Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Dance/Contact Improvisation | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation | Photos | Poetry | Quaker
Signs Around Town (Excerpt)
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Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Dance/Contact Improvisation | Meditation | Photos
Fences, Freedom, and Viveka
Refining how and to what we say “yes” and “no” in the world is one of the purposes of the yoga practices. The dedicated yogin seeks ever-growing discernment (viveka) of his or her own limits for the purpose of living ever more expansively and in fact more freely than is possible for those who fight against or ignore limits.
If we stick up or hold onto fences and defenses where they are not needed, we miss the opportunity to connect. Conversely, if we fail to honor the extraordinary combination of limits that makes us our exquisitely individual self and shapes our embodied connection to the world around us, we will be less free in ourselves and in the world and with each other, which leads to suffering.
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Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Dance/Contact Improvisation | Food for the Body | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation | Photos
The Goddess(es) and the Green Tomatoes
When someone tells me I need to see the Divine I can get anxious that they mean I’m supposed to see whatever that person thinks is “the Divine.” I don’t think anyone ever should be required to do so by anybody else. I am, however, all for being reminded to see the divine if such exhortation is to look on whatever I encounter with the most gratitude and compassion and wonder I can muster.
Here: two kinds of tomatoes with two versions of the goddess (Tara and Uma (a/k/a Parvati)). I had only a large tomato or two per week throughout the summer; with the equinox passing, the vines are for some inexplicable reason now abundant. I will either be making a good sauce in October or pickling green tomatoes, depending on how soon we get a frost. Or perhaps both.
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Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Dance/Contact Improvisation | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation
Found Quotation
Ellsworth Kelly at the Phillips Collection
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Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Dance/Contact Improvisation
Contact Improv Curious? Or Experienced?
For those of you who have heard me talking about contact improv and how much delight in it I’ve found and how a steady engagement with this art form has influenced my asana practice, there will be a great opportunity to get the basics at the morning workshop session on August 24th at Dance Exchange in Takoma Park.
Many thanks to my friend Leslie for coordinating the workshop. For more information and to register, click here.
Hope to see many of you there. For those more comfortable with movement, dance, and the form, there will be more opportunity to dance all day.
If you’re out of town and interested, email me separately about a possible visit.
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Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Dance/Contact Improvisation | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Gardening | Meditation | Poetry
Another Blink of Siva’s Eye
Another blink of Siva’s eye, another,As a friend has been saying, trip
Around the sun. Decades from now,
A parent walking in the woods with a child,
Or one lover to another, or a forest guide
Might point out the signs from the
Big hurricane of 2012. I expect 2013 will
Be momentous and full of joy, ephemeral,
Another trip around the sun.
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Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Dance/Contact Improvisation | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Photos
Yoga Slow Dance (Making It All Improv)
The dance of yoga is about motion in stillness and stillness in motion, and in not letting oneself be frozen. Stillness is the space between vibrations, instead of the shutting down or closing off vibration. To experience the space between the vibrations (spanda) when changing shapes (poses; going from one thing to the next), one must emerge into the shape and disssolve out of it, with the expanding delight of the coming and going more important than achieving some precise, required shape to demonstrate self-control and mastery (not unlike the teaching in the Siva Sutra that knowledge both binds and liberates).
