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    Invite to Practice Yoga and Gardening

    ByElizabeth

    I am pleased and excited to announce my first public, in person practice since the inception of the pandemic.  Is it any surprise that this yoga offering is an invitation to the garden, which is a place dedicated to creating and sharing joy, learning, and nourishment throughout the community for over 50 years?

    Come get out into beauty and into your own body and into the dirt on Tuesday, June 6th, from 9 am to 12 pm: at the Washington Youth Garden, on the grounds of the National Arboretum.  After the welcoming yoga practice, we will all join the staff and the regular volunteers (I’m one of them), in the garden.  Throughout the time, I will be available to respond to individual questions about yoga and about optimizing physical alignment/orientation to make it more sustainable to work in the garden, especially for older bodies.  Here’s the link to get more details and to register:   Yoga and Volunteering at the Washington Youth Garden

    Think this sounds great, but you’re hoping for a different time or location, please feel free to reach out.

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    Sensing the Subtle Energies (an Earthquake)

    ByElizabeth

    I woke up around 4 o’clock this morning, inexplicably agitated and unable to fall back asleep right away. Sully, too, was restless. I went into the yoga room and did a series of restorative forward bends and twists, which provided some ease, but I was still a little restless and unable to go back to sleep.

    It was too far out of my usual experience for living in DC and too little impact at my house (compared to what it was reported to have felt like in some of the suburban areas) to have identified the earthquake for what it was.

    When I called the weather, which advised of the earthquake, I knew that its immanence was what had caused me to wake in anticipatory anxiety.

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    Call and Response

    ByElizabeth

    I went to a Lenten service for ceasefire that was led in front of the White House today. First there was a Catholic Mass and then an ecumenical service.

    I sometimes participate in religious rituals outside of my own, as a way of honoring our shared and diverse experience of being.

    This is the first time I have gone to a Christian service on Ash Wednesday. No ashes for me. I was willing to, however, to participate in the invitation to participate in a call and response. The speaker listed the heinous atrocities that our tax dollars are funding, and the response was the acknowledgment that “I have blood on my hands.”

    I’m still complicit even if I am letting those with power know that I do not agree, although that is better than being silent. One of the religious speakers suggested that repentance does not mean regret. It means acknowledgement and a change of behavior.

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    Prop or Crutch

    ByElizabeth

    “Liberty” is again encased in scaffolding, though it hasn’t been that long since she was taken down for a good cleaning. Seeing her thus supported while simultaneously blocked led me to think about the use of yoga props.

    I am a big fan of using props to discover places one thought out of reach, either because an injury is limiting range of movement or because intelligent or inspired use of a prop can teach where the next step could be in practice.

    Liberty’s scaffolding might be necessary for structural repairs or cleaning, but it is obscuring the view–her view out and our view in. We wouldn’t want her bound and stuck unless it was truly necessary for her full beauty and integrity to be maintained and revealed.

    So, too, with yoga props. As beneficial as they can be, we do not want to rely on them automatically without seeing whether we can open to and discover the full flourishing of ourselves in a pose without them by being open, sensitive, and discriminating about our physical boundaries; applying the alignment principles to the fullness of our knowledge; and using just the right amount of effort.

    By all means use props, but use them to find and witness new freedom (ultimately, svatantriya) not to bind or obscure it.

    Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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