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.

Sweat Pray Write

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

The Goddess Who Pauses to Speak

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.