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Devotion (Bhakti)

ByElizabeth

Much is said about devotion in yoga, and there is a great privileging by many of the path of devotion — bhakti.  With no clear answers, I contemplate often what it means to practice bhakti, to be devoted in a religious or spiritual sense.  Witnessing those on pilgrimage when I was in India (it was “pilgrimage season”), I was flooded with memories and ideas for contemplation about what it means to be devoted and how people express devotion.

Among the thoughts and memories were having observed the operaphiles in their expensive clothes swoon and gasp and applaud at the Vienna Opera House on the opera level where I had paid a dollar for standing room; having been literally swept off of my feet in the press of the crowds heading to the tube at Wembley Stadium after seeing the Rolling Stones in concert; watching the people do the standing wave thing at ball games while hollering for their team as if their whole view of the world was dependent on who wins; having taken, standing room only, the third class train from Florence to Rome during Easter week (a different pilgrimage season), on asking who is that woman on the billboards, discovering that India, too, has a habit of electing movie stars to political office.

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    Whether It Is Good Weather

    ByElizabeth

    When I was out doing an errand at lunchtime, I bumped into a neighbor I haven’t seen in a long time. We did not spend much time talking; I needed to get back home to my work within the short allotted time, and she was meeting someone. “Did I just hear thunder,” she asked. The sky was thick and white with heat and “Code Orange” air. “You might have heard thunder, but there isn’t any rain with it” I replied. We talked about how much we need some good rain. The trees are really struggling. (Note: forget about cleaning any outside things with water. Forget non-edible annuals. Water established trees and perennials very deeply once a week instead of less watering more frequently. Shallow watering in drought conditions promotes growth of fungus and other pesky things.)

    As gardeners, my neighbor and I notice how much rain we are getting in any given season and week. We think about whether the rainfall is what the farmers and the trees and birds and wild animals need, in addition to whether it will interfere with a child’s soccer game or a planned outing. We were at the point that we would far rather get caught out in a deluge than miss out on any chance of rain. On the other hand, those in flooded parts of the north are praying for a few warm (but not blazing hot) dry days in a row. Today’s storm is welcome and needed, though one storm does not end a drought. We need some more good ones for days on end.

    I think the approach of various classes and intensity levels of asana practice can feel like a whether a thunderstorm is welcome weather. Sometimes an outrageously intense and fierce practice is what will bring me to my fullest possibility of growth and expansion. At other times, I need to step back and rest my body. Restorative and other gently therapeutic practices are what nurtures best. Sometimes, I have long, steady periods of moderate practice.

    The more sensitive, aware, and knowledgeable I get about the weather outside and how it impacts life around me, the better able I am to take care of my garden. The more I am sensitive and open to the weather inside and the more knowledgeable both from study and experience of how my practice best aligns with inner and outer weather, the better able I am to live out the yoga principles I seek ever better to follow–the most important being to see the highest first and to be of service.

    Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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    Yoga of Eating Part I (what it is and what it isn’t)

    ByElizabeth

    Yesterday, a former student of mine stopped me in the hallway at Willow Street and asked whether the “Yoga of Eating” workshop I will be leading on June 13th  will cover Ayurveda.  “I will mention it,” I said, “but I will not be teaching it.”  I didn’t have time to explain further because I was about to lead class.  As far as I got was to add that I was not sufficiently trained to teach it.

    Ayurveda is a wonderful science, and I honor and respect my yoga friends and colleagues who study, practice, and teach Ayurvedic principles.  Ayurveda is a much broader discipline than yoga, though, and is really medical practice rather than yoga.  Asana are among the practices that might be recommended by an Ayurvedic practitioner for a client or patient, but eating in accordance with the Ayurvedic principles is not the same as bringing yoga to how we eat.  For me, many of the principles of Ayurveda I have read or been taught are useful, but it has not resonated for me as a governing system, just as I do not believe in applying all of the principles of Western medicine to how I heal and nourish my body.

    Bringing yoga to my eating, like bringing yoga to all of my life off the mat,  is both simpler and harder than being taught a science such as Ayurveda with fairly clear, but quite complex, do’s and don’ts and then following them.  For me, practicing the yoga of eating, is practicing conscious eating.  It is practicing reverance and moderation.  It is balancing nourishment and pleasure.  It is knowing deeply when the will to eat is serving us or getting in our way.  It is both simple and subtle.  It is easy to say, but deeply challenging and sometime complicated to practice — just like practicing the Anusara yoga principles of alignment.

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    What’s Blooming Inside Right Now for Me (is it “forcing” or inviting?)

    ByElizabeth

    I’ve been living with blooms from bulbs since just before Christmas.  The amaryllis in the vase is the third bloom from a bulb I bought at the beginning of January; the third stem got too tall, so I put it in a vase, so it would not topple over.  The orchid I have had since it was about half this size and have been tending it by bringing inside and out with the seasons for over a decade.  It has bloomed every February without fail.  The paperwhites were a gift.  I enjoy a little of the scent, but find the usual presentation of several flowers simultaneously overwhelming.  I have brought them to flower one at a time.  As soon as the bulb flowers (and inevitably needs to be propped up somehow), I have cut the flowers to put in a vase and started the next bulb.  By the time the flowers in the vase have faded, the next bulb is budding.

    The cherry blossoms — this is why I dreamed of cherries blossoming; I had them in my bedroom.  In a previous post, I showed the nearly bare branches from a tree that had fallen in the blizzard.  Although gardeners would call bringing the branches inside “forcing,” I wonder whether I really “forced” these blooms.  What I did was take branches that would have gone to a landfill, brought them into an auspicious environment and invited them to bloom.  This seems to me, not unlike using props in yoga:  I might not be able to experience the full opening of a pose myself, but if I properly use props, I can expand what I can experience.  It is not the same as doing it on my own, but it still gives me a different sense of the beauty that can be experienced, just like bringing in branches that otherwise would have fallen or need to be pruned into the house to reveal their glory in advance of the spring blooming outside.

    The last photo is of dogwood and cherry that were on the side of the street two days ago (cherry tree down at the Japanese War Memorial); dogwood in a pile on the north side of the street in the 300 or 400 block of D Street, NE.  Start your own blooms, there is more winter in the forecast.  I am fairly certain from my previous experiment that the cherries will start blooming in a couple of weeks, but it remains to be seen whether the dogwood will want to open.


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