You Are Invited - Bending Light: One Goddess - Three Reflections

 Kamaksi, The One Whose Eyes are Desire

For quite a while, I've wanted to offer a retreat with my teacher and good friend of many years, Dr. Douglas Brooks. I thought about it frequently, knowing that so many of his students and friends ask this of him, and finally realized that if I didn't ask, then he could never say yes...um...of course. And so I did and then he did.

I was thrilled. When I asked him what sort of topic he thought we might choose for the retreat, he responded, "Whatever you like." After a decade of study together, I had compiled a mile-long list of topics I wished to study with him, and had to contemplate it for a while.  

 Minaksi of Madurai, Warrior Princess

I thought about how the time I have spent with Douglas in South India has so sweetly and powerfully turned me inside-out and shown me deeper layers of myself. I thought about my profound love for and connection to Chidambaram and the way in which I feel so surprisingly at home wandering the grounds of this great temple and at the foot of Shiva Nataraja. I remembered how, after each visit, my teaching has been infused with the beauty of what I have experienced there, and my passion for teaching yoga is reignited.

Akhilandesvari, Mother of the Universe. She is Never Not Broken.

When I was in Tamil Nadu this past summer, I was determined to acquire a goddess murti. I have Natarajas big and small, and other forms of Shiva, but I felt lacking in the devi department. I found a beautiful one who now sits prettily in my apartment, her foot poised and hovering over a sricakra. I realized that this was what I wanted to study.

I wrote to Douglas that I was torn between studying three forms of Shiva Nataraja's beloved: Kamaksi, Minaksi, and Akilandesvari. They were so different, yet so significant - how to choose? He wrote back saying, "Do the three.  They are all you." 

And just as they are all me, they are also all you...and you...and you. 

So with great happiness, we invite you to:

Bending Light: One Goddess - Three Reflections

a Yoga Retreat with

Douglas Brooks &  Susanna Harwood Rubin

May 31 - June 3

 

Kamaksi is the goddess whose eyes are desire, Minaksi is a warrior princess, and Akhilandesvari is known as mother of the universe. All three goddesses are forms of Shiva’s beloved, and are intimately associated with the sricakra, the Devi’s most sublime emanation. These Goddesses are nothing less than your very self, showing how to be empowered in your desire, sovereign over your strength and how to wear your own fractured presence as a mark of beauty.

In our practice and study together we will learn the stories of the Goddesses, advance our meditation, learn mudra, mantra, and step into the invitation of greatness so sweetly offered by the Shakti. No previous experience is expected or required.  Bring an open mind, a welcoming heart, and a desire to dream what more there is than waking consciousness, the inner light and shadow of your own possibilities.

  

Each day we will have lecture by Douglas on the three Goddesses, asana practice with Susanna weaving each lecture’s theme into the body, and time to relax, swim, canoe, hike, & enjoy the lush spring beauty of Lake Rahasya.

Lake Rahasya Retreat House in Bristol, NY is a modern log cabin on 20 acres in the hills of the Finger Lakes. The picture windows in the yoga room overlook the lake and hills. 

DATES - Thursday, May 31 – Sunday, June 3, 2012

REGISTRATION & MORE DETAILs–Vishali Varga - Rahasya Retreats website 

QUESTIONS – contact Susanna - om_susanna@yahoo.com

COST - $575 before May 1 / $625 after May 1. $250 deposit holds your spot. Balance due May 9. This includes all accommodations, meals & snacks, daily lecture with Douglas and asana practice with Susanna, and all of Lake Rahasya Retreat’s amenities. Cost without accommodations is $450

 

Join Us.

Making the Pilgrimage

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.

The Beauty of Diversity

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 the Unknown

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.