Long time neighbors and participants in the rose garden yoga posse, who have now retired and are moving to be nearer children and grandchildren, gave me their yard sign.
I will miss them for practice and around the neighborhood. I like, if they must go, that I will think of them fondly every time I come home to this exhortation and its call to practice.
When do you ever see pictures of the underside of a butterfly? Usually it’s the top view or from the side with the wings folded together. The underside, too, is sweet, especially because we can see the delicate legs clinging to the flower.
As I was noticing the decorations going up around the neighborhood about witches, ghosts, vampires, and ghouls, I found myself reflecting that as in the cultures that brought us Halloween, Indian folk tales are replete with stories of yogis who are practitioners of black magic. Even Patanjali, in his Yoga Sutras, warns that the practices (sadhana) must be for the purpose of uniting with spirit and not for attachment to the idea of developing supernatural powers.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
A couple of years ago, I took a brilliant class with Desiree Rumbaugh in which she used the theme of “getting out of our own way” to lead us to a place to better integrate our shoulders. As I was practicing with the Anusara principle of “thigh loop” this week, I was reminded of that class. We’ve all been in the situation where our habitual mindset, physical posture, life style, or emotions get in the way of our finding more freedom and happiness.
When our thigh bones move into the front plane of the body, the forward movement keeps us from opening our hips more fully and from getting into deeper and stronger poses that require our hips to be open (in fact, out of the way). When we take our thigh bones back, we physically have more freedom, more range of motion and are better able to access the deepest places of power and openness that allow us to soar on the mat. I’m working on it on the mat as a great reminder to get out of my own way off the mat.
Rosa’s Pizza is on the Long Island Railroad level of Penn Station. To my best recollection, it has been there since before I started taking the LIRR regularly in the early 1970s, and I still go there occasionally when I connect through Penn Station to visit my parents a few times a year. Rosa’s makes an eggplant slice that tastes like eggplant parmigiana on decent pizza crust. Yup, it’s got cow dairy and gluten and lots of fat, but it is one of those foods that is so strongly associated with both place and belonging for me that it gives me great delight to eat it once or twice a year.
When I was meditating yesterday morning, I had a vision of myself jet-lagged and groggy from landing in JFK and taking the train from the airport to Penn Station to head home after two and a half weeks of a study tour led by Professor Douglas Brooks of Tamil Nadu (including Chidambaram), which I am planning to do at the winter holidays. In this meditation moment, I was ecstatically happy to be eating an eggplant slice from Rosa’s after taking my seat on Amtrak. I enjoyed the moment and then let go of this reverie to slip deeper into meditation.
At work, I told a friend of mine about this vision. He said that was not the right approach to a trip to India — shouldn’t I be eagerly anticipating what I would experience in India itself? I begged to differ. The excitement and anticipation of what I will see and experience and learn is a given. It was sweet to have pierce my meditation how happy I will be to return home. It helps me remember that for all the ups and downs of my choices, I am comfortable enough with them to be finding meditative bliss in the idea of something that is part of “home.”
