Happy Halloween
To my surprise, my
Shadow dressed as Darth Vader
This Halloween eve.
I was wearing my blue and green hat with the pompom.
Similar Posts
Daylight v. Day Lights
A year or two before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released, I went to a panel discussion and film (alas, I cannot remember the title of the film) about global climate change. One of the speakers was a Nepalese attorney who was working on a case in the World Court that sought to address the impact of various corporate practices on the Himalayan snow cap.
One of the things this man said continues to resonate with me: “Why is it,” he asked, “that Americans are always turning on lights in the day time? Do you ever think about how much energy we could save and dangerous, climate-changing emissions we could stop, if we just relied on day light during the day instead of adding unnecessary electric lights?”
- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation
Quote of the Day
“I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting.” President Barack Obama (on accepting reelection November 2012)
What is Beauty? (and “Ankle Loop”)
When I was meditating this morning, the last lines of Keats’ ‘Ode on A Grecian Urn’ welled up in my thoughts: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” How odd, I thought, for this to appear, as if out of nowhere. I have been contemplating this week on what it means to be refined, but not in the way of an aesthete. Rather, as I have been concentrating on the Anusara alignment principle of “ankle loop,” I have been thinking about how deepening our practice with repeated exploration and study we are able to refine our understanding and the flow of energy within us so that we can be more connected to ourselves and each other.
As I understand the essential structure of the Anusara principles, the “loops” are really tertiary principles. The primary principles are those of “attitude, alignment, and action,” which are the principles of how we practice. The secondary principles are the fundamental physical and energetic principles — “opening to grace, muscular energy, inner/expanding spiral, outer/contracting spiral, organic energy.” The loops serve to refine the secondary principles. Ankle loop, for example, which starts at the base of the shin bone, travels down the back of the heel and then back up through the arch, energizes the foot, lifts the arch, supports our stance and helps us focus muscular energy. When we are feeling challenged finding as much muscular energy in our feet and legs as would be optimal for a full expression of the pose, we can use ankle loop to refine our understanding and practice of muscular energy in the legs. Keeping in mind the primary principles of practice, though, the refinements should also always lead us towards the heart and not just get us into details. Getting more sophisticated and refined, likewise should not lead us to disdain for that which is unrefined.
Funny, then, that the aesthete’s call to beauty should arise in my meditation while I have been consciously thinking about refinement. What does it mean to appreciate and study refinements, but still honor and delight in a novice’s full expression of “attitude, alignment, and action” as much as an impeccably aligned and skillful pose that does not reveal a yearning for spirit? Beauty may be truth, and truth beauty, but what is “beauty?”
