Reflections on Eng's take on A New Earth and Yoga

I was listening to Elizabeth Lesser’s discussion after A New Earth aired last week (I download it on iPod for my walking pleasure) and was so taken with Kim Eng’s integration of the spirit and silence evoked in the book on which the web class is based. She teaches movement based awareness, and counts yoga among her “modalities” with Chi Kung and T’ai Chi. She talked about progressing from breath, to sensation to innerbody feeling. I’ve been using this as a sort of template for myself and for my class, and the results have been, well, peaceful.

She brought people to their own silence by first suggesting a breath focus. She progressed to noticing sensation – usually tension, stress – but not naming it. Just being it, being with it.  She calls this the outer body. And finally, casting your attention, awareness, your inner gaze on your own sense of aliveness. She suggested the question “How do you know you are alive?” Answered not by words, not by concepts, but in silence, by feeling.

This corresponds in essence to a yogic view of embodiment. Since I don’t relate to yoga as a modality, but as a way of being – like the Tao – encompassing and companioning other ways, I just see the reality to which different systems point. Yogic Philosophy describes embodiment as “koshas” – sheaths. There is a purely physical, the food body, there is energy or breath, there is interactive mind, there is the wisdom body and finally just bliss. Each within and among the others. One way to say what yoga is, is to focus on allowing the alignment of these koshas, or bodies. Allowing, because it’s not a relationship that can manufactured, only facilitated. The kinks and blocks are part of the whole and awareness is alchemical element that dissolves what demands dissolution, cleanses what clings to what is not its own, awakens what is dormant and grows what is nascent.

And breath awareness is lovely, immediate access that defies conceptualization, making it an open and wide entryway into the space we all are.  Sensation really takes the open awareness and gives it a finite determined object  with which to practice open awareness. And aliveness, chi, prana, spirit: awareness opened on this vista gives rise to presence and joyful action. That’s really the point of it all.

Sometimes yoga just means getting out of the way…

If you’ve been reading here for very long, you know one of my careers is Paramedicine. Street medicine draws on my ability to discern, do, organize, energize – emphasis on the “do!” – turn around and do it again. Again! (think claymation baby dinosaur…

There’s great flow and joy available in this groove. Remembering its a groove though, among other curvy, smooth, deep grooves is the trick. So it’s a blessing when I’m reminded of what I call yoga-mind (you may call it tao-mind, Christ-mind, Spirit or Bob) or union. It’s so easy to get caught up in the role-ness of our careers: I am a …. And then the world conspires to remind us that the activity and the flow are all, and that the special designations and lines we sometimes draw for our own comfort, the ones that identify “me” and “mine” (think furry blue cookie monster) are fictions, fudgible and dispensible – in fact dispense-worthy!

When I count these moments throughout the day as yoga time I find that they don’t substitute for mat time, they inspire it, I want more, I give more, I do more and I yoga more. Then the “I” falls out.

Love, Bodies, and Demons

I’ve been listening to Iyengar’s Light on Life, read by Patricia Walden (yes, I’m inseperable from my iPod). I’m not an Iyengar practitioner and have always been disturbed by the stories of striking students and denigration of the body. All third (or twenty-seventh) hand, mind you, but repetitive none-the-less. His dualistic perspective seems to me evident from Light on Yoga, and is not one towards which I gravitate.

But I was listening to Lara’s last YogaPeeps show (yay Lara! see my blogroll for a link…) Light on Life was one of the books highlighted at the end. And it was one of those turns of phrase that tells you, “hey, that’s something to check out.”

So here I am, listening to a book I’ve passed over many times before. And I am not only impressed, but awash in his wisdom. These are not, to my ear, the words of a body denigrating yogi. In fact, the bath of tears I find myslef taking when Walden reads his words about loving every cell of your body, putting love into every cell of your body, tells me the shoe may have been on the wrong foot.

I’ve been engaged in a practice aimed at dissolving obstacles recently. I began with exterior obstacles. I quit smoking. I’ve created healthier routines. I’m rearranging my work life to align with my creativity. All well and good. And then I became aware of some stirrings of internal obstacles, stirrings of bonds being shaken. Old bonds. Strong bonds. And then there was fear protecting those bonds. And I was able to dissolve some of that. All the while, mind you, I’m still not sure what the bonds hold, only that it’s part of me and that the binding is keeping it hidden. Also, this is taking weeks. Slow, wordless, sometimes dubious process.  I plod on.

And slowly I am aware of a subtle rumbling, an undercurrent of unhappiness. Not with this or that. In fact this and that all are well. Slowly I find it’s with myself. It’s a secret, long hidden but ever-active seemingly endless cavern of self loathing. That’s right. Self-loathing yoga teacher. if you want to put a label on it.

And actually this is where labels are helpful. Because when I’m teaching I feel the farthest thing from self loathing. I feel transparent and powerful and awed by my students’ power all at the same time. I feel beautiful.

But when I look at myself or find myself wearing the role of yoga teacher (as in “what does your wife do for a living? Oh, how interesting! kind of role) deep feelings emerge that don’t fit with my pictures. Unsettling feelings, feelings familiar from long ago, from things and times I thought I’d processed and released. The ugly little girl (not the truth, but my picture of myself). The chubby girl. The athletic girl (not used as a compliment). They’re all here with me once more.

And Iyengar’s wisdom in Walden’s voice is helping me to care for them, to love every cell of them. To enjoy all my steps, to realize my samskara, meet it with tapas, svadyaya, surrender and find samtosha. My bonds are little by little being released, and the prisoners are escaping. They didn’t need to be locked up. Only to be acknowledged and loved.

Fall back into your Self

Yesterday my practice was crunched between writing and dog walks and getting off to work, quick sun salutations to warm and move me. The familiarity helps me connect to contentment and stay open for the surprises of my body and my day.

I’d just finished writing on Gather about the pain body Eckhart Tolle talks about, so this way of relating to pain and perceived burdens was much on my mind. As I entered the rhythm of practice and my mind began to clear of such entanglement, I rose from the forward bend at the end of a cycle, arms circling wide, dropping my tailbone to raise my heart. The heaviness of these thoughts lifted and I sensed them as a cloud gathering from my root, up my core and coalescing in front of my third eye. As my hands rose and I lengthened my side bodies in Urdva Hastasana I felt lightness and clarity. And as I brought my hands together in front of my third eye to trace down my midline to touch my heart, it was as if my hands had come together to form a knife’s edge which dissipated the cloud.

Try it for yourself, intentionally imagining what weighs on you as a cloud in front. Standing, circle your arms up and out, coming together and slicing through the pea-thick murkiness. See how you feel.

In some cultures the Self is believed to live in the back of the body, around the spine. I was told this when I first had the bodily sensation of falling back into myself years ago. As if I’d been living out in front, disconnected, and becoming present felt like finally coinciding with myself. Fall back into yourself today. Take a quiet moment, ask what will bring you back. Even if you’re not sure what the “right” answer is, try your first idea and see how it feels, if it gives you another idea, or if you just want to stay with the feeling you’ve now found. Fall back into your Self today, again, and again.

A New Earth, Chapter 1: The Flowering of Human Consciousness

Tomorrow evening kicks off the webinar with Eckhart Tolle and Oprah at 7pm MST. Check the website to arrange to be a part of this truly groundbreaking 10 week series.     Each week is focused on a chapter, and the first sets out the book’s purpose:

“Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness?” (p. 5)

Can I? Can you? I believe so.

One of the qualities that sets this book apart is that it is more a tool than a set of claims. This is very exciting. This is not an argument or an attempt to change your beliefs or improve your habits, though any of those activities may ensue. Or not.

“This book’s main purpose is not to add new information or beliefs to your mind or to try to convince you of anything, but to bring about a shift in consciousness, that is to say, to awaken. … If the awakening process has begun in you, the reading of this book will accelerate and intensify it.” (6-7)

What do you make of this? Do you believe it is  possible to loose our conditioning? The ultimate condition of language, and therefore the mind, is time and soon follow space and duality. Are these structures outside of which we can be? Have you? How?

I look forward to reading of your experiences here and elsewhere. Thanks for being. Here. Now.

Namaste

(the universal spark of me recognizes and bows to the same universal spark of you)

yogaeveryday.gather.com

You can find our dedicated group for discussion of Eckhart Tolle’s new book A New Earth at yogaeveryday.gather.com.

The cool thing about joining the group – aside from being quick & easy – it becomes a co-blog. You can comment on what others write or make your own article (blog) reflecting how you are digesting your experience.

Look for this icon on the groups page.

Let me know if you have any difficulty and I’ll help. yogaguidesatgmaildotcom

Awareness & Thinking: A User's Guide to Recursive Consciousness

Something Tolle said from the very beginning rubbed the trained Philosopher in me the wrong way: Stop Thinking. That’s like blasphemy for someone who deals in definition, analysis and understanding. Or so I initially reacted.

Tolle makes a deeply subtle distinction between thinking and awareness that helps to illuminate the nature of reflective, or recursive, consciousness. Simple on its surface, the fact that human consciousness is multileveled and that the levels are free to act independently or interact together has been the bedrock of philosophical observation since the Ancients. Plato and Aristotle used the metaphor of the tripartite soul. The Medievals related to God as the ordering principle. Descartes made a crucial, revealing and powerful error in taking as his bedrock “Cogito ergo sum” often translated “I think, therefore I am.”

Tolle directs us behind thinking, defined as unbridled naming or language using. Who is it who thinks, and thus knows “is”? (Yes, Billie, it does depend on what the definition of “is” is.) Tolle’s work is no polemic against analysis or language, but a careful understanding of its relevance, which has for so long been taken to be universal. Language depends on distinctions, on duality. The very structure of sentence making depends on the subject object distinction and is remarkably useful. We are often seduced by this usefulness, however, into mistaking description for experience. Tolle’s call is one to experience, to silence punctuating our endless naming which breaks the present apart into past, present, future, memory and expectation, subject and object.

Take breathing breaks to interupt the stream of unconsciousness and bring awareness to thinking mind. Do you know where your mind is and what it’s up to? Check in, surprise yourself.

Where are you?!?

Hello, Friends! Lovely, smart, inquisitive yogi friends!

 I’m reading. I have been reading. I have a yoga book to review. There’s a book on the food industry I want to review. I’m reading a friend’s manuscript. I’m reading Eat, Pray, Love, which I know you all have read before me, but if you haven’t, oh please pick it up! It’ll make you want to write, to cry, to eat, to hold, to drink wine and laugh and cry some more. Whatever you do that is you, where the you of you disappears and the activity just glistens in the moment – it’ll make you want to do that.

I’m reading, I’m practicing, I’m being. I’m adjusting to a new schedule (I love it). I’m cogitating. I’m incubating. I’m detoxifying, releasing and opening. It’s January and I’m hibernating.

Where are you? What directions has your practice taken you this new year? Did you resolve (which means to unify, simplify, come to essence)? Are you resolute? Are you doing your own duty, your own dharma, and no one else’s?  Are you doing the one thing that represents the state of affairs of you right now? Are you enacting your truth?

Let’s all get about just that. Right now. This moment.

Attention & Intention

What you attend to, you transform.

What qualities does your attention possess? Is it intense, relaxed (how do your eyes feel? your tongue? your hands?), curious, open? Do you have words in your mind right now? Are they coming from that to which you’ve surrendered your attention?

What state is body in? Are you in motion? Are you at rest? Are you relaxed?

Where do you have sensations as you render your attention to your subject? (What is the difference between subject and object in this state?)

Embodied Awareness = Yoga

You’re doing yoga right now! Take a bow, I mean Uttanasana!