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Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
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Rosa’s Pizza (and a Planned Trip to India)
Rosa’s Pizza is on the Long Island Railroad level of Penn Station. To my best recollection, it has been there since before I started taking the LIRR regularly in the early 1970s, and I still go there occasionally when I connect through Penn Station to visit my parents a few times a year. Rosa’s makes an eggplant slice that tastes like eggplant parmigiana on decent pizza crust. Yup, it’s got cow dairy and gluten and lots of fat, but it is one of those foods that is so strongly associated with both place and belonging for me that it gives me great delight to eat it once or twice a year.
When I was meditating yesterday morning, I had a vision of myself jet-lagged and groggy from landing in JFK and taking the train from the airport to Penn Station to head home after two and a half weeks of a study tour led by Professor Douglas Brooks of Tamil Nadu (including Chidambaram), which I am planning to do at the winter holidays. In this meditation moment, I was ecstatically happy to be eating an eggplant slice from Rosa’s after taking my seat on Amtrak. I enjoyed the moment and then let go of this reverie to slip deeper into meditation.
At work, I told a friend of mine about this vision. He said that was not the right approach to a trip to India — shouldn’t I be eagerly anticipating what I would experience in India itself? I begged to differ. The excitement and anticipation of what I will see and experience and learn is a given. It was sweet to have pierce my meditation how happy I will be to return home. It helps me remember that for all the ups and downs of my choices, I am comfortable enough with them to be finding meditative bliss in the idea of something that is part of “home.”
Using Your Head to Connect (and skull loop)
I think one of the most wonderful things about the Anusara principle of skull loop is that it uses the head to bring mind into connection with the body. Far too often, staying in our heads or using our mind can disconnect us from the body. Skillful practice of “skull loop” reminds us that the head is part of the physical body. Skull loop, like all the loops, is a refinement that typically would not be the focus of alignment after not only the major principles (open to grace, muscular energy, inner spiral, outer spiral, organic energy) are set in the pose. It is also the refinement that generally would be done last in most poses because of its distance from the foundation of the pose.
I rarely work skull loop as a focus without also concentrating on shoulder loop and the relationship between the two. Both start in the upper palate. While shoulder loop acts to integrate us and draw us in by hugging the shoulder blades onto the back of the heart as a refinement of muscular energy, skull loop helps us to reach out and serves as a refinement of organic energy — inviting us to extend more fully out of the crown of the head.
Even though skull loop helps remind us how much organic energy — a reaching out with offering that goes all the way from the focal point (more on that another day) out through the periphery, including the head — can empower us, skull loop also has a sweet and subtle reminder to come back to the first principle. Skull loop starts in the upper palate and goes up the back of the skull to the crown of the head. That initial action is what helps with organic energy, and when done powerfully, it can really give a lot more strength and lift to a pose. The second part of the loop softens the forehead and lower eyelids, bringing our inner gaze (drishti) back to the heart. Skull loop thus shows us both that the head is physically an powerful and important part of the movement of the body and that no action of the head is complete unless it brings us back to the heart and the ultimate purpose of our actions and offerings.
