I went to visit today. Is it wrong for me to so delight in the grace of this sculpture—when it is so far from where it was originally created (Tamil Nadu, India)?
This week I drafted, and today signed along with two witnesses, a living will. It has been on my “to do” list for a good 20 years, and I have been carrying in my wallet a card from the Society for the Right to Die (which no longer appears to exist) saying that I have a living will in my possession. Two things led me to get it done at this time. The first is my deeply held belief that privileging hospice is an important and mostly missing element of the health care debate. The second was witnessing a dear friend have the last few months of her life being attached to machines and receiving ever more painful medical intervention even with end stage cancer. I know that is not what I want.
This society gives you the medical care, though, whether you want it or not, if you do not say something loudly, clearly, and with technically the right jargon. I could not wait any longer. I did the research, drafted the document, spoke to my family and friends, and finally did it. It is hard to do. I am still anxious that I did not do it right or that in the end, should it come where the living will would be necessary, my wishes will not be honored. It is hard to think about death, illness, and accident. It is scary to approach legal documents that are so fraught with political and religious weight (a friend cautioned me to make sure I have lots of copies because of his experience of a nurse, who because of her religious doctrine, repeatedly “lost” copies of his mother’s directives when she was dying from advanced Altzheimer’s.)
The yoga helps me think about these things with some measure of equanimity. I have even heard teachers say that the whole reason for a steady practice is to be prepared for death and dying, so that we can go peacefully, comfortable with both our life and our death. Part of the yoga off the mat, in this regard, is recognizing how society is likely to behave, and what we need to do to be healthy within the confines of society.
If not for the storm
It is unlikely I would
Have cut the roses.
This morning, woken by the purring cat from an anxious dream in which I was not doing enough to make things better (I am not making this up), my first thoughts were of escalating war in Afghanistan and deepening economic crisis at home. It felt almost strange and abstract to be worrying about these things from my warm comfortable bed.
I think worrying can have a positive place in our lives. If we just get worried or anxious about things and get trapped in not doing or growing or reaching (both inward and outward) for a sense of connection and spirit, then worrying will cloak or limit us. If we recognize worries as showing us limitations, then we can use them to grow and change and spur us to action.
After the 25 tattvas describing the physical world and our being and understanding of the world that correspond in both the classical and Kashmir Shaivist systems, are Kashmir Shaivism’s six kanchukas — cloakings or coverings. The kanchukas are niyati (limitation of place), kaala (limitation of time), raaga ( attachment), vidya (limitation of knowledge), kalaa (limitation of action), maya (illusion of individuality/manifestation).
From a tantric perspective, experiencing ourselves as thinking, individual beings in the manifest world, constrained by time and space, only binds us if we think that is all we are. If we get completely entangled in these constraints, then our sense of spirit is cloaked, just as if we get stuck in worrying, instead of using worries as a spur to work for change, we become miserable.
I meditate and practice asana, as taught by my teachers, to reveal the restraints of physical being as only part of my being. Spiritual practice can serve to enable us to experience freedom of heart and mind, to bathe in the bliss of the essence of ourselves that is universal and unconstrained by the limitations of individual manifestation. The point of these practices not to escape our individual selves or to gratify them (that would still be “cloaked”), but to find the strength and stability to serve better and to work for a world in which all beings have an equal chance to seek the spirit and experience the bliss of connection.
