Santa Fe and Home

ByElizabeth

I just came back from a wonderful week in Santa Fe, studying therapeutics with John Friend.  It was most wonderful to be among friends with a shared passion for nurturing and healing through yoga, all of whom are deeply committed to continuing intense study. It was also delightful to be in a beautiful place, away from the cares of the day to day.

Although I have many friends from around the country I have met on previous study trips, I found that I spent the most time outside of class with fellow teachers from Willow Street.  It was not because I know them best and it was expedient for me as a person who is by nature introverted to stick with people I know better, but rather because when we are home, we all are fully engaged in our daily lives and do not have much time to see each other.  That we need to go away together to be free to see people close to us is a mindset that I am working to shift.  If I have time to go away for a week, then I should be able to make time to see someone for lunch or tea.  How do we make this shift?  Part of it is just a conscious recognition that we need each day to pause and reflect, to make time to connect to our own spirit and to our home community.  Living this way will not diminish the joy of going away, but it will make us more grounded and rested at home, while we are working.  We will work better, be happier on a day to day basis, and be better able to serve.  Yes, this is another aspect of enriching life by simplifying.

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    The 17th sutra is “madhya vikasha cittananda labhah,” which is translated by Swami Shantananda as “the bliss of Consciousness is attained through expansion of the center.”

    Madyama, in our physical embodiment is the central channel, the sushumna nadi that runs vertically in the space of the spine.  One of the key actions of Anusara’s organic energy is expansion from the midline.  It is, in its essence, using the body to physically explore the bliss that comes from the expansion from the center.

    If we can get bliss just from expanding, then why would we first draw in?  In applying the Anusara principles, we use muscular energy first.  We hug into our core before reaching out.  This parallels the yoga texts.  If, for example, one already embodies the perfect bliss of consciousness, one doesn’t need to study the sutras or to practice yoga, one would just live from that place of perfect bliss.

    The way I think about it in terms of the Anusara principles, if one were perfectly open to grace and lived being fully open to and expressive of grace, there would be no need to explore, learn, or study any of the other principles.  That’s a rare being though.  Most of us, and definitely me, need practice to discover and embody even a glimpse of perfect bliss and grace.  So the expansion from the center comes after consciously softening and opening, after intentionally drawing in to strengthen and embrace, after making with discrimination further expansion, and after drawing in to contentrate mind and body with honed intensity.  With ever more refinement and practice, we then can experience and make offering a deeper bliss when we expand from our center.

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    Talking About the Wisdom Goddesses (and February Willow Street Book Club)

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    One of the things I have been pondering on this latest read is how I can fully imbibe the wisdom that is offered with the imagery and stories of the goddesses, without getting caught up in being troubled from a feminist perspective.  Many yoga practitioners I know rely on the call in the texts to worship the “goddess” as a way of saying that women are not diminished in the classic texts.  My conundrum is that when one looks at the texts and the images about the goddesses, all the stereo-typical notions of beauty and youth are inextricably intertwined.  Like the Western fairy tales I gobbled up in my youth and their entrancing but insidiously prejudicial archetypes, the sweet, loving, desirable goddesses are the young and fair; the fierce and powerful goddesses are the ugly crones.


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    Signs Around Town

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    It may be true that power that gives power over corrupts, but being empowered is liberating. The yoga, when practiced as part of an ethical life, is empowering. But beware those who claim that “enlightenment” frees one from behaving with integrity.

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

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    Spam, Praise, Criticism, and the Pairs of Opposites

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    The yoga teachings say that we need to be unattached to the pairs of opposites–pleasure (sukha) and pain (dukha).  When all of our motivations come from seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, we suffer.  Even the tantric yogis, who invite us to fully engage in the vast array of experience that is being human, say we need to  turn to the auspicious and recognize the divine play in all experience and not get entangled in thinking what we desire is all that is.

    Today’s spam is a nice illustration of why taking any praise or criticism as a reflection of how one should feel about one’s creative output is a recipe for suffering:

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