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    Afternoon Walk

    ByElizabeth

    After eating homemade popsicles.  This week’s variation:  lemon, lime, with white nectarine.  The liquid was an chilled tisane with herbs from the garden; the sweetener, local honey.  The farmers at the market were packing to go home.  Tomatoes and peaches only $1 a pound.  Tonight–cucumber and tomato salad with the second cucumber of the year from my own garden.  The salad to accompany whole wheat pasta tossed with garden greens, herb pesto (basil, parsley, arugula; garlic in the pesto from a friend’s garden), and white beans.  Later in the week when it gets cooler, slow-cooked tomato sauce and white peaches poached in wine (perhaps turned into popsicles).

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    Worrying (and the kanchukas)

    ByElizabeth

    This morning, woken by the purring cat from an anxious dream in which I was not doing enough to make things better (I am not making this up), my first thoughts were of escalating war in Afghanistan and deepening economic crisis at home.  It felt almost strange and abstract to be worrying about these things from my warm comfortable bed.

    I think worrying can have a positive place in our lives.  If we just get worried or anxious about things and get trapped in not doing or growing or reaching (both inward and outward) for a sense of connection and spirit, then worrying will cloak or limit us.  If we recognize worries as showing us limitations, then we can use them to grow and change and spur us to action.

    After the 25 tattvas describing the physical world and our being and understanding of the world that correspond in both the classical and Kashmir Shaivist systems, are Kashmir Shaivism’s six kanchukas — cloakings or coverings.  The kanchukas are niyati (limitation of place), kaala (limitation of time), raaga ( attachment), vidya (limitation of knowledge), kalaa (limitation of action), maya (illusion of individuality/manifestation).

    From a tantric perspective, experiencing ourselves as thinking, individual beings in the manifest world, constrained by time and space, only binds us if we think that is all we are.  If we get completely entangled in these constraints, then our sense of spirit is cloaked, just as if we get stuck in worrying, instead of using worries as a spur to work for change, we become miserable.

    I meditate and practice asana, as taught by my teachers, to reveal the restraints of physical being as only part of my being.  Spiritual practice can serve to enable us to experience freedom of heart and mind, to bathe in the bliss of the essence of ourselves that is universal and unconstrained by the limitations of individual manifestation.  The point of these practices not to escape our individual selves or to gratify them (that would still be “cloaked”), but to find the strength and stability to serve better and to work for a world in which all beings have an equal chance to seek the spirit and experience the bliss of connection.

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    Spiced Rice and Sprouted Lentil Salad with Chiffonade of Leaf Lettuce

    ByElizabeth

    Sprout brown lentils for 2-3 days and use while just showing sprouts.

    Cook one or more types of whole grain rice (here a mixture of red and brown rice) (I like to use a rice cooker).

    Let rice cool.  Mix rice with lentils.

    Add some oil to keep the rice a good texture.  I used sesame oil.  You could use the oil recommended for your Ayurvedic type if you are familiar with the recommended oil for your type.  Though this does not really resemble traditional kitcheree, the basic/unprocessed elements of the dish –the mixture of rice and lentils and the spicing — are the same.

    Add a mix of spices.  Here, too, you could vary the spicing according to your dosha if that is something with which you have experience.  I used turmeric, ginger, clove, black pepper stirred into the salad mixture and then minced some green coriander seeds from the garden to sprinkle on top.  I think a squeeze of lemon, had I had it, would have added extra zest.

    Serve the salad on delicate, freshly picked greens–spinach and baby chard would be good, though I used lettuce because it was what needed most to be harvested.

    sprouted kitcheree salad

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    Learning From Our Demons (Hanuman Leaps to Lanka)

    ByElizabeth

    Last month, Sianna Sherman taught a weekend workshop at Willow Street Yoga.  At the beginning of one of the segments of the workshop, she talked about the story of the monkey god Hanuman and his leap to Lanka (he did this to rescue Sita, who had been abducted by her own demons.  Sita sent Hanuman back to India without her, asking Hanuman where was Ram, but that’s a whole different thread in the Ramayana.)

    The first demon Hanuman encountered was Mainaka, a golden mountain who rose up out of the sea.  She gave Hanuman a place to rest.  She was helper.  But she was also demon in that she wanted Hanuman to stay and rest with her and to give up his journey.  Some of the stories characterize Mainaka only as a helper, and not as a demon.  If Hanuman had become stuck in the comfort Mainaka offered, though, and failed in his journey, she would have been for him the demon of complacency.  The question Sianna left with us to consider about Mainaka was where have we been too comfortable?  Where do we need to express gratitude and appreciation, but move on?

    The second demon, Surasa, was a fierce water serpent who emerged from the water to swallow Hanuman up as he was flying over the ocean.  To escape, he first tried making himself so big that she Surasa could not swallow him, but she just opened her mouth wider and wider, gnashing at him with her razor-sharp teeth.   Hanuman escaped by then shrinking himself to the size of a dust mote and flying out from between Surasa’s teeth.  Being able to make himself immense was one of the powers he needed to be able to fight the various demons, but he needed also to be willing and able to make himself small to complete the journey.  He would have been stuck if he had not been capable of taking on different shapes and approaching things from different perspectives.  Surasa may have tried to swallow him up, but she also taught him perspective.  “Are there places where you could use more perspective?” asked Sianna.

    The third demon , Sinhaka, at least according to some versions, tried to eat Hanuman’s shadow.  Inseparable from his shadow, the only way to escape was to turn back to face and claim his shadow as his own to battle Sinhaka.  Running away would have just kept Sinhaka champing at his tail and dragging him back from success.  We have to recognize and face our shadows in order to be complete and to understand the full spectrum of being.  We were invited to ask whether there were particular fears from which we were running.

    What stayed with me, and has me still thinking about the workshop, was that the emphasis was on treating ourselves and the obstacles we face on and off the mat with compassion.  We often give lip service in Western tantra to seeing the good or the necessary in our demons.  For example, whereas classical yoga thinks desire needs to be eradicated, tantra recognizes both that we would not get out of bed in the morning without it and that desire is what can lead us to practice and seek spiritual connection.  When we can truly look at our demons (both our own personal ones and those we see in both wider and more intimate relationships), our demons are not evidently nor necessarily to be slain or eschewed or to be seen as only malignant or pestilent.   When we approach our own demons and those of others with true compassion, we open the possibility of change through deeper awareness, connection, and recognition of humanity.

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