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What Do You See?
What do you first notice when you look at this photo? What do you notice next? Do you find yourself making aesthetic judgments or comparisons? What about moral judgments?
Is it possible truly to witness without judgment? To see the good (or at least the potential for good) in everything, even if it does not please us or fit in with how we would like the world to be?
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation
A Happy Life is an Engaged Life (and Sadhana)
I have spent most of my life practicing one thing or the other. What attracts me about practicing in the sense of complete absorption that it brings. For a time, the absorption can be enough. Ultimately, though, the absorption should bring joy. I do not really think that it matters what it is that one is practicing as long as steady engagement brings a sense of inner peace and bliss that enables one to be kinder and to offer service in some way. I have quit some things along the way either because the practice did not bring enough joy or fulfillment or the practice was detrimental to my nature.
I know yoga and meditation are the right for me at this point in my life because sadhana (practice) continues to brings me ever increasing delight. I do not think of practice as work (though sometimes I need to use some self-discipline to remind myself to practice), but as an invitation to greater depth and understanding of not only the practice, but myself.
I have friends for whom the right practice is not yoga, but something else — a visual art, music, law. It is not what one does, but how one does it, and whether it brings a sense of fullness to life, a satisfaction with the engagement in the doing, rather than in what the doing achieves.
The White House Farmer
Voting is still open, see The White House Farmer. (Pretty sure this is a non-partisan position).
Talking About the Wisdom Goddesses (and February Willow Street Book Club)
I am looking forward to February’s meeting of the Willow Street Book Club this coming Sunday, where we will be discussing David Frawley’s, Spiritual Secrets of Ayurveda: Tantric Yoga and the Wisdom Goddess. Especially since many of us will likely have been to hear some or all of Professor Douglas Brooks’ discussion of the great goddesses last weekend, the meeting promises to be full of lively, thoughtful, and insight-provoking discussion.
One of the things I have been pondering on this latest read is how I can fully imbibe the wisdom that is offered with the imagery and stories of the goddesses, without getting caught up in being troubled from a feminist perspective. Many yoga practitioners I know rely on the call in the texts to worship the “goddess” as a way of saying that women are not diminished in the classic texts. My conundrum is that when one looks at the texts and the images about the goddesses, all the stereo-typical notions of beauty and youth are inextricably intertwined. Like the Western fairy tales I gobbled up in my youth and their entrancing but insidiously prejudicial archetypes, the sweet, loving, desirable goddesses are the young and fair; the fierce and powerful goddesses are the ugly crones.



