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Noun or Exhortation?
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Honeysuckle, Among Other Things
How could I question
The existence of soma?
I’ve smelled honeysuckle.
Amy Ippoliti’s 30-Day Yoga Challenge
Anusara yogini and teacher extraordinaire, Amy Ippoliti, started a “30-Day Yoga Challenge,” which she updates monthly, for students and friends who are her Facebook friends. For the past several months, the challenge has been to work towards some very challenging poses (how appropriate for a challenge). This month Amy invited students to practice without air conditioning, or for hot yoga practitioners, without extra heat. Granted, she is based in Boulder, Colorado, where it is not 101F today, but she speaks my mind. Whenever people have asked me what I think about hot yoga, I have answered that it serves some people very well, but I always find myself asking the question, whence is the heat coming and will it enhance my yoga to change the room temperature if I need to burn fossil fuels to practice?
Why is practicing without a technologically altered environment a yoga challenge? Have you ever found that if conditions aren’t right, you think you cannot do your practice? If we are truly practicing with commitment, then what we want to do is to find the practice that will fit the environment (including not just the outer environment, but the state of our mind and physical well-being) on any given day, even if it means that the practice will not meet our expectation of what our practice should be.
When we practice steadily and listen to the teachings, one of the things yoga teaches us is how to be more sensitive to our environment and to what we put into our minds and bodies. A friend complained of being terribly sleepy the other day. I said it was the heat; look at your pets; don’t you notice that they are sleeping more in the heat? What practicing in accordance with the ambient temperature means (or eating or sleeping or dressing or engaging in leisure activity) learning better how to align with the energies around us, including being sensitive to how we would optimally practice in the heat. As yogis, I believe that what we want, ever more deeply and more profoundly, is to live aligned with nature and our own being in it so that we can find better recognize the fullness and the light of being whatever challenges arise.
I’m doing a modified version of Amy’s challenge here in DC this week: at the William Penn House, I’ll take whatever air conditioning is on (which, for those of you who are wondering, can be pretty nice and cool since it is the ground floor). At the house practice, I’ll keep the house at the same 80-82F I typically keep the house when it is over 90F outside; I won’t lower it because I am practicing, but we won’t be having it over 90F. At Willow Street, I’ll go with the flow.
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Books on My Trip to California
The two books I read while I was traveling to California (San Francisco for the delight of it and Lucerne Valley to study with Paul Muller-Ortega): Home of the Dancing Sivan, India in Mind.
The first I picked to bring because it was one on the bibliography Paul has given us to read that I had not yet read and was also something that I wanted to read in anticipation for my planned trip to to Chidambaram in December. By coincidence, while we were on this intensive, Paul showed us a video of a ceremony at Chidambaram, so I was glad to have read the book on the way there. The second, I picked up recently at the Bryn Mawr Lantern Bookshop, where I do regular volunteer work. India in Mind is an interesting collection–well-known Western voices writing about India, but collected by Pankaj Mishra, an Indian author who lives part of the time in London. Much in the collection I have read before, but the editing gives a very interesting perspective on how we in the West have related to and imagined India. More reading in preparation for my upcoming trip and for my continuing exploration of what has drawn me to the yoga over these many decades.
The five books I bought while in San Francisco (the first three from my every year or three pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore; the last two from a used bookshop in Hayes Valley near Yoga Tree’s Hayes studio):
The Essential Tagore (a large and beautiful collection), Great Tales of Jewish Fantasy and the Occult (fantasy and magic from my ethnic heritage–why just concentrate on other cultures such as India?), White Hand Society (more on Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, which ties in at a deep level to my Westerner’s understanding of Eastern mysticism); Wintering (I was captivated by Sylvia Plath in my teens and 20s; it looked like a nice book), The Violent Foam (wonderful and profoundly important poetry).
