Craig Constantine

Awareness with Anna Bezuglova →

Published February 26, 2024 · All posts on Feb 26 · Movers Mindset

Awareness with Anna Bezuglova

What role does sacred practice play in daily life and how can it transform mundane activities into meaningful experiences?

Anna Bezuglova transforms the mundane into sacred practice, challenging our perceptions of daily life and movement with insights from her unique journey and teaching philosophy.

“The dialogue of sacredness of deep meaning is something that is often connected to daily things. It’s not only the physical practice that I treat in such a way but also just daily moments and living life. Being present to it all the time— and it doesn’t matter whether I’m doing an official session of practice, or I’m driving a car, or I’m talking to my husband, or I’m teaching a class, or I’m just walking down the road. I think this mindset shifts something in the way you do things day to day.”
~ Anna Bezuglova, 3:00

In a deeply reflective conversation, Anna describes how she treats daily practices as sacred, a wisdom imparted by her Zen teacher. She shares her journey of recognizing the sacredness in her routines, initially performing practices that outwardly seemed sacred to others but later realizing their intrinsic value to herself. Anna emphasizes the importance of being present in every moment, whether it’s in a structured practice session or the simple acts of daily living, highlighting how this mindset transforms the mundane into something deeply meaningful.

Anna’s reflections extend into the lessons learned from her father, a martial arts teacher and a Buddhist, who, despite never directly teaching her martial arts, deeply influenced her perspective on life and practice. She recounts growing up in the challenging times of the 1990s in Russia, drawing resilience and a unique outlook from her parents’ examples. This background informs her teaching philosophy, where she advocates for a holistic approach to movement that intertwines physical, cognitive, and emotional aspects.

Anna argues for the significance of continuous change, consistency, and awareness in practice, underlining how these elements contribute to a fulfilling and transformative journey. Through her narrative, she challenges listeners to see movement not just as physical exercise, but as a comprehensive method to engage with life, fostering change, and personal growth.

(more…)

Embodied →

Published February 26, 2024 · All posts on Feb 26 · 7 for Sunday

I could do a lot worse than sitting staring at trees. We know they’re alive, and yet they’re so still.

Trees are the longest-living life form we know, and manifest their temporal and geographic histories within their very bodies. In both form and function, trees tell the stories of their individual past, which is intimately connected to the history of their microenvironments as well as that of the planet. This distinctive and intimate relation between trees and their temporal and geographic histories is what we call the ‘embodied history of trees’.
~ Dalia Nassar from, Rooted

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“You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.” ~ JRR Tolkien

February 25, 2024 — #73 →

Published February 25, 2024 · All posts on Feb 25 · 7 for Sunday

Reading time: About 4 minutes, 800 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/73

Why not? →

Published February 25, 2024 · All posts on Feb 25 · 7 for Sunday

Because it’s crazy. It’s insane. It will never work. You’ll hear this a lot if you have a lot of far-out ideas. “Moonshots” is the term I prefer for such ideas, or a really big swing.

And then in an instant he realised that rather than building a cable through the wildernesses of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia in the hope of saving a couple of days’ transmission time for the telegraph, one could build a cable directly from Newfoundland to Ireland, under the narrowest point of the entire Atlantic Ocean. If he was able to do that, it would reduce the time for a message to pass between the two greatest cities in the nineteenth-century world from a matter of days to just a few seconds.
~ from, The Death of Slow News

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Why not, indeed. Because what if your idea actually worked?

Listening →

Published February 23, 2024 · All posts on Feb 23 · Podcasting, 7 for Sunday

I’ve now done a lot of recorded conversations for podcasts. I’ve spent a lot of money, and I’ve spent a vast amount of time. I’ve had every imaginable problem. I’ve been stressed out. I’ve literally worked myself to exhaustion and illness.

The line from Zeno was that we were given two ears and one mouth for a reason. That reason? To listen more than we talk.
To learn from people who can teach us. To find something that makes us better.
~ Ryan Holiday from, 27 Things I’ve Learned From 150 Million Podcast Downloads

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The rewards I’ve gotten—the things I’ve learned and the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve had—have been worth every penny and every moment and every hardship.

The opportunity to speak with hundreds of people (most of whom I’d never have crossed paths with, let alone had a good conversation with) is priceless.

Little Box of Quotes →

Published February 22, 2024 · All posts on Feb 22

I didn’t set out to collect quotes. I simply wanted to randomly be inspired, or challenged to think, by things others have said or written.

~~…and 30 years later, I now get a little email from my past self every day. No noise. Just a quote. https://littleboxofquotes.com /~~

In 1994 I began collecting inspirational quotes, displaying them randomly on my personal blog. After a few years I copied them all onto 3×5 cards. I put them in a small box and continued to add cards. Today, there are more than 1,500 quotes and the collection continues to grow.

It never gets easier →

Published February 21, 2024 · All posts on Feb 21 · 7 for Sunday

Very early in my rediscovery of movement, someone said: What was once your workout, will one day be your warmup. It’s both motivating (simply do what you can, today, and the changes will come) and inspiring (it implies that the people far ahead, at one time, were here, where I am today). I can now see in hindsight that it is an expansive perspective: One will expand their capabilities as one expands one’s practice to bigger and better things.

Years later I realised that the answer to this question is: everything. There can be more articulation of the toes; rotation can be made more extreme; even that ineffable quality of artistry can be developed. It’s often thought that the greater your prowess, the easier your performance becomes. However, as I progressed upward through the ranks of the ballet world, I saw that this wasn’t the case.
~ Barbara Gail Montero from, Against flow

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Years into my rediscovery of movement, I realized it was truly a mastery practice. Something which can be done, forever, just for the process.

And just now, it’s occurred to me that this is also true: What was once my warmup, will always contain enough challenge to also be my workout.

From scratch →

Published February 19, 2024 · All posts on Feb 19 · 7 for Sunday

Clear cut and plant. Clear cut and plant. I’m not sure, but this doesn’t feel like a great idea. I started reading this article thinking it wasn’t going to be that interesting. I was wrong. I’ve moved through forest where there are no trails: doing boundary monitoring and corridor maintenance for the Appalachian Trail Council, and bush–whacking towards rock climbing. It’s type-2 fun. But reading about what these super-humans do to move through clear-cut “blocks”… *shudders* that’s definitely type-3 fun.

Up in the sparsely populated wildernesses of the north, meanwhile, logging companies work 24/7 to fell trees for lumber, leaving behind ‘cut blocks’ – bleak fields of stumps, mulch, roots and detritus covering thousands of hectares. Following in their wake come hordes of seasonal tree planters, who drive for miles up dangerous roads to enter these remote areas. Staying in basic bush camps, off the grid and armed only with shovels and bags of saplings, they set about creating new forests from scratch.
~ uncredited, from The tree musketeers

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“Fun” comes in 3 types: Type-1 fun is fun in the moment. Type-2 fun isn’t fun now, but we’re really going to enjoy this once we get past this sucky part, even more so as soon as we’re done, and especially years from now when we retell this story. Type-3 fun isn’t fun now, mistakes have been made, life choices need reconsidering and this is actually going to be a cautionary tale when retold.

February 18, 2024 — #72 →

Published February 18, 2024 · All posts on Feb 18 · 7 for Sunday

Reading time: About 5 minutes, 1000 words
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This issue is https://7forsunday.com/72

148 lines →

Published February 18, 2024 · All posts on Feb 18 · On Writing, 7 for Sunday

Preparation—getting everything just so, the right desk, the right software and computer, the right room, the right beverage, the right time, the right mindset—is really simply a form of hiding. Sometimes it’s only a few moments, sometimes it’s days, but I always hide before writing every single one of these blog posts. I definitely don’t enjoy the hiding. I mildly enjoy the writing. I love the reading and thinking parts that this 13-year labor of insanity requires. But some people are not only good at the writing, they absolutely love the craft of writing itself.

While you or I may respond with a counter-argument, Tolkien went home and wrote 148 lines of heroic couplet […]
~ Brenton Dickieson from, The Effect of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Mythopoeia

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This seemed insane. Who would take an idea for a counter-argument, from a conversation, and rush off to go write for what must have been hours? And then I realized that I do that sort of thing all the time. I run with an idea down some rabbit hole, forming it into something real in the world. It’s only that I don’t it with writing.