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.”

Texting

Ok, the times they are a changing or rather the schedules they are a shifting. Sutra Friday has proven to be a little trying not because the sutras themselves are difficult but because my schedule gets a bit hairy towards the weekends. So altering this plan, Sutra Fridays will now become Sutra Mondays! Because Monday needs to be a little heavier for most folks, yes? No. Oh well, something to distract you then form the return to the grind of a 5 day work week.

In addition to the Sutras I’ll be diving into The Bagavad Gita, yet again. I’ve tried to read this book before (see, Reading the Gita), I even traveled to Brussels last year to study it. However, this is no easy book, the language is dense and the story is epic (and I mean epic in the tradition sense of the word not the trendy bastardization to mean basically, cool) and the concepts are big. So this time I am employing one of the oldest tools of book learning, the book club. The Sacred Text Reading Group in fact, an idea I wish I would have come up with but am so happy to be involved with. As a group we are diving into the Gita with the objective to relate the experiences of Arjuna to surviving the Holidays? Hmmmm, a little dramatic? A warrior melts down in fear as he stares out upon his enemy as compared to the gathering of family and the pressures of gift giving? Actually not so much, because the opposing army that our hero stares out at is his family, he cousins, uncles, teachers and fellow Community members and he must discover what he’s duty is to himself and his family and the best action to take and at what cost? Sound familiar or maybe familial? We meet again in January to discuss our experiences with the Gita and the Holidays and hopefully there will be mini-meetings along the way to help the process along. You shall be kept posted (blog posted that is) to all progress made.

The Gita re-visited, the Sutras Rescheduled, could be fun.

for Rose

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?
-Kahlil Gibran

goodbye autumn...

One leaf left on a branch and not a sound of sadness or despair
One leaf left on a branch and no unhappiness
One leaf left all by itself in the air and it does not speak of loneliness or death
One leaf left on a branch and it spends itself swaying mildly in the breeze.
-David Ingot

Beyond Asana Sunday

Meditation brings wisdom; lack of mediation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what hold you back, and choose the path that leads you to wisdom.

Sutra Friday: a yogi looks at violence and sees her life.

II-35 Aminsa Pratisthayam Tat Samnidhau Vaira Tyagah: In the presence of one firmly established in non-violence all hostilities cease.

One might think that being a yogi would make the practice of non-violence fairly easy, well that would be wrong. Oh so very wrong. In order to elaborate on this wrongness I’ll start with the word ahimsa. The root himsa means ‘injustice’ or ‘cruelty’ so by the addition of a that would suggest the opposite of injustice and cruelty, so already delving far beyond the depths of simple violence. By abstaining (which the yamas, the first step on the 8 limbed path of yoga, are all practices of abstinence) from these qualities a yogi tries to counter them by cultivating traits of kindness and consideration and even friendliness.

For me this yama really brought to light not just the ways in which I have violence in my life but more the way I practice all yoga in my life. But first the ahimsa stuff, which goes far beyond on day one when I looked up to see a mosquito (yep, a mosquito in November) on my window and out of pure reflex squashed him. Not very cruelty free. And that’s just the outward violence the place where I noticed the largest amount of violence was internally. Literally, the things I put into my body as well as the way I treat my body. When I think about the things that can harm a body internally like alcohol, overly processed food, sugar then I have some major work to do. I work part-time in environments that are crawling with sweets and good wine and not having the best will power in the world I tend to indulge a little. Especially now with the winter sunset of 4:30 in the afternoon my SAD (seasonal affective disorder) really works me into a funk, so often I self medicate, or rather anesthetize, myself in the evenings and wind up in bed by 8 o’clock. Not the nicest thing I could be doing to my body, in fact a very harmful thing to be doing. So how do I change this, this is where I stopped seeing this week’s sutra practice as an individual practice and a great introspective to my entire yoga practice.

When you get down to it it’s is a sort of half full half empty thing, people are usually one or the other. For some the idea of practice abstaining or doing without works and they can start to trim away the unwanted behaviors, sort of a spiritual, diet. For me that doesn’t work, the best way to get me to do something is to tell me I can’t, I don’t work well with restrictions. So instead I think of adding instead of eliminating. I think ‘I want to add these behaviors to myself’ and the result of this addition is a decrease in the opposite behaviors. For instance instead of telling myself; no more wheat and refined sugars, I say; I really want more rice and yummy fruit sugar in my life, so by adding these more ahimsa types of foods there is less room for the himsa type foods. That’s it. That’s my practice, my yoga, my life.

I don’t want to be keeping things out, I want to be gathering in; always growing, always learning, always experiencing. By bringing in the positive attributes of life I crowed out the negative; if my heart if full of compassion I have no room for jealousy, if my mind is full of kindness I have no room for judgment, if my body is full of nutrients and flexibility I have no room for disease and pain. Two thousand pounds of poo and two thousand pounds of gold both weight a ton, but which would you rather spread around your life.