There’s nothing like a list of no-nos to inflame the adolescent western mind.
I was sitting in a a circle at a yoga study group in New Zealand, and the only person of Indian descent was reading out a list of their personal list of yama and niyama, which very roughly translates as ethical precepts, dos and don’t dos…
Read MoreDespite the fact that most Western Yoga teachers are women, we don’t often hear much discussion of gender or gender inequality in the yoga world, perhaps because of the unhelpful separation between the personal and the political that persists in our society. New Zealand-born, U.S.-based Mark Whitwell is on a mission to change that. We interviewed him to find out about his Yogic approach to gender equality, and how this necessarily entails a critique of masculinity and a vision of a more equal world. Interviewed by Rosalind Atkinson.
Read MoreApparently the culture of casual sex hookups and “friends with benefits” relationships now rampant on college campuses and elsewhere in American life isn’t living up to expectations. In her book The End of Sex: How Hookup Culture Is Leaving a Generation Unhappy, Sexually Unfulfilled, and Confused About Intimacy, researcher Donna Freitas reveals that although she expected to find that the vast majority of college students revel in the casual sex ethos, “instead I encountered a large percentage who feel confined by it or ambivalent about it.”
Read MoreWhich one is your favourite?
Originally published in 1969 to confusion and excitement (“If you are subject to the screaming meemies, don’t read this book alone at night” the Luna Monthly reviewer beamed), Philip K. Dick’s Ubik instantly gained notoriety as a “mind-fuck” novel, and its street-cred has never quite faded.
Read MoreOh Corona. Yeah, you had us there for a moment.
After what may be called a “global panic attack”, following the first weeks of disturbing information about the virus on the telly and online, it literally felt like the world had pushed the “pause”-button for a while. Quiet streets, closed shops, empty cinemas and museums. Social distancing strategies have had us wiggle around each other in 1.5 meters distance, giving each other “the elbow” instead of the hand.
Read MoreTwenty ideas for lockdown activities.
Read More1) Enjoy a daily practice of intimacy with your body and breath, linking the mind to the whole body, and abiding in the mystic perfection that is your life and its perfectly established relatedness to the cosmos.
Read MoreIs there an inherent power dynamic between the Yoga teacher and the Yoga student? Is the teacher powerful and the student less so? Can authentic Yoga be transmitted within hierarchical power structures? In this short essay I want to offer a non-patriarchal framework for understanding the teacher-student relationship in Yoga. A perspective which sees mutual friendship and equality as both the means and end of wisdom transmission. The way through the trauma of alienated social relations is via intimacy…
Read MoreOne day, the woman stretched out her face and let the sounds in. She had never liked them. Sounds were impatient, sounds were invasive, they wanted to crawl into her ears and camp there. She had spent years of her life trying to block them out: with blutak and hats, with BOSE noise-cancelling headphones, with silent rooms and pure digital interactions…
Read MoreWouldn’t it be great to be able to fight injustice how they slay dragons in fairy tales — find the bad thing, wipe it out, job done. Wouldn’t that be a relief, rather than dealing with the complex internal-external web of power we call patriarchy? Wouldn’t it be a relief for the worst assholes to mysteriously go missing and for everything to be magically all okay?
Read MoreGod's P.O. box is in the sky, said someone, and from there
he watches us…
A poem by Rosalind Atkinson
Read MoreThis article is for anyone who is looking to understand the phenomenon of desperate men mobilizing women’s pain in attempts to attain validation from society as a worthy, good, ally, and crusader for anti-patriarchal justice. It is also for anyone witnessing those who seek to take down those whom they falsely perceive to be powerful figures within communities so as to claim that imagined power for themselves in the eyes of others.
Read MoreHow rape culture manifests in the legacy of criticism of Blake’s famous prophetic poem, ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion’, and how the poem itself predicted this.
Read MoreWe are given much information about the behaviour of Weinstein and those like him, and analysis of why it’s harmful. There is even recognition that men like him are obvious and particularly toxic examples of an issue that runs right through society, affecting us all, rather than individual moral failures. But why we are facing this failure of the masculine in the present world? And what we can proactively do to heal and move forward?
Read More“If you want to teach people, you have to love them,” said the tall figure seated near me on the floor.
Shit, I thought. What am I doing here, then? I don’t love people… I hate them! I feel them frozen in fear and radiating phoney bullshit, and I can’t bear it!
I looked around the room at the other bodies. No-one else seemed to be freaking out…
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