I was laying on the floor yesterday (something I have been doing more lately) and I remembered an early morning in Mysore practice. I was laying on my mat at the end of my practice, my sweat cooling my skin. The firm and nourishing support of the ground underneath me. A teacher came up to me and quietly asked if I wanted weights on my shoulders. The weights used in yoga are usually cloth bags filled with 5 or 10 pounds of sand. I love them. So of course, I said yes. She placed a bag on the front of each shoulder so that the sand bag spilled off the corners of my shoulders, grounding them to the floor. She then walked off and came back with two more and placed them on the top of my thighs. Again, she left and came back and placed a smaller sand bag on my forehead so that most of the bag was sitting on the floor and there was a firm but welcome weight on my skull. My eyes were closed, darkness filled me. Although I was weighted down, I felt light as if I were floating.
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Are We Being Good Ancestors?
“I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it. I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the change comes out well. I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks.” ~ Danny Hillis
How would you live your life if you took the next 10,000 years into account? If you geared your actions to benefit whoever or whatever might be around at that time? We don’t know what everything will be like in 10,000 years. We don’t know how we will travel, communicate, or if the human race or this planet will even be around. But, for this essay, let’s be hopeful and say that the world will be around and there will be living beings on it, all of them our descendants in some way. How would we make choices today, knowing that we will be the ancestors one day? What would we make if we wanted it to last and be of benefit 10,000 years from now?
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What can you stop doing?
“Tension is who you think you should be. Relaxation is who you are." ~ Chinese proverb
We are a society that does too much. We have, on top of all of this, come up with strategies, practices, and scientific reason to convince ourselves to ‘do less’. And, why not? We need support every now and again. I have recently made big changes in my life in order to stop doing the things I really don’t want to do and find a little more space to breathe. I switched jobs and now work less and have a five minute commute, I have taken a hiatus from teaching yoga. These were the external markers of doing less. But, I have a whole lot of internal ‘things’ I do that feel like too much. I do find my thoughts darting around in all directions trying to find my next big move. It doesn’t work this way. Not well, anyhow. It’s so easy to accumulate, do too much and keep looking for new things.
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The Thing About Other People (and Why We Need Them)
“There’s nothing we could know about ourselves or another that could solve the problem that other people actually exist and we are utterly depend on them.” ~ Adam Phillips
When I first began practicing yoga with others, I used to walk from my university residence to the studio in another part of town, my yoga mat bag slung over my shoulder. I would go to a class just about every day (the freedom of being a student!) and attempted to be discrete about the whole thing. “What are you carrying in the bag?” I would sometimes get asked. “An instrument?”, “A fishing rod?”, “A gun?”. “A yoga mat,” I’d say and quickly carry on away from the stranger with a perplexed look on their face.
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Mystery - A Threat to the Modern Mind
There are ten values to living yoga in our daily life – the 5 yamas and the 5 niyamas. Some of these, like non-violence and truth, are easy to agree upon. We know that a lie will agitate the mind. Inflicting violence on someone will reverberate in our bodies and will likely be followed by a torturing regret. So, while not always straight forward to follow, it’s easy to get on board the theory.
The niyama that I have had a little more resistance to is ishvara pranidhana. This is often translated as 'surrendering to god'. This word, god, brings up resistance in many of us whether we were raised with a concept of god or not. It is a word that names some thing that is, by many interpretations, unnamable, yet w know that these differences are not always easily allowed. Even within the recorded history of yoga, this niyama has been interpreted in various ways. But, there is no denying that the appearance of this term orientates some forms of yoga as theistic traditions, although much common practice and discourse nowadays abstain from this notion.
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A Long Look
Over the past couple months, I have been teaching philosophy as part of a yoga teacher training. One of the topics last week was dharana, which is a Sanskrit word that is part of the 8-fold path of yoga. Dharana is translated as attention, focus, or holding steady. This is my favorite, I said when I introduced this word, which means to say that this is an idea I am holding closely lately. Each word learned in this system is worth getting to know with more intimacy. This is the only way any sort of understanding can come.
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When There is Too Much in Our Head
While my son is in his piano lesson at our local music store, I sit in the foyer tapping and swiping away on my phone. It is two weeks away from the end-of-year concert when budding musicians play their best rehearsed song on a stage in front of mostly parents. My son flat out refuses to do this. When he first refused, I made a couple of encouraging remarks to help him get over what I thought was his nervousness. But then I shrugged. No problem, I said, we can both just watch. He doesn’t practice, not formally. Some mornings, before school, he stands in front of his keyboard banging away at the keys overtop a terrible demo-song and sometimes he’ll turn off the accompaniment to play little tunes like Ducks on the Pond or Old MacDonald. While I am looking forward to his playing improving, I don’t encourage him to practice. He is only six after all.
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A Modest and Meaningful Life
“How wonderful it is that nobody needs to wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” ~ Anne Frank
Harold, my grandfather, was a bee keeper, a peach farmer, a gardener, a volunteer with the Amnesty International. He, like many radical pacifists, is someone who didn’t make a huge name for himself in the way we tend to think is most important. He did not get famous or make a lot of money. He was a quiet man who always seemed to be smiling. This inconspicuous way of living is something to admire and no less meaningful or impactful than those of us whose lives and words are booming in the daily news.
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