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    Signs Around Town (and Some Thoughts on Community)

    ByElizabeth

    I found on first and second and even third reading this declaration a little confusing. It may be that something was lost in translation (from the Bulgarian–a completely unknown language to me).

    It does not say that to each his own is freedom, but that we should have freedom AND to each his own.

    I think this means that true freedom is not everyone getting his or her own. Rather, out of freedom, we choose the binds of community and sometimes elect to forego complete individualism so that we can maximize the fulfillment of each individual as a member of the community.

    To each his own as the only governing principle does not permit anything other than suspicious and antagonistice relationship. Honoring that everyone wants to be recognized as a free individual but that getting the benefit and support of community requires freely choosing to submit, commit, and work to a relationship in which maximum individuality thrives but the community of individuals is greater than any of its individual members–that’s a great and worthy dance.

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

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    The Search Continues (based on some dreaming)

    ByElizabeth

    In 2000 or 2001, shortly before I started practicing Anusara yoga, a teacher who regularly played music in class, played for us a recording of Alice Coltrane singing a tantric chant to Siva and the Goddess Bhuvaneshvari.  I only heard the chant once while we were in savasana — corpse pose/final relaxation.  Although I only heard the chant once, for several months afterwards, I found myself having a recurring dream that I was wondering in a neighborhood that looked like the one where I grew up and went to high school and chanting the full chant.  At the time I merely found it curious that I seemed to have learned the sanskrit just by hearing the chant one time.  I have since learned that the recording may have been done right near my high school; that is where the Coltrane’s had a recording studio.  I also learned that the chant was a tantric chant.  At the time, my teachers were coming from a classical yoga perspective.  Did I actually learn the chant by osmosis?  Was having the very vibration of the chanting near where I lived and studied the catalyst for me, as a receptive being, discovering a path of tantric yoga?

    I have found other recordings of the chant.  One is Atman’s “Dancing to the Goddess” on the Eternal Dance CD, which is an electronica version.  The other is Ragani’s “Om Mata” on the Best of Both Worlds, which is a very nice kirtan/pop version.  I have several of Alice Coltrane’s recordings, which are great jazz, if you aren’t familiar with Alice Coltrane as a fabulous musician in her own right.  Recently I searched again on the internet to see if the bootleg had become available.  There was nothing on YouTube (though some good Alice Coltrane things to watch).    I bought Alice Coltrane’s “Radha-Krsna Mana Sankirtana,” which was originally recorded in 1977 (when I was in high school) and reissued in 2005, as I thought that was a promising source.  It has some good things on it, but no luck finding the recording I wanted to hear.

    The chant goes like this:

    Samba sadasiva, samba sadasiva, samba sadasiva, samba shambo.

    Om mata, om mata, om sri mata, jagade mata.

    Om bhuvaneshvari, sri bhuvaneshvari, hari parashakti, devi bhuvaneshvari.

    It is a chant to the benevolent, auspicious one within, the radiant goddess, the creatrix of the world.  Bhuvaneshvari is one of the ten wisdom goddesses.

    Please advise if you have access to the Alice Coltrane or another recording of this beautiful chant.

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    I Don’t Have a Life (Really? What a Strange Thing)

    ByElizabeth

    Last night I was thinking about what that phrase means.  I was talking with a friend who has a similar enthusiasm for studying, practicing, and teaching yoga, who also has a full-time job/career.  At some point in describing the number of hours I have spent studying with John Friend and other Anusara teachers, it came out of my mouth that I have been able to pursue this passionate engagement with yoga because, as others have said to me, “I don’t have a life.”  My friend, being in the same society after all, initially went right along with that statement as if it was a perfectly reasonable thing to say.

    Then we started questioning it.  It is not as though we do not both have rich, full, engaged, active lives.  How did the vernacular come up with a phrase  that says we do not “have a life,” if we are not so occupied with the things that society would have us do (for the “modern” woman I think this means high-powered career, husband, children, nice house) that we have enough time and flexibility to deeply pursue and explore beyond what we are supposed to do?

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