Mother Nature is so amazing! Spectacular Aurora Borealis

Lights Over Lapland Photo Expedition video of CME impact on 1-24-2012 from Lights Over Lapland on Vimeo.

What is with all the make up ladies?

Berlin -Potsdamer platz at night -supermodels watching your children, originally uploaded by veggy.

Ok. I went to a yoga studios one year anniversary where they served booze, meat, and i saw more plastic surgery, peroxide, and make up then i would at a drag show. What would Patanjali say? 8 Limbs of Yoga out the door and in with what we have translated into our superficial money making machine. Who's lineage are we respecting now? Who is Patanjali anyways? Is he that new hair stylist?

Is Yoga lost in the west? Been twisted and churned out into heated rooms, glass mirrors, and good smelling soaps? I hope not, but it took me almost a decade to pull myself out of the vortex of western yoga (which i am still in i guess, and don't claim to know it all).
I don't want to judge, because i have been there so i can understand when we don't see things as they are.
For example, I used to dye my hair, until my body rejected it when my glands in my neck swelled up to the size of golf balls and didn't reduce in size for weeks and my scalp was so itchy that sores developed. That is because ultimately peroxide is bad for you. It is a toxin, and we let it sink into our skull and run through our blood stream, so it can stain our hair, and change the colour, so we can look like someone different, someone that isn't truly ourselves. I was scared to accept myself if i am not different in some way. I know this. I spent my teens exploring this concept with piercings as well. It took me a long time to have contentment with my natural image, but i realized my body was telling me that this was bad and that it was a blessing that i couldn't die my hair jet black (red, blue, blond) anymore, and my tongue piercing swelled up one day and i let it go. Funnily people ask me to this day if i my hair is its natural colour, and i have to laugh, and say yes, and thank god for that lesson. Would i have learned it if my body hadn't showed me? I am not sure, but i hope so. Lessons come to us all the time, and we have to listen when our body says something.

We try so hard to look like what media wants us to look like and it made me sad at this party. So many possibly gorgeous women all hiding behind masks of costume like make up and afraid to make eye contact or smile back. We have become a product of a immense successful multi billion dollar marketing machine, and have failed in the areas of basic love and acceptance, and grace of who we really are?
I have faith that we will pull ourselves back into what is real, and where are roots and reality lie and know that we are beautiful just the way we are. We are all so unique, why would we ever want to mess with that?

The fundamentals of yoga and eight limbs tell us to practice yoga we need to accept these basic rules before we can proceed, yet in the west we through them out the window, or most of us don't even know they exist.
Can we practice non violence on ourselves in society (ahimsa)? Contentment of our real selves (Santosha)? Truth and honesty of who we are trying to be (Satya)? and still have studios and call ourselves yogis? Non stealing? Non possessiveness?

It is a challenge. I personally would love to see you without your Cover Girl, Lancome, Mac etc mask on though, because i think there is something beautiful underneath it.