On the Way to William Penn House for Tuesday Night Yoga Practice
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Teacher Feature (Willow Street Spring Newsletter)
Please see the Spring 2010 Willow Street Newsletter to see more about what led me to teach. While you’re reading, check out all the fabulous yoga offerings.
Signs Around Town (Temporary Covering)
What does it mean? What is it meant to say and to whom? What does it say to you?
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Body | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc)
Rosa’s Pizza (and a Planned Trip to India)
Rosa’s Pizza is on the Long Island Railroad level of Penn Station. To my best recollection, it has been there since before I started taking the LIRR regularly in the early 1970s, and I still go there occasionally when I connect through Penn Station to visit my parents a few times a year. Rosa’s makes an eggplant slice that tastes like eggplant parmigiana on decent pizza crust. Yup, it’s got cow dairy and gluten and lots of fat, but it is one of those foods that is so strongly associated with both place and belonging for me that it gives me great delight to eat it once or twice a year.
When I was meditating yesterday morning, I had a vision of myself jet-lagged and groggy from landing in JFK and taking the train from the airport to Penn Station to head home after two and a half weeks of a study tour led by Professor Douglas Brooks of Tamil Nadu (including Chidambaram), which I am planning to do at the winter holidays. In this meditation moment, I was ecstatically happy to be eating an eggplant slice from Rosa’s after taking my seat on Amtrak. I enjoyed the moment and then let go of this reverie to slip deeper into meditation.
At work, I told a friend of mine about this vision. He said that was not the right approach to a trip to India — shouldn’t I be eagerly anticipating what I would experience in India itself? I begged to differ. The excitement and anticipation of what I will see and experience and learn is a given. It was sweet to have pierce my meditation how happy I will be to return home. It helps me remember that for all the ups and downs of my choices, I am comfortable enough with them to be finding meditative bliss in the idea of something that is part of “home.”
Coming Snowstorm (and Heyam Dukham Anagatam)
As I think about whether I will be able to get up to Willow Street to teach my last classes of the session, how much shoveling I will need to do , whether the next forecast storm (middle of next week) might create challenges for my planned trip to NY, etc, etc, my favorite (well, in the top 10) sutra of Patanjali, sprang to mind: heyam dukham anagatam, 2.16, which means roughly: the pain that has yet to come can be avoided.
I have several translations/commentaries of the Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras in my library. All have a different spin on what this means in practice. What I know is that it is at least partly about being in the present and taking things as they come. One should still practice and plan. By practicing and planning, we are better prepared for inevitable pains and challenges. (For those of you who are giddy with excitement with the thought of a “white Christmas,” this Sutra still helps. Part of the pain that can be avoided is disappointment when expectations are not realized the way we hoped they would be realized.) Once we have prepared in a healthy way, though, there is no point in agonizing about what might come, in being in pain in the present because of the possibility (or even inevitability) of a future pain.
The snow seems inevitable. I am charging my camera battery. I’m picking what is probably the last of the chard and the baby leeks from the garden, and I am getting ready for Serenity Saturday restoratives. As long as I can walk to the studio — eight inches is just plain fun, not impassable — I’ll be there with a warm and full offering. In the meantime, I am enjoying my day instead of worrying about the potential barriers to enjoyment.
We Are Only Safe in Solidarity
White House, October 28
