Signs and Blossoms Around Town
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State of the Garden
Uma was indifferent to it, but my friend H thought the tat soi I’d picked within the half hour was better than catnip.
- Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation
Found Exhortation (and “Opening to Grace”)
I was contemplating today the Anusara yoga principle of “opening to grace,” one aspect of which I always understood to be seeking to pause and listen in and from a place of luminous spaciousness before acting or responding to what one does or encounters. Ideally, the intentional practice of yoga opens the possibility of doing all this simultaneously and immediately, but most of us need to reduce the speed at which we approach or take in things if we are to experience and engage the fullest and most nuanced relationship with the wild extraordinariness of what is in and around us.
If we move too quickly or push effortfully or immoderately past our limitations, we are at risk, as I have recently reminded myself in a rather clumsy way. When through our own actions or happenstance we are pushed past our healthy capacity, it is time to slow down, to pause, to reflect, to reinvite and reexplore the basics and seek a deeper level of understanding and capability if we are to expand our capacity to live with grace.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Hare Om Ganesha
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
- Art and Culture | Community and Family | Food for the Body | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Gardening | Photos
It Does Not Get Much Better (and Satcitananda)
The key concept of yoga–satcitananda can be elusive, like all abstract concepts in the yoga philosophy and in other philosophies or areas of study. We are given metaphors and analogies in the texts to help us recognize when, through our practice, we experience in our self the manifestation of what had just been theory (book knowledge).
It is hard to describe, for example, what it truly means to be fully present and aware in the moment and thus suffused with bliss
(satcitananda).There was a moment, standing in the hot sun, when I tasted a sun-warmed, perfectly ripe blueberry that I thought, this is a moment many of my students might imagine to be able to extrapolate the abstract concept of satcitananda.
Notice also the volunteer purslane at the base of the blueberry bush. Weeding and harvesting greens for salad and stir fry can be coextensive. Don’t poison or discard your purslane (or your dandelions). Pick it and eat it; purslane is a great plant source of omega fatty acids.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
What to Say When
It appears from my long silence here (but not on other social media, where I am regularly posting photos), whatever I might have to say about yoga has been eclipsed by the fact that when I think to write about anything else, I think about calls for peace and justice and, and, and…
I say this then to those, like me, who are not struggling to have enough food and a safe place to sleep and have either never known or long forgotten what that is like, I use what I have learned from my practice of asana to keep my bones and muscles in alignment and I meditate to keep perspective. I make sure to be contributing in someway to share the safety and abundance I am privileged to enjoy, and I question myself regularly about whether I have the capability and capacity to do more.
And —a key teaching of yoga from my perspective— I let myself have hits of joy from encounters with beauty. Every day.
How are you holding up?
