The Beauty of Movement II

Still is still moving to me... ~ Willie Nelson

Definition: Wanderlust

a strong longing for or impulse toward wandering (Merriam-webster.com)
a strong, innate desire to rove or travel about (Dictionary.com)

About 15 years ago I spontaneously visited a friend in Colombia.

It was a particularly wet and miserable February in New York, and I was itching to be anywhere else. I called my friend Luis, and in a week was on a plane to Bogota.

We drove from the city two or three hours to some of the small towns surrounding it. Luis navigated rapidly along winding highways through the mountains, the damp high-altitude fog lifting to reveal trickling waterfalls along the sides of the mountains and explosively green foliage everywhere. Beyond the green in the lower altitudes, the mountains shone orangey-pink in the sun. We stopped by the side of the road, grabbed chunks of the mountain and crumbled it into a terracotta dust that stained our fingers.

At the time, many of the highways on which we drove were guerrilla-controlled, so speed was of the essence, as the guerrillas’ good humor in letting through the supply trucks and travelers’ cars vanished with the day’s diminishing light.

It was imperative that we arrive at our destination before the sun set. We drove through jungle, coffee country, arid towns famous for their clay work, and stayed in small colonial villages where the white walls around the central squares overflowed with bougainvillea, music and cooking smells. The diverse richness of it all was exhilarating. There was also a subtle but persistent edge of uneasiness lurking around the perimeter of daily life that, to my perception, compelled people toward a profound appreciation of the fleeting sweetness of the moment.  We decided that while I was there we should eat like crazy and dance every night. And so we did.

At the apex of our non-stop motion, I had a conversation with one of Luis’ friends who said that he did not leave Colombia much because he didn’t enjoy traveling—that he began to lose his sense of self when he was removed from his everyday surroundings.

This was a stark contrast to what Luis and I were experiencing. Inspired by our constant movement—walking, driving, dancing and eating, I expressed to him how passionately I love traveling; how I find calmness within the incessant movement. The strangeness of new places and experiences makes me acutely aware of my own habits and assumptions, which I find liberating. Movement offers me perspective. Perspective creates self-reflection. Self-reflection cultivates insight and empathy and so on.

Once you get a hit of the stillness held by movement and of movement‘s suspended stillness, no matter where you are, you carry the awareness of it with you. Multiple frames of a movie give us one flickering image. Stare at a still image for long enough and it seems to shift before your eyes. This is the pulsation of nature. In Anusara’s Tantric tradition we call the stillness Shiva and the movement Shakti. Stillness defines motion and motion stillness. We can’t conceptualize one without the other. The beauty is both in the difference and in the merging. We hold them in a continual play. I move. I stop. I pause. I wander.

For the first time this year, I decided to go to Wanderlust. It seemed ridiculous that I have not yet gone, given my love for travel and, of course, yoga. There are yoga teachers who wander all over the globe and there are others who stay put at their home studio. Both roles are valuable and I find myself somewhere in between. My travels make me a better teacher, but I also love the day-to-day relationships I have with my students. What seduced me about this particular Wanderlust is that it is on the East Coast, and is hosting the Anusara Grand Circle, which is the ultimate annual gathering for anyone who practices Anusara Yoga. So I get my fix of stillness—resting in the heart of my community—through my embrace of motion—picking up from my surroundings and leaping into a new experience.

From Wanderlust, I leave for India. From India, I fly to Paris. From Paris, back home to New York. I embrace the mirror that travel provides, holding up infinite reflections of my own identity. I bring back experiences, insights and new perspectives for my students. In August, I will rest, my stillness holding its whirling wandering history like a passionate pulse.

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 Desire

Morning Skies (II)

Desire is not a problem – it is our very nature. This is one of the first things that my teacher Dr. Douglas Brooks said when I met him nine years ago in the big kick-off weekend for my Anusara® Yoga Teacher Training. His statement continues to resonate as powerfully for me now as it did that first icy but exciting January day.

Desire is our nature. For me, this exuberantly exploded the popular trope that we are trapped and bound by desire - that we are mired in a cycle of always wanting more and that we can never be satisfied until we somehow free ourselves from that inclination. I listened and thought yes! The fact is that I enjoy my desire. I love that longing, that yearning, that delicious notion that there is always more to do, more to feel, more to accomplish, more to taste…and that my desire can take infinite forms, pointing the way toward a multiplicity of experiences and possibilities.

Desire is what gets me out of bed in the morning – the memory of how much I love that first flowery taste of my hot milky tea, that initial yawningly satisfying stretch of my morning Surya Namaskar, the promise of plans and conversations with friends, the excited wait for that satisfying press and scratch of pencil on paper as I draw. Desire is what motivates me, excites me, inspires me. Desire makes me care passionately about things and about people. I love that I can be moved to tears by a Picasso painting or a Fellini film or the taste of a distant hillside in a great glass of wine. I feel incredibly fortunate that I am so deeply connected to my desirous self that it repays me with joy on a daily basis.

I want to become ever more in touch with my desire. I want to step deeply into the flow of passion that moves through my everyday life. Join me: close your eyes, go inside for a moment, and reconnect to that glowing ember called desire that constitutes your very core.

The Beauty of the Dance

His body is half-naked and ash-smeared with a tiger skin draped across his hips. In his two upper hands he holds the drum of creation and the fire of dissolution. His tangle of matted hair is gathered and loosely held in a knot. Perched on the knot is the pale crescent moon behind which descends the waters of the Ganges, which separate and divert into many tributaries, reflecting his infinite forms. He is multiplicity itself. But here he is Nataraja, the dancing form of Shiva.

As he begins to twist and move, his lower left arm and leg rise, crossing over to the right side, the languid hand pointing gently toward his gracefully upturned foot. He holds a fourth hand palm-out, offering abhaya mudra, the sign of fearlessness, inviting us to dare to engage in our own dance, our own process of creativity. As he dances, his dreadlocks fly wildly out from his head revealing glittering diamonds studding their matted swirling length. They reflect and refract the light, creating a dizzying optical spectacle evoking thousands of white sparkling fireworks. Ash and gem. Nature and culture. Visceral instinct and refined choice. This is our center where our contradictions meet.

Who we were, who we are now, who we may be…it’s all in the dance. The grittiest earthiest parts of our makeup combine with our most refined and cultivated sensibilities, because we contain both. In Nataraja’s undulating asymmetrical dance, he conceals one bit of reality and reveals another because this is the way we experience the world. Something surges into focus, something else recedes like the sound of a train in the distance. He stands on Apasmara, representing forgetfulness, because we remember just enough and forget just enough from day to day so that we get to dance again, tasting our own recalled and forgotten beauty. Nataraja is an invitation to dance our lives more deeply, more artfully, connected to the earth and in love with the stars.

Spring Cleaning with Shiva

I’ve decided to do my spring-cleaning in the company of Shiva this year. Or rather, I plan to tap into those aspects of Shiva within me that shift, clarify, and empower. So as I transition through the gray drizzle of early New York City March into the softer season, when rubbery stems of flowers optimistically emerge around the two trees planted in the cement of my block, I’ll be negotiating the same mysterious process of transformation within myself.

Shiva is my map, my game plan. Look at Nataraja, the dancing form of Shiva. In his upper right hand he holds a drum, representing creation. In his upper left hand, he holds fire, for destruction. He supports himself on one bent leg, displaying sustenance or maintenance. These three of Shiva are the ones on which I am focusing right now. Through the contemplation of these acts: creation, destruction, and maintenance, Shiva Nataraja is an invitation into our own consciousness – a path that offers us the opportunity to deeply engage with ourselves and with the world. Shiva is a mirror, inviting us to gaze upon our own lives – to see the choices we make and to more clearly recognize our patterns, to evaluate what is and isn’t working, and what changes we need to make.

Periodically, I notice that my little stacks of books and paperwork have turned into furniture in the corners of my apartment. I realize that the physical stacks of stuff are some interesting sort of parallel to the inner stacks of stuff inside my head and heart. It is time to dissolve them, reorder them, and create a more sustainable system. So those habitual patterns that aren’t serving me – those ways of thinking that limit me – burn them to ash and sweep them away. It is only from this place of clarity that that I can create something substantial, something worth my energy and effort. By daring to destroy, I can create something new that I am excited about sustaining. This is an endless loop. This is a dance. By fully engaging in this dance, my own consciousness becomes Shiva.

How can you skillfully engage and navigate the vicissitudes of your own personal transitions? How can you take hold of Shiva’s tools of consciousness and meaningfully engage them in your dance?

The Beauty of Connection

Once upon a time there was an exquisitely beautiful woman named Sita, whose looks and graciousness inspired passion in every creature who encountered her. Sita, however, was madly in love with her partner, a powerful and righteous king named Rama, who was equally crazy about her. One day, as they played and picnicked with their attendants in the flower-dotted fields near where they lived, Sita wandered into the nearby forest to find a little shade. From the treetops, a demon by the name of Ravena, who was obsessively in love with Sita watched… waited…and then leapt down, scooping up Sita and whisking her away to the island of Lanka where he hid her deep inside his walled-in kingdom.

Finding a few of Sita’s glittering jewels on the forest floor, the devastated Rama and his devoted servant Hanuman knew right away that the demon had stolen Sita. Hanuman told Rama that he would leap over the ocean to Lanka to find her, that nothing could deter him from reuniting the couple. Now Hanuman was a sort of demi-god: half monkey and half man, who had magical powers, such as shape-shifting and flying through the air. So Hanuman gathered up his powers and leapt all the way to Lanka, then made himself tiny so that he could scamper unnoticed through the treetops inside of Ravana’s gardens. There he found Sita, weeping under a tree. He gave her Rama’s ring to prove that he was sent by him and then leapt back to tell Rama, so that the king could lead his army to Lanka and recover his stolen love.

So here’s where it gets interesting. Place the story inside of you. You are the landscape – the verdant fields and the shadowy forest, the ocean and the walled-in kingdom. You are the strong king who wants to do the right thing and the exquisite beauty who longs for what she loves. But you are also Ravana, that demon who causes you to feel alone or disconnected, who tears you away from your self. And finally, you are Hanuman, the one who restores unity, who, in fact, is so utterly devoted to creating connection, that he will create alignment again and again and again, because Hanuman is the ultimate yogi, alignment and connectivity are a constant process, and this is one of many stories…

Observe within yourself how the story plays out in every moment in your day. Your mind flickers over a particular thought or desire and waves of excitement, curiosity, self-doubt, and longing rise and subside. When do you feel separate? What makes you doubt yourself or become excessively self-critical? Remind yourself that those alienating sensations are only one character in the story, that just as they attempt to pull you out of alignment, there are other characters in your story that elevate and exalt you. Call on that part of you that is deeply devoted to your own alignment and connectivity. Call on that part of you that is Hanuman.

The Flavors of Love

The Rasas

Rasa is the Sanskrit term for the flavor or texture of an experience. The nine Rasas include Comic, Compassionate, Furious, Heroic, Fearsome, Gruesome, Wondrous, Peaceful, and Erotic. Every moment of life touches upon one or several of them, as they tumble into each other and overlap. The Rasas are referenced when talking about art or aesthetic theory because of the power of a great work or composition to evoke them: a Goya etching may tap into the gruesome yet leave you in a state of wonder. The Mary J. Blige song that makes you cry may help you end up in a place of peace. Anyway, I've been thinking about the connection between the Rasas and the different flavors of love...

There is a love that feels like peacefulness, a love that feels like yearning, a love of bubbling-over joy, and a love that evokes eroticism. Love can feel clearly directed and specific, or it can be as vast and expansive as the cosmos. My love of cake is not the same as my love for my beloved, which is not the same as the love I have for my parents, or for my best friend, or for the ocean. Yet I feel passionately about all of those things. And within each of those forms and variations of love there are infinite nuances of experience.

Love resides not in the object but in the subject. It is not something to pursue or look for anywhere outside of yourself. This is not to say that you can’t find love with someone or something else. But it is the word with that makes all of the difference. You have to connect to the experience of love within to receive love from anything in the external world. And then maybe you don’t receive it in the way or form that you wanted, which feels surprising, interesting, or lousy, but it doesn’t change the fact that love is still there, because the love resides in you. The feeling of love, the ability to love is always present, while the object of your love and the texture of your love shift, change and diversify.

Love offers us an intensity of experience that dives deeply into the Rasas, showing us how vast and diverse our capacity for love really is. If that flavor of love were not a part of you, you wouldn’t even be able to recognize it. So something from the outside evoked the love that was already present within you. And regardless of what happens on the outside, that flavor of love is always there.

Try this: Take a moment to think of what you really love and whom you really love. Observe the flavors or textures of each of those particular loves. Then recognize how each one of them is an aspect of your self.