Having been brought to yoga by the Beats and the Beatles and having discovered Be Here Now not long after it was published (Quaker youth camp in New York in the 1970s—of course we did), this was a bit of history.
Tomorrow I go back into the office. I am grateful for my slow reentry.
When my friend Mac asked if I would let my readers know that his dance group Human Landscape Dance will be performing at Dance Place on Saturday and Sunday, July 9th and 10th, I agreed without hesitation. As I was contemplating what to write, I found myself thinking about the koshas–the energetic sheaths of the body. The yogis claim that the individual has five koshas. The outermost, the annamaya kosha, is the “food body.” “Food” in this context encompasses everything that comes into our body through all of our senses–touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell. I thought about what it might mean to “eat local” if eating meant everything that we encounter with our senses.
I am not a locavore (I too thoroughly enjoy avocado, coconut and, in winter, citrus), but I do try to emphasize local food as the mainstay of my diet. I do it mostly for energetic reasons. I want fresh food to have been picked as recently as possible and not to have grown weary from travel. I want as few hands as possible to have touched the food I buy, and those hands to be those of a person who is happy with farming and is paid a living wage by the sale of the produce. When your food growers, transporters, and preparers live nearby you are getting to know your neighbors and community, and not just getting food from a faceless corporate entity. Over the years, you get to know each other a bit and learn what friends you have in common. More threads are woven into the fabric of your community.
Just as knowing the person who grows and sells you food means you can be more certain that it was raised and offered for sale with nourishment intended at every stage, so too having the art and entertainment we bring into our senses be created within our community creates a network of connection and support that we do not get when we only consume commercially prepared entertainment (though I cheerfully buy music from my favorite “stars,” go to the movies, and enjoy trips to Lincoln Center,and London’s West End, etc., just as I get avocados and citrus along with the greens from my garden and the fruits from the local farmers’ market).
I feel blessed to be able to connect with Mac as a neighbor (Mac, his wife Jennifer Mueller, who is a student of mine and fellow yoga teacher on the Hill, and their delightful daughter live several blocks from me) and others who are performing next Saturday as fellow dancers at the Sunday Contact Improv Jam. My dancing and personal explorations are raised up by the company of the wonderful dancers and friends who share that space, including those who will be performing next weekend.
Why wouldn’t I want to both support my friends and learn more about them by going to Dance Place to receive the dance offering they are so lovingly preparing for all of us? Such is the nature of feeding mindfully the annamaya kosha to help lead us to the opening and nurturing of our innermost spirit, finding and creating more bliss in ourselves and in the very essence of our community.
FYI. I’m looking for company to carpool or walk together to and from the Brookland Metro (for safety on the way home). Perhaps Sunday CI Jam, dinner on the Hill, and the Sunday night show?
Photo courtesy of Human Landscape Dance.
Friends will be interested to know that this week’s Department of Labor elevator poster announces the induction of Bayard Rustin in the Department’s Hall of Fame on the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington.
Note: If you look at this on the big screen or an IPad, or Android, and click on the image (enlarging as possible and as needed), the quotes are legible. I would like to type out the quotes for you, but I have much else that is clamoring for my attention.
“Write more, that’s all I have to say.” There were several more lines of text, but none so coherent or compelling as this.
Yes, spammer, I would like to be writing more imaginatively and more about the yoga here and elsewhere. I am fully occupied, though, with a technical writing of quite some magnitude if magnitude were to be measured only by the number of words and ideas included. With the social and substantive complexity relating to the project and how it fits within the fabric of creating the rules that govern our society, it is a creative in its own way, but it is more draining than inspiring.
The exercise involves many drafters who come from a wide range of perspectives, training and background, and who have different responsibilities and senses of responsibility. Most everyone is feeling stressed and under-supported in their own way and acting in the multifarious ways people act when that’s how they are experiencing things. I am struggling to stay compassionately present for myself and all who are engaged in the endeavor.
Reminding myself of reasons to be grateful always helps. The yoga and meditation practices, in addition to my creative pursuits, are at the top of the list. The practices are the only truly steady back up that I have. Perhaps that is true for everyone to a greater or lesser degree. The philosophies that inform the practices–whether renunciate or tantra–ultimately would not, I think, disagree.
