My Decade of Beauty – Building the Palace Within.

Douglas with the Dikshitar Priests during the Homa, Chidambaram, Dec 2010 - photo Frank Andolino

How deeply do you wish to participate in your life?

To my teacher Douglas Brooks

Ten years ago today I sat in a room with 26 other people and listened as you said to us: You are sufficient unto yourself. Everything you truly need is present. The question is: How deeply do you wish to participate in your life?

This was day one of my Anusara Yoga Teacher Training, and I could say that I didn’t know then how much my life would change, which might make for a better story or at least build more drama for a later moment of epiphany, but the reality is that I did realize in this moment that my life had just shifted. I had no idea of what was to come, but I knew that I had stepped into something seismically upending.

My Eka Pada Koundinyasana by the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, July 2011

What I did not know was that throughout the next decade I would begin to shift my identity away from the Susanna whose life revolved around the art world, organizing my weekly schedule around openings in Chelsea and my annual schedule around my residencies and exhibitions. I did not imagine that I would walk away from a highly coveted position at MoMA in order to teach yoga classes in the East Village and Soho, then in Paris and in Rome. At that point I could not have pictured myself meditating in a temple in South India and wanting to be nowhere other than exactly where I was. This paradigm-shifting moment ten years ago was not something that I had consciously sought out, yet clearly, beneath the surface, I had cultivated an internal space for it to take root and blossom. And I recognized it when it happened – that’s the thing.

Dancing on the steps of Palani Temple, Dec 2010

At this time last year I was returning from pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu with you. In an article I wrote upon my return, I proposed this: 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.

Dikshitars Priests at our Rudra Homa, Chidambaram, Dec 2010 - photo Frank Andolino

I had just moved through the humid and darkly ecstatic interiors of Tiruchendur. I had climbed past waves of camphor smoke, pressing the folds of my sari against my leg to mount the hundreds of steps to the top of Palani. I had woken up day after day before dawn in anticipation of the cacophonous temple music that preceded each sunrise, then stained the soles of my feet red with the spilled kumkum at Tillai Kali Amman Temple. I had craned my neck toward the Cit Saba in Chidambaram, my body sweat-soaked and immobilized by so many other bodies, all of us yearning for a glimpse of the dancer’s face gleaming behind the flames of the arathi, and pressing against the grate to see the rahasya as the Dikshitar priests drew open the curtain.

The external experience merged with my internal process, which was sometimes ferociously passionate, and at other times sweetly bewildering. I have written about all this and more, but the sensory experience still inhabits me so thoroughly that I soften my eyes and I am there with you now as I write these words.

During the Homa, Chidambaram, Dec 2010 - photo Frank Andolino

I have another teacher who showed me how people like me, whose minds are ever moving, ever flickering, sending off sparks of energy in all directions, can build palaces within ourselves with rooms upon rooms in which to meditate. In those rooms I can arrange things to create particular environments. Then I can go back and change it all around, redecorate to structure my meditations and to expand them. I have different rooms for different purposes and the content of the rooms gets rearranged when it suits me. Everywhere I’ve ever been and everything I’ve ever done resides in this inner landscape, my interior palace. This is the site on which I broke ground that day ten years ago. Although I was never not building it, that day was when I cut the ribbon and walked in. That was the day I began to lay claim to the palace within.

Roof of the Cit Saba (Hall of Consciousness), Chidambaram, Dec 2010 - photo Frank Andolino

I have already written that once you have been to Chidambaram, the temple takes up residence within you. And so it has. My friend Harrison Williams told me a couple of days ago that he dreamt of the temple, walking endlessly through its elaborate corridors. He remembered, with precision, where certain stones were cracked and loose and he could feel them beneath the soles of his feet in his dream as he made his way through, pausing to offer mantra and mudra at Ganesh, then Subrahmanya, at Dakshina Moorthi, and at the feet of Nataraja, just as you showed us.

Chidambaram Nataraja Temple Corridor, Dec 2010 - photo Frank Andolino

You have told us how in the north, the traditions tend to revolve around Tirtha – a place such as a river or mountain as a site of pilgrimage, whereas the southern traditions invite us to the temple to pay homage and to receive Darshan, the exchange of glances between the deity and ourselves. Inside of me I have temples, I have palaces, I have forests and fields. As I traverse my inner landscape, I wander across dry clear plains, rest in dense green thickets, and wind my way through the labyrinthine temples that have assembled themselves within me.

Tirukalakundram-view while walking up to the temple, 2010

There are so many places to pause, so many reasons to bow down. Nothing has become simple and streamlined in my creative and spiritual practices. On the contrary, everything has become infinitely more complex and so wildly beautiful. This is our tradition, which utterly suits me. And for this, on our tenth anniversary of study together, Douglas, I thank you again and again and again.

Satsang with Douglas Brooks, Swamimalai Dec 2008

Special thanks to Frank Andolino for the his beautiful photos of our time in Chidambaram.

Looking for God on the 6 Train

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

The Beauty of Listening

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 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.