The Strangeness of Beauty

My Double Life (or…Doing the Yoga of Art)

2011-12-16T14:49:00.000-08:00

My Hummingbird Sky installation at Studio Salon – With Eastern Eyes Nov 2011

"So you're not going to make art any more? You're just going to do yoga?"

I said something out loud about myself the other night that surprised me. It wasn’t that I was unaware of its truth, but the fact that I articulated it is as precisely and as forcefully as I did was somewhat arresting. I was perched on a stool at an art opening just in front of an installation of mine that ran along the side of a wall. I had been included in an exhibition called Studio Salon – With Eastern Eyes in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Four of us had work in the exhibition and I was speaking with another one of the artists who, like me, had spent time in India and who combined her life as an artist with her life as a yogi. This was clearly reflected in our work and we immediately found that we had volumes to talk about.

We were discussing the art world and I was remarking upon the ways in which my relationship to it had changed since I had become a yoga teacher. I said, At this point, my artwork serves my yoga. I paused and looked at those words hovering in the space between us, startled that I had said them out loud. And then the funniest thing happened – some taut internal sensation gave way, and I felt utterly happy.

My Pink Victorine installation at Studio Salon – With Eastern Eyes Nov 2011

What I had said was some sort of art world treason. Most people in the art world don’t even want to hear that you have a day job. You are supposed to do whatever it takes to make your work and the work is the point. But any job you hold is supposed to be disposable, as opposed to a career or a lifestyle choice. Artists work as art movers, as waiters, as temps. There’s a good reason for this since all of these jobs involve marketable skills, but minimal commitment. You can take off for a residency or an exhibition in another city, knowing that you can find a new position when you return. Your job is supposed to serve your work.

Art is something like a religion involving sacrifice and single-mindedness. This works for many artists, and it functioned well for me for many years. But at a certain point in time, in the midst of my deepening involvement in yoga, this way of being and thinking ceased to sit comfortably for me, and somewhere in there a significant shift happened.

MoMA Sculpture Garden Garudasana

I have spent years trying to keep my yoga life and my art world life separate. I have told myself the story that the art world doesn’t want to have anything to do with my yoga life for a long time, and that I somehow wouldn’t be taken seriously as an artist anymore if I revealed the depths of my commitment to yoga. The link to the yoga part of my website is slightly hidden in my belief that the yogis will happily dig through the artwork to find it, but that it’s probably best if the art world doesn’t see it.

And frankly, there are good reasons why I’ve nurtured this separation (or dodged the connection), namely because this assumption of mine has proven art world conversation after art world conversation to be accurate, and also because there’s a lot of terrible yoga-driven art out there. I have huge issues with the rainbow-y aesthetic and low-end psychedelia of much of the art I see in the yoga world. It makes me cringe.

In front of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (the best painting ever)

I spent years lecturing and writing for the Museum of Modern Art, and unabashedly still worship at the altar of Picasso. I made highly cerebral and conceptual work for years until yoga smoothed its brittle edges and filled it with both color and a greater physicality. I continue to be a tough critic of art that I see in Chelsea Galleries and can analyze in seconds what concepts artists are exploring, while being wildly over-opinionated about whether or not it seems to be working.

For the most part, the art world seems to find it interesting and vaguely provocative that I can organize my body parts into interesting shapes and patterns, and certain people ask my advice about beginning a yoga practice, but a number of my friends continue to be perplexed about the extent of my involvement in it. I was asked just a couple of years ago by a good friend, So you’re not going to make art any more? You’re just going to do yoga? I was taken aback and scrambled uncomfortably to explain that no, this was not the case AT ALL. But now if someone said that to me, I would just shrug it off, because beneath the question is a belief system that is simply different from mine. How do you debate in two different languages? Additionally, I’m so deeply in love with my yoga practice that I simply don’t care what people think about it anymore.

Puja with Dakshina Moorthi - with Douglas Brooks, July 2011

So how does my artwork serve my yoga? First of all, what needs saying is that yoga for me is far more than a physical practice. In addition to asana, my philosophical studies, meditation, pranayama, mantra, and mudra practices are huge parts of my daily life. The ideas that I explore and encounter in my studies of Hindu Tantra are mind-bendingly complex and can be applied to every conceivable aspect of my life. They are fascinating. And moving. And beautiful. And aesthetically ecstatic.

Inner Landscape #6 - one of my drawings

It is from this place of delighted inquiry and close attention that I make art now. This is how the art serves the yoga. The yoga is the thing that connects every aspect of my life – every breath, every gesture, every moment, every creative impulse, every line inscribed on paper, every delineated form. When I create from this place, I offer my best self. Everything that I am making right now is emerging from a fullness that was not previously realized or acknowledged, but now constitutes my center. And for that reason, I am making the best work of my life.

Hummingbird Sky Bakasana at Studio Salon – With Eastern Eyes Nov 2011

Looking for God on the 6 Train

2011-12-11T19:31:00.001-08:00

Waiting for the Train, Morning, NYC

“If you are regular in your practice, you will shift the field” – John Friend

I used to read like crazy on the subway. I would almost panic if, after procuring a seat, I opened my bag to find that I had left my New Yorker Magazine or my book at home (Was it on the table where I had inhaled my breakfast? Did I toss it on the chair by the door when I put on my coat?).

But one day I became a yoga teacher and something shifted. Suddenly I had so much to do, so many things to think about, and so many practices to implement. I no longer had the desire to read on the subway, which was really very strange because I love to read. I crave books like food. For years I have shared a joke with my similarly-inclined friends about how I want to take a sabbatical from my life so that I can spend a year doing nothing but reading. Do they give grants for that?

Some of my Bookshelves

I remember my best childhood friend Kristen musing, It’s so unfair, they just keep writing and writing – we can never catch up. It was pretty funny, but there was an anxious passion beneath what she said – a desire to know as much as we could know and to travel down every possible avenue of beauty and creativity available to us. She ended up working in film in LA and I found myself in the NYC art world, supporting myself as an artist by commuting to the far reaches of every borough lecturing about art in the public school systems on behalf of MoMA. This brings me back to the whole subway situation.

Suddenly I wanted to be more fully in the experience I was having at the moment that it was occurring. I wanted to connect with what was going on around me – not that I wanted to engage in conversations with strangers, but I wanted to listen more and escape less. I wanted to soften to the richness of each moment and recognize the interesting-ness of everything. I wanted to become more sensitive, more aware, more engaged and entertained by the world. And the more I did it, the better it became.

Open 6-Train Doors

I no longer feared the unbearable boredom of the flickering lights, the jockeying for seats, the banality of the beige-yellow-orange subway seats or the clacking of the machinery. I was interested in it all. I admired the clean lines of the stainless steel doors. I wondered why the woman across from me tapped her foot so anxiously and whether the workmen in their dusty clothes were traveling to their construction site or headed home. I found myself listening for mantras in the patterns of sound – the screeching and clattering – the voices – the iPod music overflow – the newspapers – the multilingual conversations. There were so many stories, emotions, plans, and thoughts packed into a small space. Amazing.

There was this practice that I began to do, because, despite my new interest in my immediate commuter reality, its shoving, noise, and dirt still really got to me: people taking up precious subway real estate with their mounds of bags or their widely-spread knees, their dripping umbrellas, their open-air coughing…So I slowly began, one by one, to look for god in every person in my vicinity.

6-Train Rush Hour

Maybe I would choose the angry guy who crammed me into the corner with his backpack in my face – or the self-absorbed teen eating a pungent slice of pizza and dropping greasy napkins on the floor. I would take them in and then soften. I would think, someone loves this person. This person has aspirations, things they feel passionately about, personal tragedies and victories that I cannot imagine, yet are as significant as my own. And I could see these things in their faces, their postures, making me feel tender toward humanity. I shifted the field.

John Friend in NJ Oct 2011

I spent last weekend with my teacher John Friend. He alluded to that “feeling in the heart when a friend does something that reminds you of god,” and I had this flash of association – of the almost physical feeling of connectivity to the world around me when I regularly did my subway practice. John said that one of the first things his teacher Gurumayi said to him was, “See god in each other.” It was storming outside as he spoke about this, and he invited us to see our experience of the world like the storm – as having a layer of disorder or an appearance of chaos, but if you backed off just enough to see the individual raindrops, there was deep order and amazing beauty.

These days I do most of my reading in the afternoon or evening. Sometimes I can’t wait to get home and read my book. And when I do bring one with me on the train, I usually find that it rests undisturbed in my bag, waiting for a more settled reading time. I often skim through my emails or briefly peruse the NY Times headlines, but sometimes I stop myself, click off my phone, slide it into my bag, and choose to reenter that place of wonder at the world, which, since the moment I discovered it, has been continually available to me.

Subway Floor Cosmos

How I Learned to Write

2011-11-24T20:16:00.001-08:00

Writing at Breakfast, Paris, 10th Arrondissement, July 2011

Outlining and Eye-Rolling
I was required to outline my U.S. History reading every night for homework when I was in High School. Our text for the yearlong course was Garraty, which I found to be the driest, most uninteresting History book imaginable. It included little Social History, simply listing wars, strikes, elections, and laws in a crisp unending chronology. There was none of the messiness of daily human life, no anecdotes or conversations. Garraty was dryly unemotional.

I took delight in making connections between things, in creating little histories, but the class seemed to consist solely of taking in and spewing back, which was fairly boring to me – more of a memory game than anything else. I couldn’t wait to escape and make my way to English class, to Art, to French Lit class, and Philosophy – anything that involved subjectivity, interpretation, craft, and beauty.

Despite my teen eye-rolling, the daily process of cramming history into outline form heightened my awareness of writing’s organizational structure. Overriding ideas were the Roman Numerals, big ideas were the A-B-Cs, and details were the somewhat more interesting (to me) 1s and 2s. The name of a Constitutional Amendment was such and such A or B. Fact. The debate raging around this Constitutional Amendment was a slightly more curiosity-inducing 1 or 2.

This outlining practice transformed my way of thinking, reading, and writing. A year later I found myself in my college Art History 101 class, in which I rapidly scribbled elaborate ink notes in outline form, highlighted with rapid sketches of every major artwork. My Art History Professor and mentor, John Hunisak, told me I should find some way of marketing them – both the notes and my insane yards-long timelines that I wound around my compact dorm room walls and finally brought in to show him. I wasn’t sure if he was serious, but I never forgot the complement, for I decided to take it as such.

My Art History 101 Timeline-detail from somewhere in the 19th Century

Rewriting Myself
Another thing transformed my writing that first year in college. I had always been a good writer – taking delight in the look and sounds of words combined in different ways, confident in my abilities, and writing for my own pleasure. I had not been challenged for a long time.

My usual writing pattern was to ruminate over my topic as I moved through my day until I had more or less written the paper in my head. I would then pour it onto the page with a minimum of revision, and be done with it. At this point I was so adept at outlining previously-written work that, when required for my freshman writing course to hand in an outline along with each of my papers, I would hastily slap one together after completing the paper itself. It didn’t take more than a couple of assignments for my English Professor to catch on. It was at a point in the term in which I would listen to anything she said, because she had just introduced me to one of my lifelong literary loves, MFK Fisher.

She pulled me aside after class one day to talk to me about it. I readily admitted my process, explained my history of outlining and we both laughed about it. She said – “You’re a good enough writer to pull it off, but don’t you want to be better than good enough? I listened, because the answer was yes, and because I knew that she was right about so many things.

Sometimes when something comes easily we don’t push ourselves past the point of complacency and a perfectly polite sense of accomplishment. What I had not yet done in my writing, or what I had not yet done at this phase of my writing (for this is a cycle that we move through again and again and at different stages of our lives), was to shift my definition of who I was in it, and who I wanted to be, and therefore recalibrate my habitual patterns in order to do the dirty work that was required to rewrite my new self into being.

Visiting Bernini's Ecstacy of St Teresa, Rome

Choosing Beauty
I can remember several years after college walking through the Baroque churches in the heart of Rome with my Art History Professor, mesmerized by the Berninis and Caravaggios exploding passionately from their dusty, dimly lit corners. John happened to be visiting Rome while I was passing through en route to Apulia for a wedding, so he, my boyfriend, and I planned out several hedonistic days of incessant eating and art.

Over dinner he told me that what he most remembered about having me as a student was not my obsessive outlining and intense commitment to my timelines, but rather that from day one, I sat in the front of the room, enraptured by every image cast upon the giant screen. There was a heat, a feverishness that I would physically feel and still do when looking at a really great painting or reading an exquisitely written sentence. It was the sensation of beauty experienced bodily.

Looking at Rubens at the Louvre

At that point in my education, I had not yet been to Rome, to Berlin. I had not yet lived in Paris. I had not stood in the ruins of Caligula’s Palace on the Palatine Hill or wandered through the deliriously unfolding rooms of Goyas and El Grecos at the Prado. I had not seen Venetian canals, Gothic Cathedrals, or Renaissance Palaces. I had images and words that craved an architecture of experience on which to mount them. For a few hours each week, I wrote madly in the screen’s reflected light, as the projected slides glowed with the promise of new worlds, slowly opening gateways into vast fields of beauty that I was just beginning to realize were available to me.

Staring up at the ceiling of St Severin, Paris

NOTE – I am delighted to be teaching Writing Your Practice, a writing course for yogis through the Yoga Teacher Telesummit

Smashing Coconuts at Dawn

2011-11-06T14:53:00.000-08:00

Morning, Chidambaram Temple, by the Shivaganga Tank

When I was in South India this past summer, one of my favorite things to do was to smash coconuts on the stone steps of the Ganesha Temple. We were visiting the Shiva Nataraja Temple complex in Chidambaram, Tamil Nadu, which houses many smaller temples inside its thick walls and elaborate gopurams. We would go there several times each day to wander, meditate, and to participate in the rituals and events surrounding the 10-day seasonal Ani Festival.

Inside a Shiva temple complex, you can find what I’ll describe as a Shiva family gathering, meaning any Shiva-related deity may have its own shrine. The shrine might be a tiny nook in the wall, a little side corridor, or its own separate enclosure. In enormous complexes such as Chidambaram’s approx 40-acre temple-village, there are sizeable individual temples located throughout the extensive courtyards that range from the modest scale of my downtown New York City apartment to the size of a large city block.

Walking toward the Shivakamasundari Temple at night

Shiva’s beloved, Shivakamasundari, has the biggest private temple on the grounds, followed by Shiva’s sons, the much-adored elephant-headed Ganesha and the Tamil favorite, the sly warrior Subrahmanya, who majestically rides a peacock. These two are well represented in multiple small shrines throughout the complex in addition to having their own free-standing temples in the courtyards surrounding Nataraja.

One evening we went as a group to the small Ganesha temple, and after moving through the rituals of mantra, mudra, and arathi that had now become comfortable, we descended the slight staircase back outside, then took turns hurling coconuts at the stone steps of the temple. Slam – Crack! So satisfying.

As each coconut shattered, gushing water and scattering its shards across the courtyard, a few children and one woman ran around gathering up the pieces. It felt simultaneously like an act of aggression, an amusement park activity, and a physical form of prayer.

Temple Offerings

We were walking quietly back to the Hotel Sharadharam later that evening and my friend Zhenja LaRosa suddenly said, I need to do that thing again with the coconut. We’re getting up really early tomorrow morning and doing it again. I agreed. There was something profoundly cathartic about the coconut smashing. Each of us had been dealing with a lot of change in our lives, which had been both challenging and exciting, and there was something in this act that felt like an acknowledgement of a real break with the old and an embrace of the new, which is at the heart of the Ganesha paradigm.

Ganesha is often described as the remover of obstacles, but he also happens to be the one who places obstacles before you so that you have to confront something in your life. He is heavy and sedentary, yet can balance while dancing on the back of his little mouse, Musaka. He is complex and contradictory, just like us. He is that part of us that invites us to dare to create change, to be audacious enough to step over known thresholds into new places within the temples of our lives.

Little niche Ganesha, Meenakshi Temple, Madurai

Is this level of change scary? Yes. Is it exhilarating? Yes. Do we sometimes need to break one thing down in order to build up something new? Absolutely. This is why Zhenja and I found our selves back at the temple steps at dawn, smashing coconuts on the warm stones and stepping through pools of their sticky and satisfying water.

Do this: Set an intention this fall. Choose a specific aspect of your life that you wish to dramatically shift or transform and write it down. Commit to taking specific steps outside of your normal habits and comfort zone. And every single day this fall, have a chat with Ganesha, Lord of Thresholds, symbol of new beginnings and of infinite possibility.

Om Gam Ganapataye Namaha

As a final note, my July coconut smashing gave birth to Writing Your Practice, a writing course designed specifically for yogis through the Yoga Teacher Telesummit. It begins on Monday, October 2. For more information, click Writing Your Practice

Saying Thank You - A Love Letter To My Teachers

2011-10-22T18:03:00.000-07:00

Nataraja, Bristol, NY, July 2011

Yes...That. I am that. That I am.

My Two Teachers
I have many teachers, but the two who are really the great teachers of my life are the ones who, when I first heard them speak, seemed to be voicing the contents of my brain. If you have had this experience, you know exactly what I am talking about. You are surprised, and think – wait – how did you…? but I… and then – yes and yes again. Then the surprise gives way to a magnetic compulsion that makes you want to scrunch your chair or yoga blanket or whatever you happen to be perched on …right…up…close.

It makes you want to travel around the world to study with them and precipitates dramatic shifts in how you order your time and with whom you wish to spend it. Your initial amazement and delight pool into a profound sense of gratitude for this glimpse into the mysterious synchronicity of things. Resonance and Recognition. This is what happened when I met my teachers John Friend and Douglas Brooks.

To Backtrack for a Moment – Paris and Proust
I keep thinking about the first time I read Proust. I was studying in Paris and as I tackled the dense text, I suddenly realized that I was being moved by the quality of the language and by the beauty of the prose. For the first time reading in French – instead of translating in my head, instead of it being about comprehension – I had moved into a place of profound aesthetic appreciation. That was something.

The writing seemed strangely familiar. As I read, it felt as if someone had transcribed the phrases and ideas lining the inside of my brain. I was seeing myself reflected in his words – not just things I had thought about, but patterns of thought – an underlying structure that said – That is me! The differences between myself and a neurotic French writer born in 1871, who closeted himself in a silent cork-lined room so that he could write all 3000-some pages of his book were evident. Yet, the startling sense of recognition triggered a sensation of deep connectivity to the world around me, which is actually what he was writing about. And this experience is what I’m now talking about.

Post-practice with John Friend - Anusara Grand Circle-Wanderlust, VT, June 2011

On Recognition and Moving through Things
Many years later, I was going through a challenging period in my life – I had lost 3 people I cared about in 3 months in unrelated violent deaths. I was toughing it out, trying to be there for other people while I just barely kept it together myself. I felt as if I was held in place by lots of little overlapping pieces of psychic tape and messes of determined glue – a shifting collection of pieces.

I had been studying with John Friend for about 5 years, and had already had the above-mentioned recognition experience with him. He was in town teaching a series of workshops in Soho. Usually when I studied with John, I was like an excited puppy – exponentially more bouncy and chatty than I normally am. This time I was in a place where I just wanted to find some peace – to stop grinding my teeth for a few hours and feel happy again. We put down our mats and gathered toward the front of the room.

As John began to speak, something in the tone of his voice shifted something for me, and my carefully taped together self began to come unstuck. I spent most of the morning crying and sweating in the bathroom, finally managing to fit in about 30 sniffling minutes of practice. He came over to me immediately at the break and I recall spilling some incoherent mess about what I was dealing with, as he took it in and held that space for me.

Exhausted, I went back to my apartment, showered, scrubbed everything off of myself, and when I returned for the afternoon session, I was on the other side of it – clear, clean, and actually slightly happy for the first time in months. The tone of recognition and acceptance within his voice had triggered a profound alchemical shift within me. He had invited me more deeply into a particular part of myself so that I could process what I needed to move through.

Great teachers speak to you from where you are. They don’t try to yank or push or pull you into where they want you to be. They remind you to move into the fullness of your experience, to embrace whatever rasa, or flavor of experience, you are in so that you can best figure out how to align with your current reality.

With Douglas Brooks - Swamimalai Subrahmanya Temple, Dec 2010, photo-Diane Stone

On Reflection and Thatness
I was in upstate New York studying with Douglas this past week. Near the beginning of a meditation practice that Douglas was guiding, there was a moment near the beginning when one thanks one’s teachers. He let us know that this was what he was doing and that we were welcome to do the same.

Look way back – he suggested – go to 2^nd grade. I decided to really go for it, and it was amazing how many people I genuinely wanted to thank. I tried to pare it down to my parents, my high school English and Art teachers, my college Art History professor, several of my Anusara mentors, and Douglas and John. But then I thought about all of my teachers’ teachers, and that kept multiplying as well – lines and lines of them extending in every direction. It was endless.

I met Douglas when he was invited by Amy Ippoliti to kick off our Anusara® Teacher Training in January 2002. I have extremely vivid memories of being floored at every single thing he said. It was brilliant. And totally new. And yet utterly familiar. To conclude one evening, we were asked to give one word or phrase summarizing our experience. People said, inspired – intrigued – exhausted – perplexed – blown away, and more. The one thing that I could truly say, was Yes…THAT. I am that. That I am.

You know in a minute flat when someone is going to be a great teacher in your life. You can learn from many, but the great ones – that is always clear. And there it was again and again, and here it still is again and again: the vimarsha shakti, which can be loosely defined as the energy of you being reflected back to you. Being around my teachers makes me a better person because of this endless mirroring and self-reflection, this sense of recognition, the inescapable resonance, the sweet invitation to that.

Jet-lagged but happy - with Douglas - Tirukalakundram Vedhagirishwar Hill Temple, Dec 2010

Saying Thank You
I was away traveling for much of this summer – Vermont-India-Paris–Boston-upstate NY, and had intended to write something like this for Gurupurnima, the traditional time of year to honor one’s teachers, so this is slightly late. But I honestly think about my teachers every day, which somehow blended with the nostalgia or longing that kicks in for me at the end of summer and the fading august light, so I felt compelled to write this belated thank-you note.

So here it goes – thank you to Mom and Dad for being the most ridiculously fabulous parents anyone could wish for, to my sister Jen for being a model of integrity, thank you to my academic teachers who believed in my creativity and my skills – thank you to my yoga mentors and inspirations – Sianna Sherman, Elena Brower Amy Ippoliti, Lois Nesbitt, Vishali Varga, Ellen Saltonstall, and Sue Elkind. You have all given me so much.

And thank you John. Thank you Douglas. I thank you all for offering me myself.

With John - Anusara Grand Circle, VT June 2011

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. ~ Marcel Proust

Which is Your Favorite God? Travels with Jesus, Shiva, Mary, and Ganesh

2011-08-28T20:05:00.000-07:00


Mary and Ganesha on the Dashboard (photo Harrison Williams)

Shopping on West Car Street, Chidambaram
I was walking with Bharathi and Vishali on West Car Street. We had just gone sari-shopping and Vish had paused to look at the bangles at one of the shaded market stands lining the west gate entrance to the temple. The sweet smell of guavas oozing with juice in the midday sun permeated the air around us. We had nowhere to be for a few hours, and this rare moment of lingering felt slow and satisfying. The hair on top of my head felt shockingly hot to the touch as I adjusted the jasmine in my braid, drawing a few damp strands off of my forehead and back into some attempt at order.

As we looked through our purchases from the sari store, talking about color, fabric and style, Bharathi suddenly asked me, – Susanna, which is your favorite God? Standing yards from the entryway into one of the world’s greatest Shiva temples, which I had just traveled across the world to visit for the third time, there was no question - Shiva Nataraja, I said. She paused and looked at me. I wondered what she was thinking.

But Jesus? - she asked – He is yours. Don’t you love Jesus? Surprised, I said –Yes, Jesus is great – I love Jesus. This was so inexplicably funny to me that I started laughing. Then I clarified – I love Shiva AND I love Jesus. They’re both good. And you? Bharathi said – Me? I love Shiva – and she touched her heart. I said – Oh, yes, Shiva… and touched my heart as well. Then she laughed too. The three of us purchased some bangles, bobbypins, and sari clips, then hailed an auto-rickshaw to return to the Hotel Saradharam for lunch.

Walking through the Marketplace, Chidambaram

Driving from Chidambaram to Swamimalai
We climbed into one of the two white vans outside of the hotel, and I eased myself into the cool air-conditioned seat just behind the driver. As everyone settled in around me, I looked at the dashboard, which was evenly ornamented with two little deities: on the right, a shiny gold-colored Ganesha sat cross-legged, and to his left stood the Virgin Mary, gracefully draped in blue robes.

I loved seeing this juxtaposition just a few days after my conversation with Bharathi. I pointed to the dashboard – You like Mary and Ganapati! - I said to our driver – Me too! He said – Yes, yes – Mary and Ganapati! Very good! Then, because we had exhausted his English and my Tamil, which doesn’t go beyond Hello, Thank you, and ordering food, we smiled at each other as he began backing the van out into the street for our ride to the Subrahmanya temple in Swamimalai.

I remembered how, when I was here in December, every roadside restaurant seemed to have a crèche, or manger scene, with lots of rainbow-colored tinsel, Merry X-mas banners made of shiny cardboard letters, and sometimes strings of blinking lights. Somewhere in the vicinity there would be a Ganesh or a Subrahmanya, Ganesha’s warrior brother, who is particularly popular in Tamil Nadu. There didn’t seem to be any conflict or contradiction in the two different belief systems being simultaneously acknowledged and celebrated, and there didn’t seem to be any attempt to separate them. On the contrary; the Christian figurines were mixed right in with the Hindu ones. Everyone was invited to the party.

Subrahmanya wall paintings, Swamimalai

Contemplating the Temple
It’s a funny thing to fall in love with a set of traditions that aren’t yours by birth or by culture. I find myself constantly asking myself why the Hindu Tantrism that I’ve spent the last decade studying with my teachers John Friend and Dr. Douglas Brooks resonates so powerfully for me and makes so much sense to me, offering such beauty and richness that I cannot imagine extricating it from my everyday thinking and way of being in the world.

Unlike the Catholic churches in which I grew up, the Shiva Nataraja temple in Chidambaram is not geared toward one particular group of Hindus with a specific set of codified beliefs. Imagine a Jesus church designed to accommodate every conceivable sect of Christianity, as well as anyone else who happens to think that Jesus is cool. This is the surprisingly inclusive paradigm that we step into when we come to this temple.

I love the fact that I am not forced to choose here – that it is as ok for me to be as inclusive as I am selective. Because I am an outsider, there is a curiosity about why I am here, but never a critique from any of the people with whom we interact. Part of this may be an effect of language differences, but it honestly seems to be a non-issue. The Dikshitar priests never ask us what we think or believe, even inviting us into their home. The other visitors to the temple are friendly and openly approving of our presence here, the women patting us on the shoulder and saying Super-good! when we wear saris. It seems to be accepted that if we are here, Shiva means something to us. Our showing up is explanation enough.

East Gate Entrance, Chidambaram Temple-morning

What we talk about when we talk about Nataraja
In class, I tell my students that the names of the gods are names for different aspects of our selves. When we talk about Nataraja, we are talking about an amalgamation of concepts that comprises our identity. When we look at Nataraja, we are looking into one of those endless reflecting mirrors in which we catch glimpses and slivers of glimpses of our limitless selves. The complex cosmology of Nataraja reminds us that we are dazzlingly diverse. We are additive rather than reductive, like a cubist painting that reveals infinite perspectives from a single vantage point. We are multiplicity itself.

Gopuram detail, Chidambaram Temple-morning

Sweat Pray Write

2011-08-16T14:36:00.000-07:00

Nataraja, Shivakamasundari and Subramanya Rathas, Chidambaram, July 2011 photo-Jagannath Babu

I am sitting in the 100º heat of the lobby of the Hotel Saradharam typing. No AC but Wi-Fi, so I try to perch on the edge of the inappropriately plush cushions of the couch beneath two whirling fans that busily attempt to dry out my contact lenses. I’ve soaked through layers of my sari and my computer rests on my thighs like a portable oven. There are a couple of tiny ineffectual mosquitoes flirting with my neck and arms – so sluggish in their movements that I easily swat them away before they manage to settle. I’m fantasizing about what it will feel like to peel off the layers of my sari to take yet another cold shower, about consuming a cool lime soda and a dosa. Yet, I’m determined to write.

I have come to Chidambaram in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu with my teacher, Dr. Douglas Brooks, and some friends for the annual Ani Festival, which marks the seasonal transition. This is one of the only times that the temple’s presiding deity, Nataraja, is removed from the Cit Saba, the heart of the temple, and brought through the streets in the most spectacular way imaginable: towering and elaborately carved carts hosting Nataraja and several other deities are draped with thousands of flowers strung into garlands, while surrounding the carts are burning ghee-torches, music, fireworks, and innumerable pilgrims. Hundreds of us pull the carts’ giant ropes to move them through the streets around the temple complex. We have come to honor our friend Kirubakaran, one of the temple’s Dikshitar priests. Kirubakaran was chosen to lead the festival this year – a once in a lifetime opportunity for him, for his family, and for us.

Selvaganesan, Greg, Susanna, Kirubakaran, Pushpa, Vishali, Harrison, Vasu, and the kids at the temple entrance, photo-Jagannath Babu

Take a profound religious ceremony, cross it with the ultimate street fair, add the 4^th of July, and you’ll have a sense of what it is like. The way in which I’ve described this 10-day opulent visual extravaganza to my friends is “Fellini on acid” because I don’t know how else to evoke the wild sensation of it all. The truth is that it is deeply sweet and ecstatically beautiful. It makes you want to bow down. And you do so again and again.

Inside the Temple-Kirubakaran after the Homa, July 2011, photo-Doug Neal

So it is in this context that I find myself wondering about the urge to write, to record. I’ve actually written less this trip than I have in any of my previous trips to India. I wanted to just be in the experience instead of continually engaging in the meta-cognitive process of thinking about what I’m doing while I’m doing it, evaluating what I’m seeing and experiencing, processing what I’m receiving through my senses so that instead of just sweating, I am thinking about writing about sweating, and then revisiting my wording and revising it in my head until I think, “Yes – that is perfectly evoking this moment of sweating.”

A few years ago, my parents decided to stop taking photos when they traveled for this very reason. They didn’t want their trip to be a step removed from the actual experience by having every view mediated through the camera lens. I understood and admired this decision, yet I can’t seem to utterly commit to it. I am proud of myself when I put down the camera for a couple of days and let my friends document the experience. But I happen to be a profoundly visual person, who learns and recalls through my own process of documentation. My art history notes from college were outrageous – outline form with thumbnail sketches. I retained amazing amounts of information.

Ideally I would be able to do the trip twice – once just sinking into the tough lushness of it all, into the realm of the heightened sensory experience that South India has to offer – and then a second time with my camera, my notebooks, my pens, my computer and its satisfying clicks and taps. This is my fantasy. But, of course, it is the fleeting quality of the experience that makes it so precious, that intensifies it and makes me yearn for what has already occurred yesterday or an hour ago, even as I sit here typing these thoughts. The visceral feeling of the experience slips away, leaving an evocative residue captured by my words, my images, my overflowing notations on my life.

Ani Festival, Chidambaram, July 2011, photo-Jagannath Babu

Meditating With Your Eyes Open

2011-08-05T15:04:00.000-07:00

Looking down at the stones beneath my feet, early morning, Chidambaram courtyard

Exchanging Glances in Southern India

In the late morning the stones of the temple courtyard burn the soles of your feet, so you walk very quickly scanning for the light-colored ones while headed for the shade of the main complex. You say hello to Ganesha at the temple threshold, and then move more deeply into its center, passing by the priests engaged in business and ritual, weaving through streams of other visitors headed for different shrines in the seemingly infinite corners of the temple, which is essentially a walled village the size of multiple football fields.

Swamimalai

When you arrive at the heart of the temple, you find Nataraja, intricately adorned in vibrant silks, jewels, and garlanded with flowers. Endless patterns of ritual revolve around him involving fire, liquid, smoke, and substance, immersing you in a complex synesthetic experience.

The dusty grooves of the temple stones capture occasional puddles of coconut water, milk, sandal, and ghee that cool your toes as you step through them. The bats swoop and chatter through the air accompanied by the temple music’s drums, bells, and horns. Smoke from the ghee lamps and the homa drifts through pillars and columns. Your forehead is host to sweet-smelling smears of ash that mingle with the scent of jasmine from your hair. And you listen or join in with the murmurs of mantras that swell like tiny whispering waves. You are permeated in every sensory manner and you release into it. The temple is a body, pulsing with life. When you are in it, you become an element of its chemistry.

Jasmine outside the temple

Most people who visit Chidambaram come to see Nataraja. This is his temple, the site of the Ananda Tandava, his Dance of Bliss. Shiva presides over the temple in the form of Nataraja, the dancer, the artist, who, with every movement, dances everything that exists into being and non-being. If you love Nataraja, this is the center of the universe. If you love Nataraja, you have come to see him and to be seen by him. The word for this is darshan, which my teacher Douglas Brooks explains as “the exchange of glances.” By entering, you have offered yourself to the temple, and then the temple offers itself back. As you inhabit the temple, the temple takes up residence within you.

A Nataraja murti

If you want to meditate, you can choose to close your eyes and go inside your own body, heart and mind. Or you can do the very same thing with your eyes open, drawing the outside in as an entirely different way of moving into the very same places. Through this invitation, this conversation, the body of the temple becomes your body. You gaze upon the deity and the deity shows you yourself. You exchange glances with Nataraja, This is why you are here.

Morning in the Chidambaram Temple courtyard, South Gate

There are times when you want to be within the quiet of your own inner vision. This is when you close your eyes. There are other times when you want to invite in all of the wild delirious diversity of the world, and this is when you open them. This receptivity enables you to converse more deeply with your surroundings and consequently, within yourself. Everything outside of you calls upon something within you. You begin to recognize that you are in a state of constant conversation with the world.

Om Namah Shivaya

Vishali walks through the Chidambaram Temple Courtyard

Swollen With Light

2011-07-16T09:29:00.000-07:00

John Friend-Anusara Grand Circle, Wanderlust, photo by Elena Brower

Notes from the Anusara Grand Circle - Wanderlust

Swollen with light ~ John Friend
I have just lowered down from another backbend and am staring up at the taut curves of an enormous white tent. My teacher, John Friend, has been talking about the burgeoning quality of the light at this time of year, the Summer Solstice. One little fragment of his talk still resonates: the idea of being “swollen with light.” For some reason, this particular phrase delights me. There are a few pregnant women practicing and I imagine them light-filled, their bellies glowing like fireflies.

Pulsation
If you want to learn about the universe, get very quiet. Watch your breath as it moves through your body, initiating your inhale like you are pouring a glass of water. Fill the pelvis – the waist – the ribcage – the shoulders. Everything expands. Now pour out your exhale top to bottom. What you just felt in your body is what happens in every aspect of nature, whether we choose to pay attention to it or not. The Sanskrit word for pulsation is Spanda. The passage of your breath. The pulse of your heart. The rise and fall of a day. The trajectory of a life. The structure of a yoga class from the beginning invocation to savasana. Expand to contract. Contract to expand. Spanda.

Intentionality
Intention is an interesting thing in that it can be difficult to discern productive determination from needless grasping. Think about not trying to be like X, but rather, to be X. In this way, as John Friend said this morning, you ”put your will in the flow of the bigger will…then all we’re doing is lining up.” If you align so deeply with your desire, you become it. If you see your desire as a part of you, as opposed to something outside of you, the longing and the longed for become a unified dynamic: two parts of a whole, the question and its answer.

photo by Elena Brower

Dwelling in the wonder of not knowing ~ Hareesh Wallis
All good answers give birth to further questions, like sparks cascading from a firework. If we see an answer as a directional indicator rather than as an end, our worlds become vast skies lit up with the sparks and patterns of our sensibilities. We create our own personal constellations of questions, our own configurations of limitless light. “We dwell,” as Hareesh Wallis said, “in the wonder of not knowing.”

Raising the resonance ~ Elena Brower
Sometimes when I teach a class I feel it so acutely within my body that it seems as if I have actually moved through the entire physical practice. Sometimes when I assist a class I have the same experience. I opted to assist my friend Elena Brower today instead of practicing. The verbal instructions, the manual assists, and the physical practice formed a triangle of communication in which what was said, heard, and enacted upon “raised the resonance” of the experience. As Elena spoke of living ever-more fully within our individual choices and lives, I felt the words permeate my skin, soften my tired muscles, and open into a dense honeyed internal place. We finished in meditation, word, body, and intention melded into a gently glowing intensity.

photo by Elena Brower

We see all places as places of pilgrimage ~ Bill Mahony
Sometimes we journey to find a sense of ourselves. The strangeness of a different context can illuminate our particular qualities and habits. We leave home to come more profoundly home, which is why we’re all here. Bill Mahoney spoke about seeing every place in our lives as a place of pilgrimage. In this context, a place can be an event, a relationship, our connection to the world, or our sense of self. If we treat these “places” as sacred, our world becomes one in which every observation and interaction becomes rich with meaning and worthy of reverence. Our world becomes more substantial, our lives become a moving prayer.

Eversomuch More-So

2011-06-14T15:33:00.000-07:00

Sianna Sherman and Douglas Brooks - Paris, May 2011

Yoga is virtuosity in becoming yourself
~ Douglas Brooks

There was a story I loved when I was little called Ever So Much More So. The story, written by Robert McCloskey, revolves around a stranger who comes to town selling shakers full of a mysterious product invisible to the eye and without smell or taste. Everything sprinkled with it seems to become more essentially itself. The name of the product is Eversomuch More-So. The people of the town shake it over everything, and are amazed to find that their water gets wetter, a squeaky spring becomes squeakier, and people’s individual characteristics such as a stutter or a tendency toward pomposity become more pronounced. Everything touched by Eversomuch More-So becomes its heightened self.

Two curious boys finally open the product’s container, which appears to be empty. Of course the stranger is long-gone, and the townspeople wonder if they have been swindled, but one older man pours it over the earth, and celebrates as the grass becomes greener, the birds sing more clearly, and the world becomes more profoundly itself in every way. So is it suggestion or is it real? The story ends ambiguously, leaving us wondering: how does something become eversomuch more itself?

I spent last week in the company of two of my favorite people –Douglas Brooks and Sianna Sherman – both of whom have distinct and powerful voices. I was assisting Sianna with her Paris Anusara teacher training, which included people from 17 different countries. The range of cultures, languages, and life experiences was impressive. I listened and gave feedback as everyone brought their particular sensibilities to the conversation, refining the structure and the poetry of their teaching.

Speaking to the group one night, Douglas stated: Yoga is virtuosity in becoming yourself. For yoga teachers in the process of honing their skills, this was particularly meaningful – essential, actually. If you parrot another teacher or take on a persona, your lack of authenticity will be evident.

But virtuosity in becoming yourself is about far more than teaching asana. This is about how you want to be in the world. This is about gazing inside to recognize that you are the sum of your own individual particularities, and that no one else can speak from your experience, your voice.

Live fully in your strengths and vulnerabilities to sing the song of you. When your song comes from this place, it moves people. You have become eversomuch more-you. Your virtuosity becomes an opening, inviting others to sing their songs.

If you want fluency and depth in your life, you must cultivate a state in which you are always becoming more profoundly yourself. If you want to inspire people – to move people – to offer people a taste of their deepest selves, you have to step into your own virtuosity. Like attracts like. This is the yoga.

How can you invite your green to become greener, your water to become wetter?
How can you inspire your voice to arise from that fertile place of your identity?
How can you cultivate your virtuosity in becoming Eversomuch More-You?

The Beauty of Movement II

2011-05-10T14:56:00.001-07:00

Still is still moving to me... ~ Willie Nelson

Definition: Wanderlust

a strong longing for or impulse toward wandering (Merriam-webster.com)
a strong, innate desire to rove or travel about (Dictionary.com)

About 15 years ago I spontaneously visited a friend in Colombia.

It was a particularly wet and miserable February in New York, and I was itching to be anywhere else. I called my friend Luis, and in a week was on a plane to Bogota.

We drove from the city two or three hours to some of the small towns surrounding it. Luis navigated rapidly along winding highways through the mountains, the damp high-altitude fog lifting to reveal trickling waterfalls along the sides of the mountains and explosively green foliage everywhere. Beyond the green in the lower altitudes, the mountains shone orangey-pink in the sun. We stopped by the side of the road, grabbed chunks of the mountain and crumbled it into a terracotta dust that stained our fingers.

At the time, many of the highways on which we drove were guerrilla-controlled, so speed was of the essence, as the guerrillas’ good humor in letting through the supply trucks and travelers’ cars vanished with the day’s diminishing light.

It was imperative that we arrive at our destination before the sun set. We drove through jungle, coffee country, arid towns famous for their clay work, and stayed in small colonial villages where the white walls around the central squares overflowed with bougainvillea, music and cooking smells. The diverse richness of it all was exhilarating. There was also a subtle but persistent edge of uneasiness lurking around the perimeter of daily life that, to my perception, compelled people toward a profound appreciation of the fleeting sweetness of the moment. We decided that while I was there we should eat like crazy and dance every night. And so we did.

At the apex of our non-stop motion, I had a conversation with one of Luis’ friends who said that he did not leave Colombia much because he didn’t enjoy traveling—that he began to lose his sense of self when he was removed from his everyday surroundings.

This was a stark contrast to what Luis and I were experiencing. Inspired by our constant movement—walking, driving, dancing and eating, I expressed to him how passionately I love traveling; how I find calmness within the incessant movement. The strangeness of new places and experiences makes me acutely aware of my own habits and assumptions, which I find liberating. Movement offers me perspective. Perspective creates self-reflection. Self-reflection cultivates insight and empathy and so on.

Once you get a hit of the stillness held by movement and of movement‘s suspended stillness, no matter where you are, you carry the awareness of it with you. Multiple frames of a movie give us one flickering image. Stare at a still image for long enough and it seems to shift before your eyes. This is the pulsation of nature. In Anusara’s Tantric tradition we call the stillness Shiva and the movement Shakti. Stillness defines motion and motion stillness. We can’t conceptualize one without the other. The beauty is both in the difference and in the merging. We hold them in a continual play. I move. I stop. I pause. I wander.

For the first time this year, I decided to go to Wanderlust. It seemed ridiculous that I have not yet gone, given my love for travel and, of course, yoga. There are yoga teachers who wander all over the globe and there are others who stay put at their home studio. Both roles are valuable and I find myself somewhere in between. My travels make me a better teacher, but I also love the day-to-day relationships I have with my students. What seduced me about this particular Wanderlust is that it is on the East Coast, and is hosting the Anusara Grand Circle, which is the ultimate annual gathering for anyone who practices Anusara Yoga. So I get my fix of stillness—resting in the heart of my community—through my embrace of motion—picking up from my surroundings and leaping into a new experience.

From Wanderlust, I leave for India. From India, I fly to Paris. From Paris, back home to New York. I embrace the mirror that travel provides, holding up infinite reflections of my own identity. I bring back experiences, insights and new perspectives for my students. In August, I will rest, my stillness holding its whirling wandering history like a passionate pulse.

The Beauty of Alignment II

2011-05-10T14:42:00.000-07:00

Once, in the town where Krishna lived, a venomous multi-headed serpent named Kaliya took up residence in the local river. Kaliya’s poison had polluted the water so thoroughly that any of the townspeople who went to take a drink, bathe, or even wash their clothing became sickened by its toxicity and died. The poison had begun to creep up the riverbanks, leaving a trail of dessicated grass and plants in its wake, and the cows eating the grass collapsed beneath the withered trees. Everyone was in a panic.

The young Krishna, realizing that he had to take action, leapt into the water, and as the stunned villagers watched, vanished into Kaliya’s thrashing, swirling, vortex at the center of the lake. They waited, fixated on the water’s surface. A few minutes went by in silence. Nothing. No bubbles. No ripples. No movement. The townspeople began to cry in despair. Krishna’s mother fainted and his father began to weep.

But then, in the midst of their tears, the townspeople heard a sudden splashing noise. As they lifted their heads, peering toward the river’s surface and pointing, a smiling Krishna began to rise up out of the water, balanced on one of Kaliya’s poisonous heads. Krishna began to play his flute and dance, hopping from hood to hood, as the dazed serpent slowly swayed, mesmerized by the rhythm. Subdued and remorseful, Kaliya apologized for his violent behavior, explaining that it was his nature, as a serpent, to be venomous. Krishna, acknowledging that it is difficult to control one’s nature, forgave him, requesting that Kaliya move out of the river and into the ocean, where his poison would be less damaging. And so he did.

Invite the story within. Kaliya is a thing out of place – a misalignment. A thing out of place can be toxic, but when placed properly, can be harmless or even advantageous. This is an essential tenet of yoga, and one that both of my teachers, Douglas Brooks and John Friend, emphasize. Douglas frequently points out that it’s called earth outside, but dirt inside. That stuff that looks so rich and fertile in your garden is simply a mess when it’s on your rug. One of John’s key concepts in Anusara Yoga is your Optimal Blueprint. The point of a pose is not to make it look like the version of it you saw on the poster, on the magazine cover, or even like the person practicing next to you. The point is to apply the alignment principles to yourself, building the pose from the inside out in a way that honors the particularities of your own body and lets your mind and heart sing. The point is knowing where to put things.

Alignment is a continual process of negotiation and renegotiation. Even when the waters of your everyday life seem still, there’s going to be something underneath – a thought, an incident - that will bubble up. And if it doesn’t emerge from the muck within it’s going to surprise you from riverbanks. The big question is: How are you going to align with the challenges? How will you choose to negotiate the vicissitudes of life so that your challenges lose their toxicity and take a more appropriate place in the landscape of you?

The Beauty of Desire

2011-04-21T18:31:00.000-07:00

Morning Skies (II)

Desire is not a problem – it is our very nature. This is one of the first things that my teacher Dr. Douglas Brooks said when I met him nine years ago in the big kick-off weekend for my Anusara® Yoga Teacher Training. His statement continues to resonate as powerfully for me now as it did that first icy but exciting January day.

Desire is our nature. For me, this exuberantly exploded the popular trope that we are trapped and bound by desire - that we are mired in a cycle of always wanting more and that we can never be satisfied until we somehow free ourselves from that inclination. I listened and thought yes! The fact is that I enjoy my desire. I love that longing, that yearning, that delicious notion that there is always more to do, more to feel, more to accomplish, more to taste…and that my desire can take infinite forms, pointing the way toward a multiplicity of experiences and possibilities.

Desire is what gets me out of bed in the morning – the memory of how much I love that first flowery taste of my hot milky tea, that initial yawningly satisfying stretch of my morning Surya Namaskar, the promise of plans and conversations with friends, the excited wait for that satisfying press and scratch of pencil on paper as I draw. Desire is what motivates me, excites me, inspires me. Desire makes me care passionately about things and about people. I love that I can be moved to tears by a Picasso painting or a Fellini film or the taste of a distant hillside in a great glass of wine. I feel incredibly fortunate that I am so deeply connected to my desirous self that it repays me with joy on a daily basis.

I want to become ever more in touch with my desire. I want to step deeply into the flow of passion that moves through my everyday life. Join me: close your eyes, go inside for a moment, and reconnect to that glowing ember called desire that constitutes your very core.

The Beauty of the Dance

2011-04-09T15:27:00.000-07:00

His body is half-naked and ash-smeared with a tiger skin draped across his hips. In his two upper hands he holds the drum of creation and the fire of dissolution. His tangle of matted hair is gathered and loosely held in a knot. Perched on the knot is the pale crescent moon behind which descends the waters of the Ganges, which separate and divert into many tributaries, reflecting his infinite forms. He is multiplicity itself. But here he is Nataraja, the dancing form of Shiva.

As he begins to twist and move, his lower left arm and leg rise, crossing over to the right side, the languid hand pointing gently toward his gracefully upturned foot. He holds a fourth hand palm-out, offering abhaya mudra, the sign of fearlessness, inviting us to dare to engage in our own dance, our own process of creativity. As he dances, his dreadlocks fly wildly out from his head revealing glittering diamonds studding their matted swirling length. They reflect and refract the light, creating a dizzying optical spectacle evoking thousands of white sparkling fireworks. Ash and gem. Nature and culture. Visceral instinct and refined choice. This is our center where our contradictions meet.

Who we were, who we are now, who we may be…it’s all in the dance. The grittiest earthiest parts of our makeup combine with our most refined and cultivated sensibilities, because we contain both. In Nataraja’s undulating asymmetrical dance, he conceals one bit of reality and reveals another because this is the way we experience the world. Something surges into focus, something else recedes like the sound of a train in the distance. He stands on Apasmara, representing forgetfulness, because we remember just enough and forget just enough from day to day so that we get to dance again, tasting our own recalled and forgotten beauty. Nataraja is an invitation to dance our lives more deeply, more artfully, connected to the earth and in love with the stars.

Spring Cleaning with Shiva

2011-04-04T10:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve decided to do my spring-cleaning in the company of Shiva this year. Or rather, I plan to tap into those aspects of Shiva within me that shift, clarify, and empower. So as I transition through the gray drizzle of early New York City March into the softer season, when rubbery stems of flowers optimistically emerge around the two trees planted in the cement of my block, I’ll be negotiating the same mysterious process of transformation within myself.

Shiva is my map, my game plan. Look at Nataraja, the dancing form of Shiva. In his upper right hand he holds a drum, representing creation. In his upper left hand, he holds fire, for destruction. He supports himself on one bent leg, displaying sustenance or maintenance. These three of Shiva are the ones on which I am focusing right now. Through the contemplation of these acts: creation, destruction, and maintenance, Shiva Nataraja is an invitation into our own consciousness – a path that offers us the opportunity to deeply engage with ourselves and with the world. Shiva is a mirror, inviting us to gaze upon our own lives – to see the choices we make and to more clearly recognize our patterns, to evaluate what is and isn’t working, and what changes we need to make.

Periodically, I notice that my little stacks of books and paperwork have turned into furniture in the corners of my apartment. I realize that the physical stacks of stuff are some interesting sort of parallel to the inner stacks of stuff inside my head and heart. It is time to dissolve them, reorder them, and create a more sustainable system. So those habitual patterns that aren’t serving me – those ways of thinking that limit me – burn them to ash and sweep them away. It is only from this place of clarity that that I can create something substantial, something worth my energy and effort. By daring to destroy, I can create something new that I am excited about sustaining. This is an endless loop. This is a dance. By fully engaging in this dance, my own consciousness becomes Shiva.

How can you skillfully engage and navigate the vicissitudes of your own personal transitions? How can you take hold of Shiva’s tools of consciousness and meaningfully engage them in your dance?

The Beauty of Connection

2011-03-28T19:27:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was an exquisitely beautiful woman named Sita, whose looks and graciousness inspired passion in every creature who encountered her. Sita, however, was madly in love with her partner, a powerful and righteous king named Rama, who was equally crazy about her. One day, as they played and picnicked with their attendants in the flower-dotted fields near where they lived, Sita wandered into the nearby forest to find a little shade. From the treetops, a demon by the name of Ravena, who was obsessively in love with Sita watched… waited…and then leapt down, scooping up Sita and whisking her away to the island of Lanka where he hid her deep inside his walled-in kingdom.

Finding a few of Sita’s glittering jewels on the forest floor, the devastated Rama and his devoted servant Hanuman knew right away that the demon had stolen Sita. Hanuman told Rama that he would leap over the ocean to Lanka to find her, that nothing could deter him from reuniting the couple. Now Hanuman was a sort of demi-god: half monkey and half man, who had magical powers, such as shape-shifting and flying through the air. So Hanuman gathered up his powers and leapt all the way to Lanka, then made himself tiny so that he could scamper unnoticed through the treetops inside of Ravana’s gardens. There he found Sita, weeping under a tree. He gave her Rama’s ring to prove that he was sent by him and then leapt back to tell Rama, so that the king could lead his army to Lanka and recover his stolen love.

So here’s where it gets interesting. Place the story inside of you. You are the landscape – the verdant fields and the shadowy forest, the ocean and the walled-in kingdom. You are the strong king who wants to do the right thing and the exquisite beauty who longs for what she loves. But you are also Ravana, that demon who causes you to feel alone or disconnected, who tears you away from your self. And finally, you are Hanuman, the one who restores unity, who, in fact, is so utterly devoted to creating connection, that he will create alignment again and again and again, because Hanuman is the ultimate yogi, alignment and connectivity are a constant process, and this is one of many stories…

Observe within yourself how the story plays out in every moment in your day. Your mind flickers over a particular thought or desire and waves of excitement, curiosity, self-doubt, and longing rise and subside. When do you feel separate? What makes you doubt yourself or become excessively self-critical? Remind yourself that those alienating sensations are only one character in the story, that just as they attempt to pull you out of alignment, there are other characters in your story that elevate and exalt you. Call on that part of you that is deeply devoted to your own alignment and connectivity. Call on that part of you that is Hanuman.

The Flavors of Love

2011-03-06T18:52:00.000-08:00

The Rasas

Rasa is the Sanskrit term for the flavor or texture of an experience. The nine Rasas include Comic, Compassionate, Furious, Heroic, Fearsome, Gruesome, Wondrous, Peaceful, and Erotic. Every moment of life touches upon one or several of them, as they tumble into each other and overlap. The Rasas are referenced when talking about art or aesthetic theory because of the power of a great work or composition to evoke them: a Goya etching may tap into the gruesome yet leave you in a state of wonder. The Mary J. Blige song that makes you cry may help you end up in a place of peace. Anyway, I've been thinking about the connection between the Rasas and the different flavors of love...

There is a love that feels like peacefulness, a love that feels like yearning, a love of bubbling-over joy, and a love that evokes eroticism. Love can feel clearly directed and specific, or it can be as vast and expansive as the cosmos. My love of cake is not the same as my love for my beloved, which is not the same as the love I have for my parents, or for my best friend, or for the ocean. Yet I feel passionately about all of those things. And within each of those forms and variations of love there are infinite nuances of experience.

Love resides not in the object but in the subject. It is not something to pursue or look for anywhere outside of yourself. This is not to say that you can’t find love with someone or something else. But it is the word with that makes all of the difference. You have to connect to the experience of love within to receive love from anything in the external world. And then maybe you don’t receive it in the way or form that you wanted, which feels surprising, interesting, or lousy, but it doesn’t change the fact that love is still there, because the love resides in you. The feeling of love, the ability to love is always present, while the object of your love and the texture of your love shift, change and diversify.

Love offers us an intensity of experience that dives deeply into the Rasas, showing us how vast and diverse our capacity for love really is. If that flavor of love were not a part of you, you wouldn’t even be able to recognize it. So something from the outside evoked the love that was already present within you. And regardless of what happens on the outside, that flavor of love is always there.

Try this: Take a moment to think of what you really love and whom you really love. Observe the flavors or textures of each of those particular loves. Then recognize how each one of them is an aspect of your self.

The Goddess Who Pauses to Speak

2011-03-03T17:04:00.000-08:00

Bagalamukhi

Pause for a split second. Now say what you wanted to say – clearly, concisely, and artfully. Within that tiny suspended moment, your breath shifts, your thoughts coalesce, your mind hovers between this and that, now and then, and finally chooses its self-expression. That moment contains a particular power. Its name is Bagalamukhi.

Bagalamukhi is the goddess who hovers just an inch above an nectar-filled ocean dotted with yellow lotuses, wrapped in a turmeric-colored sari and bathed in her own golden light. She is also called the crane-faced one, the length of her long neck showing that extended moment when the heart’s intention rises to the mouth and is spoken. In her right hand she holds a club and in her left, the tongue of a demon, reducing it to silence. For this reason she is sometimes called the paralyzer, freezing the demons of the mind and of speech. Her own silence accumulates power, so when she speaks, she says exactly what she means. She is that pause before your utterance that makes your words meaningful.

This is a practice of course – one that is not always easy and won’t always function every time you open your mouth, but as you cultivate the link between your mind and your speech, what you say begins to carry more weight and feels more authentic. Your articulations resonate more profoundly with the people around you and begin to create internal change as well, deepening your sense of who you are, where you stand in the world, and how you want to present yourself. When we run ourselves down or criticize others, our articulations are destructive. The more we speak destructively, the more we emanate negativity. Who wants to be around that?

Bagalamukhi is about pausing to cultivate your inner alignment so that what you put out into the world represents your best self. Words shape our thinking and ways of being in the world. As your lips are about to verbalize a thought or an opinion, call on that part of you that is Bagalamukhi, and in that hovering suspended moment, your intention coalesces into the gems of speech that adorn the ocean of your thoughts.

Making the Pilgrimage

2011-02-11T13:55:00.000-08:00

Pilgrims lighting camphor beads, Palani Temple, Dec 2010

It was Christmas and I was zip-zagging across the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu in a bus filled with about 25 other people. Led by my teacher, renowned Tantric scholar Dr. Douglas Brooks, we were on pilgrimage to the six primary temples of Shiva’s son Subrahmanya, a fierce warrior known for his multifaceted and diverse self, thus the many temples. Although I missed my family, I had made the choice for the second time in three years to have what we now referred to as “Susanna’s Hindu Christmas.”

A pilgrimage is a journey to a sacred place to connect and pay homage. The outer journey will ideally run parallel to an inner journey that may shuffle and shift our every way of looking at the world. Each Subrahmanya temple we visited engaged us through its own distinctive personality, eliciting those same qualities within us. Tiruchendur seduced us into a dark crowded interior, churned us through its dense corridors, and then released us ecstatically onto the beach to wade in the ocean. Palani beckoned to us to climb its 650-some steps to the top of a mountain, where it offered an expansive clear healing sensation that one can only find on a mountaintop. Swamimalai sweetly invited us in and coaxed us gently into conversation. And so on…

What each temple offered us was a particular experience of ourselves – a no joke face-to-face with our own consciousness – stuff we love and stuff we don’t like to see at all. Pilgrimage is about walking the path within oneself. As we moved from temple to temple, we moved from place to place inside our bodies, minds, and hearts. How does pilgrimage do this? It invites us to step into the mix, to engage in an outer journey to create an inner conversation. The process is both startling and exquisite.

Toward the end of the trip, as our bus wound its way through the lush rice fields and palm trees of Tamil Nadu, it became clear to me that every aspect of the pilgrimage was nothing less than a mirror reflecting my many selves. The sweet smell of jasmine, the muck from the cows, the press of the crowds with its sense of urgency and joy. The mounds of garbage and detritus, the drip and perfume of the ghee candles, the crack and gush of coconuts being split and drained of their water. The burning beads of camphor mingling with the fragrance of sandalwood. The white smears of ash(vibhuti) and vermillion dots of kumkum staining my forehead. The deliriously cacophonous temple music mixed with the cries of babies, marketplace conversations, and the shouted prayers of pilgrims. And I thought: there is actually nothing here that is not deeply familiar- the complexities and the messiness, the tragedies and the ecstasies. As my teacher Douglas often says, “That is nothing like me. That is something like me. That is nothing but me.”

I extend to you this invitation:

Make a pilgrimage within yourself. Treat this year like a journey. Visit every place you can find that resides within you. And then honor your experience, regardless of what you find along the way. As you wind through your own consciousness, remember that you will find contradictions and surprises, because you are multifaceted. You are your own world. And whatever you encounter on your pilgrimage is you.

Making the Pilgrimage

2011-01-25T14:18:00.000-08:00

Making the Pilgrimage

The Beauty of Habit and Ritual

2011-01-21T11:31:00.000-08:00

At the Thiruvalamchuzhi Ganesh Temple, Tamil Nadu, Dec 28, 2010

This morning I made my tea, as I do most mornings, and sat down with it to think about what new habits and rituals I want to establish in the New Year. Our lives are filled with both rituals and habits, and it’s interesting to discern between the two. A habit is a recurring pattern of behavior, conscious or unconscious. A ritual is a symbolic action or behavior that marks an occasion or confers significance. The line delineating one from the other can be fairly blurry, but ritual can or should make meaning in your life. Preparing my tea and sitting to think is a habit that gives me pleasure, but it doesn’t necessarily have meaning beyond that satisfying moment. In contrast, here is an example of a ritual…

When I finish teaching a yoga class, I release my palms from prayer pose (Anjali Mudra), touch my left hand to my heart and my right fingertips to the ground. Release. Lift my head and take in the room. I’m not sure if I adopted this small ritual from another teacher some years ago or if I made it up, but the symbolism is clear to me – I am affirming the connection of my heart to the hearts around me, and honoring what we have just co-created in the space. It is a gesture that takes approximately 5 seconds, but it seals the experience for me, and fills me with gratitude for having yoga in my life and for being part of an amazing community. This ritual feels good, and after some years of doing it, necessary.

Think of the rituals we embrace: lighting candles, making toasts, creating new year’s resolutions, sharing birthday cakes, sending cards and emails, and more. Celebration, remembrance, reverence, and transition are all moments that call for ritual. Rituals can become rote, and turn into empty habits, but with a little attention, we can re-infuse them with meaning or simply decide that they no longer serve us. If we create the habit of a daily yoga or meditation practice, that habit can become a ritual, rich with meaning and substance.

In this New Year, I invite you to join me in examining old habits, forming new ones, and creating meaningful ritual that enriches our daily lives.

The Beauty of Ferocity

2010-12-10T18:10:00.000-08:00

She is burningly fierce and infinitely gentle. Her ferocity knows no limits, but she knows where to direct it and when to apply it. Her beauty is unparalleled, her face reddened from the heat of her own passion and rage. You are either with her or against her. She is so powerful that there are twelve forms of her, each form displaying a specific aspect of her personality and power. She has a closet full of outfits but favors dressing in vivid red from head to toe. In her four hands she holds prayer beads, a book, and makes the gestures of fearlessness and of graceful offering. Draped around her neck and shoulders is a garland of severed heads, her chest and face smeared with their blood. From the midst of the gore, her three luminous eyes shaped like lotus blossoms shine like the rising sun…

The Goddess Bhairavi represents that intelligent ferocity that resides within us. When we stand up for something we care about, when we leap to defend someone we love, when we plunge wholeheartedly into our own passions and beliefs, or eliminate something detrimental to our lives, we are Bhairavi. Undeterred. Without doubt. Taking no prisoners. Fiery. Infinite. Bhairavi is always within us – she is a part of who we are. What is interesting is when she appears – what it is inside and outside of us that calls her to the surface.

To receive beauty and grace in your life, you sometimes need to be ferocious. First you need to cultivate a clear analytical intelligence that enables you to discern what benefits you and what is self-destructive. Once you have determined this, unleash Bhairavi. Sever what isn’t serving you. Do so with precision, clarity and deep self-awareness. Own your choices. Don’t be subject to her. Be her. Be terrible in your raging beauty, standing up for what you believe in, whom you love, and who you are in the world. Be passionately ferocious and fiercely graceful. Like Bhairavi, you become as luminous as 1000 suns.

The Beauty of Celebrating Yourself

2010-12-06T20:39:00.000-08:00

In order to give to others you also need to give to yourself. In order to be a good friend, family member, or partner you have to be good to yourself first. You have to love yourself. In Anusara® yoga we begin with the premise of self-embrace. This is not any sort of narcissism. Rather it is a reverence for nature, of which we are a part. It is an appreciation offered to the people who created, advised, guided, and supported us: family members, teachers, and friends.

A close friend who spoke English as a second language once said to me, “I am so conceited!” When I explained to him that conceited was probably not the word that he was searching for, he explained, “What I mean is that I love myself…I mean, I’m the only me there is. If I don’t love me, who will?” And then he said, “Don’t you love yourself?” I never had anyone ask me this before, so I briefly outlined a few of my faults and then a few strengths. He laughed at me and said, “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, don’t you love you?” It took me a minute, but I finally said, “ …I guess so. I mean…yes!”

The exchange took place just a few years ago, and in retrospect, it is one of the best gifts anyone has given me. He helped to give me the gift of myself. The more I embrace myself, the more I am able to offer love to the people around me. I am better equipped to be a friend, a teacher, and a family member. So this December, in the midst of my gift buying and finishing up of 2010 commitments and goals, I also plan to take fabulous care of myself. Because I love me.

The Beauty of Asymmetry

2010-12-03T18:38:00.000-08:00

Asymmetry (Via NotZolddLab.)

Beauty resides in the asymmetrical, the not-quite-matching-up-ness of things, the unexpected, the quirk. Think of the crack in the vase that accentuates the beauty around it. Symmetry can be beautiful in its evenness, but too much of it becomes stasis. Sameness. Predictability. Beauty lies in surprising contrasts.

Instead of viewing asymmetry as a flaw, entertain it as possibility, as an opening. When things don’t match up perfectly there is a friction – the extra screw after you have assembled the Ikea shelving. It drives you crazy, but then again, it gets your attention. It makes you look more closely because there is a role for you – something you need to do – a way to involve yourself. A grain of sand inside an oyster can create a pearl. The displaced thing, the flaw, produces beauty. In our best moments, we can recognize that our flaws and asymmetries can sometimes be our assets. Without asymmetry there is nothing to negotiate, no space of possibility – nothing to work on or to address.

Someone asked me once why I chose to create drawings on ordinary white paper instead of beautiful handmade rice paper. The reason was that the rice paper was already finished as far as I was concerned. It was so perfect and symmetrical that the only interaction with the paper that seemed appropriate to me was admiration. There was nothing further that I wanted to do with it. What do you do with perfect symmetry?

What is that part of you that you view as a flaw?
How can you begin to see it as an opportunity to create beauty in a way that is uniquely yours?

Your Body is a Stage

2010-11-14T17:07:00.000-08:00

Inner Landscape 4

At last week’s Anusara® yoga Teacher Training in Paris, my intelligently poetic friend Sianna Sherman described the body as, “either a cage to trap you or a stage to set you free.” Think about it. Our bodies are the vehicles through which we experience the world. What we touch-smell-taste-hear-see is filtered through our own particular physical parameters – through the amalgamation of sensations that is us. Through our bodies we suffer pain and illness, but also pleasure and even ecstasy.

When I find myself complaining about sore hamstrings or wishing that my backbends looked more teardrop-shaped than bridge-like, I remember that I am privileged to even have such concerns. We can use our limitations as excuses to give up or as reasons to feel resentful, but neither of those reactions serve us. We are either accepting the cage or trapping ourselves further through our own negativity. When we begin to appreciate our abilities more than we resent our limitations, our body becomes our stage – a place filled with sensation, drama, beauty, emotion, and artistry.

We need to recognize our limitations so that we can more profoundly celebrate our gifts, but we also need to regularly test those limits, to push at what we believe to be our boundaries and constraints – to get a taste of our potential and savor our fullness. The question we need to ask ourselves is:

Who do we want to be and how do we want to be within our bodies?

The Beauty of Yoga in the City of Light

2010-11-07T14:22:00.000-08:00

Le Sainte Chapelle (Via Dimitry B..)

I want to be luminous. I want to glow. I want to be lit up like the Sainte-Chapelle, the extraordinary cathedral of stained glass in Paris, where I've been this week assisting my friend Sianna Sherman with an intense five-day Teacher Training. In Anusara yoga we have an expression, "Inner Body Bright." The expression is intended to evoke the energetic brilliance that resides at our core, to draw it to the surface, and to shine it out around us like a full-body halo. How do we access that inner light so that we can extend our talents and gifts out into the world? We do the yoga.

The yoga for me is asana practice, philosophy study, art making, and writing. For someone else, the yoga might be singing, cycling, or martial arts. Yoga means yoking, connecting. Doing the yoga is about creating internal and external unity. The details don’t really matter. What matters is choosing to do what lights you up.

This week in Paris we've discussed what inspires us, what resides so authentically at our center that even mentioning it creates an inspirational glow for those around us. When our teacher John Friend was here, he spoke of being bathed in the light of the Sainte-Chapelle. The luminosity of the building was more powerful than the stone architecture. The cathedral became a body, while the light was the energy enveloping the structure. Lumineux dans le corps interieur. Illuminated from within. Inner Body Bright

What illuminates you from the inside out? How do you do your yoga?

The Beauty of Diversity

2010-11-05T14:38:00.000-07:00

Walt Whitman by photographer George C. Cox, New York, 1887

You are uniquely yourself, yet you are many selves. You are both singular and diverse, a continually unfolding being. As my teacher Dr Douglas Brooks frequently points out, the self who you are with your parent is not the same as the self you are with your lover, your child, or your best friend. This does not make you inauthentic in any way. It simply means that you are multi-faceted. At the core of your identity is this play between your singularity and your diversity.

Embracing diversity in the world around you makes you richer, deeper. When you dive into a new job, enjoy new friends, explore a new interest, or travel, you expand the universe of you. You are different and will be perceived differently. You may view yourself in this alternate context and be confronted with a new image of yourself. External diversity precipitates self-awareness and encourages self-knowledge.

The more aware you are of your own particularities, strengths and challenges, the better equipped you are to understand and appreciate other people. But interestingly, the more you see within yourself, the more endless the process of seeing becomes. You become internally diverse. You begin to recognize that for every drop of self-knowledge you have, there is a river of unknowns. So now you have a choice: you can stop looking, stagnating into set habits and patterns, or you can leap into the cascading limitless waterfall that is you. Appreciating the nuances of difference within yourself offers you a glimpse of your limitlessness.

Walt Whitman said it best: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

The Beauty of Your Story

2010-11-05T14:30:00.000-07:00

Krishna & Gopis (milkmaids)

Once upon a time there was a beautiful young man who played the flute exquisitely. He lived in a small village of cow-herders. In this village all of the women were madly in love with him because of his good looks and his music. One day as he wandered, playing his flute, the women stopped milking their cows and followed his music deeply into the forest, where, seduced by the sound, they dreamed and longed for him.

They began to argue and fight, each claiming that she was the charismatic man’s true love. Suddenly they realized that he had vanished, and they panicked, churning through every lover’s emotion, from jealousy to hope, joy to anguish. Exhausted, they finally became peaceful, and it was then that the beautiful man reappeared. The man, whose name was Krishna, multiplied himself so that everywhere each milkmaid looked, behind the trees and in the streams, in the clouds and behind her eyelids, all that she could see was him. Dazed and sated with love, the milkmaids wandered out of the woods, and back to their homes, carrying the magic of the forest, the beauty of the music, and their passion for Krishna with them. They had internalized the story, and everything they needed was within.

Imagine this story happening inside of you. You are all of the characters and every element of the landscape. Within yourself, you contain Krishna’s artistry and the milkmaids’ yearning for beauty and love. You possess the dark mystery of the forest, in which nothing is clear and anything can happen. You embody the earthiness of the village and the brilliance of a deity. You seduce and are seduced. You are passionate and disdainful. You are singularly yourself, yet you contain multitudes. There is nothing in the story that you are not.

Every story tells you about yourself. Within your daily life, within your daily practice, you tell your story. As a yogi, when you step onto your mat, your practice churns through a cycle of emotions. You watch as your energy and attitude shift and change within each pose. The events of your day wash through your body and mind, shaping your attitude and giving form to your thoughts. So the next time you begin your practice, ask yourself:

What kind of story do I want to tell?

How do I accept the challenging parts of my story and still embrace the beauty?

The Beauty of Listening

2010-11-05T14:20:00.000-07:00

Listen (via ky_olsen)

I spent this past weekend in a meditation workshop with a small group of fellow yoga teachers with whom I’ve been studying asana and philosophy for many years. We engaged in multiple meditations with breaks to write notes and share information. The act of setting aside a weekend to do this created a space within which our minds were able to become quiet. Within the quiet, we learned more about ourselves than most of us had imagined. The repetition of meditate-write-discuss created a familiar rhythm that made it increasingly easy to hear what was being said to us within our meditations. We emerged from the weekend inspired, exhausted, invigorated, and amazed.

If we want to know ourselves better, we need to become quiet and listen. When we are quiet, we are better able to hear what our bodies imply, our minds indicate, and our hearts gravitate toward. Cultivating this type of self-knowledge offers us a richer experience of the world around us. The outer world becomes a mirror that reflects back to us our beauty, our complexity, and our infinite capacity for transformation.

Some people develop their ability to listen through ongoing kinetic movement such as running or swimming. Others find it through physical stillness, such as sitting in meditation, and many through practices that play with the pulsation between movement and stillness – yoga, basketball, music, drawing, dance. All of these activities create a framework within which people can focus on themselves in a clearer, deeper way. Through the repetition of one of these particular practices, we become better acquainted with our motivational peaks and valleys. We learn about our abilities to grow and change, where we get stuck, and how to become creative within a given structure. In yoga we constantly talk about how to take what we learn off of the mat and into the street. What we learn about ourselves in our practice is applicable to every aspect of our lives.

What practice offers you clarity and quiet so that you can best listen to your body, heart, and mind?

How can you embrace this practice as a daily or weekly commitment so that you are inspired and amazed by your very self?

The Beauty of Transitions

2010-10-10T14:31:00.000-07:00

I noticed the transition this past week – my hands felt smooth and papery when I woke up in the morning, the bathroom floor tiles felt cold instead of cool under my feet. I started craving warm foods in the morning and evening, and I felt quiet, more inward. I observed my body and mind responding to the shifting weather and moving into their autumnal state. It wasn’t an external marker that made me aware of the seasonal shift, such as the beginning of the academic year or baseball season waning. The transition could be felt in my very body chemistry - sort of like a plant responding to the barometric pressure.

Everything in nature pulsates energetically. In yoga we use the Sanskrit word spanda to refer to the pulsation of the universe, of nature, of our bodies. Just as a flower or leaf may close at night and open up again in the daylight, our bodies open and close, drawing energy inward and then radiating it back out.

If we look at the statue of Nataraja, we can see that his upper right hand holds a damaru, or drum, which represents creation, and his upper left hand holds fire, which represents destruction. We know that a tree’s leaves have to shrivel and fall in order for the tree to create new buds and blossoms. This is the natural pulsation of things. In any aspect of our lives we must recognize that there is a time when we need to shed an old habit or pattern so that we can create a new one that serves us better. We need to let the old leaves die to make way for the new. If we resist change, we deny nature.

In this transitional time of year – light giving over to increasing darkness, green growing things slowly turning brown, we have the reminder of what we need to do for ourselves. How can we gracefully transition from the external expressiveness of summer into a more inward autumnal state? How can we hold closely what is essential and shed what is no longer needed?

The Beauty of the Unknown

2010-10-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

This morning I woke up at 6:30 am when the alarm on my iPhone went off. It was still dark out, cool, rainy, and almost completely silent, but I could hear my friends moving about the room. Sharon Kenny and I were upstate assisting our friend Zhenja LaRosa with an Anusara® Teacher Training retreat and the three of us had personal meditation practices that we planned to do before joining the group. As each of us moved into our individual meditations, I found my mind wandering off, distracted by my fatigue and my curiosity about the dent in my mattress, detoured by a recollection about a party I had been to Saturday evening and by the color choices I had made in a drawing that I had just started. I began wonder about what I would eat for breakfast.

Meditation is like a mysterious structure that you enter into that contains within it every rasa, or flavor of experience. As I wandered through the hallways of my meditation, I ducked under one thought, pushed another one behind a door, and in frustration, was about to exit, when…there it was…my own personal space of meditation. Just when it seemed like an impossibility, I softened, stopped being so hard on myself, let my daily thoughts and distractions rest to the side, and stepped into the unknown.

Sometimes it is difficult work to get to the space of meditation, and it is frequently interrupted by a meta-cognitive train of thought such as: Am I there yet? Oh yes, I think I’m entering into that place now. But wait. Is it happening?” Meditation is entering the mystery that resides at your very core. You don’t know exactly how you will get there, or if you will get there, or what you will find once you arrive. You are traveling without a plan. But to grow as a person, you need to enter into unknown parts of your self, and to do that, you must begin by opening to all the possible experiences that may emerge.

Not knowing what will happen is opportunity. Not knowing is possibility. Embracing the unknown is an ecstatic affirmation of your own hunger for experience and self-knowledge. The practices of yoga and meditation are, as my teacher Dr. Douglas Brooks says, “the creative pursuit of uncertainty.” They are a glimpse into the vast structure of our own consciousness.

The Beauty of the Universe

2010-09-24T11:05:00.000-07:00

Universe (via jurvetson)

Imagine your body as a universe - a vast cosmic landscape in which every planet and every star is a point of energy signifying one of your particular qualities, talents, or aspects of your identity. Imagine each of these coalesced points of energy as a marker of some aspect of your life. Now imagine recognizing that that vastness, that sense of limitless possibility, that ever-expanding tapestry of seen and unseen, darkness punctuated with flashes of illumination…is your very essence.

Just as a star pulses, expanding and contracting energetically, so do we. When you feel depleted mentally, physically, or spiritually, when you have a hesitation of the heart - anxiety, self-doubt, or feelings of unworthiness, hug in to your inner universe - to the constellation of your own complexities. By moving inward, we become expansive. This is not a contradiction. It is an essential fact of the natural world. A dense and compact seed contains the promise of a tree. At the core of our bodies, we find infinite potential. In Anusara yoga we call this pulsation muscular and organic energy. We hug in toward the center of our bodies to tap into the expansiveness that resides there. This enables us to unfold and open, to extend and become spacious.

While it is still warm at night, go outside. If you need to, find an open space – a park or a rooftop. And just look. Receive the lessons of the inky and infinite sky. Welcome the night air into your body. Soften until there is less separation between you and the sky. Commit to recognizing your own vastness - to not getting stuck in one small corner of your personal universe. Commit to seeking out options. Step into your own enormity. And recognize that the endless night sky is a reflection of you.

The Beauty of Alignment

2010-09-17T20:34:00.000-07:00

John Friend as SuperOM

“The future is about responding in alignment” - John Friend 9-11-10

Daily life is an ever-shifting process of aligning and realigning. You wake up and realize it’s raining or that you forgot to buy food for breakfast. Maybe you check your email and see a message that adds a layer of complication to your day or one that makes you excited about how your day will unfold. Perhaps you make the most perfect breakfast and the coffee has never tasted so delicious, or instead you forgot to pick up milk and feel vaguely disappointed. You imagined this, but now you have to readjust to that. Every moment of your day instigates a series of tiny shifts and adjustments. Each adjustment is a point of departure from which your actions and choices ripple outward, affecting your life and the lives of the people around you. So the essential question becomes: how do you align with those incremental shifts and changes - with what was, with what is and with what might be?

As my teacher John Friend reminded us this past weekend in Boston, everything is microcosm-macrocosm. The shifts of our bodies and minds mirror the processes of the world around us. If we deny those processes, we become misaligned. If our knee suddenly feels tweaked and we decide to run 5 miles or sit in lotus position for an hour, that’s a misaligned decision that will result in injury. If we decide to address that unexpected shift with rest or a theraputic physical practice, we have responded intelligently, realigning with what is, and setting a positive path for what might be.

The more aligned we are as individuals, the more skillfully we align with those around us. We become proficient at navigating the vicissitudes of life, which enables us to more positively affect our world. We are less likely to lash out in anger when provoked, less likely to be devastated by sadness. If we can align with the small shifts, we can better address the life-changing ones.

So try this:

First, notice some small unexpected shift in your plans or expectations.

Then observe: How is this change affecting my thinking & mood?

Then ask yourself: How, at this moment, can I best align with what I’ve been given so that I can move forward in a positive way?

The Beauty of Beginnings

2010-09-14T20:01:00.000-07:00

Yellow Leaf (via My aim is true)

It’s officially September. No ocean weekends, roof deck urban sunbathing, or persistent flip-flop wearing can deny it. For many of us, this signifies the bittersweet trailing off of summertime heat – a regretful goodbye to the radiant openness of our bodies that offers us a similarly open state of mind. For others, the transition into September is filled with the excitement of the new – the cooler weather activating our motivation, our work ethic – a shift into focusing and goal setting. So I remind myself at the onset of Fall that this season can be about possibility and freshness, an opportunity to create a new way of thinking, to set new habits, to shift emphasis from something that didn’t serve us to something that holds potential. An opportunity to make our someday into our now.

I begin my Fall by committing to some particular practice for 5 minutes each day. Seriously - 5 minutes. A few years ago, I committed to a 5 minute a day Pranayama practice. I knew that committing to 5 minutes would make it impossible for me to fail. Even when I had a head cold and was in a state of exhaustion I did it. In the process, I fell so in love with my practice that I often continued for a half hour or an hour. But achieving 5 minutes was so reasonable that I was easily able to honor my commitment to myself. It provided a calm and expansive backdrop to my days.

My teacher Dr. Douglas Brooks says, “If you make a mistake, don’t do it again. And then, if you do it again, then don’t do it again.” This is such a generous way of looking at human nature, offering the reminder that every time we begin something again, we are actually beginning it anew. Every recommencement is a new beginning, regardless of associations or familiarity.

So what will you commit yourself to this September? 5 minutes of running, writing, asana, meditation, drawing, stretching, dancing, apartment cleaning, singing? Remember to be kind to yourself. Offer yourself the present of a practice. And don’t beat yourself up for occasionally forgetting about it entirely. But if you do forget, then don’t forget again. And then if you do forget about it again…then don’t do it again…and so on.

The Beauty of Knowledge and Wisdom

2010-09-01T19:08:00.000-07:00

Pablo Picasso-Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (detail) 1907

Knowledge is different from wisdom. Knowledge is acquired information, facts, or technique, like how to speak another language or do a handstand or bake a cake. There is external proof of your knowledge in the form of visible accomplishment. Knowledge enables you to make an educated decision, to get things done, and is the foundation for wisdom. Wisdom, however, is what you do with knowledge, how you apply acquired information to the rest of your life. Wisdom is far more subtle and elusive than knowledge, and is not measurable. It is a refinement or an expansion of knowledge. Wisdom is how poetically you speak that language, the radiance of your handstand, the transcendent, “oh!” of the cake.

In Sanskrit the word jnana means knowledge and the word vidya means wisdom. Vidya is the intelligence, creativity, and artistry of how you apply what you know to what you do. One is not more important than the other – both are necessary to live a rich fulfilling life. You can live less brightly without vidya. But you can’t even make your breakfast without jnana. Jnana is the foundation that allows for vidya to flourish, as long as you cultivate it. But vidya is what offers insight, makes beauty and art, and makes life worth living.

Before Picasso turned toward increasing degrees of abstraction in his work, he painted in a highly realistic manner. His contemporaries could also render in a visually accurate technical style. They all had the jnana. But they did not all have the vidya. How Picasso applied his knowledge was his wisdom – his genius – his vidya. He pushed the boundaries of jnana so much that he changed the rules.

So how does this relate to you?

In what areas of your life do you need to acquire more knowledge, more jnana?

In what areas of your life do you need to cultivate wisdom, vidya?

How can you build your knowledge as a point of departure for the wild creative leap of your wisdom?

The Beauty of the Fire

2010-08-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

Ian Britton/Freephoto.com

We must destroy to create. My intention in saying this is not an endorsement of aggression or violence, but an observation of a fundamental fact of nature. When we truly desire change in our lives, when we crave the transformation of our bodies and minds, we need to burn down our old patterns and habits to make room for the new. We must dramatically and emphatically rid ourselves of that which no longer serves us. Sometimes things need to fall apart before they can come back together in a more positive and substantial way. When you burn something, you transform it – it is a form of alchemy.

Now, what you need to throw into the fire could be a bad habit, an addictive behavior, a toxic friendship, or a negative thought pattern - anything that holds you back from being your greatest self. I remember Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps saying that whenever someone insulted or harassed him, he used it as fuel to feed his practice. Whatever came at him he was able to alchemize. These transformed experiences nourished the soil of his practice.

There are fire rituals in virtually every spiritual tradition. Fire symbolizes memory, alchemy, disintegration, and transformation. In Anusara Yoga we begin every class with the mantra Om Namah Shivaya, which can sometimes be interpreted as: I honor Shiva, the great Destroyer. The Shiva we refer to is our own inner light, our own inner fire. This light is luminous and powerful, beautiful and frightening. When, through our practice, we tend to the inner flame, burning away that negative habit – that destructive tendency - that nagging doubt, we clear our inner landscape, creating a fertile ground for personal growth.

So what is holding you back from being your greatest self?

What in your life isn’t serving you?

Envision throwing that thing into the fire. Visualize it burning until there is nothing left but ash. Feed the flame. Transform your self.

The Beauty of Practice III

2010-08-23T23:04:00.000-07:00

Imagine yourself as an ocean. Now imagine yourself as a rock tumbling through the waves of that ocean, grating upon sand, other rocks, shells, and seaweed, and being smoothed by the incessant movement of the waves. This is you and your practice.

Stepping into your practice is like diving into the ocean of you – all of your complexities churn and shift as you are buffeted by excitement, curiosity, doubt, frustration, exhaustion, and bliss. These are the thoughts and sensations that arise within the context of your practice. Some of these sensations might be residual from your day or your week, others might be hidden on the ocean floor of your psyche, just waiting for the churning of your body and mind to jiggle them loose. But it is all you – you are the rock, cleansed by the practice, debris shaken loose, rough edges smoothed. And you are the ocean, your own world, deep and enveloping, in which anything can happen. In your practice you plunge into the depths. You move. You see what arises.

Your practice, like the ocean, is always right there waiting for you to step into it. But in a sense you are never not practicing. Everything you do feeds your practice in some way. So the relevant question becomes:

How deeply are you willing to dive into the ocean of your practice?

Or, to paraphrase:

How deeply are you willing to dive into the ocean of you?

The Beauty of Practice II

2010-08-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

Sianna Sherman at Dig Yoga

“Practice, practice, practice and all will come…” -Shri K. Pattabhi Jois

I woke up Saturday to the birdlike sound of a flute playing a raga, listening as the sound wandered, swooping down, climbing up, and meandering through the morning quiet. Sleeping downstairs from me for the weekend was master bamboo flautist Steve Gorn. who was engaged in his morning practice. In the bedroom next to mine, Sianna Sherman was on her asana mat and across the hall, our host, Sue Elkind, was deep in meditation. As I moved through my own morning rituals of meditation and asana, the sound of the flute connected us, telling the story of our love for our own practices.

The reason why I share this moment is to make a point about practice. All of these people are brilliant practitioners who had converged for a weekend Intensive at Dig Yoga in Lambertville, NJ, along with the brilliant Tantric scholar Paul Muller-Ortega. These individuals have more skill in their fields than most people dream of acquiring in a lifetime. But what do they do first thing in the morning? They practice. Clearly, they all have a natural gift, but without practice, the gift might never have emerged or fulfilled its potential. Their brilliance, like everyone’s, is in a state of continual evolution. Without practice, it can’t grow, develop, or flourish. The gift shrivels, like a neglected plant.

Accepting that moments of frustration and dissatisfaction are part of a whole that also contains contentment, curiosity, and sometimes ecstasy, is part of being a mature practitioner of any art. Yoga-running-writing-painting-cooking-singing-whatever. My teacher, John Friend, reminds us of how many times he had to fall in a pose to get to where he is now. And it never ends. That’s the beauty of having a practice. As Paul Muller-Ortega said to us on the last day of the Intensive, “You cultivate this path with love, commitment, dedication, vigilance…Life is the process of refinement.” And to refine, you have to practice.

The Beauty of Boundaries

2010-08-17T12:41:00.000-07:00

River Bank (via makelessnoise)

“Clear Boundaries - No Limits” -Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy

Boundaries are different from limits. Boundaries delineate, cultivate, and protect. Limits obstruct, denying possibility or real growth. In my yoga class I tell often tell my students this: Imagine your body as a river. Without riverbanks the water would have no direction or force. The riverbanks create directionality, purpose, here-to-thereness. The riverbanks are parameters, just as any particular yoga pose or asana is a specific set of parameters. When you move into an asana, you pour your body into a specific configuration that creates an effect. If it is a backbend or an arm balance the effect is often agitating and exhilarating, channeling the energy up and out. If the asana is a deep hip-opener, the effect is generally grounding, calming - the waters settle. We apply alignment principles in order to best serve the body’s energy flow – expanding and narrowing the riverbanks according to the form of the asana and the individual needs of our bodies.

Boundaries allow the asana practice to deepen in a clear way. For example, there is a basic form for down dog, but within that form you can personalize it, bringing your body’s particularities and your own associations to it. Limits would deny the expansive potential of down dog, dictating, “only do it exactly like this.” Once you shape your body into an asana, you choose your boundaries. Let them be strong but malleable, like the banks of a river.

Now, invite this concept into your mind. Invite it into your heart. Apply it to any particular situation or relationship. And then ask yourself:

What kind of boundaries do I need here?

Where have I created limits instead of boundaries?

How can I be as wildly creative as possible within the boundaries that I’ve chosen?

This is doing the yoga.

The Beauty of the Farmers Market

2010-08-10T13:25:00.000-07:00

Via Lizard10979

Looking, smelling, touching, tasting. For me, the Farmers Market is a party of the senses. One of the upsides of teaching a 7am yoga private is that by 8:15, I am wandering through the freshly displayed fruits and vegetables in Union Square. I find myself in the inspiring company of restaurant chefs and sous-chefs in their white kitchen jackets, conversing, inspecting, and buying in bulk. I follow their lead as they descend upon the sugar snap peas, the bunches of fresh herbs, the wild garlic and mushrooms.

The first Farmers Market thrill for me each spring is the emergence of favas and ramps, and after that wild strawberries. That was a few weeks ago, although you can still find them here and there. Now suddenly this week lavish orange squash blossoms are everywhere and the green curling shiseido peppers which are so amazing just seared in olive oil. Or a bunch of the most delicious french breakfast radishes dipped in goat butter and sea salt. Amazing raw milk cheeses and fresh eggs – fresh as in feathers stuck to the carton and you have to rinse off the stickiness before cracking them. And then the flowers…you can smell the roses from yards away, gently squeeze the snapdragons, inhale the scent of lilies and gaze upon sunflowers…

Touching and eating things that have recently been in the ground makes me feel that much closer to the earth. As I go through the frankly sensual process of gathering, preparing, and eating my Farmers Market meal, I feel clean. There is less of an intermediary between my food and myself. I have thwarted the takeout container and the hastily prepared meal. I am reminded that the tons of concrete, steel, glass, and miles of electrical wiring that surround me can’t entirely obscure the innate relationship of my body to nature.

So take the time this week to find one perfect peach or tomato or ear of corn. Look at its shape and color. Feel its texture. Inhale its fragrance. And then don’t do anything else while you eat it. Being mindful of our senses offers us a deeper, more satisfying experience of ourselves and of the natural world in which we reside.

The Beauty of The Guru

2010-07-29T12:41:00.000-07:00

Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy, my teacher's teacher.

Maybe it was the person who first taught you to read. Or perhaps that teacher who saw something special in you and urged you to push just beyond what you thought were your limits. It could have been a friend or family member who extended him or herself for you, showing you how to be a better person in the process. Or an artist, a writer, an athlete who ignited something inside you that made you want to dance or paint or write or run as brilliantly and as beautifully as you ever had before. That person on some level was a guru - a spiritual guide in your life.

The word guru comes fraught with all sorts of associations in our culture – there is an implication of a submissive worshipfulness that is anathema to many independent and free-thinking people, myself included. There are stories of gurus with fleets of Rolls-Royces and/or dubious behavior in their personal lives. For many people I know, it is a term that evokes a certain uneasy feeling. None of my teachers will allow this term to be applied to them. We dance around it, embracing its true meaning, but not its sometimes unfortunate associations.

Let’s make this simple: Gu can be defined as darkness. Ru can be defined as illumination. The Sanskrit word guru means the one who draws you from darkness to light. That would be a teacher. But here’s where it gets interesting for those of you who aren’t into geeking out over Sanskrit grammar: a guru can be anyone or anything that offers you an illuminating experience. I think about the dazzling brilliance of my college art history professor but I also think about the beauty and tenacity of a blade of grass popping up through the NYC concrete. Both sweetly and ferociously affirm life. Both take the role of guru in a particular manner.

This past Sunday, July 25 was Guru Purnima, which, for yogis, is the annual celebration of our teachers. It always falls at this time of year on the full moon (purnima = Sanskrit for full moon). A flurry of yogi messages criss-crossed on Facebook, as so many of us in the Anusara Yoga and the Rajanaka Yoga communities thanked our teachers and each other. So to my teachers, my gurus, to all of you who inspire me, push me, encourage me, and coach me through life…Thank you!

Ask yourself this:

Who are my teachers?

To whom am I a teacher?

And then:

Thank them…via phone, email, letter, or face-to-face conversation.

With this gesture, you become the teacher too.

The Beauty of Choosing Happiness

2010-07-23T19:01:00.000-07:00

“First happiness is a choice. Then it is a practice.” Jason Nemer, co-founder of AcroYoga

You have to make the choice to be happy – it is like anything else – sometimes it is graceful and effortless and sometimes it seems beyond our grasp. When petty irritations arise or a sense of futility or loss dominates our days, it’s time to ask yourself, “Do I want to live in this place?” I was discussing life on and off the mat with friend and fellow yoga teacher Siri Peterson. When we teach, we put our best selves forward. So what happens if we carry that off of the mat and into our daily lives? Both of us are in the art world - I am a visual artist and Siri is a dancer. Both worlds can be viciously competitive environments, which, after a while, leave their imprint. Although competition is a reality in any professional world including yoga, the overall tone of the yoga world is one of openness, assistance, compassion, and warmth. Needless to say, we both lead slightly divided lives.

I decided this week to take that best self from the studio out into the streets. Normally, if someone slammed into me in the subway, I might snap at them or fume, feeling irritable and wronged. If a student pushed past me at Virayoga, where I teach, or shoved aside my things to put down their own, what would I do? Not much, actually. I would think, “that person really needs class today,” and then seek them out, acknowledge them, let them be heard. And that would feel good.

As a yoga teacher I make an easy choice to be my best self. Anger begets anger, just like sorrow does sorrow and happiness - happiness. When we default to anger or irritability, we perpetuate the grasp of those destructive sensations in our lives. Don’t get me wrong, feeling the entire cycle of emotions is an essential part of being complete human beings, but getting stuck in the ones that drag us down is a problem. This goes for sadness as well. When something painful happens, feel it fully – go to the depths, but then rise back up. Choose to surface. This is both liberating and empowering. Think of the sensations in your body and mind when you feel any particular emotion. What feels the worst? What feels best? What serves you most in your daily actions and interactions? Choose to constantly move toward that feeling, that emotion. Dedicate your day to it. Your week.

All week, my experiment has been surprisingly smooth. It has actually been easier to not succumb to negativity in that my mood stays balanced, my interactions graceful. I feel happy. But still, it is a practice. So try it. Begin like this:

Inhale into anything that feels stuck or blocked inside your body and mind.

Exhale whatever is not serving you.

Repeat this as many times as you need.

And then choose happiness. Again. And again. And again.

It’s like answering to the universe. And answering to the universe opens up the vastness of your heart.

The Beauty of Touch – Visiting Amma

2010-07-13T22:43:00.000-07:00

First you wait in line on 34^th Street for a while, with an assortment of yoga teachers, Indian families, and assorted devotees in the 90° evening heat. Then you enter the Manhattan Center, taking a paper number, like at a deli counter, and move through the marketplace, distracted by the stacks of brightly-colored scarves, bronze Ganeshas and Lakshmis, books, cds, photos and essential oils. Somewhere beyond the market, there is rhythmic music and chanting which floats up through the space. Peering over the crowd, you can clearly see a plump, radiant-looking woman seated onstage under bright lights, surrounded by white-clad assistants and a long line of people.

Amma, who is known as a living saint, gives out hugs. She is highly respected for her addresses to the United Nations and her extensive charities that feed, clothe, and educate the poor, but she is most famous for the way in which she gives darshan, or blessings, in the form of an embrace. Amma has hugged over 25 million people all over the world. Sometimes she does this for more than 18 hours straight. This sounds unusual, but if you remember that touch, offered lovingly, is essential to human happiness, the meaning of the experience shifts. Babies deprived of touch suffer developmental problems. Pets are brought into nursing homes so that the elderly can have physical touch and affection in their lives. When we are massaged or have bodywork done, we often have an emotional response. Amma offers touch as a gift and as a lesson.

So what is the experience like? Her assistants line you up, wipe your face, ask you to remove earrings or glasses, then bring you forward into her arms. You are enveloped in her embrace. She smells good, like jasmine maybe. She chants a mantra in your ear, and then releases you, smiling, placing flower petals and a Hershey’s kiss in your palm, as the next person in line is guided into her arms.

You feel either calm or emotional, happy or released, a little spaced out and meditative. Maybe you go downstairs and eat a dosa or drink some of the fragrant chai, basking in the bhavana or vibe. Last year, sometime between midnight and dawn, hip-hop pioneer Doug E. Fresh, radiantly energized from Amma’s darshan, stood up and gave a 20 minute impromptu performance, freestyling and beatboxing his way into everybody’s heart. No one around me had any idea who he was, but still, he pulled the entire crowd up from their meditations and onto their feet, ecstatically clapping and participating in a call-and-response.

Touch does more than activate our pleasure sensors. It develops our brains and our awareness. It offers solace, which in turn creates connection and community. Think about this: How and when do you offer physical touch to the people in your life? What is the quality of your touch – even of your hand touching someone’s arm to tell them something? And most importantly, what message does your touch convey?

The Beauty of Body Art

2010-07-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

Marina Abramović performing Rhythm 0, 1974

Honey, a knife, feathers, grapes, a bullet, a gun, a rose, a whip. In 1974, artist Marina Abramović placed objects that could give both pleasure and pain on a table in an art gallery, and invited the general public to use them upon her as they wished. After 6 hours, she walked out half-naked, covered with honey and blood. The piece was over. She presented her body as a canvas – a medium on which people expressed their impulses and desires.

Our body is our canvas – one of our primary means of self-expression. We clean it, sculpt it, feed it, starve it, push it to its muscular and energetic limits. We adorn it with clothing, cosmetics, jewelry, tattoos and piercings. We use it to dance, to celebrate, to experience pleasure and pain. We use it to communicate in a way inaccessible through words.

The purpose of movement can be practical: the cause and effect of exercise and diet. But movement can also be aesthetic: as ecstatic as a victory lap or as haunting as a Pina Bausch dance. Some feats of the body push beyond mere functionality to create beauty, grace, artistry. Abramović’s work might be read as more gritty and disturbing than beautiful, but it challenges us to contemplate our own bodies and their relationship to the world around them, so it is aesthetically provocative, and conceptually beautiful.

Think about this: How can we create meaning with and through our bodies? How can we elevate the quality of our movement so that it becomes art?

Marina Abramović sits for 700 hours in eye-to-eye meditation with members of the general public, MoMA 2010

The Beauty of Dynamic Movement

2010-07-06T12:57:00.000-07:00

(via tibchris)

Should I practice yoga or should I catch up on my sleep? Should I spend the afternoon drawing in my studio or should I clean my apartment? Should I cook a healthy dinner or order take-out, spending that saved time checking emails? Depending on my choice, I’ll end up more energized, organized, physically gratified, or creatively fulfilled.

Given the essential nature of all of these activities in my life, how do I prioritize? Most of the creative people I know bump up against this question on a daily basis, because we are almost never not working. We are in constant motion, the world around us is in a state of constant motion, and the only fixed thing, ironically, is movement.

So we need to begin the answer with the assumption that in a dynamically moving environment, things won’t slow down and it is simply a matter of figuring out where to step in so that you collaborate with time to move forward with it. When this happens, we call it being in the flow, whether it happens while running, dancing, writing, singing, drawing, cooking, and so on.

So first ask yourself: What is essential to my well-being?

On the most basic level this should include adequate sleep, good food, and exercise in whatever form inspires you. Your physical well-being should be cared for in order for you to address anything else.

And then ask: What offers me security and stability?

Without the basic needs of home and income tended to, all movement becomes frenetic, desperate, more about surviving than about living.

And finally ask yourself: What gives you pleasure?

Find the daily things that make your life into art instead of a cycle of obligation and routine. This depends more upon your perspective than upon the actual events of your day. If you are fortunate enough to love what you do OR to be able to bring love to what you do, the sweetness of life waits inside the smallest action, gesture, or event of your day. Step into your daily life by infusing it with your best intention and your most skillful artistry.

The Beauty of Solstice

2010-06-29T22:52:00.000-07:00

I can remember a night last year when a delicious restlessness made me want to wander for hours through the city. It was humid with that satisfying damp smell rising from the asphalt as it released the day’s stored-up heat. The urge to walk endlessly felt familiar, triggered by the smells and the quiet openness of the city. There was a sense that only very slow activities were taking place in the syrupy air. Almost no one was out as I moved through the urban quiet, meaning distant sirens, a chorus of dripping air conditioners kicking on and off, cars zipping past, fragments of music and overheard conversation. As I walked to the Hudson to look at the river and sky, I had a pervasive feeling of balance, like floating in warm salty ocean water - bobbing gently through the night.

This impulse to walk and walk and walk is one that strikes me every year at this time – a personally recurring solstice event. My meandering was just another element contributing to this landscape of sounds, smells, and shadowy activities in an ever-shifting collage. What was happening in the heat was a melding of my external and internal worlds - the cityscape with my personal landscape. The pieces were distinct yet overlapping. I didn’t want to sit, stand, or talk. I wanted to move. As my body traced its trail block by block, I left my soft mark on the landscape that enveloped me, my skin’s surface a permeable wall faintly delineating inner and outer, me and not-me.

In moments of connection to our world, we luxuriate in the feeling of merging with something bigger than ourselves, but we do so through our own individual sensibilities. As we move through our environment, how can we draw our experiences into our bodies and minds to more deeply appreciate our richly layered world?

The Beauty of Discernment

2010-06-29T22:32:00.000-07:00

Inner Landscape I, 2008

“Being open to everything doesn’t mean you accept anything”

John Friend at the Anusara Certified Teachers Gathering,

May 17, 2010

The Sanskrit word shri means discernment - that which is auspicious, abundant, and life-affirming. Wrapped up in this word is the notion of selectivity, of educated choice. In yoga, in relationships, in life, shri tells us not to align with anything that comes our way, but to be discerning – to cultivate our own eyes, our own ears, our own palates, our own individual practices. Shri invites us to choose with wisdom.

There are teachers from all over the U.S and the world gathering in the Hindu Society in Morrisville, North Carolina for the annual Anusara Certified Teachers Gathering. We pull into the parking lot in the warm humidity of the North Carolina rain, grabbing our mats and bags and running in, having taken a wrong turn a few miles back in the rental car. We rapidly place our mats and grab our notebooks while waving to friends we haven’t seen in months or more across the room just as our teacher, John Friend, begins to speak.

John talks about our commonalities and our differences as a rapidly growing yoga community, addressing how we can expand and grow while maintaining our authenticity. We explore this idea of expansion from our own individual centers through asana and meditation throughout the rest of the day. To expand as a centered community we must do the exact same thing individually, cultivating our own strengths and particularities within a greater context.

John Friend speaks at the Anusara® Certified Teachers' Gathering

The particular form or iteration of a pose that is efficacious for the person on the mat next to yours is not necessarily what best suits your own body and way of moving. John always speaks of our “optimal blueprint”, meaning that which is optimal for each person based on their own individual body, mind, and heart. In other words, don’t make trikonasana (triangle pose) look like the one you see on the poster, but use your knowledge of who you are, where you are coming from, and what your capacities are in order to move into your own optimal trikonasana. The pose is a set of parameters like an equation. You are the variable. So in the ever-shifting variable of you, where does the pose reside?

The more deeply we cultivate our own individual gifts, the better able we are to grow in an optimal manner – we become richer, more fluent in the physical, verbal, and spiritual articulation of our own selves. The best we can offer to our community and to the world is the most refined, substantial aspect of who we are.

The Beauty of Language, Yoga, and Paris

2010-06-13T11:10:00.000-07:00

Double Self-Portrait with Flowers, 2008

Language connects. Movement connects. At the heart of any yoga practice is the notion of unity, connectivity. We are upstairs at a dance studio in the 11th arrondissement in Paris – around us are the sounds of various practices happening in the building – the clattering of shoes in the hallway, the drumming from the African dance class coming through the open windows from across the courtyard, faint conversations from the stairwell and the studios around us. Three of us, representing Spain, Portugal, and the U.S. are assisting my friend Sianna Sherman with her annual Paris Anusara workshop.

Yoga mats carpet the studio floor in a grid. The students stand up, moving from our seated meditation at the front of the room back to their mats to begin the practice. Voices chat and exchange information in French, English, Spanish, Portugese, Swedish, and Italian, and a hybrid patois emerges. The murmur of the French translator serves as a backdrop, but overall, he necessity of communication becomes more significant than the perfect structure of any specific grammatical system. Everyone develops their own way of speaking to their neighbors as the students assist each other in handstand, gesturing and modeling with their bodies when words fail. There are moments of depth and intensity and others of absolute hilarity as words are mixed up and terms are translated.

Paris yogis lunge & twist

Bodies shape the space around them – language delineates this from that – terminology designates a pose or an alignment instruction – hands on bodies adjust and move to offer people a deeper sense of connectivity and communication within their own bodies and minds. There is a sense of oneness and unity, but there is also clear diversity and uniqueness. The differences offer contrast, which enables us to recognize beauty in its myriad individual forms: an undulating ocean of particularities.

Sianna Sherman & Jason Nemer in Paris

Sianna tells a story of the Hindu gods Sita and Ram, who always long for each other, for connection. They are simultaneously distinct and united, and are often referred to as SitaRam - one word. When we practice yoga or anything that we love, we are affirming connection, creating unity, either within our own bodies and minds or with someone or something outside of ourselves. In yoga we use language to designate a pose. We use language to refine the alignment of the pose. Then the pose communicates back to our bodies and reverberates within our MindBody. We foster unity through language – the language of words and the language of the body.

The Beauty of Fluency

2010-05-29T15:44:00.000-07:00

Inner Landscape #5, 2008

In order to develop fluency in any aspect of our lives, we need to discover what feeds and sustains us and what doesn’t. Becoming more adept at this process is at the heart of any yoga practice. Through yoga, we develop our bodily fluency, our energetic intelligence, so that we retain the essential and release the extraneous. What serves us is retained so that it nourishes us. What doesn’t serve us is shed, released.

Through yoga, we become better acquainted with what resides at our core. From asana to breathwork and meditation, yoga offers us deep insights into our strengths and weaknesses, our abilities and our challenges. The better we know the topography of our bodies, hearts, and minds, the more we know where to place new information and ideas, where to dig, establish, and build. We can host new experiences in an optimal way, and develop fluency, a certain ease and clarity in regard to ourselves. We transform the world around us as we are transformed by it.

Paul Cézanne - Still Life with Apples c.1890

When something speaks to our sensibilities, it embeds itself within us on an emotional, psychological, or physical level. It makes us its home. Most likely it is a magnetic draw of like to like. Think of how two adjacent drops of water seem to magnetize toward each other. Now think of that apple from a Cézanne still life whose roughly sensual smudges of orange-red-brown-yellow-green make you want to merge with the painting itself…or the way that the translucent fabric of a woman’s collar in a Vermeer painting makes you hold your breath for just a moment, and in that moment the image takes up residence within you…or that sudden turn of a dancer that echoes and reverberates inside your body. Where there is affinity, the boundaries blur, open, and embrace.

Johannes Vermeer - The Lacemaker c. 1669-1670

Walt Whitman says:

I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,

They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

As an artist, Whitman is a medium. He transforms and is transformed by. He is fluent. Let our bodies be a host for our experiences, allowing the best ones to embed themselves and the rest to pass through us. Then watch as we become more complex, richer for our having invited them.

Yoga is the means by which we connect, process, and transform what exists within us. As we step onto our mats, we bring with us that mix of things that is a collection of every experience we have had that day: frustrating, joyful, confusing, interesting, sad, sweet, hilarious, and indifferent. Yoga offers us the space, time, and techniques with which to process that amalgamation of experiences, and to develop fluency, lucidity, and artistry.

So try this:

Inhale. Take in every bit of information that you have received through your senses from the minute you awoke this morning - the cool tile of your bathroom floor under your feet, the fragment of a song heard through a car window, the smell of a perfect espresso or of a grimy subway stairwell, the churning crowd of bodies on your way to work, the chiseled architecture of a particular building against its blue or gray backdrop of sky… Draw these things in a steady stream toward your center.

Pause. What resides at your core? Every experience you’ve ever had is somehow lodged there or has passed through. Assimilate the new information. Soften. Let the experiences settle and merge.

Exhale. Release what doesn’t serve you. The breath draws in experience so that the external becomes internal and the internal is transformed. What you exhale is the residue. What remains is the essential. In this way, you become more adept, more fluent at understanding your own motivations, abilities, values, and goals. You become more fluent in the art of your own life.

The Beauty of the Yoga

2010-05-04T11:18:00.000-07:00

Double Bakasana with Lotus, 2007

I was talking with a friend over a post-yoga Saturday brunch about being frequently asked to explain why yoga can be a spiritual and not merely a physical practice. As someone who has been teaching yoga for eight years, I am regularly presented with this question from a wide range of friends and acquaintances: students, family members, childhood friends, and particularly from people who know me from the art world, in which, somewhat ironically, there is a frequent sense of suspicion surrounding my choice to dive so deeply into a spiritual discipline, as if it threw into question my commitment to my other spiritual discipline, namely art making.

So when someone does have the curiosity to ask (and I welcome the question), “How can a series of movements and alignment instructions be a spiritual practice?” My briefest, most lucid response to an extremely complex question is generally something like this:

If we consider the body, heart, and mind as a triangular relationship, when one of the three falls out of balance, the triangle is thrown off, distorted. We need to tend to all three points, as each serves as a gateway into the other two. We weave back and forth through the gateways like a circuitry: body – mind – heart. And what happens in each area functions on both a literal and metaphorical level within the others. If I am mentally irritated or emotionally joyful or physically energetic, that visibly manifests in the other areas. It can be seen and felt. Once we get a handle on this dynamic, we can step into this circuitry and play with it, shift it, use one of the gateways to draw the others back into balance. In this way, we begin to participate more fully in our own embodied experience.

It is this constant dance between these three entryways that leads us into a deeper more meaningful experience of ourselves. If we look at the Tantric model, body, heart, and mind not only triangulate, but fractalize. So every single point is a point of departure in every direction for more–expanding exponentially outward like shooting stars.

Bodyheartmindheartbodymindheartmindbodymindheartbodyheart…And so on, and so on...

Repainting a Shri Chakra, Meenakshi Temple, Madurai

Can yoga be a spiritual practice? Yes. Can art making be a spiritual practice? Yes. Can running or dancing or singing? Yes-yes-yes. Of course, you can strip away the spiritual component of any of these practices and leave them as simple calisthenics – whether physical or mental. Any can be reduced to a simple technical enterprise. But then you’re not doing the yoga any more, or really fully participating in anything in a rich and meaningful way.

Double Bakasana Double Lotus, 2007

The word yoga literally means union. The Sanskrit root of yoga is yuj, meaning to yoke, to connect, to unite. When we do the yoga, we are uniting body, heart, and mind. Every asana, every breath, every gesture and movement becomes a deeper assertion of the exquisite circuitry of our very selves.

The Beauty of the Space Between II - Sun Salutations

2010-04-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

Inner Landscape 6

The moment when one pose transforms into another.

The moment when materials merge with intention to become art.

The place of unknowing, possibility, and potential hovering between a thing and a thing – an idea and an idea – a place and another place.

The space between each yoga pose is a place of ambiguity, an acknowledgement of dissolution – the anything-can-happen moment of transformation. If you take a basic Surya Namaskar or Sun Salute (standing-standing forward bend- plank-catturanga-up dog-down dog-and so on), the rhythm is pose-pose-pose-pose. But what happens in the shift between the poses is the dissolving of one form and the assertion of another. Utter chaos in the sense that anything could and does happen in that space between the poses:

You inhale or exhale. This inflates or relaxes your body. You wonder what you might eat later. You have the shiver of a recollection of something someone said to you earlier that you need to remember or that chafed a bit or flattered you. You experience pleasure. You experience discomfort. You feel ecstatic and think yes! endorphins! You feel sluggish and wonder if the pose will always feel like this from now on. You think – what if I don’t ever love this pose? You ever-so-slightly adjust the direction of your front foot. Suddenly you feel like everything in your hips is off kilter. You squeeze the feet toward each other, toning the muscles of your legs and feel a burst of energy rise up through your body. You wonder if you need to wash your mat. Why is the person next to you breathing so loudly? That’s ok, actually, you tell yourself. Or maybe it’s not. This has been 10 seconds of your practice.

The Space Between is a universe of possibility - a mental and sensory primordial muck that you can dive into headfirst or dread. Your choice. You can flounder endlessly or you can pull together and sculpt the space with your intention. You can be overwhelmed or you can feel liberated by the momentary lack of boundaries. You can plunge feet first into your choices instead of passively waiting for them to emerge.

Rilke says, “everything is gestation and then bringing forth.”

Contemplate-plunge in-draw out.

In the studio 2010

I was sitting alone in my studio looking at the hundreds of pencils and colored pencils grouped generally by color into a number of jars. I looked at the sheets of deliciously thick smooth drawing paper and realized that I was in the goo, the muck. Not in a bad way. Just an acknowledgement of what was. And this was ok. I knew that a whole bunch of physical, mental, and, yes – spiritual movements had to take place before the pencils and the paper did their thing by means of my eyes, hands, and mind.

You can’t force inspiration but you can’t sit around and wait for it either. Engage. Do the yoga of art. Dive into the muck instead of simply stopping at the contemplation of it. Begin doing, accepting that sometimes the engagement calls forth your creativity and sometimes it doesn’t…it might be a crescendo or it might be a whimper. You can make a bad drawing or have a bad practice, and it is a necessary part of the rise and fall of any creative endeavor.

In the studio, 2010

Sitting and writing tonight, ideas and images poured out my head through my fingers onto the keyboard and took their sprawling form on the computer screen. A rich mess of four pages filled with fragments, ellipses, quotes, ideas, and references had emerged when I finally stopped typing. I closed my computer and went to brush my teeth. Then I stopped, reopened my computer, and wrote this paragraph. In the space between my one action and my next, something gelled, codified. Tomorrow I re-attack the raw material, cutting and pasting until a coherent whole emerges. I move. I draw. I write. We use our bodies and minds to inscribe our worlds – to create and delineate our embodied experience.

I am guest blogger and "Spirit Guide" at SocialWorkout.com - April 15-May 15, 2010

for their Million Minute Month challenge - posting every Tuesday - please take a peek!

http://www.socialworkout.com/2010/04/20/sun-salutations-and-beauty-space-between

The Beauty of Unexpected Juxtapositions II - Water Fai, Pikachu Moon Mama, Organic Greens, & Yoga in Spencer Tunick’s Barn

2010-03-15T13:06:00.000-07:00

Photo by Austen Mikulka

Question:

What do you get when an organic farming advocate and an artist famous for photographing thousands of nude bodies in public host a weekend performance of a Japanese psychedelic rock band in the artist’s upstate barn, bracketed by an elaborate farmers market meal and a morning yoga class?

Answer:

At the top of the barn stairs, we shed layers of rain-soaked clothing and dripping boots to settle into the warmth of a room carpeted with enormous pillows. Full from an amazing meal of organic food bought at the Union Square greenmarket and driven, like the rest of us, upstate through the thunderstorm to Spencer Tunick’s barn, we waited for the music to begin. In the group of about 40 people – artists, writers, yogis, musicians, designers, parents, kids - there were unexpected connections linking the New York art world to the Osaka music scene and the international Anusara Yoga community, people who hadn’t seen each other in years or who knew of each other but who had never actually met. The connections went deeper than the differences, as they often do, offering unanticipated creative links and affinities.

Photo by Austen Mikulka

And then...Bubble letters spelling out WATER FAI and PIKACHU MOON MAMA covering the photo paper roll serving as a backdrop. Pikachu Moon Mama exploding with energy, penetrating voice and grinding guitar. Discarding her guitar, feedback streaming from the amplifier, Pikachu methodically removing her clothing, fixing all of us with her gaze while crawling through the pillows, drawing on her body with a vibrant red lipstick, inviting others to do the same. Returning to the mike, pulling the energy back to a focused center, slipping her dress back on, settling back down into the pillows. Then Water Fai first sitting then standing on the floor, guitars-drums-keyboards, waves of notes and rhythms moving toward each other, slowly building an ocean of sound. A watery immersive energy in contrast to Pikachu’s fiery and coy persona. The intensity of the rain, the lightening, the humidity, the wet warmth concentrated in musical form.

photo by Austen Mikulka

Morning in the kitchen. Over a bagel I ask our hosts Kristen and Spencer what kind of a story they want me to tell for the yoga class. Spencer says – one in which the women always desire the men – and then we all start laughing. Back in the barn, cushions stacked, mats out, I tell the room about the Gopis’ love for Krishna…they follow him into the forest, seduced by his song…they fall into meditation, and awake, missing him, jealous of each other, angry, they move through all of the rasas, the flavors or tones of experience, until he reappears, saying to them – You are never without me. I am never without you. I am your very nature. And your very nature is desire…

The weekend ends for most of us with a glimpse over Spencer’s shoulder as he photographs some of the musicians posing nude in his kitchen. Bags and equipment packed up, we disperse into trains, buses, and cars: Pikachu Moon Mama and Water Fai off to Providence for a performance, the rest of us back to NYC. We pass miles of sheared-off branches and uprooted trees resting heavily in deep side-of-the-road puddles left by the storm. We sit in traffic in the quiet comfortable hum of the car, enjoying each other’s company.

photo by Austen Mikulka

Water Fai – http://waterfai.com
Pikachu Moon Mama - http://www.myspace.com/moonmama2013

Spencer Tunick – www.spencertunick.com

Daniel Bowman Simon – www.TheWhoFarm.org

The Gothamist's write-up of the event:
http://gothamist.com/2010/03/16/video_spencer_tunick.php

Master of Ceremonies Spencer Tunick

The Beauty of The Space Between - Visiting the Art Fairs

2010-03-11T20:01:00.000-08:00

Mona Hatoum - Worry Beads

The work that seemed to me to be able to hold its own in the cluttered environment of the Art Fairs this weekend in NYC were pieces that had, at their center, an open-endedness or spaciousness – not a lack, but a loaded emptiness – a meaningful sense of space. There was the giant loop of Mona Hatoum’s Worry Beads, implying without illustrating a human presence, series of gestures, and sense of ritual.

Jonathan Schipper - To Dust

There was the space between the two upside-down dangling figures in Jonathan Schipper's To Dust, which, as they gently swayed, grated bits of cement off of each other’s surfaces - a reflection on relationships and perhaps time. There was also the cobweb of glass and gourds spilling from the snout of Rina Banerjee’s taxadermied gazelle head, stretching toward a knickknack globe on a little stand. The disparate objects were joined together to shape an implied set of symbolisms some of which related to colonialism and conquest, but the totality of which evaded any one specific interpretation. The meaning happened between the objects in the space that the viewer could construct – leaping visually and associatively from object to object and forming connections. In each of these pieces what wasn’t said or done was as significant as what was.

Rina Banerjee

Heather Cantrell representing Kinkead Contemporary at the Volta show created a scenario that viewers were literally invited to step into. The piece was comprised of a painted Rousseau-like jungle environment - an cluttered green floor filled with a couple of stumps, plants, backdrops, and strategically placed mirrors. You could pose to have a black and white Polaroid taken in the jungle surroundings with the artist reflected in the photo as well. There were a number of props and masks available for use. This was a creative psychological space between the artist and participant in which a variety of scenarios could happen image-wise. Then of course there was the space between what the participant thought was happening and the illusion shaped by the artist and captured by the camera. This series of variables resulted in a number of wildly different photos, each one fascinating in its own way, as the space between the artist and the participants was continually renegotiated.

A Study in Portraiture (Susanna) - by Heather Cantrell

It takes courage to leave space – it’s risky. Silence or emptiness can be boring or uncomfortable, signifying that we don’t have anything to say or draw or to express. One has to be very confident in the power of one’s words and images in order to be silent and let space speak. It requires giving up some degree of control and flirting with possible failure.

Much like the importance of leaving visual and conceptual space in an artwork, one of the things I’ve learned about teaching a powerful yoga class is knowing when the silence can be as significant as the words. Newer teachers sometimes feel the urge to clutter up the space with too much language – a barrage of verbal instructions and explanations. You have to sculpt the space, making your words strong enough so that the silence offers a counterpoint, a pushing back at the sound. This is like the positive and negative space for me in a drawing.

Doris Salcedo

Certain highly skilled artists use the denial of space as a strategy. The artist Doris Salcedo packs the negative space of ordinary pieces of furniture with cement, creating a glacially solid unyielding non-space. Where there should be space there is none. And it reads as terrifying, suffocating. The lack of space between things is painful in these pieces because it does not allow for possibility, growth, or change. It is denying of life.

In the yogic practice of pranayama, or breathing exercises, we talk about the pause between the breaths. That moment when an inhale shifts to an exhale or the exhale to an inhale. It is a space of change, possibility, and transformation. We expand to release and release to expand. This pause is a place, a room, a world that we can inhabit and in which we can meditate. That moment of suspension between the breaths is a place of unlimited potential. It is an oasis, an opening that is always there waiting for us to return.

I do not know which to prefer

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

From Thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird

by Wallace Stevens

The Beauty of the Unexpected

2010-02-27T20:19:00.000-08:00

Karma and Lila and unexpected beauty

Karma –action, cause and effect, the idea that an action taken sets into motion a series of other actions, occurrences, or events

Lila – chance, unexpected beauty, play, that which cannot be planned, but only hoped for

Charles Ray - Untitled 2009

Charles Ray at the Whitney Biennial 1993 & 2010

I was speaking with my friend Jesse who had just gone to the opening of the Whitney Biennial on Wednesday. He said that it was the Charles Ray show – The artist who parked a sculpture of a fire truck outside of the Whitney for the duration of the 1993 Biennial, and frequent creator of shocking pieces. This time Charles Ray was represented by a room of tall gorgeous flower paintings that he previously made only for family and friends and didn’t generally exhibit. There was the surprise and delight of the flowers, and then the surprise and delight of the fact that they were made by a guy also known for a piece called Family Romance – a nude nuclear family, each member shrunk or expanded so that the children and parents were the same height – the nudity of all four holding hands gratingly uncomfortable to look at. But these flower paintings were…pretty…really outrageously pretty.

Charles Ray - Family Romance 1993

William Kentridge at the MoMA 2010

We shifted to a discussion of MoMA’s exhibition of the South African artist William Kentridge, who makes scratchy black and white drawings into animations of helplessness and alienation. I mentioned one particular moment in which a middle-aged man in a business suit looks down, watching as water rises up to engulf his pants legs. For whatever reason this image always makes me want to cry. My friend Jesse immediately responded – me too! But how? The first time I saw it I felt that way and every time I’ve seen it since I have had the same reaction.

Obviously Kentridge did the work, planned it carefully, applied his sensibility to it with care, but what is it about that moment that elicited such a specific reaction in both of us? That degree of emotional connection with an artwork goes beyond Karma, because you can plan forever to make an emotional piece and fall completely flat. Actually that is usually what happens if you begin with such an intention. But because the structure is there, the Karmic thing, the Lila might and in this case DID happen.

William Kentridge -from Stereoscope 1998-99

Bill T. Jones (Lois Greenfield photo)

Bill T. Jones – Still/Here at Brooklyn Academy of Music 1994

A couple of days later I was thinking about the introduction Bill T Jones gave at the premiere of his Still/Here, a groundbreaking piece addressing the crisis and loss of the AIDS epidemic. It was a while ago, but this is how I remember it: the ever-elegant BTJ walked up on stage in his tux to introduce the piece. He then brought up his mother, who was tiny in relation to his towering height and wide shoulders. She was dressed very simply with a flowered dress and hat. Without musical accompaniment, she began to sing a gospel song. Her voice cracked a bit on the higher notes. BTJ began to make subtle rippling movements with his body while standing in place by his mother’s side, reacting to the rise and fall of her voice. She finished the song. The two took a bow, walked off stage, and STILL/HERE began. I honestly could have walked out before the rest of the performance ever happened. I was already saturated with the intense beauty of the experience. It was elegant and raw, sentimental and disorienting. It drew together an unimagined combination of associations to move me in a weirdly specific way I hadn’t been moved before or since. It felt profoundly authentic.

Karma and Lila and art making

The play of Karma and Lila is a concept essential to art making. Lila isn’t just sweetness or happiness – it is the magic, the unexpected beauty popping up like a late winter crocus through the snow – or a 6½ foot man in a tux making snakily beautiful movement next to his elderly mother singing a church hymn onstage. Or the surprise of a famously shocking artist making pretty flower pictures for his family. Or the resignation of a crudely drawn animated figure watching but doing nothing as smudges of blue water slowly rise up past his knees. And beauty can be pretty or beauty can be gut-wrenching.

But you DO have to do the Karma – you have to have structure and discipline in your art making practice in order for anything to happen. No action = no result. But the idea is that you cannot anticipate a very particular action or a specific outcome. It trips you up and cuts off creativity. Part of what makes great art great is the magic of ‘how did they do that?’ And very few artists can entirely explain how a particular work came into being. We can talk, on one hand, about the materials and techniques used, and on the other hand about the ideas that inspire us - what we were experimenting with or pursuing philosophically. All that is the Karma. But there is a gap. On one side lives the day-to-day business of the matter and means. And on the other side lives the eventual outcome. In the gap is where Lila resides.

So I remind myself within my creative life to:

1. Be authentic to my personal vision and creativity

2. Do the Karma, the work, the action.

3. Embrace the unexpected and the unlikely.

3. Invite Lila without expectation. Stay open to possibility.

“When you’re hoping with expectation that’s Karma.

Hope without specific expectation is Lila.” - Douglas Brooks

The Beauty of Practice

2010-02-20T20:47:00.001-08:00

“We practice for the practice” Douglas Brooks

The reason why some of us become artists is a persistent and overwhelming urge to create…something. Something written, drawn, performed - whatever medium best connects with the impulse. The creative urge is generally wrapped up in the act of creating rather than in the result, but once the process begins to take form, the purity of the initial impulse is altered by public opinion, day-to-day practicalities, and the external life it takes on outside of ourselves.

So how can art making be a practice and not just a process moving toward a particular result? It is amazing how attached I am to work when I am in the act of making it. But once I am done, my fascination softens to a fondness or interest in what I have created - hardly the compulsion that propelled its creation forward. While I am working on something, it is like a love affair. I think about it all day, before I go to sleep; I dream about it. It alternately torments me and thrills me and creates a profound immersive feeling like a delicious meal that I am in the midst of savoring.

Most of my artist friends and I regularly joke around about our ongoing swing between – “I am so brilliant” and “I’m an idiot, a fraud – I have nothing to say.” It’s just part of the creative package and is determined by where we are in the process at the moment. But if we can see the act of art making as a practice rather than as a set of results (all economic concerns and the art market aside…), then the paradigm shifts. We are in the process and the process is in us. Actually there is no separation between the process and ourselves. We succeed because of the simple fact that we have engaged and are engaged.

This is what yoga has taught me on the most transformative and essential level. If you are IN it, you are doing it. The goal is often the process and if you can live fully in the process, mindful of where you came from and open to where you are going, then you have accessed the delight of simultaneity and are living in the heart of your creativity. This is not a rejection of aspirations and goals, but rather an embrace of the richness of all aspects of the creative experience. It is a bigger picture than the linear pursuit of a solitary goal. In holding together the origin of an idea, its present incarnation, and its future prospects, the process becomes the past, present, and future woven together in a vibratory hum of creativity and possibility.

Henri Matisse - The Red Studio 1911

In Matisse’s The Red Studio, the circle of numbers on the grandfather clock is visible, but no hands. Matisse’s work hangs on the walls, sits on the table and on sculpture stands, and rests on the floor. The materials and inspirations for art making are scattered throughout the room as well. There are unfinished canvases and empty frames. But time is indeterminate, suspended in a sensuous flood of red that seems to pour off the edges of the canvas. Past-present-future in a painting. A limitless self-portrait in which creativity envelops time.

In any creative pursuit we talk about being in the flow. In Anusara yoga we talk about stepping into the flow. We move toward the midline, our center, so that we can dive into the reservoir of our resources. We expand outward from there into the unknown. A pulsation between inner focus and outer expression. Process. Simultaneity. An intricate weave of then, is, and will be.