Inspirational Reading

Okay, getting back on track...

One of the commenters a few posts back mentioned being an Osho follower and that was something I have never heard before. So I looked it up.

Osho was an international guru, having a large effect on the "new age" movement in the West. According to Wikipedia: "His syncretic teachings emphasise the importance of meditation, awareness, love, celebration, creativity and humour – qualities that he viewed as being suppressed by adherence to static belief systems, religious tradition and socialisation."

That sounds pretty delightful. Awareness, love, celebration, meditation, humor, and creativity are all great things. I will have to look up some writings from him. If he is as uplifting as Wikipedia makes him sound, I might add his books to my collection.

There are some negative things said about him, but we are all human, even the really great men and women and I would rather see if his writing speaks to me than judge based on anything else.

Though I follow a particular path, I do believe in looking for Truth and Meaning in everything around me. I gather books and articles and other readings that inspire me, that have insight, regardless of what tradition they come from.

Often when I am feeling down or frustrated or hopeless, I can just flip to a page of one of these books and feel filled with the light and joy or the masters. Easwaran is a favorite on that bookshelf. I've had Ekhart Tolle recommended, so I'm going to give him a try. Sri Ramana Maharshi is another.

Off Topic: Beauty

I just read a fascinating article in Psychology Today and it is not related to the topic of this blog, but it got me thinking about some things in my life. It is about why beauty is important. The article is a bit intense and I found it kind of shocking, but also made some interesting points.

The Truth About Beauty by Amy Alkon is the name of the article and here are a few key parts:

"There are certain realities of existence that most of us accept. If you want to catch a bear, you don't load the trap with a copy of Catch-22...Yet, if you're a woman who wants to land a man, there's this notion that you should be able to go around looking like Ernest Borgnine: If you're 'beautiful on the inside,' that's all that should count...

...It just doesn't seem fair to us that some people come into life with certain advantages--whether it's a movie star chin or a multimillion-dollar shipbuilding inheritance..."

Men are drawn to beautiful women, no surprise there, and women are drawn to men with resources and status, which also makes evolutionary sense.

The article later continues...

"Just like women who aren't very attractive, men who make very little money or are chronically out of work tend to have a really hard time finding partners. There is some male grumbling about this. Yet, while feminist journalists deforest North America publishing articles urging women to bow out of the beauty arms race and 'Learn to love that woman in the mirror!', nobody gets into the ridiculous position of advertising men to 'Learn to love that unemployed guy sprawled on the couch!'"

Interesting point. Is there a difference? I'm not sure. Giving the message that women don't need to take care of their appearance at all seems like a bad idea, yet we have to find the balance of not killing ourselves trying to reach a standard that's impossible or feeling terrible about ourselves when we are not the most beautiful girl in the room.

The next part of the article gets a little bit into the idea that women who take care of their appearance are not smart:

"Take The Beauty Myth author Naomi Wolf: She contends that standards of beauty are a plot to keep women politically, economically, and sexually subjugated to men--apparently by keeping them too busy curling their eyelashes to have time for political action and too weak from dieting to stand up for what they want in bed. Wolf and her feminist sob sisters bleat about the horror of women being pushed to conform to 'Western standards of beauty'--as if eyebrow plucking and getting highlights are the real hardships compared to the walk in the park of footbinding and clitoridectomy. Most insultingly, Wolf paints women who look after their looks as the dim, passive dupes of Madison Avenue and the magazine editors. Apparently, women need only open a page of Vogue and they're under its spell..."

It's true that I hate when people think that just because I enjoy reading Vogue, that is makes me a slave to the beauty industry.

"...We consider it admirable when people strive to better themselves intellectually; we don't say, 'Hey, you weren't born a genius, so why ever bother reading a book?' Why should we treat physical appearance any differently?"

"...Unfortunately, because Americans are so conflicted and dishonest about the power of beauty, we approach it like novices. At one end of the spectrum are the 'Love me as I am!' types, like the woman who asked me why she was having such a terrible time meeting men...while dressed in a way that advertised not 'I want a boyfriend' but 'I'm just the girl to clean out your sewer line!' At the other extreme are women who go around resembling porn-ready painted dolls."

The article also talks about studies showing that there are universal standards of beauty around the world. Some things are different, but some are the same. Ideal weight seems to be directly related to availability of food, so in places where food is plentiful men prefer thin women and in places where food is scarce, men prefer large women. However, they all like to see a woman's waist, regardless of her size.

There are also some articles in this issue about the differences on the other side, how male beauty is very different and not the trait to cultivate when looking for a woman.

I'm curious to see what the backlash to this article will be.
****************************************************
To speak on this issue from my own personal life:

I have been caught in a beauty trap all my life. I grew up in an area with a lot of hippies who emphasized that inner beauty was the most important thing. Hearing that so much, I felt confused when I was expected to put an effort into looking beautiful. On the one hand, my mother has never worn makeup and told me that I was being vain when I was staring at myself in the mirror at eight years old; on the other hand, she took me to get electrolysis treatments for hair removal when I was twelve (in case you don't know, electrolysis is a very painful treatment involving shooting electric currents into the skin. I had it done on the most sensitive parts of my face for years).

My female cousins in the South are brilliant at clothes and makeup and hair. They know how to use a flat iron and how to apply the most tasteful eye color (neither of which I know how to do). The culture in the Northeast seemed to suggest that women who care about their appearance are shallow and dim-witted and just plain stupid. I discovered just how untrue that is when my beautiful cousin went into engineering in college! Just as the movie Legally Blonde charmingly illustrates, a woman can be both smart and beautiful, can care equally for school and for fashion.

I was interested in makeup as a teenager, but I was the only one of my friends in high school experimenting with it and if I wore it to school I got teased by my own friends, or given looks that suggested they thought I was from another planet.

Every time I start feeling good about how I look, I bash myself back down again with negativity in my mind. I feel guilty for caring, feel shallow for loving clothes, feel vain for loving my hair.

I'm the kind of person who always wants to make everyone else feel good and be happy. I'm afraid to go for my true beauty potential in case I make other women feel inadequate. Which is odd, because I really do believe that 99% of women are gorgeous. And imperfections are so easy to hide, there are thousands of little tricks out there so that we can all look and feel like the models in the magazines. I have yet to see an ugly woman. They all have at least one feature that is achingly beautiful.

The other thing this article briefly brought up is that we trick ourselves into thinking that the quest for beauty is a Western thing, when of course it is a human thing. Every culture has a standard of beauty, and there are actually some universals, like an hourglass figure, which is said to be a visual cue of fertility to men. As the last post showed, while in America we strive for tanned skin to give a "healthy glow", in many parts of the world extreme measures are taken to look paler. I think there does need to be a certain amount of loving what we have. We need to see that there is beauty in a wide variety of natural human appearances.

You can probably tell from this blog that I have a hard time doing things without evidence and support from others. That's something else I am still working on understanding and exploring. It isnt' enough for me to believe something, I seem to need support from others.

It's hard for me to make the decision to enjoy my quest for beauty without backup from a magazine article that has studies in it. I want to show it to people who tell me that I shouldn't pay attention to my own appearance or to the appearances of the people I date and say, "See? Appearances do matter. And they should. It doesn't make the world a bad place that appearances matter."

I do have a suspicion that, despite where I started out, I could be quite beautiful with a little effort. I have some cousins who have the same coloring as I do and are very beautiful. I think it wouldn't be too hard to look like them. I am also encouraged by the website Before You Were Hot, which shows people's ugliest awkward teenage years picture along with how lovely they look now. It makes me smile to know that I'm not the only one trying to go from sweatpants and a uni-brow to head-turningly beautiful!

Okay, sorry for the aside! The talk about skin color and beauty from the last post got me going in this direction and this blog is mostly a self-analysis, so I found it very useful to explore and think about these things in writing.

What do you all think about beauty?

Can't tell by looking

Radha found this article about "looking Indian." This really proves that you can't go by appearances to figure out who is Indian and who is not.

The article is about a pale, blonde girl competing in a Miss India competition in New Zealand. Though she doesn't look it, she is half Indian. Some people were shocked and upset that she was accepted into the competition and that she made it as far as she did (second runner up).

I could see having a concern that there is already a struggle to help young Indian women to know that darker skin and dark hair is beautiful. Beauty does not have to match up a European standard.

But that is a general idea to try to spread around in culture, not something to use against one young woman whose heritage is Indian even if she doesn't look it.

http://www.theimproper.com/13701/entertainment/jacinta-lal-call-too-white-to-compete-for-miss-india

Holiday plans

Being connected to a variety of Indian communities has served me really well this year.

My study group people are having a Navratri puja at their home tonight that I've been inviting to. I've picked out a sari to wear!

I am also signed up for a few Indian meet up groups on meetup.com Usually their events are too far away (often in Virginia, which is just a tad far for me), or they are doing bar hoping or some other "young person" thing that I've never been that interested in. However, on Saturday some people are getting together to find places doing Garba and other celebrations and I'll be joining in for that.

I'll have to do my relaxing time after holiday season is over! :D

Busy, busy

My schedule is packed, as usual. I need to learn how to not try to do everything all the time. I'm lucky I only work part time.

Here's what I do every week:
Monday, work, long walk with dog and friends, paralegal class
Tuesday, therapy session, work,long walk with dog and friends, Hindi class
Wednesday, work, long walk with dog and friends, game group with friends
Thursday, work,long walk with dog and friends, paralegal class
Friday, weight watcher's meeting, work,long walk with dog and friends
Saturday, temple, dance class
Sunday, study group (and once a month, writer's group)

There's some obligation on every single day. And I used to go to a knitting group, but I can't fit it in anymore. They meet Sat morning, Tue morning, and Wed evening, and all those times I have other things happening.

The paralegal classes are on a campus that is not close to me and takes at least an hour to drive to and from.

The Hindi class is in Washington D.C. and takes me close to two hours to get to.

I am enjoying the Hindi class. I signed up so that I would be forced to speak and to get some of the finer points of grammar. It's intense because there are only two of us in the class, so there's a lot of attention on both of us and we have to translate sentences on the spot. It's good for me, but I'm not going to take it next semester. It's too far and I really can't afford it.

I have too many hobbies! I'm trying to fit in language learning, writing novels, and knitting (as well as several computer games!)

So, sometimes I go days or even weeks without posting and this is why! Rest assured, when I have something that I think is interesting to share, you will know right away.

In one year I should be done with my paralegal classes and after Thanksgiving I'll be finished with the Hindi class. That will free up some of my time and energy :)

For the kids...

You know how when you're a kid, your parents have certain rules like no television during dinner or no more than two cookies for dessert or ice cream is not a breakfast food? Then you grow up, move out on your own and eat dinner sitting on the floor in front of the television, eat three cookies, and eat ice cream for breakfast...or is that just me?

We enjoy doing things our own way, but what puts a stop to it is when we have children of our own. Suddenly the cycle starts over again and you find yourself telling them that they can't have three cookies.

When it's just us, we make our own choices, bad or good, but when there are little kids who we are responsible for, we want to teach them to make good choices. Even though they are highly likely to grow up and disregard it all until they have their own children.

Sometimes I feel like I do the same thing with spirituality.

I don't sit down for a puja every morning. I don't meditate every day. But I figure that when (if) I have children, I will do these things every day just to set a good example to them.

But then they'll just grow up and continue the cycle, only doing spiritual things when it's for show, to demonstrate to their own children.

Why don't I do these things regularly for my own sake? For my own soul? When will the cycle end, whose soul will actually benefit? It will be the one person in this chain who performs her spiritual tasks for her own sake, not to show it to others.

I want to do things because they will help and benefit my soul, not as practice and to get in the habit for when I have children who are looking to me to see how they should live.

I wonder if this is why spiritual differences between spouses becomes much more pronounced after they have children? People in general seem to become much, much more spiritual once they have children. I guess it's not just me.

Garba

Navratri time is known for lots of dancing, particularly the Gujrati folk dance, Garba. I posted an example video of that a few weeks ago.

www.gnaana.com's blog has a post about it and an instructional video so we can all learn a little Garba (and it is a lot of fun!)

http://www.gnaana.com/blog/2010/10/get-up-and-garba/