Saturday 2nd September 2006
Since I’ve let go of my attachment to the physical practice of yoga, I’m less inclined to talk about the poses and the minor epiphanies that surface during practice. Instead I’ve silently made an agreement with myself not to limit my blogging to what I think the reading audience may be interested in. I figure if anyone does read this blog, they most probably do Ashtanga, or at the very least do some kind of physical yoga. It wouldn’t be of interest or make sense to anyone else.
That agreement has given me free rein to ramble on at length about what’s REALLY going on behind the scenes with an intellectual honesty that lays bare my deepest despairs, my thoughts and feelings that are often barely formed and are even more often obscured by the limitations of a language that falls short in its ability to describe the maturing of one’s spirituality.
Thomas Merton in his introduction to “No Man Is An Island” says
“I consider that the spiritual life is the life of man’s real self, the life of that interior self whose flame is so often allowed to be smothered under the ashes of anxiety and futile concern.”
I may talk about my asana practice as it melts and morphs with the passing of the weeks, I may talk about the divine love that infuses me on a daily basis, I may talk about my self doubts as a yoga teacher and my attempts to leak more of my soul into my classes when I’ve been warned against it.
Such indulgent, pot-pourri blogging may not be to everyone’s taste, but I’m now writing for me, not for you.
You’ve been warned now.
Last week I’d planned to practice Tuesday and Thursday morning in the Gallery with my yoga friends. At Tuesday morning’s practice, for reasons that elude me, my body felt like a lump of lard. Practice was slow and unfocussed so I wrote it off and gave up after one hour. A violent attack of food poisoning on Wednesday night (5 hours of vomiting, diarrhoea and passing out of the bathroom floor) put an end to the plan to practice on Thursday.
Today I rang my students and cancelled my two yoga classes – Although I’m still in recovery and haven’t eaten for two days, it was more that I desperately needed a ‘mental health day’ all to myself.
So a whole week has gone by with almost no physical yoga practice. And I’m not bothered. In fact, it’s quite exciting not to be bothered by this – the detachment indicates great progress.
Add to a week of zero practice the food poisoning episode, and I’ve had a complete physical and mental purging of magnificent proportions.
All part of a bigger plan to help loosen those last threads of attachment to being a superyogi.
It may well be that my former approach to yoga practice, the importance I’d attached to it and it’s relevance to my greater spiritual life are all being re-evaluated at an obscure depth that is most characteristic of a relentless surge of unconscious activity that is drawing me into the vortex of God. For any spiritual aspirant experiencing the pain of loss, trauma, or even just a life change, I urge you to read this most insightful and poignant book to help see the hidden agenda of why these things happen to us. We are not usually permitted to see the mysterious direction in which we are being prompted to go; if we did we’d resist with all our might. Instead we are put through trials of heart and soul without being given the reasons why and we are asked to trust that what is happening to us, no matter how difficult, is cleverly but lovingly calculated to bring us down to our knees, because only then can we ascend to the hidden summit of our divine potential.
So where does that leave me and my yoga practice?
I intend to get to my mat regularly, but the NEED TO KEEP IT UP as I have been doing has dropped away, and the reasons for doing yoga have irrevocably changed.
If I do go back to early morning Mysore classes at the shala (which for now is still a possibility), it will be with a mind that is peacefully detached, somehow softer, no expectations of myself or the practice. Or I may not go back – I may just keep up my twice a week schedule for now (which will make my shoulder happy). Definitely the hard edge of the Mysore mentality has worn away and what I do on that mat has become simply yoga.
For a while now I’ve seen yoga differently, more as just a vehicle to travel in for a certain period and for a certain distance, a bit like a little boat. I’ve been paddling along the river in this vehicle, doing my yoga and meditation, believing my little yoga vehicle is moving me closer to the ocean (if I’ve lost you, this is turning into a metaphor for the spiritual journey and the ocean is of course Samadhi or enlightenment which is a life lived in divine union with God). But I think the vehicles we travel in can also be what separates us from the ocean and there comes a time when we have to discard all our vehicles (yoga, Buddhism, meditation etc) and just dive headfirst into the ocean.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely necessary to use these vehicles for a while, because it’s only when we’ve been travelling down the river in these little boats for a while that we come to realise the ocean is all around us and within us and not something far off in the distance.
I recently read the letters of Brother Lawrence (here are some excerpts) whose only instruction for meditation is to sit with the presence of God – none of this watching the breath, watching the sensations, visualising chakras, or even abiding in pure empty awareness stuff.
No. Just sit within the loving and powerful presence of God. Now that is the ultimate.
All those little meditation boats we paddle along in are for sure leading us into the more subtle areas of our soul, but ultimately immersion in the ocean that is divine union with the source is what we must seek. So why not just do it from the start.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Monday 28th August 2006
These mornings without a yoga practice are strange. To get out of bed at a ‘normal hour’ and head for Cibo’s café for an hour of reading before the working day begins is like being on holidays for me - this kind of morning routine is still so different and novel. Though looking around at all the business people in the café it’s obviously a pretty ‘normal’ thing to do.
My disciplined routine is softening around the edges. I’m lightening up on myself. For so long, morning yoga practice gave my life a solid structure and it’s been a really important and useful discipline for consolidating and growing a richness to the yoga life.
But the yoga leg of my bigger journey seems to be coming to an end. Without discarding anything I’ve learned from the physical, psychological and spiritual practice of yoga, I’m taking it all with me into another level of spiritual life.
Mind you it hasn’t been an easy thing to let go of. Over the last 10 years of dedicated study and practice I’ve increasingly identified my self more and more as a yogi. To erase that label, to become a nobody, is to feel both a loss of identity, but a sense of peacefulness.
We do like to think we’re unique in some way (well our little Ego does) and yoga has been something that made me feel special and different – family, friends, acquaintances rolled their eyes at my dedication to this strangely exotic and subversive life. To relinquish teh status and become a nobody with no identifiable label is quite a juicy exercise to get my spiritual teeth into.
Letting go of all the images of that person I was aiming to be has not been so difficult, although it has taken some time to get used to. It’s ultimately liberating to drop all the subtle striving, all the doing and trying and maintaining. Even though yoga’s been an enormous influence on my life and psyche, I’m being encouraged by a greater force to let it go. And voila, I’m a nobody, not a yogi, not a Buddhist, not a special anybody at all, just humble and simple little me, with nothing to live up to, and there’s a vast empty open space in which to exist where I am peacefully receptive to the promptings of the universe.
The purification process that the yoga practice initiates in us is very real and as we practice it sets in motion a gradual release of the conditioning we hold in our body and mind. I think the purification process that inescapably leads us to divine union has taken on its own momentum and is clearing away my yoga conditioning. Very weird.
“The greater the purification, the clearer the vision (of God).”
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Since I’ve let go of my attachment to the physical practice of yoga, I’m less inclined to talk about the poses and the minor epiphanies that surface during practice. Instead I’ve silently made an agreement with myself not to limit my blogging to what I think the reading audience may be interested in. I figure if anyone does read this blog, they most probably do Ashtanga, or at the very least do some kind of physical yoga. It wouldn’t be of interest or make sense to anyone else.
That agreement has given me free rein to ramble on at length about what’s REALLY going on behind the scenes with an intellectual honesty that lays bare my deepest despairs, my thoughts and feelings that are often barely formed and are even more often obscured by the limitations of a language that falls short in its ability to describe the maturing of one’s spirituality.
Thomas Merton in his introduction to “No Man Is An Island” says
“I consider that the spiritual life is the life of man’s real self, the life of that interior self whose flame is so often allowed to be smothered under the ashes of anxiety and futile concern.”
I may talk about my asana practice as it melts and morphs with the passing of the weeks, I may talk about the divine love that infuses me on a daily basis, I may talk about my self doubts as a yoga teacher and my attempts to leak more of my soul into my classes when I’ve been warned against it.
Such indulgent, pot-pourri blogging may not be to everyone’s taste, but I’m now writing for me, not for you.
You’ve been warned now.
Last week I’d planned to practice Tuesday and Thursday morning in the Gallery with my yoga friends. At Tuesday morning’s practice, for reasons that elude me, my body felt like a lump of lard. Practice was slow and unfocussed so I wrote it off and gave up after one hour. A violent attack of food poisoning on Wednesday night (5 hours of vomiting, diarrhoea and passing out of the bathroom floor) put an end to the plan to practice on Thursday.
Today I rang my students and cancelled my two yoga classes – Although I’m still in recovery and haven’t eaten for two days, it was more that I desperately needed a ‘mental health day’ all to myself.
So a whole week has gone by with almost no physical yoga practice. And I’m not bothered. In fact, it’s quite exciting not to be bothered by this – the detachment indicates great progress.
Add to a week of zero practice the food poisoning episode, and I’ve had a complete physical and mental purging of magnificent proportions.
All part of a bigger plan to help loosen those last threads of attachment to being a superyogi.
It may well be that my former approach to yoga practice, the importance I’d attached to it and it’s relevance to my greater spiritual life are all being re-evaluated at an obscure depth that is most characteristic of a relentless surge of unconscious activity that is drawing me into the vortex of God. For any spiritual aspirant experiencing the pain of loss, trauma, or even just a life change, I urge you to read this most insightful and poignant book to help see the hidden agenda of why these things happen to us. We are not usually permitted to see the mysterious direction in which we are being prompted to go; if we did we’d resist with all our might. Instead we are put through trials of heart and soul without being given the reasons why and we are asked to trust that what is happening to us, no matter how difficult, is cleverly but lovingly calculated to bring us down to our knees, because only then can we ascend to the hidden summit of our divine potential.
So where does that leave me and my yoga practice?
I intend to get to my mat regularly, but the NEED TO KEEP IT UP as I have been doing has dropped away, and the reasons for doing yoga have irrevocably changed.
If I do go back to early morning Mysore classes at the shala (which for now is still a possibility), it will be with a mind that is peacefully detached, somehow softer, no expectations of myself or the practice. Or I may not go back – I may just keep up my twice a week schedule for now (which will make my shoulder happy). Definitely the hard edge of the Mysore mentality has worn away and what I do on that mat has become simply yoga.
For a while now I’ve seen yoga differently, more as just a vehicle to travel in for a certain period and for a certain distance, a bit like a little boat. I’ve been paddling along the river in this vehicle, doing my yoga and meditation, believing my little yoga vehicle is moving me closer to the ocean (if I’ve lost you, this is turning into a metaphor for the spiritual journey and the ocean is of course Samadhi or enlightenment which is a life lived in divine union with God). But I think the vehicles we travel in can also be what separates us from the ocean and there comes a time when we have to discard all our vehicles (yoga, Buddhism, meditation etc) and just dive headfirst into the ocean.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s absolutely necessary to use these vehicles for a while, because it’s only when we’ve been travelling down the river in these little boats for a while that we come to realise the ocean is all around us and within us and not something far off in the distance.
I recently read the letters of Brother Lawrence (here are some excerpts) whose only instruction for meditation is to sit with the presence of God – none of this watching the breath, watching the sensations, visualising chakras, or even abiding in pure empty awareness stuff.
No. Just sit within the loving and powerful presence of God. Now that is the ultimate.
All those little meditation boats we paddle along in are for sure leading us into the more subtle areas of our soul, but ultimately immersion in the ocean that is divine union with the source is what we must seek. So why not just do it from the start.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________
Monday 28th August 2006
These mornings without a yoga practice are strange. To get out of bed at a ‘normal hour’ and head for Cibo’s café for an hour of reading before the working day begins is like being on holidays for me - this kind of morning routine is still so different and novel. Though looking around at all the business people in the café it’s obviously a pretty ‘normal’ thing to do.
My disciplined routine is softening around the edges. I’m lightening up on myself. For so long, morning yoga practice gave my life a solid structure and it’s been a really important and useful discipline for consolidating and growing a richness to the yoga life.
But the yoga leg of my bigger journey seems to be coming to an end. Without discarding anything I’ve learned from the physical, psychological and spiritual practice of yoga, I’m taking it all with me into another level of spiritual life.
Mind you it hasn’t been an easy thing to let go of. Over the last 10 years of dedicated study and practice I’ve increasingly identified my self more and more as a yogi. To erase that label, to become a nobody, is to feel both a loss of identity, but a sense of peacefulness.
We do like to think we’re unique in some way (well our little Ego does) and yoga has been something that made me feel special and different – family, friends, acquaintances rolled their eyes at my dedication to this strangely exotic and subversive life. To relinquish teh status and become a nobody with no identifiable label is quite a juicy exercise to get my spiritual teeth into.
Letting go of all the images of that person I was aiming to be has not been so difficult, although it has taken some time to get used to. It’s ultimately liberating to drop all the subtle striving, all the doing and trying and maintaining. Even though yoga’s been an enormous influence on my life and psyche, I’m being encouraged by a greater force to let it go. And voila, I’m a nobody, not a yogi, not a Buddhist, not a special anybody at all, just humble and simple little me, with nothing to live up to, and there’s a vast empty open space in which to exist where I am peacefully receptive to the promptings of the universe.
The purification process that the yoga practice initiates in us is very real and as we practice it sets in motion a gradual release of the conditioning we hold in our body and mind. I think the purification process that inescapably leads us to divine union has taken on its own momentum and is clearing away my yoga conditioning. Very weird.
“The greater the purification, the clearer the vision (of God).”
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
