Day 40. We are One.
I AM a child of God. We all are!
in every breath
if you’re the center
of your own thoughts
the sadness of autumn
will fall on you
but if in every breath
you strip naked
just like a winter
the joy of spring
will grow from within.
~ Rumi
Be like the sun for grace and mercy.
Be like the night to cover others’ faults.
Be like running water for generosity.
Be like death for rage and anger.
Be like the Earth for modesty.
Appear as you are.
Be as you appear.
~ Rumi
Clancy Rawks.
Remember when you were a child. All things were filled with wonder and anything was possible… Well, anything is possible and the world is wonderful! Through yoga the impossible becomes possible.
(What’s Up? ~Brett)
“Children have a lesson adults should learn, not to be ashamed of failing, but to get up and try again. Most of us adults are so afraid, so cautious, so ‘safe,’ and therefore so shrinking and rigid and afraid that it is why so many human’s fail. Most middle-aged adults have resigned themselves to failure.”
~ Malcolm X
Check out Pablo Picasso!
“It takes a long time to grow young…It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up… We should say to each of them: Do you know what you are? You are a marvel. You are unique. In all the years that have passed, there has never been another child like you. Your legs, your arms, your clever fingers, the way you move. You may become a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo, a Beethoven. You have the capacity for anything. Yes, you are a marvel. And when you grow up, can you then harm another who is, like you, a marvel? You must work, we must all work, to make the world worthy of its children.”
~ Picasso
At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, ” Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a child, whom he put among them, and said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”
~ The Holy Bible
“The law of love could be best understood and learned through little children.”
~ Mahatma Gandhi
I want to thank you all for walking (burning!) with me and (Rumi!) for these 40 Days. I especially want to thank my love, Caitlin, for her help and support over these days. I hope the ending of this 40 Days is a new beginning for us to live the lives that we were born to live. Please continue to keep growing, practicing courage, humility, truthfullness and Love.
The Truth is we are the Children of One God, we are the Ancestors of the Future and the Architects of our Destiny. We are all related, we are all connected, we are all One Family, we are all One Love.
ONE YOGA
“(With yoga practice) You will create the compact, strong, light body of a lion.”
~ Sri K Pattabhi Jois
“So my advice to all of you - see that the light that has been light by Krishnamacharya’s direct pupils does not fade at all. The light (of his teachings) should be kept burning - the yoga dipa (a lamp, light). So please keep to the practice. Let it be burning, burning, burning.”
~ Sri BKS Iyengar
“Strengthen yourself through the fire of practice and remain humble.”
~ Sri T Krishnamacharya
OM
Day 39. Burning.
Remember Rumi’s poem, Chickpea to Cook?
A chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot
where it’s being boiled.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
“Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you.
I’m giving you flavor…
God or Love is giving us Flavor. These 40 days connect us to who we really are.
Keep practicing Love. We have the power to Love, unconditionally. But to find it, just like the chickpea and the cook, we must Burn.
The cook says,
“I was once like you,
fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time,
and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings. 
“My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with practices,
and boiled some more, and boiled
once beyond that,
and became your teacher.”
“The real irony of spiritual growth is that instead of being some miraculous experience, it feels a lot more like going to pieces. As soon as we open ourselves and our lives up to be healed, suddenly all kinds of unpleasant feelings come to the surface. We experience fear, disappointment, shame, even rage.
If you ask for wisdom or higher virtues, know that they only come through trials and tribulations. If you ask for inner peace, God will send you a storm in which to practice and cultivate peace.
You can stay stagnant in your comfort zone on or off the mat, but in order to transcend yourself and gain wisdom, you need to go through fire, walk on hot coals, travel through the desert of your own mind, and come through the other side transformed.”
~Baron Baptiste
The path is not easy. To follow the path of Yoga you don’t have to go to India, and become a Hindu. You have to find the path of Love, heart, intuition and truth. Our work is to bring Love and Light to all situations all the time, no matter what. If you are anything like me, we have lots of work to do…
It takes courage to become truth. Tupac said this, “We talk a lot about Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., but it’s time to be like them, as strong as them. They were mortal men like us and every one of us can be like them. I don’t want to be a role model. I just want to be someone who says, this is who I am, this is what I do. I say what’s on my mind.”
Father Joe Pereira teaches that Jesus is the supreme example of a Yogi who claims that “The Father and I are One.”
Imagine the wisdom and strength it must take to, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.”
Imagine the courage it would take to ask for forgiveness for someone who is crucifying you, “Father forgive them for they know not what they are doing.”
As Tony Demello, saids, “if you ‘look’ at the serene countenance of the crucified Saviour, you may see a ‘laughing Buddha’!”
We have divinity inside of us, we have to burn away all that keeps us from that truth.
“You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”
~ Jesus
Let us keep Burning!
Day 38. Rock On.
“There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.”
“We’re all Hitler inside. We’re all Christ inside… try to work on the good bit of you.”
~ John Lennon
“Why Fearing?”
Guruji (Sri K Pattabhi Jois) was know for his ability to read his students, sometimes casually asking during a difficult asana, “Why fearing?” Guruji saw the student’s struggle was mostly result of fear rather than a lack of flexibility or strength.
Iggy Pop looks like fear has lost it’s grip on him (below)?
I look around at many musicians, past/present who are living/have lived their dreams with out giving into to the fears that would have kept them from singing, dancing and creating. I asked Win Butler of Arcade Fire, “Did you know you were gonna ‘make it’?”
He said he never doubted, never feared, even when they were paying to play shows and driving their own broken down van to perform.
(Win Butler, Matt Bonner and Regine at ZZTOP’s (Me!) Charity basketball game Yoga Warmup in Montreal)
Has your fearing caused you to sacrifice your ‘music’, your creativity?
“In Indigenous cultures. When someone is feeling ill, the shaman asks ‘When did you stop dancing? When did you stop singing? When did you stop being enchanted by story? When did you become uncomfortable with the sweet stillness of silence?’ The questions of the shaman reveal a more holistic approach to health. It demonstrates how central creative expression is to physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being.”
~Angeles Arrian
“So the thing is, if you really want to get it [spiritual enlightenment] permanently, you have got to do it, you know.be healthy, don’t eat meat, keep away from nightclubs, and meditate…
I’d rather be one of the devotees of God than one of the straight, so-called sane or normal people who just don’t understand that man is a spiritual being, that he has a soul…
From the Hindu point of view each soul is potentially divine, the goal is to manifest the divinity. The word yoga means union and the union is supposedly between the mind, the body, and the spirit, and yoga isn’t lying on nails or standing on your head. I mean, there’s various forms of yoga and they’re all branches on one big tree. The Lord, or God, has got a million names, whatever you want to call him, it doesn’t matter as long as you call him, Jesus is on the mainline, tell him what you want. Going back to self-realization, one guru said he found no separation between man and God, saving man’s spiritual unadventurousness, and that’s the catch, everybody’s so unadventurous. We’re all conditioned, our consciousness has been so polluted by the material energy it’s hard to try and pull it all ways in order to really discover our true nature. Every one of us has within us a drop of that ocean and we have the same qualities as God, just like a drop of the ocean has the same qualities as the whole ocean. Everybody’s looking for something and we are it. We don’t have to look anywhere—it’s right there within ourselves.”
~ George Harrison
This singing art is sea foam.
The graceful movements come from a pearl
somewhere on the ocean floor.
Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge
of driftwood along the beach, wanting!
They derive
from a slow and powerful root
that we can’t see.
Stop the words now.
Open the window in the center of your chest,
and let the spirits fly in and out.
~ Rumi (Where Everything Is Music)
Day 37. A Great Yogi.
A GREAT YOGI
In my travels I spent time with a great Yogi.
Once he said to me,
“Become so still you hear the blood flowing
through your veins.”
One night as I sat in quiet,
I seemed on the verge of entering a world inside so vast
I know it is the source of
all of
us.
~ Mirabai
Be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign
that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running
from silence.
The speechless full moon
comes out now.
~ Rumi
Day 36. Waves.
Vanda Scaravelli started practicing yoga at around 50 years old, while going through a difficult emotional period due to sudden death of her husband.
Her book Awakening The Spine changed the way I looked at Yoga. Her emphasis on Nature and Breath brought a softness and a receptivity to the Art of Yoga. She says, “It is not so much the performance of the exercises that matters, but rather the way we are doing them.”
Erich Schiffman on Scaravelli: “She liked to lay in the sun… You know, she was doing her own yoga. She was giving expression to how the energy was going to move. And I remember I was doing something and she said, “Oh, you’ve got to put more feeling into it, more joy into it.” And I was like, oh, yeah. OK. “Just like more love into it, not just bend yourself, do everything just right. Be a little softer, put a little more breath, put a little more love into it.”
About Yoga, Vanda said, “I did not know that it would help me because I practised it like tennis or any other game, for me it was fun. But it acted on me much more profoundly than I could understand at the time. A new life entered my body. In nature flowers bloom in spring and then again in autumn. This is what I felt was happening to me”.
In Switzerland, Vanda studied first for 8 years with BKS Iyengar and then refined the study of breath with Desikachar, the son of Krishnamacharya, who was invited by Krishnamurti. Without searching for it, she studied with two of the world’s greatest yoga teachers, with whom she kept up a true friendship. Later when Desikachar passed through Florence, he always visited her and chanted for her. After studying with teachers, her own practice became here Guru. In Awakening the Spine she wrote it was when she stopped having classes and became her own pupil that yoga revealed itself to her in all its beauty.
In a Yoga Journal article, she explained what yoga meant for her. “It is health, it is comprehension, it is creation, and it is above all love. When you are open, love comes in. It is when you are defensive and fearful that you close the doors. When you are open, you can communicate with the person that is near you, with nature, with the world, and you become One with everything that surrounds you”.
Turned by the Waves of Love
Know that the wheeling heavens are turned by waves of Love:
were it not for Love, the world would be frozen, stiff.
How would an inorganic thing transform into a plant?
How would living creatures sacrifice themselves
to become endowed with spirit?….
~ Rumi
Lotus Flower ~ Radiohead (Thom Yorke Rules!!!)
Day 35. ssssssssshhhh.
“Listen to your Heart.”
~Thom Yorke (Radiohead)
There is power in listening. Our communication (commune, unity, union) is often based on talking rather than listening. Real communication is often beyond words. Take your time…
“Conversation was never begun at once, nor in a hurried manner. No one was quick with a question, no matter how important, and no one was pressed for an answer. A pause giving time for thought was the truly courteous way of beginning and conducting a conversation. Silence was meaningful with the Lakota, and his granting a space of silence to the speech-maker and his own moment of silence before talking was done in the practice of true politeness and regard for the rule that, “thought comes before speech.” ~Luther Standing Bear
Julia Butterfly teaches that just because something doesn’t have a mouth, it is ridiculous to think it can’t communicate. All of nature is constantly communicating, our work is to get present and to (re)learn how to listen.
“Truly listening means we can receive from any source - from great teachers, or from an acquaintance or a complete stranger, even from an animal, a plant, a mountain.” (Desikachar) In effect we can learn from everyone and everything. And of course, that includes ourselves.
However, the most important source is within us, not outside. “Learning to listen is the most important step towards being ready for meeting the ‘special source’ that resides in our heart. But it is not always easy. The more we think we know something, the less we tend to listen.”(Desikachar) Somehow or other, we have seemingly lost our connection, our link, with our own heart.
~Tomas Downey from “What Are We Seeking” by T.K.V. Desikachar.)
http://www.khyf.net/khyf/articleview.aspx?spage=A&DParticleid=45&icategorylist=
(The ears of Ganesh signify that a perfect person is the one who has a great capacity to listen)
The Jesus of your spirit is inside you now.
Ask that one for help, but don’t ask for body-things…
Don’t ask Moses for provisions
that you can get from Pharaoh.
Don’t worry so much about livelihood.
Your livelihood will turn out as it should.
Be constantly occupied instead
with Listening to God.
~Rumi
Dupree’s ‘Ness Speech.
Dupree’s Pod Speech.
