On the Way to William Penn House for Tuesday Night Yoga Practice
There will be practice next week–December 20th, but not the 27th, as the house is closed for the holidays.
There will be practice next week–December 20th, but not the 27th, as the house is closed for the holidays.
For the fall session, we have been examining in detail and in sequence how each of the Anusara physical alignment principles can deepen our practice and awareness. It is my practice to start each session with the overarching principles of “attitude, alignment, and action,” which invite us in every moment, on and off the mat, to invoke an attitude of grace, to use the precision of alignment to refine our practice, and to use the cultivation and refinement of the principles to express in our poses and actions, the ultimate attitude of grace. Last week we explored how the actions of skull loop serve to refine organic energy and enhance the strength of reaching out and making offering, while ultimately drawing our gaze softly back to the heart.
Here I am, just in time for the holidays, intensely busy at work and overfull with all sorts of other commitments, feeling blessed to have this reminder to come back to the beginning, to soften, to open to the grace of the season, and not to get helplessly caught up in the details and the demands (though those are inevitably present).
What’s a gardener and concerned for the trees and the health of the planet citizen to do? I’ve got enough water in the rain barrel to water the vegetables and herbs once or twice, but what impact does that really have? At work, people were grumbling because it was cloudy. They seemed shocked when I advised them that we are an inch under normal rainfall for August and have a fairly significant deficit for the summer despite the July rains.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could move some of the flood waters that have fallen only a couple hundred miles away to irrigate our fields without disrupting our eco-system? Part of me just wants not to know about the consequences of global climate change, but it is hard not to notice that all the weather patterns I used to know and understand do not seem to apply quite the same way anymore. What do we do when the systems and practices we have in place for our ease, comfort, well-being, and understood day-to-day peace of mind are disrupted?
Yoga will not fix the big outer problems, but it can provide us with the steadiness and ease needed to stay present and be flexible in the face of crisis, upheaval, or disease. It can also provide insight into how we can live in better alignment. In the meantime, I am practicing gratitude. I know how blessed I am that, so far, the wild upheavals I read about in the news have not kept me from all the food and comfort that a person could possibly want. And I pay attention, because to be ignorant ultimately never serves ourselves or others.
