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people doing yoga

George Boole reportedly said, "A real mathematician ... must be something more than a mere mathematician, he must be also something of a poet." It seems to me that something similar could be said about being a yoga teacher in 2020, and that a successful teacher must be more than a mere yoga teacher. Yoga isn't "just exercise" anymore than it is "mere mathematics." But what else more "must" a yoga teacher be?

Cover of Ajahn Sumedho Intuitive Awareness

Over the past few decades, Ajahn Sumedho has said much about "intuitive awareness." Most often the Pāli word sampajaƱƱa is translated as "clear comprehension," but Ajahn Sumedho prefers to foreground the notion of "intuitive awareness" as a way to extend and elaborate how we understand this important meditation concept.

Yesterday, I spent much of the day working on a deck project in my backyard. Activities such as housework and home improvement projects offer good opportunities to watch the mind. On meditation retreats, these activities get labels such as "working meditation" or "yogi jobs." The common wisdom seems to hold that we should perform these activities in silence, paying full attention to the task at hand. Over the past few years, I have been investigating the validity of this claim.

As the global pandemic continues to spread — causing widespread sickness and death, restricting in-person human contact, creating additional responsibilities at home or financial hardships, or any of the countless other changes to daily life that have resulted in feelings such as fear, anger, boredom, or uncertainty — this virus has forced some of us to reassess our values and our place in the world. While the majority of us who participate in the Drupal community remain focused squarely on technical issues, others might find now is an especially good time to take a closer look at Drupal's Values and Principles.

As each of us negotiates a world where COVID-19 dominates the headlines and our everyday interactions, this article considers how some of the lessons that the Drupal community—perhaps an idealized Drupal community—has learned might shape our understanding of these times that feel so extraordinary. Drupal does not have a monopoly on any of these concepts, but in stressful times, similes and metaphors can help us interrogate our underlying assumptions and the communities that we have each constructed.

Three R progamming books

For the professional web developer/engineer who gets paid to write code and build websites, writing R code for data science should feel somewhat familiar. Web development and data science can both involve writing code. However, some of the fundamental concepts are quite distinct, such as data structures. For instance, at multiple points in my life, after months of writing code almost exclusively for web development, I will suddenly get the idea that I want to analyze some data.