On the way home, it being twilight because I’d stayed talking about the state of our country and what William Penn House can do to support action and resistance, I was fortunate to see bats swooping for mosquitoes. In practice, we contemplated dharma and integrity.
This summer, we will be exploring a very few of the names of Shiva and how they can draw us to a better understanding of ourselves on and off the mat.
According to the sources, Shiva has either 108 names or 1,000. Each name has a different meaning. All of the meanings point to aspects of our own being that are worthy of contemplation. Some aspects will resonate more deeply for us. Some less so.
For me, besides my almost childlike delight in of lists, words, and myths, contemplating the various aspects is of deep usefulness in exploring my understanding of myself on and off the mat. The various names describe different aspects human nature and how we relate to others and the earth.
The multiplicity of the names also highlights that each of us names and experiences spirituality in a unique way and should have the freedom to do so. (As an aside, I think this multiplicity of forms of worship could be seen as a kind of rebellion within a rigid system of religious laws, but that is a whole other set of thoughts).
In using these forms of meditation as part of our yoga practice or otherwise, whether we meditate on highly abstract notion of “Shiva” representing the auspicious nature of all beings or on one of the names that points to individual aspects of personality, contemplation on any aspect or name can be used to deepen our relation to our best self so that we can be more aligned with our world inside and out.
For class this summer, we obviously cannot get to more than a very few. Feel free to send to me your suggestions about names to highlight.
Tonight, in addition to the regular students, a group of high school girls who were staying at William Penn House for the week, joined us. Their school, which is a Catholic girls school in Kentucky, requires the students to select a work of service in their senior year that involves the quality of mercy.
On the initiative of two of the girls, the group came to DC to lobby their senators on global climate change for their mercy service. They mostly hadn’t taken any yoga, but were enthusiastic to have it be part of their experience, and we explored a little how yoga practice might support them in such service.
said the guy who is doing the exterior painting and repairs to me this morning, after we were talking about what needed to be done with the stairs, and we talked a little to the downstairs resident who was on his way out to work. Then he paused, after thinking about what he had seen of my house and garden and added, “unless it is cultivated.”
“Yes,” I replied, “it is cultivated.” I will never be completely easy-going, but at the same time as some might wish me more easy going, one of my strengths is my attention to detail and my ability to create order. I cultivate, though, an ease with necessary disorder — the disruptions that come hand-in-hand with construction, repairs, creation (art, kitchen, garden, home), growing relationships, and comfort where I am. We may not be able to change our nature, but we can make shifts that ease our being. Radical affirmation in yoga is accepting our tendencies, but then seeking shifts to make life even fuller.
What if we were to cease to think of discipline as constraint, as punishment, as something confining and unattainably rigorous, something satisfying only in having suffered for gain? What if we were to understand it, as Swami Chidvilasananda, suggests as discipleship, a cleaving to the path out of the exquisitely blissful yearning for the light? Such discipline is, I think, what is the true practice of brahmacharya — aligning with the divine.
It was such a beautiful day that I spent as much time as possible walking in the neighborhood. That walking is “good for me” was just an incidental benefit.
