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Prop or Crutch

ByElizabeth

“Liberty” is again encased in scaffolding, though it hasn’t been that long since she was taken down for a good cleaning. Seeing her thus supported while simultaneously blocked led me to think about the use of yoga props.

I am a big fan of using props to discover places one thought out of reach, either because an injury is limiting range of movement or because intelligent or inspired use of a prop can teach where the next step could be in practice.

Liberty’s scaffolding might be necessary for structural repairs or cleaning, but it is obscuring the view–her view out and our view in. We wouldn’t want her bound and stuck unless it was truly necessary for her full beauty and integrity to be maintained and revealed.

So, too, with yoga props. As beneficial as they can be, we do not want to rely on them automatically without seeing whether we can open to and discover the full flourishing of ourselves in a pose without them by being open, sensitive, and discriminating about our physical boundaries; applying the alignment principles to the fullness of our knowledge; and using just the right amount of effort.

By all means use props, but use them to find and witness new freedom (ultimately, svatantriya) not to bind or obscure it.

Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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    Kvelling and Kvetching

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    It started before yesterday’s Tuesday night class.  There was a piece of fuzz next to one of the students mats–a schmutz.  We then decided that the yoga outfit, especially the old raggedy one, was a schmata. Tonight, I was in an uncharacteristically silly mood.  With birds falling out of the sky, fish washing up on the shore, and the Republicans taking back “control” of the house, I could weep or I could find the laughter in small things.  Tonight, with a practice theme of the Anusara’s “first principle” — opening to grace — I spontaneously and giddily came to the latter.

    I mentioned the idea of yiddish for yogis, and the class took off.  We were all women tonight, so it was “yoga for yentas.”  The word one utters when going into the first forward bend of the practice, is of course, oy, which can be lengthened to oy vey is mir. When we are truly opening to grace, we are kvelling; when we are noticing our aches and pains and forgetting to move towards the good, we are then kvetching.

    Just FYI, I learned after doing a cautious internet search before posting this blog entry, that it turns out that the phrase “Yiddish Yoga” has been trademarked.  I am pretty certain we can still have fun talking about using yiddish vocabulary words in yoga class without violating any laws, though it has been over 20 years since I took class in copyright and trademark law.  So feel free to think of your favorite yiddish word and how it should be used in yoga class.  You never know how it will enhance your practice, for whom it will bring a smile or a laugh, and what other thoughts might arise.  I’m pretty sure that there isn’t a yiddish equivalent for satcitananda, any more than there is an English equivalent for weltanschauung or schadenfreude, or a French word for sandwich, but at least one student wants to give it a try.

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    Found Sculpture

    ByElizabeth

    I saw this beautiful roll of chicken wire in the Enid Haupt garden when I was walking back to the office after a quick visit to see the Gods of Angkor exhibit at the Sackler Gallery (sorry about the absence of links; blogging from the BB).

    I was first introduced to the idea of “found poetry” in junior high school and have developed a life-long habit of photographing words to change, enhance, and/or question their meaning and hidden beauty by the act of extracting them from their original place and presenting them as a photograph. Marcel Duchamp and others did what poets and photographers were doing with words with ordinary objects by presenting them as sculpture.

    Here, where I have photographed the chicken wire roll, is the art a sculpture (because I could treat it as such) of which I have taken a photograph–the photograph being mere documentation? Is the art the photograph of what I have seen to the extent I am offering it as a vision and a dialogue generated by what I saw? Or is the photograph merely a snapshot taken with a hand-held computer device documenting an object that happened to be sitting there–not art at all? If it were not for artists such as Duchamp, could I or would I even be able to ask this question?

    I think that analogous types of questions have been and can be asked about the variety of religious and mystical experience. Is there a particular way they must be experienced? Do such experiences have to fit within a prescribed framework to be valid? When are such experiences madness or delusion and when are they the voice of the spirit? Who gets to decide? Does it depend on the era and the culture in which the experiencer lives? Does the answer to any of these questions matter if the experiences lead one to a more loving, compassionate, and beauty-filled life?

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