Sirilakshmi Yoga

Gratitude.

When winter turned cruel, kindness turned warm.

In northern India, villagers came together with an extraordinary act of compassion—knitting massive sweaters to protect rescued elephants from biting cold that threatened their fragile health. These gentle giants, already survivors of hardship, found unexpected comfort in the care of human hands determined to keep them safe.

Thread by thread, the sweaters became symbols of empathy stronger than the cold itself. The moment reminds us that true humanity is measured not by grand words, but by quiet efforts to protect the voiceless when they need warmth most.

We have created a society that demands all our time, all our energies, all our life. There is no leisure to learn, and so life becomes mechanical, almost meaningless. —Krishnamurti

Context: Leisure implies that a mind is not occupied. It is only then that there is a state of learning. A school is a place of learning, not merely a place for accumulating knowledge. This is really important to understand. Knowledge is necessary and has its own limited place in life. Unfortunately, this limitation has devoured all our lives, and we have no space for learning. We are so occupied with earning a livelihood that it takes all the energy of the mechanism of thought, so that we are exhausted at the end of the day and need to be stimulated. We recover from this exhaustion through entertainment, religious or otherwise. This is the life of human beings. Human beings have created a society which demands all their time, all their energies, all their life. There is no leisure to learn, and so life becomes mechanical, almost meaningless. So we must be very clear in the understanding of the word ‘leisure’: it is a time, a period when the mind is not occupied with anything whatsoever. It is the time of observation. It is only the unoccupied mind that can observe. Free observation is the movement of learning. This frees the mind from being mechanical.

"Dandelion"

She broke wild horses by swimming alongside them in the Rio Grande—born in exile, Johanna July trained horses barefoot and answered to no one.
Johanna was born around 1860 in Nacimiento de los Negros, a remote settlement in northern Mexico where freedom came at the cost of everything familiar.
Her people—the Black Seminoles—were descended from escaped enslaved Africans and Seminole Indians who had built lives together in Florida, farming land and forming families.
But after the brutal Seminole Wars of the 1830s and 1840s, when the U.S. government forced Indigenous peoples westward and recaptured Black people to enslave them, the Black Seminoles fled south across the Rio Grande into Mexico.
Mexico offered them something the United States never would:
Citizenship, land, and the promise that no one would be returned to slavery.
So they built Nacimiento—a village of exiles who refused to surrender their freedom.
This was the world Johanna was born into.
A world where survival meant adaptability, where identity was layered and complex, where home was wherever you could defend it.
In 1870, the U.S. Army came calling with an offer.
They needed scouts who knew the harsh borderlands of Texas and Mexico—people who could track, translate, and navigate terrain that baffled white soldiers.
The Black Seminoles, desperate for steady income and a chance to return to U.S. territory, agreed.
In exchange for military service, they would receive land near Brackettville, Texas, and American citizenship.
In 1871, Johanna's family crossed back into the United States, settling near Fort Duncan outside Eagle Pass.
Her father, Ned Phillips, broke horses for the Army while farming and raising livestock. Her mother, Jennie Bruner, tended the household.
And Johanna? Johanna fell in love with horses.
Black Seminole culture had clear gender roles: women managed homes, men handled livestock.
But Johanna had no interest in cooking or sewing.
She wanted to be outside, working with animals, feeling the power of a thousand-pound creature learning to trust her hands.
An old Seminole scout named Adam Wilson taught her to ride.
Not sidesaddle like a "proper" lady, but ba****ck, with nothing but a rope around the horse's neck.
She wore bright homespun dresses that she sewed herself, thick braids that hung down her back, and long gold earrings and necklaces that caught the Texas sun.
She went barefoot. Always barefoot. Even when riding.
When her father died shortly after his military discharge in 1872, Johanna—still barely a teenager—took over his work.
She herded the family's goats and cattle.
And she began breaking horses for the U.S. Army and local ranchers.
But Johanna didn't break horses the way men did.
Male horse breakers used force and fear. They roped wild horses, threw them to the ground, tied their legs, and forced saddles onto their backs while the animals screamed and thrashed.
It was violent, dangerous work that often injured both horse and rider.
The goal was domination—to "break" the horse's spirit until it submitted.
Johanna invented a different method entirely.
She would lead a wild horse down to the Rio Grande.
Once in the water, she'd swim alongside the animal, letting it grow accustomed to her presence.
Then, as the horse tired from the current and the swim, she would gently grab its mane and ease herself onto its back.
The horse, exhausted and disoriented in the water, couldn't buck effectively.
By the time they reached the opposite shore, the animal had learned something crucial:
This human wasn't a predator. She was a partner.
Trust took root in that river.
And when Johanna climbed off, she had a horse who would work with her—not out of fear, but out of relationship.
Her reputation spread.
Ranchers and Army officers sought her out specifically. She became known throughout South Texas as one of the finest horse trainers on the border—a tall, barefoot Black Seminole woman who could gentle the wildest mustang without breaking its spirit.
But when Johanna was about eighteen, she made a decision that would prove more difficult than any wild horse:
She married a man named Lesley.
They moved to Fort Clark, another Black Seminole community along the Rio Grande.
And immediately, Johanna discovered that marriage was a trap she hadn't anticipated.
Lesley expected a traditional wife. Someone who could cook, sew, keep house while he worked.
Johanna tried. She genuinely tried.
But she had spent her life outdoors with animals, not indoors with pots and needles.
The domestic life suffocated her.
And when she struggled, Lesley responded with violence.
So one day, Johanna simply left.
She climbed onto her pony, rode back to Fort Duncan where her mother lived, and never returned to Lesley.
In a time when women had few legal rights, when domestic violence was considered a private family matter, when leaving a husband meant social ostracism—Johanna chose herself.
She chose the horses. She chose freedom. She chose the open land and the river and the work that made her feel alive.
Life went on.
Lesley eventually died, and Johanna married twice more—first to Alexander Wilkes, then to Charles Lasley.
With Charles, she ran a successful business raising cattle, breaking horses, and selling hides.
But the core of her life never changed.
The horses remained. The land remained. The barefoot girl who refused to be tamed remained.
Around 1910, Johanna moved to Brackettville and built herself a small house on a hilltop near the cemetery.
She lived there for the next three decades, riding into town, still barefoot, still breaking horses, still carrying herself like a woman with nothing to prove and no apologies to make.
In 1937, when Johanna was in her late seventies, a woman named Florence Angermiller came to interview her as part of the Federal Writers' Project—a New Deal program documenting the stories of formerly enslaved people and their descendants.
Angermiller recorded Johanna's voice, her memories, her river method of horse training.
That interview is one of the few records we have of Johanna's own words.
On January 18, 1942, Johanna July died in Brackettville at approximately eighty-two years old.
She was buried in the Seminole Indian Scout Cemetery alongside other Black Seminoles who had served the U.S. military, raised families in exile, and built lives in the brutal borderlands between two nations.
Her gravestone doesn't tell the full story.
It can't capture the feel of the Rio Grande's current, the weight of a horse's mane in her hands, the moment when a wild animal chose to trust her.
It doesn't mention the husband she left, the decades she spent on her own terms, the revolutionary way she trained animals through partnership instead of domination.
But her legacy endures in the stories people still tell about the barefoot Black Seminole woman who trained horses in the river, who chose freedom over safety, who proved that strength doesn't require cruelty.
Johanna July wasn't famous. She never sought recognition.
But she lived a life that was entirely her own—and in doing so, she showed what freedom actually looks like when you're brave enough to claim it.

In 2012, Kenyan orphanage worker Anthony Omari became a hero when three armed men attacked his workplace. Despite being struck in the face with a machete, Omari’s first priority remained the safety of the children in his care. Even as he collapsed from his injury, he ensured the children were protected, displaying incredible bravery in the face of danger.

Anthony Omari's actions go beyond self-preservation. His unwavering focus on protecting the vulnerable, even at the cost of his own life, shows the true meaning of sacrifice. His heroism serves as an example of the courage we can find in ordinary people when they are pushed to their limits.

His story is a reminder that acts of heroism can occur in the most unexpected circumstances. It challenges us all to think about the lengths we would go to for others, and to honor those who choose to protect and serve. 🦸‍♂️🛡️

She was twelve when a boy led her into the woods, and the silence she carried afterward would shape her entire life.

Roxane Gay grew up in Nebraska with two loving Haitian immigrant parents who nurtured her curiosity and her love for stories. She was shy, bookish, and happiest behind the typewriter they bought her. She adored her two younger brothers, loved school, and lived the kind of childhood that felt safe — until the day her boyfriend asked her to follow him into the woods.

A dozen boys were waiting.
Roxane later called it “an incident,” choosing softer language so she could carry the weight without drowning in it. But what happened shattered her understanding of safety and trust. She was twelve, too young to understand what boys could do to break a girl. She walked home a different person, and she told no one. Not her parents. Not her teachers. Not a single adult who could have helped her.

Instead, she created a plan only a terrified child could invent: she would eat. She would gain weight. She would make herself big enough, unapproachable enough, invisible enough, to be safe. “I am going to get fat,” she wrote, “so I can protect myself.” The body she built became a fortress — protection, punishment, shield, and prison all at once. Her parents watched helplessly as their daughter changed before their eyes, without knowing why.

For years she lived inside that fortress. At Phillips Exeter Academy and later at Yale, she tried to mimic the life everyone expected from her. But the silence grew heavier. At nineteen, she ran away with a man twenty-five years older — not out of rebellion, but relief. Relief from the pressure of pretending she was fine.

When she finally returned home, she began rebuilding from nothing. She earned a master’s degree, then a PhD. She started writing everything she had never been able to say aloud — stories, criticism, erotica under pseudonyms, essays that spilled out of the life she had survived.

And in 2012, twenty years after the attack, she wrote what she once believed she never could. Her essay What We Hunger For unspooled the truth she’d carried alone for decades. It wasn’t just raw — it was precise, unflinching, an X-ray of trauma and the ways a child learns to survive what should never happen.

Women wrote to her by the thousands. They recognized the silence. The shame. The strategies of survival that look like self-destruction from the outside.

Two years later, her book Bad Feminist made her a cultural force. She insisted that feminism must make space for imperfect people. She refused the idea that women must be flawless to deserve dignity. The essays became a bestseller, and suddenly her voice was everywhere: in major newspapers, universities, conferences, and editorial rooms.

But success brought labels.
When she wrote about race — she was divisive.
When she wrote about feminism — she was demanding.
When she wrote about her body — she was unhealthy, a bad example, too much.
When she asked institutions to do better — she was difficult.

Roxane understood the pattern: label a woman difficult, emotional, or crazy, and you silence her without ever addressing what she’s saying.

She had lived in silence long enough.

She kept writing anyway.
In Hunger, she examined her “before” and “after” with fearless honesty. She described what it feels like to live inside a body judged, dismissed, and misunderstood — a body built out of necessity, a body she is still learning to live in. Critics called it one of the most honest memoirs in modern nonfiction.

She edited anthologies about r**e culture, mentored emerging writers, became the first Black woman to write for Marvel Comics, launched magazines and newsletters, and shaped national conversations about gender, race, trauma, and power.

Through it all, the world kept trying to make her small. She refused.

The girl who built a fortress out of her body became the woman who built a career out of her voice — and every time someone tried to silence her, she wrote louder.

Fun Fact: Roxane Gay’s book Bad Feminist became a New York Times bestseller and helped redefine what modern feminism could look like — messy, human, imperfect, and inclusive.

If a story buried for decades can rise and reshape how millions think about truth and survival, what might still be possible when we finally speak the words we once swallowed?



Sources
Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger detailing the assault at age twelve and its lasting impact
The Guardian profile covering her childhood, trauma, and rise as a cultural critic
Marvel and NPR confirming she became the first Black woman to write for Marvel