There is a new teacher in town, and we all fell in love with him immediately. I mean this in the kindest, most respectful way. How could we feel otherwise? He is a disciplined and elegant practitioner. He knows his way in and out of poses and is able to clearly articulate their execution to his many students wherever his students happen to be in their individual practice. He is not showy or boastful of what he has learned. He has studied Sanskrit and chanting and can chant in Sanskrit like a scholarly Brahmin without the aid of the Roman alphabet translations. He would like his students to learn something of this part of the lineage, too; so, he chants with us weekly for half an hour before class begins. Every Saturday. For free. He is reverent of his teacher, Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, and our teacher by extension, and we learn daily to be more grateful to Jois for keeping this practice alive. Our new teacher even brings us coffee to enjoy after practice, using Pattabhi Jois's recipe as well as Jois's axiom "no coffee, no prana."
During a workshop last year, David Williams--who lays claim to having been the first Westerner to have learned the entire ashtanga syllabus directly from Pattabhi Jois--said that yogis are the real thing when it comes to alchemy. Rather than spending their time turning straw into gold, they practice the solemn art of turning prana into energy. What better way of recognizing that we are all connected, that we are one with everything as the American Tibetan Lama Surya Das insists in his latest book Make Me One with Everything. If OM belongs to the entire universe as the universal hum, the eternal inhale-exhale of the world, then the breath we work with in our daily practice is part of the primordial stock of what is and always has been. It makes sense, then, what Lama Surya Das says, breathing in and breathing out, the whole universe is my body, and our notion of separateness is the ultimate cosmic joke.
In his late 80s now, the Benedictine monk Brother David Stendl-Rast has given TED talks on the nature and art of being grateful. For Stendl-Rast, cultivating a sense of gratefulness is as important as, well, learning how to breathe. One of the most poignant comments he makes in all of his talks on the subject is a simple reminder to pause and remember that we go back so far. His observations make me think of gratefulness as a byproduct of riding the energy of the breath. Inhale. Exhale. Give and take. Send and receive. Feel what others feel. Remember where we come from. Be moved to help. Repeat.
Placed in this context, the repetitive nature of our asana practice has new meaning. In a recent interview for Tricycle magazine, the poet David Budbill talks about life as a quasi recluse and his desire to emulate the solitary lifestyle of many of the ancient Chinese poets who he says gave up civilization "to meditate and garden and watch the moon." Budbill says he is drawn to the simplicity and directness of these ancient poets. According to Budbill, the more remote the landscape, the easier it is to see how far back we go. While Budbill does not practice yoga, he is steeped in the art and practice of living moment by moment and the impermanence of things.When asked about his goal to do the same thing every day, Budbill explains: "I suppose it means that you're not involved with the novelty, but rather something deeper. If you do the same thing every day, you'll discover in that sameness an enormous variety of stuff to deal with. In fact, you'll discover such variety it will make your head swim. The variety comes from what you do with the sameness--how you engage with it."
Budbill has given me a profound lesson for my daily practice, another lesson in svādhyāya. If my concentration during practice--and after practice--travels in the direction of getting the next pose and finishing the series and beginning the next, then I am still engaged in the novelty of this tradition rather than its depth, which is always about the breath.
My fellow ashtangis and I, we joke among ourselves about coming to class for the coffee, for the gifts of this new teacher, but we understand that prana is the true reward. There is no substitute for the timeless inhale-exhale work of the breath. So, we come back to this ritual and our new teacher and his coffee one very early class after another to learn how to keep our cups full one sip of breath at a time.
Placed in this context, the repetitive nature of our asana practice has new meaning. In a recent interview for Tricycle magazine, the poet David Budbill talks about life as a quasi recluse and his desire to emulate the solitary lifestyle of many of the ancient Chinese poets who he says gave up civilization "to meditate and garden and watch the moon." Budbill says he is drawn to the simplicity and directness of these ancient poets. According to Budbill, the more remote the landscape, the easier it is to see how far back we go. While Budbill does not practice yoga, he is steeped in the art and practice of living moment by moment and the impermanence of things.When asked about his goal to do the same thing every day, Budbill explains: "I suppose it means that you're not involved with the novelty, but rather something deeper. If you do the same thing every day, you'll discover in that sameness an enormous variety of stuff to deal with. In fact, you'll discover such variety it will make your head swim. The variety comes from what you do with the sameness--how you engage with it."
Budbill has given me a profound lesson for my daily practice, another lesson in svādhyāya. If my concentration during practice--and after practice--travels in the direction of getting the next pose and finishing the series and beginning the next, then I am still engaged in the novelty of this tradition rather than its depth, which is always about the breath.
My fellow ashtangis and I, we joke among ourselves about coming to class for the coffee, for the gifts of this new teacher, but we understand that prana is the true reward. There is no substitute for the timeless inhale-exhale work of the breath. So, we come back to this ritual and our new teacher and his coffee one very early class after another to learn how to keep our cups full one sip of breath at a time.
Taoist Poet
Always everything plain and simple
No fancy words, no allusions, no
metaphors.
No quirky phrases.
No allegories, no analogies, no symbols,
no anything standing for something
else.
No analysis. No conclusions.
No grand anything.
Just the common and the ordinary
spoken in a common and ordinary way.
Just this
then that
then the other.
No fancy words, no allusions, no
metaphors.
No quirky phrases.
No allegories, no analogies, no symbols,
no anything standing for something
else.
No analysis. No conclusions.
No grand anything.
Just the common and the ordinary
spoken in a common and ordinary way.
Just this
then that
then the other.
From Nine Taoist Poems. Edited and published with permission of Bob Arnold at Longhouse/Vermont.
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