the power of photgraphs

Maybe I’m just sensitive these days but when I was scrolling through buzzfeed’s list of the 45 most powerful images I got to this image and burst into tears.


Christians protect Muslims during prayer in Cairo, Egypt.

See the thing is I’m not a big fan of religion, in fact one of my favorite sayings is “God looked down on His people and said ‘as a gift to my people, who I love so much, I will give them the gift of religion.’ To which the Devil spoke up and said ‘ooooh, and I’ll organize it.’” I am sure many people who, like me, were raised Catholic can say they took away to major things from that religion; the ritual and the harshness. I’m not even sure why I feel a sense of severity because I was so young when I was involved with the Church, but it’s there. Hell (I mean…heck), for a long time I had a hard enough time dealing with the idea of monotheism and the word God itself. But I wanted it!

For whatever reason, my Catholic upbringing or just my DNA, I struggled for a long time with faith, or rather my lack of faith. I wanted with the entirety of my being to have faith in something, anything! But nothing ever felt right, there was always too much dogma or worse too much wooing- the places you go to that are so obviously trying to appeal to the people and not even trying to promote ‘the good word.’ And speaking of the good word, that’s another reason I was seeking religion, because wanted to be a student. I wanted a wiser more learned individual posing thought provoking questions to me about love and compassion and maybe even a good moral tale thrown in every now and again for amusement.

And then I got into yoga, like really got into yoga, in fact this was a few years after I went to yoga school. I realized through some reading of ancient and modern texts that there was less of an emphasis on NAMING a god as there was to BEING FAITHFUL to a god. The teachings and practices of yoga seemed (to me at least) to align themselves with nearly every faith I had looked at or too for guidance. And for the very first time in my life I felt ok being a spiritual being and not necessarily a religious one. I even started using the word God again (by the way that’s bigger than it relates in this blog) and I didn’t worry or feel inauthentic about not being able to name that God.

So why this picture, why is this the 1 of the 45 most powerful images of 2011 that brought me to tears? I think it’s because this image relates the one thing throughout all of my religious struggle I never really stopped believing in and that is spirit. Whether it’s the human spirit or the Holy Spirit or the spirit of freedom and solidarity, I just knew on some level there was something out there bigger than me, bigger than all of us. So too see people standing together displaying what for so long I had no words for, it profoundly impacted me. People who proudly proclaim a religion, one set in its beliefs that it is the way, joining hands to protect others who proudly proclaim a different religion from their own. It should make you cry, it should resound across the borders (external, internal or otherwise) and shake the foundation of all those who commit terror in the name of faith. It is the people joined together in spirit that is religion and that is more beautiful than a thousand churches and more powerful than a thousand bombs and summed up quit poetically in this, one of the most powerful images of 2011. Enjoy and may the Spirit be with you…

…(this is where the Catholics say, “and also with you.)

J

and so it begins

1.1 ATHA YOGANUSASANAM
Now the exposition of yoga begins.

I thought this seemed an appropriate way to "re-launch" Sutra Monday. And yes Monday is almost over (at least the working day part) but I’m working on that whole blogger timing thing.

When I prepare for a sutra blog I don’t just read Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, I read several different version and explanations. Some of them written as late as 1951, so there are more modern versions out there which tend to have language easier to get your head wrapped around. But for this sutra it was the last line of Patanjali’s sutras, as translated by Sri Swami Satchidananda that gave me the inspiration for this blog, it reads: Without practice, nothing can be achieved.

I like to write, I like getting into a rhythm, feeling the creative juices flowing, finding the right words to line up in a sentence that relates not only a meaning, but imagery and emotions to. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t usually I just let it happen when it’s happening and don’t push it when it’s not. But that can often lead to a rather empty blog, so I tried to instill a little discipline to my writing via Sutra Friday. Well I didn’t account for how busy my life is right now so I moved it to Monday which didn’t make my life any less busy so I’m not sure why I thought I’d be more prepared to blog a few days later. But not doing something just because time is short isn’t the way to have discipline, so here I am blogging about yoga, how yoga begins. This is me beginning my yoga.

This is my practice. I am transforming my writing from a habit to a practice just like I did with my asana practice. I took my physical yoga from being something I did every now and again to something I did daily (when in yoga school at least) and not only did I start to love my asana (yeah, go ahead and read that pun into it) I began to love all of it, all the yoga, the Sanskrit, the history, the stories. A whole new world opened up to me when I simply had little discipline, a little practice. Now do think writing every week is going to crack open a new world of enlightenment, no. Well, maybe. Maybe this practice of reading sacred text and relaying what I glean from them will help their bigger meanings sink in better for me. Maybe I’ll start reading things I never thought I would and finding new paths along the road to enlightenment. Maybe I’ll start to love writing so much that I start writing letters to my family and friends far away, making their day better and then they call me and make my days better and we all find a little more happiness. So yeah, maybe writing will be a powerful tool for change in my life but I have to do it because just like the Swami says: “Without practice, nothing can be achieved.”