Take a load onto your head!

There were no such things as wheelbarrows or lifting devices, and the labourers went about transporting the bricks in typical Bangladeshi fashion—stacked on top of their head.
I would marvel at how the workers could balance up to 10 or more bricks on their heads, let alone walk upstairs like that. I couldn’t help but think how dangerous it must be—those bricks must have weighed more than 10 kgs! “One slip,” I thought to myself, “and they would surely snap their necks”.

My Bangladeshi colleague, who had some authority in the hospital, and ironically, happened to be immersed in the occupational health and safety project we had just started, soon put a stop to the brick-on-the-head conveyance.

Marching outside, he quickly arranged a meeting to tell the workers and their supervisors that the hospital was trying to set a good example in safety, and they must not carry bricks on their heads anymore.
Hospital management were supportive; after all, this was a spinal injuries hospital and were trying to rehabilitate people who had broken their necks, not trying to create more of them!

The next day, right outside our office was one of the labourers, and he wasn’t carrying bricks on his head anymore; instead, he was throwing the bricks up to another labourer on the roof!
It seemed that, instead of solving what we thought was a problem, we had no doubt created another potentially more dangerous problem (what would happen if the guy above leaned out too far and toppled over the building? What would happen if the guy above missed the brick and it fell down onto the guy below?).
In any case, pretty soon, the labourers went back to their former way of carrying bricks.

Neck breaking work?
Back then, I was only starting yoga, and now, on reflection, I cannot help but marvel at those brick carriers. For, despite my perception of imminent danger, there was not one patient that I was aware of ever admitted to our hospital (the only spinal injuries hospital in the country) who had an injury from carrying bricks on his head; falling from roofs, yes; falling from mango trees, yes; car accidents, of course. But never one from load carrying.
This is not to say that it never happened—just that our hospital never saw those patients.
But, if I think about those brick carriers now, what I remember most is their beautiful posture, their mindful walking, and their fluid movement.

As a yoga teacher, I am always trying to concoct ways to get students to be mindful of their posture and movement. And I was reminded of those brick carriers, after attending a yoga class with my teacher recently.
As I was standing, she came around, put her hands on top of my head and pressed firmly down through the crown of my head.
As she pressed down through my head, my body instinctively made a slight correction to my posture—tucking the lower ribs back to the spine slightly and lifting up through the lower belly. It did this, I realised, to help bring my whole spine into alignment, and send the force of the weight on my head directly down into the earth through my feet.

It was an amazing feeling of lightness, lift and connection to the ground, and I have been thinking about it—and the brick carrying Bangladeshis—ever since. And I can’t help but wonder, if those brick carriers have just as much—or more—to teach us about good posture than yoga does!

Organising from your centre
When you put a load on your head, your body must organise itself from your core—aligning your spine to support the weight of your head (and whatever it is carrying) so that you can move from a place of freedom, rather than stiffness.

Indeed, if you look at people from other cultures, who carry loads on their heads—the women in Africa who carry large baskets come to mind—they are not stiff and rigid. They do not seem to stumble, they seem perfectly in balance. They are indeed elegant, as they carry their loads. Their feet move with mindful placement and their limbs are fluid and free.
How many of us can claim to move with similar freedom or similar grace?
So, this week, I am posing the question: How would your posture change if you had to carry a load on your head?

If you close your eyes and imagine, your body will no doubt guide you, intuitively aligning your head on top of your spine so that it rests so perfectly balanced that it feels almost weightless. You may even notice yourself grow a little taller.

Then stand up and see if you can imagine those bricks or that basket on your head. What would you have to do to support it there? How would your body have to re-organise itself? Can you really hang your belly out and round those shoulders and expect to keep it up?

Now see if you can keep imagining this load on your head, as you take a few steps. Don’t try to alter the speed of your walk, try to focus on altering the way your body may hold itself. You should find that, if you let your belly flop and your chest sag and your feet fling mindlessly, you will, no doubt, lose that load. You should also find that, if you move stiffly like a toy soldier, then you will probably lose the load as well.

If you have difficulty feeling this in your own body, why not get a hold of a video of someone who is practised in moving with a load on their head (youtube is a good place to start!). But watch them with your body rather than your eyes, and see if your body can learn what they are trying to teach you!
May your practice be peaceful and joyous!
Namaste!

When he saw us hanging stockings on the tree for the kids, he asked us why, and when we told him it was for Santa to fill them on Christmas Eve with gifts, he insisted on his having one hung for himself as well. We obliged him by hanging an extra large sized stocking with his name marked clearly on it.
From the time we put up the tree, William spent all his spare time gazing at it. He kept asking us why his stocking was still empty, while we repeatedly assured him it would be overflowing when Christmas dawned.

As the days drew close to Christmas, and shop windows began to be dressed up with the usual Christmas bells, multi coloured candles, Santa Claus on sleighs drawn by reindeer, holly wreaths, poinsettia flowers and stars, we decided to take William on a pre Christmas tour, to show him the sights, colours, and scents of Christmas, which he said he was not familiar with. The pavements had already begun filling up with freshly cut Cyprus and pine trees brought in van loads from upcountry estates, and the air filled with that wonderful aroma of pine wood . As he told us later, it was altogether a new experience for him.

Like the rest of the family, William too, was encouraged to be actively involved in all the pre-Christmas preparations. As we sat chopping up the ingredients for the Christmas cake, William would regale us with yarns of his past. My kids, in turn, would swap yarns of Santa Claus and his annual visits to this part of the world.
They told him how Santa now came flying in a helicopter, as his reindeer couldn’t stand the long journey from the North, and how every Christmas, the helicopter would land him somewhere in our back garden, without our knowledge. He would then enter the house, his bag of gifts on his back, ringing his bell, and greeting everyone with a loud ‘Hei Ho, Ho! And a Merry Christmas to you all!”
“He will come this year too, so be sure to wear your best sarong and shirt as he will be bringing you a lot of gifts,” they told him.

On Christmas Eve, mostly for William’s sake, we went out and bought an extra large cypress tree with lots of branches and began decorating it to place in the main hall. Soon it was full of gold and silver bells, gold and silver stars, the biggest star on the top of the tree. Angels, tiny candles, Christmas fairies, Santa Claus figures, Christmas cards, hung on every branch, illumined by tiny multicoloured jet bulbs that alternately lit the room in a different colour. Seeing it, William stood entranced with delight and amazement. When we began hanging the Christmas stockings, he handed us three handmade stockings of red and green plastic material decorated with tiny stars. They were for us; one each for the boys, and one for me and the other for my husband. Touched by his thoughtfulness, we decided to give them pride of place on the tree, hanging them in the most prominent place.

Came Christmas day, William was agog with excitement and eagerly looking forward to Santa’s visit. The moment he heard my sons lighting crackers to herald his arrival, he emerged from his room wearing his new clothes. When Santa (my husband dressed up for the occasion in a full Santa outfit complete with long white beard and boots) entered the room ringing his bell and greeting us all with a hearty ‘Ho ! Ho! Ho!’ William got so excited and afraid, he nearly fell on the ground. But when Santa called out his name to take his gift, giving him a bear hug, he lost his fear and even hugged him back.

After Santa left, carrying his now empty red sack, William began unwrapping his gifts. There were so many, he could barely keep count. We, in turn, opened William’s gifts to us, a small notebook for my husband, a cup for me, two pen knives for the boys, bought out of his hard earned money.
It was a Christmas to remember for all of us.

From then on, William hung his Christmas stockings every year, until the day he got ill and had to be rushed to hospital, where he passed away after a stroke. We were devastated with grief, and we mourned his loss.
Rummaging through my Christmas boxes, I came across the three stockings he had made for us. Though he is gone, I will hang them up on the tree along with the stockings for him. They will remind me of our beloved Man Friday who enriched our lives, and won our hearts with his endearing antics and thoughtful gestures.

As would be expected, the pleasure-loving Sophocles could hardly be expected to live according to the tenets of Puritan morality. Yet, in line with the Greek virtue, his was a life of moderation, never aberration. At his death, Aristophanes described him as “kindly in the Shades, even as he was on earth,” and Plato recalled that as Sophocles approached death, he had exclaimed: “Most gladly have I escaped from that [the demands of passion] and I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.”
Sophocles wrote over a hundred dramas. We have only seven: “(Oedipus the King” “(Oedipus Colonus” “Ajax the Antigone” “Electra” the “Trachiniae” and “Philoctetes”. His dialogues became of true dramatic importance when he introduced three actors on stage rather than the customary two. Goethe has remarked: “His characters all possess the gift of eloquence, and know how to explain the motives for their actions so convincingly that the hearer is almost always on the side of the last speaker.”

True, the plots of his plays were tragic. None could escape the prevailing Greek idea of Nemesis, but there still remains a far greater serenity. Take “The Antigone”. This is a typical example of Sophocles’ art. I’d like to give you a potted form of the action and what I quote is from Sir Richard Jebb’s “Primer of Greek Literature” (Macmillan) and from “Sir R. G. Jebb’s English Prose Translation of the Plays of Sophocles” (Cambridge University Press).

Creon, king of Thebes, had decreed that the body of Polynices, who had been killed during an assault on the city, remain unburied.
“It hath been published to the town, that none shall entomb him or
mourn, but leave unwept unsepulchred, a welcome store for the birds,
as they spy him, to feast on at will.”
But Antigone, the sister of Polynices, was determined to bury her brother:
“I will bury him: well for me to die in doing that. I shall rest a loved one with him whom I have loved sinless is my crime; for I owe a longer allegiance to the dead than to the living.”
For her act of disobedience, Antigone was dragged before Creon. She was unwavering. She knew she would be executed, but made no attempt to plead:
“For me to meet this doom is trifling grief but if I had suffered my
mothers son to lie in death an unburied corpse, that would have grieved me.”
She was condemned to be buried alive in a tomb of rock. Yet, she was also betrothed to Haemon, the son of Creon. Haemon pleaded for her life, but Creon was adamant. We have a vivid and extraordinarily modem dialogue between father and son. A blind prophet, Teiresias, also warns Creon that swift punishment would overtake him:
“Thou shalt not live through many more courses of the sun s swift chariot ere one begotten of thine own loins shall have been given by thee, a corpse for corpses; because thou hast thrust children of the sunlight to the shades, and ruthlessly lodged a living soul in the grave.”

The punishment did come. Haemon hanged himself beside Antigone’s tomb, and his mother, Eurydice stabbed herself in grief when told of her son’s death. Creon lost both wife and son and was left to mourn alone. The Chorus sums it all up:
“Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness; and reverence towards the gods must be inviolate. Great words of prideful men are ever punished with great blows, and in old age, teach the chastened to be wise.”
Certainly, there was a good deal of humanity in Sophocles’ tragedies, but it was the time when men still remained the playthings of the gods. In Gilbert Murray’s excellent work, “Ancient Greek Literature” (Heinemann’s “Literatures of the World” series) we have this translation of the full Chorus in “(Oedipus the King’:
“Ye citizens of Thebes, behold’ ‘tis (Edipus that passeth here, Who read the riddle word of Death, and mightiest stood of mortal men, And Fortune loved him, and the folk that saw him turned and looked again, Lo, he is fallen, and around great storms and the out-reaching sea! Therefore 0 Man, beware, and look toward the end of things that be, The last of sights, the last of days,· and no mans life account as gain Ere the full tale be finished and the darkness find him without pain.”
Sophocles lived to a peaceful old age. Perhaps the best tribute of all is found in the famous lines of his epitaph:
Thrice happy Sophocles! In good old age,
Praised as a man, and as a craftsman praised
He died: his many tragedies were fair,
And fair his end not knew he any sorrow.

How markedly different was Euripides, the third and youngest of the great Greek dramatists. He was a recluse, wanted no truck with the times or the moods of the Athenians. He claimed to prefer a simple country life, not the life of the town. He insisted on innovation and change, was always bad-tempered and hated being ridiculed or laughed at. In his own words:
“My spirit loathes
Those mockers whose unbridled mockery
Invades great themes.”
His foul moods have been explained away by the fact that he had two wives who were both unfaithful to him. As he grew older, he left Athens in disgust, went to live in Macedonia, where he wrote his last play, the “Baechae”. The king of Macedonia showed him much favour and roused the jealousy of the courtiers who even planned to have Euripides attacked and killed by a pack of savage dogs.

By the time Euripides began to write, the belief in the gods had faded in the minds of the Athenians. The age of faith was over; and Euripides chose as his dramatic personae, men and women, thus becoming the father of the romantic drama. Also, he shared a popular skepticism and thought all those legendary gods quite immoral. If they were true, he said, the gods were not worthy of worship or respect, and was pleased as Punch to see the whole fabric of the Greek religion fall to pieces. However, he was ready to go long with ancestor­ worship that was quite common in Greece.

Aristophanes labelled him an atheist, and he did not seem to mind. Instead, he declared that it was neither the gods nor the non-belief in them that affected morality. As a Greek, he deemed virtue attractive and followed and admired it as something beautiful.

In his plays, we find an acute analysis of character, particularly that of women. This prompted Gilbert Murray (in his book “Ancient Greek Literature” - Heinemann’s “Literatures of the World” series) to call him the classic Ibsen.

Of Euripides’75 plays, only 18 are in existence today. The best-known is “Medea”, which Murray described as “a tragedy of character and situation.” It expresses the writer as a sceptic, yet a devotee of truth. The play tells of Jason and Medea, his sorceress mistress who bore his children. Tiring of her, Jason married the daughter of the king of Corinth, then concentrated on his career. Medea was filled with hatred that was further fuelled by the king who ordered that she be banished in order to protect his daughter. Medea begged for one day’s grace before she left, then went to Jason. It was a bitter scene. She lashed him verbally for his ingratitude. Hadn’t she helped him gain the Golden Fleece? Hadn’t she saved his life? Hadn’t she killed his usurping uncle Pelias? As Jason grew more resentful at her outburst, the Chorus comments:
“Dire and beyond all healing is the hate
Where hearts that loved are turned to enmity. “
Jason grew angry and ugly in mood. He exclaimed:
“Would to God
We mortals by some other seed could raise
Our fruits, and no blind woman block our ways!”
But Medea did not give in. Spurned, she planned a horrible revenge - a deadly gift that would cause her rival, Jason’s new wife, to die:
“Fine robings and a carcanet of gold
Which rainment let her take but once and fold
About her- a Ibul death that girl shall die,
And all who touch her in her agony.”
That was not all. She determined to make Jason not only wifeless but also childless. She would kill her own children who Jason had seeded in her:
“For never child of mine shall Jason see
Hereafter living never shall beget
From his new bride.”

The king’s daughter died; and Medea then rushed her children to their deaths. Learning of her intention, Jason became frantic. He rushed to Medea’s house, battered at her door, but it was too late. Medea gloated at him from the roof of the house. She stood in a chariot drawn by dragons, and in the car were the dead bodies of her children. She then prophesied Jason’s fate:
“For thee, behold death draweth on,
Evil and lonely, like thine heart: the hands
Of thine old Argo, rotting where she stands
Shal smite thine head in twain, and bitter be
To the last end thy memories of me.”
The moral was that to do evil was to merit suffering - Jason’s base ingratitude; Medea made a victim of her own hard heart. True, the punishment seems excessive, but Euripides maintained that to whatever degree; punishment must follow sin - the bill had to be paid.
When Euripides died, all Athens wore mourning robes. Even Sophocles, who had no jealousy in him, and Aristotle praised the poet’s genius.
It was the end of the great age of Greek drama.