This song changed my life. It continues to change my life. Practicing life to this song, happiness flows through me.

My analysis or thoughts cannot do Baba Hanuman justice. Here is how Krishna Das wanted these powerful words to be translated:

Baba Hanuman

Namo… Namo…Anjaninandanaaya
I bow, I bow again and again to Anjani’s son, Hanuman
Jaya Seeyaa Raama, Jai Jai Hanumaan
Victory to Sita and Ram, Victory to Hanuman
Victory over the darkness of suffering…
Jaya Bajrangbalee, Baba Hanuman
Victory to the one with the body of a thunderbolt
My Baba, Hanuman.
Sankata Mochan kripaa nidhaan
You are home of all Grace. 
Destroy all my problems, calamities and sufferings.
Jai Jai Jai Hanuman Gosaaee
Hail My Lord Hanuman
Kripaa karahu Gurudeva kee naaee
You are my Guru, bestow your Grace on me.
Sankata Mochan kripaa nidhaan, 
You are the destroyer of Suffering, the abode of Grace
Laala Langotta, Laala Nishaan
You wear a red langotta and carry a red flag
Hare Raama Raama Raama, Seetaa Raama Raama Raama

Let the river of these Names take you…
Let yourself float in the beauty of your own heart
into the ocean of Love that fills all space,
that ALWAYS is…
that ONLY is.
When we know ourselves to be That,
then we can be This too.
Then we can play,
We are free and bound in the same breath,
The breath of the One breathes in us.
It’s OK to be messed up, to feel small and sad and hurt
with no hope of ever seeing a good day.
It’s OK to forget, to be forgotten,
to be left behind,
It’s OK to be betrayed, strung out on everything
that everyone has ever done to us and we can’t ever forgive…
Because
The breath of the One breathes in us.
Breathes us.
Even when we don’t know.

Where is this One? How can we find that One?
The Saints say that the One is hidden in the Name.
The Divine Name. The name of Love.
And that by constant repetition,
gradually but INEVITABLY
the Presence that is hidden in the Name reveals itself!
Where? In our own hearts!
The medicine of the Name
hidden in the sugar syrup of music
begins to cure us of our sadness;
begins to cure us of our fascination with STUFF;
to cure us of thinking that happiness will come to us from the outside;
that if we have just one more hit; a better car;
a more beautiful lover, or more beautiful lovers;
a good relationship; a better relationship; ANY! relationship;
it will be enough.
When the Buddha came out of the jungle after His Enlightenment,
he said, “YO! Monks…guess what? Stuff doesn’t make you happy.
The nature of stuff is that it will be NEVER be enough!
Or something like that…

On May 25, 1948, a former United States Army flier entered the American Embassy in Paris, renounced his American citizenship and, as astonished officials looked on, declared himself a citizen of the world.

In the decades that followed, until the end of his long life last week, he remained by choice a stateless man — entering, leaving, being regularly expelled from and frequently arrested in a spate of countries, carrying a passport of his own devising, as the international news media chronicled his every move.

Garry Davis, a longtime peace advocate, former Broadway song-and-dance man and self-declared World Citizen No. 1, who is widely regarded as the dean of the One World movement, a quest to erase national boundaries that today has nearly a million adherents worldwide, died on Wednesday in Williston, Vt. He was 91, and though in recent years he had largely ceased his wanderings and settled in South Burlington, Vt., he continued to occupy the singular limbo between citizen and alien that he had cheerfully inhabited for 65 years.

Read more about Garry in this feature from the NYT.

One of the greatest benefits of yoga practice is that it trains us to stay calm when emotions and physical sensations get intense. This type of training not only allows our negative emotions to pass more quickly, but it encourages us not to impulsively act out from a place of anger, fear, or hostility. So, could this aspect of yoga practice be helpful to those who are incarcerated? A new study says yes.

In a recent 10-week study funded by the Prison Phoenix Trust, an Oxford, England, based charity that offers yoga classes in prisons, psychologists assessed the benefits of yoga for prisoners. Study leaders Dr. Amy Bilderbeck and Dr. Miguel Farias, who are Oxford University researchers in the Department of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry, found that prisoners who took one 90-minute yoga class each week improved in mood, had a decrease in stress, and were able to curb impulsivity. This last finding indicates that yoga may not only be a way of helping inmates deal with the stress of incarceration, but that offenders may have a better shot of resisting the temptation to commit crime again once they are back out in the world.

“Almost half of adult prisoners return to prison within a year, having created more victims of crime,” Sam Settle, director of the Prison Phoenix Trust, says in an article posted on the India Educational Diary website. “So finding ways to offset the damaging effects of prison life is essential for us as a society. This research confirms what prisoners have been consistently telling the Prison Phoenix Trust for 25 years: yoga and meditation help them feel better, make better decisions, and develop the capacity to think before acting–all essential in leading positive, crime-free lives once back in the community.”

Before and after the yoga course, all the prisoners completed questionnaires measuring mood, stress, impulsivity, and mental wellbeing. The results of the study were printed in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.

“We’re not saying that organizing a weekly yoga session in a prison is going to suddenly turn prisons into calm and serene places, stop all aggression and reduce reoffending rates,” said Bilderbeck, who is also a yoga practitioner. “But what we do see are indications that this relatively cheap, simple option might have multiple benefits for prisoners’ wellbeing and possibly aid in managing the burden of mental health problems in prisons.”

“We sit in the shade under trees others have planted.”

~Walter Lippmann

Note: I heard this quote yesterday listening to Warren Buffet speak in a Learning by Giving Foundation online course. To hear a man with $50+ billion in the bank speak with the humility and awareness that he exudes gives me an awesome feeling. I loved the example he and his sister referred to: “If I was born in Bangladesh I would never have even had the opportunity to make this kind of money.” The man gets it. He understands how random the process is and how much Bigger the process is.

To my great regret, I no longer know how to be lazy, and summer is no fun without sloth. Indolence requires patience—to lie in the sun, for instance, day after day—and I have none left. When I could, it was bliss. I lived liked the old Greeks, who knew nothing of hours, minutes, and seconds. No wonder they did so much thinking back then. When Socrates staggered home late after a day of philosophizing with Plato, his bad-tempered wife Xantippe could not point to a clock on the wall as she started chewing him out.

In my youth, I had a reputation of being extraordinarily lazy. My fame extended beyond our neighborhood. When my name was mentioned, my teachers in school used to roll their eyes and cross themselves. My mother could not agree more. She’d tell about the day I started for school wearing just one shoe, and when I realized my mistake, instead of going back home to get the other, I stayed where I was in the street watching a piano being lifted to several stories up to some apartment, till I was late for school.

“He’s a dreamy child,” one of my aunts used to say in my defense. I didn’t like to hear her say that, but today I’m ready to admit that daydreaming used to be my favorite occupation, especially in summer. As soon as the weather got hot, I looked for a shady place to lie down. When I got bored with daydreaming, I took a nap. One time I dozed off on the Oak Street Beach in Chicago and didn’t wake till it was almost evening, surprised to see the empty beach, the tall buildings along the lake already in shadow, and feel my back hurting from the sun and my head not knowing for a moment how I got there. After getting up and stretching, yawning, and scratching for a while, I sat down once again and thought to myself, How wonderful all this is.

Via Charles Simic

The breeze at dawn
has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask
for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth
across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

~Rumi

A free online course that started Monday will offer students the chance to learn about giving from Warren Buffett and help decide how to spend more than $100,000 of his sister’s money.

More than 4,000 people have already signed up for the course that will also feature philanthropic advice from baseball legend Cal Ripken Jr. and the founders of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. Boston Red Sox Chairman Tom Werner and journalist Soledad O’Brien are other featured guests. The amount being given away could grow if more students sign up.

Buffett and his older sister, Doris Buffett, will be featured in the first class to talk about their motivation for philanthropy. Warren Buffett is gradually giving away all of his $58 billion Berkshire Hathaway stock while Doris Buffett has already given more than $150 million away en route to her goal of redistributing all her wealth before she dies.

The Giving With Purpose online course is modeled after a class that has been taught at more than 30 universities that allows students to give away $10,000 after evaluating several nonprofits and learning about effective giving.

Its not to late to register and watch week 1’s video lectures. Hit the link about and click “register.”

Via HuffPo