"The Bloom"

That which God said to the rose,
and caused it to laugh in full-blown beauty,
He said to my heart,
and made it a hundred times more beautiful.
-- Rumi



Om Amme

Glorious Chores

Yesterday I noticed a trend in my approach to manual labor—I spend more energy bemoaning it then I actually would spend if I just DID it.
My beloved room-mate, friend and teacher Lisa asked me, “are you tired from worrying over the housework or are you tired from doing it?” Bingo—she blew up my spot—I hadn’t lifted a finger, I'd just been procrastinating...

It was hilarious to see that only an hour later I was happily absorbed in the task of dusting and reorganizing the shelves. It is that first bit of momentum that's hard; getting past that resistance at the point of entry. The obstacle is mental but it feels like a fixed-gear bike going straight up a San Francisco Hill... But once you get pedaling through it you start to flow, right? My writing teacher Rachel Cohen said at some point you just get so familiar with this voice, with the resistance that you just don’t care about it anymore!! And you begin:

I passed down the tall vases and purple glass tea set from the highest shelves onto the counter top and then jumped back to the sink and cleaned and polished everything dry with a dish towel. How it all Sparkled!!

Then I did the thing I did this summer at the ashram when I was doing housekeeping: I would turn around and then turn back and be struck again by how great the polished glass looked on those clean white shelves. Or walk out and walk back in to the room—- bam, great job. I love the instant gratification of a job well done. And the power of our hands and our patience to do work well. I actually looked forward to the layer of sticky gray dust that awaited on the lids of the jars of grains on the middle shelf, and so I got back to work.

Karma Yoga, the yoga practice of just working without being attached to the outcome, is so effective because it brings up ego reactions. Usually ego reactions have a big “I” or “ME” as their subject, if your not already alarmingly familiar with what I'm talking about..! “I don’t wanna!”, "This is going to be hard", and "But I’d rather be..." are all ways Ego intercepts our actions and creates obstacles for us to just work and live. (It's hard to be a tool for divine energy to come into the world when you are blocking it with petty needs...) So doing Karma yoga, doing work just for the sake of working, volunteering at the ashram and yoga centers, has been a big part of my practice. It has started to make me look at the way I block myself by having expectations before I even begin. As I have recognized again, and again and AGAIN! So hopefully I am finally getting the point this time and in the future will see this type of procrastinating thinking as a useless habit. ("You DO LOVE to work! Remember the vases?!" You might have to remind me next time..) So the idea is to use the work as a means to move beyond the ME and the I. When we act outside of our ME thoughts things really get done and it adds to the sense of harmony and joy of all.

Then time started to fly by, my initial resistance weakened and floated to the past I was just in the present finishing up the counter tops and putting away the dishes that had air dried while I did the shelves. It helped that Lisa reminded me to chant my mantra to keep the mind engaged and present. The whole process was a purification, “A privilege not a punishment” she said, half jokingly.

Chogyam Trugpa talks about “Drala” the concept of bringing freshness and beauty into the physical world as a practice. My Grandma was a master of this art. In fact, my family is all sensitive to Drala and it is one of my favorite things in the world—to make things nice by caring for them. Isn’t it beautiful how something so humble can be made elegant by investing it with care and attention? Like a home in a foreign country that is swept and tended to everyday? It has that Drala sparkle! And Drala is not only visual, you can feel it—maybe more importantly is that Vibration that you FEEL. I felt like my Grandma, paying attention to the details, ironing table clothes and napkins, patiently organizing recipes, coupons and receipts, taking coffee grounds out to her rose bushes.

To have all these beautiful objects and a beautiful house to clean is a privilege and to cleaning it turned from a chore to away to worship and to enjoy it. Feeling awake and lively 2 hours after I slowly had started my tasks I felt in commune with my Grandma and that primordial MA energy within us all. It takes time and patience to care for our material lives, but can we step up and not let the I and ME hills obstruct our view of the expansive beauty we are capable of creating in our worlds? Because when we bring it in to the world, we share it with the world, and everyone is lifted up.
My room mate Brooke washes and collects her to-go cups (which she gets when she isn’t carrying an empty jar to drink her coffee from). I’ve really enjoyed using the cups for convenience sake, but also because of the palpable nectar of sweetness, the Drala, of the fact that she saved them. Let’s make the world a better place to live and begin with our own lives. Lets take time out to let the Drala flow!

Harness ur Chi

"Mencius, one of the foremost sages of ancient China, speaks of Chi as the soul, the center of our spiritual nature. It may help us better visualize this situation if we understand Chi to be the field that radiates from a human being's soul. If this field is weakened or blocked, then it can no longer keep the body in the state of liveliness. It becomes afflicted and ill, lacking in orientation and strength. The soul in this body is in the process of forgetting what it really is, where it comes from, and to where it will return. If the soul is now reminded of its true nature by the presence of the divine within itself, then it can again become oriented; its power and joy; trust in life, intuition and healing becomes strengthened."-- The Spirit of Reiki

You can't love nobody else until...

Is it just me or is the term “Self Love” taboo?
First off there’s the connotation of masturbation. As Woody Allen says in Annie Hall: "Hey, don't knock masturbation! It's sex with someone I love.” **Blush**!
Both the physical act of ‘self-love’ and the psychological version are surrounded by uncertainty—is it ok? If so how much!? It’s embarrassing to ask your parents growing up and our culture doesn’t speak openly about it-- so it becomes this indefinite question mark. Just as one’s relationship to auto-eroticism must be explored and defined privately so too we must uncover/ recover a healthy bed of self-love to lay our worries down in to when the going gets tough. Can we please stop being so hard on ourselves and love the one we’re with? We’re gonna be here for a while longer, so we’ve got to figure out how to make this livable and hopefully lovely.

In “The Art of Happiness” the Dalai Lama has a chapter on Self Love and he reacts with disbelief that someone could actually not love themselves!!

The ego takes many forms, in Hindu Mythology Ego is symbolized by the great transforming Demon Mahesvara that the Goddess Kali epically slays. In our modern Western psyche I feel we have this super critical, perfectionist mutation of Ego that when not sharply judging others, judges ourselves. We can be our worst enemies sometimes, right? In the Yoga practices we begin to see our life situation for what it is and see where we are being to harsh or too lazy—we discover our Sat- our Truth and soften to flow with OM the ever changing current of existence.

In his memoir Bhagavan Das writes that he chants kirtan because he loves to hear his own voice.
Isn’t that great?! Not because of anything esoteric but this simple, organic action of hearing and loving one’s own voice! Can we follow Baba D’s example and just love what we do and the simple pleasure of our lives? One of my beloved teachers Ali Cramer has said: “Let’s fall in love with our lives, and if your not in love with your life what are you doing to change that?” Amen.

So rather than see ourselves as good or bad we have to find a harmonious ground to move through life with. Sure, there is the risk of narcissism and vanity, but for a long time I avoided any sense of self love out of self-consciousness that I was not supposed to just enjoy myself.

We have to remember OM and the inherent ONENESS our Yoga practice is reminding us of! If we feel miserable all the time we should be working to make it better. Sometimes it is just a matter of thinking, we have to remember our problems are not the end of the world, and not WORRY ourselves so much. First we have to see the habits of our mind for what they are—we have to identify what shape the Demon Mahesvara has taken in our own psyche and begin to appease his roaring with the salve of Amrita—the eternal nectar of Love that resides in our own hearts.

I esteem and honor the yoga teachings because they lead me back to that Amrita—maybe not every single time, but I would say every week I receive some understanding that sincerely makes me feel lighter and happier in life. That’s why I keep practicing. Not because my life is becoming perfect because I practice yoga, but because it keeps me warmed up and close to my own Love nectar. Maybe someday I will be so familiar with the source of this feel good stuff I won’t need the practices, but until then I love asana, meditation and especially kirtan.

In my experience kirtan is a way to let the voice and life force flow and be really free and flowing. This has reconnected me more and more with my original feeling of freedom in loving the moment and just letting it flow.

I once asked my friend and teacher Prem Prakash how Bhakti yoga worked. It seems fake to try to make yourself cheer up by smiling but IT ACTUALLY WORKS!?! (Try it sometime). So in the same way, Bhakti practices, and any practice done with Love and Devotion draw us back into familiarity of that origin of action that is prior to the rational mind.

Now instead of getting mad about my faults and mistakes and challenges I see it as an opportunity to start a dialogue with the universe, and to trust that the Universe is at its base LOVING and to let my thoughts be an expression of that. In this way we add love to the world, instead of contributing to conflict and troubles. We have to fight the war within for the positive benefit of all. “Begin Within”. “A House divided among itself cannot stand”. As I get more into yoga I see how my thinking was weakening me, and as I get more into living life with Bhakti, devotion, and surrendering whatever is happening up in life to a cosmic energy, OM, the more I feel Love for myself and others, and things don’t seem so heavy after all....

Osho

I am currently in love with this book “Wings of Love & Random Thoughts” by Acharya Rajnesh. I found it at the ashram and was blown away by the quiet sharpness of his words: “A point is reached when the entire universe ceases to appear as a gross object of perception, and the pure unclouded vision of the Supreme Soul alone remains. In order to achieve this we shall have to prepare ourselves. The farmer prepares the soil before sowing seeds. Persons seeking the realisation of the supreme must keep the ground in readiness and tune themselves within in order to hear the all-pervasive divine music without... Our vital breaths are all His, every limit is His; but we do not realise it, because our own hands keep the passage of entrance closed to Him.”

I was gushing to a friend about this amazing mystic author I had just discovered in the free shelf at the Ananda Ashram when she informed me Acharya Rajnessh is none other than Osho! (He changed his name at some point!) So, these words of Osho are so inspiring, but they came through as being really special because I didn’t frame them as being already familiar since I have read some of Osho’s books! (Funny how little things can keep you on your toes and show you where you hold your preconceptions and how to let go of judging a book by it’s cover..!)

"The Warrior"

The warriors tame
The beasts in their past
So that the night's hoofs
Can no longer break the jeweled vision
In the heart.

The intelligent and the brave
Open every closet in the future and evict
All the mind's ghosts who have the bad habit
Of barfing everywhere.

For a long time the Universe
Has been germinating in your spine.

But only a saint has the talent,
The courage to slay
The past-giant, the future anxieties.

The warrior sits in a circle
With other men
Gathering the strength to unmask
Himself.

Then sits,
Giving,
Like a great illumined planet on
The Earth.

--Hafiz

Thanks Elaine for reading this in class last night and all your beautiful comments on it!
Indeed, the universe is germinating in our spine! And we sit in the circle, gathering together as we practice together and get ready to lift off veils of misunderstanding and become like our own great illumined planets! I am going to do my asanas now, orbit around like an illumined planet.. Om Shanti

Shiva & Shakti

"There is no power-holder without power. No power without power-holder. The power-holder is Shiva. Power is Shakti, the Great Mother of the universe. There is no Shiva without Shakti, or Shakti without Shiva." -- Avalon, Serpent Power
painting by Ghulam Rasul Santosh
via http://www.koausa.org/painters/grsantosh.html