Warm Feeling (from an unexpected place)

ByElizabeth

For the past hour or so, one of my neighbors has been shoveling the sidewalk.  He is a young teenager; for a while a younger girl was out with him, too.  They both had shovels and were working pretty vigorously.  I always wave and say hi to these neighbors, but have an uneasy relationship with them.  In the 19 years I have lived on the block, various members of the household (though not these particular kids) have broken into my house and threatened me and my neighbors.  People who live in the house and their visitors regularly throw litter into my yard, and other neighbors have reported that they have caught kids currently living in the house throwing stones at houses and cars.

The shoveling was going on for a long time and the sounds were getting closer.  Sure enough, this young man, perhaps because he was feeling trapped by being stuck in the house all day and was feeling full of energy, was shoveling the entire sidewalk, including the space in front of my house.  I am delighted and grateful.  I was not looking forward to going out and doing it myself.  I will make certain to thank him.  He has reminded me that I need always to be open to receiving the good from whatever source, however unexpected.

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    By now, the news of scandal has become widespread on the internet.  The Huffington Post has put in its two cents in the way that modern journalism does–highlight the bad, forecast turmoil, and invite continued readership.  Put John Friend or Anusara scandal into your favorite search engine and you will get a couple of dozen blog entries about broken-hearted yoga teachers feeling they need to resign from the organization (though many say they will be teaching the method, just not articulating it as the brand, which confuses me somewhat).

    Last week, I chose to post only a guest blog on the District Kula website (since that posting, District Kula is no longer affiliated with Anusara).  Though I have much more information now than I did last week, I am still waiting to see.  I will be gradually revealing more of my thoughts here as things develop now that I believe that those far beyond the immediate (though large) community of practitioners are discussing the allegations and potential repercussions with intelligence and kindness or gleeful malice or somewhere in between.

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    Last Night I Slept At My Parents House (and akrama)

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    I slept last night in the room that I slept in as a child. My mother now uses the room to store some of the vestiges of her old antiquing business. The carpet, wallpaper, and curtains from the 1960’s are gone, but the bed is the same one in which I had slept. The picture on the wall is a kit for making a stuffed animal that my Grandma Rose had bought me (probably when I was about 8) at the Brooklyn Museum of Art that my mother decided would be better as framed art than a sewing project for me.

    The neighborhood looks different–it is far more developed as is everywhere near a big city–but the bones are the same.

    It is a challenge not to feel the weight of my history and ancestry when I return. Taking the time to meditate when I woke helped me stay fully in my adult self.

    When we meditate, we ideally dissolve our individual consciousness into the luminous spaciouness of universal consciousness. In that space, where we are temporarily not experiencing ourselves as an individual, we are also not experiencing our individual self in the sequence (krama) of time. The luminous spaciousness of meditative consciousness is sequenceless (akrama) and, as universal consciousness, is the place in which the sequences of being in time and space arise.

    What I experienced this morning when I meditated was that I did not have to be flooded with the emotions of my, to try to graciously describe, emotionally challenging childhood. In the space of meditation I could bring to my day an acceptance of all of my life and be where I am at present, coming to a place of recognition that although I lived all of my history, it neither defines me nor binds me from expanding into a space of growing love and light.

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