A Hallway
Sometimes, the healthiest way to address one’s environment is:
1. Accept what one cannot change;
2. Cultivate a sense of humor;
3. Know that going inside to witness the pure beauty of inner awareness is always available.
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- Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation | Photos | Poetry
Never Mind What Might Be Happening On The Ground
Sky was having a
heart-shaped clouds everywhere
you look kind of day.
A Letter from Tamil Nadu
The attached photo of devotees at a kumkum-reddened shrine to Hanuman is just a taste of the extraordinary things I have been privileged to experience and witness in this journey. I think that there as many reasons to go on a pilgrimage and as many experiences of it as there are people. For both the challenges and the wonders, I have been given a chance to feel and shift and explore myself at the deepest levels.
As you know, I had planned to take a mini-sabbatical from posting photos and writing while I was on the trip. I was faced with an opportunity, though, from a lesson in both non-attachment and gratitude that opened up this opportunity to share.
On our first full day in Madurai, we went to see the famous Meenakshi temple. The experience at this temple was different from that we had in other temples for two significant reasons. The first was that the inner sanctum was rigidly restricted only to Hindus. Ironically, this correspondingly led to a permission to take photographs within the temple (usually forbidden) because we who are allowed only in the other parts of the temple are viewed more like tourists than worshippers.
Right before we went to the temple, my camera reported that the battery was exhausted; intermittent power the night before must have prevented my getting it properly charged. I took out my Blackberry as a second best alternative. It had somehow turned itself on and depleted the charge looking for a radio signal even though I had turned off both the phone and Internet connections. I couldn’t imagine making it through the rest of day without being able to take another photograph, and it appeared that I had no choice other than to call in what I have learned from yoga practice about non-attachment. (Yes, I recognize that for even the most avid of amateur photographers, this was not a big loss).
As grace would have it, though, a fellow enthusiastic photographer on the trip hearing of my predicament understood completely. He had three cameras and his fiancee also had one. He handed me the extra camera and showed me the basics. The next day, he uploaded the photos I had shot onto my IPad, giving me a lesson in technology, along with the loan of the camera. I may have avoided having to practice non-attachment for this minor moment of potential disappointment, but I was definitely gifted with a big opportunity to practice gratitude. Having been the recipient of this gift, I wanted to share a little with you.
I look forward to sharing more images and stories when I return, especially with all of my students when winter classes resume in January.
Devotees of Hanuman - Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Photos
Expanding to Receive the Beauty, Opening to Grace, and the Isha Upanishad
In Anusara yoga, one of the ways the first principle of “opening to grace” can be experienced and practiced is as a radical expansion of the capacity to receive and appreciate the very wonder of being. During my visit to India with Professor Douglas Brooks, I found myself repeatedly thinking of the concept of radical expansion and also the preamble to the Isha Upanishad (long a favorite of mine; Shantala on their first CD, Love Window, have done an exquisite rendition), which can be roughly translated as saying that adding fullness to fullness is itself fullness (fullness can also be translated here as perfection).
What I believe this is saying that being itself is infinitely full; thus, we cannot make it more infinite by adding to it. Human consciousness of the infinitude of being, though, is limited by the filters of space and time. One of the key reasons to practice yoga (including meditation) is to expand both our capacity to appreciate the fullness and to receive its full wonder by uniting our own consciousness with the infinitude. When we can appreciate ever more the wonder of our being, we will naturally be more joyous, and I believe, led to be more compassionate and generous with ourselves and others.
Day after day on the India pilgrimage, just when I thought my heart and mind were already full to bursting, there were yet more experiences of the beauty and extraordinariness of life and creativity and nature. I found myself chanting the Isha Upanishad—purnamadah, purnamidam, puranata purnamudatacyate. Fullness and fullness is fullness. “Let me expand still more to appreciate to its utmost yet more beauty,” I thought to myself again and again. Though I already thought I’d developed a fairly full understanding of the concept through study and practice, I thought, “this is what John Friend means when he is talking about radical expansion.” I look forward to studying and practicing to experience and share ever more beauty.
