When I was at school, the worst teacher wasn’t Mr A, who screamed at everyone all the time. No. It was Ms F, who never shouted at anybody, ever, but who, when we were misbehaving, would simply sit there with a sorrowful air, waiting for someone to notice. Inevitably one pupil would finally see her, and would then shout “Oy! Everyone, SHUT UP, MISS IS UPSET.” After protracted, theatrical shushing from all and sundry, a sheepish silence would fall on the classroom, until Ms F would sadly murmur: “I’m so disappointed.”
It was the WORST and we would all feel terrible. (I later became friends with Ms F and she told me she loved doing that to us and thought it was hilarious. Such sadism).
A curious inversion of this, though, has happened recently to my partner, Kim. She signed up for a one-off ‘Mind Calming’ workshop held in the home studio of her regular yoga teacher. Kim returned from the workshop in a state of considerable un-calm. It all started off well; the teacher explained she takes the Buddhist philosophy underpinning yoga very seriously as she is under the instruction of a Bigshot Lama (as in someone who could actually succeed the current Dalai Lama). They discussed the eight ‘limbs’ of yoga. Apparently, the bendy postures (asanas) just make up the third limb, while the first limb is actually Yama, involving one’s ethical standards, social responsibility and compassion towards others. So far, so vegan.
So what your jobbing Lama would have made of the home-made all-butter flapjacks the teacher served up during a break in the workshop, I’m afraid I’m nowhere near enlightened enough to guess, but it became increasingly hard for Kim to swallow the message of the lesson while everyone scoffed down oaty snacks made with coagulated breast milk. But make no mistake — this wasn’t mindless dairy consumption, it was, oh irony, mindful: “These aren’t all hippy, coconut-oil flapjacks,” she boasted. “These are all-butter. These are the real deal.”
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