Glimmers of Newness

Glimmers of newness
amongst confusion. Love it.
Wouldn't change a thing.


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Teacher Training Anti-Ashram.

I'm going back into teacher training tomorrow. It's the second half after an extended break of the level 2 teacher training at Yogaview.

As I'm moving toward tomorrow, I'm thinking that I'd like to stop coffee and sugar-treats, and set up some rigid practice guidelines for myself for the last several weeks of the training, in addition to the course requirements.

In seclusion, like someone might experience in a visit to an ashram, it might be easier to make changes, but then before we know it "normal life" is back—which for me is a bit off from my ideals at the moment.

I want to make a real "normal life" adjustment so I'm going to attempt to make it during this time of the special focus of teacher training. Instead of an experience apart from regular life, I want to make it a part of it.

So tomorrow I'll try to go to the anti-ashram of my ordinary life and do some extraordinary honoring and practice right here.


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Enlightenment in 3 years?

…such is a supreme seeker, fit for all forms of Yoga. He can reach enlightenment in three years.
~ B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Yoga

My recent post at Elephant continues the topic:

More human than humans?


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Understanding the Blessing of the Bud!

After reading Laura's recent post at Shine the Divine, I was inspired to take pictures of some buds I saw. I was practically choking with every sentence of her recent blog—so much of what she quoted and wrote seemed to apply directly to me and some struggling I have been doing (for years).

It's funny, too, because in the language of her metaphor my new blooms are opening right now. I know this and I can witness her great wisdom. Even though I have struggled with the walls of my own situation, I have also received amazing gifts through the natural restraint of my life.

Here are some of her words:

There is a great deal of soulful maturation taking place swaddled inside the soft petaled walls of the closed bud. It is a necessary part of life, this turning inward, and I am grateful for the wisdom of nature that teaches me to stay right where I am for as long as I need to be here, safe and healing in my own way, even though there is pain involved. I am speaking of all aspects of healing, body/mind/heart/soul as a fully integrated embodied being. … All I need to do is rest right where I am and have faith that when I’m ready I will indeed open up into a flower that will be different, perhaps wiser and more beautiful than the one that died away so that this new bud could form, incubate and birth another blossom of me into the light.
~ Laura Hegfield

Oh, thank you, Laura! I needed to hear that! Read the rest of her post here:
Tight in a Bud

Radiance is the best boundary.

These quick notes after a yoga class are the base of my recent post at mulabloga!

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Let's say that March 2011 is my last month to live…

How would I live it?

(It's a prompt from #reverb11)

The good thing about a question like this is that it can bring a sense of immediacy to life choices:

Wow! I'm going to live important things now!

is a possible revelation from this kind of inquiry…

Or someone might stare in the face of their own irrelevance: What can I accomplish in one month that could make a positive impact on the world?

I think the question can also imply that the future is a burden. So if our lives were shortened things would get easier! And I think that I'm over that perception of life.

I have mixed feelings about this exercise because I've already spent years of my life between two similar self-messages:

Message 1. "I wish I was dead." I have discovered that this is a fearful child response to life (for me). It had no thrust behind it for a real suicidal threat. So I know that I don't really wish I was dead, I just sometimes wish that things were different than they are.

Message 2. "I'm going to die, anyway." This response to life allowed me to be really irresponsible, at times. I could ignore responsibilities because I was going to die anyway, so what did it matter?

So I've actually come to an understanding of life that works best if I live as if I had a future, rather than living as if my death was near—even though either one can be true at any time.

I think this is partially because I see that in cosmic time our actions do continue to affect our communities whether an individual continues to live or not. My grandparents continue to live on in me even though they are no longer in those bodies. Their actions continue to affect me. My actions affect the people in my life. I want my actions to be good and helpful because I see that they live on.

I live as if I'm a living being because I am alive, and that way has proven to be a more successful way to go. It also makes more sense to me than living like I'm dying (even though I am-nobody lives forever in these bodies!).

So here's my response:

Glad, grateful, loving
is how I take my next breath,
And forward from here.

Song of My Pelvis

(inspired by Song of Myself, by Walt Whitman)

I celebrate my pelvis, and sing my pelvis,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to my pelvis as good belongs to you.

* more adoration of the pelvis available at mulabloga *