As I was walking into work this morning, I appreciated how fresh was the air after last night’s rain and wind. It wasn’t just the cleansing of the pollen, but the shift from Code Orange to Code Green air quality. What would it be like to live somewhere that the air was mostly Code Green?
Imagine if this exhortation (more like a plea) were applied not to a folk art representation of a gun, but real ones.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
As I consider both what I want to change and what I am grateful for while we go through this time of imagination and possibility and grief and rage and creativity and patience and restraint and fierce need for engaged action, I realized that making offering is one of the holiday things I am still able to do that brings joy for the holiday season.
In that light, I invite you and others who might welcome starting a practice, strengthening their practice, and regardless, having an opportunity together consciously to support ourselves in body and mind, as well as spirit.
In that light, please join me and Suzanne Lynch for an all levels, all perspectives, all ages, light-hearted yoga and meditation practices on:
To register, please visit: https://www.suzannelynchwellness.com/holiday-yoga-classes
Many thanks to Suzanne for gifting the extra administrative work to open her membership platform for these holiday practices. BTW, it is super helpful to register early to make sure we can get all the Zoom link for the practice with a minimum of extra admin.
If you are moved to make a donation, please consider a local or national food bank.
A friend of mine who is an avid and wonderful knitter decided to make a shawl for a friend who is about to have surgery. Instead of whipping out a shawl herself in a few days, she invited other friends to knit squares and bring them to her. She is going to piece together the squares to create, in essence, a physical manifestation of a gentle, loving, communal embrace.
I loved this idea. Though I could not put name to face for the friend who is suffering (I think I would likely recognize her), to support my friend who is setting such a strong intention of sending healing, I am knitting a square or two with some beautiful handspun yarn leftover from a sweater several years ago.
As I knit, I am setting an intention to infuse the cloth with healing energy. In having been invited to participate in this project, I have been given the gift of a potent reminder of how strongly our attitude and intention in whatever we create and offer can shift how it goes forth into the world — whether it be gifts, practice, speech, food, work.
On the way to Madhuban, we caught a rare glimpse of Trishula and Nanda Devi. It is usually too misty to see them from where we were staying, and they were not visible when we were on the drive back to Delhi.
In a few hours, I head to the airport for the long ride home, having bathed in the beauty of music and mountains, with, I hope, fresh perspective for the work ahead.
When I was meditating this morning, the last lines of Keats’ ‘Ode on A Grecian Urn’ welled up in my thoughts: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” How odd, I thought, for this to appear, as if out of nowhere. I have been contemplating this week on what it means to be refined, but not in the way of an aesthete. Rather, as I have been concentrating on the Anusara alignment principle of “ankle loop,” I have been thinking about how deepening our practice with repeated exploration and study we are able to refine our understanding and the flow of energy within us so that we can be more connected to ourselves and each other.
As I understand the essential structure of the Anusara principles, the “loops” are really tertiary principles. The primary principles are those of “attitude, alignment, and action,” which are the principles of how we practice. The secondary principles are the fundamental physical and energetic principles — “opening to grace, muscular energy, inner/expanding spiral, outer/contracting spiral, organic energy.” The loops serve to refine the secondary principles. Ankle loop, for example, which starts at the base of the shin bone, travels down the back of the heel and then back up through the arch, energizes the foot, lifts the arch, supports our stance and helps us focus muscular energy. When we are feeling challenged finding as much muscular energy in our feet and legs as would be optimal for a full expression of the pose, we can use ankle loop to refine our understanding and practice of muscular energy in the legs. Keeping in mind the primary principles of practice, though, the refinements should also always lead us towards the heart and not just get us into details. Getting more sophisticated and refined, likewise should not lead us to disdain for that which is unrefined.
Funny, then, that the aesthete’s call to beauty should arise in my meditation while I have been consciously thinking about refinement. What does it mean to appreciate and study refinements, but still honor and delight in a novice’s full expression of “attitude, alignment, and action” as much as an impeccably aligned and skillful pose that does not reveal a yearning for spirit? Beauty may be truth, and truth beauty, but what is “beauty?”
