Epics of India

So the story that most intrigued me this week was the one with 4 of the Pandavas dying and Yudhistira answering riddles to revive them. Basically what happened, was that a large deer scooped up some prayer items from a monk in the woods and the brothers gave chase. Eventually they got really tired and thirsty. Thusly, they decided to look for water and one by one came upon the same pond. When each of them got there, they were issued a warning not to touch the water, but promptly ignored it and died. When Yudhistira finally came around, he headed the warning and ended up answering a large number of riddles from a god that turned out to be his father. His father then granted him a boon of being unrecognizable. This would make a pretty good story involving a vivid description of the pond and the game of wit. Yudhistira Bibliography: Title: The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic Author: R. K. Narayan Year: 1978 Link

So I finally decided I wanted to start with the Hanuman page. Shocker really, considering my two favorite stories that I've written so far are about him. While looking through the page this time around, I found mention of Bhakti Yoga . Honestly, I thought yoga was yoga so I naturally decided to look deeper. Turns out that Bhakti Yoga is a "spiritual path of loving devotion to a personal Divine." My interpretation of that is that you spend time every day in quiet meditation, relaxing your body and praying to the Divine that resonates most with you. I'm not sure if that is correct, but that's what I understood. This particular yoga was apparently discussed in the Bhagavad Gita . This is a collection of verses and scripts that discuss the interactions of Arjuna and Krishna. This book is apparently a part of the Mahabharata , which is much larger than the version we are reading for class. From the sounds of it, the original Mahabharata is 2000 verses. For re...

So this week, I've been in the computer chair a lot and decided to do the deskercise challenge. Being a self conscious person, I really liked the article here , which is specifically non-embarrassing yoga. From this, I will definitely be using the open chest stretch very frequently, as the muscles in my chest tend to get really tight, and this seems to help a lot. Interestingly, the reverse prayer pose was also very calming, and I am not at all opposed to using it some more. The deep breaths provide a nice reminder to relax a little and not stress so much. Classy

I decided to talk to my girlfriend about growth mindset. We've been dating for a long time, so it wasn't a very awkward conversation. She has actually done quite a bit of work towards developing growth mindsets in younger children through her work. She works for the KISS Institute of Practical Robotics, and spends her time teaching kids about robots and programming. She said that one of the more important things is to keep everything interesting. As long as she can keep the kids interested, they are more than willing to tackle new challenges head on, even if they may fall short every once in a while. It is honestly really cool that a company like this one exists right here in Norman. KIPR

This week was really great. We had the first, second, and third snow-days of my college career at OU this last week. I transferred in to the college after the last one happened a couple years ago, so this was a nice surprise.  The bummer was that this last week was also Engineers' Week, meaning a lot of events got cancelled. That's okay though, I still got to decorate the engineering quad with some cool people and we got to go to the fluid dynamics lab on Friday. It is the best time of year to be an engineer, and there is just a wonderful sense of community at every event that goes on. The snows days helped me get a little ahead in some of my classes, but more importantly, I was finally able to catch my breath. It seems like I have been going nonstop since the semester started, so this was a more than welcome break for me. In other news this week, I got to try out the alternative to the story telling assignment. The story planning is interesting to do, because ...

This week, I found this cool video about sacred trees in India in the stream. It talks about all kinds of different tress and their place in the culture. As someone who really likes plants, this was just neat to watch. Link

Here is a map of Sri Lanka, which is speculated to be the ancient country of Lanka. From here, Ravana would have overseen his kingdom.