500 to get him on a ship to Sao Paulo. From Brazil he went to Columbia and then by boat to Panama, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and ended in Guatemala where he is asking for asylum.
Most of us live sedentary lives. We might be born and die within the same state, certainly within the same country. Not so for the millions who seek jobs wherever they may be, for those who are displaced by wars and economic crises, for those in countries where there are no opportunities, no way for them to be able to earn what hey need for basic necessities. Conditions such as these have led to a whole class of people who live without a kind of security we take for granted. I know where I can get mail. They don’t.
We tend to look down on those people, they’re the subject of news reports on makeshift camps in Spain, they’re a group unwanted in Italy. In Germany and France they’re trying to pass laws against them. In the U.S the whole issue of illegal immigration has stirred up the passions of many. And yet they are people, struggling like anyone else to survive the best way they know how.
I can’t help think they could easily be us.

It was more than an ordinary drain problem. Certain pipes behind the bathtub had rusted and needed to be changed. That required the plumber to go through what he called the crawl space, an opening about a foot high and two feet wide to be able to enter the basement of the complex where all the pipes could be visible. We’ve had rats there and a neighbor believes it houses at least one cat. It was the kind of job that required two people, so the two young men flipped a coin as to who would go under. No complaints, no hesitation, no ifs or buts. They had to do it and they did it, and a little over an hour later the problem was fixed. Had I been the one to have to go through the crawl space into a dark and dank basement full of unknowns I couldn’t have done it without fears, emotional crutches, without insurance I’d come out, without groans and gripes. I don’t think those I know would feel much differently. In fact most of us complain for far less, for most jobs have their unsavory tasks. Still, when one thinks of all the tasks involved in being a plumber, when one appreciates how grubby, unpleasant and downright nasty they can be, when one values their necessity and how much what a plumber does contributes to our lives, then one has to be humbled.

The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall unleashed many recollections, tributes, promises. It was an occasion to remember human rights and those who still can’t live under them. Several heads of state had choice words while many columnists and pundits had theirs. Of all that was said the words of Sen. John McCain in a Financial Times’ article captured the significance in a particularly pithy way, and to my mind at least placed its importance in a forward context that may perhaps foretell the Wall’s legacy. “The fall of the Berlin Wall made history, but that history was made by countless men and women over many decades who longed for a world in which their rights would be protected too. Those impatient dreamers are still out there today, in Iran and Cuba, Zimbabwe and Burma and beyond. States like these, hostile to human dignity, may look stable, but they are actually roting inside—for they have only fear and force to sustain them, and people will not be afraid forever.”