I attended a Zoom restorative yoga workshop led by my friend Suzanne. Maitri played sandbag and also provided a back massage while I was in child’s pose. Taking photos was tricky.
Sequence shown:
Supported supta badha konasana
Balasana
Viparita karani
Goddess of the unfolding of our deepest desires (of the subconscious). So I was told. At the Tillai Kali Temple outside of Chidambaram.
After hours of document drafting and emails and phone conferences today (with the pleasurable interlude of a walk to Eastern Market for celery, Russian pumpernickel, and a ripe avocado), I found myself wanting to remind myself that I have been some times some where other.
When I enter into a contact improv jam, I make a commitment. I commit to paying attention with all of my being, to myself, to my partner or partners of the moment, to all the others in the room, and to a spatial, energetic, and creative attention to the dance itself and for the dancers as community and co-creators of the dance (and sometimes for the observers, too).
I think this is not unlike the commitment of the tantric yoga practitioner who ideally engages all of life with a simultaneous attention to the inner and the outer, to the dance between the self and all that to which ones self comes into relationship and to the dance of relationship.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
In classical yoga, the term maya, one of the meanings of which is “illusion,” refers to all of our embodied being — the physical, mental, and emotional. The perceptible world is not real; only spirit is real. In the tantric philosophy of Kashmir Shaivism, maya tattva means something different. Kashmir Shaivism does not hold that the perceptible world is unreal, but rather that it is a more concrete form of spirit and that its very manifestness gives rise to the illusion that it is other than spirit. Maya, as such, is the beginning of the measurable world of intellect and perception. In this sense, it does not mean that any aspect of being of either ourselves or the very whole of being is more real than any other. As maya tattva, it denotes the conceptual bridge between the unknowable idea of spirit and the manifest world of our day to day. As we think and perceive the world in progressively more concrete terms, we tend to see difference, division, and diversity. When we see only difference and not the pervading unity of spirit, it is maya, illusion.
Yesterday, following the election in Massachusetts, the headlines screamed that the Democrats had lost control of the Senate and that health care reform was in jeopardy. Perhaps the simple arithmetic and vocabulary I learned in elementary school has changed, but last time I checked, 41 out of 100 is not a majority. It is as though we are hunting for division, for us v. them. We are looking for ways to create difference and divisiveness. Would we be more likely to fund health care for all instead of two wars, if we could stop being so bound in the maya that we are not all equally of spirit? I think so. In this, I am divided from millions of my fellow voters, who prefer waterboarding to health care, war to building an environmentally sustainable infrastructure, etc. or at least vote that way In thinking this way, I too am caught up in the web of difference. How then do I see spirit in all people (regardless of how they vote and what they believe) when I feel so passionately about this divisiveness and all the conflict, destruction, and misery it engenders? How do I personally (as my own yoga) create less conflict, even while working for what I believe?
Creating and seeing
Both division and unity
Is awfully human.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
