I am really enjoying the proliferation of “Little Free Libraries” in the neighborhood. I found Ann Petry’s “The Street” and then immediately put it back after reading it so that as many people as possible could read it. It is one of those books that makes an indelible imprint.
I saw these tools on the sidewalk in the afternoon. They were still there in the evening when I was walking home from teaching at William Penn House.
I wondered how or why someone might abandon, forget, or lose such well-made tools.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
A yoga teacher acquaintance once said rather dogmatically to me that it was not possible to be a true yoga teacher unless one had a guru. He meant having a guru in the traditional sense — being devoted to a particular person as the embodiment of the divine and of the true teachings. I did not engage on the issue, thinking (perhaps unfairly) that he would not listen to another point of view.
I do not have a guru in the technical sense. It would be unlikely. I was raised attending unprogrammed meetings of the Society of Friends (Quakers), where services are premised on the idea that there should be no preacher or minister because the light of the spirit shines equally in all and that each person is equally able to connect through his or her own faith and practice to the spirit. My first major exposure to the teachings of yoga was through the writings of J. Krishnamurti, which a teacher in an alternative program in high school I attended gave us to read, along with the classic yoga texts. Krishnamurti believed that all change comes from within and eschewed devotion to a guru.
Although I do not have a particular guru to whom I give my devotion (bhakti), I strive to honor and recognize that our true teacher is the light and spirit that is within all beings. The first line of the Anusara invocation — om namah shivaya gurave — resounds with truth for me.
On this guru purnima, the full moon of July, I honor the teachings that have so shifted my life, my teachers, especially John Friend and Suzie Hurley, and all of my students and friends, who shine with light always, and who inspire me to try each day to live more aligned with the ideals of yoga.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
I am finding it soothing, these days, to draw symmetries. And then, because I am who I am, I cannot quite follow convention.
Last weekend, I went with a friend to see The Steins Collect at the Metropolitan Museum. I made a special effort to see the exhibit because of the incredible impact on art and culture that the Steins had by virtue of their collecting. Many of the paintings in the exhibit were familiar; I’d seen them before either at the Met for those from its own collection, at other museums, or in books. Some, which have ended up in other private collections or in the collections of museums that I have not visited, were completely new to me.
Among the paintings in the exhibit is Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse (which, as you can see from the link, the MOMA website currently indicates as “not on view”). I’ve seen the painting many times before at MOMA. The shift of location and context shook up my perceptions of the painting, and I indicated that to my friend. Another woman who was looking at the painting too engaged in the conversation. “It seems wrong here,” she said. “It’s a different view,” I replied. “It is disconcerting, but seeing it in different light, context, and company is enabling me to see new things in the painting and to find a more enhanced appreciation.”
I have been thinking this week, and talking about it in my classes, how a change of context can bring us new vision. How often, when things just keep going in a set pattern, do they collect dust and cobwebs (literally or figuratively)? I asked my therapeutic students whether they had preconceived notions about various challenges of embodiment, especially the chonic ones. Do you see them as part of your identity, something that causes you pain instead of giving you the joy of movement? What if you embraced being ever more conscious of alignment instead of being conscious of pain and limitation (and learning better and sooner when you cannot get out of injury without outside help)?
What of it? What of the change of perspective? After all, things get rearranged for us and the dissolution can be gradual or violent or something of both and be something of greater or lesser magnitude. Times of flux and dissoluti9on are the perpect time for questioning, for new vision, for discovering new ways to experience what had become too familiar, for seeing how one might wish to shift one’s own perspective for the good, to know and take responsibility for one’s own place and piece of this relationship to whatever it is that is shifting, dispersing, or dissolving., to seek to become unbound from the habitual binds of whatever invisible clothing we might be wearing.
When I prepare to teach a workshop, I usually do a fair amount of background reading in addition to preparing the asana practice and contemplating the theme. Right now, I am getting ready to teach a workshop on the hidden powers of hanumanasana (See Workshops page for more info). A few weeks ago, I came across a tattered 1987 edition of an Indian publication of the Ramayana by Chakravarti Rajagopalachari. I was planning to read other works about Hanuman, but thought that I must be meant to read this one.
It is an interesting little book. Chakravarti, also known as “Rajaji” was the first Indian governor-general of India and a close compatriot of Gandhi. The work is interesting from a historical perspective. It was first published in 1951 in Tamil and then translated from Tamil into English. The purpose of the work was to make the Ramayana accessible to those who were not educated in Sanskrit and philosophy. Although purportedly for children, it obviously had appeal for a wider audience (the 1987 edition I found was the 25th). Rather than a translation, it is a retelling of the story, filled with homilies and somewhat paternalistic commentaries. Although because it is faithful to the story it still has the relentless sexism of the original, Rajaji does tell his readers in his commentary that the commonly held belief (supported by the language of the Ramayana, which is regarded as a religious text) that a woman has sinned or is shamed if “a villain behaves like a brute” to her is just wrong.
What was most interesting to me about this particular telling of the Ramayana, aside from its historical and social context, was how it resonated with my Anusara studies. When Hanuman first battles the demons, Rajaji says the demons “showered missiles on him which mostly glanced harmlessly off his adamantine frame.” Rajaji uses the word “adamantine” to describe Hanuman elsewhere in the work. Here, Hanuman is adamantine because his devotion and steadiness make an energetically impermeable boundary. Hanuman is able to love deeply and to engage in battle fully, but is protected from the inside out by his practice and his devotion. John Friend speaks often of using one’s practice to become “adamantine.” He suggests that the practice of opening to grace, and then pulsing a perfect balance between drawing in and reaching out energetically (muscular and organic energy), gives us an adamantine core that enables us to be open to a full range of experience without being harmed by negative things. I have experience myself from six steady years of Anusara practice, how the principles can indeed help me be open, while keeping negative energy from invading my space.
A used copy of this edition would likely have been around when John Friend was traveling in India when he first went to the Siddha yoga ashram. Did reading this particular edition lead him to use the word “adamantine” in the context of his teaching of the energetics of asana? I do not have an answer to that question, nor should I conjecture. What I do know, is that regardless of how I feel about some of the exterior social influences and teachings of the great Indian texts (think how I might feel about the Spanish Inquisition as it relates to the Bible), there is much to learn about meditation, yoga practice, and personal integrity interwoven in the stories.
Other readings:
The Concise Ramayana of Valmiki by Swami Venkatesananda (much more scholarly — the translation you would read if you were taking a university course, but didn’t know Sanskrit)
The Ramayana retold by William Buck — easy to read; like reading a novel-length fairy tale rendition for adolescents (changes the ending to make what happens to Sita more palatable)
The Ramayana — A Modern Retelling of the Great Indian Epic by Ramesh Menon. Great novel. Cannot recommend highly enough, but probably won’t resonate as much unless you are familiar with the Ramayana and other Indian epics and philosophy.
The Monkey Grammarian by Octavio Paz, trans. from the Spanish by Helen Lane. From the back cover: “Hanuman, the red-faced monkey chief and ninth grammarian of Hindu mythology, is the protagonist of this dazzling prose poem — a mind journey into the temple city of Galta and the occasion … to explore the nature of naming and knowing, time and reality, and fixity and decay.”