Liberating Spaces

‘Asana’ in sanskrit means ‘sitting down’. In yoga it refers to the positions a yogi takes in the practice. In life, it can refer to all things we do or are done to us, our ‘life positions’.

An Asana can be more or less difficult for one person according to the state of her body, mind, heart and soul. We all have positions, asanas, we don’t like. In life, we have things we don’t like doing or we don’t like that are done to us.

This is the state where I was when I decided to stop for a while this blog and go away from Facebook. There were things I was doing and things done to me that I didn’t like. So I decided to try to stop them…

In yoga, it is normally the asanas we don’t like doing that are the ones that hide the most powerful potential of transformation. One important reason why we don’t like them is because they touch on emotions we have buried for a long time. In life, actions we don’t like touch on emotions we don’t want to feel, including those we have repressed to protects ourselves in fear.

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No, it is not that I am going to the dark side, or I am changing colors. This blog goes darks. I’ve been writing a blog since 2004. My audience is not huge, so this won’t affect many people, if it really affects anyone at all! Just felt like taking a break. For how long? I don’t know…Hope you enjoyed my ever-changing posts!

Namaste..

So, here I am in London once more, but, as it has been my life in the last year and a half, only for a few days. On Sunday I am going to Sweden for a Yoga Festival in Ängsbacka, which this year’s theme is “Connect with yourself – connect with others”. Coincidences do no exist. Connection has been the theme of my past year and a half, so it is very appropriate that I finish a period of great transformation in my life with a 7-day yoga/mediation/singing/community festival in the middle of the Swedish woods…

Not long time ago I was at the table, having dinner with my family in Barcelona. My uncle, a youthful sixty-five year old man, responded to my call for “change in the world” with a “you can’t change people, you may change yourself, and from there people may change, but you can’t change people”. This same thing was said many decades ago by a wise man who changed and keeps changing the world.

Be the change you want to see in the world – Mahatma Ghandi

Change is in ourselves. All starts with an exercise of self-awareness, a self-realisation of our immense possibilities and, yes, our boundaries. From there we can “establish new behavior patterns” to “form habits”. Slowly, gradually we change ourselves. This was reminded to me just a couple of days ago. This is the only real and durable change. People around us will then start to realize their own potential, their own boundaries by seeing our own change. This is a long process, in which patience is important. It is a process not free of pain and suffering on the way, but the rewards are far greater…

Through constant familiarity, we can definitely establish new behavior patterns, using our tendency to form habits to our advantage. If we make a steady effort, I think we can overcome any form of negative conditioning and make positive changes in our lives. But we need to remember that genuine change doesn’t happen overnight. – Dalai Lama

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Sir Ken Robinson’s lecture is a loud and clear call for change. We must change the current paradigm of education based on the intellectual ideas of enlightenment, and the practical considerations of the industrial revolution. It is actually numbing our humanity, our feelings, real interests and emotions, killing our creative potential for the sake of a narrow view of the world and the material interests of a few who are the actual profiteers of industrial production.

As a child, I went to seven different schools. I was expelled of some of them, recommended to leave in others and just moved by my parents from a couple. The first time I changed schools I was 7 years old. Unknown to me until very recently, that first time was a very emotional and traumatic affair for me. I had to leave my friends, those with whom I shared so many memories and experiences until then. Why was I thrown out? Basically because I was often not putting attention into what the teachers were saying. I preferred to either talk to other students, read, draw or do other stuff instead of focusing in one single point. I actually felt alienated, it felt like someone was hammering me down into a box. My whole being was resisting. Always with a big smile though.

Robinson’s talk wakes these feelings again up in me. It is so true, so right what he says. It is so at the core of what I call the emotional revolution, a change of paradigm that takes seriously us as emotional beings, who feel and create in our freedom and diversity. Rationalism and standardisation tries to kill this by making us all the same – like classifying us by our production date (i.e. birthday). I believe that understanding and accepting what’s inside us, the combination and collaboration of our reason and emotions, is an essential step to make a future which is freer and fairer for us.

Writing this in the free ING internet gate area (all airports should have one!) in Warsaw’s Frederic Chopin Airport to fly through Riga to Stockholm, to visit the person who took this picture in Montmatre, Paris on January 2, 2011. Finally, I have some spare time to post it!

Funny way of showing how the Wikileaks affair has touched upon a very important issue for all of us: our right to know what governments are doing with our money, our people and to others aka freedom of information…

…and yes, you guessed it, she is Swedish, what it makes the picture even more amusing…the picture was surely taken with a big smile in her face…this post is written with a corresponding one

This is my personal blog. It started as a semi-professional space, for my ideas on a series of topics in which I worked on. But during the latest months it has become more personal, mixing life events with more theoretical/practical ideas. Now I feel I need a different space for my thoughts and my stories. One that is not cluttered with widgets or other gimmicks, which are good for this blog, but not for a pure space with just what comes from my mind.

Simple. White. One column. No tag clouds. No pages. No calendar. No nothing. A new clear space for my thoughts and the stories I write. There I rant about topics I find interesting. There I can tell my stories. Nothing about my (personal or professional) life. Just thoughts and fiction. It’s raw A.

NOTE: all posts published on Raw A. will be automatically published on this blog.

I remember the drums, the beats and the feet. Bodies touching. Hands raising. Down, Up. Beat up, beat down. Louder and louder. Hips left and right. The floor full of those whom the night calls every day, at every sun. Moon-dominated souls that want to live what’s not allowed in the waking lights. Amnesic mind blowing experience. Drugs or not. Changing lives by the contact with the other. The unknown looking at you. Luring you to the depths of the dark. There, where the wolves wait your coming to make you theirs. There, where the bat sucks your blood. There, where the fairies bring you pleasures unattainable in the clarity of the day.

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There is on IMDB a reviewer of the wonderful movie Before Sunset who says

I remember a line that says “nothing that is complete breathes”, and I think that is what we see in this film. A perfect connection with another human is a blessing and a curse; having experienced perfection a part of us stops breathing, unable or unwilling to mar the perfection of that memory.

How truthful!

Due to a last minute professional incident, I had to cancel my trip to Nepal. I am very disappointed, for these were the only real holidays of a really tough year.

I’m planning it again for March-April next year for two-three weeks.

This comes from my previous post. I’m posting the tracking of my K21 race from Klosters to Davos, Switzerland.

And a video I made in the middle of the race of a lake called Schwarzsee (on the map) (yes, I know I should have aimed for a better time, but the view and the weather were astonishing!)

Since Thursday morning I am in Zurich. Originally I planned this trip to run the Swiss Alpine K21, a half-marathon race through the Alps from Klosters to Davos. Though I’ve stayed a bit longer, with a good friend of mine that lives in Zurich and who I haven’t seen for a long time. We went to Klosters on Friday and, in the afternoon, went all the way up to the Sertig Pass (2,762 m) in the Albula Range. Fantastic excursion, we were the only ones over there. A luxury. The next day I ran 21 kms in 2 hours and 1 minute (it was my first time running more than an hour!). When I’m back home I will post the GPS tracking of my race, with a couple of videos of astonishing Alpine views in a bright sunny day.

My trip to Nepal is nearly prepared. I’m leaving London on August 5 and coming back on September 6 (though I am again flying to Barcelona the next day, September 7 :S). Originally, I planned to go to Delhi and get a bus to Kathmandu from there, but because of the Indian visa I had to change these plans for a flight to Kathmandu the same day I’m landing in India. Shame. Next time. It’s entirely my fault. I didn’t think of the Indian visa on time! For it takes at least 15 days to get it in London if you are not a UK national.

I am going to stay a few days in Kathmandu Then I’ll be in an organic farm project of the RUWON organization, where I’ll do some farming and teaching for women living in rural societies. I hope I can also do some trekking in the middle. I expect to update my blog regularly with pictures while I’m there.

Right, tomorrow I am off to Poland again. It seems a country that won’t be leaving my life for a while. As I wrote in a previous post, I’ll be training Polish officials on negotiation in the European Union for a while (until January 2010).

My life has been a strange ride in the last 3 months. Full of serendipity and “coincidences” of all kinds, many related to Poland. The last one is related with my next trip. A bit than less 3 months ago, I had a great dinner in a restaurant in Warsaw called U Kucharzy. Then a friend of mine who has visited me in London this week, mentioned it by chance the same day that another friend in Warsaw sent me an email saying that he had reserved in that restaurant for Saturday! The first and the second friend don’t know each other at all. It’s either the only restaurant in Warsaw worth going or another “coincidence” of the many and many happening around me? The funny thing is that I knew I was going to end up going back to this restaurant way before my friend’s booking. I just can say one thing: curious.