Quite exhausted last night, I didn't know how I'd finish both Bound Lotus and a mantra practice I've undertaken for 40 days that ends today...so I thought instrumental music to accompany my chanting would at least make it easier, just as it does for Bound Lotus. I had been looking for fresh new music to teach by on iTunes, and had purchased several pieces that I listened to last night including Moroccan Spirit's "Dervishe" and "Music for 1001 Nights". Hm. Seems as if I might listen to the latter for savasana after Bound Lotus...ha, ha!
But the following pieces were also music to soothe the savage beast in me:
Raga Bairagi Bhairav: Alap by Debashish Bhattacharya from the album "Rainbow"
Raag Bhairavi (Meera Bhajan Pt 1) - "Nectar" by Kala Ramnath
Raga Rageshri Alap - "Nectar" by Kala Ramnath
Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali) - Ravi Shankar with Yehudi Menuhin
Pangkur from "Java: The Jasmine Isle: Gamelan Music
I felt so rejuvinated! I'll play them again today to finish the practice of 10 full malas of a Sun Mantra, 5 full malas of a Saturn Mantra, and 1 full mala of a Moon Mantra. I undertook them for health reasons, and they seem to be clearing out my body.
My dreams are strange and alarmingly vivid lately. For a long while I did not remember my dreams. For the past few weeks since beginning the practice of Bound Lotus...they are life-like. Two nights ago I dreamed I was back in Jamaica on the cliffs of Negril riding a bicycle bound for 'Amrita'ville. Last night I dreamed of phallic symbols.
Sexual energy is the same energy as spiritual energy, and sometimes, in both instances, it is a little raw. I feel a little raw and angry. I'm nice to people, but that doesn't mean they should mistake my kindness for weakness. I taught a beautiful class tonight and my student were smiling and laughing when they left, but these two arrogant "seasoned yogis", as they call themselves, in the following chose to be 'catty' toward us because I ended the class five minutes late, even though there was still plenty of time for them to come in. They stuck up their noses at me, and said "Excuse me," in that snotty way women will. I've heard them judge my teaching before and say that it is not hard enough, as if Yoga were only about 'getting a yoga butt'. The sort of women who say things like, "Ah, you know I'm Level 3 now." They are just missing the whole damn boat, I think. But what do I know.
Honestly, I wanted to be snotty right back. I wonder what Bound Lotus will bring up for me today? Should I have done the practice earlier in the day? Would I have been less likely to want to flip those women off? Honestly, speaking from my throat chakra after finishing an arduous 40-day mantra practice, there are quite a few people I'd like to flip off. But I won't.
As I prepare to sit for Bound Lotus, I am aware that my sex drive is being sublimated upwards through the practice of moola bhanda at the end of the practice. This includes the wild, unrestrained energy I've been feeling. A calmness and a sense of peace come over me like never before with this practice, and I am grateful for this practice. It is healing me in so many ways, though it is sometimes very, very hard to take.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Mmmm...Pomegranate Raita
I made Pomegranate Raita yesterday to soothe my throat. Yogurt, those little ruby gems of pomegranate seeds peeled out of the shells like crystals from a vein in the earth, fresh mint, dry roasted and ground cumin, coriander, clove, pepper and salt to taste. Yum! Easy on the throat. Then, I went to see the French film 'Mia and the Magoo'. It is an animated film with a little girl trying to find her father, and these magickal creatures called Magoos who have holes in their heads, and then in their stomachs, and can't think straight until the damage is repaired. Makes you think about damage to the energy body in a new way.
Later, when I got home, I opened Mick Wall's book on Led Zeppelin to a discussion of the album "Presence" and the 'object' on the cover, the little obelisk with a hole in it. Jimmy jokingly called it 'the present' because there was nothing present. I think I have a hole in my belly that needs to be filled, and this movie about the Magoos guarding the Tree of Life filled some of the hole in the strange way...
Today I saw "Song From the Southern Seas" by Pesn' Juzhnykn Morej in Russian. A beautiful meditation on race hatred and it's resolution through love. A shadow theatre character kept asking to be released from his grief and memories so that he could be free to be like a child again. I find myself wishing for this too. The practice of Bound Lotus is bringing up so much painful stuff that I thought I'd already laid to rest; the layers of pain are so very deep. I had no idea how far down the roots ran...
And this movie, a fitting end to my experience of the St. Louis Film Festival, made me feel a longing to visit the Russian steppes. I've been mistaken for being Russian before, so who knows. My maternal grandfather's family was supposedly either Moorish or Russian, which upset my racist Danish grandmother when she found out. So much meanness over race and religion. She didn't like the fact that he was a Mason either.
I walked in the park with a good friend, who truly is the love of my life, and we stood under the pavilion in Forest Park gazing at the night sky. We talked about our parents. His father is Palestinian and moved to the U.S. to get away from the war and the rich grape vineyards that were taken from his family after 100 years, because he wasn't Jewish - basically. A spade is a spade is a spade. How do you right the injustices toward the Jewish nation by hurting the Palestinian Muslims? Is there an answer? I get so tired of hearing the rationalizations...
Sitting for Bound Lotus brought a calm peacefulness while opening the right side of my body; mind-numbing, almost agonizing pain as I opened the left side. I was crying the words to the Ray Man. How can both sides of the body be so different when they are the same? How can people be so different when they are the same?
As I sat for my mantra practice as a practicing Hindu, I listened to several ragas I found on iTunes, and a song by Moroccan Spirit. Lo and behold, my pain in both my neck and my throat dissappeared!
Later, when I got home, I opened Mick Wall's book on Led Zeppelin to a discussion of the album "Presence" and the 'object' on the cover, the little obelisk with a hole in it. Jimmy jokingly called it 'the present' because there was nothing present. I think I have a hole in my belly that needs to be filled, and this movie about the Magoos guarding the Tree of Life filled some of the hole in the strange way...
Today I saw "Song From the Southern Seas" by Pesn' Juzhnykn Morej in Russian. A beautiful meditation on race hatred and it's resolution through love. A shadow theatre character kept asking to be released from his grief and memories so that he could be free to be like a child again. I find myself wishing for this too. The practice of Bound Lotus is bringing up so much painful stuff that I thought I'd already laid to rest; the layers of pain are so very deep. I had no idea how far down the roots ran...
And this movie, a fitting end to my experience of the St. Louis Film Festival, made me feel a longing to visit the Russian steppes. I've been mistaken for being Russian before, so who knows. My maternal grandfather's family was supposedly either Moorish or Russian, which upset my racist Danish grandmother when she found out. So much meanness over race and religion. She didn't like the fact that he was a Mason either.
I walked in the park with a good friend, who truly is the love of my life, and we stood under the pavilion in Forest Park gazing at the night sky. We talked about our parents. His father is Palestinian and moved to the U.S. to get away from the war and the rich grape vineyards that were taken from his family after 100 years, because he wasn't Jewish - basically. A spade is a spade is a spade. How do you right the injustices toward the Jewish nation by hurting the Palestinian Muslims? Is there an answer? I get so tired of hearing the rationalizations...
Sitting for Bound Lotus brought a calm peacefulness while opening the right side of my body; mind-numbing, almost agonizing pain as I opened the left side. I was crying the words to the Ray Man. How can both sides of the body be so different when they are the same? How can people be so different when they are the same?
As I sat for my mantra practice as a practicing Hindu, I listened to several ragas I found on iTunes, and a song by Moroccan Spirit. Lo and behold, my pain in both my neck and my throat dissappeared!
Saturday, November 21, 2009
"That's the Way"
As in the lyrics of the Led Zep song: "I don't know how I'm gonna tell you I can't play with you no more..." At least for now I can't ask the shadow emotion of grief to come out to play...I need to balance it with the human talent of Radiance. I need a few timeless moments of bliss. I awoke with what appears to be a mild case of Strep throat. My upper palate is swollen and a little blistered, the back of my throat raw and veiny. It is slightly difficult to swallow. I'm coughing a little for the first time in a while. Last night I watched my abdomen go completely flat from all of my trips to the bathroom. Something is clearing out, to put it bluntly. All these crazy attempts of the body to thwart the healing energy of this practice. No matter. I'm STILL going to do Bound Lotus. So ha ha ha!
I feel really tired. Ugh. Really tired. I called a friend and asked them to send Reiki. Then my phone rang, and it was someone I hadn't seen in years! We talked about mutual friends and past experiences. I told her about my little episode with the flies last fall, and we laughed. I'd been doing an intense mantra practice with the planetary mantras, much like the ones Saul gave in his workshop, but these were mantras with the seed syllables that intensify the practice. Also, each planetary mantra has a specific number that is chanted, and is begun on a specific day connected to the planet, and in a new moon phase. So the Saturn mantra for Shani is begun on a Saturday. You can chant these mantras anytime, but to do the strict yogic practice is much, much more potent.
The example of Saturn is not by accident. Saturnian energy is a taskmaster, giving life lessons with no sugar-coating. My personal lessons I was given were no exception. Just before the end of the practice, three flies awoke me one morning with incessant buzzing in the window. Eventually I killed them. Then I felt bad. I'm no Jain Buddhist nun, but still. Over the next two weeks exactly 50 more flies came to the window like something out of "Amityville Horror", or so I hear, having never seen the movie. Until the last few, I killed them all quickly. Then, one, and only one, came beyond the windowframe and into the room. It attacked me, and bit my neck, leaving a hickey-like mark. I was pissed.
The next few, I was rather savage and brutal about killing, going so far as to stab a few with a dagger, since the rolled-up newspaper wasn't doing the job. And there were exactly 54 total, as many as the number of beads on a half-mala. I know because I'm a tad OCD about stuff, and I kept count after the first three. The last one came in three weeks later after the rest, on a sunny November day in 2008. This one, unlike all the others which only came into the bedroom, was in the living room. I was sitting on the floor reading when I heard the tell-tale buzzing, and I got up and found the old rolled-up newspaper, strolling casually and calmly toward the fly. I heard myself say out loud, "You know you're gonna die, it's just a matter of how quickly you want to go." Ick!!! But...I killed him quickly, and I once again felt bad for doing so.
It made me think that, in my small apartment classroom with flies as the vehicle for the lesson, I was learning how easy it is to get into a murderous mindset, even if it is just flies. I mean they are just flies right? But what if each of those flies repesented someone in a concentration camp, and I were a Nazi? To get stuck in the mindset of killing is easier than most of us would allow given the right circumstances to create the impulse. If, for instance, my evil Phantom of the Opera had succceeded in destroying me by helping me to kill myself, as he periodically tried to goad me into doing, and if it could be proven that he did, would my family try to have him murdered by the state? My father, I know, would not. But he would also be honest with himself and say that he would have fleeting impulses of seeing the man go to the electric chair. My point is that we all have impulses toward destruction. Maybe mine are only toward flies, for the time being, but who is to say that if I ever have to sit through a jury trial for a multiple rapist that I'll be able to vote an unequivocal 'No' for the death penalty. These aren't questions that are easy to wrestle with, but sitting in Bound Lotus everyday seems to leave me with nowhere to run to but myself and my Self, which sometimes has a rather wild energy. This is, after all, the most difficult Kundalini Yoga practice there is...and, over-achiever that I am, I chose it. Or did it chose me?
A friend told me, upon hearing the story later, that I sounded like Dexter. Since I don't watch TV I had to be filled in on who that was... Needless to say, I was mortified to find that I have the capacity to be a serial fly-killer. It was a hard lesson in accepting that there is some form of unrestrained darkness in each of us, and I'm no exception. I told my friend who called me day that last November was rough in many ways, and I never thought I would ever hurt a fly. She laughed and said, "You could make a list and start it with: Number 1: I never thought I'd hurt a fly...and then I killed 54." Ew. But it's true. We all have parts of us that are dark and cruel, whether we want to admit it or not. I'm not better than that man who hurt me so many years ago, I just choose, most of the time, to ignore the impulses to cause pain and suffering, to lash out and attack back. It is a choice, and I think of this as I sit for Bound Lotus and squirm in my seat at the realization that I am not always compassionate.
I feel really tired. Ugh. Really tired. I called a friend and asked them to send Reiki. Then my phone rang, and it was someone I hadn't seen in years! We talked about mutual friends and past experiences. I told her about my little episode with the flies last fall, and we laughed. I'd been doing an intense mantra practice with the planetary mantras, much like the ones Saul gave in his workshop, but these were mantras with the seed syllables that intensify the practice. Also, each planetary mantra has a specific number that is chanted, and is begun on a specific day connected to the planet, and in a new moon phase. So the Saturn mantra for Shani is begun on a Saturday. You can chant these mantras anytime, but to do the strict yogic practice is much, much more potent.
The example of Saturn is not by accident. Saturnian energy is a taskmaster, giving life lessons with no sugar-coating. My personal lessons I was given were no exception. Just before the end of the practice, three flies awoke me one morning with incessant buzzing in the window. Eventually I killed them. Then I felt bad. I'm no Jain Buddhist nun, but still. Over the next two weeks exactly 50 more flies came to the window like something out of "Amityville Horror", or so I hear, having never seen the movie. Until the last few, I killed them all quickly. Then, one, and only one, came beyond the windowframe and into the room. It attacked me, and bit my neck, leaving a hickey-like mark. I was pissed.
The next few, I was rather savage and brutal about killing, going so far as to stab a few with a dagger, since the rolled-up newspaper wasn't doing the job. And there were exactly 54 total, as many as the number of beads on a half-mala. I know because I'm a tad OCD about stuff, and I kept count after the first three. The last one came in three weeks later after the rest, on a sunny November day in 2008. This one, unlike all the others which only came into the bedroom, was in the living room. I was sitting on the floor reading when I heard the tell-tale buzzing, and I got up and found the old rolled-up newspaper, strolling casually and calmly toward the fly. I heard myself say out loud, "You know you're gonna die, it's just a matter of how quickly you want to go." Ick!!! But...I killed him quickly, and I once again felt bad for doing so.
It made me think that, in my small apartment classroom with flies as the vehicle for the lesson, I was learning how easy it is to get into a murderous mindset, even if it is just flies. I mean they are just flies right? But what if each of those flies repesented someone in a concentration camp, and I were a Nazi? To get stuck in the mindset of killing is easier than most of us would allow given the right circumstances to create the impulse. If, for instance, my evil Phantom of the Opera had succceeded in destroying me by helping me to kill myself, as he periodically tried to goad me into doing, and if it could be proven that he did, would my family try to have him murdered by the state? My father, I know, would not. But he would also be honest with himself and say that he would have fleeting impulses of seeing the man go to the electric chair. My point is that we all have impulses toward destruction. Maybe mine are only toward flies, for the time being, but who is to say that if I ever have to sit through a jury trial for a multiple rapist that I'll be able to vote an unequivocal 'No' for the death penalty. These aren't questions that are easy to wrestle with, but sitting in Bound Lotus everyday seems to leave me with nowhere to run to but myself and my Self, which sometimes has a rather wild energy. This is, after all, the most difficult Kundalini Yoga practice there is...and, over-achiever that I am, I chose it. Or did it chose me?
A friend told me, upon hearing the story later, that I sounded like Dexter. Since I don't watch TV I had to be filled in on who that was... Needless to say, I was mortified to find that I have the capacity to be a serial fly-killer. It was a hard lesson in accepting that there is some form of unrestrained darkness in each of us, and I'm no exception. I told my friend who called me day that last November was rough in many ways, and I never thought I would ever hurt a fly. She laughed and said, "You could make a list and start it with: Number 1: I never thought I'd hurt a fly...and then I killed 54." Ew. But it's true. We all have parts of us that are dark and cruel, whether we want to admit it or not. I'm not better than that man who hurt me so many years ago, I just choose, most of the time, to ignore the impulses to cause pain and suffering, to lash out and attack back. It is a choice, and I think of this as I sit for Bound Lotus and squirm in my seat at the realization that I am not always compassionate.
Friday, November 20, 2009
Figure 8 Neck Rolls...
On p.126 of Gurmukh's "The Eight Human Talents" is an exercise called 'Figure-Eight Neck Rolls'. She states that:
It helps release muscle tension in the neck, which then takes more newly oxygenated blood to your brain, eyes, and ears. Your thyroid gets massaged and balanced; it brilliance brings a more youthful glow to your face.
I've added these to my warm-ups that I now use according to Saul's system. But my neck is really hurting since the massage. It keeps going into spasms. Maybe the massage was too deep? Holding Bound Lotus today felt a little tighter in my shoulders even though I warmed up with Saul's Ritam Kriyas. I fell asleep for an hour in savasana I was so exhausted! I woke up and did Bound Lotus straight away, felt some anxiety just before the end, and then did mulha bhanda and forward fold as suggested. In Forward Fold I began to cry. It was intense grief with so many images and I missed my mother so much...so much.
When I really needed to grieve her death back in 1996, I was too busy being the sexual slave of my boyfriend and living in fear of when he would get angry. I'd been a very shy reclusive person very attached to my mother before her death, and had only recently begun exploring my sexuality prior to her death in 1996. I was so very lonely at a time when the few friends I had abandoned me, unable to handle my grief over my mother's death from cancer and ultimately suicide.
This new boyfriend had an amazing hold on me due to his own frightening level of charisma, and my intense grief and loneliness. I didn't want to lose him and be alone with my pain, so I did whatever he asked, including allowing myself to be repeatedly sodomized and bent over tombstones in dark graveyards for more than a year, while he told me stories of how some forms of yoga involved meditating in graveyards. But this was not meditation it was torture - mental and physical. He was always careful to punctuate these sorts of 'sessions' with deeply intellectual discussions of how my obedience to him was helping me to become a much more humble and kind person to others; that my obedience and ultimate surrender to his will was equivalent to that of surrendering to God. His ability to twist the truth of Tantra - of seeing the 'other' as a manifestation of the Divine - was criminal; verging on the twisted and extreme intelligence of people like Charles Manson with his 'family'. I was considered to be a part of his 'family', which I initially saw as kindness, but grew to see was bondage. He still has a 'family' of women devoted to him, not all of whom live with him - some whose glossy 8 x 10s with their devoted signatures on them grace his walls in a sort of shrine to him. As far as I know, I'm the only one who saw him for what he was...
All his stories of how my mother was living in Hell because of her suicide from the pain of Stage IV cancer, and his assertions that she came to him in dreams and visions to advise him how to deal with me were hideously cruel. I wonder how many people on earth are the victim of such cruelty, and talk of duality and the necessity for ever action and thought to exist in creation does little to assuage my lingering grief and anger at the loss of my mother and the mental and emotional mutilation I endured at the hands of this monster of a human being. His stories of his own rape and abuse don't ring true, so theories of how that behaviour gets passed along... I don't know.
On one of the few occassions when he was honest about his ulterior motives he said that there were some people like himself on earth who were just evil because it was their nature. He told the story of the turtle crossing the river on the scorpion's back. The scorpion assures the turtle that he will get him safely across and not sting him, but halfway across he stings the turtle and they both begin to sink. When the turtle asks why the scorpion says: "It's in my nature."
No amount of intellectualizing the behaviour of people such as him, taking advantage of those in deep emotional pain and grief will lay the compounded grief to rest. I know that. I'm not quite sure why I wrote this, other than to be able to do so... I have every right to talk publicly about what happened, as long as I don't mention his name. Sometimes I wonder if in a past life I was a gypsy at Auschwitz and he was my tormentor. Was this lifetime to learn to forgive him? And to forgive people like him for the endless evil they do? All I know is wrestling with the issues takes me deeper into the places in my body that are blocked and need healing.
The experience of being in Bound Lotus is not a closing of my heart as the physical therapist suggested; it is a learning to sit patiently with my pain and grief as they leave my body a little bit at a time. This sort of 'bondage' to my Self IS connection to the Divine and a deepening of trust in the ultimate goodness of the universe that transcends human cruelty and atrocity. My journey down the path of Yoga has introduced me to people and situations full of human frailty, but predominantly peppered with human kindness.
For all that man's assertions that it is in man's nature to be evil, and his tendency to regard William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" as a sort of Bible, he is wrong. People are both little angels and little demons. We have free will to choose if we will stumble through the darkness to find the warmth of the darkness and light co-existing in such a way as to render the light as real and not sappy, the dark as warm and comforting, not angry at being abandoned. It would be rude to be exclusive and only invite one guest and not the other. The acceptance of both heals the difficulties of each seperately. Maybe someday I will be able to hug this man and not feel the bile rising in my throat and the urge to spit. Who knows? He talked often of how forgiveness is really to heal the person doing the forgiving because you can't change the other. You can't change the other. Acceptance of the co-existance of light and dark, or "light and shade" as Jimmy Page would put it -- this is the essence of Tantra. Non-exclusivity. Hmm. Hum.
It helps release muscle tension in the neck, which then takes more newly oxygenated blood to your brain, eyes, and ears. Your thyroid gets massaged and balanced; it brilliance brings a more youthful glow to your face.
I've added these to my warm-ups that I now use according to Saul's system. But my neck is really hurting since the massage. It keeps going into spasms. Maybe the massage was too deep? Holding Bound Lotus today felt a little tighter in my shoulders even though I warmed up with Saul's Ritam Kriyas. I fell asleep for an hour in savasana I was so exhausted! I woke up and did Bound Lotus straight away, felt some anxiety just before the end, and then did mulha bhanda and forward fold as suggested. In Forward Fold I began to cry. It was intense grief with so many images and I missed my mother so much...so much.
When I really needed to grieve her death back in 1996, I was too busy being the sexual slave of my boyfriend and living in fear of when he would get angry. I'd been a very shy reclusive person very attached to my mother before her death, and had only recently begun exploring my sexuality prior to her death in 1996. I was so very lonely at a time when the few friends I had abandoned me, unable to handle my grief over my mother's death from cancer and ultimately suicide.
This new boyfriend had an amazing hold on me due to his own frightening level of charisma, and my intense grief and loneliness. I didn't want to lose him and be alone with my pain, so I did whatever he asked, including allowing myself to be repeatedly sodomized and bent over tombstones in dark graveyards for more than a year, while he told me stories of how some forms of yoga involved meditating in graveyards. But this was not meditation it was torture - mental and physical. He was always careful to punctuate these sorts of 'sessions' with deeply intellectual discussions of how my obedience to him was helping me to become a much more humble and kind person to others; that my obedience and ultimate surrender to his will was equivalent to that of surrendering to God. His ability to twist the truth of Tantra - of seeing the 'other' as a manifestation of the Divine - was criminal; verging on the twisted and extreme intelligence of people like Charles Manson with his 'family'. I was considered to be a part of his 'family', which I initially saw as kindness, but grew to see was bondage. He still has a 'family' of women devoted to him, not all of whom live with him - some whose glossy 8 x 10s with their devoted signatures on them grace his walls in a sort of shrine to him. As far as I know, I'm the only one who saw him for what he was...
All his stories of how my mother was living in Hell because of her suicide from the pain of Stage IV cancer, and his assertions that she came to him in dreams and visions to advise him how to deal with me were hideously cruel. I wonder how many people on earth are the victim of such cruelty, and talk of duality and the necessity for ever action and thought to exist in creation does little to assuage my lingering grief and anger at the loss of my mother and the mental and emotional mutilation I endured at the hands of this monster of a human being. His stories of his own rape and abuse don't ring true, so theories of how that behaviour gets passed along... I don't know.
On one of the few occassions when he was honest about his ulterior motives he said that there were some people like himself on earth who were just evil because it was their nature. He told the story of the turtle crossing the river on the scorpion's back. The scorpion assures the turtle that he will get him safely across and not sting him, but halfway across he stings the turtle and they both begin to sink. When the turtle asks why the scorpion says: "It's in my nature."
No amount of intellectualizing the behaviour of people such as him, taking advantage of those in deep emotional pain and grief will lay the compounded grief to rest. I know that. I'm not quite sure why I wrote this, other than to be able to do so... I have every right to talk publicly about what happened, as long as I don't mention his name. Sometimes I wonder if in a past life I was a gypsy at Auschwitz and he was my tormentor. Was this lifetime to learn to forgive him? And to forgive people like him for the endless evil they do? All I know is wrestling with the issues takes me deeper into the places in my body that are blocked and need healing.
The experience of being in Bound Lotus is not a closing of my heart as the physical therapist suggested; it is a learning to sit patiently with my pain and grief as they leave my body a little bit at a time. This sort of 'bondage' to my Self IS connection to the Divine and a deepening of trust in the ultimate goodness of the universe that transcends human cruelty and atrocity. My journey down the path of Yoga has introduced me to people and situations full of human frailty, but predominantly peppered with human kindness.
For all that man's assertions that it is in man's nature to be evil, and his tendency to regard William Golding's "Lord of the Flies" as a sort of Bible, he is wrong. People are both little angels and little demons. We have free will to choose if we will stumble through the darkness to find the warmth of the darkness and light co-existing in such a way as to render the light as real and not sappy, the dark as warm and comforting, not angry at being abandoned. It would be rude to be exclusive and only invite one guest and not the other. The acceptance of both heals the difficulties of each seperately. Maybe someday I will be able to hug this man and not feel the bile rising in my throat and the urge to spit. Who knows? He talked often of how forgiveness is really to heal the person doing the forgiving because you can't change the other. You can't change the other. Acceptance of the co-existance of light and dark, or "light and shade" as Jimmy Page would put it -- this is the essence of Tantra. Non-exclusivity. Hmm. Hum.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Turning on a Dime
The deep tissue massages I'm getting on my back, neck and right arm leave me feeling refreshed for several hours, but each time, within a few hours the relief turns into intensified pain. I know this is because the muscles are trying to tighten the way they were before and having difficulty, as well as a release of lactic acid and toxins, but it's painful! I'm in pain half the time anyway, so I will undergo this treatment to ultimately realign my cervical curve, but had I not fallen on my head I think I'd be hard-pressed to talk myself into these adjustments. I miss the flexibilty that allowed me hold Eka Pada Rajakapotasana with my head almost to my foot as well. Getting back to that and headstand is what I think of as I breathe through the pain. That and that I could have died or shattered my spine and been paralyzed like someone whom I used to work with who fell on her head at a pool party. I can't even imagine. She only lived another ten years after that, and here I am bitching about a little pain.
This morning I laughed when I got up. Saul told us to do that every day. Then I went into my meditation room to spread the rose petals from last Friday's Vaishnodevi Puja, and as I walked away from the windowsill I stepped on a dime. I didn't see it before, and the room is small with a Persian rug in the center and only an altar and a few bookcases filled with crystals. I would have seen the dime, I think, if it had been there. I was filled with an inexplicable calm, remembering how my Dad said he'll find lots of dimes whenever he is missing my mom, and how some people say that is how the dead communicate with their loved ones who are alive. I miss her so much 13 years later, and it is my baptismal anniversary: November 19th. Once, many years ago, I used a Ouija board to contact her, and I asked her if she was ever near me... She spelled out the words with a planchette my friends were able to see: "I am with you in your Yoga." Though I'd never use a Ouija board again, I wish that she were with me now. I guess I'll have to do more Yoga. I know my mother would have loved Saul David Raye's workshop.
My practice of Bound Lotus today was easy because I did my practice of Saul's Kriyas first. My neck feels much better than yesterday when it spasmed up while watching Faouzi Bensaidi's "What a Wonderful World". This work seems like Rolfing. It hurts to get my spine adjusted and manipulated, and the practice of Bound Lotus eases it. Saul's style of Yoga eases it.
When I taught this evening I taught his style, and everyone loved it except for the dancing. Oh well. I like it, so I'll do it myself. I taught a student how to come into headstand without physically demonstrating. It's the first time I've taught the pose since I can no longer do it, and was amazed to find that I didn't mind and I wasn't jealous. I only wanted her to find the beauty of the pose herself. Before the head injury, before Bound Lotus, before Saul's workshop I would have wanted to show off. I'm much more humble and concerned for my students. Yoga works....if you do it.
This morning I laughed when I got up. Saul told us to do that every day. Then I went into my meditation room to spread the rose petals from last Friday's Vaishnodevi Puja, and as I walked away from the windowsill I stepped on a dime. I didn't see it before, and the room is small with a Persian rug in the center and only an altar and a few bookcases filled with crystals. I would have seen the dime, I think, if it had been there. I was filled with an inexplicable calm, remembering how my Dad said he'll find lots of dimes whenever he is missing my mom, and how some people say that is how the dead communicate with their loved ones who are alive. I miss her so much 13 years later, and it is my baptismal anniversary: November 19th. Once, many years ago, I used a Ouija board to contact her, and I asked her if she was ever near me... She spelled out the words with a planchette my friends were able to see: "I am with you in your Yoga." Though I'd never use a Ouija board again, I wish that she were with me now. I guess I'll have to do more Yoga. I know my mother would have loved Saul David Raye's workshop.
My practice of Bound Lotus today was easy because I did my practice of Saul's Kriyas first. My neck feels much better than yesterday when it spasmed up while watching Faouzi Bensaidi's "What a Wonderful World". This work seems like Rolfing. It hurts to get my spine adjusted and manipulated, and the practice of Bound Lotus eases it. Saul's style of Yoga eases it.
When I taught this evening I taught his style, and everyone loved it except for the dancing. Oh well. I like it, so I'll do it myself. I taught a student how to come into headstand without physically demonstrating. It's the first time I've taught the pose since I can no longer do it, and was amazed to find that I didn't mind and I wasn't jealous. I only wanted her to find the beauty of the pose herself. Before the head injury, before Bound Lotus, before Saul's workshop I would have wanted to show off. I'm much more humble and concerned for my students. Yoga works....if you do it.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
If anxiety is refusing to open the heart, then grief is a crack in the shell
The pose came relatively easy today while I was doing it, and then as I drove to my chiropractic appointment I broke down crying in the rain in waves of gut-wrenching grief. Grief that brought with it, of all things, images of my Uncle Paul's funeral when I was four. I really loved him and the little red purse he gave me. I found myself grieving for my father's loss of his twin brother, and my mother's loss of a friend. I felt their grief.
At the chiropractor's office they said the swelling around my spine is going down and that the curve is coming back. I felt it this morning as I lay in Bridge Pose - there is space behind my neck that just wasn't there before. JenTara showed me how to lie down in a preparation for Bridge the way Desiree Rumbaugh did in the Anusara tradition to get her cervical curve back. She also did bregma headstand, but I'm not safe to go back to doing headstands yet.
When I kick up into Feathered Peacock, I realize just how much my spine is realigning itself because I can't find the balance point. Inner and Outer Spiral I can't feel anymore. But it is much like driving a new car I think. At any rate, I'm feeling deeply blessed again, because I know just how close I really came to being paralyzed.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Smell the leaves, look at the sky!
In my head are T.S.Eliot's words made into the song 'Memory' from "Cats":
"Burnt out ends of smoky days, the stale cold smell of morning. Street lamps die, another night is over ..."
And I think of Shakespeare:
"Out, out brief candle. Life is but a walking shadow that struts and frets it's hour upon the stage and then is heard no more."
As Jimmy Page said in "It Might Get Loud": "weaving the light and the shade."
Only the heart that knows true suffering can feel the mighty joy... or something like that. Julian of Norwicki? I can't remember. I am grateful for the misery, the depression, the anger, the suicidal impulses, the murderous and rageful impulses.... If they lead to such as this. Joy, wonder, surprise, laughter, tears of deep grief and of joy, of stretched emotions, the phantom scent of roses, redemption in my heart for my own personal Phantom of the Opera, conjured up into being from my impromptu 'Dance of the Chod' so many years ago. The Chaos Dance? Bhuja Tandava? Is that what Saul called it? The counterpart to Ananda Tandava in Tantra? In the loving of my demons they are transformed... And if see my hairy, fat, bloated Turkish and Kurdish demon on the street, I will love him. I will love and squeeze all the hate out of him, the war and nastiness out of him. And me. I'll yodel, cackle and chuckle and chortle until he succumbs to a bone-crushing hug and all his tears hardened like Hagga's diamonds from "The Thirteen Clocks" melt into water - emotions - feeling.
In my dreams last night, I was in a jazz bar, a sort of restaurant at the end of the universe, a la whatever his name is, and I was mouthing the words to a song: learning it. Some asshole told me to sing, and I said, "I'm listening! I'm listening! I'm listening to the words you asshole!" Then I flipped him off, and the bartender stared at me. The middle finger represents the throat chakra and how you use it: to heal or to harm. Go figure.
Then someone else, looking like an extremely sleazy version of the composite of two T'ai Chi instructors I used to have came up and thrust his hips towards me. I closed my eyes and said I wasn't interested. He moved closer and kept talking. I felt indignant and I told him to fuck off. Then I woke up and my heart sunk. Where I'd been was a testing ground, and I did not do what I had planned I did not snort, chuckle and guffaw. I did not laugh these creeps out of my awareness. I reverted to old behaviour. Just like my spine. No wonder they call it practice/ sadhana. Like my mother's father said as his first words in English: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."
It's not the goal, it's the journey. As I sit again for Bound Lotus, for the first time I find myself looking forward to it for the actual 'presence' of being in it, not just the release from the pain of the pose and the pain of neck and back that comes afterwards. Child's Pose and Garland Pose don't bring the feeling of going into the pain and the lair of the internal demons and just loving them and hugging them in all their messiness and misery. At the bottom of the deep well of pain, the Haruki Murakami-like well of pain, my demons rest their foreheads on the ground with me. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I love you, I love you, I love you, peace, peace, peace my fellow travelers, my little demons, little angels. I love you. I love you all. Right now. Today. Who knows about tomorrow... I'll have to try again.
"Burnt out ends of smoky days, the stale cold smell of morning. Street lamps die, another night is over ..."
And I think of Shakespeare:
"Out, out brief candle. Life is but a walking shadow that struts and frets it's hour upon the stage and then is heard no more."
As Jimmy Page said in "It Might Get Loud": "weaving the light and the shade."
Only the heart that knows true suffering can feel the mighty joy... or something like that. Julian of Norwicki? I can't remember. I am grateful for the misery, the depression, the anger, the suicidal impulses, the murderous and rageful impulses.... If they lead to such as this. Joy, wonder, surprise, laughter, tears of deep grief and of joy, of stretched emotions, the phantom scent of roses, redemption in my heart for my own personal Phantom of the Opera, conjured up into being from my impromptu 'Dance of the Chod' so many years ago. The Chaos Dance? Bhuja Tandava? Is that what Saul called it? The counterpart to Ananda Tandava in Tantra? In the loving of my demons they are transformed... And if see my hairy, fat, bloated Turkish and Kurdish demon on the street, I will love him. I will love and squeeze all the hate out of him, the war and nastiness out of him. And me. I'll yodel, cackle and chuckle and chortle until he succumbs to a bone-crushing hug and all his tears hardened like Hagga's diamonds from "The Thirteen Clocks" melt into water - emotions - feeling.
In my dreams last night, I was in a jazz bar, a sort of restaurant at the end of the universe, a la whatever his name is, and I was mouthing the words to a song: learning it. Some asshole told me to sing, and I said, "I'm listening! I'm listening! I'm listening to the words you asshole!" Then I flipped him off, and the bartender stared at me. The middle finger represents the throat chakra and how you use it: to heal or to harm. Go figure.
Then someone else, looking like an extremely sleazy version of the composite of two T'ai Chi instructors I used to have came up and thrust his hips towards me. I closed my eyes and said I wasn't interested. He moved closer and kept talking. I felt indignant and I told him to fuck off. Then I woke up and my heart sunk. Where I'd been was a testing ground, and I did not do what I had planned I did not snort, chuckle and guffaw. I did not laugh these creeps out of my awareness. I reverted to old behaviour. Just like my spine. No wonder they call it practice/ sadhana. Like my mother's father said as his first words in English: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."
It's not the goal, it's the journey. As I sit again for Bound Lotus, for the first time I find myself looking forward to it for the actual 'presence' of being in it, not just the release from the pain of the pose and the pain of neck and back that comes afterwards. Child's Pose and Garland Pose don't bring the feeling of going into the pain and the lair of the internal demons and just loving them and hugging them in all their messiness and misery. At the bottom of the deep well of pain, the Haruki Murakami-like well of pain, my demons rest their foreheads on the ground with me. Thank you, thank you, thank you, I love you, I love you, I love you, peace, peace, peace my fellow travelers, my little demons, little angels. I love you. I love you all. Right now. Today. Who knows about tomorrow... I'll have to try again.
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