I was feeling a bit melancholy at work this morning, so I went across the street at lunchtime and soaked up some beauty.
I am indeed blessed (by a combination of conscious choice and effort and good fortune) that I am able to take a lunch break on many days and that there are multiple opportunities to connect to beauty steps from work and home.
I was cranky at work today. I remembered to open to beauty. The scent of these lilies of the valley reminded me of my maternal grandmother and old-fashioned French perfume.
When I decided to make strawberry towers part of the new sleeping porch garden extension, Niraj Ray of Cultivate the City told me to remove all of the flowers until mid-May to allow the plants to develop leaves large enough to support sizable and sweet berries. He also suggested feeding them every time I water.
It has been a pleasure nurturing the plants and finally watching plump, juicy berries redden in the sun outside my study window.
Might this delicious lesson in the benefits of being patient be a lesson applicable to how and when and why to re-emerge post vaccination, but before the end of the pandemic?
Watching traffic blocked, standing hands over ears having to wait to cross the street as an ambulance races in an emergency gives us the opportunity to b grateful that this time it is not for us and also that the emergency workers are there if we need them (so long as we can remember them in our societal budget priorities). It is also an opportunity to respond from the highest, to be reminded to offer love and healing instead of responding with annoyance at the minor disruption in our path.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
When I think about the Anusara alignment principles in the context of the tattvas (see earlier posts), I think about “opening to grace” appearing in two places on the tier. As “first principle” it is the first among a larger sequence about how we come to the mat, rather than just the first of the physical principles. “First principle” not only starts the practice and the dialogue, but is already there. It is, in this sense, so fundamental that it is not part of the sequence, but is sequenceless (akrama). If you are fully conscious of “grace” and can embody it in all aspects of your physical, energetic, and mental day to day existence without further instruction, study, or practice, then there is no need for other practice or instruction (this I think is a very rare being, and certainly I’m not such a being).
The next set of tattvas — suddha vidya, ishvara, saddha shiva, and shiva-shakti (see link above), correspond to the Anusara alignment principles of “attitude, alignment, and action,” which although they are themselves described in sequence, are fundamentally sequenceless as they happen all at the same time and are more elemental than the practice of the physical/energetic alignment principles in sequenced practice.
In this way of understanding the play between the sequenceless and sequenced, we have a universal “first principle” that embodies the purpose of all we do on and off the mat. It is followed by how we want to practice, described in a way that becomes less of just a concept (which as a universal concept is akrama) and more of a practical understanding (which applies when we are in space and time and therefore in the krama of embodied existence). As we dance in this play between the sequenceless and the sequenced, we come to practice (or to do any activity) with the “attitude” of wanting to live the “first principle,” to know and experience what is fully present and not bound by time and space. We then (because we must) study and practice specific “alignment” to try and express this attitude with our “actions.”
The physical/energetic alignment principles then come in as a the way of better refining, studying, and practicing the desire to recognize with mind and body the “first principle.” The sequence of “open to grace, muscular energy, inner spiral, outer spiral, organic energy” comes then at the level of physical and mental practice to return us back to “first principle.” “Open to grace” is first in this sequence, too, but as “first principle,” for me, it is something more than the first of the alignment principles. “First principle” is not just the start of how we practice when we practice Anusara yoga, but the whole reason for practice. It is the universal, overarching, blissful element of being that draws us to the practice because of our yearning to know it.
