Found Exhortation (and the Tillai Forest?)
But perhaps find your Self? Wondrous and scary and unsettling things happen in the forest when we muster the courage to leave settled notions behind and explore.
Similar Posts
- Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc)
Prana+Yama or Prana+Ayama (and Global Climate Change)
The other day a friend commented that it seemed that a major contributor to global climate change is how we have set out to control our environment instead of aligning with it (my paraphrase). So much, he said, of what contributes to global climate change is how we heat and cool and light our homes and work places. For example, instead of honoring the change of seasons, we overcool in summer and overheat in winter, so that we can wear the same clothes and eat the same foods year round in apparent comfort.
This comment resonated with me deeply. It brought to mind what I have been taught about possible approaches to pranayama — the yoga practice of conscious breathing. Pranayama usually as translated as breath control or restraint. This assumes that the conjunction in sanskrit is of the two words “prana” and “yama.” Prana here refers to the subtle energy of the life force in general, which we can understand best through the breath. Yama means restraint. If, however, we think of pranayama as the conjunction of “prana” and “ayama,” which is a reasonable way of looking at the way the word is formed, we can understood pranayama to be the practice of expansion or alignment with prana.
When we seek with our yoga breathing practices on the mat or with our technology and lifestyles off the mat to restrain and control nature at the expense of listening and understanding, we will be at war with ourselves and the earth. If, however, we seek to align better with nature on and off the mat, to expand and enhance our relationship with the life force, rather than to restrain and control nature, we will expand our awareness of the subtle forces of the earth and live in a more life-affirming way.
Signs Around Town (Excerpt)
It is the absence of a verifiably shared signifier that makes it so difficult, and perhaps unwise, to attempt to communicate mystical experience.
Perception and Illusion (maya)
I have been thinking about perception and how as soon as we have more than one person looking at the same thing, each person has a different story, a different truth, a different explanation. Add to that the mysterious systems humans have created: information technology, cyberspace, monetary system. All of these are energy fields. We can only perceive small pieces of them, and we have varying degrees of skepticism about the reality of what we get from them. It is not a hard leap from that to understand what the yogis are saying when they say what we receive through the senses is illusory (maya).
We read news articles about the fact that Yo-Yo Ma was not playing at the Inauguration, but just moving his hands over the instrument to a recorded tape. Why would I believe the news stories more than I would believe what was on the “jumbo-trons” — or if I had been one of the few close in, what I’d thought I’d seen and heard? Why would I be more likely to believe the Inauguration of President Obama if I saw it on TV than I would the story line of a movie? How is it that we distinguish between news and fiction, our side of the story v. the other person’s side?
When we emphasize the “reality” of our own perception, we bring ourselves to schisms, disputes, and hurt feelings. When we let ourselves be skeptical about our own perceptions and know that they are only one aspect of a unity (like the blind men and the elephant), then we can be softer, more open, and less divisive. I am working on this; it is a challenging aspect of my yoga practice. What do you think?
“Bob Dylan is a strange one,”
says the man next to me with a slightly interrogative inflection, while we are both looking at a photo of Dylan taken by Alan Ginsberg at the show of Ginsberg’s photos at the Nat’l Gallery. He is a beefy guy with a crew cut, wearing chinos and a polo shirt. He looks like he’s maybe one of the thousands of police officers from around the country who are here for “Police Week.” Lots of police wives are taking a break from the demos and competitions to look at the impressionist and modern paintings from the Chester Dale Collection. Maybe he just got a little farther west than he had intended.
I smile at him in a way that I hope seems welcoming and open, yet does not actually convey agreement with his statement. I wonder how he felt about the photos ofd the Orlovsky brothers. I am at the exhibit on my lunch hour for the first of what will likely be a number of visits.
The Beats are an important part of my identity. My parents met in Greenwich Village in the late fifties — my mother dabbling as an artist, my father involved in peace activism, the places they frequented also frequented by the beats. My great Aunt H’s favorit book in those days allegedly was “On the Road.”
As a teenager, I relished and romanticized this part of my history. In so doing I read widely not only the writings of the Beats, but also what they were reading, which included the great Hindu and Buddhist texts. To want to discover the illumination of the Beats was to explore Eastern philosophy and mysticism and to meditate and practice yoga.
“No,” I thought to myself, “I’ve never connected the word ‘strange’ to Bob Dylan. Maybe when I get home I”ll play me some before I sit to meditate.”
Siva-Sakti
And I imagined coming and heaping red sandalwood powder and golden turmeric on the concrete barriers shaped just like linga that are next to the fountain and guard this building devoted to human labor.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
