Everyday Sacred

The Yoga of Gratitude

While the turkey is cooking, I actually have a bit of time to blog. I am grateful for that and for take out trimmings.

Today, the topic of conversation is gratitude. Now, a 1 day harvest celebration of gratitude is a wonderful thing but, what about gratitude as a practice? What about gratitude as an art of perception? What would this do for us? How challenging would this become?

A harpist friend of ours, who died of cancer several years ago (on the same day as my Dad died), spent her last days in deep gratitude for the beauty she saw around her. She was moved to tears by a bowl of apples, a song, her daughter's smile. She knew something about paradox and perfection that we have forgotten. If you really open yourself to such radically deep gratitude, it will bring you,weeping, to your knees. To live in total appreciation for what is real. To love what you have not what you want. To drop the agendas, preferences, opinions, judgements and any other conceptual filters we place over our experiences is the highest Tantra. It is the adoration of the manifest as the growing tip of God.

I am wrapping up 3 months of an autumn yoga practice. Autumn energies are predominantly Air Element (Metal for the Taoists). An autumn practice is designed to make the whole person more oxygenated. It generates winds that move out dead orgone energy held in the body (especially the lungs). A good autumn practice will evolve over the 3 months of the season to:
1.Build strength and stability
2.Dredge up unconscious material that has been keeping you stuck
3.Detoxify the body, surrender old emotional patterns, make informed choices

Lungs are the organ of the autumn practice. They repesent a spectrum of emotions ranging from courage to grief. Depending on how these emotions are expressed, they can be toxic or healing. In balance and with stability,we find the courage to grieve and the courage to be happy.

This takes time. We are cyclical creatures. Last autumn, I was still in the initial phases of grieving my father's death. I needed to go through a whole turning of the wheel before I was ready to be released from the grief-cycle. I needed to come into another Lung Season to let go.

Hatha means sun and moon. The early yogins knew the powerful influences of cosmic forces. They also knew the secrets of how to use them for transformation. The mid-autumn practice comes in the sign of Scorpio (secrets, the unconscious). The Scorpio full moon fell in Taurus (what we have). The full moon's energies have a way of popping your issues into full view.

They sure popped mine. I received many insights about my self-identity (in relationship to my father) and how this actually was reflected in the life I've built. That insight came after a big piece of grief-work, of finding the courage to really feel the pain and the hurt around that relationship.

It's no coincidence that I've had a respiratory infection for 2 weeks. The body, the Earth element, is the last to reflect the change. No transformation of consciousness is ever complete until it has been integrated on all levels of our being. This takes time.

It smells like the turkey is done. It's time to receive what we've harvested (all the fruits, both bitter and sweet) and embrace it all,
with gratitude.

SACRED HUNTING

In my last post, I spoke about fear but you can't really discuss fear without talking about courage. We may need to model a new understanding of courage. What do courage, fear, the new moon, Pat Robertson endorsing Rudi Guliani and the looming crises in Pakistan have to do with your life and your yoga practice? Some days the sacred revelation finds you (this is not always pleasant) and some days you have to hunt for it. On days like this, the waters around you are calm but, you know the winds are up on a distant shore. You know eventually, they will reach you. On hunting days, you've got to cast a wide net and take a long look at how patterns are setting up.

If the universe is a perfect mirror of our inner Truth (and I believe it is), then solutions focused solely on external measures do not change the fundamental cause. Innovation cannot come from the thinking that created the problem.

When things are quiet, we get to have a vision of what we want to create. We get to intuit the opportunity presenting itself. At the new moon, we get to plant the seed of that vision.

Let's look at how to apply your yoga practice to being a global citizen and a peaceful warrior. That is the archetype of the Autumn practice. I credit my teacher Nevine Michaan (founder of Katonah Yoga, www.katonahyogacenter.com, and one of the most brilliant and generous people I've ever known) with my understanding of a seasonal yoga practice. As the seasons change, energetic differences effect all organic life. As we change, so should our yoga practice.

Autumn is the season when the energy moves from the branches to the roots. We turn our focus within, concentrating more on the spiritual than the material.

November 9th begins the last moon cycle of Autumn. In this Scorpio new moon, my garden is finally dying. The morning glories bloomed all through the unreasonably warm October. Now it's quite cold and Nature is packing up. However, humans love to hold on. We resist the dying process, even when it's metaphorical, even when death occurs so that something new and better can take its place. Our bodies support this effort to resist change. Breathing is diminished. Energy flow slows to a trickle in an effort to stop time and freeze frame the past.

It takes courage to stand centered in eternity as life is changing so fast and danger may be looming on the horizon. It takes a felt sense of stability and a belief in the Basic Goodness of life to determine if the danger is real. We were designed to take immediate action when we sensed danger, not to live with it year after year. This makes our responses inappropriately dull (tamasic) or extreme (rajasic).

For the Taoists and early yogis, Autumn was lung season, the season of the element Air and of the emotions of courage and grief. According to Taoist theory, fear is a winter emotion. The work of Autumn, opening the flow of life force in the physical-psycho-spiritual system of the lung primes you to use the winter months to by pass the chilling grip of holding back in fear and, instead, flow with possibility. If we can receive it, winter's gift to us is to nurture the vision of creating something new.

Grief is a quality of energy that contracts the lung. Most of the time, we resist letting ourselves go with the full contraction of grief. This is why many of us don't grieve fully. We arrest the process. In order to get on with living, we need to give ourselves over to grief. Tears and sobs are meant to wash the feelings out of us. It takes courage to give over to grief. Look at how confused we are about grief. We still idolize the iconic image of a stoic Jackie and a saluting John-John at President Kennedy's funeral. Perhaps this is why African Shaman and author, Maladoma Some, felt Americans could not approach the grief rituals so common in indiginous cultures without shattering. We have not grieved Viet Nam or the Gulf War or Iraq.

If you can't flow through the organic cycles of grief, how can you find anything deeper than one dimensional, image-driven courage? How can you understand that the most courageous thing is to make peace, to stop acting out of self-interest and to stand in Truth without flinching or resorting to a power-will display?

This brings me to the Autumn practice. In the earlier Autumn, we emphasized the warrior poses. They create stability and strength. As you ground, the energy flows upward into natural, lung-opening backbends. Now, in late Autumn, twists, especially standing ones, set up a dialogue between the kidney and lung. These really move the blocked energy out of the back of the lung (where infections start) and create a more pliant kidney and lower back. At this point, we cycle through many dimensions of experience: contract-expand, inhale-exhale, courage-grief, fear-gentle acceptance... Feeling everything. Trying not to get trapped in any of it, at least, not for too long.

Find some time to practice today.

EVERYDAY SCARED

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES
Yesterday, my 11 yr. old son quite innocently asked me if the name of my blog was Everyday Scared. It was, of course, Halloween. He's always had impeccable timing. That got me thinking about what it means to be scared, how there are really 3 different somatic responses to fear and how we may need to take a fresh look at what it means to be scared. Is it really so bad, after all?

THE 3 WINDS
Yogic philosophy holds that all creation is woven from a combination of 3 types of energy:Saatva(neutral, centered, Absolute), Rajas(positive, assertive, aggressive) and Tamas(negative, passive, lethargic). These energies are known as the 3 Gunas, the 3 Hands of God and the 3 Winds.

THE POSSUM RESPONSE
Fear is a primative response that zaps the adrenal glands into the fight or flight response. This served our prehistoric ancestors well by giving them a shot of adreneline to act fast and strong. As the work of Dr. Hans Selye, the father of stress research, made famous, there is good stress (eustress) and bad stress (distress). One makes us stronger and the other kills us. A yoga practice relieves the bad kind but, it goes further. Longterm, low grade adreneline stimulation has become a way of modern life. This type of stress leads to the Possum Response. You freeze up and shut down. The buttocks, quads, calves, back and shoulders tense and bulk up. The pelvis tucks under(pulling on the already strained hamstrings and lower back), the chest collapses, respiration becomes shallow and digestion slows down. We become Tamasic, unable to respond fast enough or creatively enough to adapt to changing circumstances. Tamasic responses are habitual and do not alleviate the fear. They preserve the fear because they would not exist if fear disappeared.

LOOSE CANONS
Rajastic responses tend to be ungrounded, impulsive and even more dangerous. Road rage is an example. The term 'hot-headed' reveals the firey nature of unchecked rajas. Grounded, centered rajastic aggression is the Samauri warrior. History is loaded with examples of rajastic aggression and righteousness and tamasic denial and knowing when to act. The difference is the presence of Saatva.

ENLIGHTENMENT IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER
What is this illusive 3rd current saatva? It's always present. It makes itself known in our more lucid moments. It's a peak experience, a runner's high, a particularly good meditation, amazing sex when you melt into each other, a revelation, an epiphany... We've all had them. The big headline is THIS IS MINI SATORI and it's a naturally occuring state of consciousness in many people nowadays. Spiritual practices, like yoga, are pathways to grounding this awareness into a platform of consciousness. You are developing the capacity to live more and more from this place. You are developing the ability to flip a switch (an evolutionary sleeper cell) and access this dimension of your consciousness. You'll still get pissed off, depressed and anxious. Emotions are real but the stories around them may not be as solid as you think. You don't get so enmeshed. You're tired of the drama. You're driven by a higher purpose.

SOUNDS GOOD BUT...
Anyone who has ever tried to break a habit knows how hard it is. Habits are held in place tamasically by our breath, our bodies and our unconscious. The Tantric Yogis knew this and they had tricks for jumpstarting us out of our inertia. BOO! A little fear, discomfort, stress and evolutionary tension are ways of applying the heat of Rajas to move us out of the torpor of Tamas. Rajas gets us moving in the direction of our unfolding potential. When you are enlightened you know the truth of your being is Saatva. The face you had before you were born is the One Face. However, your playground is here in the world of duality... Rajas and Tamas. Everyone of us has a chance to unfold something good, true and beautiful. It may involve risk and being scared everyday. It may even result in Everyday Scarred (I couldn't resist).

REIMAGINING FEAR
Maybe we need to define another type of fear...
How about fear that is grounded, clear-headed, accepting of what is and unwilling to be defeated? How about fear that doesn't rob us of our vision and convictions and can coexist with courage and compassion? In this type of fear, we stay in the present, in relationship with the other and ourselves. We are able to feel our feelings and own them as our own without resorting to blame. We are able to respond fully and creatively to injustice, to suffering, to beauty and, of course, to the innocent wisdom of a child. Maybe Everyday Scared is another way of saying Everyday Alive.