Art and Culture

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    My “Black Friday” Spending

    ByElizabeth

    I paid to take a yoga workshop with Paul and Sommer Sobin back in town for their annual day after Thanksgiving workshop at Willow Street Yoga, which was just delightful.  I spent the money for round trip transportation between Union Station and Silver Spring.  I had lunch with friends and paid for my share of lunch:  green tea salad, ginger salad, and tofu with sour mustard at Mandalay in Silver Spring.  I am grateful for what Willow Street Yoga offers me and the community, for easy access to public transportation (I wish we would spend some of our defense budget on public transportation), and for a wide variety of restaurants with delicious vegetarian and vegan alternatives near to my home.

    I chose to spend money today to have a refreshing and rejuvenating vacation day before teaching tomorrow and to support people whose livelihood is providing services and goods that make the community a better place to be and that enrich my own life.  I express my gratitude by, in the method created by the consumer society, contributing to the livelihoods of those who will, in exchange for livelihood, provide life-enhancing services and creative gifts to the rest of us.

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    An Example of How One Door Closing Opened Another (and Article in Yoga Journal)

    ByElizabeth

    I think snow can be beautiful and enjoy the hush when it first falls, but it’s not my favorite thing, which was one of the reasons I settled this far south (yes, DC is pretty far south for a native New Yorker).  Last winter with its record snow falls felt at times as a seemingly endless exercise in looking for the good and trying to respond in the highest.  Among other fallout of the snow, the February blizzard grounded my flight to San Francisco where I was supposed to go to celebrate the start of John Friend’s 2010 workshop schedule and to visit friends.  Instead, I was home shoveling.  With the arthritis in my spine and some other old injuries to groin and shoulder, I had to be extra careful with my alignment so that shoveling could be an enjoyable work out instead of a dreary and potentially debilitating task that I was doing instead of playing with friends and yogis in San Francisco.  Being grounded at home and needing to be in alignment with the shoveling, led me to blog about Anusara alignment for snow shoveling.  Putting this advice out there led to an editor at Yoga Journal discovering my blog and interviewing me for a short article that (I haven’t seen it yet–waiting for my copy to arrive in the mail, but a friend who was reading the most recent edition at Willow Street’s Silver Spring studio gave me the heads up last night) is in December’s magazine (page 22).

    While missing out on a vacation due to weather is not exactly a momentous disappointment or life challenge, this story is an example of how we never know what life is going to bring our way.  We cannot choose what life gives us, but we can choose how we respond, and how we respond will change how the path unfolds.  I persist in the yoga and meditation and share my teachings and experiences because it has been so helpful in opening my perspective and finding more delight and opportunity in life.  In that regard, one of the reasons I challenge myself on the mat, inviting myself into places of discomfort and effort and staying with them until I find ease and even delight, is to help me be able to see the good and to respond in the healthiest and most optimal way on and off the mat.  While I love sometimes just to do the easeful poses, what has brought more strength and joy to all of my life is going deep into the hard places and staying with them.

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    Some Books About Gurus

    ByElizabeth

    As I have discussed with a few of you, I have been contemplating deeply and for a long time the questions of what is a guru and who is a guru.  In the context of this contemplation, I read to enhance my background and understanding, deepen my contemplation, and give myself food for thought or additional exploration.  Here are some books that I have in my library about gurus or those who have been labeled gurus (in no particular order).  Some are written with loving devotion by disciples.  Some question or comment on the interrelationship between the status of guru and the sometimes all too human foibles of the guru and his disciples.  Some are of the guru’s own experience of practice and his relationship with his own guru.

    Be Love Now, Ram Dass, HarperOne (New York, NY 2010)

    Miracle of Love — Stories About Neem Karoli Baba, Ram Dass, E.P. Dutton (New York, NY 1979)

    Autobiography of a Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda, Self-Realization Fellowship (13th Ed., reprinted 2001)

    The Golden Guru — The Strange Journey of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, James S. Gordon, The Stephen Green Press (Lexington, Mass. 1987)

    My Guru and His Disciple, Christoper Isherwood, Penguin Books (New York, NY 1981)

    Ramakrishna and His Disciples, Christopher Isherwood, Simon and Schuster (New York, NY 1970)

    Great Swan — Meetings with Ramakrishna, Lex Hixon, Shambhala Dragon Editions (Boston, Mass. 1992)

    Bhagawan Nityananda of Ganeshpuri, Swami Muktananda Paramahamsa, SYDA Foundation (South Fallsburg, NY 1996)

    The Buddha from Brooklyn — A Tale of Spiritual Seduction, Martha Sherrill, Vintage Books (New York, NY 2001)

    Yoga and the Quest for the True Self, Stephen Cope, Bantam (New York, NY 1999)

    At the Eleventh Hour — The Biography of Swami Rama, Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, Himalayan Institute Press (Honesdale, Pa. 2001)

    Play of Consciousness, Swami Muktananda Paramahansa, SYDA Foundation (Oakland Ca. 1974)

    The Great Oom — the Improbable Birth of Yoga in America, Robert Love, Viking Press (New York, NY 2010)

    ps Jess–Yes, the widget for Library Thing is coming for the website.  I just need to add more books, so that it is a decent start at a representation of at least the yoga-related portion of my library.

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    Found Exhortation (Core Value of the Month: Discipline)

    ByElizabeth

    What if we were to cease to think of discipline as constraint, as punishment, as something confining and unattainably rigorous, something satisfying only in having suffered for gain?  What if we were to understand it, as Swami Chidvilasananda, suggests as discipleship, a cleaving to the path out of the exquisitely blissful yearning for the light?  Such discipline is, I think, what is the true practice of brahmacharya — aligning with the divine.

    It was such a beautiful day that I spent as much time as possible walking in the neighborhood.  That walking is “good for me” was just an incidental benefit.

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    Needless Anxiety (and messages from the universe in my spam folder)

    ByElizabeth

    From a German language spammer advertising “female viagra” comes this bit of universal wisdom on a day when I found myself needlessly anxious about a mistake that was fairly easily rectified:  “It sounds like you’re creating problems yourself by trying to solve this issue instead of looking at why their [sic] is a problem in the first place”

    If I were one who just trusts naturally that many simple things can be fixed easily if I just ask for help, there wouldn’t have been any need to be anxious.  It would have been better not to have made the mistake in the first place, but as much as I might dislike it, I will inevitably make mistakes–here, not getting my dates right for asking for sub coverage for a yoga class.  With the wonderful community in which I am blessed to be a member, it only took a few phone calls to work things out.

    It is one of my biggest challenges to have to ask for help.  Having to ask for help because I made a mistake made it even more challenging.  A big part of my yoga is learning  to soften and trust in such situations.  When I did just that, I not only was able to ease away from needless anxiety, I was able to allow in more love and support.  Sometimes we need to be put face to face with our toughest stuff to open at another level.

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    Waiting for the Bus

    ByElizabeth

    Is it benign multitasking or a sign of being too attached to social media that I am writing while I am waiting for the bus home? I have taken my moment to appreciate the beauty of the Dome.

    Tonight, I think it is the former. I have twelve minutes to spare. Writing now means that I will not even be tempted to turn on the computer when I get home. I will pet the cats and wash and sit for meditation before getting ready for bed.

    I can pause, here, thinking about the synchronicity of the centering Batya used at the beginning of class I took tonight (level 4 at Willow Street, Takoma Park). She told us of a story she had heard on a podcast about a woman who described having a stroke as freeing her mind from its incessant chatter when the language center of the brain was temporarily immobilized. That quiet is, in part, what comes from a deep and consistent meditation practice. The synchronicity was that I am reading Ram Das’s “Be Love Now” (hot off the press), which is inevitably leading me to think about the interconnection between yoga practice and facing a stroke. It is not something I think of often.

    The more we are open and aware, though, the more we will see connections and synchronicities. The more consistently we practice, the more likely we are to experience the good in even the greatest of challenges.

    And now, the bus is here, and I am on my way home.