My friend asked me tonight whether I’d gone over to the Supreme Court to see if there were any more heart-shaped clouds during the oral arguments today. I was occupied mostly by errands on my too brief lunch time walk (work was very busy) and didn’t get all the way over to the Supreme Court, but yes, there were more today when I was within a few blocks of the Court:
A gift from a friend–from a cutting from a cutting from my friend’s mother’s garden. It almost always blooms around this date.
I have been cleaning out old files. Mostly I keep my drawers and closets relatively free of clutter and the unnecessary, but there are occasional pockets that have lived on because they were not a priority and neat enough. Found among postcards and letters from friends was one I received from a friend of a friend in October 2001. I never got to know her well. My friend has since moved out of the neighborhood and his friend moved back to Germany several years ago to start a family. Here is what she sent:
a picture from India [not shown] and a saying for you —
Live with intention
Walk to the edge
Listen hard
Practice wellness
Play with abandon
Laugh.
Choose with no regret
Continue to learn
Appreciate your friends
Do what you love
Live as if this is all there is.
A super sweet message. Now that I have shared it, I will recycle the original piece of paper. Thank you Uta. I hope all is well.
Last night another storm front passed us by with only a trace of rain, leaving us deeper in drought. The wind picked up, the temperature dropped, and the clouds scattered, leaving the sky scrubbed bright blue and the air fresh. Though this morning on my walk to work there was hardly a cloud in the sky, a rather menacing gray cloud hovered directly over the building where I work. Observing this odd cloud led me to ponder about how I often feel that I have my own personal cloud–everyone else has purpose in their lives and is worthy of love, but not me (this is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the idea).
The reality is that all of us get such feelings to a greater or lesser degree some of the time. It can be a helpful step in clearing away feelings of unworthiness to remember that it is part of the human condition. The tantric yogis say that there are three cloaks or malas (anava mala, mayiya mala, and karma mala) that result from the manifestation of diversity from the pure universal out of its own play. The sense of unworthiness we sometimes feel (anava mala) comes from forgetting that we are spirit, and anava mala– in whatever form it appears to manifest–is just because of the loneliness of not remembering our true self. When we experience or create conflict or unhappiness out of the illusion (maya) that separateness and distinction are the only state of all that is real then we are in thrall to mayiya mala. When we think we are completely in charge and responsible for everything we do and how it impacts the world, that is karma mala at work.
We practice to pierce through the clouding of our individual consciousness by the malas. By inviting ourselves to open to the luminous space of consciousness and to surrender to the very fullness of our being, we reduce the impact of the malas on how we conduct our lives. Our practice helps us to remember our worthiness so that we can be happier and freer and do our work and engage in our relationships with more love and light. It helps us remember the light in each being so we are naturally drawn to respond with more compassion and friendliness to everything on the planet. The grace of dissolving kriya mala is that when it is not obscuring our vision, we can engage fully on our path, but still accept that we are ultimately not in charge and do not know what the universe truly has in store.
Those of you who are regular readers may sometimes wonder why this blog, which purports to be about yoga, only on the rarest of occasions goes into any detail about the physical alignment principles for asana. I just received a comment on a post that I wrote several months ago that reminded me of my conviction that the optimal place to discuss and practice physical alignment principles is in class. This conviction is not because there isn’t value in reading about the alignment principles–I look at the Anusara Teacher Training Manual on a regular basis–but because it is critical to understand the bigger picture, to have a loving eye on the alignment, and the opportunity to ask questions right away, which we can only get when we practice with a teacher. In this instance, the commenter said in response to a post in which I had indicated that “thighs out” was shorthand for part of inner spiral that she had heard that “thighs out” in the common Anusara alignment instruction “shins in, thighs out” was just hitting the thighs apart and was something separate from inner spiral. Would I mind clarifying.
I found the comment timely as I was recently at a workshop where the teacher had noted the injuries that can flow from overdoing an isolated action that is intended to describe one part of an element of the basic principles of alignment (in that case “taking the armpit back.”) I agreed with the teacher that just jamming the armpits back can stress the shoulder and limit freedom if it is done in isolation and as the first action in a movement involving the shoulder girdle. It can be an incredibly helpful alignment instruction, though, if the students recognize (as reminded by the teacher) that we don’t take the armbone back without first opening to grace, including softening and expanding and making the “inner body bright” and also practicing the movement in a way that recognizes the point of the instruction is to encourage students to integrate the head of the armbone into the shoulder socket by means of muscular energy.
Like taking the armbone or armpit back, I do not believe that taking the thighs apart should ever be treated as an isolated point of alignment. It should only be done in proper sequence and in proportionate action to the amount the yogi is able to work the other principles. “Shins in” should not be done without first opening to grace, including softening, expanding, listening to the body, and establishing a good foundation. It is also only one of the three aspects of muscular energy. “Shins in” is just one way a teacher might tell students to apply the principle of hugging to the midline, but the student should not neglect hugging the muscles to the bone or drawing energy from the periphery to the focal point of the pose just because the teacher only cued “shins in, thighs out.” After all, there are only so many words that can be said in a single class and only so much on which we can focus at a time, but that does not mean we should be neglecting the basics as we seek to become more refined in our practice. Just as “shins in” is only part of muscular energy, the companion shorthand instruction “thighs out,” emphasizes just one aspect of inner spiral — that which serves to broaden the broaden the pelvic floor by means of the movement of the thigh bones. That does not mean that it is independent of the other aspects of inner spiral–spiraling inward and expansively from the feet upwards and taking the thighs back, both of which sequentially come before the “apart.”
Wow. For those of you who read this for the gardening or cooking or to enjoy the photographs, this level of detail might seem mind-numbing. Part of the danger of getting into the weeds in writing about alignment is just that. Not only is it distancing, but it gets educated readers into a space of debating the finer points and wondering whether things have been said just right. It becomes far to easy to lose sight of the point of yoga in the first place, which is to bring us joy on and off the mat. Remembering the intention to cultivate joy (ananda) when we are practicing actually physically protects us from getting in trouble by over-efforting with regard to one small aspect of alignment. When we are (sat) consciously (cit) in the moment with an intention to cultivate bliss, then we are much less likely to do any physical action so hard or so precisely that we forget the big picture and how the principle or the pose fits in with the overall flow and alignment principles and do more harm than good.
