Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation | Poetry
Screen Shots Around Town (and Karma and Samscara?)
Similar Posts
Found Exhortation
Found yesterday. Today, I managed to stay inside working.
New Year’s Puja Cards
Very interesting.
What is Beauty? (and “Ankle Loop”)
When I was meditating this morning, the last lines of Keats’ ‘Ode on A Grecian Urn’ welled up in my thoughts: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” How odd, I thought, for this to appear, as if out of nowhere. I have been contemplating this week on what it means to be refined, but not in the way of an aesthete. Rather, as I have been concentrating on the Anusara alignment principle of “ankle loop,” I have been thinking about how deepening our practice with repeated exploration and study we are able to refine our understanding and the flow of energy within us so that we can be more connected to ourselves and each other.
As I understand the essential structure of the Anusara principles, the “loops” are really tertiary principles. The primary principles are those of “attitude, alignment, and action,” which are the principles of how we practice. The secondary principles are the fundamental physical and energetic principles — “opening to grace, muscular energy, inner/expanding spiral, outer/contracting spiral, organic energy.” The loops serve to refine the secondary principles. Ankle loop, for example, which starts at the base of the shin bone, travels down the back of the heel and then back up through the arch, energizes the foot, lifts the arch, supports our stance and helps us focus muscular energy. When we are feeling challenged finding as much muscular energy in our feet and legs as would be optimal for a full expression of the pose, we can use ankle loop to refine our understanding and practice of muscular energy in the legs. Keeping in mind the primary principles of practice, though, the refinements should also always lead us towards the heart and not just get us into details. Getting more sophisticated and refined, likewise should not lead us to disdain for that which is unrefined.
Funny, then, that the aesthete’s call to beauty should arise in my meditation while I have been consciously thinking about refinement. What does it mean to appreciate and study refinements, but still honor and delight in a novice’s full expression of “attitude, alignment, and action” as much as an impeccably aligned and skillful pose that does not reveal a yearning for spirit? Beauty may be truth, and truth beauty, but what is “beauty?”
Night and Day
Note how little variation there is in the meditation posture whether practicing night or day or both—but not taking so much time on the cushion that there is no time for engaged action.
- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Gardening
State of the Garden (and Puja to Dakshinamurti)
Rose, nasturtium, pansy, lavender
“Who Goes On A Diet to Lose Three Pounds?” (and the Carbon Footprint of Orange Juice)
The other night after yoga class, a group of us went out to celebrate a friend’s 39th birthday. During the ambling course of the conversation, I said that I was turning 50 later this year. I added that I would grow my hair another couple of inches longer and lose three pounds, and 50 would be just fine (let’s leave aside for now all the societal conditioning that goes along with feeling that such an age marker wouldn’t feel too old as long as my hair was long and my body at a youthful weight).
“Who goes on a diet to lose three pounds?” asked one of my friends. I find that people sometimes look at me and are shocked that I pay attention to my weight. They have an idea that someone who stays slim is just lucky rather than consistently mindful. My grandmother who was 4’11” in her high-heeled slippers was the one who taught me to be mindful in this way. Once or twice a year, she would moderate her diet to lose the two pounds that crept on after one too many desserts over the course of a few months without any other change in her modest, healthful for those days diet.
Going on a diet to lose three pounds means never having to lose 10 or 20 pounds or more. It means returning to mindfully eating a little extra less for a couple of weeks after a couple of months of having eaten a little more than what is perfectly sustaining rather than having to go through a major lifestyle change. In my middle age, I pay attention to my diet not as much for how I look in my clothes and feel about my body, but more for whether what I am eating is healthy for me and the planet. One of the best and easiest ways to be at an optimal weight, feel healthier, and have less impact on the planet is simply to eat less (though this is a new announcement by the government, any one with even an ounce of common sense knew that, no matter how much exotic, novel, or challenging diets seemed more appealing).
Part of eating the right amount for your ideal fit with your body and its relationship to the planet and society is having food that is not necessary for a healthy body only on special occasions (which is different than rigidly forbidding it to yourself). In reviewing what is sustaining for me and the planet while still enjoying a delicious diet, I periodically take a look at what I am eating and think about what is really fulfilling. One of the things I enjoy, but have known really should be a treat is orange juice (which I stopped drinking on other than an occasional basis several months ago and truly have not missed).
If you are eating multiple servings of vegetables and a piece or two of fruit a day, orange juice processed, packaged, and shipped outside of a grower state provides little more benefit to your diet than does a can of soda. If you kept everything else in your diet consistent and aren’t already eating enough to be gaining weight, eliminating the unnecessary glass of juice would not only diminish your carbon footprint (and if it is not organic, your chemicals into the drinking water footprint as well as your carbon footprint), but you also would be eliminating the number of calories it takes to gain a pound over the course of a month. And if you live in one of those states covered in snow and ice and are yearning to eat something from the land of sunshine, eat an orange or some other tropical fruit–organic if you can get it — and skip the processing, the cooking (pasteurizing), and some of the packaging that goes into it being shipped to your grocery store as juice.
