à la carte spirit by ilona fried
Religion
What’s the Feldenkrais Method? A Beloved Spiritual Offers an Answer
People have never thought about how consciousness develops. You’ll see, in the long run, people will have to become skeleton conscious. – Moshe Feldenkrais (Amherst, July 2, 1981) My mother used to sing this tune to me when I was growing up. Perhaps you’ve heard it, too. Toe bone connected to the foot bone Foot … Continue reading
Bringing Passover Consciousness to a Dojo and Finding More Freedom
Perhaps the desire to turn everything inside out and upside down, like religious Jews who remove every last crumb of hametz before Passover, is in my DNA. The impulse still arises even though, as an adult, I have never followed Jewish law impeccably around any holiday. Having wandered from Jewish observance, preferring to focus on essence rather than form, I wasn’t sure … Continue reading
Convoluted Kaddish for a Complicated Relation
[note: this post is 2-3 times longer than usual] “Oy, es iz shver tsu zayn a Yid!” — Oy, it’s hard to be a Jew The world changed in large and subtle ways in early November. The day before the U.S. election I received a short e-mail from a distant cousin in Munich. She told me that her … Continue reading
New on the Blog: A Guest Poem from Across the Globe
Almost a year ago I wrote that blogging is like placing a message in a bottle and throwing it out to sea. I expressed a longing that “someone I don’t know will open these bottles, read the messages, and send one back to me. Ideally that message will light me up, connecting with me a kindred spirit whose inner life is similar to … Continue reading
Veni, Vidi, Edi Prosciutti
At the end of a recent post,”Is Yoga My New Pork?!“, I mused about my longtime curiosity about prosciutto. When I visited Italy in 2007, I didn’t partake but had a close encounter with it: while sitting at a restaurant’s bar, I looked up and found myself staring at a pig’s dark hoof. My eyes followed the … Continue reading
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