My shopping Saturday February 28, 2008

This slide-show is peeping into my personal life and has nothing to do with my spiritual experiences that I usually love to share with my readers.

Being very busy with work and social activities during the week, it is usually only on a Saturday afternoon that my husband and me, we can stroll around the City of Vienna and enjoy shopping, good coffee and the pleasant mood of that beautiful and cosy Austrian capital.

Although this gallery is very personal, I guess most of you  – if not everyone – has some similar experiences with shopping 🙂 I bet you will smile at the final picture!

(the captions are done with Flickr Toys)

LOVE, axinia

Mental Silence is the essence of Sahaja Yoga Meditation

(picture of me, meditating 🙂 )

LOVE, axinia

Ask most people what they did on holiday February 26, 2008

 photo by axinia

Ask most people what they did on holiday and they`ll tell you about the great sights they saw, the grand events, the glamour, the extremes in weather, environment or people. But they`ll be hard pressed to remember the small things, like the market they passed through on the way to the cathedral, or the beautiful flowers they saw on the path to the beach house. Yet it is the small things which give substance to the reality of the whole experience. 

Meditation teaches us to enjoy the journey as a whole and not to waste time peering into the future to catch a glimpse of the destination. We learn that the flowers at our feet are unbelievably fragrant and beautiful, of only we would stop for long enough to appreciate them. We realise that patience is a power that cannot be cherished too much. It is the bedrock of peace, contentment and our spiritual desires.”All good things come to whose who wait”, is an ancient proverb, and how true it is. 

It`s all about the perspective…

 

photo by axinia

It can be the same landscape, but depending on the window we look through, it may look quite different… An old wisdom but it`s nice to remind oneself about it from time to time 🙂

LOVE, axinia

What is really wrong with capitalism? Or Why I believe in communism. February 23, 2008

 photo by axinia

 Capitalism, Neo-Liberalism, Corporatism – call it whatever, I personally have a big difficulty with the kind of a system I live in. One of the reasons for that difficulty can be that I spent my childhood and youth in a society that was not driven by money and consumption (at least not to that extend like in the West). It seemed to me that people  – because they were not that stressed to make money and to spend them – lived happier, enjoyed more and appreciated the human values like friendship, family, creativity.

When I came to live in the West 10 years ago I was most of all shocked by the concept of profit, which seemed to be very natural for people here. Profit, copy-right, interest… It took me years to comprehend the ways and methods of this system. And now, while working as a Sales Manager in the Marketing and PR business (!)  – imagine what I think about all that machine. Day by day, the more I can penetrate into the depth of the capitalism, the more I understand that my personal belief lays somewhere else. May be I am a communist?

My idea of a marriage

Are they two or one?

photo by axinia

The river and its waves are one February 20, 2008

  

photo by axinia

 

The river and its waves are one surf:

where is the difference

between the river and its waves?

When the wave rises, it is the water;

and when it falls,

it is

  the same water again. 

 

Tell me, Sir, where is the distinction?

Because it has been named as wave,

shall it no longer be

considered as water?

 

Within the Supreme Brahma,

the worlds are being told like beads:

Look upon that rosary with the eyes of wisdom.

 

poem by Kabir (1440-1518), Indian poet

 

Are you a B-person? February 18, 2008

 photo by axinia

Yes! Yes! Yes! – great news indeed for someone like me: it is scientifically proved that some people need to start working later. Denmark’s B-Society was found in order to advocates the rights of ” B-people” who are sluggish and bed-bound first thing, but whose energy spikes in the evening.

Every individual has their own biological rhythm (known as the “Circadian rhythm”), which means we have our very own sense of time and planning of time. There are lots of different kinds of circadian rhythms. Most people are B-persons,which means that their circadian rhythm has a cycle that runs through 25 hours or more. Science has shown that our biological rhythms through “a day” (i.e. “Nychthemeron” = “a day and a night) are regulated by a so-called “clock gene”.
 
B-persons have a clock gene lasting 25-27 hours, whereas A-persons have one that runs for approximately 23 hours.

Dr Roberto Refinetti,a biopsychologist at the University of South Carolina, is an expert on circadian rhythms. “These rhythms describe anything in the body that shows a daily oscillation,” he says. “Your temperature rises and falls at the same time every day and you probably feel drowsy at around the same time daily. But circadian rhythms also control your blood pressure, glucose levels and much more.”

My flickr flowers (one year collection) February 16, 2008

A flower is something that doesn`t need any explanation or comments. Enjoy my treasures!

LOVE, axinia

Female Voting or “babysitter” candidate test for US Elections February 14, 2008

 photo by Amsterdamned

A good friend of mine Pryanka Joshi, an Indian journalist in America posted her impressions of attending one Obama´s performance. She says she is “not covering the Obamamania” and yet she preferrs him over Hillary.

As an honest journalist, Pryanka asks if there is actually something more behind the charisma and the Obama`s spirit of “change”:

Lo and behold, in no time, this is what the first voter results started saying too, and it took no time for the candidates to start saying they were the ones with “real change” on their minds.

But, what ARE those new ideas? Where are they? Are they too afraid to be shot down? Are these candidates’ offices full of spin doctors, and poll pundits? Why do they not employ think tanks to come up with solutions to global problems? What is their answer to Outsourcing? To the war? To Pakistan? To education? We’re hearing, “Ya, we’ve gonna do great things”, but have no idea what they may be?!? How can they convince a whole country to vote them into power without concretely sharing their ideas? Isn’t that absurd?

All these questions are very reasonable, but… That passage reminds me of an abstract from one modern Russian novel where one young woman is thinking of voting for the Russian president.