Joanna Frueh Home

Blog

Yogic Aphrodite/action

During a conversation one of my close friends, who often calls me Aphrodite, pointed out that the Greek goddess in her original configuration is pretty neurotic and therefore not befitting my intentions for either my art or my life.

Playfully having chosen Aphrodite as my email name and, more importantly, writing about her in my work, I saw that her capriciousness, vanity, and ill temper, her neurotic tendencies, clog the intention of my project, which is to advocate for beauty, especially in the forms of creativity, love, and eros. Also, Aphrodite never grows older, and I do! Lightheartedly, my friend addressed me as “Yogic Aphrodite,” and I thank her for her humor and insight. Yogic Aphrodite is a more complex, useful, and satisfying model than is the sometimes spleenful ancient goddess. Read more

Belly

I saddened when I read Eve Ensler’s The Good Body, published in 2004, because it is exemplary of women’s self-hatred. Unlike lots of women, I found The Vagina Monologues, the play by Ensler through which she became famous and which was first performed in 1996, disappointing for the same reason–the clearly stated and unremitting repugnance that women feel for their bodies. Read more

I AM desire

Steady, easy, and passionate–intensely centered–in desire, I let myself relax into it. That relaxation fits with ideas that I’ve read in Yoga Spandakarika: The Sacred Texts at the Origins of Tantra. Desire is at the heart of tantra, and the commentary by Daniel Odier, who both studies and practices tantra, illustrates that being in desire is as simple as soft breathing.

Desire is benign, but people think otherwise. Read more

A time defined by honey

I return home from visiting friends and family who I love and who love me. I am sated from conversation and food. Travel has sapped my energy.

For close to 20 years I’ve traveled a lot, for work and pleasure, in the United States and internationally. I travel easily and come home full. Now, for a while, home is the only place to be.

At home it is hotter than 7 suns.

I entertain my cool head.

A tow truck driver verbally displays to me, who sits in the passenger seat of his vehicle, a passion for guns. He mentions his high IQ. Then karma. I say, at the end of our short trip to a tire shop, “It was fun talking with you.”

In a waiting room 2 workers in residences for the old and the infirm talk of low income, comparative shopping for an axle fluid change, and administrators who they like and dislike.

A fat woman with the energy and skin tone of health teases herself about her love of food.

Unwanted immigrants and other citizens wait for rain as the clouds build every afternoon.

I soften like the girl I was, I am, in my mother’s arms.

I am quiet like the sky as the rains get ready to test the strength of rooftops.

Sacred tantric texts reveal what every yogi knows: mind rules the world, mind bends it, mind in its ordinary state is clear, and empty of concoctions, intellectual or fantastical (which can partake of each other). Yogis may read tantric texts. They may be scholars of Buddhism, Taoism, or embodiment. They may theorize and philosophize, they may write books about the history of yoga. None of that matters. Practice does.

People try to hold their world in place, to keep it from changing so that it can stay what it is, which nothing can. The rain does not hold back–a drop over there on the patio, a torrent for miles with bolts of lightning.

I eat Greek yogurt, densely rich like sour cream, a little less tangy, with local honey from a 12-ounce jar. The label reads “Sonoran Desert Honey.” Beneath the words an illustration of saguaros and prickly pears and a tree, ironwood perhaps, conveys the expanse of the land in which I live. I like knowing, from the information to the side of the picture, that Sonoran Desert Honey “is a pure natural blend of mesquite, catclaw, ironwood, saguaro and other springtime honeys.” The reddish gold liquid is the infinitely sexy complement to the thick dairy. The honey is startlingly sweet, even after my eating it days in a row, a most desirable partner for the mildly tart yogurt. (Before buying the Sonoran Desert brand a couple weeks ago, I hadn’t eaten honey for years.)

An attractive man helps me choose a gunpowder green tea, the smokier of 2 choices.

I water the plants until the rain comes.

In New York in March I met a man’s who’s a delight. I don’t think that I’ve called any man but him a delight. Our romantic interlude at his home in April was absolutely satisfying. I feel no desire or need to spend more time with him. I tell my friends about it all. “I feel like I’ve just heard a novel,” one says, and they and I accept the mysterious goings-on of a happy heart.

I’m listening to a clock and birds.

I’m drinking that smoky tea.

I’m living in a time defined by honey.

Mystic/realist

No one lives more in reality than the mystic. Forget asceticism, altered states of consciousness, transfiguration, or idealistic foolishness. The mystic enjoys the everyday world because its marvels fulfill her.

Marvels–the voice of a cashier, the color of brewed tea; a man sleeping in an outdoor alcove of a church, the sheen of a polished wooden chair; the scowl of a woman who looks at you when you board the bus, ice cream and butter at the temperature of their perfect softness. No dark night of the soul, à la St. John of the Cross. No flash-in-the-pan epiphanies.

Experiencing everyday anything as a marvel, the mystic doesn’t linger in an experience in order to prolong its pleasures or discomforts or to agitate, vilify, or congratulate herself. When feeling moves along at its own pace, everyday anything is new, instantly and continuously, and the body and senses freshen themselves. When  disappointment, dread, anger, sorrow, anxiety, delusion, projection, envy, stupefaction, cowardice, yearning, or frustration arise, they pass quickly, as does any perception or feeling, because she does not oppose them.

The mystic practices ordinariness–the mind untrammeled, unraveled from discursive embellishments. She lives in a palpable, sensuous world which includes her body. You may call the mystic’s ordinariness extraordinary if not impossible. For her, gliding and loving are synonyms, as are smoothness and peace.

A problem with passion

“You’re passionate” rings as a compliment, a superlative in contemporary ears.

Passion is a problem in the sacred texts and counsel of Buddhism and yoga. There, passion is fever. Fever flames when the human system is out of balance. Read more

Thinking more/thinking less

A sign in a shop window reads “Pray less. Think more.” Seeing it on Tucson’s 4th Avenue, a commercial street in a socially and politically liberal neighborhood, has me imagining that the dual directive is an anti-fundamentalist or -evangelist corrective, perhaps to a sign or bumper sticker that reads “Pray more. Think less.” If my supposition is true, then praying less and thinking more offers itself as a solution to people’s self-serving, egotistic, and mindless–or simple-minded–requests of a deity.

“Pray less. Think more” implicitly defines thinking as rational–sensible, reasoned, and analytical–and implicitly assumes that reason produces good outcomes. However, thinking defined differently, as in “You think too much,” is obsessive and unproductive. Or, “You think too much” can operate as an anti-intellectual’s trashing of an intellectual, if we define an intellectual as a mentally active person.

Being a scholar and having had a career in academia, my impression is that intellectuals tend to believe that thinking, the rational kind, presents facts accurately and leads to considered opinions and calm deliberation. Consequently, thinking is the best and most realistic way to solve problems. Reasoning is surely better than beating up people or yelling at them. Yet, reasoning, because it’s a human activity, has the human quality of being reactive, even when used by someone who can critique her own positions and arguments, because everyone is subject to their own persuasions, whether we call them biases, ideologies, or just likes and dislikes. Persuasions can be hidden to oneself or so embarrassingly glaring and incriminating to ourselves that we are ashamed to own up to them. Reactivity indicates imbalance. Thus, the supposed balanced nature of reasoned argument falters. Read more

Maturing sexiness

The word “naughty” trivializes eroticism and sex. A popular synonym for “sexy,” “naughty” is a sly, little smile with an insinuating wink that force sex into a playground that is associated with children. Making love is play, looking and feeling sexy is play, but adults make love and children look pathetic in sexed-up attire. “Pathetic” in that sentence does mean arousing pity. Children are not capable of the richly erotic sexuality that powers a mature and, if chosen by a person, continually maturing sexiness.

“Naughtiness” defined as disobedience deserves mild punishment. Sexy adults may be disobedient in terms of societal norms, but they are not bad girls or bad boys–they are grown-ups feeling good about themselves. A grown-up has grown from her experiences so that she can discern what feels good to her and what does not, what gives her ease and what does not.  Not all people over the age of 21 have accomplished that. One of the best things about being a grown-up is that you get to make choices about how you enjoy yourself and with whom.

“Naughtiness” is also a cute kind of indecency. Honestly! What a ridiculous way to perceive or talk about a grown-up man or woman.

Life-altering

I heard about a book–or movie,  news story, disease, unexpected occurrence–this morning while half listening to NPR that an announcer, interviewer, or talk show guest called “life-altering.” The adjective “life-altering” caught my attention, but neither its object nor the speaker did, because the use of “life-altering” seemed arbitrary.

Although a “system” exists for calling something life-altering and includes matters of loss and gain and of life and death, that system feels pat, both too inclusive and not inclusive enough. Too inclusive: a new job, a firing, a retirement; marrying and divorcing; giving birth or expiring are life-altering because they mark what people consider to be monumental, grand, or absolutely memorable. Not inclusive enough: everything is life-altering because individuals’ reactions–or non-reactivity–to all that comes their way leaves a subconscious imprint.

Petite, unimposing, forgotten–no matter. The small composes the large, the ephemeral composes the earth-shattering, and quintessentially prosaic acts and impressions, whether old and latent, superficial and seemingly forgotten and inconsequential, or unconscionably self-critical, determine life alterations, what human beings call fate.

Rushing minds in rushed bodies

Some journalists who host talk shows or speak on them talk really fast. I wonder if it’s because they feel pushed by a time limit. I wonder if they’re conscious of their pace, which sometimes has me laughing, as do the halts, overall jumpiness, and even stumbling over words that often accompany the speed. The voices impress me as overloaded–with information that a person wishes to communicate? With emotions that must be suppressed in order to convey objectivity? Actually, the vocal rate and rhythms sound excessively excited and not at all neutral. Rushing minds in rushed bodies. Vocal urgency expresses lack of peace, lack of pleasure.

During my time as a professor, students every now and then told me that I talked really fast in class. They were right.

I’m not thinking that the rapid speech I hear on the radio or TV makes the ideas or facts that it contains any more or less credible than does slower speaking, but the hurry conveys anxiety. More particularly, I feel mildly anxious listening. The journalists’ haste makes waste of my peace, if I let it do so. When I laugh, peace resolves the anxiety.

I wonder if the interviewers and interviewees talk that fast at home. If so, I’m glad that they don’t live with me. I’d rather be living with a person of sensuous speed, meaning movement through time and space rather than rapidity; a sensuous speed that communicates self-awareness and quickens my own.

 
 Older Entries »
  • legally purchase viagra
  • xalatan best price
  • buy cheap zyprexa
  • diamox
  • zyrtec
  • mobic rx
  • generic online zyrtec
  • discount generic viagra online
  • cialis line order
  •