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Happy May Day (and radical affirmation)
It feels wonderfully auspicious to me that my Spring classes at Willow Street are starting on May Day. It is Beltane–the true end of winter and the beginning of the effulgence of the time of growth and light. It is May Day–the mark of a shift in power from the oppressors to the once oppressed, now freed (I’m not going to get into whether that really worked as planned). It is a time of tradition at my alma mater; the sophomores wake the seniors with strawberries and champagne, enjoying celebration and revelry (dancing around May poles and the like) as they get ready to take their final exams. Today is Kentucky Derby; I remember a party where the fact I had mint in my garden for the juleps started a fabulous passion.
The potential for delight, for freedom, for fullness is always with us. For me, yoga helps me find it and recognize it. The longer I practice, the more richness it offers. This Spring session I will be focusing on radical affirmation of the potential in ourselves so that we can recognize and reveal it. Much more on that to come; for now, I must head to the metro to go teach.
Looking Within
The great texts and teachers of meditation exhort us to look within with the promise that by so doing we will find great peace or bliss or splendor.
For many, though, initial attempts at meditation are just as likely to reveal troubling aspects of the self or agitating thoughts as any sense of beauty or quiet and the reaction can be a dismissal or disbelief in such teachings.
The exhortation to look within is not directing us to introspection or the self-examination of therapy (which are also useful in appropriate circumstances), but rather is inviting us to open to seeing that the beauty and specialness that we might believe of and recognize in others is also within ourselves.
Only when we can first look inside ourselves with love and empathy, can healing, change, growth, and compassion begin regarding those things that make introspection scary and challenging.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.





