From Alice in Wonderland's tardy White Rabbit to the petty thieving of Peter Cottontail; from Saturday Morning's mischievous Bugs Bunny to bedtime tales of the ever-wily Brer Rabbit; from long floppy ears to soft fluffy tails, bunnies populate our myths and stories like...well, like prolific little rabbits! Of course, no hare looms larger in our collective psyche than the Easter Bunny, hippity hopping down the Bunny Trail delivering those beautiful coloured eggs. But wait a minute: a rabbit delivering eggs? Wassup, doc?
This story begins with Eostre, Anglo-Saxon Goddess of the Dawn, approached one day by an ungainly, unhappy bird. A colossal mistake has been made, sobbed the bird. Her true calling was a rabbit, and it was only in bunny form that she could be herself. Sympathizing, Eostre granted the bird her wish, and in gratitude, the new bunny returned each year at Eostre's festival to lay eggs--an avian feat she apparently retained from her past. Hippity, hoppity, Eostre's on her way.
From Eostre's name we derive "east," the direction of the breaking dawn, as well as Easter, which coincides with the ancient celebration of the Vernal Equinox, when daylight begins to grow longer than the darkness of winter's night. (Linguists posit that the name is also the root of Esther, the Jewish queen celebrated at the spring festival of Purim.)
With Easter we get bright blossoms, and seeds sprouting enthusiastically in the warmth of the lengthening days. Tadpoles become frogs. All life on Earth renews itself: animals pair and mate, and the great branches of old bare trees become green again.
Things change.
And the egg and the hare are symbols of this manifest regeneration, this festival of fecundity.
The consummate demonstration of potentiality, while humble and supremely delicate, the egg contains all that is necessary for new life. It is its own small universe.
And the rabbit? Well, two bunnies can make 72 bunnies in one year alone, comfortably nominating them for fertility's most contented Poster Animal. With Spring all about the wonderful, magical abundance of life, the bunny embodies not only nature's renewal, but also captures the vivacity, the joy, the playfulness of the season.
Get in touch with your Inner Easter Bunny and celebrate a new dawn: the birth of an idea, the pursuit of a goal, a fresh purpose. After all, we too maintain our own small universe; everything we need for our own expansive growth we carry within. Tap into it. Dive into it. Discover what wonderful stuff you're made of, and like Alice tumbling down the Rabbit Hole, learn to see from a novel perspective.
Feed your head.
Lam
Vam
Ram
Yam
Ham
OM
silence
Into simulating your chakras? Begin at muladhara, the root, and work your way up the sushumna, singing these mantras to awaken Kundalini, the latent consciousness coiled at the base of your pelvic floor, encouraging her rise to the crown of your head, and the balance of your energy body.
Lam at Muladhara, your center of support, then Vam at Svadhistana--the seat of the vital forces. Follow with Ram at Manipura chakra, where will and ego reside, Yam at the focus of love at Anahata chakra. Next comes Ham at Vishuddha in the throat, the powerful centre of communication, and Om, at Anja, the third eye of Insight. Silence is the song that completes the sequence at the seventh chakra, the sahasrara, envisioned as a thousand-petalled lotus at the crown of the head, with the ability to create integration.
Tap into the battery charge of each spinning energy disk, amassing prana as you travel upward, until your feel the vitality surging through you--free and as strong as a river in spring.
All yoga poses should be therapeutic...should be therapeutic. But what does this mean? What component is necessary to transform our asana from simple exercise to therapy?
Alignment, certainly. But is elegant alignment enough?
Therapy--whether physical or psychological--begins with a process of investigation, and the goal is curative. Etymologically, the word therapy actually means healing. Therapy is meant to have an ameliorative effect; it is curing, beneficial, good.
So to be good yoga, we want our postures to help heal us, to be beneficial to our well-being--inside and out. And what can we do to make this happen? It all starts with being clear in our intention.
When we have therapy as a goal, and move toward it, alignment becomes something we participate in with such true caring, engagement becomes as critical as breath. We bring a commitment to become something more, to deepen our knowledge--our awareness--of ourselves.
As the subtlest nuances of our physical and emotional landscape become known to us, we grow more sensitive to our body's innate intelligence. We give it what it asks for, and in return, it responds with what we need. We become more fully ourselves, as the sphere of our life grows and deepens. We expand into our potential, leave the ordinary behind. Wings wide open, heart wide open, we fly free and discover our uniqueness.
In the world at large we act from the skin out. In the morning, we shower, dress, check ourselves out in the mirror--witnessing our outer selves, as others see us. All the long day, our senses are busy retrieving the outside information necessary to navigate our lives.
In our yoga class, though, we are invited inside. We think about our muscles, our fascia. We position/ re-position our bones with meticulous precision. Listening to our breath, we move with it, work with it, directing our energy within. We taste ourselves--what stock we're made of.
With this interior focus, we establish a radical reference point, a radical view of ourselves; we perform that greatest of magical tricks--The Change In Perspective.
From this new vantage, we find new challenges, new satisfactions. New cares, and new commitments.
People may think yoga is about bending into a pretzel, but they have no idea that our goal is actually to turn ourselves completely inside out. To see the seams, then erase them, knitting ourselves a deeper, more expansive, and more integrated reality. Discrepancies minimized. Partitions dismantled. Seamless and whole.
BTW...have you noticed that a pretzel is shaped like a heart? Just another unexplained but delicious moment of synchronicity.
