Join me this Friday 6/21 for a Full Moon ocean dip 🌝 🌊
5:00AM | Ala Moana Beach Park | beach near the large parking lot
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.from the poem Sometimes, by Mary Oliver
I love watching people. Like, to the point of distraction.
Recently, my friend Ryan told me he was given people-watching as a class assignment, so lately, when I watch, I call myself a “cultural anthropologist” and I do it with more intention.
Pema Chödrön teaches something similar called Just-Like-Me practice.
You sit in a place where lots of people walk by and you notice them. Pema suggests, as you watch them, you tell yourself:
Just like me, this person doesn’t want to experience suffering.
Just like me, this person wants ease in relationship, wants to feel safe and loved.
Early one morning I stood on a busy street corner, watching.
I saw a man in a bright yellow construction shirt sweeping the gutter clean at the entrance to a giant condo development. Then I saw him hug another worker.
Then another young man came by, also in the bright yellow shirt, and the sweeper stopped him, shook his hand, and they hugged.
Then another.
This kept happening as one after another the men made their way in to work.
And do you know what happened? My mouth started to water. I was literally savoring being witness to male affection at a construction site. (Remember: we have to make the effort to savor the delightful, and it’s worth it!)
Then I remembered Pema’s words: Just like me.
And my eyes also started watering.
What?! You mean, just like this sweeper, I have affection, care, and generosity within me? The courage to be vulnerable?
Yeah, I do. WE ALL DO.
This felt important. Pema’s instructions seemed to be about recognizing the suffering of others. But what a gift—both sides!—to also acknowledge their capacity for love and abundance of heart.
Because, as my Buddhish teacher Barbara DuBois says, when you do that, you’re just seeing your own reflection!
The sight of men in traditional roles of masculinity publicly showing affection for one another truly delighted me. We need more images like this. It benefits everyone when men feel free to show love in this way.
When I go to the beach in the morning, I often see a father and his adult son with special needs doing water exercises. On one of these mornings, I watched as the dad grabbed his son by the back of the head and kissed his face — hard.
Then I heard the son laugh loudly.
It was absolutely gorgeous.
For me, intentionally noticing these moments is a reparative experience.
Some of my most painful experiences have been around men demonstrating an aggressive need to dominate and intimidate:
growing up in a deeply misogynistic fundamentalist church,
decades existing in a male-dominated science career, where leaders are more concerned about women saying what men do than addressing the abuse and humiliation of women by those men, and
The negativity bias of my brain is working overtime to keep me safe. So I am making the effort to see kindness, affection, and tenderness from men, and celebrating it when I see it.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6da86a50-812d-4c7f-b955-fd6120d9689f_1368x1824.jpeg)
I wanted to extend this imagery to my yoga classes.
I asked a few male students if they wouldn’t mind letting me photograph them. And, beautifully, even though they didn’t know each other and were very sweaty after practice, they stepped up.
We could say more about these images… the physiology of positive touch, witnessing care and affection, noticing and savoring the pleasant.
Or we could leave words and thinking behind, and just feel what it’s like to exist together, right now, capable of so much love and courage.
If you try Ryan’s Cultural Anthropologist game this week, let me know.
I’d love to hear from you. 🫶
Practice in-person
This week’s yoga offerings
Sun 6/16
| Yoga Under the Palms Kaka‘ako
10:30AM Foundations
6:30PM The Earth
Mon 6/17
| HiClimb
9AM Active Flow
Tues 6/18
| HiClimb
9AM Active Flow
Fri 6/21
| Ala Moana Beach
5:00AM Full Moon Ocean Dip 🌝
I love the set up as changing the brain bias to cultural anthropology and seeing the positive. I also love the in depth chat about it on a lovely hike!
Thank you Shannon for sharing these findings and your thoughts. You have the gift of putting the dot on the i, capturing the essence. You are inspiring and healing so many readers of these posts and emails.