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A Glimpse

ByElizabeth

On the way to Madhuban, we caught a rare glimpse of Trishula and Nanda Devi. It is usually too misty to see them from where we were staying, and they were not visible when we were on the drive back to Delhi.

In a few hours, I head to the airport for the long ride home, having bathed in the beauty of music and mountains, with, I hope, fresh perspective for the work ahead.

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    Amy Ippoliti’s 30-Day Yoga Challenge

    ByElizabeth

    Anusara yogini and teacher extraordinaire, Amy Ippoliti, started a “30-Day Yoga Challenge,” which she updates monthly, for students and friends who are her Facebook friends.  For the past several months, the challenge has been to work towards some very challenging poses (how appropriate for a challenge).  This month Amy invited students to practice without air conditioning, or for hot yoga practitioners, without extra heat.  Granted, she is based in Boulder, Colorado, where it is not 101F today, but she speaks my mind.  Whenever people have asked me what I think about hot yoga, I have answered that it serves some people very well, but I always find myself asking the question, whence is the heat coming and will it enhance my yoga to change the room temperature if I need to burn fossil fuels to practice?

    Why is practicing without a technologically altered environment a yoga challenge?  Have you ever found that if conditions aren’t right, you think you cannot do your practice?  If we are truly practicing with commitment, then what we want to do is to find the practice that will fit the environment (including not just the outer environment, but the state of our mind and physical well-being) on any given day, even if it means that the practice will not meet our expectation of what our practice should be.

    When we practice steadily and listen to the teachings, one of the things yoga teaches us is how to be more sensitive to our environment and to what we put into our minds and bodies.  A friend complained of being terribly sleepy the other day.  I said it was the heat; look at your pets; don’t you notice that they are sleeping more in the heat?  What practicing in accordance with the ambient temperature means (or eating or sleeping or dressing or engaging in leisure activity) learning better how to align with the energies around us, including being sensitive to how we would optimally practice in the heat.  As yogis, I believe that what we want, ever more deeply and more profoundly, is to live aligned with nature and our own being in it so that we can find better recognize the fullness and the light of being whatever challenges arise.

    I’m doing a modified version of Amy’s challenge here in DC this week:  at the William Penn House, I’ll take whatever air conditioning is on (which, for those of you who are wondering, can be pretty nice and cool since it is the ground floor).  At the house practice, I’ll keep the house at the same 80-82F I typically keep the house when it is over 90F outside; I won’t lower it because I am practicing, but we won’t be having it over 90F.  At Willow Street, I’ll go with the flow.

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    Boy Leading a Horse

    ByElizabeth

    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.

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    A Cookie and a Note

    ByElizabeth

    Last week, a co-worker stopped by my office to chat. Not surprisingly, the conversation turned to current affairs, and I voiced my every day growing anger and grief and disgust and commitment to seek more ways to have positive impact. My co-worker essentially responded that as a yoga teacher, she thought I ought to know that I shouldn’t get so upset, things weren’t so bad. 

    As should not be surprising to those who know me or practice yoga with me or read what I post on social media that I explained that my yoga calls for lucid and engaged citizenship and not escape from challenges and difficult emotions. My co-worker demurred, still wanting her own comfortable silence.

    The fateful weekend passed. When I returned to the office this week, I found a note and a cookie on my desk. The note basically said, wow, Charlottesville, I hope you’re feeling ok, I thought you might like a cookie. Without addressing the substance of the note, (my own conflict aversion coming to the fore or perhaps my sense that in this case there was little point in pursuing the conversation further and my co-worker has been a pleasant colleague ),  when emailing about another matter, I said merely thank you for the cookie.

    I’d thought that would be the end of it, but my co-worker then stopped by to thank me for saying thanks for the cookie, I no longer restrained myself from passionately though tolerably politely articulating what I really thought, including what a privilege it is to be able to have a bakery cookie  whether for hunger or comfort. 

    I can relate to wanting everything to be ok, and I’m really glad I have plenty of food and a comfortable home, but I also believe that with my privilege comes great responsibility, now even more than ever. I seek to be more aware not less. What about you?

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