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Found Exhortation (Tantric?)
Some systems of yoga describe the body as consisting of five sheaths or koshas. The outermost sheath is the annamaya kosha, literally the food body. Food, here, is anything we ingest with the five senses. Including sights and sounds. The tantrikas think of themselves as rasikas–ones who taste the very essence of life, who through the practices refine their senses seeking to be able to discern the divine in all being. All sense perception becomes a fully creative, artistic endeavor.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Statuary Around Town (and Zoomorphic Varaha?)
I think it highly unlikely that the neighbor who chose to decorate a front yard with a silver-painted pig and wood chips intended in any way to reference Vishnu in his incarnation as a boar. But as I’m caught up in learning about the animal chariots and incarnations of the 330 million these days, that is what came to mind for me.
There’s a story that Vishnu incarnated as a boar to kill a demon who could not be killed by man or god (similar to the story about Durga slaying Mahisha, the buffalo demon).
When in anthropomorphic form, Varaha is often seen with Bhudevi (Earth goddess) and sometimes also Lakshmi. There she is again–Lakshmi–calling to me to remind me to act from my abundance (from there comes my capacity to slay demons).
- Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation
Mahashivratri
It was perhaps because it was the most moonless night of the year–the last absent moon of winter–when absence and darkness reveal the plenum of potentiality, that I was able to see (and photograph with a phone) some of the stars recognized as the constellation Orion, despite the lights of the city.

To do list? (Yoga citta vrtti nirodaha)
Twitter? What would be
The point without an I-phone?
Buy one? Save the nation?
Last night I wrote this “twaiku” (why is it not a “twittiku?”) after having read yet another series of articles on why or why not to Twitter and still more articles on why it is important for a nation of consumers to keep consuming even if that is what got them into trouble in the first place. One of the articles was lamenting the loss of true communication that comes with being limited to 140 characters, and it set forth some examples of how peculiar, when taken out of context, some twittering can sound, especially to the uninitiated. In my attempt to keep an open mind about devaluing language while still communicating in language, I was led to think about haikus v. sonnets and other longer poetic forms. A haiku easily fits into 140 characters. This led me to wonder whether anyone had created a haiku trend on Twitter? A quick Google search revealed that I am way behind the times in terms of the twaiku?
One of the articles suggested that Twittering is about being in the moment. Contrarians say it fosters attention deficit disorder and a host of other language-loss ills. This led me to think of the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali “yoga citta vrtti nirodaha” (yoga is stilling/aligning with the thoughwaves of the mind). When evaluating what to consume, when to consume, and how to consume (whether it is language and communication methods or electronic goods or anything else), if we are serious about taking yoga off the mat, it is good to think about whether our consumption eases the trials of being embodied or makes daily living more agitating, and whether our consumption brings us more into alignment with nature/spirit (brahmacharya) or turns us away.




