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Gardening, Cleaning, Cooking (and Vinyasa Krama and Kali)
Vinyasa krama is the art of sequencing. How a yoga practice or flow is sequenced can determine whether it is uplifting or inward going, exhilarating or calming. When we are trained and attentive, we start to know the most optimal order to open our bodies and our focus to align with the time of day, the season, the weather, our mood, and our health. This incredible art helps us be positioned and aligned in a way that we feel free in time and space, rather than being constrained by time and space.
This morning while I was out in the garden, I was thinking a lot about vinyasa krama and the goddess Kali — goddess of, among other things, time and change, and thus, of sequencing. I woke very early, brought to consciousness by the long light of the solstice even through closed curtains. As I went about my morning, rinsing the sprouts while heating the water for my morning coffee; cutting back the greens and herbs before starting breakfast; doing the major pruning and clean-up before doing more decorative garden work; finishing cooking before taking out the recycling; applying a facial mask before starting to vacuum; never walking up or down the stairs empty-handed; waiting to gather the bills until after I was clean and waiting for friends to arrive, etc., I realized how important sequencing is to the richness of my days. By knowing the best way to order tasks for my needs, my day is simultaneously productive, unhurried, and enjoyable.
By the time my friends arrived around noon, I had meditated, taken care of the garden, gathered food for my own breakfast and to share with friends, talked to neighbors, cleaned the house and myself, done a little asana, written in my journal, and sorted the mail. Had I not known from long experience and conscious attention how to sequence all the different elements, knowing which ones went together, which took longest, which ones if done earlier or later would create double clean up, etc, I would have been tired and the tasks unfinished. Instead, after brunch, I came home to a tended garden, a freshly made bed, and time to enjoy a quiet evening.
These sequencing principles also apply for me on major projects at work. If ordered one way, the work is exponentially harder, the deadline a fearsome thing; if ordered another way, everything comes together mostly as it should when it should. When I order my work with attention (this assumes others cooperate with this endeavor), I have time to do a good, careful job and still take breaks, eat well, and leave the office in time to take or teach yoga class.
Whether you are doing your home yoga practice or cooking or working, choose to sequence the elements of your practice, your activities, or your day, with attentiveness, reverence, love, and respect, and Kali will support you and not show you her most fearsome face.
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July Greetings–Ultimate Freedom (and Some Free Yoga) (Web Version of E-Newsletter)
Dear Friends,
It is Saturday morning of Independence Day weekend. I have sat for my morning meditation, watered the garden, pet the cats, and done a few errands around the house. In an hour or so, I will be heading up to Willow Street to teach my noon class. As I take the time to care for garden, cats, house, and prepare to teach, I have been contemplating the concept of freedom.
In the tantric shaivite tradition, we are taught that one of the key aspects of spirit is svatantriya — ultimate freedom. We are also taught that we are ourselves inseparable from spirit, just as a drop of ocean water is no less part of the ocean for being a drop. Spirit chooses, out of its freedom and play (lila) to embody itself in forms that are limited in space and time. One of our greatest sources of suffering is feeling bound, thinking that we are stuck with who and what we are in the constraints of this mortal body, with all its quirks, forgetting our own auspiciousness.
I could get grumpy about the need to do errands and to teach on a holiday weekend. I could feel constrained from my usual activities around town by the combination of single-tracking on the Metro and the influx of tourists for the activities on the Mall, the combination of which will likely add an hour’s communiting time to teach today and to do volunteer work in Georgetown tomorrow at the Lantern Bookshop. I could choose instead to be grateful that I have a house that needs caring, a garden to water, a class that gives me great joy and abiding satisfaction to share the incredible yoga principles that have so enhanced my own life, and volunteer work that I have enjoyed for over 15 years.
I am not going to be telling anyone that we are without limitation, being as we are in time and space. We are always and perfectly free, however, to choose to turn towards the auspicious, the light, the good, the uplifting, the highest or we can turn away. We can act in ways that bring us ever more in alignment with spirit , or we can act in ways that take ourselves and that in our orbit farther from the good. The more we exercise our freedom to turn towards the auspicious, the happier and healthier we will be, regardless of the fact of life in a mortal body. That choice is our true freedom and the way to our hearts.
To help you experience svatantriya, to choose freedom of heart, there’s nothing better than some free yoga. The weekend of July 15-17, Willow Street Yoga will be offering it’s summer free class weekend. I’ll be offering gentle/therapeutics at noon on July 16th in Takoma Park. Preference is giving to new students and to returning students who have brought new students with them.
For July at William Penn House, I’m offering a two-part freebie: (1) brand new students get first class free; please invite your friends and neighbors; (2) if you are an existing student who brings a new student with you, you get a free class when the new student comes back for a second class.
Have a wonderful Independence Day, however you choose to celebrate and see you soon.
Peace and light,Elizabeth
