Dont get (as) sick

Teaching these past two weeks in an inner city high school has taken a toll on my system. So I want to share my favorite remedy.

My first Art of Living teacher, Mark Ball, once showed me a recipe for staying healthy that I use to this day; every time I feel sickness coming on.

• Take a piece of ginger about the size of your thumb, peel, and chop.
• Boil the ginger in a medium to large covered pot on a low boil for about an hour. It will reduce a bit and become much more potent.
• At some point (I havent found the timing to make much difference) squeeze in a full lemon.
• When its done boiling pour into a cup and add a fair amount of honey
• (Variations using black pepper and other ingredients exist, however, ginger, lemon, and honey taste intense enough by themselves, and seem to work just as well for me.)
  

The key seems to be to catch the sickness early. For me its a raw feeling in the back of my throat. If I drink this tonic as soon as I feel the symptoms, I am able to keep the worst effects of the sickness away. In the 7 years since I learned this trick, I have only been really sick a couple of times.

Teaching breathing to 120 inner city kids

The past two weeks has been educational, exhausting, and very satisfying.

For the first time in a few years, I am teaching the Art of Living YES! course in a high school. What makes it even crazier, is that its a pretty tough inner city school and we are teaching 180 kids over a period of three weeks, four courses a day.

I should mention that this particular high school is not as rough either in terms of student behavior or administrative support as others I have seen. Its a newer school, and the administration is amazingly supportive. That said, the kids at this school have really tough circumstances. Two of my students have been expelled in just these two weeks (two that I know of), and others have experienced disasters during this period that would shut any of us down. One of my students had two friends shot and a third who killed himself over a girl, all in one week.

Ok, so those are the circumstances. But the really interesting part is seeing the evolution of these students in this short time. I am really amazed at how powerful the transformation in people's level of openness can be in such a short period of time.

If I was asked to do yoga and breathing techniques in college, I am sure I would have been a lot of trouble for the teacher, and initially most of these kids were resistant. However, even the most challenging of the 6 periods was completely silent last week when we did our breathing. Its fun to watch the teachers stare out at their kids resting peacefully in class, something most of them have probably never seen in years of teaching.

One of my favorite things about teaching these kids is the occasional profound insight one of them will share. When they say things like "I felt like all my troubles were gone," or "I have ADD but I was able to be still for that whole meditation," or when I watch a group of kids that 10 minutes earlier were doing everything in their power to look cool and tough, just sinking into a deep and peaceful rest where they have nothing to worry about, I know I have the best job in the world.

New Blog

Lately I have been contributing to, and creating blogs for teams and organizations that I am a part of.

Here is my personal blog for those that want to see what is going on in my world.

I hope to come up with some interesting anecdotes from my life, as well as some commentary on things I am experiencing, reading about, seeing in the world, and so on.

Hope it informs and/or entertains.

Thanks for coming by.