Signs Around Town
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
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- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Dance/Contact Improvisation | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Miscellaneous (blog matters, etc)
“Seriously”
A friend from the DC Sunday contact improv jam (one of my favorite places to play) sent this link showing a clip from a documentary in progress about the importance of play to our health. One of the things that I love most about Anusara yoga is that John Friend has always described its practice as being “seriously playful.” I was born serious nature and have worked hard in my adulthood to learn to play spontaneously, and what is being offered here resonates for me.
This is a long clip, but well worth the time. Anusara yogis, notice how familiar some of it sounds. Enjoy!
- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Body | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Gardening
Another Storm Passes Without Any Rain Falling Inside the Beltway
What’s a gardener and concerned for the trees and the health of the planet citizen to do? I’ve got enough water in the rain barrel to water the vegetables and herbs once or twice, but what impact does that really have? At work, people were grumbling because it was cloudy. They seemed shocked when I advised them that we are an inch under normal rainfall for August and have a fairly significant deficit for the summer despite the July rains.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could move some of the flood waters that have fallen only a couple hundred miles away to irrigate our fields without disrupting our eco-system? Part of me just wants not to know about the consequences of global climate change, but it is hard not to notice that all the weather patterns I used to know and understand do not seem to apply quite the same way anymore. What do we do when the systems and practices we have in place for our ease, comfort, well-being, and understood day-to-day peace of mind are disrupted?
Yoga will not fix the big outer problems, but it can provide us with the steadiness and ease needed to stay present and be flexible in the face of crisis, upheaval, or disease. It can also provide insight into how we can live in better alignment. In the meantime, I am practicing gratitude. I know how blessed I am that, so far, the wild upheavals I read about in the news have not kept me from all the food and comfort that a person could possibly want. And I pay attention, because to be ignorant ultimately never serves ourselves or others.
Found Exhortation
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Rain in the Night (and the four states of consciousness)
This morning when I woke, my first thought was that I thought it had rained in the night. My second thought was that I felt well-rested for having slept through the night — not having had my sleep disrupted by thunder or the earthquake, as was the case for recent nights — perhaps I had just dreamed about the sound of rain..
The yoga teachings say that there are four states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, deep (dreamless) sleep, and the fourth or turya state. The fourth state is both beyond the other states and also encompasses the others. It is where we find in meditation the merger of the individual consciousness with universal consciousness. The better we are able to access the fourth state, the more the other three states, and how we think and act in them, are illuminated by the very light of being.
The more I meditate, the more aware I am of what is going on around me while I am in a non-waking state. I am also finding that waking and dreaming are more luminous.
My awareness of the rain without knowing whether the awareness came while I was awake or asleep show both that I am finding more awareness in the different states and that I have a long way to go and much to discover.
