Falling in Love with Your Life

Teaching at Abhaya Yoga, Brooklyn  (Photo-Katie Claire for Abhaya Yoga)

When it rains in summer I think about Krishna.

As I left this morning to teach, I watched the sun fading behind storm clouds and on my walk to the studio a few heavy drops landed before the entire sky exploded from its own heat. Whatever plan I had for the class was gone, having been blurred and dispersed by the downpour.

Krishna

So…  Once upon a time, I told my class, the monsoon came to the cow-herding town of Vrindavan. The plants bloomed – a passionate chaos of fecundity. The most lavishly-petalled flowers and fruits burst forth in every conceivable jewel tone within the deep ripe green of the jungle. Some glowed red like embers, others were stained with shocking spills of pink and orange, and a few shone with the intoxicating midnight blue of Krishna’s skin. The jungle vines grew rapidly into thick tangles as the cows in the nearby pastures grew fat and healthy from the grass.

Adding to the exuberance of the landscape, Krishna played a few notes of love on his flute; some were as deep and private as the darkest earth and others were thin, reedy and wistful like a bird’s cry. The Gopis, Krishna’s beloved milkmaids, began to swoon with love, dropping their milk pails and abandoning their chores to follow the trail of Krishna’s music into the forest, the bright colors of their saris mingling with the plants so that they looked like moving blossoms. They began to play games deep in the forest as Krishna flirted and seduced them one by one, until each had discarded her clothing to bathe naked in the lake.

Krishna plays with the Gopis in the Forest

To tease them, Krishna gathered up their clothing and climbed high up into a tree then called down to them. “Look,” he said, I’m up here!” and playfully waved an armful of sari silk at them. Their love-dampened eyes lifted. They smiled and laughed. In love, in love, in love… with the music, with the forest, with Krishna. The waters surrounded them and the waters trickled down on them, filtered by the leaves and vines of the forest. They were lost in love.

Krishna Steals the Gopis’ Clothing as They Swim in the Lake

Imagine, I said to my class, that the story is happening inside of you. This is your inner landscape. You are the seducer and the seduced. The forest is your heart and the lake is your consciousness. You are the ripe earthiness of the forest floor and the cultured beauty of the women’s woven saris. You are the placid unquestioning cows and the yearning and intoxicated women. The music is your breath and you are falling in love with yourself. The purpose of your practice is to follow the breath in order to weave your own story.

So what is the story of your practice? How can you fall ever more deeply in love with your life? And how can you inhabit this inner landscape so thoroughly that it stays with you through whatever challenges you encounter and wherever you choose to go?

Thick overhead
clouds of the monsoon,
a delight to this feverish heart.
Season of rain,
season of uncontrolled whispers—the Dark One’s returning!
O swollen heart,
O sky brimming with moisture—
tongued lightning first
and then thunder,
convulsive spatters of rain
and then wind, chasing the summertime heat.

Mira says: Dark One,
I’ve waited—
it’s time to take my songs
into the street.

~Mirabai -The Dark One is Krishna (translation by Andrew Schelling)

Forest, 2010 (©SHR.com)

Photo of me teaching is courtesy Katie Claire at Abhaya Yoga, Brooklyn, NY

The Beauty of Alignment II

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 Your Story

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?