• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Read An Issue
  • About
  • Advertising Information
  • Where to Find the Reader
  • Subscribe to our Mailing List
  • Contact Us

Park Slope Reader

  • The Reader Interview
  • Eat Local
  • Dispatches From Babyville
  • Park Slope Life
  • Reader Profile
  • Slope Survey

lifestyle

YOGA: The Four Noble Truths

March 20, 2018 By Anna Keller Filed Under: Bending Towards Brooklyn (Yoga), Yoga Tagged With: Brooklyn, buddhism, health, lifestyle, local, season, winter, yoga

What is it about the cold months in Park Slope that make Brooklyn stand out like a Charles Dickens village? With all the chaos and commotion of our city, our world and our speck in the universe, it is Brooklyn that remains unchanged. Even with new renovations, new neighbors, new schools, hospitals and restaurants, the true heart of winter lives and thrives on the streets of Brooklyn. Some of this has to do with the deep roots of our borough, the history of Park Slope and it’s surrounding neighborhoods. But, some of it also has to do with Yoga. 

Yoga has become a phenomenon in western culture. Brooklyn is no exception. This is nothing new. As human beings our attachment to the affects of yoga are great. Also, let’s face it; aside from the benefits we enjoy the community. It is in a yoga class where people find they can be alone. It is also in a yoga class that most people find they are not at all alone. So how great is our suffering during this season? How much time have we spent on our own hearts between the cool rush of holiday shopping and New Year’s promises? Winter in Brooklyn gives us the opportunity to deepen our practice in an open and more vulnerable way.

[pullquote]The four noble truths can guide us through a cold season and bring to light our own noble hearts. After all, winter is not about gifts or holidays or even resolution. Winter is about a solace we can find when we are quiet enough. [/pullquote]The true heart of winter resides somewhere between Windsor Terrace and Prospect Heights. I mean to say that if one walks through all of the neighborhoods that relate to these two places, there will be an abundance of coffee shops, a plethora of bars and a vast array of yoga studios. In the coffee shop laptops and frothy cappuccinos prepare us for our daily grinds by serving the daily grind. The bar allows us to unwind from the stressful perimeters of our work, family and home life. But it is inside the yoga studio where we may enter, remove our shoes and respect where we are in the moment. We do not try to escape the cold. Instead, we seek refuge and our own bodies feed us the warmth of our tired souls.

There are four noble truths that can be incorporated into these long months of winter; four noble truths seem to follow us on our paths to the heart. These truths ignite the cold months with a fiery reality. What we might find at the coffee shop, the bar or the yoga studio throughout the year is dukkha. Dukkha is the first noble truth in Buddhism and it roughly translates to “life is suffering”. I know, it sounds depressing right? Although this sounds awful it actually should have the opposite affect. It is a teaching that enriches the idea of impermanence. Our happiest moments can be considered dukkha because they too will end, and so we can say that our saddest moments are also dukkha. They will not last. Dukkha is significant in winter because the cold season too will end. Flowers will bloom again and so we can carry the first noble truth in our mind’s eye as a compass and as a means of letting go.

The second noble truth is tanha. Some translate this word as “craving”. This has to do with our human attachment to the things we desire, or just desire in general. Our need to attach ourselves to material objects, ideas and people create chaos within our hearts and minds. This truth has been realized on yoga mats all over the world. In Brooklyn throughout the cold months and the buying frenzies tahna sticks its tongue out at us and dares us to enjoy our lives as they are. Tahna asks us not to try and change anything but to see everything with a third eye as if we are hovering over ourselves without judgment but with a greater awakening of the spirit. It asks us not to hold on.

Nirhodha is the third noble truth and it is also an instruction on the end of suffering. It sounds so simple: just let go, stop craving things, stop attaching to things. But, I really want my cappuccino! This truth arrives at a slow pace. Through our yoga practice and meditation it comes. The need to grasp dissipates. We may awaken. We may stay asleep. But we practice. This is our path, which then leads us into the final and fourth noble truth.

The fourth truth, magga is our path. It is often referred to as the eightfold path because it is comprised of different areas and aspects of our lives and instructs us on how to walk our own path. In a nutshell it is a mindful way of living. The first three noble truths cannot exist or be realized without this one. The magga is like a sacred duty we have to ourselves and to the world around us.

The heart of winter in Brooklyn can be brutal. Or maybe I’ve just attached myself to that idea. But where there is a lull in the season, there is an opportunity to awaken on the yoga mat. The four noble truths can guide us through a cold season and bring to light our own noble hearts. After all, winter is not about gifts or holidays or even resolution. Winter is about a solace we can find when we are quiet enough. When we walk past the coffee shop, skip the bar and take off our socks at the yoga studio in order to look at our own feet, the ugliness, the beauty, the impermanence and the silent possibility of our own wonder.

 

Art by Heather Heckel

Filed Under: Bending Towards Brooklyn (Yoga), Yoga Tagged With: Brooklyn, buddhism, health, lifestyle, local, season, winter, yoga

THE MOTHER’S DAY MINDFIELD

May 9, 2016 By Nicole Kear Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: advice, Brooklyn, children, dispatches, humor, Kids yoga, lifestyle, Mother’s Day, parenting, raising children

In my first few years as a mother, I totally fell for the Mother’s Day hype. It’s very name, and the Kay jewelers commercials that run constantly, led one to believe that it’s a day in which those who constantly cater to the needs of others finally have their needs catered to, the one day among the other 364 in which mothers are given their due, honored for the terrific martyrs they are.

Awesome idea. Stellar. Too bad it’s a load of malarkey. I should clarify here that I’m a holiday person. I make homemade costumes for Halloween and throw elaborate themed birthday parties for my kids. I hurtle myself headlong into Christmas, like a moony teenager falling in love for the first time. Once, when my kids and I boarded a bus only to discover the meter was broken and no fare required, I declared it “Free Bus Day” and we sang jubilant songs on the theme, on and off all day.

I like celebrations. And I especially like celebrations in which the person being celebrated is me.

I respect, but do not understood, folks who try to ignore their birthdays, people who forbid their spouses and co-workers to make a big deal. David, my husband, is one such person, and it caused some arguments in our early years together.

[pullquote]

I’VE RECONCILED MYSELF TO THE FACT THAT I WILL NEVER GET A WHOLE DAY OF HUGS AND KISSES AND GRATITUDE.  BUT I CAN GET FIVE TO TEN MINUTES. 

[/pullquote]He has a particularly strong aversion to surprise parties, which I discovered when I threw him one for his twenty-third birthday in our living room. I convinced him to take a nap, and while he was sleeping, I hung streamers, sneaked out the German Chocolate Cake I’d spent two hours baking according to his mother’s recipe, and ushered in the guests. When everything was ready, I woke him from a dead sleep by crying: “The kitchen sink! It’s flooding! Come quick!” Still half asleep, he stumbled into the living room in his boxers and T-shirt and when everyone yelled “Surprise!” he about-faced with nary a word and marched right back into the bedroom.

Looking back, my surprise party plan was not as well-conceived as I’d thought. I nailed the surprise part—the party part, not so much.

Of course, in marriages we give our partners what we want. I have been waiting patiently for several decades for someone to throw me a surprise party—for my birthday, Mother’s Day, International Women’s Day, even Free Bus Day, I’m not picky.

Sometimes, I wonder if maybe David has been planning a surprise party all this time, and he’s just playing a long game, so that I’ll be absolutely flabbergasted when it happens. It’ll be Mother’s Day in my seventy-sixth year of life and David will contrive for me to play mah jong with my girlfriends (by that time, I will have started playing mah jong and calling my ladies “girlfriends”). But when I arrive, instead of being greeted just by Ethel and Martha and Frances (my friends’ names will age along with them), I’ll be greeted by a room packed full of friends, my children, my grandchildren, maybe even the barista of my favorite coffee joint, who’s always thought of me as a mother figure. The mayor might swing by for a minute, say a few words.

There will be not only a chocolate fountain but a prosecco fountain and a marble bust in the exact likeness of me. This will all be possible because one of my three kids will have become a billionaire, having invented the cure for the common cold. After everyone yells “Surprise!” David will turn to face me, leaning on his walker, and he will say: “All these years, you thought we were slacking off, but we were really planning this. Happy Mother’s Day “

And I will finally feel satisfied on Mother’s Day. I will finally feel adequately honored.

It is no surprise that on a recent Mother’s Day, David’s card to me read: “I love you. I hope you have a great day. Just manage your expectations.”

For my part, I think my needs are fairly simple. While I would certainly enjoy a ticker tape parade, I don’t expect one. All I want are heartfelt, homemade cards from each of my children, some kind of dessert with so many calories it’s illegal in some states, and the privilege of choosing the afternoon’s activity.

Of course, I can’t help but hope that, on this one day, my kids will tone down the bickering, or even eliminate it—for one day, how hard is that? I can’t help but dream that they might toss me a moment of gratitude, in the vein of, “Thank you for your joie de vivre and the priceless gift of hope”—that, and maybe pick up their dirty clothes off the bathroom floor.

I always tell my kids that “practice makes perfect—or at least, better” and this is true of Mother’s Day celebrations, as well. Over the past eleven years, David and I have gotten better at hopping around the Mother’s Day minefield, without detonating any explosives.

The primary lesson David had to learn was that it is his job to oversee the children’s card-making. This came as something of a surprise to him. It was a little like watching the sausages get made.

When the kids were in nursery school or Pre K, this was a non-issue because their teachers made the construction of such cards mandatory. Those cards were the best, the Rolls Royce of Mother’s Day cards. Quality materials, like heavy weight card stock and tempera paint, were used. Time was devoted to the enterprise. The cards were both funny and sweet, including phrases like: “Today, I wish for you a donkey!” and “I lov u mame beecaws u ar nis and pretee and giv me candee.”

But when the children were either too young for too old for nursery school, they fell into a dead zone of cardlessness. A two-year-old will not think to make a card for her mother. A six-year-old will think to do it but lack the follow-through to make it happen, hatching extraordinary plans and then getting distracted, permanently, by a stale gummy bear under the couch. Thus, there was one Mother’s Day early on in which I waited and waited for the official Presentation Of the Cards and alas, I waited in vain.

“Why didn’t you have the kids make cards for me?” I asked David.

“That’s their responsibility,” he countered.

Then I let forth a bitter laugh. An “Oh, to be as ignorant as you!” chuckle.

“Why do you think you get Father’s Day cards every year?” I asked. “I stand over them and make sure they do it. And not just a two-second scribble either. I make them go back and revise and give you the good stuff. Acrostics, Haikus. Drawings with verisimilitude.”

So David started overseeing card construction. He doesn’t have the natural ability of a Pre K teacher, and I’ve yet to receive a sonnet, but he gets the job done.

I’ve learned a thing or two myself. I’ve learned to lower my expectations. The lower, the better. If I could bring those expectations to street level, and then pulverize them underfoot, that would be ideal. As it stands, I’ve managed to get them from Sky High to about Fifteen Stories High, which isn’t half bad.

I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that I will never get a whole day of hugs and kisses and gratitude. But I can get five to ten minutes. And the good news is, I don’t just have the chance for these moments on Mother’s Day. Because I’m a mother every day.

Much as I’d like to shout “Action!” and instantly call up Hallmark moments, these moments tend to happen spontaneously, sometimes at the most inconvenient times. I’ve noticed children get very lovey when it’s way past their bedtime or you’re in the middle of talking to someone else about something very important or when you really, really have to go to the bathroom. No matter when they occur, I try to savor the tender moments. I have a whole folder full of heart-melting, no-occasion notes from my kids, as well as drawings of me and them holding hands in a field of flowers and hugging in a room full of cats and smiling while standing next to Frankenstein (mysteriously, I am always wearing a pearl necklace, though I do not own one. Pearl necklace, I’ve learned is the signifier for “Mother”).

That’s to say nothing of the moments we share for which there is no paper trail. The early mornings when my three-year-old clambers into my bed and nuzzles in my shoulder. The bedtimes when my nine-year-old will curl up next to me as I read Little Women aloud. The sporadic, sudden hugs from my eleven-year-old who is so much taller than me that my head nearly rests on his shoulder now.

String these moments together and you get one hell of a Mother’s Day. n

Nicole C. Kear is the author of the memoir Now I See You (St. Martin’s, 2014), and the forthcoming chapter book series for kids, The Fix-It Friends (Imprint, 2017).

Filed Under: Dispatches From Babyville Tagged With: advice, Brooklyn, children, dispatches, humor, Kids yoga, lifestyle, Mother’s Day, parenting, raising children

Peeling Your Onion

June 26, 2015 By admin Filed Under: Healthy Living Tagged With: lifestyle, spring cleaning, wellness

Deeper Levels of Spring Cleaning & Decluttering

red onion

This season I’m going to suggest you upgrade your spring cleaning regimen. I am not one to diminish the power of a de-cluttering session to create massive shifts in your well-being. Anyone who has ever dumped the entire contents of their closet on the floor and given garbage bags of clothes away knows this power intimately. But what I am going to suggest is that this spring you go one layer deeper. This season, while you spring clean, also focus on intentionally reorganizing your living space into a microenvironment that subtly shifts your behavior so you can achieve your health goals with ease and sustainability. Yes, I basically want your environment to trick you into being a healthy, happy person.

As a health coach, I am fascinated by human behavior and what facilitates lasting, behavior change. Almost every patient I’ve worked with has a genuine desire to be healthy and happy and also, seems to have about the same five health goals. They even know what they need to do to achieve those goals. Yet, only a fraction of them seem to be able to create the change they desire despite being motivated, intelligent people with lots of integrity. What gives?

No, I have not come to the conclusion that we are all just lazy and dishonest. As we learn more about human behavior, it appears we outsource a lot of our decision-making and behavior cues to external factors, rendering a large percentage of our decision making unconscious. Our brains seem to get decision fatigue rather quickly, so in order to save our brainpower for the really vital decisions, we form neural networks that ingrain daily decisions into habits that occur mostly on autopilot. Hence, willpower, while a nice idea, ends up being overrated and largely unreliable.

Habits are made up of a cue—routine and reward. Traditionally, we emphasize going straight to changing the routine with less emphasis on reworking the cue or replacing the reward. Without getting overly technical, a lot of exciting research is emerging that shows a lot of our behavior cues are housed in our external environment. It appears when we change our environment, we change our behavior with relative ease (For more information check out the recent NPR article on heroin addiction and Vietnam soldiers.) You can harness this phenomenon in your own home to achieve some of the most common and evasive health goals.

Here are my top three tips in order to make your home one big, health-inducing cue!

1. Create a designated meditation area in your home
The desire to sustain a regular meditation practice is one of the most common health goals people come to me with. In our fast paced world, it is increasingly vital to actively pursue relaxation and contemplation to cultivate healthy brains, nervous systems, and hearts (both physically and emotionally). In the health sphere, meditation continues to crop up as the latest panacea for our physical, mental, and esoteric ailments. How can our environments support building a sustainable meditation practice?
My number one tip is designating a location in your home as your meditation area (or corner or window). Start by pondering what kind of environment will seduce you into sitting down to practice. Don’t worry too much about size here. Placing a candle in a windowsill or the corner of a room counts. Put things that you love and that inspire you there. Keep it fresh and updated. Then meditate every day for about a month in that spot (even if just three minutes). By the end of this time period, you should have the start of a strong meditation habit with the help of this physical cue!

2. Hide your devices
These days, reducing screen time is something many of us strive to do. Despite acknowledging that our increase in screen time contributes to feelings of isolation and disconnection, many still feel powerless over our usage. While the rampant, nearly constant use of technology may feel inevitable and out of our control, we benefit enormously when we bring an element of conscious choice back to our tech habits. This allows us to make empowered decisions about how we’d like to engage with technology so it fosters intimacy and connection, rather than detracts from it.

To get a hold of your technological addictions, I recommend implementing a digital sunset at least one hour before you’d like to go to bed. To structure this ritual within your home environment, the concept of out of sight, out of mind is vital. Most of us don’t have that much control over our addiction to technology and need a physical barrier in order to not be lured back in. Designate a “hiding” spot for your devices. For phones, iPods and iPads, I suggest having a designated drawer or basket you put them in. For TVs and computers, cover them with a blanket. Next, pick a digital sunset time each day and stick to it.   To make this easier, I recommend linking this ritual to something you already do each day (this powerful technique is known as habit stacking). For example, shut down and hide your devices right after dinner or right before you brush your teeth. For extra credit, hide your devices when you eat as well.

Finally, focus on consciously replacing the “reward” you get from engaging with your beloved devices with something that feels like a worthy replacement. Perhaps this is your time to pursue something creative. Maybe it’s when you get to connect more deeply with your partner, read the stack of novels you’ve been meaning to get to, or a chance to get really into taking bubble baths. If nothing else, this habit will do wonders for your sleep as the light of screens impact our circadian rhythms by suppressing the release of the sleep promoting hormone melatonin.

3. Don’t bring unhealthy food into your home. If you do, hide it
This may seem a little extreme but if you are serious about changing your diet, this massively increases your odds of success. We encounter plenty of unhealthy food temptations in our daily lives operating in the birthplace of SAD, the notoriously awful and embarrassing Standard American Diet. If your home is a clean food zone, you will likely reach some semblance of balance. When healthy food is what’s most readily available and easily accessible, you’ll eat healthy foods. Seems like kind of a no-brainer but we often forget to harness this fact.  For example, when Google changed up their cafeteria so water and healthy beverages were at eye level and soda stored below—soda consumption dropped by 7 percent and water consumption increased by 47 percent. In other words, the default, easy choice is generally what we pick, so work this to your advantage!

Let’s come back to reward replacement.   If you have developed a habit of coming home and eating Ben and Jerry’s every night to activate your pleasure centers after a long day, make sure you are replacing it with a reasonable substitute that lights up the reward center at least a little bit. If I you try to go from eating Ben and Jerry’s every night to just drinking water, you better believe you’re going to find yourself at the nearest bodega buying more ice cream. Replacement of the reward is key as you build healthier habits because no one responds well to having something taken away without a decent replacement (including our brains!). You may be wondering, WTF could replace Ben and Jerry’s? Good question. Answer: Nothing! But you might try something like dark chocolate (70 percent or above for less sugar and more antioxidants), chocolate mousse made with bananas or tofu, coconut milk ice cream or fresh fruit.

Filed Under: Healthy Living Tagged With: lifestyle, spring cleaning, wellness

Primary Sidebar

The Spring 2025 Issue is now available

The Reader Community

READER CONTRIBUTORS

Copyright © 2025 · Park Slope Reader