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On Being Anxious About The Election

ByElizabeth

As one who has long been intimate with anxiety, my best remedy is to take Krishna’s advice to Arjuna to heart and get up and do something.

If you don’t get the hoped for results, at least you tried. If there’s success, you’ll be a part of it. If you do nothing, all you have is your anxiety.

Second batch of postcards about to arrive. I don’t know if it will get out enough of the vote, but it feels like it helps create positive momentum.

May you be happy, healthy, and inspired.

And remember to pause for beauty.

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    Only a little rain (and vimarsha)

    ByElizabeth

    My gardening friends have been commiserating and worrying about the abnormally dry weather.   For the past couple of days, we have all been concerned that this storm has brought so little needed rain, although we are grateful to get whatever rain comes.  Other acquaintances were complaining yesterday that it still wasn’t sunny.  When I mentioned drought conditions, they had not noticed.  If they noticed once it was pointed out, they suggested reasons why for them personally, it would still be a better thing for it to be a sunny day.  Part of the reason I garden is to keep me connected with the rhythms of the seasons and the weather.  If we do not grow our own food and depend on the fruits of our labors, nor are taught the relationship between the weather and our survival, there is no reason to know it.  We become disconnected from nature and from the earth.

    For me, connection to the earth deepens my connection to myself and to spirit.  How can we know ourselves if we do not know how the earth nourishes us and how we relate to the earth?  How can we recognize the light within ourselves, if we are disconnected from nature?  At the same time, the practice of yoga, with its inward questing (antar-vimarsha — the quest to touch or reveal the true Self), by revealing to us the subtle energies and knowledge of the relationship of body and mind, can lead us back to yearning for a deeper understanding of the world around us and for a healthier relationship between the give and take between us and the earth.  We can thus reach spirit both by being more aware of the outside and seeing where we are disconnected in our practice off the mat and by reaching inward using our spiritual practice (the Anusara principles are designed to be a pulsation of reaching outward and inward for an ever growing expansion and understanding of mind and spirit) and then knowing the outside is not aligned and needs to be shifted.  All this is the process of vimarsha, like a little more rain in the drought to nourish and encourage the unfolding of spring.

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    Personal History (and Samskara and Opening to Grace)

    ByElizabeth

    A samskara is generally defined as an impression left in us by a past action or experience.  I found myself thinking about the process of samskara yesterday, when I went with long time friends of my family to watch their son taking class at the summer program at the Kirov Academy of Ballet.

    I have not watched a ballet class (except on the occasional film) since I was actively studying ballet as a teenager and young adult.  I have long been conscious of how ballet imprinted my body image and way of looking at myself, but have not found a space before where I was able to look at this aspect of my history with fresh eyes.

    What was different yesterday, was that I was observing with openness.  I was sitting with people I have known all my life, sharing their warmth, love, and parental pride for their son, rather than concentrating on my own history.  It brought back memories, but not in the same way that sitting by myself or with a girlfriend, watching a documentary has done.

    In this open state of reflection, I witnessed something that I knew at some level, but had not given much thought to before:  how much having taken thousands of hours of ballet class has informed the way I teach.  My tendency in my own practice and in my teaching to see the details of  alignment and to try asanas repeatedly until it seems that I or my students have experienced the alignment in the most optimal way for the day is straight out of my experience in ballet class.

    Softening and witnessing instead of feeling or judging from past experience gives the possibility of shifting from samskaras, even ones that are very deeply etched into body and mind.  Being with my friends yesterday, of course, gave me the joy of seeing the spectacular dancing of these young men and the delight of connection.  It also gave me the unexpected gift of a moment of understanding how the Anusara principle of “opening to grace” allows us to shift.  When we are open, nonjudging witness consciousness  (an aspect of “opening to grace”), that is when we have the possibility with each thing we repeat, to experience it new without being bound by our samskaras.

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    Warming Up on a Windy Wintry Day (and Warm Organic Ginger Oil Massage Treatment)

    ByElizabeth

    If it had not been for the half off coupon from Green Deals, I might not have gone to Wellbeing Massage in Dupont Circle for an ayurvedically inspired warm organic ginger oil massage after work today.  But I am certainly glad I succumbed to the lure of the coupon.

    It was absolutely perfect on this windy, bitter day in mid-winter to surrender, in a perfectly heated and softly lit room, to having warm oil poured onto my eyebrow center (ajna door) and having it massaged into my scalp, face, and neck and then poured on and slathered all over.  With the quantity of oil used, it is more a treatment than a massage, and and such, an admirable supplement (and never a replacement) for my regular massages with long time Capitol Hill massage therapist and friend Patrick McClintock of House of Hands.  For the first time in weeks, my skin feels completely hydrated, and though my house was set at 59F when I got home two hours after the treatment, I still feel warm.

    If you decide you want to get one of these treatments to chase away winter cold and dryness, please mention my name (shameless solicitation; if five of you go, I get a free treatment).  And if you are looking for a fantastic therapeutic massage from a wonderful person and experienced therapist, give Patrick a call.  And if five of you go to get a massage with him and mention my name, maybe he and I can work out a deal donating a portion of the proceeds to D-CLAW‘s next charity of choice (that’s DC Ladies Arm Wrestling for Charity) (more on D-CLAW in a future post).