Sensitive, the Novel

Yoga has a history spanning centuries which includes its practices being used by people in power to further their own agendas. Today's yoga has so many branches, lineages, and teachers, that one could find yoga to suit any individual's interests, preferences, and agendas: yoga and chocolate, yoga for athletes, yoga and beer, or yoga with goats are a few that come to mind. On the surface, today's yoga still has an image problem - the people who are seen doing and teaching yoga are still presented as being largely white, upper class, thin and able-bodied with bodies that are somehow both bendable and strong. Yoga promises relaxation, lowered stress, ease and calm. But yoga today has the potential to be so much more. Yoga for decades in the west was practiced to find inner peace and greater ease in the body. People came to yoga to "bliss out", and the practice involved a significant amount of navel-gazing. If we each individually could find our own peace, then the ...

I spent the last month doing a deep dive into my thoughts and feelings on a beloved American classic and reading new articles that have come out about it thanks to the success of the new Broadway adaptation. What I have to say about it is going to upset some people. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is considered one of the great works of American literature. Long woefully wanting of celebrated female authors, the American canon kind of needs Harper Lee's inclusion just to have a female voice. Scout was a compelling female main character, and certainly she spoke to me as a child since we shared some characteristics - both young tomboys who were left pretty much to our own devices in backwards small Southern towns that time had forgot. My children will be reading To Kill a Mockingbird in their eighth grade classes soon. It is still taught alongside other old classics. They will study Of Mice and Men and have studied The Outsiders. These pieces are read still because we want ou...

I am very interested in studying race, racism, and systemic injustice. I have been researching, digesting, thinking about, meditating on, and processing as much as I can for the past several years, but recently, I found a book that has touched me more deeply than any other source, and I have found within its already-worn pages a call to additional action that has sparked a fire beneath me. I plan to publish stories here, from the heart, as a result of this call to action, and I highly recommend that you also read Ruth King's Mindful of Race. I plan to quote heavily from her text here, in this first entry, and then jump off more into recollection, memory, and other sources as I move along. "If you are a white person becoming mindful of race, you have stories to tell about what it's like waking up to whiteness and its impact on other races, including white struggles and contributions to humanity. When you tell such stories, you demonstrate a way for other whites to talk ab...