Observations that dive deep into life and come up with treasures for all

Yesterday, I filled the last open space in my four yoga classes, which start Tuesday. The feeling I get is that of people getting the last tickets on a cruise ship that they have heard is going to wonderful places, but they don’t know exactly where. And I am on the same boat. Even though I’m creating the classes. I have no idea what is going to happen.

All I do know is what yoga has done for me, and that if I stay with my experience, the ship will get to its destination. But if I assume that I know anything and start changing the course, then we could hit an iceberg. Yoga works best when allowed to be what it is.

In fact, I’m putting up a little sign that says: Yoga is being friendly with what is. This simply means: allow this moment to be what it is. Don’t try to fix life in order to enhance one’s sense of importance. So, just as one practices yoga asanas by relaxing into the posture and paying attention to what the inner body is saying, that’s the way I’m going to be with these classes: relaxed and listening to what the body of the class is saying. The first sign of tension or doubt or worry is my wake up call from the bridge: “Iceberg ahead!”

Posted under General Observations

Through the magic of the internet, I’m writing this journal from a motel room in Raleigh, where we came to see the Lion King Broadway production last night. The Arts Center was filled with wonder as the brilliantly costumed characters of the African lion country came to life to tell the ancient story of sleep and remembering. For three hours our minds were propped open by the powerful presence of this production, and most forgot, for awhile, who we were.

One could tell from the standing ovation and the smiles on the face of the audience that they enjoyed being removed from their “me” for awhile. This story of the lion forgetting that he is a king was first read during my early practice of Yoga, but it was a tiger reminding the tiger cub of his true identity. The tiger cub had been raised by sheep and had forgotten his true nature. In Yoga, it is the guru who holds the mirror up to the student to show him his true identity.

Simba, the lion king in the play, looks into a pool of water and sees his original face, and he then returns to his land to remove the ego that has pretended to be king, and harmony is once again restored to the kingdom.

The ancient wisdom teachings are everywhere in our culture, coming at us in new disguises everyday. A movie here, a play, a song, a book, even advertisements sing this ancient song of our forgetting and our remembering. We enjoy them, we pay big bucks to see them, but we have little consciousness of what this secret communication is really saying.

Our higher self knows what the message is, and as the “little me” sleeps during the play, it drinks in this brief but powerful ambrosia. The mind labels this momentary forgetting of itself as “entertainment.” When we label something like the Lion King “entertainment,” that means we can watch the play, but we don’t have to give up anything. When the stage lights go off, we are back!

We can keep our ego, our “me” and all its conflicts and problems, for this “me” is our kingdom, and it is all we know. But while the “entertainment” is capturing the attention of our mind and putting it temporarily out of business, our true king can be secretly fed and kept alive…but not awakened.

A play like the Lion King has the power to awaken a soul to its kingship when the separation between the ego and the play (or the world) disappears. One can grasp in a moment of realization that this play is a mirror and that the observer is also the observed.

In such a moment of insight, we become Simba and our soul suddenly feels the energy of Life flowing through the body, and we roar.

Posted under reviews

Flowers have liked me this year. My front yard has been like a beach where wave after wave of flowers have come to break open and release their beauty on my shore. First came the spring jonquils and tulips, then the pansies and lilies, followed by roses and petunias, and for the summer we were wowed with dahlias and daisies. Now for the final wave come the late summer mums and more daisies. The flowers successfully withstood attacks by Japanese Beetles and outlasted the dry spells. Their blooms would not be denied this year.

I felt as though the flowers were my children as I carefully watered them through the spaces between the rains, and I was pained when I missed my duties and found them bent over to the ground in their thirst. As if each flower was a baby bird with mouth wide open for the incoming worm, I poured my attention on them, becoming familiar with each plant as it reached for its bloom and the reason for its existence.

The flowers have been a good teacher for me this year because they show me how to live. The flowers in my front yard are here for all who pass by our house, whether they look or not. And the flowers don’t care if they are appreciated or not, because their fulfillment is not in being liked but in just being.

Each flower has its moment, and then it passes without complaint. Each flower has its unique beauty and fragrance that is entirely its own. Never comparing itself with other flowers, each bloom exists only for itself and is complete in itself. Flowers never fear death because each flower knows it is the opening of eternity and never just a fragile petal of time.

Flowers always remind me that each moment is an unfolding bloom, unique and beautiful in its own way, even when the flower comes with thorns. No matter what the moment brings, if allowed to be what it is, there is a beauty to be discovered, a fragrance to be enjoyed, and a truth to be known.

As Keats said in one of his poems: “Truth is beauty, beauty truth, that is all we know on earth, and all we need to know.“

Posted under General Observations

Today, I visit my disc jockey. That’s what I call my chiropractor, Ed DeRegibus, who came to Farmville to open his practice back when I was first teaching yoga here in the early 80s. We go back either occasionally, like we do now, or for a series to snap, crackles, and pops when some alignment problem begins to give us a crooked perspective of the world. Today, I’m going for a minor tune up.

The whole idea of chiropractic has been in alignment with my practice of yoga because the science begins with the principle that our problems are the result of our being out of tune with our real being. Chiropractic and yoga don’t add anything to make you well, they remove the obstacles to health. In our culture, it is just the opposite when it comes to health and well being. “What can I take that will fix things,” we ask our experts. And we keep breeding more experts to fix us because we never quite get completely fixed.

Yoga is like chiropractic in slow motion. Some of the positions DeRegibus puts me in remind me of my yoga postures, especially the one he does to straighten my hips, which have always been a little crooked. When I lie on the floor and put one leg over the other and then twist my head in the opposite direction, I can imagine DeRegibus leaning down on me, pushing, and making my sacroiliac pop.

When I went to Yogaville in July, 2005, I got a chiropractic adjustment on a higher level. I felt the shift in my consciousness, and my spiritual energy began moving like our body moves when we wake from a night’s sleep. I had gotten out of alignment with my true being, and needed a little tune up. This is what Guru’s do.

Guru means “remover of obstacles.” He knows what position to put your ego in so that you can pop back into your natural being. He applies a little frustration here, a little double bind there, and in time the self centered ego just pops out of it crooked view of the world, and there you are, feeling full of energy, at peace with the world, and knowing exactly who you are.

When I go to my chiropractor, I also go to my Guru, and ask for a little adjustment on the ego level too, since I’m already on the table and surrendered.

Posted under General Observations

On several occasions recently I’ve seen someone really get upset when life took a sudden turn and went contrary to their plans. When then can’t correct the situation and set it back on course, they get angry. And then the uncooperative life situation gets even worse because the anger has created a storm that had not been in the weather forecast. “A sudden storm came upon the fleet of ships and several were sunk in the violent waves.”

It is too bad that the art of sailing is disappearing from our life. In all recorded history until this last century, most humans as one time or the other came under the teaching of the sailing ship. The single principle of sailing is learning to move with the changing of the wind.

Sailing also teaches us about the art of living. If life is the wind and our plans are our sails, what does this analogy say about the person who gets angry when the wind changes? Imagine a ship’s captain, who, rather than change the tack of his sails, just got angry at the wind, even to the point of capsizing before he would change his sails.

When a person’s plans can’t change with the wind of life, their mind interprets this resistance between their desire  and the uncooperative moment as a painful psychological fire. You can actually see the blood rise to their face. The promise of their fulfillment in the fruit of their desire is being frustrated by life, and, unable to give up this fruit  they are trapped in a storm of their own making.

Captains like this believe there is only one course, one map, and to compromise or change is seen as a loss of power and control. To this captain, even the winds must bend to his will power. The fatal flaw here is the belief that one is separate from life. Since it is obviously impossible for life to be separate from itself, such a captain, or ego, is totally lost in the sea of his own life.

From this perspective, if we know how to sail through life saying yes to the changing wind of each moment, then all our days will be fair weather days. But if we can’t surrender to the wind, then all our days will be stormy, and our ship will probably sink before it ever reaches home port.

Posted under General Observations

Now that Tilly is back from the beach and the yoga rooms are operational downstairs, our mornings are falling into a very peaceful routine. For me first thing at 4 am is the hot tub, then a shower, then a hour of asanas where the body is stretched and rested in a series of poses that makes the body feel totally free of all aches and stiffness. Then we meditate for 45 minutes, have tea and listen to a few minutes of Echart Tolle. By then it is 6:30 or so, and I write my morning journal entry. Then I’m ready to say hello to the world and give whatever it asks of me this day. I love these mornings.

And I love my days. Each day is an unknown because no matter what I think I’m going to do, I never know what or who is going to walk through my door. The day no longer exists to fit my plan, but I have learned to fit the day’s plan. And whatever the day has planned for me comes with a sense of play. I no longer feel the burden of work, even when my photography work piles up and customers call to find out when they can get their albums or whatever. If I do begin to feel stressed, I find that this merely becomes an indication that I’m trying the fit the day to my plan, and I am able to let it go.

This ability to let go begins in the morning practice of yoga, where in the asana one’s awareness searches out any tension in the body and lets it go. Letting go is taken to the next level during meditation when awareness watches the mind for thought ripples, and when a thought stream surfaces, by staying centered in the still awareness, the thought is let go.

All during the day, this practice of letting go of any form that the mind pushes away or clings to keeps me centered in my peaceful morning. Whatever I’m doing, whether its walking, doing the dishes, or anything that doesn’t require full attention, my awareness is centered and alert for any rising thought form that I can let go of. Thoughts rise in the mind, to be sure, but when they rise in the still field of awareness, they have no power to make me lose my peaceful morning.

Stress, doubt, unhappiness, fear, guilt, confusion, jealousy, envy, self loathing, despair, these are all mental states caused by thought that has been allowed to take away our peace. Like storm clouds, they enter our peaceful morning, and we forget our beautiful dawn where all disturbing feelings and thoughts were washed clean from our horizon.

Yoga is the practice of living in this state of peace throughout the day.

Posted under General Observations

Yesterday’s wedding was the first since I started wearing this eye patch over my eye so I won’t see double. With the cataract removed from my right eye, my clouded left eye is very comfortable tucked away behind the patch. Children look at me and tell their mother’s that I’m a pirate. Since my eyes don’t focus without prism lenses, I’ll have to wear this patch until both eyes have been repaired and healed and I can get a new prescription.

Since I only need one eye to operate my camera, the wedding was okay, but I especially enjoyed the reception where I began to notice a play going on in my mind. The difference between vision with a cataract and clear sight is a good metaphor for understanding what went on.

My practice as a photographer at receptions is to just be totally aware of the people, and capture the moments of laughter and joy that will suddenly open their faces to the light of the present moment. My thinking gets in the way of this style of photography, so I become aware when thought labels a person or situation. When I find myself thinking about a person I’m looking at, I am looking at that person through the filter of my mental concepts, which is not unlike a cataract.

Awareness is not judgmental. Thought always is. When I am aware of a person, I am just aware of the person as what is. But when the mind is active, I see that person from my perspective, and the mind compares or describes what is sees. “Boy, that person is fat.” Or, “She looks so unhappy.” This is like the words crawling across the bottom of the Fox news TV screen. As a photographer, I’m looking for beauty and truth, not my noisy spin on the situation.

At this reception, I noticed this space between my awareness and my thought, as if my self was very vast and this thought or mind activity was like a flock of geese going south. In the past, before this space came into my awareness, I knew only the thought. Everything was my perspective, my spin. That was when both eyes had cataracts, and I thought the world looked like that.

But now I see with one eye clearly, and when I take the patch off the cloudy eye, I can see how much I was missing by being identified with my thought. If we could see our egos with their need for compulsive thinking, we would say, “That ego has cataracts.”

Yoga is learning to see without cataracts.

Posted under General Observations

Tilly returns from her week at the beach with her HS classmates, who gather each year to escape their husbands and the responsibility of feeding them. I know what this responsibility is like because I have fish. If I didn’t give my betas four little beta bites each morning, they would die. And some husbands are like that, so their wives can’t stay away too long. But most can survive a week.

We did, my son and I. We were well stocked in cereal, peanut butter, and baked potatoes and cottage cheese for dinner. I must say that it is easier keeping the kitchen clean on such a menu. Being a vegetarian makes eating something one does to stay alive, instead of living to eat, so it doesn’t matter if there is no variety or special meals to look forward to. And going out to dinner has lost it’s luster here in our area because the restaurants have nothing but side order of mashed potatoes and a salad for people who don’t center their lives around meat.

Giving up meat not only has enormous health benefits, what with all that the industry puts in meat these days, but it also makes one aware of our addiction to meat and the emotional connection our culture has to meat as a status symbol. To be poor means you can’t afford good meat. One is rich if one can buy choice cuts of prime for dinner.

But I didn’t really have to give up meat. In fact, I was at a point in my life where I could afford the choice cuts and had a stainless steel grill on my deck to cook them just right. Then Yoga came back in my life like a jealous lover said, “Out with the meat. I won’t have that dead animal in my house.” So the meat left without so much as a thank you and a goodbye. And not a trace of my old friend is left. Now when I see or smell meat, I just see a dead animal, and it doesn’t look that appealing.

Maybe that is what happened. Yoga just took away my mental labeling stamp. If you stamp a slice of dead animal with the concept STEAK, it changes the whole meaning and flavor of the flesh. The memory of the experience of STEAK rises up and becomes what one sees. And as the steak is eaten it is compared to past steaks and put in the memory box to be pulled out at the next encounter. “Oh, this steak isn’t as good as they one we had the other day, is it?”

But if you take away the label, you see directly what it is, just a piece of dead and decaying cow. One might feel like a vulture, who just loves dead animals.

Yoga also makes one aware of another level of awareness on this subject. Yoga quiets the mind, and foods have a direct effect. We are what we eat, the mantra goes. And this is true. If we eat dead animals, we also eat their animal nature, which is the energy vibration of action and desire, and also the violence with which they were killed. If we want to feed our brain the food that will help it become still, sensitive, and open to insight, then we would eat foods that are living, such as fruits, nuts, and vegetables. On such a diet, one begins to feel lighter, healthier, more peaceful and creative. One also doesn’t need to eat as much, so weight is lost.

I can speak with some experience here, now that meat has left me over a year ago. But you know, I’ll bet the main reason more people don’t quit the meat is that old fear that monitors all our actions: “What would people think if I gave up meat?”

I know that fear is out there because the world of meat doesn’t want to lose a single slice of its body. “What? You gave up meat! What in the world for?”

But I’m not here to advise anyone to give up meat. I only advise them to practice yoga, and then watch what happens.

Posted under General Observations

Whenever brides come for their portrait, I always say, “It’s getting real now!” And they smile in agreement as they prepare to have the reality of being a bride confirmed with a photograph. Once the image is captured, there you are. No going back now.

So, yesterday, David, my son, and I put up the Blackstone Yoga Center sign. “Yep, it’s getting real now,” I exclaimed. In a way I feel like the bride must feel when the idea of being a bride finally opens from the bud of the mind and lets the world know that the bride is here. I am sure that this idea of the bride is planted in every girl’s mind in childhood, and the first third of her life is the unfolding of this idea.

In this way we are all like the flowering of the bride. When we have a life completing idea, something that we want to be, maybe a career or a business or an artist, whatever, and that idea struggles to find it’s way to its full bloom in the sun, then we are like the bride. This is what our whole life has been waiting for, we say as the idea takes form and begins its life. Just as the bride who feels completed in her love and her gift of self to her groom, so we feel completed when our transforming idea has grown from its infancy to maturity, and we hang our sign on the front door.

An idea that completes life has only one requirement: one must be able to feel that it is through this idea, this form, that one can truly give all that one has to give. A compleing idea must be that which fits one’s nature, in fact, the idea must grow out of one’s nature.

In this way, a completing idea is very simple because it is who we are. Our nature is the soil, who we are is the flower.

Posted under General Observations

What is trust? We trust friends. We trust our machines, until they let us down and we get another one. We trust our president, until he lets us down and we get another one. We trust everything…until he, she or it lets us down. Sometimes we get over being let down, sometimes we don’t. When broken, some of the most sacred trusts create great disturbances in our lives. What is trust?

Is there one trust which can’t be broken? Is there a trust upon which all other trusts rest? Are we looking for that root trust in “all the wrong places?” Is that why we suffer so when our trusts are broken? We thought it was forever, and it wasn’t. We always think or hope that our love relationships are forever, but they seldom are. So what is trust?

This morning I opened my laptop, and I had no idea what I was going to write about. But I have a trust that when the moment needs something, that need will be met. When I open my laptop, I am opening the moment to write. And writing happens.

Now, what if that trust were applied to every moment. Actually, “every moment” is a figure of speech, because there is only one moment in which everything happens. We live in an eternal moment that is always unfolding new forms, physical forms, emotional forms, and thought forms.
So what if we trusted that whatever situation unfolds that we would have exactly what we needed to answer that moment, or be that moment in its fullness. What if we said Yes to every moment.

This would require that we don’t resist the unfolding forms of our moment. By resist I mean wanting the moment to be different that it is. Resistance always says, “Yes, but….”, or “No, I won’t put up with this.”

Trusting the moment is accepting the moment as being just perfect, just what it is without wanting it to be different. And in that trust we find that we are just what we are, just perfect and complete. Trust is saying than this moment is for me—that this life, which is this moment, is…me.

When we trust our moment to be for us, then all our secondary trusts, our loved ones, our machines, can’t let us down…because all these trusts rest on our trust of life. No matter what arises, life will not let us down…because we are life. When all the smaller trusts go, we still have trust.

Trusting life to be here for us “yokes” us to life in its wholeness. Trusting life removes the separation we feel from the world. When there is trust, there is no “me” against the “world.”

Yoga (which means “to Yoke”) is such a trust.

Posted under General Observations