I was feeling a bit melancholy at work this morning, so I went across the street at lunchtime and soaked up some beauty.
I am indeed blessed (by a combination of conscious choice and effort and good fortune) that I am able to take a lunch break on many days and that there are multiple opportunities to connect to beauty steps from work and home.
As I have discussed with a few of you, I have been contemplating deeply and for a long time the questions of what is a guru and who is a guru. In the context of this contemplation, I read to enhance my background and understanding, deepen my contemplation, and give myself food for thought or additional exploration. Here are some books that I have in my library about gurus or those who have been labeled gurus (in no particular order). Some are written with loving devotion by disciples. Some question or comment on the interrelationship between the status of guru and the sometimes all too human foibles of the guru and his disciples. Some are of the guru’s own experience of practice and his relationship with his own guru.
Be Love Now, Ram Dass, HarperOne (New York, NY 2010)
Miracle of Love — Stories About Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass, E.P. Dutton (New York, NY 1979)
Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, Self-Realization Fellowship (13th Ed., reprinted 2001)
The Golden Guru — The Strange Journey of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, James S. Gordon, The Stephen Green Press (Lexington, Mass. 1987)
My Guru and His Disciple, Christoper Isherwood, Penguin Books (New York, NY 1981)
Ramakrishna and His Disciples, Christopher Isherwood, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY 1970)
Great Swan — Meetings with Ramakrishna, Lex Hixon, Shambhala Dragon Editions (Boston, Mass. 1992)
Bhagawan Nityananda of Ganeshpuri, Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa, SYDA Foundation (South Fallsburg, NY 1996)
The Buddha from Brooklyn — A Tale of Spiritual Seduction, Martha Sherrill, Vintage Books (New York, NY 2001)
Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, Stephen Cope, Bantam (New York, NY 1999)
At the Eleventh Hour — The Biography of Swami Rama, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, Himalayan Institute Press (Honesdale, Pa. 2001)
Play of Consciousness, Swami Muktananda Paramahansa, SYDA Foundation (Oakland Ca. 1974)
The Great Oom — the Improbable Birth of Yoga in America, Robert Love, Viking Press (New York, NY 2010)
ps Jess–Yes, the widget for Library Thing is coming for the website. I just need to add more books, so that it is a decent start at a representation of at least the yoga-related portion of my library.
Some think of yoga as folding or knotting oneself into pretzel-like shapes. No one wants to feel that they are tied into a knot in life, and those who make fun of yoga may do so because it seems silly to them intentionally to make knots with the body.
But carefully learning how to stretch and fold and bend and mold oneself into the shapes of the various asanas paradoxically can free one from feeling bound up or constricted by the knottiness of existence.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
A treasured friend and respected colleague who left her body late last week was buried this morning. The work year started, then, with some colleagues and I leaving the office for a portion of the middle of the day to drive up to the cemtery and offer our love to her family and our good-byes to her physical presence. On the way back to the office, I noticed that the Potomac has been icing over, which is very unusual. I also remembered that I had my camera in my pocket. So I took it out and caught the moment in honor of my friend who would have loved the way the birds were dancing on the ice, in honor of beauty, in honor of the life teeming above and below the apparently still, frozen river.
