I used to live in macrobiotic study houses and learned to cook brown rice there. We always used a pressure cooker. I'm not even sure if rice cookers existed back then. But anyway, using a pressure cooker cooked the rice far better than the simple method of cooking it in a pot.
If you've used both a pressure cooker and a rice cooker to make brown rice, which worked better?
As soon as I heard about Christina Applegate's recently published autobiography, I immediately got a copy. I read it yesterday.
I have great empathy for the physical challenges that Ms. Applegate is experiencing from MS. No one should have to undergo such suffering, especially at a young age.
But if I may be frank, I've never read an autobiography as filled with resentment, victimhood and self pity. She has virtually nothing good to say about anyone except her mother and her daughter. Nor does she give a word of gratitude for the extraordinary good fortune she was blessed with. Good looks, riches, fame, success, she seems to see it all as burdens imposed on her.
She indeed was born with sad eyes.
My options seem to be :
I'm leaning toward driving my own car and paying for parking at/near the airport. In the past I've always rented a car, I'm not sure that makes sense anymore.
What is your preferred way to get from the SD area to LAX?
I was surpised that Fujis are the sweetest. But there's no arguing with a chart. OR IS THERE?
I was never much of a fan of honey, but then I tried the TJ Wild. A tablespoon is only 60 calories. I love putting it on apple slices, bananas, or a section of an orange. Omg. The honey harmonizes with the fruit in such a way that it's mind-blowingly good.
I didn't expect much when I began reading this biography of Phil Spector, but it was a total page turner. One of the best music biographies I've come across.
To answer that question, there's a question before it: What exactly do you mean by "yoga"?
(Not to confuse the issue, by "yoga" I'm referring to all the major schools of hatha yoga.)
Broad summary: there are relatively soft forms of yoga, like Sivananda and Satchidananda.
Then there's the Bikram Hot yoga, 26 poses.
Then there's the 3HO Kundalini yoga.
Then there's Iyengar yoga
And the astanga vinyasa yogas, including Deshikachar and the various "power" yogas.
Though these yoga schools practice similar asanas, they are all arguably quite different from one another.
So, back to my question: Are all of these yoga schools legitimately "yoga"? Or is one of them the real-deal, and the others are illegitimate knockoffs?
I used to think that Iyengar yoga was the real hatha yoga. It has so much technical detail absent from the other schools.
Then I discovered astanga and did that for several years. Partly because I loved astanga's integration of breathing and poses, but also because I found the Iyengar attention to detail to be a bit much. I was now convinced that astanga was objectively the best yoga school.
I then left regular traditional astanga practice because of an injury, (and its potential for other injuries) and began doing Bikram yoga. I missed the upper body strength workout that astanga provided, but I appreciated what the Bikram method had to offer. Not just to myself, as I felt that Bikram hot yoga was far more practical for the average person than Iyengar or astanga.
(Please note, I do mean average person. People with certain physical issues may find Iyengar the perfect choice, and those who have natural ability may find astanga compelling and Bikram boring.)
"Where are you going with all this?" you ask. Just this: Whatever school of yoga you prefer, and would like to teach, there's a core of yoga knowledge that's common to all of them. It's a knowledge that can't be transmitted in 200 hours of a teacher training.
How then to get this knowledge? Daily practice over the course of a couple of years.
It took me a long time to get to some basic level of competency in yoga. I went to classes every day and studied under a variety of teachers.
Then there's teaching yoga -- having a good yoga practice does not mean one is any good as a teacher! I've seen people with extremely advanced practices who absolutely sucked at teaching. I've also seen yogis with so-so practices who knew how to inspirationally lead a class, and who built very successful yoga schools. The late Larry Schultz for example. He got razzed a lot by the astanga world because he didn't get to Advanced B, but he was practically adept at teaching. I say practical, because though he didn't possess or teach deep technical asana detail, he provided a yoga that many people found attractive and beneficial.
To me, Larry's example points to what I think is the big picture of what teaching yoga should be about: Helping people by providing a practice and environment that's healthy, safe, sattvic, inspirational, and sustainable -- i.e., people want to come back for more.
The Muay Thai clinch is tough to break. Here's how to use Wing Chun principles to break it and gain the advantage.
