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- Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation | Photos
Puddles (and Prakasha and Vimarsha)
In the tantric yoga philosophy, two key concepts are that of prakasha and vimarsha–light and reflection. Prakasha is the fullness of the light of consciousness itself; vimarsha, the reflection of the light that is our own individual recognition of the light of consciousness in ourselves. The sweetly mysterious joy we get in seeing reflections in a puddle is the reminder we are given of the pulsing dance between the light and the reflection of the light, neither of which we can know without the other.
A Hawk
At one point, during this walk with a friend at the National Arboretum, four hawks were circling. I wondered what was on the ground. It was a gloriously temperate day.

It Takes a Snowflake
It is almost inconceivable to my limited mind how many snowflakes it took to whiten our world yesterday morning. This weekend, there will be far more snow (alas, it will be too cold to stick to the trees and create such a beautiful canopy; instead we will have howling winds and heavy going). I might catch the first of the snowflakes tomorrow morning on my walk to work before the storm really comes in with all its wild fury. When there are only a few, it is easy to see the individual flakes. Once there is a storm, though, we tend only to see the storm.
Just as it is hard to remember that the snow is about both each individual flake and the whole snow fall together, we forget about the simultaneous place of ourselves as individuals as part of the whole, or we get caught up witnessing ourselves as individuals and forget that we are all a part of a much vaster energy. The reality is that we are all both all of the time — we are completely individual and part of a vast, interconnected web. When we can remember and witness both aspects of ourselves, then we can most deeply witness, participate in, and appreciate the extraordinariness of being.




