The Importance of Doing Yoga First

Most of my early meditation education happened in the shade of a tree. But in place of lotusly postures, I was sprawled, my legs some variety of akimbo. My body was emanating wavy lines in the summer heat, and I was covered in painful yellow cartoon lightning bolts.

I had just experienced my first yoga class. My car was a mile walk up a steep hill, and I was not going to make it.

I wouldn’t meditate in a serious way until a year later when I went to university, but the first day of laying in a destroyed heap was an underline beneath the lesson I would learn over the coming months: breathing mattered.

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A Compassionate Schedule

Trying to get into the college class of your choice nowadays can be brutal.

If you’re currently a college student, you probably know from experience that because of budget cuts, fewer classes/sections are being offered, more students are attending, and everyone is rushing to get their degree finished. The result: if you want to get into a popular professor’s class, you have to fight for it. While there’s nothing wrong with being proactive and assertive, what ends up happening sometimes is a “every man himself” mentality, which may not create the friendliest peer atmosphere.

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Lists: The Tofu and Potatoes of Buddhism

While I was going to community college, I took a class on “World Religions.” The text was Michael Molloy’s Experiencing the World’s Religions, which is a comely tome that has only received a more attractive cover as time and editions have gone by.

Notice the multicolored soothing waterfall.

It was an enjoyable class, and as sometimes happens, the class bonded as we probed the questions that really mattered. When it was time for the class to end, I asked a number of my different classmates about how they enjoyed it. I got the exact same response from every single one of them:

“The class explained the other religions really well, but was TOTALLY OFF about my religion!”

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