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    Devotion (Bhakti)

    ByElizabeth

    Much is said about devotion in yoga, and there is a great privileging by many of the path of devotion — bhakti.  With no clear answers, I contemplate often what it means to practice bhakti, to be devoted in a religious or spiritual sense.  Witnessing those on pilgrimage when I was in India (it was “pilgrimage season”), I was flooded with memories and ideas for contemplation about what it means to be devoted and how people express devotion.

    Among the thoughts and memories were having observed the operaphiles in their expensive clothes swoon and gasp and applaud at the Vienna Opera House on the opera level where I had paid a dollar for standing room; having been literally swept off of my feet in the press of the crowds heading to the tube at Wembley Stadium after seeing the Rolling Stones in concert; watching the people do the standing wave thing at ball games while hollering for their team as if their whole view of the world was dependent on who wins; having taken, standing room only, the third class train from Florence to Rome during Easter week (a different pilgrimage season), on asking who is that woman on the billboards, discovering that India, too, has a habit of electing movie stars to political office.

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    The Importance of Doubt (and Shrada)

    ByElizabeth

    I was just led by a friend’s Facebook posting to the website for an upcoming movie about the Siddha yoga ashram (Siddha yoga was part of the teaching and practice lineage of John Friend and Paul Muller-Ortega, and both have told stories about how useful the fierce ashram  discipline was for them, but who adopted too much of the ashram style in their yoga organizations for me ever to have tried to be in the inner circle).   In watching the trailer and reading the background materials for the movie, it struck me that the most important point for me is that the followers who were most injured were those who doubted least and who were the most hungry for an authority and love figure.

    As a born and bred doubter (how could I not be one who consistently doubts as part of my spiritual practice, given that I am a culturally jewish, New York intellectual who was raised on the Quaker system of queries and advices, who studied western philosophy and law, and who works inside the Beltway?), I believe that you will always be able to get the good out of teachings without losing your own control, sense of self, and discriminating (viveka) ability to evaluate your commitment to a teacher or organization and the teachings offered, if your faith is in your own intuition and education and not in any one human or organization or specific teaching.

    Faith (in Sanskrit shrada), in order to serve us well, needs doubt; it needs questioning; it needs testing at every point of the way or it is superficial faith.  Don’t let anyone–particularly someone with whom you study or engage in religious or spiritual practice ever tell you otherwise.  Sometimes doubting with faith means getting involved or staying fully committed to an organization or teacher despite misgivings or despite troubling  behavior (assuming you are not sticking with being abused yourself or standing idly by when witnessing the abuse of others).  After all, no humans, organizations, or relationships are without their shadow sides.  Sometimes doubting, even with faith, means a radical and complete separation–quietly or loudly.  Sometimes what is best for you is something in between.  Learning to be in community is part of the practice, after all, keeping in mind that you are the company you keep.

    All I can say is this:  Please doubt.  Please doubt with sincerity.  Please doubt with love.  Please doubt with respect.  Please educate yourself, and with appropriate doubt, have faith that there is good in connecting and in the teachings, no matter how challenging is getting and sharing the teachings and the practices with and through the filter of others.

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    Mantra

    ByElizabeth

    The texts on sadhana — yoga practice  — say in simplified essence that mantra is the fulcrum between the unknowable universal and manifest particulars.  What language we use and how we use it can either lead us towards skillfully navigating life informed by illuminated understanding or blundering through things with obscured vision (or, I add, somewhere in between, but which do you want to be your goal?).  If you listen for your authentic voice, what words do you want to utter, which do you want to embody, which do you want to offer?  The mantra is a tool (in the best sense of the word) to find a source for our own language (thought and spoken) that recognizes the common bond of dwelling together as neighbors (near or far) on this earth, in this universe.

    New York City, June 13-14

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    Petting the Temple Cows

    ByElizabeth

    After a day of teaching and more discussion and emails regarding the upheaval, I had a memory of petting one of the temple cows at Chidambaram.  I was jetlagged and in sensory overload, and then I petted a most wonderful cow.  I dropped into a space where I was perfectly at peace and unaware of the time and all the things going on around me.  This space is always there for us, even in the absence of a sacred cow, and we practice so that we can find it more and more consistently, especially when we are being challenged.

    I did not photograph the Chidambaram temple cow, although a nice Indian lady asked me if her husband could photograph the two of us with the cow, so she has a photograph of herself with the strange American lady in a sari who was petting the cow.  I stopped to pet many cows after that.  In one town, a man told me, as I was scritching a cow between ears and horns, that the cow would enjoy a banana.

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