Because when your teacher has intentionally placed a message where you can see it, the message is more received than it is found.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
The light woke me early on this summer solstice. The sky is bright blue, the air clear and pleasantly temperate, the mountains lushly green, and friends surround me. The practice yesterday was lustrous, and the next two days promise to be equally delightful.
The delight from being surrounded by beauty and good friends can give us a taste of the possibilities of experiencing true bliss. As the surface enjoyment of being on vacation (albeit an extraordinarily good one), though, it has a shadow side, just as the picture below of a smiling ganesha at the base of a tree in the middle of a heart is flanked by a fire hydrant and a pile of trash bags.
It is really easy to imagine ananda — divine bliss, under these circumstances. It is important for all of us to find moments within our means when it is easy to experience the spark of spontaneous happiness. When it is challenging to find it, when grief or hardship confront us, it is ever more important to be able to tap into a space of bliss so that we can bring the most light to our challenges. Having the sweet times helps us find it in the bitter.
Ananda, John reminded us at the afternoon philosophy lecture yesterday, is the joy that has no opposite. It is a deep contentment with what is–hearts and trees and fire hydrants and trash bags and all–that fully accepts the play of opposites.
Those of us who do not know and live ananda spontaneously and naturally all of the time have the yoga. We challenge ourselves on the mat, knowing the exhilaration of heart opening and the challenge of stiffness; we sit for meditation on good days and bad, finding sometimes the pulsing, vibration of the fullness of consciousness and other times our to do list; we practice pranayama to open our energy channels; we chant to remind ourselves of why we practice: to open our hearts and discover the best in ourselves and in all beings.
Happy solstice to all and hope see you soon for the yoga.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
That it ended up in the shape of a heart for me to notice, does not make me wish any less that people would stop the disgusting habit of spitting over-chewed gum onto the sidewalk.
Though I believe that true happiness depends on seeing the good in everything, some times the only good to be seen is the goad to seek change.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Yesterday was the first day of the season working in the youth garden at the National Arboretum. Something made me look up. A bald eagle perhaps 40-50 feet overhead before soaring higher. “Look; follow my finger,” I called to my fellow gardeners, pointing to where the great bird was flying. They all looked up, and we shared a moment of awe.
“What made me notice?” one of my companions asked. I could not say exactly. I could have seen it’s shadow or perhaps even, without hearing it well enough to identify the sound, heard the wind in the eagle’s feathers. Or perhaps just instinct.
The tantric yoga philosophy ascribes the characteristic of svatantriya or ultimate freedom to the energy that infuses all of us. We all want to be free, but when we get stuck in our embodiment, forgetting that we ourselves are manifestations of spirit, then we lose sight of our true freedom. To find our own freedom of spirit, we need to be disciplined, to practice, to study, to live in a way that brings us into better alignment with ourselves and world with which we are inextricably interconnected.
In this country, one of our principle ideals and buzz words in dialogue about how we should live is freedom. What can so often be forgotten in this dialogue, though, is that freedom is a contract. To be in a society where all have the opportunity to experience freedom, we need to agree, with discrimination (viveka) to certain limitations (for example, we agree to stop for red lights so that we can be free to drive and walk without a constant risk of being hit in crowded city).
Granted, I am grossly oversimplifying here, but part of the great losses of freedom we are currently experiencing is the abdication by individuals of the responsibility to shape the agreement to maximize our collective freedoms. Like the agreement with ourselves to practice steadily to experience inner freedom, we need to stay engaged, even when it seems impossible or deeply frustrating, in order not to lose sight of the ideal entirely. Here’s some information from FCNL on why it is important to lobby despite how fruitless an act it may appear to be.
