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.

Leaving Anusara.

         

This has been the longest time I have gone without publishing a piece of writing in over two years. I kept trying to write this piece and that piece, and frankly, I have  pages of fabulously rich notes, scribbles, and thoughts to play with at some point. What has prevented me from drawing them coherently into an interesting piece of writing has been the bottom falling out of a central component of my life, namely Anusara Yoga. If you’re reading this, you know the rough outline of what has happened or perhaps you know the gritty details or the hints and shadows of them. In any case, every time I attempted to develop a piece of writing for the past few weeks, it felt forced, stilted, beside the point.

I realized tonight, as I wrote my resignation letter, that this would be a purging of blocked words, a letting go of things so that I could clear the way for new words to come, new ways of thinking to coalesce. And as I type this now, I feel relieved, renewed. I am creating instead of leaving, forming instead of dissolving. I’m entering the upswing of a new cycle.

The following is my letter to my community. Some people will like that I published it here and others will not. I wrote a piece here last year in which I spoke about the need to smash apart the old to begin again, and so this is what I’ve done. This is the way I need to deal with it to feel complete. Putting something into words makes it feel real to me. It seals the commitment. To those of you I love who are staying and those I love who have left, I hope it’s ok with you all. It’s the best I have to offer at the moment.

Chidambaram OM

Dear Friends,
This evening I came to a calm, yet profoundly sad decision to end my business affiliation with Anusara Yoga. This has been a painful process for me, involving the same anxiety, sleeplessness, and tears that so many of you are also experiencing. I love our system of asana and believe it to be the most elegant and intelligent one out there. I deeply love and admire our community as well, and for over ten years now I have been in a continual state of wonderment over the ocean of talent, intellect, and creativity that I have encountered in Anusara teachers and students. I cannot imagine my life without it and without all of you.

Furthermore, and the toughest point in all of this, is that I truly love, admire, and respect John. He has been supportive of me in many ways, and his teaching has helped me to heal when I was going through a couple of tough times. He has changed my life for the better. I am amazed at what he created, and I am forever grateful.

After several days of emotional turmoil, I realized that I was resisting leaving because of my deep love for the practice and for our community. The problem was, I had fallen out of love with the organization. Did you ever end a relationship because you and the other person were playing with different rulebooks? This is what I’m talking about. And this is why I have to leave.

I would like to be very clear. My resignation is a painful and carefully thought-out decision. It is a decision whose roots are in thoughts, feelings, and experiences that I’ve had over a few years. The events and revelations of the past couple of weeks have sealed it, but that tiny seed of thought indicating my eventual departure has been gestating for a while.

I pulled away from the initial cascade of resignations that began Sunday, feeling that I did not want to make a major life decision quickly, simply because so many of my close friends had left. What is necessary for me in any major life event is to get quiet, to make sure that I am in a thoughtful and grounded place, and to act from that place with informed certainty. I wrote, I meditated, I taught, I spoke with friends and family, and I’m in that place right now.

My reasons for leaving are rooted in my belief that an organization cannot successfully and healthily exist when one person has control over so many. I have felt like a bit of an outlier in the past few years because I have resisted some of Anusara’s philosophical underpinnings, specifically the Shiva-Shakti Primer. I have also disagreed with some of its financial initiatives, such as the 10% dues we are asked to pay on yoga products, when so many of us can barely make a living.

I have not felt empowered to publicly contest either of these policies without potentially damaging my career within Anusara, Inc., and that is a huge problem. I am a person who once spent six months on a picket line at the Museum of Modern Art fighting for my rights, and for me to feel, at this point in my life, that I can’t voice my dissent is not healthy. A silently fuming person is not the person who I wish to be. A person who says one thing and then does another is also not who I want to be. I believe in boundaries but I don’t believe in constraints. There is a difference. In addition, I feel that there has been a culture of fear and secrecy that is the opposite of the transparency I embrace. There are far too many moments for me to cite here, but I welcome anyone’s questions for clarification. This is about my personal integrity and about how I want to move through the world.
I am still a certified Anusara Yoga teacher, although I will be relinquishing my license. I will fulfill the teaching commitments that I have planned in the next few months that offer credit hours to those attending.

There is no other style of asana I wish to teach. I firmly believe that this brilliant alignment system is the best there is out there. I will continue to teach exactly how I teach right now. I will honor all that I have learned from John and from everyone, both teachers and students, who have been with me through this wild and beautiful ride. I love you all. Thank you. I’ll see you on the other side.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
- Rumi

With Love and Gratitude,
Susanna

Saying Thank You - A Love Letter To My Teachers

 

Nataraja, Bristol, NY, July 2011 

Yes...That. I am that. That I am.

My Two Teachers
I have many teachers, but the two who are really the great teachers of my life are the ones who, when I first heard them speak, seemed to be voicing the contents of my brain. If you have had this experience, you know exactly what I am talking about. You are surprised, and think – wait – how did you…? but I…  and then – yes and yes again. Then the surprise gives way to a magnetic compulsion that makes you want to scrunch your chair or yoga blanket or whatever you happen to be perched on …right…up…close.

It makes you want to travel around the world to study with them and precipitates dramatic shifts in how you order your time and with whom you wish to spend it. Your initial amazement and delight pool into a profound sense of gratitude for this glimpse into the mysterious synchronicity of things. Resonance and Recognition. This is what happened when I met my teachers John Friend and Douglas Brooks.

To Backtrack for a Moment – Paris and Proust
I keep thinking about the first time I read Proust. I was studying in Paris and as I tackled the dense text, I suddenly realized that I was being moved by the quality of the language and by the beauty of the prose. For the first time reading in French – instead of translating in my head, instead of it being about comprehension – I had moved into a place of profound aesthetic appreciation. That was something.

The writing seemed strangely familiar. As I read, it felt as if someone had transcribed the phrases and ideas lining the inside of my brain. I was seeing myself reflected in his words – not just things I had thought about, but patterns of thought – an underlying structure that said – That is me! The differences between myself and a neurotic French writer born in 1871, who closeted himself in a silent cork-lined room so that he could write all 3000-some pages of his book were evident. Yet, the startling sense of recognition triggered a sensation of deep connectivity to the world around me, which is actually what he was writing about. And this experience is what I’m now talking about.

Post-practice with John Friend - Anusara Grand Circle-Wanderlust, VT, June 2011

On Recognition and Moving through Things
Many years later, I was going through a challenging period in my life – I had lost 3 people I cared about in 3 months in unrelated violent deaths. I was toughing it out, trying to be there for other people while I just barely kept it together myself. I felt as if I was held in place by lots of little overlapping pieces of psychic tape and messes of determined glue – a shifting collection of pieces.

I had been studying with John Friend for about 5 years, and had already had the above-mentioned recognition experience with him. He was in town teaching a series of workshops in Soho. Usually when I studied with John, I was like an excited puppy  – exponentially more bouncy and chatty than I normally am. This time I was in a place where I just wanted to find some peace – to stop grinding my teeth for a few hours and feel happy again. We put down our mats and gathered toward the front of the room.

As John began to speak, something in the tone of his voice shifted something for me, and my carefully taped together self began to come unstuck. I spent most of the morning crying and sweating in the bathroom, finally managing to fit in about 30 sniffling minutes of practice. He came over to me immediately at the break and I recall spilling some incoherent mess about what I was dealing with, as he took it in and held that space for me.

Exhausted, I went back to my apartment, showered, scrubbed everything off of myself, and when I returned for the afternoon session, I was on the other side of it – clear, clean, and actually slightly happy for the first time in months. The tone of recognition and acceptance within his voice had triggered a profound alchemical shift within me. He had invited me more deeply into a particular part of myself so that I could process what I needed to move through.

Great teachers speak to you from where you are. They don’t try to yank or push or pull you into where they want you to be. They remind you to move into the fullness of your experience, to embrace whatever rasa, or flavor of experience, you are in so that you can best figure out how to align with your current reality.

With Douglas Brooks - Swamimalai Subrahmanya Temple, Dec 2010, photo-Diane Stone

On Reflection and Thatness
I was in upstate New York studying with Douglas this past week. Near the beginning of a meditation practice that Douglas was guiding, there was a moment near the beginning when one thanks one’s teachers. He let us know that this was what he was doing and that we were welcome to do the same.

Look way back – he suggested – go to 2^nd grade. I decided to really go for it, and it was amazing how many people I genuinely wanted to thank. I tried to pare it down to my parents, my high school English and Art teachers, my college Art History professor, several of my Anusara mentors, and Douglas and John. But then I thought about all of my teachers’ teachers, and that kept multiplying as well – lines and lines of them extending in every direction. It was endless.

I met Douglas when he was invited by Amy Ippoliti to kick off our Anusara® Teacher Training in January 2002. I have extremely vivid memories of being floored at every single thing he said. It was brilliant. And totally new. And yet utterly familiar. To conclude one evening, we were asked to give one word or phrase summarizing our experience. People said, inspired – intrigued – exhausted – perplexed – blown away, and more.  The one thing that I could truly say, was Yes…THAT. I am that. That I am.

You know in a minute flat when someone is going to be a great teacher in your life. You can learn from many, but the great ones – that is always clear. And there it was again and again, and here it still is again and again: the vimarsha shakti, which can be loosely defined as the energy of you being reflected back to you. Being around my teachers makes me a better person because of this endless mirroring and self-reflection, this sense of recognition, the inescapable resonance, the sweet invitation to that.

Jet-lagged but happy - with Douglas - Tirukalakundram Vedhagirishwar Hill Temple, Dec 2010

Saying Thank You
I was away traveling for much of this summer – Vermont-India-Paris–Boston-upstate NY, and had intended to write something like this for Gurupurnima, the traditional time of year to honor one’s teachers, so this is slightly late. But I honestly think about my teachers every day, which somehow blended with the nostalgia or longing that kicks in for me at the end of summer and the fading august light, so I felt compelled to write this belated thank-you note.

So here it goes  – thank you to Mom and Dad for being the most ridiculously fabulous parents anyone could wish for, to my sister Jen for being a model of integrity, thank you to my academic teachers who believed in my creativity and my skills – thank you to my yoga mentors and inspirations – Sianna Sherman, Elena Brower Amy Ippoliti, Lois Nesbitt, Vishali Varga, Ellen Saltonstall, and Sue Elkind. You have all given me so much.

And thank you John. Thank you Douglas. I thank you all for offering me myself.

With John - Anusara Grand Circle, VT June 2011

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. ~ Marcel Proust