Empire State of Mind

Am back in Hong Kong after two weeks in the Big Apple, and the first thing I was grateful for is Hong Kong's super efficient airport. From the gate to the Airport Express took just 15 minutes, including waiting for luggage. Flying to and within the US is just such a drag these days. Having said that, New York City still has a great vibe. As the Jay-Z/Alicia Keys song goes:

New York, concrete jungle where dreams are made of
There’s nothing you can’t do
Now you’re in New York
These streets will make you feel brand new
Big lights will inspire you
Hear it for New York, New York, New York

There is plenty of inspiration to be had in New York. While I was in town, I celebrated Hannah Seligson's book launch, was mesmerized by Anish Kapoor's Memory at Guggenheim, saw two hilarious plays (The Understudy and Present Laughter), and got to take a yoga class with Baron Baptiste who will actually be teaching in Hong Kong next weekend at Pure TST.

Baptiste's class did not disappoint. It was a killer. He enjoyed telling us to just "be" as he ran us through a 15-minute series of core exercises and made us hold poses for countless breaths. While I still enjoyed Jules' classes at Jivamukti, I was introduced to Marco's classes at Pure East by JGK with a warning the class would likely piss me off because he likes to have his students hold poses. I ended up going to four classes by Marco. It was not until the last class, when Marco spent the entire class telling us ad nauseum to "inhale into the upper lung, exhale from the mula bandha (pelvic floor) to get rid of what you don't need from the root", did I finally manage to cruise through his class without wanting to curse him.

Noël Coward's Present Laughter, just opened on Broadway last night to rave reviews with Victor Garber (aka ALIAS' Jack Bristow) in the starring role. Coward's play is about a narcissistic actor and the drama he manages to stir up with more than one woman who has "lost/forgotten my latch key". There's plenty of wit to fuel 2.5 hours of jovial laughs, and Dodge's luscious Art Deco set is eye candy (the grain on the wood paneling is all hand-painted!). The play runs until 21 March at the American Airlines Theatre.

As for restaurants, I re-visited many of my usual haunts: Via Quadronno (sadly, the one in HK just does not compare), Candle Cafe, La Esquina. But my favourite meal was probably the post-yoga falafel and baklava lunch at Hummus Kitchen, while the most memorable was evening post-flight nibbles at Rock Center Cafe the day before the tree was to come down. The food and drink were nothing spectacular, but the view of the skating rink made for a very warm, festive welcome to the city.

Another yoga mat moment: intuition

I had an amazing yoga class yesterday. For the first time in my years of yoga practice, I did a one-legged wheel. But what was amazing was not that I did it, but how I came to do it.

It was towards the end of Wendy's yoga class yesterday. We were doing wheel (a backbend pose where both hands and feet are on the ground and the rest of the body lifts off the ground forming an inverted "u"). Normally, this pose puts a lot of pressure on my wrists (probably because I'm not grounding through my feet enough) and I can usually only hold the pose for a few breaths. While I'm coming down, the more advanced yogis in the class are usually going through other variations like lifting one leg or arm off the ground or standing up from the pose. Yesterday, as we were in our first wheel, Wendy, in her usual soothing voice, tells the class: "Sometimes we can't do something, because we tells ourselves that we can't. If we stop believing that we can't, we just might do it." Or some variation of the same theme; as I can't remember her exact words. As I heard those words, I decided to stop thinking I couldn't do it. Once that decision was made, I felt like I was somehow on auto-pilot observing myself. I observed my feet to moving closer together (normally, teachers only tell us to move our feet closer towards our hands). In that moment of shifting the feet towards each other, I suddenly felt that one leg could hold the weight and I lifted my right leg up. I got as far as getting my leg half way up. But as soon as I registered surprise and disbelief that my leg was up in the air, I panicked and tumbled down from the pose. But in the second set, I started first with my left leg and then right leg and managed both times to lift one leg up completely without falling out of the pose.

It was interesting to observe that once I stopped believing I couldn't do the pose, my body revealed the solution, which was to move my feet closer together. In hindsight, it's an obvious solution, because that's how one does a one-legged bridge. So essentially, the body knew what to do all along, only the mind was not ready.

We hear it all the time -- the power of positive thinking. But it seems we can cognitively agree with something without really believing in it. So perhaps the phrase is incorrect. It's not so much positive thinking, but positive belief. I'm not sure how much of yesterday's achievement had been primed by my dim sum chat with AS about vipassana meditation.

I have always been a bit of a meditation sceptic; wanting to believe yet not really believing that meditation is useful (I mean, how can sitting and doing nothing be useful?), at least not enough to give up 10 days of my life to it. Ever since AS went on the 10-day meditation retreat in 2007 and raved about it though, my curiosity about it has been piqued. AS only told me yesterday what prompted him to go on the retreat and the effects therafter. It had been a very stressful period in his life and he had started noticing that he was suffering from memory loss. He would wake up in the morning, go to the bathroom and walk out wondering whether he had brushed his teeth or not. His doctor suggested that he get tested by the specialists at UCSF's Memory & Aging Center. There's a long waiting time to get an appointment there. It so happened that he completed the vipassana retreat the day before flying off to UCSF. Once at UCSF, he was put through a series of concentration and memory tests (In one exercise, he would be told a series of numbers and was asked to recall them in reverse order. He managed to go up to 17 digits!). The tests revealed that, far from suffering memory loss or deterioration, AS was actually scoring off the charts! Of course, he acknowledged it could have been akin to the placebo effect. But nonetheless, it illustrates the power of the mind to manipulate itself into doing unexpected things if we just let it. And my little one-legged wheel moment on the yoga mat further confirmed that. All of which is convincing me to put a 10-day vipassana retreat onto my 2010 to-do list.

This point makes me think of my students as well. I've been grading their final exams and noticed that most had not been able to correctly calculate a per person cost when given total trip costs. It's a simple calculation, yet many ended up with a per person cost that was nearly as high as total trip costs for 25 people. As I graded the papers, I kept wondering why they would overlook/accept this obviously non-sensical number. I believe that most of the students, despite having previously done the calculations correctly in their own homework and group project assignments, continue to believe that they do not know how to do the calculation. I can only imagine that the belief in their own lack of competence clouded even their most basic common sense. I wish I could have taught them how to trust their own intuition and logic more rather than relying on standard formulas. But of course, I myself am still just a student learning to trust and have faith in my own intuition.

New York Faves

1. Enid's, Brooklyn -- I spent an afternoon in Brooklyn after a lunch at DB Bistro. The steak sandwich was more memorable than the signature DB burger stuffed with foie gras and braised ribs. And it was only 1/8th the price! Next time, I'm going to have to have the pulled pork sandwich. Their banana rum cake is also delish.
2. A yoga class by Jules Febre @ Jivamukti -- a student:teacher ratio of 4:3!
3. Shopping for cold weather running gear -- Running Company (their latest shop on 63rd & 3rd, having taken over the shop that used to be Really Cool Foods). They let you try their running shoes on a treadmill that also videos your stride.
4. Equus -- An intriguing take on the struggle to find meaning in life. Daniel Radcliffe bares all, but it's Richard Griffiths who gets under your skin.

Hamptons Weekend: Ross School, Lois Nesbitt

Am catching up on my posts in the BA lounge waiting to board the CX flight to Vancouver, which is running half an hour late.

Headed out to the Hamptons on Friday afternoon; the drive out took 3.5 hours. Much of Saturday was spent by the pool with HB & BM putting together quite the BBQ lunch spread. For dinner, NK had arranged for us to attend a Nobu-catered fundraising dinner for the Ross School. Dinner was excellent, especially considering that they had to bring everything in from Manhattan. The school was also the perfect setting for the dinner; as there were quite a few Asian-inspired interiors around the school. Ross School was founded in 1991 by Courtney & Steve Ross (former Time-Warner CEO). Looking through their brochure, it is exactly the kind of school I would have loved to have attended. The school's curriculum embraces technology in all areas of learning and its approach to teaching is inter-disciplinary and global in perspective. Most importantly, Ross teaches that learning doesn't just take place from textbooks or from within the walls of a school. There's an emphasis on community service and learning opportunities outside the school and abroad. Students are encouraged to explore their own areas of interests and intellectual enquiry. The Hong Kong education system could use a total revamp along these lines. At it stands now, probably only a handful of international schools offer a similar educational experience.

The most active thing we did on Sunday (aside getting the NY Times and my Dolce de Leche latte, for which I made BM drive me out to Bridgehampton's Starbucks first thing in the morning) was a morning yoga class with Lois Nesbitt at One Ocean Yoga. Lois, like Patrick at Pure Yoga, is a student of John Friend. It was a great class, felt very familiar and I got to work on my handstand. An interesting tidbit about Lois is that before becoming a full-time yogi is that she was an artist, writer and taught at Princeton University. Interesting career change, but I guess yoga is full of such stories.

The rest of the day (and weekend) was spent reading the Times at the beach. It only started to rain just as we got on the LIE to head back into Manhattan.