I've shaved off all my head hair. It was a minor piece of hair styling since I've been wearing my hair as a buzz cut for the past six years, but it was for a big cause, at least for my family.
My younger brother, Richard, was diagnosed with lung cancer in December. This came as a shock since he has never smoked and always had a healthy life style. He got married in October 2005, and cancer is not a good way to start of a marriage. Fortunately, Susan, a neonatal nurse, took the news in stride and has been a tremendous support for Richard throughout the whole process. He underwent surgery to remove about a quarter of his left lung and is now receiving chemotherapy (now getting over his second treatment, which sent him to the hospital for a day because of an adverse reaction). His hair has started falling out and he's shaved it all off. I told him that I would keep my head shaved until he had recovered completely.
More importantly, I believe, I reminded him about the value of meditation in getting through pain and suffering. As a Christmas gift him, I sent him a copy of Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness by Jon Kabat-Zinn. He had done a research project on biofeedback and was familiar with the idea. He even had some meditation tapes, which he dug out of the boxes remaining from his move to a new home. He says that the meditation has helped him a lot when he's feeling the worst side effects of the therapy.
I hope my karma is not reduced by my liking my new Kojak/Michael Jordan look, which I may keep for good. And it also begs the question of whether it means anything if most of your hair has already turned gray and fallen out.
I have taken another inch off my waist since my previous entry on this point a month ago. I would say that's good progress, given that Christmas and other opportunities for gluttony also occupied that same time span. My weight is about the same, 194 pounds, though it did shoot up during the holiday excesses. On the other hand, my weight has been steady for the past 12 months. But I've probably turned a lot of fat into muscle during that time, but have not reached my weight goal. I've come to the realization that I am going to have to pay more attention to what I eat because taking pounds off is a lot harder than putting them on. If I were really strict, I should be aiming to get my weight down to 165 pounds, what I weighed back when I got married. It would make my yoga practice a lot easier.
I am reading You on a Diet: The Owner's Manual for Waist Management
Newsweek: Common Yoga Injuries, and How to Avoid Them:
But to reap the benefits, you have to do it right—as all too many people are now discovering. Do it wrong, and you could end up as one of the growing number of casualties. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, there were more than 5,000 yoga-related injuries in 2005 that resulted in visits to doctors' offices, clinics and emergency rooms—up from 3,700 in 2004. Those numbers are largely a function of more people, especially aging boomers, taking up yoga.
Newsweek interviews Dr. Johnny Benjamin, chief of orthopedic surgery and a spinal specialist at Indian River Medical Center in Vero Beach, Fla. Most of the patients seeing Dr. Benjamin are novices who are overexerting themselves. The most dangerous pose is lotus because people think it's easy and they'd done it when children.
I chanced across this video that features Shiva Rea in a class with interview excerpts in the background audio:
I believe that this clip is part of a bigger film being produced by YYoga Movies, but Arthur Klein's MySpace page is such a mishmash of media all trying to play at the same time so I called out the video here. If you don't want to watch the whole thing, just pause the player. There's another video on yoga in Iraq.
