Durga Slaying the Water Dragon

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At the Rubin Museum (which graciously does not forbid photos). I regard that as a desire to have visitors expand the invitation. It is one of my favorite places to go in N), especially when I only have a few hours before heading back home.

Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Signs Around Town

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Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Spring Greetings–Embracing Change (web version of e-newsletter)

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Dear Friends ,

Greetings to all in this strange, but glorious Spring. As I sit down to write, I cannot help but recall that in my new year’s letter, I wrote of the practice in some Indian temples of cracking open a coconut to symbolically break open the head to get out of old living patterns that do not serve us. I blithely wrote how blessed I was that in having taken myself to India, I was intentionally choosing to be challenged, while recognizing that we don’t always get to pick when challenges will come. Less than two weeks after I returned, my family gathered to visit my father who was in the hospital for a hip replacement (he’s healing well). Only a couple of weeks after that, the Anusara yoga community was turned topsy turvy,. When I wrote of choosing to break myself open to discover new paradigms and possibilities, little did I know what was going to happen to the yoga community that has been and continues to be such an important part of my life.

Even Spring is not behaving according to settled expectations. It burst forth especially early–the cherry blossoms are already gone and azaleas and roses are blooming almost a month early. Records were set around the country for the warmest March on record, and we are approaching drought conditions (again) in the Washington metropolitan area.

Not surprisingl for one who likes things to be settled and secure, while admiring the wild blooming around me, I have been thinking about how disconcerting change can be. For someone who prefers warmer weather to winter, getting Spring early is delightful, but I cannot help but recognize that it has come with disastrous storms and high risks for farmers and our food sources, evidence of the fraying relationship between our populous society and the earth. What is a gardener, a yogi, and a member of society to do?

As a gardener, it is necessary to remember old teachings and methods (for example, just because it was prematurely warm does not mean that the danger of last frost is earlier than in other, colder years), but it was also necessary to plant and tend the garden earlier to make sure that cool weather plants, such as greens and snow and sugar snap peas, actually have an opportunity to grow. The erratic weather is also serving as a reminder to try and shift to be more in alignment with the forces of nature and to contribute less to global climate change. In a word, a true gardener, like the dedicated yogi (on and off the mat) will rely on the lineage of teachings and experience, continue to be fully engaged without giving up, be adaptable to the vagaries of season–both serendipity and calamity, and seek to live in a way that fosters the good in oneself and all beings.

It is going with the flow, but in an active and intelligent way. In this time of uncertainty, I believe that an ever deeper and more open study and practice of yoga is a great gift. Yoga when practiced sincerely and in community provides us opportunities to connect more deeply and techniques to turn unsought changes into opportunities for growth and transformation. In that light, in my own yoga offerings to you, there is both stability and change:

The big change in my yoga classes is moving my long-running gentle/therapeutics class at Willow Street to Friday nights. I am very excited about this shift. On a personal level, it gives me free weekends for the first time in six years, which will give me more time and space to study, practice and explore. For you, I intend that the class will now be a perfect transition from the work week to the weekend, fostering and enhancing the ability to heal and celebrate. Those who like things to be steady can still expect the same full hour and a half of nurturing, alignment-based, therapeutic poses and restorative practices. Registration for the full session is preferred, but drop-ins are always welcome. New to the class and want to know what it is about? Please come join me on Friday, April 13th, as part of free class week.

The Tuesday night all levels group practice at William Penn House continues. As always, a portion of the proceeds support the work of William Penn House, and if you cannot pay the suggested donation ($12-15), do not let that keep you away. We want to make the yoga available to those who truly seek it.

I hope to see many of you soon. Please feel free to be in touch by email or Facebook message when you cannot make it to class. For in-between newsletter information, please “like” my “Rose Garden Yoga” page on Facebook, and there are always new photographs and musings about yoga on and off the mat on the blog.

Peace and light,

Elizabeth

Found Exhortation

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Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

True Nature

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Crow gets on well with
Human, being by nature
Carrion eater.

Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Tulip Mania

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Whenever I see extensive plantings of tulips, it brings to mind the tulip mania of the 17th century Dutch. At the height of the mania, single bulbs could sell for several times the annual income of a skilled worker.

Now, the tulip is just another beautiful flower. How could it ever have been the focus of such outrageous extremes of lust, gambing, greed, and social mania?

It is a great contemplation to examine what leads us to desire and seek and value particular things–either individually or collectively. Do the desires bring us to a place of greater good and true fulfillment or is the desire just fueling the unhappy dance of craving and loss?

The tantric philosophers point out that desire itself is not bad. After all, it is what gets us out of bed in the morning and can turn us to the good. But if it is driven by external opinion and emptiness of self, then it yields suffering–the suffering from which yoga seeks to free us.

Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Cause/ Effect and Integrity

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Earlier in the week, on my way home from a conference on the other side of town, I found on the $1 cart outside of Second Story Books, Starhawk’s Dreaming the Dark — Magic, Sex and Politics. Though I always learn something from reading Starhawk’s books and I had not read this one yet, the book was so heavily underlined, I thought twice about getting it.

Something made me hesitate before putting it back, and I opened it at random. On the page was the following: “Directed energy causes change. To have integrity, we must recognize that our choices bring about consequences, and that we cannot escape responsibility for the consequences, not because they are imposed by some external authority, but because they are inherent in the choices themselves.”

I wondered why this had not been underlined in full when so much of the rest of the page had been underlined because I thought on reading it: “Exactly right; that speaks to our current condition.”

And being in the midst this dialogue in which there has been so much discussion of integrity (along with what we might have caused and how we might have been affected by certain actions), I dismissed the possibility that the underlining would be too intrusive for my own reading because, yes, this teaching comes at just the right time in just the right context for deep contemplation of the deep truth that to act with integrity, we must appreciate our own contribution to causes and results/responses in the undulating fabric of our connected being.

Found Exhortation

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Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Signs Around Town (and a Tantic Philosophical Conundrum)

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I haven’t photographed the t-shirt with the statement “it’s all good” to go with the sign below “needs work,” but I would need to if I wanted to show the apparent philosophical tangle of tantra.

The tantric texts do tell us that it is all good; more accurately, they tell us that all is divine and perfect, and that we are just an element of the “all.” It is hard to believe that when we can see suffering and bad behavior (including some of our own) all around us.

The tricky thing about the declaration that all is divine is that it does not mean that there is no work to be done. The work, though, is not to fix ourselves or what is wrong or bad. Rather, the work (sadhana) is to study so that with discrimination (viveka) we can determine what is out of alignment and causing our own suffering or contributing to suffering of other beings and move towards and unveil the perfection and fullness that we are.

It is sort of like finding a great treasure that has been neglected and misused out of ignorance or carelessness at a yard sale. It takes knowledge to recognize that the cheap, discarded thing is a treasure and skill and effort to restore its intrinsic worth.