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Historic Anniversary and Yogic Discernment

ByElizabeth

January 6 is yet another day so historic it warrants reflection and impetus to action on every anniversary. (That might be resting, by the way, if you spend much of your temporal, energetic, and emotional resources in the efforts to make change and ward off evil.)

One of the yoga practices is exercising discrimination and acting with discernment (viveka) in response to changes in the world, the human collective, and ourselves. Discernment requires learning and admitting to the difficult truths and learning from experts and innovators.

Meditation, contemplation, reflection, and being present to oneself is all very nice, but without study and discriminative participation in the collective, it starts being more like spiritual bypassing than not.

What are your thoughts on this day? How does staying present to the reality of it make you feel? How are you balancing taking care of yourself and participating in shifting the narrative?

It seems somewhat fitting that DC has been crippled today by the first significant snow storm in quite some time.

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    Ripple Effects (and personal yoga)

    ByElizabeth

    Yesterday I looked at the continuing news about the crash.  Among all the other stories, it seemed fairly unlikely that there would be metro service between Capitol Hill and Takoma Park by the weekend.  This created a complication for me.  Living without a car and commuting a number of times a week to Takoma Park to teach and take class, I had to figure out how to get there.  It will be easy enough (I think) to get to Willow Street on Saturday to teach by taxi cab and to find a bus combination to get home.

    In addition to teaching, though, I had been looking forward to studying with Amy Ippoliti on Friday night and Sunday morning.  I could take a taxi and a bus combination to study with Amy this weekend or just forego my tuition.  All that would be easy enough.  But I had invited a friend to come and visit to take the whole weekend with Amy — which includes another 12 hours of teacher training on Saturday and Sunday, where I will be off doing my own thing.  Since my friend and I will have very different schedules for this yoga weekend, and neither of us are much of a driver, renting a car was not really a viable option.  I thought about just staying in a hotel in Silver Spring.

    Then I got to my personal yoga.  One of the hardest things for me to do is to ask for help (of almost any kind).  I am good at offering to help and am good at both helping when asked and saying I cannot help (the latter took some practice).  What I know from being a “helper” is that I get great joy from giving and offering assistance.  My never asking, then, means not giving those in my life the joy of providing assistance.  I overcame my deeply ingrained reluctance and asked for help.  Not big help.  Just is there someone already attending the training who can give a ride from the workshop into the District each night or provide an extra bed for my friend.  Fellow yogis were indeed happy to help; there are now a surfeit of options.

    The minor inconvenience to me from this tragedy reminded me again to send healing energy to those who are suffering and to see things in perspective.   I was given a sweet reminder of the warmth and generosity of my yoga friends and colleagues.   I was able to practice with success addressing one of my continuing challenges.  I have been blessed, then, in the aftermath.  Contemplating these gifts with gratitude gives me more energy to send out for those in need.

    For those of you who are local, I think there is still space in the workshop with Amy:  come join us for all level hip openers on Friday night and intermediate/advanced backbends and standing poses on Sunday morning.  See link to Willow Street above for more information.

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    Starry Nights, Tantric Yoga, and Pratyahara

    ByElizabeth

    On my previous visits to Sedona in the past year and a half, the moon has been full or nearly full each time.  Even though there was little light from man-made sources, the bright light of the moon illuminated the sky enough that the stars were outshone.  This trip, though, there was only a sliver of a crescent, and then, no moon at all.  In the absence of the moon, the stars blazed forth in all their glory.

    I recently have been contemplating how the practice of pratyahara (usually translated as withdrawal of the senses) fits into a tantric yoga path. Pratyahara is the fifth limb of the eight-limb path of raja yoga, see Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.   In classical yoga, the aim of yoga practice is to transcend the body-mind, and the eight limbs provide the means for that transcendence.  It fits within that paradigm to withdraw from the senses to move towards meditation.  In tantric yoga, though, the aim is not to transcend or quell the body-mind, but to understand that the body-mind is an emanation of spirit and to live ever more full of the light of spirit. The senses are not something to be transcended.  Yet we still practice pratyahara on the tantric path.Why is that?

    I think that in order to remember our own light, we sometimes need to choose to withdraw from the potentially constant stimulation of our senses; we need to pick darkness and quiet so that we can better discriminate between being delighted and inspired by the senses and being bound by craving stimulation of the senses.  If we get completely bound up in the senses and seek only to get more and more stimulated, we will forget the fullness and light of spirit.  We choose, therefore, at times in our practice, to diminish outer sensory input so that the inner light can shine more brightly.  When we return from the inner light to go back to the senses, we are then better able to appreciate the wonder of what our senses bring to us.  It is not unlike how we get to witness the extraordinary magic of the stars when we take ourselves away from the light of the sun, the moon, and the city.