Roam the Hub of All Sacred Places….

“The light which shines above this heaven, above all the worlds, above everything, in the highest worlds not excelled by any other worlds, that’s the same light  which is in you.” ~Chhandogya Upanishad

What if all the thinking, all the words, ideas aren’t our minds? What if they’re the covering over our minds? Don’t get me wrong – they’re great tools. But what’s overseeing the job site? They’re not the tools you’ll need if you’re looking for your true self or for a steady place to stand.

Science tells us our minds are decentralized in the body. Yoga helps us settle into our heart, where wisdom and intelligence reside. Of course when we talk about heart in yoga, we’re not just talking about the juicy pumping muscle to the left of center in our ribcages. There are a lot of bits housed around there – chemoreceptors, baraoreceptors, lungs, thymus, arteries, lymph nodes, spine, circulating blood and air, esophagus, diaphragm. When we bring our attention to this area, when we just feel what comes up, we are contacting the heart of yoga. Our yoga.

Bringing ease to the muscles and joints around this area can be the beginning or development of this process. This is where many of us Western Yogis start, with asana. Maybe a little breathing practice. Then we might start calling that pranayama. Maybe we meditate for stress reduction. Somewhere along the way we realize these pesky emotions are less pesky, the aches are less achey, the mind is less muddled.

“The heart is the resting place of the pranas, the senses and the mind. It’s your true self, which is identified with intelligence and which finds repose in the space within your heart.” ~Nikhilananada’s Intro to The Principal Upanishads

So then we explore pratyahara – sense withdrawal. But then, where do the senses go? Niky above, says to the space within your heart, your true self. Makes some sense – it’s quieter there than the head or stomach. The feelings come up, but maybe we’re in a place where we can uncouple them enough from the words and judgments to just let them be a bit.

Now we’re practicing saucha in our hearts. Saucha – cleanliness, purity. We don’t often think of it in regard to our hearts, but after we’ve gotten glimpses of the Love that lives there, it makes sense not to store our crap on the porch. If we keep the windows clean maybe it will shine more brightly. The Sanskrit word for this place – Anahata – can be translated “unstruck”. “The space within your heart  is omnipresent and unchanging.” (~Chhandogya Upanishad ) Always with us, always available for us to touch and feel is a place that is unstruck by the blows of life, unmoved by the compliments and criticisms, the lost jobs and the awards. It is always what it is. We are always who we are. Sometimes we just cover it up with judgments, which are really old experiences in new clothes. Film on our windows.

Maybe this is the impetus to poke our noses into the pesky ethical side of yoga.  But if you’ve been cleaning your windows all by yourself, and someone gives you a step ladder and an extension for your sponge, you’ll be pretty glad to pay attention. And they’re pretty simple, deceptively so. Love, Truth, Conserve your energy, Be quiet, Be fierce, Stay Open, Be present, Learn you’re not in control, Study your experience, Respect Others’ Boundaries. But Wow! try to practice ‘em all at once! That’ll give any college Ethics Professor a run for her money.

So you keep coming back to the place of quiet stillness to which your mat has become the doorway. “The heart is the hub of all sacred places; go there and roam.” ~Bhagavan Nityananda 

The Challenge

I’m well into the week of the Camel and some days I’ve indulged in a long Camel-centered practice, breathing length and openness into my shoulders, exploring the relation of my triceps to my shoulder girdle, using them to open more fully. (More on that in another post!) Some days I’ve had 5 minutes there of Sun Salutes, 10 of standing and busted out a camel in between.

I’m reminded through all of this that what camels do is store water. So, am I storing refreshing hydration for extended use, or shedding what has been stored because I didn’t digest it when I first took it in?

And I realize, the camel can’t drink until it creates room anew. It has to use its precious store of glistening droplets before it can drink deeply once more.

And the beauty of this pose is that I’m releasing and drinking simultaneously. I am storing sustenance. I am also letting go to make room. Exchange.

And the letting go can be hard. I’m through the initial terror I wrote about last year (see previous post) . And your responses have taught me that I have been in good company: many of us have stored scary and scared feelings in our guts, hearts and voices.

My new challenge is to release through all the layers of my existence. I’m finding that little – one might even say, petty – annoyances and feelings are coming to light. Feelings, judgments, ideas, words I thought I’d left behind. Ones that don’t bear repeating, but let me assure you they’re embarrassing to find tucked away. And they don’t just confine themselves to my mat. They help themselves to the rest of my day, too. Rude these little judgments are. See! There’s another of those rascals!

What is different is that while they register as feelings, they register as “mine” at first, I am finding it possible to let go of the embodied hooks, see them as “not mine, not not mine”, and not re-store them in new the clothes and layers of new judgments. Now, this isn’t a seamless process, and I’ll be perfecting it a long while. But I’m noticing noticing these packages I’ve left for my new self from all my old selves, and it’s allowing me to be more loving to all of them. And to let a lot go.

So that’s my challenge in the week of the Camel: to be a witness to my own experience, to not get lost in it, to let it do what experience does, which is to pass. And so to be able to fill up anew.

What’s yours?

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.

What does Eckhart Tolle's book _A New Earth_ have to do with yoga?

  The focus of this book is precisely yoga, only he uses different terminology. He approaches union with self from a truly philosophic – wisdom loving – perspective, discussing time relationship, elements of consciousness, relation of self to its capacities and authenticity.  Like philosophy used to be done, when it was a practice in community, in times we only now have drama and poetry to record (think Plato, among others).

In the web class held every Monday night  he and Oprah begin each live broadcast with silence. Silent meditation. In communion with 100s of 1,000s of others. 

This last week the discussion was about what he calls the pain body. The pain body refers to the stored up energy of all the emotional experiences we haven’t had the time, consciousness, energy or resources to process. The pain body in itself is not a  problem; it simply holds the remnants we have not let go. We can come back to them in the present moment and finish digesting in our own time. But as long as the remnants are being held by the pain body, they are juicy temptation to the ego. They are, after all, the stuff of stories, of drama and of entanglement when properly spun. And that is what the ego does. It spins. Stories, time, past into future, mistaking the past for the present. It’s your own personal spin doctor, running double time in your ears, not even the phone tapped, just runnin’ your world.

Until…. until you drop in. Drop in to the present moment. Drop in to your body. Become present, here, now. (Yes, I believe you will find Love, Truth and Beauty this way: Here, Now. Notice I didn’t say pleasure. That’s fickle. LTB, though, that’s guarunteed.)When you drop in, become present it interupts the sound track, if only for an instant. It inserts a sacred doorstop between the streaming banners and the open space you’ve stepped into. You can watch, observe. Now don’t get caught up in judgment, that’s just more spin: Just be. Offer your own loving presence to yourself for this moment. This one moment. The only one there is.

In yoga this digestion of experience is said to occur through tapas, a fierce, firey focus on practice. We build the fire in the belly through practice, repitition, focus, concentration, meditation, pranayam, and that fire is the digestor of our food as well as our experience. It allows us to move through the world in real time, acting and reacting to things as they are, in the moment and completely experience it, so that like ducks we can shake off the unuseful remnants and remain fresh in the present moment.

What is Gratitude?

“In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it’s wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.” ~Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

So ends this journey book.  I wrote here before that reading it will make your mouth water for whatever it is that feeds your soul. Your very limbs will revolt to drag you to the pen or the mat or the wheel or whatever it is that allows you express truth and let it flow through you.

Reading it I found myself reflecting on my own life, of course, and these last words drew from me such salty tears. Having been brought to the altar built of the myriad blessings of my life so far, I have at times felt so tempted to relive and address each one, individually. As naturally as this impetus arises, it’s roots are in the past. In an old way of seeing where each blessing, or demon, or moment is individual, could be addressed as a singular thing. When really each moment is created by and creates so many other moments and each one of those dissolves in each new present which is  really the eternal present, ever re-created.

This is the insight behind the country songs and Hollywood movies all titled something like “Pass it Along.” My own pass it on story stars an amazing individual named Lew. Several years back, when I was feeling every bit adrift, the new divorcee with a new career and a new feeling of solidity at my core but no idea how to let my old stories wear away, I was faced with crisis after crisis. Most of them presented as financial problems, and I was in fear. Lew was an angel of abundance and solidity and he made a donation to my cause. It had been our mutual intention for me to repay him as I became able and I did in fits and starts, as  I did with all my other indebtedness I had dragged from my old life. But I hadn’t completed my obligation to him and I nurtured this obligation not as a blessing, but with worry, and not a little bit of shame. Shame that I’d needed the  help, that I’d received it, that I had not yet repaid it in kind. None of this was part of the blessing of course; it was all an old story I’d dragged along.  

I was finally in a position to repay him. I was so ashamed of how long it had been, how  much he had given and that I was in need in the first place, that even repaying him felt like it wasn’t enough.   When I approached him he smiled so easily and told me to forget about it. He told me to do the same someday, I’d know when it was time. I cried. 

What I learned was that transparency and communication are more prescious than score keeping, even when you’re the only one playing. That dragging around feelings of indebtedness – different than honoring agreements – was not a way to honor what I’d been given. In that moment with Lew I learned that as grateful as I felt, as blessed as I knew I was, as important as it was to express to this all to Lew himself (for this expression is part of transparency), he didn’t need my gratitude. He knew that we both and all are part of something much bigger, that we never know what we’re really contributing to or taking from and that all that really matters is responding out of love in the present moment.

What he knew, the seed he helped me crack open, was that real gratitude is just that: responding out of love right now. Going backwards only re-inforces who we have been. History is important when we find it in the present, like that seed splitting conversation with Lew in the parking lot. It was important just then for me to acknowledge what he’d done for me, what I was prepared to do to honor my indebtedness – which I had instead converted to worry and shame for the intervening time – and this opened the door for his smile, and his new blessing, which is in a way a new obligation to help someone else. But this one, I promise not to convert to worry and shame and only to nurture the seed in my heart knowing that I’ll know when the time comes, because a ray of light will warm the patch of earth under which the seed slumbers, growing roots, and I’ll recognize the seedling as it arises.

Living this way feels like true gratitude.  

Dharma Now.

Self-possessed, resolute, act

without any thought of results

open to success or failure.

This equanimity is yoga.

Bhagavad Gita

Eckhart Tolle refers to the ego using others as reflectors, turning them into objects and trapping the mind in the false succession of past and future. In yoga and other Eastern systems they refer to the dharma.

The ego structure disappears as you sense what appropriate action is, take it, let go in the moment.

Sounds like idealism, doesn’t it. Who can be indifferent to success or failure? Who can not worry about the opinions of others? Who can release results? The one who is in the moment, who has taken appropriate action and is aware.

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.

Restore by Release

Take ten minutes tonight and try one or two of these poses. All are restorative, meaning you support yourself in a position facilitating physical release and you surrender to the pose over time, usually about five minutes. Prepare your surroundings with candles, music, scent. Use a folded hand towel for an eye pillow. Focus on your breath. Begin by allowing the belly to expand in every direction, opening the abdomen to allow room for your organs as your diaphragm pulls downward. After a few minutes of focusing on your belly, imagine your breath beginning just in front of your sacrum, inhaling the breath rises along a channel in front of your spine until it swirls in your head. Exhale, the breath flows down the same channel, exiting in front of your sacrum.

Supported Balasana (Child’s Pose): sit with your feet folded under your buttocks, knees wide. With a bolster or blankets folded in front of you for support, hinge your torso forward and lie your belly and chest on the support, arms alongside. Turn your head to one side. Feel your body move as you breathe.

Supported Bridge: Lie on your back, knees bent, feet on the floor hip width apart. Raise your pelvis up, having support (bolster, stack of blankets, block) handy to place under your sacrum or pelvis. Allow your torso to slant gently toward your shoulders on the ground. Arms angle down from shoulders to hands open to the sky.

Setu Baddha Konasana (Bound angle pose): Sitting upright, perhaps with hips elevated on a blanket, place the soles of the feet together in cobbler or butterfly pose (this was a favorite of mine when I was a little girl… I remember doing it with my Mother). Arrange the bolster, blankets or pillows behind you so that you can recline your torso with your arms opening down from the shoulders, palms releasing upwards. If your knees are above the ground, support them with blocks or soft blankets.

Vitparita Karani (Legs up the wall): Place a bolster or a stack of three folded blankets 6-8 inches away from the wall. Sit on one end with a shoulder toward the wall, facing away from the stack. Place opposite hand on floor and rolling down to your back swing your legs up parallel to the wall. Your tailbone will sink into the space between the support and the wall. You may keep your legs up or open them out to a great “V” or place the soles of the feet together in cobbler or butterfly. Arms angle gently down, again, from the shoulders, hands realeasing toward the sky.

Finish in Savasana, or Corpse pose, on your back, legs apart, feet flopping out, arms out a bit to the side of the hips again, hands open to the sky, eyes closed. Keep returning to breath. Breathe. Breathe. Let breath breathe you. Namaste.

Gossip, Gurus & Growth

“If your path is through the guru, then you see each daily life experience as part of a dialogue in which the guru keeps facing you with experience after experience, each one designed for your awakening.”

So begins today’s daily wisdom quote from the venerable Ram Dass. Now, I’m not on the guru path per se. But when I have an experience that is vivid or troubling or moving, I try to see how it alters the story so far, adds meaning and shifts my life picture. Through meditation events shift me, offer me new places to stand, sometimes altering the whole story.

Often the most powerful are the ones which at first bring me frustration, embarassment, unsettledness. The shifting point often comes when I remember to look for the winking eye behind the story. If I were an author and I put a character in this position, what joke would I be playing on my character? What joke is being played on me? And what is the nugget of truth at the center of the indignity that has me so off center?

So the gossip around work after my recent resignation from management has been a real guru for me. I knew it would come. I even knew the hottest story lines. Gossip is predictable. What is not are the little stories people tell themselves. We reveal our vulnerabilities in how we weave our stories together. And the little stories I found me telling myself were horrifying! Destabilizing, undermining. That’s the truth about gossip, it doesn’t hurt from the outside, we hurt from the inside out.

And so I am back to my breath. I knew these moments, these stories would come.  I knew that as surely as I knew my decision was right.  Before all the reasons, the stories, in the moment, in my gut.  The truth is I never knew why I took the job: I just knew it was my next step and that meaning would come. It did, and I served a purpose, one in which I believe. The purpose is gone and there will be more opportunity for what I truly value and for new lessons by stepping back into the ranks and giving up the promotion. In the moment of decision there are no stories. There is truth and sensing. In meditation there are no stories, no words. Moments – a moment, really – and witnessing. It’s a lucky person who has opportunity to act on what is revealed there. I’m very lucky to be right where I am, to give up what I give up and to receive what I receive. Very Blessed. So are you.

What do you let go? What do you receive? Before words, after stories, in silence, underneath choice. If you let go, what do you have? Try it. Find out. Bless it with your tears.

Gong Bath

Last night my husband & I attended a Gong Bath at YogaNow! here in ‘Burque. If you’ve ever felt like the glue holding your atoms together in their randomly beautiful orbital clouds was being dissolved and swallowed by a god of transformation (possible with several mind altering sorts of experiences, including yoga) then you’re on the path to understanding what a Gong Bath is. Wow.

I go every time he’s in town & I can get the night off. This time he was scheduled for Thursday, but somehow that got re-scheduled for Sunday – Lucky me! So we made it a date, had some decadent sushi, a lovely red zin & then went to the studio to roll out our yoga mat & blanket & turn our very existences over to the man with the mallet.

The gong itself is made by Paiste, evidentally a very well respected maker of such instruments, and is tuned to the vibration of the earth, and reportedly of creation – 137.1 mHz – also aum, and so vibrates at multiples thereof. As if this weren’t cosmic enough, he starts with tingshaws, moves on to Tibetan Singing Bowls so by the time the gong begins you are already riding a bliss wave. The Gong then becomes wave like and crescendos at an intensity that generates what feel like reinforcing waves over the body. The top layer sounds like percussive melody, the sound crystal stones would make if dropped in soothing pools of liquid gold. Underneath – and by this point in the experience it’s easy to miss – is an almost white-noise-like vibratory wave that you more feel than hear. Rudis, the gong man, describes the effects of this as “radiation” and notes that this is where the deep healing comes from.

Here’s what I know for sure: this guy’s a magician of the first order, a healer of embodied souls and I’ll be at the next Bath with bells on!