Officials at NASA say they are now entering a new stage of a mission intended to place a pair of probes around Earth’s nearest neighbor and only satellite. In a statement issued earlier this week, NASA mission controllers say they are preparing for the twin spaceships, named Grail-A and Grail-B, to enter the moon’s orbit over the weekend, the space agency’s latest attempt to send probes to the moon.

Read more: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/science/new-years-day-for-nasa-means-preparing-for-moon-mission/#ixzz1i8wW6dOf

Vanda Scaravelli:biography
Trained as a concert pianist. For most of her life she lived in Florence and Rome, Italy. It was whilst hosting Krishnamurti in Switzerland that she learnt yoga. Both Krishnamurti and Scaravelli were instructed for several summers by two yoga students recommended by Krishnamacharya. They were Desikachar and B.K.S Iyengar. Iyengar has a formidable knowledge of postures, and Scaravelli also learnt the benefits of incorporating breath with movement from Desikachar. Although these were inmportant sources of information, the yoga that Scaravelli developed came from her "inner teacher", by trusting her body and learning from it, developing a softer more feminine approach to yoga She felt she had discovered, or uncovered something worth sharing with the world and passed on her knowledge through her teachings. Vanda Scaravelli died, aged 91, in Italy in 1999. Scaravelli's yoga teaching continues today through the work of Dona Holleman, Diane Long, Erich Schiffmann, Esther Myers, Mary Stewart, Sophy Hoare, Sandra Sabatini.

Points to Consider in Vanda Scaravelli’s System of Practicing Yoga Postures (Asana):

• take your time and let go of ambition
• the posture will emerge as tensions and imbalances clear from the body there is no need to "muscle"
• find the roots of the posture in relation to the ground (feet, sitz bones, hands, knees, forearms, upper arms, shoulders, spine, pelvis, etc.—whichever part of the body connects with the earth)
• keep the body soft as you drop into your "anchoring"—the body part that touches the earth
• always give attention to alignment by beginning from the ground up
• during your inhalation be passive (remain still)—then move on the exhalation
• once stabilized and secure in your posture, watch for the exhalations to begin to triggerripples of release in the spine
• sense the dropping action of the sacrum, which precedes the multi-stage releasing of spinal curves, and which occurs at the end of each exhalation as the sacrum, lumbar and pelvis release, let the exhaled breath release you from the waist up the resulting wave will clear the upper spine and neck of tension and imbalance spontaneous, dynamic movement may surprise you! It brings life to the pose wait until you can do the pose well in this method before deepening it or practicing a more challenging variation once you are grounded, postures evolve through awareness of the rhythm of the breath and the lengthening of the spine
• “scooping” the pelvis while standing is helps with discovering the sense of a wave of release
• long natural curves in the spine are desirable as balancers of front / back weight distribution
• flat-backed students benefit; as the deep pelvic tensions release, a curve grows
• know that while you are in transition from a more "muscle-dependent" style of practice, your muscular corset begins to change and you are temporarily more vulnerable to injury
• when you are ready, there is no fear, and the posture arrives easily
• have "infinite time-and no ambition"
• "Do not kill the instinct of the body for the glory of the pose."
• ~ Vanda Scaravelli

http://www.mytripjournal.com/travel-449219-vanda-scaravelli-yoga-body-release-spine-breath-practice

Thanks to Greg Benson of Greg Benson Photo http://www.gregbenson.com/ for bringing this article to my attention!
It is very inspiring to see Vanda and Bernice showing us the way - all that is possible.   I love how Bernice says "we build energy in our bodies we don't take it out."  And Vanda says "when you are ready there is no fear and the posture arrives easily." So true we just need to quiet down to hear what these women are telling us - we keep building energy by putting it in and the way to do that is  let's sign the light on our fears so we can move easily.      

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. —

The yoga teacher in the front of the room lay on the floor, her hands resting on her upper thighs. She lifted her right leg high in the air, foot flexed. Then she grabbed her right foot in her right hand and brought her leg toward her face as she raised her upper body a few inches off the ground.Students in class smiled in amazement as they watched the teacher's knee graze her nose.

It wasn't just the pose that was amazing - it was the teacher's age. Bernice Bates is 91 years old, and she's more flexible than people who are a third of her age.

"If you can't quite meet your knee, that's all right," Bates told her class, gently.

Guinness World Records recently awarded Bates the title of "Oldest Yoga Teacher." While there might be other, older yogis somewhere in the world, Bates completed the lengthy documentation process required by Guinness. She was nominated earlier this year by her daughter.

Bates first began practicing yoga 50 years ago, after she saw it on a television program. As a younger woman, she taught swimming in Ohio at a YWCA.

She starts stretching the moment she wakes up, with a series of poses to get her blood flowing.

"It gives you a good outlook. It involves your mind," she said. "Your mind, your body and your spirit. They all work together and they're all coordinated. Whereas when you're on a treadmill, that's all you're doing, and you're tired when you're done. We build energy in our body, we don't take it out."

http://www.islandpacket.com/2011/12/22/1904590/florida-yoga-teacher-named-worlds.html

A Story by Mother Teresa

"I once picked up a woman from a garbage dump and she was burning with fever; she was in her last days and her only lament was: ‘My son did this to me.’ I begged her: You must forgive your son. In a moment of madness, when he was not himself, he did a thing he regrets. Be a mother to him, forgive him. It took me a long time to make her say: ‘I forgive my son.’ Just before she died in my arms, she was able to say that with a real forgiveness. She was not concerned that she was dying. The breaking of the heart was that her son did not want her. This is something you and I can understand."

Thanks to Havertown Resident Jim Lemich and Yogi  for sending this to Cerca Trova Yoga.  I especially love Steve Jobs final words "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."  So true no matter what is happening in your world and how awful it seems find a way to stay hungry and foolish.  Yoga is where it is at if you are seeking just how to do that - yoga will show you the way.   But you have to commit and trust in the process.   Yoga is fun but it's work!  


Video of the Commencement address. 
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

Years ago when I first started developing and organizing Outdoor Educational Adventure Trips I came across this article below regarding the Italian words Cerca trova while I was searching for a name to call my company.   I thought this article summed it up.  When you are out in the great outdoors it's all about seeking and finding and same in our yoga practice and really that is what we do our whole lives seek and find and seek and find and seek and find.  So, for a while  I became Cerca Trova Educational Adventure Travel and now that I'm focused on sharing my yoga practice with others it's now Cerca Trova Yoga Studio (Seek & You Shall Find).   Let me know what you think - there is a lot to think here - believe me seeking & finding is simple yet complex, easy yet hard, light but dark - full of duality - and it's all about finding the right balance.   Enjoy the read - I did and still do?  I wonder if they have had any resolution?  
From Associated Press, June 20, 2005:
"Cerca, trova - seek and you shall find - says a tantalizing five-century-old message painted on a fresco in the council hall of Florence's Palazzo Vecchio.

Researchers now believe these cryptic words could be a clue to the location of a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci painting and are pressing local authorities to allow them to search for the masterpiece of Renaissance art.

Maurizio Seracini, an Italian art researcher, first noticed the message during a survey of the hall 30 years ago, but his team lacked the technology then to see what lay behind Giorgio Vasari's 16th-century fresco, "Battle of Marciano in the Chiana Valley."

However, radar and X-ray scans conducted between 2002 and 2003 have detected a cavity behind the section of wall the message was painted on, which Seracini believes may conceal Leonardo's unfinished mural painting, the "Battle of Anghiari."
Considered one of Leonardo's greatest works, the mural is known today through the Tuscan master's preparatory studies and copies made by other artists.

"At the time, this was considered the masterpiece of masterpieces," Seracini told the Associated Press. Recovering it "would be like discovering a new Mona Lisa or a new Last Supper."

Leonardo's mural was thought to have been destroyed in the mid-16th century when artist, writer and architect Vasari renovated the hall that once served as Florence's seat of power. He then covered the walls with his own paintings.
Leonardo began working on the "Battle of Anghiari" in June 1505, when he was 53. He worked alongside fellow artist and rival Michelangelo, who had been commissioned to decorate the opposite wall with scenes of the Florentine republic's military triumphs.

Michelangelo never went beyond the preparatory work for his "Battle of Cascina," but Leonardo did paint his battle's centerpiece - a violent clash of horses and men called the "Fight for the Flag."

Leonardo later abandoned the work and left for Milan. Some chroniclers of the time said the artist had experimented with unstable paints that had rapidly degraded, leaving the painting irreparably damaged.
"For generations these stories have held us back, but there are documents that say otherwise," Seracini said. "Maybe other parts were damaged, but we know that 60 years later, when Vasari began his works, the painting was still visible and people still came to marvel at it."

Vasari raised the hall's roof 23 feet by building a second set of walls, but scans show that at one point he left a space between the two walls that is just large enough to house Leonardo's 19-by-13-foot "Fight for the Flag," Seracini said.
A similar technique was used by Vasari to preserve other works of art, he said.

"We see from Vasari's writings that Leonardo was just too important to him," Seracini said, adding that Vasari himself may have painted the message on a tiny green flag in his 39-by-26-foot fresco as a clue to the location of the "Battle of Anghiari."

"It is the only writing on dozens of flags in that painting," Seracini said. "And what are we looking for if not for something which was already known then as the 'Fight for the Flag'? Can all this be a coincidence?"
Seracini, whose research on another Leonardo painting is quoted in Dan Brown's novel "The Da Vinci Code," is an engineer who has spent the last three decades conducting scientific investigations on art treasures. He said he would like to continue his search for the "Battle of Anghiari" but authorities in Florence have denied him a permit.
"For months now we have been at a standstill and since all this is paid for by a private company, at no cost to the municipality, it's difficult for me to understand the reason for this behavior," he said.
Chiara Silla, director of the Palazzo Vecchio museum, said the inquiry hasn't been given the go-ahead because Seracini has yet to present a detailed report on his survey.

"Seracini's is a work in progress that is difficult to evaluate," Silla said. "For the last two years we have been waiting for technical and scientific documentation to decide together whether to continue or not."
If authorized to resume, Seracini said he would conduct another series of scans and insert a small probe through Vasari's painting to detect any traces of the pigments used by Leonardo. That would require at least another year of work, he said.If the "Battle of Anghiari" is located, it should be possible for conservation artists to remove a section of Vasari's fresco, extract Leonardo's painting and then safely replace the Vasari, Seracini said. He said it would be a fairly routine operation for experts.

Alessandro Vezzosi, a Leonardo expert and the director of a museum dedicated to the artist in his hometown of Vinci, said he is aware of Seracini's work and that is based on solid evidence.
"We need to get to the bottom of this. The idea of a Leonardo hidden there is incredibly fascinating," he said."
Of course this is sinister-hoisted (i.e. with the hoist at the viewer's right hand), as shown in the painting. 
António Martins-Tuválkin, 22 June 2005