Making the Pilgrimage

Making the Pilgrimage

The Beauty of Habit and Ritual

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

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

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 the yoga I practice 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

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

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

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?