Posts Tagged ‘activism’
Stuff, stuff, stuff! Do we really need more stuff? Do we need to give more stuff?
This holiday season, give the gift of yoga by supporting the Acorn Fund. The Toronto-based fund offers annual grants to local organizations who help share yoga with those who would otherwise be unable to access the practice. It was formed with the intention of stimulating the Toronto yoga community’s interest in sharing resources for philanthropic concerns.
The Acorn Fund, which is coordinated by the good people at Yoga Community Toronto, also “places priority on supporting projects that seek to demystify, legitimize, and naturalize yogic practice and thought in the public sphere.” This includes community health, rehabilitation, employment and transition services, and public education, among other services. Past recipients of Acorn Fund grants include the New Leaf Yoga Foundation and the Centre of Gravity Peacemakers.
Donate to the Acorn Fund here.
And do you want to give the gift that keeps giving? Consider using the Acorn Fund as a model for engaged yoga philanthropy in your own community!
“We are for 100% of truth, 100% of justice, & 100% of unity 100% of the time. That’s our intention.”
Seane Corn at Occupy Wall Street, Oct 10, 2011
image via Off the Mat, Into the World's Facebook page
The yogis have shown up at Occupy Wall Street! Yesterday, Seane Corn brought her big hair and articulate voice to the demonstration site. She showed up in jeans and black boots, and talked to a crowd of several hundred people about about union, community and action.
There appeared to be some namaste-ing, some om-ing, and only a little posing. The crowd that gathered around Seane Corn yesterday looked engaged, passionate and inspired. However, some of the online discussion around the event appears to be a little more divisive. Continue Reading
From the frontlines of the G8/G20 summit, Michael Stone reflects on nonviolence and engaged living. The third in a three-part series.
My son wanted to come to the protests because he heard that water privatization was on the table and he wanted to do what he could to learn about the issue and speak up for the fish. He loves fish. When he saw rows upon rows of police and hovering military helicopters he realized that there was no way of protesting or even learning about issues. (He did think the helicopters were really cool, especially Obama’s green chopper, which landed in a tight corridor between two tall buildings.) When our friend, journalist Naomi Klein, brought him out to a talk on G20 issues on the first day of the summit, he took it as a chance to tell people that water and fish need help.
What action was skillful that day? Writer Pasha Malla speaks about the sheer number of people who protested: “Simply to isolate and punish the violence of G20 protests in this way is to deny the unpunished violence done in our name to the natural environment, to the poor, to people affected by our military and corporate excursions all over the world.”
If we value the interdependence of all life, and if we see that our body is dependent on the health of our rivers and ecosystems, then we must recognize that to be silent and indifferent is to be complicit with corporate violence. Even if corporations or countries have laudable ideals, often their accountability to ecological well-being does not come into play. There is no ledger sheet for ecological debt in our economic calculations. Continue Reading
Nonviolence in the face of riot police (photo by Marc Dunne, via Flickr)
From the frontlines of the G8/G20 summit, Michael Stone reflects on nonviolence and engaged living. The second in a three-part series.
If my commitment to the dharma demands that I place non-harm in body, speech and mind at the core of my actions, then what is my stance on protesters venting their anger at shop windows and police vehicles? When the media jumped on the images of burning police cars, our collective attention was, once again, drawn away from political, social and ecological issues and into the fetishization of violence. But where is the real violence? Do Buddhists turn away from the issues at stake when the G8 and G20 meet, or do we embrace those issues and stand up for what we believe in?
There is no overall Buddhist social theory. We can gather that a Buddhist vision of is not about Left or Right but about waking up to all forms of suffering and the interdependence of all things. If we value interdependence, then what is the appropriate response when uranium is mined from native land and sold to India to run Canadian-built nuclear reactors? Or when depleted uranium from spent fuel rods are being turned into weapons and dropped on the people of Iraq and Kosovo, with disastrous long-term health consequences? Continue Reading
Peaceful protest: sangha members at the G8/G20 summit, Toronto.
From the frontlines of the G8/G20 summit, Michael Stone reflects on nonviolence and engaged living. The first in a three-part series.
When I search for an image to describe the core of my spiritual practice, the one that presses up through the other narratives of my life is this one: June 26, 2010, carrying my six year old son away from a burning police car in front of a bank tower on Bay Street in downtown Toronto. Three young protesters using “black block tactics” jumped on the roof of the car as my son and I turned away and walked towards the empty street behind us to make our way home.
I lead Centre of Gravity Sangha, a thriving community of Yoga and Buddhist practitioners in Toronto. Our community formed five years ago with the intention of integrating Yoga and Buddhist practice, everyday urban life and social action. When I first read the teachings of the Buddha, I connected with his full engagement in life – not just with internal states of mind, but how he taught that our actions sculpt who we are.
Karma is not something that happens to you, it’s the ongoing choices and effects that determine who and what we actually are. We must cultivate an awareness of and responsibility for our actions and their consequences. This is the lived experience of karma. I see both the Buddha and Patanjali (the seminal author of the Yoga-Sutra) as enlightened beings committed to a life of social and political engagement.
If learning to work with anger and greed can teach us how to respond creatively to our inner struggles, can this same skillfulness help us interact with institutional greed and imbalance and global forms of suffering? Continue Reading
