Learning to Listen

Yoga starts the time you step out from the Studio, not the time you step in. Learn yoga in the Studio to practice outside, in the real world. Most of us, we know a lot of things but how about put it into practice?

The Vertigo attack on April 24th changes my life, entirely. I was not able to do a lot of things, which most of us take it for granted including myself. How true what people said – you’ll only appreciate when you’ve lost it.

I was not able to walk my normal pace, not to mention rock climbing.
I was not able to dash out from the bed every morning.
I was not able to bring Beanie for a walk.
I was not able to drive and ride.
I was not able to hear properly thus can’t play Er Hu.
I was not able to read for 20 mins continuously.
I was not able to practice most of the asanas.

I believe in nature’s cure and our brain is capable of adapting to problems involving senses. For example, blind person often find that their other senses, especially hearing, improve tremendously to make up for their eyesight.

In my case, my brain can adjust to the new situation and after a time, could be months or years before the Vertigo gradually disappears. For this to occur, however, my brain must be regularly exposed to the misleading messages from the inner ear. If this doesn’t happen, it cannot adapt and there will be no cure.

Because my Vertigo occurs only during certain movements, and because the symptoms are unpleasant, there was almost irresistible temptation to avoid those movements and so avoid the symptoms. But I knew by doing so, I miss the opportunity for a natural cure.

Since I refused medications, yoga-ing is the only way for me to get my life back. It wasn’t easy but not impossible. As I always said in the Studio, listen to the body and I am learning to listen all over again.

Fettuccine Aglio Olio

My first cooked complete meal since April 24th, 2009. It’s good to be in the kitchen again.

The ingredients - olive oil, crushed garlic, cut dried & fresh chilies, chopped coriander.

Saute olive oil & garlic, later add in chopped coriander.
In a separate skillet, pan fry salmon (rubbed with black pepper & corse salt) - 3 mins each side.
Tomato puree with oilve oil and mixed herbs. Wholemeal pita bread, halved into 4 pcs.

Colourful salad - finely shredded red cabbage, sliced red onions, sliced yellow pepper, sliced cucumber, carrot, romaine lettuce & lettuce leaves, spinach leaves & cherry tomatoes with vinegar, ginger and thousand island dressing.

Table setting.Non-vegetarian for Gilbert. Full vegan dish for moi.
And Swiss choclates for dessert!
Having tough time to decide but at the end go for Mahony, Latee and Pistachio.

60 Going 40!

The Venue - Look Out Point, Hulu Langat. Bread & Olives Rest.

Birthday Angpow!

Birthday Carrot Cake from Celicakes, Desa Sri Hartamas.

Birthday Boy, Gilbert.

Thank You speach.

Cake cutting.

Vegetarian Pizza.

The children, June & Leroy.The siblings.

The ladies.

Rainbow, my best MAID.

My current maid is called ‘Rainbow’, best maid anyone can ever have! Rainbow keeps my house sparkling squeaky clean, from bathroom to the kitchen, bed and pillows, curtains to walls, sofas to carpets, glass doors/windows to wooden blinds and not forgetting all the books.

Rainbow not just cleans the house but act as ‘air purifier’, especially after heavy cooking, although with kitchen hood, aroma does escape; switch on Rainbow just for 5 mins and voila, all gone! Not just that, instead of conventional burning aromatheraphy oil, few drops of aromatheraphy oil (must be alcohol free) in the water, and the whole house smells good. My favourite is Siberian Pine. Can you imagine it can blows balloon as well, so when come birthday party, to blow 100 or 200 balloons no more an issue!

Light, easy to handle and the best is no spare parts required, YES NO SPARE PARTS required at all. Just water, only water will do. The only maintenance is to clean the ‘head’ with toothbrush once a month, depending on the usage.



Its like building from a huge lego parts, everything can be dismantle and connect back using the ‘lock’ system.



Rainbow can be divided into 3 sections, namely - the brain, the body and the mouth.

The brain consists of wheels, bowl and the brain.

Two different trunks - for normal cleaning (length can be adjusted accoding to one's height) and for bed and sofa.

Variety types of mouth (and sizes) – for flooring, for dusting, for curtain, for bathroom, for glass and for ballooning.


Now cleaning the house is another theraphy for me.

Ever ready to vaccum the floor.

Ready to clean the bed and sofa.

For storage, view from the back.

Friday @ April 24th,2009 – 8 hrs of my memory being wiped out!

What supposedly to be a normal enjoyable Friday, April 24th turn out to be the opposite. It’s the day I had a bad Vertigo (in my case, it’s my middle ear) attack and I fainted at Kedai Mesra, Petronas, Bukit Antarabangsa. Thanks God for the kind and caring strangers (which at least give me hope for the future) that called a doctor, an ambulance and somehow managed to contact my family members.

Due to the fall, I suffered a hair-line crack at the base of my left skull, hospitalised for a week and on medical leave until May 18th. Fainted at around 1.30pm and by the time I fully regained conscious it was 8.30pm, in SJMC! Up until now I’m still trying to fix the jig-saw puzzle in my head. My neuro-surgeon, Dr Ben of SJMC said this is common in head injury, time heals everything – crack as well as memory.

Vertigo, or dizziness, is a symptom, not a disease. The term vertigo refers to the sensation of spinning or whirling that occurs as a result of a disturbance in balance (equilibrium). It’s the feeling that the surrounding is moving or spinning or sometimes known as illusion of movement. There are 2 types of Vertigo, subjective and objective. Subjective vertigo is when we feel ourselves are moving while objective vertigo is when the perception of the environments are moving. Mine was objective vertigo.

Hopefully by next week or so I should be running about doing my normal things.

My Papa

When my papa was diagnosed with Alzheimer disease in 2004, I felt resentful, then angry, then nothing at all.

Resentful because he’s making a demand on me I can’t fulfill (I can’t quickly fix things up); he’s using up my precious time; he’s making a messy situation. Then I felt angry because I think I shouldn’t be resentful when someone is sick. Then I resign myself and my emotions shut down altogether. But in the middle of this I pause long enough to look inside myself, I find that these negative feelings seem to be going on, on the surface and that deeper within me are more positive, loving feelings.

He passed away peacefully on June 3rd, 2006 at 86.

Looking back I am glad that I’ve told him how much I love him when he’s alive, when he still remembers me as his daughter, apple to his eyes. I guess that’s why I didn’t cried much when he passed away, neither regret nor anger were inside me, only love.

Jackie, My Friend

It is not always easy to know when someone will have a great influence on us. The best way to handle this is to be nice to everybody.
When I first started teaching Yoga (moon-lighting) at the fitness clubs/spas, Jackie was one of those few people that gave me a chance, a chance to prove myself. How we met was totally unexpected. When asked, she always said we met ‘at the roadside’! I saw her ‘ad’ on the tree trunk. Yes, she posts the ‘ad’ for Yoga teacher onto the tree trunk, along the busy main road of Jalan P. Ramlee. Called her and manage to fix an appointment for the very next day.

To my horror, she’s forgotten about our appointment - I waited for almost half an hour before she sees me. What supposedly to be half an hour ‘interview’ turns to almost 3 hours of chit-chatting. She even sends me to LRT station! And I got the job as well. My friendship with Jackie blossoms into something very special up until today.

She’s always there for me – when my business in trouble or when my relationship with my ex crumble. If I need a kick in the ass, she’s the one I’ll turn to. She made me think outside the box, to look at life from different perspective and do something that I am not good at, be out of my comfort zone!

And I must say, she brings the best out of me.

The Yoga Path

Yoga, in Sanskrit, can be translated as ‘union’. It originally comes from the root word yuj, which means ‘to yoke’, to attach yourself to task at hand with ox-like discipline. And the task at hand in Yoga is to find union – between mind and body, between individual and her God, between our thoughts and the source of our thoughts, between teacher and student and even between ourselves and our sometimes annoying friends.

Today, mainly people come to know Yoga through Madonna or its pretzel exercises for the body, but this is only Hatha Yoga, one limb of the philosophy. The ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness, but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation. It is difficult to sit in stillness for many hours, after all, if your hips is aching, keeping you from contemplating, your intrinsic divinity because you are too busy contemplating, “wow….. my hips really aches”.

But Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation, through scholarly study, through the practice of silence, through devotional service or through mantra – the repetition of sacred words in Sanskrit. While some of these practices tend to look rather Hindu in their derivation, Yoga is not synonymous with Hinduism, nor are all Hindus Yogis. True Yoga neither competes with nor precludes any other religion. You may use your Yoga – your disciplines practices of sacred union – to get closer to Siva, Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha or Yahweh. During my stay at the Ashram, I met devotees who identified themselves as practicing Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus and even Muslims and at the same time others who would rather not talk about their religious affiliations at all, for which, in this contentious world, you can hardly blame them.

The Yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of human conditions, which I’m going to over-simplify define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Different schools of thought over the centuries have found different explanations for man’s apparent inherently flawed state. Taoist calls it imbalance, Buddhism calls it ignorance, Islam blames our misery on rebellion against God and psychologist explains it ‘desire is the design flaw’.

Yoga is the effort to experience one’s divinity personally and then to hold on to that experience forever. Yoga is about self-mastery and the dedicated effort to haul your attention away from the endless brooding over the past and your nonstop worrying about the future, so that you can seek, instead, a place of eternal presence from which you may regard yourself and your surroundings with noise. Only from that point of even-mindedness will the true nature of yourself be revealed to you.

It’s about the journey, not the destination. Self journey. Self discovery. The Path. The Yoga Path was conceived based on that foundation.

Namaste.

Latest addition to my Garden

Everybody loves lilies, and today's hybrids are a snap to grow, unlike some of the more difficult ones of the past. What I have in my garden is called Spring Lily (Oriental Hybrid Lily Bulbs) - slightly pinkish with very light sweet scent.

How to forgive your loved (Ex?) ones and yourself

Have you ever been in love – song by Celine Dion, my favourite song. Have you ever been in love with someone who doesn’t love you anymore?

If you arrive at this point, there are very different ways of finishing a relationship; it can be very nasty or amicable, whether or not you’re the one who is instigating the split. It can be very hard, with feelings running so deep, to behave as well as we should. So, how do you move on from here? How to forgive – not just your ex but most important is yourself.

Listen to your own internal voice – dragging things out will only make it worse. When people look back on relationships that didn’t work out, how often do you hear them say, ‘You know, deep down I knew it was over when she forgot our fifth wedding anniversary’, or ‘Looking back, when he took that job even though I begged him not to, that was the beginning of the end’?

Actually we almost always do have foresight. We just don’t realize it. There’s a little voice inside us but we just don’t listen. Of course there are times you have to work and you can still reclaim a great relationship. But deep down, if only you listen, you know when the relationship has passed the point of no return.

Recognise that it takes two. Its takes two to tango, that what people used to say. There has to be responsibility on both sides when things fall apart. I’ve been through a divorce myself and although it took me a while to admit it – I now freely accept that we both played a part in allowing the relationship to deteriorate to the point where it couldn’t be salvage.

This is important because you’ll both cope with the break-up more amicably or at least less bitter if you both admit a share in the responsibility (even if you only admit it to yourself). And if you don’t recognize where you could have done things differently, you risk making the same mistakes next time you fall in love.

Keeping the moral high ground will taste a thousand times better than revenge ever would. Oh boy, is this a simple one to say and a really difficult one to live up to. No matter how rough it gets you are never going to take revenge, act badly, be very, very angry, hurt anyone, act without thinking, act rashly and be aggressive. You are going to behave honestly, decently, kindly, forgiving, nicely (whatever that means), no matter what the provocation. No matter what challenge they throw at you. No matter how unfairly they behave. No matter how badly they behave. You will no retaliate in kind. I know revenge is tempting but you don’t have to go there, because revenge is for losers. You’ll be the one with the beasts instead of the angles.

Learn what you can from what went wrong, and then get over it. I know a person whose husband left her with the children about 20 years ago, and went off with another woman. She still hasn’t forgiven him and she’s still bitter, and it’s still eating her up.

The main person she’s hurting is herself and also her children. She’s miserable and of course, single because she hasn’t let go of her marriage from all those years ago ad she can’t move on and find a happier relationship.

The important thing is learn to forgive and remember- times wait for no man. We’ve only got one life – get on with it.

Green Salad Rice

Last night, I prepared very simple and healthy meals for few friends. I enjoy being in the kitchen, not just cooking but the whole process itself – from choosing and buying the ingredients, cleaning and preparing the vegetables, of course the cooking, up to table setting, eating the food and all the way to clearing the table plus washing up the plates and utensils.

In Thai language it is known as ‘Khau Jump’ (Pronounce as cow-jump), literally translate as ‘rice with sliced vegetables’ but I re-branded it as 'green salad rice' because the rice is green colour.

Very simple to cook but the main ingredients are very difficult to find, almost impossible to buy over here in KL. It contains of about 15 – 20 different types of leaves, pound and juice. Cook the rice with the juice and add in ‘daun pandan' and 'limau purut’ leaves.

Mix all sliced vegetables, 'kerisik' plus dash of black pepper, fish sauce with the green rice and ready to go!

Slice the raw vegetables - daun kelsom, long bean, cucumber, serai, angle bean, big onion, bunga kantan & ulam raja. I love to add bean sprout as well.







My improvised organic version of 'bubur cha-cha' - tapioca, Japanese sweet potatoes, black-eye beans, sago, ? (the coloured stuff?, not organic at all) and cocunut milk.






Table set for 5.

One for the album - Jamie, Kae Ling and Ming.

Chilled Sake, home-made apple dessert wine and fruits end the evening.