most of us might ask, who have the health, education, material well-being, and computer access and skills to be able to read this. “Not luck, but grace,” Paul Muller-Ortega advises that Swami Chidvilasananda would say. For this grace, practice gratitude.
When we fully recognize that what we have are gifts, then it should lead us naturally to want to use our gifts to serve and share our well-being.
I adore having a library and will rarely say no to a philosophy text or a book about anatomy, therapeutics, or yoga methodology. I am less interested in “self help” types of books or gadgets. Every once and a while though, I come across something that truly supports my practice and my teaching. When I first went to Inner Harmony to study with John Friend in mid-2003, there was an altar in the corner of the practice room, just at the entrance. On the altar was a set of cards (a little smaller than 2″x2″). Each card had a word in English, the devanagari, and the sanskrit of the word transliterated into our alphabet. Following the lead of others who had been to Inner Harmony for previous retreats, at the beginning of the day, I would select a card and think about how the word on the card might inform my practice and intention.
At that time, I was first starting to use Anusara’s “heart-oriented posturing language,” using a theme for class that was designed to lead the students into a deeper place in their hearts through their asana practice, and I found that the cards were an excellent source of inspiration.
Even though I first bought the cards in 2003 to serve as a basic class preparation aid, I have continued to use them regularly for my own practice and contemplation. Often, the word that appears resonates with something that is of immediate concern. The day after Becky (my beloved cat who lived to be 21) left her body last year, I went to the set of cards, which I’d not used in a couple of months. The card that I selected at random (like picking a card from a deck when someone is showing you card tricks) was moksha — liberation, and in classic yoga, literally liberation from the body. I was moved to tears.
This summer, with myself and my students, we have been working on manifesting intention. As I’ve blogged about previously, I invited us to think about an intention. Whether an intention is something basic with the body or mind or something more universal, whenever we seek to manifest an intention, ultimately it is because we want to be more blissful, more open, and more at peace with ourselves and others. The question becomes how do we use our practice both to discover an intention and to seek to make it manifest. To help me with the contemplation of this question, I have gone again to the cards as a source of inspiration. This week, the card that turned itself up was racanatmakata — creativity. “Perfect,” I thought, when I saw the word. Creativity is a human reflection of the wild, pulsing, diverse and ever-extraordinary dance of all being. When we open to our creative impulse to allow things to unfold, we can witness the fullest range of possibilities and the variety of paths to manifestation.
When teaching meditation, Paul Muller-Ortega says that we need both to practice with awareness (gain experiential knowledge) and to study the texts and teachings (explore theoretical knowledge).
With the dirt blanketed in snow and ice, it is time for jnana–time to study and theorize about possibilities for the coming gardening season.
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.
This delightful working dog is sitting near while I wait for my plane to Phoenix; I am traveling to Sedona today for a weekolong meditation and study retreat. As part of the retreat, I will take myself away from phone, internet, and email. The airport, though, cries out for electronic communication.
