I don't like these parts of myself that I'm seeing. I feel better than those bitches from last night because I feel like I'm doing "real" Yoga, and they aren't. I guess I'm arrogant as well. I am.
Last night I did my practice at 10:07 pm. Kinda pushin' it. My right hip was so mellowly open, especially after the therapist worked on the 'knot' around the sciatic nerve of my right leg. I'd wanted to scream while she did this, and as I thought this to myself, she responded as if I'd spoken. She said, "Yes you did want to tell me about it." It's not the first time she's read my mind.
Amazingly, my left hip opened for the first time in my life in full or half-lotus. There was pain, but not much. Overall, the practice was soothing my little "wild things". I think of how much I loved the movie version of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are". I'm on the island with my demons, smashing huts, igloos...and yurts...just the Czar's soldiers when he massacred the Russians from the steppes with their dark hair for real in the last century, and in the Russian film: "Song from the Southern Seas".
Back in the 30s, before the Tibetan exile, a western woman snuck into the holy city of Lhasa, and studied the practice of 'The Ritual of the Chod' with the lamas. There she succeeded in bringing a personal demon into personified form, at first as a shadow in a cloak that grew, over time, to have piercing eyes and sharp teeth. This conjuration was to be able to fight it. She'd only studied for a year with the lama before trying this, not the traditional 5 or 7. There are stories of people being killed by their personified demons. I surmise that the problem might believing in them too much as the great sage Milarepa discovered.
Demons. Ha! Making peace with the personal ones is all good and well, because we create them ourselves, but what about those that are other people's creations? Take for instance the three forms of Tantra according to Yogi Bhajan: White for healing and spiritual growth; Black for manipulating the energy to control another human being as my former wanna-be cultleader friend practiced; and Red solely for sexual purposes. Of course...the reality is also it is never really that Black and White, so to speak.
For years the Dalai Lama has been patiently stating that most of us should not even attempt most tantric practices until we have mastered the Three Principle Paths of renunciation, bodhicitta and correct view. To wield that kind of power...with a grasping hand full of ego? And yet I'm trying to get to Florida for 3HO Winter Solstice Celebration and White Tantric Yoga. Am I ready? Once, I gazed for 10 minutes into the eyes of a manipulative lover whom I thought was as harmless as a spoiled little child, and what I saw in his eyes was truly frightening. Is he not my mirror?
At the chiropractor's office I did a new exercise called 'Wall Angel', but as therapist commented it felt more like a 'Wall Demon'! Only yesterday while doing my yoga stretches for Bound Lotus, I felt moved to lie on my back and make Carpet Angels. And yet demons posing as hapless humans were in my dreams...one who lured my friends and I from a bar-hopping stint into a living room far from safe. Another, who loomed like my old nemesis, and tried to get me to climb up a towering yellow stilted house with only slice of apple for food. My instinct told me I'd starve to death up there with whomever else he had trapped; mud wasp that he is...paralyzing the caterpillars to store as future food sources. Such vivid dreams in technicolor...
In this waking reality, I sit again for Bound Lotus and it is a soft surrender into the pillows with so little pain that I almost slumber. I should not leave the practice to be done so late in the day. Too risky. I might fall into a dream and forget...
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