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    Humility

    ByElizabeth

    Last night at house practice, we were led to think about humility (in Sanskrit vinaya). Yoga, similar to religion, tends to privilege the idea of humility.

    From a one perspective, it is easy to think of the benefit that those in charge–the priests and the moneyed and privileged classes that support religious institutions to get help staying in power–get from preaching the virtues of humility. If the relatively powerless are led to believe that they will benefit spiritually from practicing humility before humans and institutions that hold sway over them, that certainly helps perpetuate a patently unfair status quo.

    We can recognize our own skills and talents and relative worthiness and actively seek justice and fairness, though, and still be humble. However much intrinsic power we have and extrinsic fairness in distribution of power we seek, we can still recognize that we are not ultimately in charge of exactly how our life will play out in the vast and complex web of being. Feeling humility in the face of all that we do not and cannot know is just living in awe at the wonder of life. This, I think, is true and sustainable humility.

    Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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    Aphids (and limitations)

    ByElizabeth

    Even though we had real, hard frosts this winter, there are already aphids on my roses.  I went out this morning and picked the aphids off of the new buds — yes, my roses are budding.  It was too cold to stay out long, but I did a little weeding and planted a couple of pots of pansies.

    I was thinking about how I garden in my tiny space — using my fingers to take the aphids off of each rose bud, pulling up individual weeds between new plants in containers, choosing to let some volunteers come up between bricks because it expands my planting area.  How different it would be if I even had a small yard by suburban standards.  It would not be possible to attend to all the detail that I see, unless I were to spend every waking hour in the garden.  If I had an acre, it would take three full-time gardeners to attend without tools and sprays the small things I touch by hand.

    It seems we make our world as big or as small as we want it.  My tiny garden is as much a universe for me as a gardener as would be an acre garden — though of course I cannot grow sprawling things like melons and potatoes and fruit trees.

    But the fullness of how much I see and experience, how much calls out for love and attention, how much I am enriched by tending and observing what is there,  is not diminished by what I do not have.  Rather, I am called to expand to the greatest what I have within my limits.  This is true, too, in our yoga and meditation practice, and our lives.  We can choose to live expansively no matter what our limits or we can choose to feel bound and diminished by our limits.  The garden, this morning, helped me remind myself of that choice.  It helped me turn towards possibilities for growth instead of towards constriction.

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    Yoga Slow Dance (Making It All Improv)

    ByElizabeth

    The dance of yoga is about motion in stillness and stillness in motion, and in not letting oneself be frozen.  Stillness is the space between vibrations, instead of the shutting down or closing off vibration.  To experience the space between the vibrations (spanda) when changing shapes (poses; going from one thing to the next), one must emerge into the shape and disssolve out of it, with the expanding delight of the coming and going more important than achieving some precise, required shape to demonstrate self-control and mastery (not unlike the teaching in the Siva Sutra that knowledge both binds and liberates).

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