Sikhs Inspiring Again

I have complained earlier about being an Asian person in the time of the virus. I have complained about being mistaken for Chinese, while not being Chinese myself.

Recently, I watched this clip from the Daily Show, about Sikhs being mistaken for Muslims. Individual Sikhs have sadly been attacked and killed ever since 9-11. Of course, the irony in this historically Sikhs and Muslims have battled against each other in the past, and Sikhs have also been targeted by Islamic terrorist groups.

Despite that fact, they are not overly invested in trying to distinguish themselves from Muslims to escape Islamaphobia. They refuse to "throw Muslims under the bus." This clip is meant to be comedy, but Sikhs are often like this in real life. It's shown me how I want to approach things in the future when it comes to issues like this one.

https://youtu.be/RskvZgc_s9g?t=228

"Even if it means things are harder for us, we believe it's the right thing to do."

What I'm Up To

These days I'm just trying to keep up good habits, and work on decreasing old ones.

Among those habits is a mantra meditation session in the morning. I have no idea what it's supposed to "do", but I'm committed to doing it at least a month since I've been told not to expect overnight magic. My throat gets pretty tired after repeating "om mani padme hum" after 30 minutes. There is a moment after my sessions when I feel "different", but it quickly disappears when I resume my daily activities. Perhaps this is why people become actual monks. It's very hard to maintain a certain level of awareness while engaged in the normal layperson's life.

Another thing I'm doing is trying dream yoga, based on trying to do something else outside of browsing my phone every night. The addiction got pretty bad as I've been obsessed with virus news. I figured I would try to make sleep more interesting, so I got a book on Dream Yoga. Observations:

1. As soon as I stopped looking at my phone every night before bed, I started remembering my dreams again.
2. My first dream after picking up the book was one where I was dating some random man. Except in my dream, I could not remember the man's name. So I went through a file cabinet trying to suss out what his name was, too ashamed to ask him directly. He ended up catching me in the act, and I made up some lie about needing to find an old resume. If this sounds familiar, it was because it was a plot almost straight out of a Seinfeld episode. When sleeping, I apparently just copy the plots of television shows.