how deep, how profound, how wonderful. the teachings this weekend were amazing, rules for life that we as yogis, says mary, must strive to live by, and certainly they have helped me turn a corner. she is coming back in the fall, it seems. here is a summary, some points.
the main new bio-mechanical thing for me was the instruction to take the front of the underside, behind the ball, forward, and the back, in front of the heel, back. This, when applied equally along both sides of each foot, grounds you deeply in the asana, and also fires up the leg muscles. brilliant. we also talked about softening in the pelvis, something that had started to come to me in my practice.
we moved with the exhale… moving with the breath is a conscious choice to follow spirit. we follow the breath. we must find the om in the breath, the power, the prana in the breath. (we did not chant, mary talked about the competition to make the longest om.) the breath removes pranic blocks and samskaras.
It is not about what you do in the pose, it is who you are in the pose. trust your breath, your wisdom, not the teachers’. hug in because you love yourself. breathe deeply and trust. strength and energy come from the wisdom in the breath, not from your muscles. breathe in through the legs and
pelvis, out through the nose. this helps deal with the feeling of stuck breath in the chest or throat, was how i understood this.
Yoga is a practice of love. a trust walk towards the inner self. and the false self is so tricky, it can disguise itself as the true self. you have to love the false self too… “hey, you old false self, i see you, i know you…”
the heart will not open when it is told to. when you feel safe and appreciated and loved, then your heart will open. the only response the heart knows is love. we must expand the center so the heart is not in us, in stead we dwell in our heart.
patanjali sutra 1: with prayers for divine blessings, now begins the instruction on yoga.
now is the here and now, an eternal point (eternity is now). yoga is here and now. the only place we can receive is in our heart, which is where our defenses are. we, as the divine, want to be cherished and adored, deeply known. there’s only one instruction on yoga, not instructions. After sutra 2, it is all commentary.
patanjali sutra 2: yoga is the restraint of movements in the consciousness.
i had a deep aha moment, when i read this and saw that it says nothing about thought, or stopping thoughts. and based on what mary said about being a creator, not a reactor, how our first job is to stay aware and not to react to our emotions, i had a realization that this sutra says that what yoga is is simply not reactiong, restraining the movements of consciousness. be still and know god. mary talked about restraining as more like watering, directing the water via irrigation systems to the vegetable, not simply spraying it everywhere.
patanjali sutra 3: practice and detachment are the means to still the movements of coinsciousness.
detachment means trusting that we are loved.
pradakshina - turning towards god - what takes us away from the true self, what takes us towards.
the problem is not with our emotions, it is with our reactions to them.
anger is not a feeling - usually it masks a fear. emotional attachments come from fear, which blocks and coagulates energy, and takes us out of ourselves.
wishing things were different is not accepting of the moment. accepting grounds you, wishing is fantasy world. we do not need to be more esoteric, we need to be more grounded. we have to ground our spirituality in real life. because the world is so hard we go into fantasy world, and we go there at the end of the exhale, where energy can get dissipated. root the energy so that it produces fruit, so it makes sweetness in the world. get rid of the ideal in your head, look at reality and accept it the way it is.
we have to do the work, we cannot expect anything of anybody else.
when we walk into a room, love, compassion, mercy should walk into the room with us.
