always there, we just have to remember it is there to see and to recognize it when we do. The first is just Anusara’s “first principle”–opening to grace. The second is practicing and studying with increasing depth and refinement (viveka) so that we can recognize the light and know how to bring it into our lives.
After work and before going to an evening asana class, I joined in at the People’s Filibuster on the looming tax bill. Speaking were a mixture of dedicated elected officials and people of the cloth. Several of the latter were arrested today for reading the Bible out loud inside the Capitol–perhaps because instead of reading the passages that support ill treatment of women and those who don’t follow a traditional heterosexual mold, they were reading the passages about how Christ advocated treating the poor and the sick.
The crowd chanted “kill the bill” and “not one penny,” but it had the resonance of gospel or kirtan.
Have you called your elected officials (or sent a postcard)? Do you have friends or family you can get out to vote? How are you going to use your voice to further spirit?
This morning, before going out to the United States Supreme Court and the Capitol to express my support for safe, legal, and accessible Abortion, I came upon a box turtle while helping to remove invasive shrub honeysuckle at Kingman Island.
In classical yoga, the term maya, one of the meanings of which is “illusion,” refers to all of our embodied being — the physical, mental, and emotional. The perceptible world is not real; only spirit is real. In the tantric philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism, maya tattva means something different. Kashmir Shaivism does not hold that the perceptible world is unreal, but rather that it is a more concrete form of spirit and that its very manifestness gives rise to the illusion that it is other than spirit. Maya, as such, is the beginning of the measurable world of intellect and perception. In this sense, it does not mean that any aspect of being of either ourselves or the very whole of being is more real than any other. As maya tattva, it denotes the conceptual bridge between the unknowable idea of spirit and the manifest world of our day to day. As we think and perceive the world in progressively more concrete terms, we tend to see difference, division, and diversity. When we see only difference and not the pervading unity of spirit, it is maya, illusion.
Yesterday, following the election in Massachusetts, the headlines screamed that the Democrats had lost control of the Senate and that health care reform was in jeopardy. Perhaps the simple arithmetic and vocabulary I learned in elementary school has changed, but last time I checked, 41 out of 100 is not a majority. It is as though we are hunting for division, for us v. them. We are looking for ways to create difference and divisiveness. Would we be more likely to fund health care for all instead of two wars, if we could stop being so bound in the maya that we are not all equally of spirit? I think so. In this, I am divided from millions of my fellow voters, who prefer waterboarding to health care, war to building an environmentally sustainable infrastructure, etc. or at least vote that way In thinking this way, I too am caught up in the web of difference. How then do I see spirit in all people (regardless of how they vote and what they believe) when I feel so passionately about this divisiveness and all the conflict, destruction, and misery it engenders? How do I personally (as my own yoga) create less conflict, even while working for what I believe?
Last night I sat down at my kitchen table to string baby seed pearls for a mother-of-pearl charm I had gotten from Manoj a few years ago.
When I took the pearles off of the thread they came on and put them on my jeweler’s mat, several challenges were revealed: even with the lights on bright and my reading glasses, it was almost impossible to see the bead hole; if I touched the wire other than on the hole, the pearl bounced; if I tried to hold the pearl still, the hold was obscured by my fingernail. Using a needle was not a viable option because the holes were too small for a wire-threaded needle.
At this point, since I was doing this after a long and frustrating day at the office, the tendency was to get more frustrated. Should I just give away the pearls? Get stronger glasses or a loupe? Try to return them?
Instead I softened. There was no mandate I get the pearls strung. I was doing this solely for enjoyment.
In softening, I discovered — to mix philosophical underpinnings — the zen of baby seed pearl stringing. If I grouped a bunch of pearls together, not only was it easier to see holes in certain pearls, but the others around it held the pearl in place for the wire to pierce the pearl. By softening, it occurred to me to use the technique of cutting the wire on a bias (and repeating it every several pearls strung), which gave me a smaller, sharper point, making the threading much easier. Most important, though, I stopped trying so hard. I let the wire and each pearl meet each other instead of my trying to force the meeting. When I did that, the openings were revealed, and I entered a quiet and serene meditative state during which the project completed itself through my agency.
It is for discovering, experiencing, and always being able to engage this essential and blissful merging of being and acting that I meditate and practice asana. We practice the Anusara principle “opening to grace” so that we can experience grace itself (whatever grace means to you) doing our acting, both on the mat and off. As such, “opening to grace” is both the primary and ultimate activator of this merged state of being that is yoga--union..
