I took the day off from work today to attend an all-day teacher training with Cyndi Lee at Willow Street Yoga. Cyndi invited us to ask ourselves how our yoga teaching informs our practice and how our practice (and the reasons why we practice) informs our teaching? Worthy questions for ongoing contemplation.
To manifest an intention, one first has to have an intention. What do you want to manifest?
I am asking myself the same question.
Tonight (technically very early tomorrow morning), will be the first full lunar eclipse on the winter solstice in 350 years. Part of me wants the sky to be clear so that I can witness this extraordinary event. The other part yearns for a cloudy forecast so I can stay warm in my bed at 3 a.m. without feeling that it would be my own inaction that led me to miss the eclipse.
I think we all feel this way about our practice sometimes. We want to have the great openings that come from a deep and steady practice, but it would be oh so nice if they came without effort. And an excuse not to practice that comes from somewhere out of our control makes it so much easier to accept not getting the benefits.
Unlike a cloud cover blocking our view of the moon, though, there aren’t many things that actually prevent practicing, although they might change what kind of practices we can do at a particular time in our lives.
Towards the end of a yoga session I start thinking about what would be a good theme for the next. I start by observing what is going on in the world — from the change of seasons, to whether it is rainy or drought, to what is going on in the political climate, noticing what is recurring in my own practice and the practices of my students, watching what is arising in my contemplations and meditations, and seeing what is resonating most in what I am learning from my own teachers. I will go into my library, reading and rereading things to see what resonates with what I am observing and experiencing. I also take into account the length of the session to be sure that it will fit well within the number of classes. Once I have set the session theme, I spend the week in which I will teach a particular principle, contemplating it, reading about it, practicing with it, and thinking about its relationship to my life off of the mat.
When I selected the tattvas this session it was for a whole array of reasons (some of which have been set out in previous posts). The order I picked to teach them, and which I chose to emphasize, were for what I thought would be the best way to share knowledge and experience and not for the outside calendar. It was then, by sheer serendipity that the themes fit as they did with the calendar:
Now this week, the last week of the session, parama shiva — the highest tattva. Shiva tattva is the most subjective principle and the most universal. It represents the essence of being (sat), consciousness (cit), and bliss (ananda). It is everywhere and nowhere, in all beings and not. It is whatever ever we think of as spirit or force or web of being or light or pulsation or divine — whatever we believe is the very essence of being. It is most interesting that by my series of contemplations and choices over the winter holidays, that I gave myself the homework assignment, as it were, to be specifically contemplating, practicing with, and studying the shiva tattva as I offer peace to Becky as she departs and seek my own peace in my grief over the loss of her physical presence.
