Art and Culture

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    Sometimes I Wonder

    ByElizabeth

    Sometimes I wonder why a thing appears in a particular place at a particular time. Then I wonder why I wonder. It is not as though I am going to get an answer. It can be good fun, though, speculating on the how and why as long as we don’t get too caught up in needing an answer.

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

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    Happy New Year–Breaking Open (web version of e-newsletter)

    ByElizabeth

    Dear Friends,

    Midnight of the new year found me sitting in a hotel room near the Chidambaram temple at festival time engaged in intense conversation while listening to wild music and chanting and the cracks and explosions of fire crackers.  Quite a change from my long-standing practice of making a healthy meal, doing a long yoga practice, taking a hot bubble bath by candlelight and going to sleep well before midnight so that I can start the year rested and refreshed (an excellent way to spend New Year’s Eve if you haven’t tried it).  Though I did not start this new year well rested, I wouldn’t have traded the experience I had for the world.  Sometimes we need to radically break out of our old patterns to discover how much we can expand.

    One of the practices at the temples we visited on the India Pilgrimage with Douglas Brooks is to take a coconut and break it open.  The coconut symbolizes your head and all the preconceived notions and rules we set for ourselves that bind us into our old habits.  The symbolic act of breaking open the coconut is to remind us that we sometimes need to break ourselves open in order to get at the true meat of our existence and to drink the sweet nectar of life.

    Many times during the trip I thought about my first experiences attending “Advanced Intensives” with John Friend.  I, like many others I know, showed up at my first Advanced Intensive wondering how I got there, asking myself whether I was worthy, and worrying that I was in way over my head and would get injured.  Though I have now been to a number, each time I still have had to practice with both an absolute willingness to be open to the possibility of expansion while being impeccably mindful of my own limits.  It is a subtle dance of consciousness, and part of the learning is finding the exact balance point where we can both break out of our preconceived limitations and still honor that we in fact have some.

    I approached going to India with much trepidation.  A friend whom I met in Peru and who I later visited in South Africa, having seen my emotional reactions to the deep poverty of developing nations had warned me off of India.  As one who likes things to be quiet and clean and thrives on healthy meals and regular sleep, I knew India would be physically and emotionally challenging.  But I wanted the visions.  I wanted to see and experience its very “otherness,” its beauty, and the source of the yoga teachings.  I packed my bags with emergency supplies, some of which I turned out to need, some of which served others on the trip, most of which I ended up donating to a village that the trip helps to support.  I had to ask people to help me (one of my hardest practices) by being close when we were in dense crowds.  I confess that I wore earplugs when it got really loud in the temples, which it does.  And having prepared and taken care, I was exhilerated.  I experienced radically more with my heart getting fuller and fuller in a short time than I thought ever possible for me.  Like discovering one can do a wild yoga pose that one thought totally out of reach and then sensibly stopping before blowing past physical limits, I broke myself open and was able to drink deeply of the nectar.  And yes, I did actually hurl a coconut to the ground to break it.  And yes, it took two tries.

    I was lucky.  This time, I got to choose when and where to break open the coconut.  Sometimes life does it for us and then we have the choice either to despair or to rise to the occasion.  This year, I invite you to the yoga to find where you can break open and find ever more sweetness, nourishment, and delight than you ever dreamed possible.  For me this includes not just the exhileration of advancing the intensity of poses, but the deepness of meditation, the precise use of alignment for therapeutics to better experience life, and the emotional depth of a long restorative practice.

    Come join me as regular classes continue at William Penn House on Tuesdays, invitation group house practice for charity on Wednesdays, and gentle/therapeutics at Willow Street on Saturdays at noon in Takoma Park.  All info on the classes page of the web site.  Mark your calendars, too, for:

    Finding the Warmth Inside: Relax Into Optimal Alignment with Anusara Restoratives, Saturday, February 25 2012, 2:30 PM – 5:00 PM, Willow Street Yoga, Takoma Park Studio, $35.00, click to Register Online or download a paper form to bring to Willow Street in person.  After a little gentle stretching and self-massage to bring awareness to the breath and body, we will enjoy the exquisite application of Anusara’s Universal Principles of Alignment to restful and supported restorative postures to release old patterns and invite in the new to find greater ease of body and mind. A great workshop and practice for all levels.

    I have been sharing photos and experiences of India on the blog (if you have missed them, do check them out and enjoy).  Some of you have asked how you can subscribe to the blog in addition to the newsletter.  Please just click here and follow the instructions to get the blog posts by email.

    I look forward to seeing you through the new year and sign off expressing my ever growing love, appreciation, and gratitude for all of you and the deepening and expanding connection through the yoga, neighborhood, and all that life here in DC and in the greater yoga community brings us.

    Peace and light,

    Elizabeth

     

     
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    Expanding to Receive the Beauty, Opening to Grace, and the Isha Upanishad

    ByElizabeth

    In Anusara yoga, one of the ways the first principle of “opening to grace” can be experienced and practiced  is as a radical expansion of the capacity to receive and appreciate the very wonder of being.  During my visit to India with Professor Douglas Brooks, I found myself repeatedly thinking of the concept of radical expansion and also the preamble to the Isha Upanishad (long a favorite of mine; Shantala on their first CD, Love Window, have done an exquisite rendition), which can be roughly translated as saying that adding fullness to fullness is itself fullness (fullness can also be translated here as perfection).

    What I believe this is saying that being itself is infinitely full; thus, we cannot make it more infinite by adding to it.  Human consciousness of the infinitude of being, though, is limited by the filters of space and time.   One of the key reasons to practice yoga (including meditation) is to expand both our capacity to appreciate the fullness and to receive its full wonder by uniting our own consciousness with the infinitude.  When we can appreciate ever more the wonder of our being, we will naturally be more joyous, and I believe, led to be more compassionate and generous with ourselves and others.

    Day after day on the India pilgrimage, just when I thought my heart and mind were already full to bursting, there were yet more experiences of the beauty and extraordinariness of life and creativity and nature.  I found myself chanting the Isha Upanishad—purnamadah, purnamidam, puranata purnamudatacyate.  Fullness and fullness is fullness.  “Let me expand still more to appreciate to its utmost yet more beauty,” I thought to myself again and again.  Though I already thought I’d developed a fairly full understanding of the concept through study and practice, I thought, “this is what John Friend means when he is talking about radical expansion.” I look forward to studying and practicing to experience and share ever more beauty.

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    Occupy India?

    ByElizabeth

    I was not witness to the most abject poverty in India (both because of where I went and because of how I was guided).  These makeshift, but semi-permanent shelters seen from the window of the bus made me think of the Occupy movement.  They are nothing like those of Occupy and much of what Occupy is trying to warn against forgetting to care.  And, oh yeah, McPherson Square is still occupied, though more and more uneasily.

     

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    Beginning to See More Light

    ByElizabeth

    It was just approaching the deep dark of the solstice when I left for places warm and light. Last week, when I got home, just by comparison to the sultriness of southern India, it felt dark. This morning, though, I noticed earlier morning light. When the wake up call sounded, I was deep in a rather wonderful dream in the violet-tinged landscape of the American southwest. As I had an early meeting at another governmental agency that required me to walk 10 blocks further than my usual walk to work, and I did not want to miss my regular morning practice, I had to get up right away.

    The light through my second floor skylight seemed softer than it had just a few days earlier. Instead of being absolutely dark, there was enough of a hint of dawn that there was no need to turn on the light just to walk downstairs. I thought perhaps a little of yesterday’s snow might have accumulated. No snow. It was just the first glimmer of the days starting to get longer. When I walked past the Capitol on my way to the meeting, I saw several robin red breasts. With global climate change, many of them now do not fly farther south for the winter.

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

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    Signs Around Town (and More Thoughts on the Dangers of Yoga)

    ByElizabeth

    These stickers have been around town for awhile; I first noticed them during one of the big marches. I assume that it is meant to be ironic. The idea of fighting for non-violence, though, certainly highlights the degeneration of much of our political dialogue into an us versus them fighting stance, even for those seeking peace or social justice.

    The truth of the matter is that just as we cannot realize inner peace by forcing our mind to be quiet, and we put ourselves at risk in our asana practice if we force ourselves into poses to realize external notions of advancement that mirror our conventional cultural values, so too, we will not open the way to peace if we fight for it using the paradigms of the two-party system that now serves the military-industrial complex instead of expanding recognition of the needs of all to be connected and nurtured.

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

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    On Seeing

    ByElizabeth

    When I paused to photograph this marker on a DC sidewalk yesterday, I wondered how many hundreds of people have walked past it–once or hundreds of times–without noticing it at all. I connected this sense of acute awareness with a conversation I had with Douglas Brooks in India, in which he said to me that he guaranteed that at that moment he was seeing more than I was seeing. He had experienced the place before, studied it extensively and intensively, and was still open to seeing. I did not take offense and none was meant. I am one who notices, but it is a given that study and experience, if one retains an openness to new understanding, maximizes the opportunity to witness.

    Paul Muller-Ortega describes the expanding ability to see and understand in terms of the essential interrelationship between jnana and vijnana–book knowledge and experiential knowledge. One without the other does not permit for complete understanding. The two together, with ever-expanding and present openness is what leads to wisdom.

    Thus, though I am one who tends to notice much of what is in my field of vision, I could not, on my first visit, possibly have seen as much in the immediate landscape as one who has devoted much of his life both to studying and experiencing it.

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

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    Found Exhortation (India Style)

    ByElizabeth

    Only after walking along the two lane streets in a sari and sandals, sharing the road with exhaust-fume spewing buses, three-wheelers, motorcycles, mopeds, bicycles, cows, goats, dogs, street vendors, and pedestrians amidst dust, puddles, sewage, potholes, cowpats, dog shit, goat turds, and piles of organic and non-biodegradable trash, could one understand how a campaign to end the practice of littering would link it to evil.  Thanks to my fellow traveler Eric for pointing out this sign.