Are you accurately aware of your limits? Do you sometimes blow past your limits to your detriment? Do you ever enlarge your idea of your limitations in a way that cuts off your ability to live as fully and joyously and generously as is truly possible?
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Dear Friends,
Just a friendly reminder that there’s no practice at William Penn House or the house next week. I’ll be off exercising the civil liberties currently available by traveling with my beloved to upstate New York to participate in tantric yoga philosophy camp (I know that’s not everyone’s idea of fun, but for those of us who love philosophy, it is quite wonderful to have found a group of people mostly outside of academia who truly relish such a conversation). An afternoon and dinner in the City and a visit with my sister and brother-in-law who are only an hour out of the way will further emphasize just how much freedom I have to come and go and to gather in groups and talk and write. For me to be going on such a vacation was partly good fortune and partly a lot of hard work and partly my balancing many conflicting desires, needs, aims, and possible outcomes, shaped by both the freedoms and strictures of this society.
With regard to the strictures, I’ve seen and experienced just enough work-place harassment and discrimination and scholarship student financial struggle and their impact on my well-being to know that, as many challenges as I have faced, life can be far more burdened and limited by hardship and challenge. I know from what was given to me and what was denied or only came after much hard work, how important it is that we make the safety nets of education, health care, housing, nourishing and tasty food, and a healthy ecology for all in our society. I go on these trips to study philosophy or to practice yoga or to surround myself with beauty and flavor not ignorant of how much I have and how much it depended on scholarships and a decent public education and student loans and millions of women (and many men) before and with me seeking autonomy and meaningful choice as to how to live their lives and care for their bodies.
I head out on vacation because I need both rest and inspiration, but I go knowing how much there is to be done at this, as Marge Piercy called it, “cruxtime.” I go to study and talk, not just for anticipated pleasure, but also with the intention to open up new insight on how, since participation is unavoidable, to navigate more skillfully this volotile time in human history.
I wish you a holiday week in which you are able recognize and experience your truest freedom–even if it is just the freedom of how to respond in the face of outrage or crisis or tragedy–and invite you to come join us for yoga some Tuesday night at William Penn House (click here for info) or the house practice on my return to nurture your body and join in community and conversation.
Peace and light,
Elizabeth
From the tree in her yard, an offering brought by a student coming for house yoga practice.
When I came out of my afternoon asana practice and meditation, I picked up the John Friend Teacher Training Manual to look up one of my favorite passages. In describing the “attitude” that brings us to our deepest practice, John Friend writes that there are two reasons to practice yoga: “1. Co-create in the art of life. 2. Realize and awaken to our divine nature.” John Friend, Anusara Yoga Teacher Training Manual (9th Ed., Anusara Press 2006). He explains that sometimes we come to our mat because we are happy and we want to celebrate. Other times, we are sad or confused and we want to remember our essentially divine, blissful nature. This particular teaching has continues to resonate for me. I find great comfort in it because it recognizes that we do forget; we will not always act perfectly. All life, though, is part of our practice, and we can keep trying to co-create and remember the light in all beings in our daily lifes just as we keep can coming to the mat.
It changes daily this time of year. In the sink, the last of the spinach that over-wintered. Making way for new plantings. A garden can only be this full at the beginning, if there is a commitment to thin constantly; otherwise the garden would suffocate itself. This kind of gardening plans on picking shoots and baby vegetables, while things that need to mature progress. A constant harvest, though because of the limited space, I need to supplement–mostly from local farmers’ markets for produce.
Much is said about devotion in yoga, and there is a great privileging by many of the path of devotion — bhakti. With no clear answers, I contemplate often what it means to practice bhakti, to be devoted in a religious or spiritual sense. Witnessing those on pilgrimage when I was in India (it was “pilgrimage season”), I was flooded with memories and ideas for contemplation about what it means to be devoted and how people express devotion.
Among the thoughts and memories were having observed the operaphiles in their expensive clothes swoon and gasp and applaud at the Vienna Opera House on the opera level where I had paid a dollar for standing room; having been literally swept off of my feet in the press of the crowds heading to the tube at Wembley Stadium after seeing the Rolling Stones in concert; watching the people do the standing wave thing at ball games while hollering for their team as if their whole view of the world was dependent on who wins; having taken, standing room only, the third class train from Florence to Rome during Easter week (a different pilgrimage season), on asking who is that woman on the billboards, discovering that India, too, has a habit of electing movie stars to political office.
