Solstice Celebration @ Sun Farm

The JuneSolstice occurs on June 20, 2020, 5:43 pm EDT.

In the Northern Hemisphere, the Summer Solstice is the longest day of the year, with the sun at its maximum altitude when it crosses the meridian.

You are invited to celebrate the June solstice at Sun Farm (42.17254, -73.67339), with a walking or mindful breathing meditation.

In Peace & Harmony

 

14.03.2020 | Pandemic COVID-19: a Journal of Resilience

While the COVID-19 pandemic expands, its awareness in the US overcomes the months-long denial. Finally extremely serious concerns prevails on financial interests. Yet the fine line between awareness and panic is often crossed. Irrational fears take over the necessary precautions and measures: panic shopping and toilet paper shortage are some of examples. If dealing with a pandemic related to respiratory illness may promote shopping of masks and sanitizers, it is puzzling the insane rushing to purchase toilet paper: on the bright side, at least in the US we have not witnessed yet related robberies.

My mailbox is flooded with cancellations of events including closure of main cultural and art venues. My social life heavily has been relying on NewYork cultural life as a single woman, recently divorced, and still dealing with PTSD caused by bullying and abuse. But I am also daily performing meditative practices developing resilience to the multitude of stressors and challenges I have faced in the past five years.

In the dystopian time, mindfulness and mindful movement, is more than ever essential to well-being. In the effort of acceptance of this new totally unexpected world order I decided to share my journal, which I started in 2014, as a means of emotional survival. I called it "journal of daily survival"; every day I record even a simple small action to transform a negative thought or emotion into a positive creative endeavor. With the coronavirus the effort is in transforming social distancing into spatial awareness. Today I have been revaluing outdoor activities, returned to power walking in my moving meditations in Riverside park. It is a beautiful mild sunny day, spring is approaching. My destination is the tennis courts at 120 Street; but it does not matter if will be able to find a court, I am just enjoying every moment of my walk, here and now, looking at the shimmering light reflected by the Hudson river. I forget about the pandemic.

Today a friend forwarded a post quite popular in Italy:

"L' Italia è come quella tipa che ha più talento di tutti, è come quella che le altre se le mangia, perché è nata bella, più bella di tutte e le altre se le asfalta. L' Italia è come quella più ingegnosa, che ha le mani di una fata, che si inventa mille cose, perché è piena di risorse. Sa discutere di storia, di mare, di montagne, sa di cibo, di buon vino, di dialetti, di pittori, di scultori, di scrittori, di eccellenze nella scienza, non c'è niente che non sa. E quando questa tipa bella e talentuosa inciampa e cade, la platea delle sfigate esulta. È la rabbia delle poverine ingelosite, quelle al buio, perché lei è comunque bella anche quando cade a terra. Ma l'Italia è una tipa con stivale tacco 12, ovviamente made in Italy, che nessuna sa portare meglio di lei... solo il tempo di rialzarsi.”

Mindfulness as Survival Means | "Finding the Axis Mundi" on My Birthday

Article 15 of New York Human Rights Law of the Executive Law (chapter 18 of the Consolidated Laws of New York) prohibits "discrimination on the basis of "age, race, creed, color, national origin, sexual orientation, military status, sex, marital status or disability" and 'under the Human Rights Law in New York, every citizen has an “equal opportunity to enjoy a full and productive life.” Since 2014 my "opportunity to enjoy a full and productive life.” has been denied by many parties. While I was undergoing traumatic divorce proceedings I was subjected to prejudicial treatment, harassment and abuse of power by the co-op board of an Upper West Side building where I have been a resident and shareholder since 1989.
    Perhaps my personal story is an autoethonography which also can be contextualized in gentrification: NYC neighborhoods have been transformed in the past decades, but the increase of real estate value is proportional to the decrease of community values.
   My divorce case is somehow similar to a multitude of cases.   Families are destroyed by the greed of attorneys and anybody else involved in the "divorce industry": the main victims are the parties with economical and social disadvantage. The lack of assistance from agencies who are supposed to support victims of domestic abuse aggrevates the situation. For years I have been trying unsuccessfully to get legal assistance from the NYC Center for Family Justice. My case involved mental cruelty, emotional abuse and financial control—which are recognized as domestic abuse—but I was never provided any legal support or counseling. I was referred to private legal practices who would not even consider my case since did not involve physical violence.
   Due to such course of events, this year celebration of my birthday in New York was extremely difficult.  I am a middle-class, middle-age intellectual and seem to have become a scapegoat for everybody's anger and frustration.  As a designer/artist and yoga practitioner I resort to creativity, a healthy lifestyle and meditation as means of survival. A yoga practice at sunset by the Hudson River reminded how the beauty of nature and the urban energy can help to overcome my immediate social context.
   A movement practice in a urban space is a way to a collective healing, bringing a personal expression to a public statement, I do not believe my story is isolated and am trying to make it public. I hope that sharing with others the abuse and bullying I have been subjected to, will help not only as narrative for the healing process, but also for public change.
    Quoting Audre Lorde,  “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.”
 

Toward Change: to a Mindful 2018

2017 has been an extremely challenging year, with a traumatic divorce still continuing. Almost any day has presented a challenge: I have been facing bullying and corruption, often surrounded by vultures, taking advantage of my soon to be ex-husband's hatred and narcissism.

I am looking forward to 2018.

practice | dual body patterns in the 'ico-fit'

On March 15 the 'ico-fit', formerly known as 'movement infrastructure' has been used as framework for a practice performed by two movers. Two movement sequences were performed. One practice was based on 'Finding the Axis Mundi', a flow of movement based on a vocabulary of yoga asanas.

The other movement practice was inspired by the geometry of the structure, in the sequence Octahedron in the Icosahedron. Each mover performed movement in rotational symmetry connecting arms and legs to the midpoints of the edges.

camminando | Discovering Golden Gray Hues

On my birthday recurrence, June 26, the early morning light shortly past sunrise had golden-gray hues. I went for my tracked usual sunrise walk at Eastern Beach while pondering about what nature gave me as a birthday present: food for thought. It was a beautiful metaphor of how the literal changes of colors  in the morning light had a symbolic meaning in life: with age hair turns into gray but t the growth offered by living mindfully every day is as precious as gold.

The golden-gray turns into blue

events | Creating Creativity

Art and "science" of phrenology: Erkenne Dich selbst (know yourself)

Creativity has always represented a survival means during the hardship times I experienced several times in my life. For me creativity develop in many modalities and be embodied by several physical media —some of which do not necessarily to aesthetics production. Solving an equation or writing computer programs are creative expressions and often an underlying aesthetics is present in many mathematical and logical cognitive processes.
I am also interested int the nature of creativity and how it relates to the brain morphology and physiology; this interest led me to pursue a PhD on the other hemisphere of the planet, namely Deakin University in Australia. My research "Form Mind Body Space Time" explores the relationship between the aesthetics of human movement and cognitive states; the methodology follows a methodological approach, weaving art and design practices to exercise science and neuroscientific investigations. My objective is to record and measure anedoctal evidence with rigorous experiments —acceptable in scientific terms. One of my research questions is if the mindfulness and aesthetics of human movement, as found in yoga postures to performance arts has influence on mental processes.
My personal research intersect the growing popularity of cognitive sciences in contemporary culture. In the last decades the scientific practices related to neuroscience have expanded from the scientific labs and experiments on mice brain to involve human participation at much greater extents. Probably there are two different developments which are responsible for the broadening of neuroscience among general population: the development of non invasive neuroimaging technology as well as the affordability of electroencephalography (EEG) —the recording of the brain electrical activity. Although the most sophisticated neuroimaging equipment, such as functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), remains in the domain of the scientific community, EEG has become widespread not only in the medical professionals offices but also in homes, mainly for its use in computer games. Neurofeedback and the effects of spiritual practices on the brain have also become the subject of articles and reportage in mainstream media, with photographs of meditation practitioners wearing a EEG headset.
So it is with great anticipation (and expectation) that I will be attending the symposium The Default Mode Network in Aesthetics and Creativity where "leading neuroscientists from top research institutes will gather in New York for a two-day symposium to discuss what the brain is doing when in a wakeful resting state. The DMN – a network of brain regions typically found to be suppressed when individuals focus on their external environment – has been hypothesized to generate spontaneous thoughts during daydreaming and may be crucial for self-referential mental processing, social interactions and the understanding of many neurological disorders."  Tonight keynote speaker Dr. Bill Kelley, Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth University, will "present on the Default Mode Network, its history, and our emerging understanding of its function in creative thought."