One of the most wonderful ways we can find our own steadiness using asana practice is the joy of standing balancing poses. Even when our feet are not steady, a gentle turning of our mind to a focused, steady place will bring us a sense of calm and ease.
Please join me this Saturday for:
Standing Steady in the Light: A Standing Balance Workshop, Sat May 8, 2:30-5pm, Willow Street Yoga Center, Takoma Park, $35. Find a place of deeper steadiness and balance in your own light and worthiness. Learn how to use the Anusara principles to enhance your ability to stand or your own two feet or on just one foot at a time. After we playfully explore a progressively expansive array of standing poses, we’ll finish with a few upside-down restorative postures to let our legs and feet feel the bright light created by the practice. Whether you find standing poses a challenge or revel in the dance, this workshop will illuminate your practice. Everybody welcome. To register, please visit www.willowstreetyoga.com.
There is also another one on the south side of the footbridge to Heritage Island, as I have noticed before. Do they ever switch locations?
Even though we had real, hard frosts this winter, there are already aphids on my roses. I went out this morning and picked the aphids off of the new buds — yes, my roses are budding. It was too cold to stay out long, but I did a little weeding and planted a couple of pots of pansies.
I was thinking about how I garden in my tiny space — using my fingers to take the aphids off of each rose bud, pulling up individual weeds between new plants in containers, choosing to let some volunteers come up between bricks because it expands my planting area. How different it would be if I even had a small yard by suburban standards. It would not be possible to attend to all the detail that I see, unless I were to spend every waking hour in the garden. If I had an acre, it would take three full-time gardeners to attend without tools and sprays the small things I touch by hand.
It seems we make our world as big or as small as we want it. My tiny garden is as much a universe for me as a gardener as would be an acre garden — though of course I cannot grow sprawling things like melons and potatoes and fruit trees.
But the fullness of how much I see and experience, how much calls out for love and attention, how much I am enriched by tending and observing what is there, is not diminished by what I do not have. Rather, I am called to expand to the greatest what I have within my limits. This is true, too, in our yoga and meditation practice, and our lives. We can choose to live expansively no matter what our limits or we can choose to feel bound and diminished by our limits. The garden, this morning, helped me remind myself of that choice. It helped me turn towards possibilities for growth instead of towards constriction.
At Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ
