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.
Geoffrey Burbridge, the renown astronomer who traced all life on earth to stardust, died this week. It was Dr. Burbridge's research which led us to understand that the chemical constituents of our bodies come from an exploding star--the same star--and introduced a scientific underpinning to the idea that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin.
Composed of cosmic building blocks, of stardust,"luminous beings are we, not this crude matter," as Jedi Master Yoda says.
Kinda raises the bar, doesn't it, when you think of life like that?
I hope they name a star after him.
a breath between
waking, and
the dream.
between heartbeats.
between heartbeats.
abandon that seam
holding disparate the pieces...
the now and then.
the here and there.
the you.
the me.
Beginner's Mind is a term we often hear, one to remind serious yogis to get a little less serious. To drop the pretense, the showiness, the I'm-All-That-Asana. To soften up and let down their guard. To find the ease--the play--within their yogic work.
Directed at true beginners, it helps take the pressure off, assuring them that we're all in this together. That no one's holding them to an unattainable standard.
But Beginner's Mind is really simply a reminder to stay in the Now--for everyone. To lose the I-Should-Have, the I-Could-Have's. To stop worrying about what happened yesterday, what could happen tomorrow. To recognize that everyday is a new day (on the mat or off) and we need to meet that newness with an equally fresh attitude--a beginning.
Of course we start with the breath--because there's no better way to get present than to focus on the breath. Your last breath can't sustain you; your future breath holds no promise. Only this breath--this one right now--is the inhale, the exhale, that matters. The current breath that is prana's currency.
We expand with the potential of the breath and get receptive in the outer skin. We stay open...wide open...and invite a surprise.
In the Now, there's no blame, no regret, no expectation, no judgement. There is only what we are doing, what we are feeling.
And this is the true irony of Beginner's Mind: it's really not about mind at all. Rather, you get out of your head and into the rest of your body, into your senses. You smell yourself. You taste yourself.
Our view of the past, our vision of the future, these are carried in the mind. Our senses, though, deliver us the moment. When listening, smelling, feeling, "now" becomes a verb, a process--like art.
And this is where we live.
Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? asked Alice.
That depends a great deal on where you want to get to, said the Cat.
It doesn't much matter where-- said Alice.
Then it doesn't matter which way you go, said the Cat.
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass
As our calendar pages flip resolutely from December 2009 to January 2010, we are confronted with a choice. A Choice. Continue business as usual. A just-another-day-in-a-long-line-of-days kind of thing (as the old saw goes: many people look forward to the New Year for a new start on old habits.) And the alternative? Use this admittedly random moment as a metaphor for the Fork in the Road.
Sure, in some ways it's just another day. But as a society, we mark the day in red (it's a national holiday, after all), give it a new number. We clean it up, brush it off, and call it 01.01. Since it's all dressed up in Red Letters, why not take it out on the town?
Named for the Roman god Janus--the god of portals, of beginnings and ends, a double-headed deity who looked over one shoulder into history, and forward to the future--much as we all do, most of the time. One of Janus' faces turned westward as the day ended, another watched dawn break in the East. And in his hand, he held a key. Symbolizing our perch on the threshold, the key is our capacity to unlock a door to the future, to make ourselves at home there.
New Year's Day. 01.01. Spotless as a fresh sheet of paper, begging for inscription. Vivid as a heartbeat on a first date. Do something special with it: decide to call it a Fork in the Road, and we offer ourselves an opportunity. A Choice.
Teetering unsteadily at this threshold, we peer down the shadowy alleys of foregone days and their foregone conclusions, and into the twinkling white light of the future--a city of promise.
To map our path, like the double-headed god, we must be of two minds: embrace our subjective desires, while simultaneously examining our goals. Employing a scathing objectivity, we consider where we are, where we'd like to go, and how we might get there. Determining your future isn't exactly MapQuest material, is it?
Who do you want to be? What do you want? How much do you want it? Gaze deeply within the crystal ball of your own mind, so that you may create not only a future perfect, but divine.
And just so you know, Janus doesn't carry the key. You hold that key in your own hand.
PS. If by chance you missed the magic of 01.01, don't despair: the future begins again each day, each day.
The fulcrum between accumulating darkness and the return of the light, winter solstice wields an unrestrained potency. As with so many of our celebrations--birthdays, anniversaries, even school reunions--we hesitate and recognize the passage of time.
But unlike these personal milestones, the solstice is shared by us all. It's a communal event, as we witness dawn tarrying day by day. As shadows gather, folding around us like heavy curtains, that feeling of being slightly cheated by the waning daylight is mutual.
Throughout our adult lives, we glance back anxiously, watching as childhood fades, as doors close. We see time as relentless, maybe even heartless, on its grim march. Did we miss an opportunity? Should we have, could we have...?
Instead of a time line, the solstice reminds us of nature's cycles: time spins a whorl, graceful as a seashell. It offers up the hospitality of an open door. If we hop softly over that threshold--buoyed by hope--and allow some uncomfortable baggage to remain behind, we find our heart is feather-light, the future ablaze with potential.
Carry only what you need for the days ahead, when the glow advances back into our lives, welcome and warm. Let optimism abide in your heart. Let your eyes see the possibilities.
Celebrate the solstice with friends, to remember that the dark times are easier to bear with the reassurance of a supportive arm. When the light around us fades, we need to amp up our own power, shine our own light a bit brighter. Then watch gratefully as the world emerges from the shadows into radiance once again.
Abundant sunshine warms the skin, lifts the heart. Tinkling ice cream trucks troll the neighborhood. The garden rages its quiet fury. Squeals of delight emerge from backyards. It's summer--full on.
Our conception of summer was formed in childhood, when the season brought day after glorious day of freedom and ease--interrupted only by the early morning torture of a swimming lesson in an unheated pool!
There was little to do and gobs of time to do it. Summer was when we learned to whistle around a long blade of grass; learned to turn a cartwheel; learned how many ripe cherries we could consume without a belly ache. (Well, maybe we had to learn that one again every year.)
Summer was filled to the bursting brim with fun. Camping, berry picking, water skiing. Picnicking. Skim boarding. Softball. But mostly, it was just pleasantly topped off with nothing: lazy days and long, long evenings--when there was no place to go and no time you had to be there. When laying on your back and gazing at the sky constituted a full schedule. Giggling with friends, dissolving yourself in a book--that was enough. Summer was a time when you could simply dig a hole in the sand for no other reason than to watch the sea refill it. Catch bees in a mason jar. Open a lemonade stand and chat with whoever cared to stop. Walk all the way to the corner store just to share a popsicle, licking it with delicious precision, then admire one another's raspberry red tongue.
You could BE. HERE. NOW.
Sometimes we speak of yoga as our "work" and in the sense that it's an exchange of energy, this is true. It has meaning for us, it's important, and that can seem like Serious Business. But in the sense that we do our yoga for its own reward, it more rightfully belongs under the "play" column, doesn't it?
So when we're on our mat, we seek ease. We attempt to lighten the load, drench ourselves in freedom. We aim to make our yoga fun. How do we do that?
First: we drop our expectations. Next: we forget that our yoga has a time slot between this and that. Then: be here now, in our bodies. With our breath. It's as straightforward as that. Just us--and maybe some friends--getting out of the limited territory of our heads and expanding into our whole being.
Finding the way to an endless summer on our mats--even in mid-December.
Flop down in it. Nap on it. Picnic. Play. Lay back and watch the clouds dance their transformation above you, the sky as blue as a dream.
Grass.
Soft and inviting, cool and green--a wide open expanse of lawn calls to us, entreats us. We run across it with wild abandon, joyous and free as summer itself.
But begin to tread just one path, and the grass underfoot will become crushed and ragged. It doesn't take long before your route looks tired, clumps of dirt showing, maybe a rock or two. The rest of the yard turns weedy, overgrown, and will no longer beckon an invitation. Instead, we avoid deviating from our chosen path; we stick to it, and it becomes even more worn, the rest of the yard more impassable.
This very thing happens in the body. We pick a path: call it routine, call it habit, call it injury. We use the same muscles, in the same way, and avoid others. We wear ourselves a pathway--physically and mentally--our minds guiding us over a terrain of least resistance, this Common Ground.
But everything is retrainable. Our bodies are constantly creating new cells, but they make the cells we (unconsciously) demand. If we sit around and don't do anything, our bodies will create fibres that are quite capable of sitting around and not doing anything--thank you very much!
For sure, if you have an inflamed injury, you want to wait until that inflammation cools. But then, the best therapy is to use those injured muscles--skillfully. With awareness. When we strengthen underused muscles, we relieve compensatory action. We release connective tissue, refining our alignment. We develop different muscles, deeper muscles. Fresh synapses in the brain fire as we explore new territory, create new neural pathways.
We alter our habit.
Cautious activity will keep scar tissue from forming and impinging movement. It will put out the call to cells to start building active, able fibres (order up!), and muscular atrophy will be warded off. Your transition back to full health will be swifter, more easeful.
How do we do this? (Awww...cummon...you know what I'm gonna say!) Yes, yoga. Alertness to the body, a "getting to know yourself," is yoga's greatest gift. It begins by becoming sensitive, by listening with attention, yearning to know yourself better.
As we increase our awareness, we find revelations around the corner of every conscious breath. Are you ready to find out who you really are, what you're really capable of accomplishing? Of diving deeper into consciousness?
The breath unites us, helps us coalesce mind, body and spirit. A thoughtful breath calms the chatter in the mind and encourages concentration. It releases connective tissue enabling us to move freely, without pain. And breath builds the prana, enhancing our energy. We soften, become mindful, listen to our breath, then find renewed integration, renewed vitality.
Mow your lawn, and feel free to step off the path.
******************************************************************************************************
beyond the senses are the objects.
beyond the objects is the mind.
beyond the mind, the intellect.
beyond the intellect, the self.
beyond the self, the non-manifest.
beyond the non-manifest, the Infinite.
beyond the Infinite, there is nothing...
this is the end: Pure Consciousness.
Katha Upanishad
