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    Making Your Practice an Offering to Yourself

    ByElizabeth

    This morning, when I was walking to work, a young mother stood on the sidewalk talking with a friend. Her daughter, who was perhaps a little over a year and new to walking, lit up with a huge smile when I came within range. She dropped her mother’s hand and ran over to me, holding out a flower petal. That her hand was slightly grubby and the petal crumpled only made it more adorable.

    Nearly eleven hours later, as I get ready to leave the office and head up to Takoma to teach a restorative yoga class, I find myself recalling the offering, with such innocence and joy, of the flower petal.

    What we want to do with our practice and teaching is to have it be, at least on one level, such a spontaneous, delighted, and innocent offering that any perceived obstructions or interference with a sense of grace (such as a long hard work-day and attendant fatigue) dissolve. We can melt into the knowledge that practicing and making offering is just the right thing to bring us back to our own fullness (purna).

    What we choose as the particulars of the practice, of course, will be tempered by our physical and mental condition.

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

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    State of the Garden (and Making Space)

    ByElizabeth

    If there is a shortage of space in one direction, before giving up, try another direction.  In a tiny garden, using vertical space opens lots more opportunities.  In our own bodies (and minds), taking advantage of different ways of getting to a particular place can make embodiment that much fuller.

    hops-blossomssquash-and-tomatoes

    hops vine, cherry tomatoes and butternut squash

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    Gardening, Cleaning, Cooking (and Vinyasa Krama and Kali)

    ByElizabeth

    Vinyasa krama is the art of sequencing.  How a yoga practice or flow is sequenced can determine whether it is uplifting or inward going, exhilarating or calming.  When we are trained and attentive, we start to know the most optimal order to open our bodies and our focus to align with the time of day, the season, the weather, our mood, and our health.  This incredible art helps us be positioned and aligned in a way that we feel free in time and space, rather than being constrained by time and space.

    This morning while I was out in the garden, I was thinking a lot about vinyasa krama and the goddess Kali — goddess of, among other things, time and change, and thus, of sequencing.  I woke very early, brought to consciousness by the long light of the solstice even through closed curtains.  As I went about my morning, rinsing the sprouts while heating the water for my morning coffee; cutting back the greens and herbs before starting breakfast; doing the major pruning and clean-up before doing more decorative garden work; finishing cooking before taking out the recycling; applying a facial mask before starting to vacuum; never walking up or down the stairs empty-handed; waiting to gather the bills until after I was clean and waiting for friends to arrive, etc., I realized how important sequencing is to the richness of my days.  By knowing the best way to order tasks for my needs, my day is simultaneously productive, unhurried, and enjoyable.

    By the time my friends arrived around noon, I had meditated, taken care of the garden, gathered food for my own breakfast and to share with friends, talked to neighbors, cleaned the house and myself, done a little asana, written in my journal, and sorted the mail.  Had I not known from long experience and conscious attention how to sequence all the different elements, knowing which ones went together, which took longest, which ones if done earlier or later would create double clean up, etc, I would have been tired and the tasks unfinished.  Instead, after brunch, I came home to a tended garden, a freshly made bed, and time to enjoy a quiet evening.

    These sequencing principles also apply for me on major projects at work.  If ordered one way, the work is exponentially harder, the deadline a fearsome thing; if ordered another way, everything comes together mostly as it should when it should.  When I order my work with attention (this assumes others cooperate with this endeavor), I have time to do a good, careful job and still take breaks, eat well, and leave the office in time to take or teach yoga class.

    Whether you are doing your home yoga practice or cooking or working, choose to sequence the elements of your practice, your activities, or your day, with attentiveness, reverence, love, and respect, and Kali will support you and not show you her most fearsome face.

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    Found Exhortation (Core Value of the Month: Discipline)

    ByElizabeth

    What if we were to cease to think of discipline as constraint, as punishment, as something confining and unattainably rigorous, something satisfying only in having suffered for gain?  What if we were to understand it, as Swami Chidvilasananda, suggests as discipleship, a cleaving to the path out of the exquisitely blissful yearning for the light?  Such discipline is, I think, what is the true practice of brahmacharya — aligning with the divine.

    It was such a beautiful day that I spent as much time as possible walking in the neighborhood.  That walking is “good for me” was just an incidental benefit.

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