Tag: Buddhism

Yoga has been working miracles on people’s health, peace of mind and flexibility for millenniums. Jean Marie Moore and Katrina LaShea recently opened a yoga studio called Anasa in the Laurel District of East Oakland. Their original goal was to wake Black people up to the health benefits of yoga, so they built it smack-dab in a retail area within Oakland’s Black community. They offer all kinds of classes including yoga, Tai Chi, Qi Gong – for beginners as well as experienced practitioners.

Recently I went to the Marin Veterans’ Memorial Center in San Rafael, where the famed Shaolin Warriors of China were to give a performance in display of their hand-to-hand and weapons martial skills. The performance was designed to be a dazzling display of gung-fu couched in a “theatrical display” of a “sacred and deadly art.”

Afrika! Black people! Afrikans! Let’s do like China did and put the whole continent on lockdown by closing our doors to the rest of the world until we’re ready to come back out again as a superpower.

The Prison Literature Project has been sending free books to prisoners all over the country since the 1980s. The prisoners are sophisticated readers. They read philosophy, history and anthropology. They study the Black Panthers and foreign languages. There is a hunger for knowledge.