Sacred Hobbies: The things we do as meditation

It’s the things we do; the times when we turn off our cell phones, power down the laptops and the televisions, the 24/7 stream of news and entertainment, the onslaught of stimulus. It’s the things we do when we make time to be silent and do something we love, whether it is walking the dog or scrapbooking, shooting hoops on your own or picking on the guitar, taking a stroll through the woods or dancing barefoot in the yard. It’s the things we do that draw us deeper into ourselves and further from the rattle of the everyday life.

Tonight the Gallery opens an art show titled Sacred Hobbies. It was a phrase that starting insinuating itself into my language as I struggled with not having time to do my yoga practice. I went back to one of the basic principles of yoga; that yoga is not our physical practice but the way we live our lives. So I started working that theory into my life; when I had to choose between taking my half hour off to either do asana or take my amazing dog on a walk I choose to take my dog for a walk but for that to be my yoga for the day. Leaving the phone behind and not just taking in each moment of our walk but enjoying each moment (even the picking up of the poop moment). And I instilled this new awareness into other areas of my daily life, stealing precious minutes and turning them into profound experiences or taking what seemed like chores and making them my new sacred hobby. My walk up the hill to my office became walking meditations, my job making sandwich and scones turning into the sacred art of nourishing people. And my life, my little life as a struggling yogi and women, became enveloped with prayer and beauty. And I wanted to share!

I started talking this idea of sacred hobbies up to friends. What do they do in their lives that helps keep them sane and plugged into their own inner landscape? There seemed to be something for everyone and it was one friend in particular that gave birth to the exhibit opening tonight. Her own Sacred Hobby was making a thousand paper cranes; she had no “intention” for the cranes but asked if I would be interested in hanging them at the studio. It seemed a perfect fit and also a way to broaden this conversation I had begun among my friends out into the Community. From that reaching out into the Community I asked another local artist, a photographer who still shoots on film and develops his own prints at home in a self built darkroom, to join the show.

When I think back to just over a year ago when I opened Second Star Studio, it was in a way the biggest Sacred Hobby I’ve ever had and now it has helped to bring even more of them into my life. This show began as the tiniest spark of an idea and now holds a very special place in my life. I am so please and grateful for the shift in perspective, helping to see the profundity in every aspect of life, to embrace the idea of sacred as something other than solemn and of course to share this all with my Community.

If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other. ~Mother Teresa

2nd Preview Yoga Nugget

"And, like the baseless fabric of vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with sleep."

- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, 4.1

yoga poetry

Savasana

The corpse I am become
lives in pure counter-
poise, between weight and
weightless tidal flow, its breath
osmotic, its pulse subsumed. Here
is death beyond fear, without
want of resurrection, unyoked

from hate or any spur to forgive,
where all the masks of God
melt into irrelevant silences.
Here the body surrenders all
tethers to the past, its crowns
and cups of woe, and hope's
a stain absolved of any future,

where the only present is presence,
a nothing that is everything stillness
yearns to inhabit, that lights
no way to or fro. Dark bliss!
Yet give me back, for now,
my stuttering heart, staccato air,
the buzzing contagions of the world.

Richard Foerster

The most precious gift we can offer anyone is our attention. ~Thich Nhat Hanh

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to bloom"
-Anais Nin

Tapas, not just an appetizer!

When I was in yoga school each student was given a yama or niyama, which are self-restraints and observations along the 8 limbed path of yoga, too write about in our final paper. My niyama was Tapas which is the practice of austerity, but there is also an element of heat to this niyama often described as a burning desire to purify the body and mind. {The word "tapas" comes from the Sanskrit verb "tap" which means "to burn." The traditional interpretation of tapas is "fiery discipline," the fiercely focused, constant, intense commitment necessary to burn off the impediments that keep us from being in the true state of yoga (union with the universe)}. As I read aloud to my class my paper on tapas I likened it to when I was a child and my father burned the grass in the yard during the fall, I remember the looks of intrigue on some of my fellow students faces. I guess not everyone’s father willingly set his yard on fire. I haven’t actually thought about that moment in quite some time but recently it has come ‘searing’ back into my memory. Though I haven’t really ever forgotten about tapas, fire seems to play a strong role in my life; either using the sacred smoke of sage to clear energy or having a small fire and throwing in affirmations and prayers into the flames to be engulfed and transformed and taken to the heavens with the smoke. So it would seem that tapas still plays a role in my life. But there was an imbalance in my relationship to fire and I didn’t even realize this until two rather unrelated moments in my life suddenly rammed themselves together in my mind.

First: I was having a bad night. It was one of those nights were you feel like the last thread you’ve been holding onto was about to snap or worse has already snapped and you have forgotten how to get back up. And in an act I’m not terribly good at I called a friend and asked for help. As we sat there on my kitchen floor my friend pressed her fingers into my chest and said “you have a fire in there, and that fire is you, it makes you you and don’t you dare change that!” it was not subtle. And it was exactly what I needed to hear so I cried a little harder and thanked her for her friendship. But the meaning didn’t sink it yet, that took another few days.

The second thing and this one is way more subtle: I spent some time this weekend in the car going here and there and taking the country roads. Along the road side I could see the charred remains of prairies and even heard a story on NPR about a woman’s love of burning prairie remnants, how we use and more importantly control this element of destruction to cleanse the land of encroaching wildlife. Freeing up the land and nutrients so the indigenous plant species can reclaim and thrive. This is exactly what I wrote about 5 years ago in yoga school. That’s when it all came together.

The thing is, I’ve been disrespecting my own fire for quite some time now. It’s no secret that last year I went through a deep depression even though I had amazingly wonderful things happening in my life; I bought a home and I opened my studio, but I was living on the fumes of my fire. I wasn’t recharging, not eating well, not sleeping because I was working so hard to build this life I’m living. And the fire smoldered out and I was cold ashes before I even knew what was happening. I was in no way a controlled burn. So when I started coming out of my depression it was as if I could feel a spark kindling inside me, my fire was coming back and I was elated. Sometime in January I hit the balance, I had just enough of my fire, my passion back in time for a yoga retreat and what a weekend it was! I came home and was practically floating, when I closed my eyes I could see the light form my inner fire connecting me with everything around me. That! That connection that is the essence of yoga, of any faith or religion, I finally got it and more than just got it I felt it! I was riding the crest of a beautiful wave. But after a year of living and struggling what I didn’t have was discipline, I had no more tools to harness my fire. So my fire consumed me and I was burned and in my brilliant burn out I also burned some people I care deeply for. So in not very much I time I had experienced the slow meandering death of fire when it has nothing to replenish itself and the super nova like explosion of fire unbridled that leaves you very much like a black hole.

So fire… Having gone through living in harmony with fire, the slow extinguishing and death of it, a rebirth and yet another death of this essential element I have learned this: fire needs to be respected for both its destructive and purifying qualities. Now I can see how to reach back to the tools yoga has taught me to first cultivate and then to harness my own inner fire. I can relearn how to use the destructive power to rid my life and practice of useless and even harmful aspects and I can embrace the purifying heat by recognizing the open space fire leaves and fill it with positive change. It’s not instantaneous, it will take time and effort but fire is a running theme in my life I just need to get it back on my mat and out of my yard.