A mourner asks, who is going to step up and defend the rights of women?
My answer is each and every one of us; how can we expect someone else to step up unless we are doing it ourselves?
I think the wish that RGB Rest In Peace and rest in power can be an exhortation to the living. When we can live resting in our own peace and power, then we will have what we need to persist and shift.
Savasana–pose of the corpse, the pose of final relaxation, the pose without which no practice is fully complete– is both a very simple pose and one that is rather advanced.
Sometimes when I teach beginners I ask them what was the first Sanskrit word they learned. Usually they guess the word is “yoga.” The first Sanskrit pose name they get, though, and it doesn’t take more than a couple of classes is savasana. For most beginning the practice of yoga, the permission to stretch out on the back after an hour or more of new ways of engaging body, mind, and spirit is welcome indeed. This is particularly true for those who are overly busy and chronically sleep-deprived as are so many people I know.
What teachers often miss about savasana is that it can be very hard for some students. Injuries (chronic or episodic), tightness, or habitual misalignment (or expectations of how lying down should feel) make it challenging to be in the pose. The default can be to put supports under the knees or head without taking the time to recognize that it may be necessary to focus on and adjust the alignment before relaxing to see if ease can be found without props.
Other practitioners find it agitating to be asked to lie still for 5-10 minutes, because they are so used to being active all the time. Even if they can make their bodies still, their minds race around, and the idea of final relaxation seems anathema.
At the beginning,
savasana can be just stopping movement and enjoying letting go and relaxing.
But the pose is something much deeper than relaxing after a good workout. The pose of the corpse is not about being unmoving like a dead body, but about ceasing consciously acting and surrendering to the elemental vibration of universal being so that the inner fullness becomes indistinguishable from that which infuses all of the matter of the universe. As one gets more advanced, the alignment in the pose evidently becomes one of inner fullness and luminousity supporting the draping of the physical body. We practice going to earth and light, dissolving the constant awareness of our individuality.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
The pouring rain is an inconvenience on a play day when I am toting baggage, writing materials, and electronic devices. It is hard to remember, when surrounded by concrete, glass, steel, and macadam, how urgently we need the rain. I am hoping for the trees, the farmers, and all of us, that it is also raining back home in DC.
Friends and acquaintances ask me whether I am teaching yoga. My answer is that I do it when asked. Last week, I offered a “release” practice for a friend who is still having hot flashes many years after their final menstrual cycle. I said, it helped me, when I suddenly overheated, to think of offering something that no longer served, into the fire pit of the goddess to transmute into energy and light.
Today I offered some asana practice-inspired tips to any older friend to help with getting up and down off the floor.
What in your current stage of embodiment are you interested in practicing and deepening your awareness and understanding?
I very much appreciate the neighbors who enthusiastically plant their gardens and share beauty.
Last night at house practice, we were led to think about humility (in Sanskrit vinaya). Yoga, similar to religion, tends to privilege the idea of humility.
From a one perspective, it is easy to think of the benefit that those in charge–the priests and the moneyed and privileged classes that support religious institutions to get help staying in power–get from preaching the virtues of humility. If the relatively powerless are led to believe that they will benefit spiritually from practicing humility before humans and institutions that hold sway over them, that certainly helps perpetuate a patently unfair status quo.
We can recognize our own skills and talents and relative worthiness and actively seek justice and fairness, though, and still be humble. However much intrinsic power we have and extrinsic fairness in distribution of power we seek, we can still recognize that we are not ultimately in charge of exactly how our life will play out in the vast and complex web of being. Feeling humility in the face of all that we do not and cannot know is just living in awe at the wonder of life. This, I think, is true and sustainable humility.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
