Another Use for a Murti
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
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Ganesha (Deity of the Marines?)
A senior colleague and I spent several hours today working together on a very challenging aspect of a long-term project. When we were wrapping up for the day, I showed him a murti of Ganesha that another co-worker had brought me from the Norton Simon Museum when she had gone on a business trip to Pasadena, where our Los Angeles office is located.
I said that I do not believe in the Hindu deities as gods, but find them helpful for contemplation as archetypes (in the Jungian sense). I said that being on this project has taught me much about yoga and about Ganesha.
“Ganesha,” I explained, “is not so much the remover of obstacles, but the one who places obstacles in your way to teach you the wisdom to grow and find a more enlightened path from having confronted the obstacles.” “Oh,” said my colleague, “like the Marines: adapt, improvise, and overcome.” “Well, sort of,” I replied, enjoying that we found a way to share laughter after our difficult afternoon.
- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc)
Devil in the Details (and jnanam bandaha)
The second sutra of the Siva Sutras is “jnanam bandhaha” (knowledge is bondage). In the context of the Siva Sutras, this tells us that getting caught in trying to acquire knowledge of the manifest world and all of its infinite minutiae can lead us away from a sense of connection to a universal spirit.
We have the phrase in the work place that the “devil is in the details” both because getting caught up in the details can take us away of accomplishing a desired result and because the details need to be worked out to realize the result, and the details (not the theory) are the hard part. At the societal level, for example, working out the details of a health care bill and how it will actually function seems to be preventing us, as a society, from offering health care to all. On our yoga mats, we need to understand the details of physical alignment so that the practice strengthens and optimizes our health, rather than taking us physically and energetically out of alignment, but we do not want concentration on the details to take us away from heart and spirit.
The “devil may be in the details” but we cannot stop the details from being part of our existence. As much as we need not to get so bogged down in the details that we have discord, distrust, unhappiness, and ineffectiveness, we also need to cultivate knowledge of the details. As beings embodied in space and time in the manifest world, we need to cultivate knowledge so that we can recognize when the details are not in optimal alignment, so that we have sufficient knowledge, strength, intuition, and subtlety to be able to shift the details so that they lead towards good for ourselves individually and collectively.
What a devilish conundrum.
Today’s Errands in Preparation for India Travel
1. Got travelers’ checks. Hard to believe there can still be a need to use them.
2. Made donation to Carbon Fund to offset plane travel to and bus rides in India (planted 100 trees).
- Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation
Advice from a Spammer (and Niralamba?)
“Write more, that’s all I have to say.” There were several more lines of text, but none so coherent or compelling as this.
Yes, spammer, I would like to be writing more imaginatively and more about the yoga here and elsewhere. I am fully occupied, though, with a technical writing of quite some magnitude if magnitude were to be measured only by the number of words and ideas included. With the social and substantive complexity relating to the project and how it fits within the fabric of creating the rules that govern our society, it is a creative in its own way, but it is more draining than inspiring.
The exercise involves many drafters who come from a wide range of perspectives, training and background, and who have different responsibilities and senses of responsibility. Most everyone is feeling stressed and under-supported in their own way and acting in the multifarious ways people act when that’s how they are experiencing things. I am struggling to stay compassionately present for myself and all who are engaged in the endeavor.
Reminding myself of reasons to be grateful always helps. The yoga and meditation practices, in addition to my creative pursuits, are at the top of the list. The practices are the only truly steady back up that I have. Perhaps that is true for everyone to a greater or lesser degree. The philosophies that inform the practices–whether renunciate or tantra–ultimately would not, I think, disagree.
