Mira Prabhu's Blog, page 80
October 7, 2014
Writing Advice: Beatrix Potter
“There is something delicious about writing…” Beatrix Potter — oh, I agree, I agree…thank you Mrs. N and Chris Graham…
Originally posted on Princess of the Light: Shining the Light For All:
I love how writing takes me on an adventure! It’s like time-travel without the pesky warp speed. :-)
Let your writing take you places you’ve never dreamed possible!
MRS N, the Writer
October 6, 2014
Rewilding The Yoga Body
Rewilding The Yoga Body — fantastic article for all of us who love the primal roots of yoga and tantra…thank you Danielle Prohom Olson for an amazing piece of work…
Originally posted on body divine yoga:
Recently a fb image of a young, white, pretty, lithe yogini balancing in an extremely deep back bend disturbed me. Not because she was just another example of the yoga Barbie -er yoga body –which saturates my yoga feed, but because she was posing in a sun-dappled forest grove accompanied by the hashtags “Fantastic #yoga” and “#rewilding inspiration.”
But c’mon. Isn’t rewilding about returning to a more natural undomesticated state? How can an icon of a corporate culture which keeps us striving to achieve artificial, cultural ideals be associated with what is wild, free and unsullied by human intervention – exactly?
Many ‘rewilders’ see the Paleolithic as a time when earth, its flora and fauna, and humans existed in a true primeval state. And if we look to our stone-age ancestors its pretty clear ‘the yoga body’ just wasn’t in. For tens of thousands of years, painted on cave walls…
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October 5, 2014
Monday Funnies
With so much dark stuff threatening our planet, it may be time for a bit of a laugh…happy Monday, beautiful people! And thank you Story-Reading Ape…mwah!
Originally posted on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog..... An Author Promotions Enterprise!:
A good mixture for your chucklement today :D
October 3, 2014
The Meat Market–Cut It Out
“Dreams are seldom subtle. A butcher’s hatchet, along with a cow later in the dreams may be suggesting that she avoid being on the “meat market” dating scene because it would drive her “loony.” It wanted her instincts (animals represent instinctive urges) to avoid getting “stuck in the mud” and avoid yearning too much. That her instincts were able to climb out of the mud was a vote of confidence from her subconscious.” Amazing interpretation courtesy Steven Fox – thank you!
Originally posted on Dreams: Guide to the Soul:
Dream 275: Cut It Out–No Yearning for the Meat Market A 36-year-old woman dreamed that there were two copy machines at her therapist’s office, a regular one and a large one. The regular copier worked fine. The large copier produced over-sized copies. She adjusted it so that it produced copies that were only 104% the size of the original.
She then saw herself driving a car through a forest. At different times a man in a white suit with a butchers cleaver would appear to the right as an image to her. These images appeared three times.
The dream shifted to a cow that was disoriented and “loony.” It was pointlessly milling about and mooing like it was yearning for other cows. It stumbled into a mud pit, but was able to climb out of it.
Interpretation
The copy machines were encouraging her to retain what she learns from therapy…
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October 2, 2014
Me & The Capricious Sorcery of Cyberspace…
“Oh, I don’t ever worry about Mira being lonely,” a friend declared at a farewell party in Manhattan, thrown to celebrate my terrifying decision to leave mainstream life for the unknown quiet of the Himalayas. “She walks down to the grocery store alone and returns with a hundred friends.”
An exaggeration? Yes, but true in essence: for I was thrust into this world with an openness towards all beings, regardless of gender, age, caste, tribe, or income. You could say I was destined for the philosophy I would espouse as an adult—of Advaita-Vedanta, which teaches, in its most simple form, that all beings emerge from One and return to One.
My quest for a home in which I could focus solely on spiritual and creative goals finally led me to put down roots in a small south Indian town. I was drawn down south from the region of the Himalayas by the cleansing fire of Arunachala, the sacred mountain millions believe to be the living embodiment of Shiva, God of Paradox and Destroyer of Illusion—who burns away our insidious attachment to ephemeral body and mind so we can experience the immortal bliss of our Self.
Given the rural Indian context, befriending every Tom, Dick and Harry (in this case, every Murugan, Uttaramma and Sendhil) is no longer possible; stricter walls of gender, education and other inexpressible cultural factors militate against a spontaneous approach to friendship. While I have come to care for many of the simple and beautiful people who live around me, I am careful about how I connect: it is easy for the innocent behavior of a cosmopolitan female to be misunderstood here, and with potentially disastrous consequences.
As a result I have come to rely on the internet for a sense of connection. And yet my cyber saga here has not been smooth. Believe it or not, it took four years of appalling service before I was blessed with hi-speed internet!
This miracle occurred about a year ago, after I published the novel that had been simmering within me for two decades. Hooking up to fast internet had become a necessity: I had let go of my Manhattan literary agent and therefore the chores of self-promotion and marketing were perched squarely on my reluctant head.
Earlier I had harbored under the pleasant delusion that if I did all the creative work, a literary agent or a mainstream publishing company would take on the hassle of marketing and promotion; in other words, I was happy to cook you a great meal provided you did the dishes. And yet, as any modern writer is likely to confirm, this satisfying equation—where an artist is free to create while others carry his/her work out into the world—is no longer in the cards for most indie authors.
A blog! my friend suggested, soon after he helped me self-publish Whip of the Wild God. That’s how authors spread the word about their work. “How do I start one?” I cried in honest bewilderment. “I’ll set it up for you,” he offered. “You just keep pouring your heart out in a blizzard of words.” So he did his bit, and I did mine, and together, we created this blog—which many of you follow today, thank you oh so very much.
You need to be active on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, indie experts advised me—these are the big ones. Ah, I thought, delighted, I already have a Facebook account, created seven years ago while I was recuperating from a near-fatal spider bite at a friend’s gorgeous home in Chandigarh. Her charming ten-year old son had insisted on opening a Facebook account for me one afternoon. Awed by his facility with this exciting cyber animal, I could not help feeling like an out-of-the-loop crone to see his fingers flying over the keyboard as he scanned the posts on his page.
Today I use social media with bravado but don’t know it well. It’s like this, I told my friend recently: I know A but not B, C, but not D, E and F…you get the point? My foundation is weak. Take Twitter, for instance—all I’m capable of seems to be re-tweeting tweets. But I’m learning, I’m learning, and in the process having fun as well as burning my fingers.
Why am I so behind the times? Well, on the eve of the millennium when many of you were diving into the magic of the internet, I had fled to Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills to begin my inner quest—and where a single satellite served a vast ice-bound region. We wannabe Boddhisattvas paid a small fortune for an hour on the net, during which time we were lucky to get a single email through. Often I would get to the end of an important email and the server would crash. Apart from cursing wildly, there was nothing else we could do but perfect our philosophical shrugs (we were in the Himalayas, after all) and make poignant speeches about bad karma to console ourselves for the wicked loss of our money, time and efforts.
Cut to my internet life post self-publishing Whip of the Wild God: while many supported me, one pure soul did all the work of uploading, downloading and whatnot, not to mention guiding me into sanity when I longed to hide in the metaphorical woods. But even he had no solution for my lack of high-speed internet.
Enter a bright young techie carrying a bunch of dongles into my home. By the process of elimination, he came up with one company that was able to give me what I craved—the mountain was blocking most other satellites, he said, and the mystery was solved. Et voila, for the first time in Tiru, I was linked in to a virtual world beyond my wildest dreams.
Some folks love money or machines or trees or rocks or three-eyed dragons or rainbows or whatever; I love many things but have always nursed a passion for getting to know unusual humans, especially those who have chosen to walk the inner path to the heart. This interest coupled with years of cyber-starvation has led me to gradually cultivate what I consider a mostly delightful, intelligent and loving cyber family—people of all races and both genders who have opened their minds and hearts to me via the mutual sharing of our thoughts, feelings, talents and skills over tens of thousands of miles. Many, of course, I already knew in person.
Another good reason to spread my cyber-wings is that every indie adviser suggests we writers build a solid internet base. And so I continue to blunder ahead, sharing posts I find interesting, sometimes dozens in a single day. This mania, of course, is due to being denied access for so long; sooner or later, like everything else in relative reality, this activity too is bound to fade and die.
Recently two things happened in a single day that gave me pause. First, a “friend” made some truly foul remarks on a thread concerning a quote attributed to Mother Teresa. Yes, I am aware that many criticisms were hurled at this controversial nun for not being a “saint”. I read an article this guy sent me to justify his vitriol and tended to agree with much of what was said—at least in principle. She was a nun under the direction of the powerful Vatican, I wrote back in her defense, and who knows her psychological problems? Of course she was not perfect—she was human!
The main reason I admired her, I explained further, was because she was capable of doing something that I, with all my hypersensitivities, would never have been able to handle—which is to care for those in terminal suffering and in the worst of conditions. How she cared for them is a moot point, and an area into which I did not wish to venture: Karma, as the saying goes, has all our addresses. The more I defended her right to be an imperfect human, the more furious and hostile this “friend” became. Finally I “unfriended” him—because he was clearly not interested in a dialogue but instead bent on destroying the happy vibe of the thread with increasingly vicious racist and sexist remarks. Yikes! I had no idea I was dealing with a troll. And yes, its true, as those close to me have often remarked, despite my globe-trotting, I can still be quite naive.
Second, a woman “unfriended” me—for sharing the photo of a man who had given an autistic boy a terrible beating; she claimed that shaming this man by spreading his picture on the net was not going to get him to evolve. The reason I had shared it in the first place was because another “friend” had asked that it be shared as much as possible to put an end to such incidents. Quick as I am with my fingers, and minus sufficient thought, I had obeyed. My subconscious reason must be that I hate bullies. And yet in retrospect I agree with this woman: most bullies who prey on the weak and the vulnerable have a history of being bullied themselves. No one gets better by being tarred and feathered. We grow by the showering of spiritual grace and nothing else.
All of which goes to say that while connecting on social media is seductive, it is also a multi-headed hydra that someone as impulsive as I am must handle with care. It is a magical tool of connection, quick and more or less painless, since we don’t have to deal with flesh-and-blood personalities. But it can turn on you just as easily, just like any other tool of samsara or relative reality.
I think of Milarepa, the inspiring Tibetan yogi who is depicted as having his hand to his ear in the mudra of listening. If Milarepa was around today, he might warn me to use the internet wisely—and I would listen. The inner path can be tricky and tortuous for those of us who don’t open our hearts and souls to every teacher who comes into our lives—negative and positive. Cosmos, I am listening.
Greetings to every one of you from the base of Arunachala, the hill of pure consciousness empowered to lead us back into our primal state of bliss!
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September 30, 2014
Don’t Stop
“The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no VISION” …check out this neat post…muchos gracias Khushboo Arora and The Story Reading Ape!
Originally posted on The Invictus Soul:
Over the years we’ve created a set of beliefs in our mind that we hold to be true. Some are indeed helpful and true, while others have completely fooled us. It’s these latter, beliefs that quietly hinder our potential and hold us back from the life we are capable of living.
Some such beliefs are :
1. Life owes me something.
Just because we’re alive doesn’t mean life is going to hand everything to us.
Life doesn’t just get better by itself. It isn’t like flying in a plane through turbulence. Life doesn’t just improve if we fasten our seat belt and wait.
Sadly, so many people expect that a great life is coming to them automatically. They believe it’ll come next month or next year. So they continue thinking the same thoughts and doing the same things, just waiting for that day when life will get better.
They come…
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My 4 Golden Rules of Writing
“The most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time. It pays off slowly, your agent will sneer at it, your publisher will misunderstand it, and it will take people you have never heard of to convince them by slow degrees that the writer who puts his individual mark on the way he writes will always pay off.” Raymond Chandler –
I love this post! It encourages me to do what I already naturally do as a serious writer — which is to make up my own rules as I go along, to go wild. Thank you Nicholas Rossis — love your blog!
Originally posted on Nicholas C. Rossis:
Found on pieroblog-citta.blogspot.com
I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while now. The main reason is that I keep coming across several writing rules that make little sense to me. Then, I came across a gem of a post by Constance Hale, “When Shakespeare Committed Word Crimes” on TED.
Constance confirmed what I long suspected: when there is tension in a language between what comes naturally and the rules, it’s because someone has tried to shoehorn the language into their idea of conformity.
Does this mean there are no rules? Not at all. It just means that the ones we are taught in workshops and classrooms are not necessarily the ones that matter to actual readers – as opposed to teachers, agents and editors. So, here are my golden rules; the ones no fiction writer should ever break, in my view:
Rule #1: Don’t let your writing get in the way of your story.
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September 29, 2014
It’s Official: Trolls are Sociopaths
It’s Official: Trolls are Sociopaths…thanks to Nicholas Rossis and to The Story Reading Ape for this far-from-hard-to-believe information…
Originally posted on Nicholas C. Rossis:
Have you been on the receiving end of a troll attack or a flame war? You can take comfort in the thought that you’re not alone – and that trolls are, officially, sadists.
My friend Jack Eason alerted me to a link between trolls and sadism, discovered by Personality and Individual Differences. The journal published a study that confirms what we all suspected: internet trolls are really messed up.
Specifically, Canadian researchers conducted two internet studies with over 1,200 people. They gave personality tests to each subject, along with a survey about their internet commenting behavior. They were looking for evidence that linked trolling with the Dark Tetrad of personality: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadistic personality.
These are technical terms; google them for the formal definitions: it’s worth your time, for the aha! Moment of recognizing an ex-boss, boyfriend or girlfriend.
Anyway, the researchers found that Dark…
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September 26, 2014
7 Bad Dating Tips From Literature
“If you stalk her enough, she’ll eventually love you.” –Gatsby (The Great Gatsby) — that’s about the worst advice one man can give to another! If anyone stalked me, he’d probably soon be singing in the choir…thanks for a hilarious post, Robert – you really know how to pick cool topics!
Originally posted on 101 Books:
When I was single, I hated dating—which is probably why I didn’t do much of it. There are so many unspoken rules, and girls play games, and it’s enough to make you want to become a celibate monk. Okay, it’s not quite that bad.
Fortunately, I was lucky enough to find the right girl, and the rest is history.
But even though my “game” probably sucked, I knew some common rules of dating. I mean, the really, really basic do’s and don’ts.
The same can’t be said for some of these characters from literature. These guys and girls really knew how to screw up some relationships.
Here’s the type of advice they might give you based on their stories.
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September 25, 2014
You CAN make a difference – One Person / Situation at a time!
“Every time I got paid, I would anonymously buy gift certificates for three struggling young single moms who had no one to help them. I got their addresses and I would type the addresses on envelopes and send gift certificates to them all year.” I LOVE this woman! Thank you Rebecca and The Story Reading Ape…we can make a difference, one person and one situation at a time…do something today that will make your soul sing…Om!
Originally posted on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog..... An Author Promotions Enterprise!:
Further to my earlier post – Isn’t it Time? – I received the following and informative reminder comment from author Rebecca Heishman that I felt needed to be shared on a ‘Big’ page, not left to founder in a comment box:
Sadly, the people who will be reading your words here today already care. The fact that they are READING is evidence of that.
You’re preaching to the choir.
Interested involved citizens are already trying desperately to make a difference. Not everyone is lethargic or asleep in his life.
There are people out there in the world already making a difference. So, why haven’t you heard, you ask?
You haven’t heard about those things because no one is watching!
Here’s my beef: there are a lot of good people out there in the world, doing good and honorable things every day.
Where are the cameras?
Where is the press?
Let’s…
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