The Step Before the Light

A few weeks ago, I began my run looking for inspiration, revelation. I was searching for a greater understanding about darkness, about how to find the deeper parts of me.

I love to run up City Creek canyon. It's small, few if no cars, it has trails if I'm in the mood for trails, mile markers for the OCD part of me, occasional restrooms, and wild enough to keep you on your toes. They see cougars up that canyon. I guess that makes me excited and a little freaked out at the same time. I imagine myself running faster if encouraged by a cougar. Yes, morbid. I'm okay with that.

I parked in the aves and ran to City Creek entrance. Already I was hoping for inspiration: to see or to experience something that would open me up, something that would smack me in the face. I decided not to force it but rather just try to stay in the moment and let it come.

Mile one: the scenery was nice. The day was beautiful. I could hear the brook, smell the earth coming back to life. It was beautiful I was feeling good but no revelation.

Mile two: uphill. Lungs full of air. Muscles working. My feet pounding a rhythm on the pavement in some relation to my heartbeat. No revelation. Just let it come. Just be present.

Mile three-four: elevation, no revelation.

At four and a half miles, I turned around and headed back down. I felt good. The sun was in my face. Suddenly, I could see so much more than just my feet on pavement. My mind opened. I saw a mouse scurrying to put her house in order after a long winter. I saw the sun. I saw all the faces of bikers, runner, walkers (bipeds and quadrupeds), saunterers. I saw trees and sky. I felt alive.

A single ray of inspiration came just then. My own voice came into my head that said, "What is the most obvious thing you can sense right now?" I raised my eyes and was met directly with the sun. "Oh yeah, this week is the week of the spring equinox. Of course! What does that mean?" And for the next few miles, my mind just opened and allowed all that spring and finding balance meant to me to warm my mind.

This was all still prep work. I wondered why I didn't get any inspiration on the way up. It seems like it's usually on the way down that I get the inspiration. Maybe because on the way down, we're not trying so hard. Maybe its because the softness about the experience has set in, creating that vital chemistry between effort and ease, now perfect enough to illuminate the soul. Or before that moment, like The Smiths say, "you just haven't earned it yet, baby."

Then, right as I was passing through the gate, the floodgate of revelation opened up in my mind. And in rapid succession, several things I'd read, scripture, poems, lectures, thoughts, all linked themselves together to form one long chain of brilliant revelation.

It said:
You only receive the witness after the trial of your faith. (Book of Mormon scripture)

Faith is walking into the darkness, willing to keep one foot moving in front of the other with nothing but hope ahead. (me)

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight.
And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
And is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.
To know the Dark by Wendell Berry

It's like stepping out of the boat into the darkness, onto the water.

And how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking
and that calling and that moment when we have to say yes! . . .
So that when we finally step out of the boat
toward them [our true love or True Self] we find, everything holds us,
and everything confirms our courage. . .
And you'll walk across any territory,
and any darkness, however fluid,
and however dangerous to take the one
hand and the one life, you know belongs in yours
True Love by David Whyte

Faith is walking onto surfaces that you know will not hold your weight as you walk toward your True Self, . . . "the stranger who has loved you/ all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart." --Love After Love by Derek Walcott

Because it's this True Self that recognizes:

Why call
those random paths
roads?
Everyone who walks
walks
like Jesus
on water.
* by Antonio Machado

And . . .

The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves, they find their own order... the continuous thread of revelation. Eudora Welty

As I ran, I thought I need to start running with a pen. I found that the answers often come on the way back down the mountain, on the way home and not at the summit. Maybe well after the odyssey, maybe when we're 80 years old, rocking on our porch and wondering if it was all worth it. Yet, we have to be willing to climb and sweat and bleed, to show our willingness, our faith, before we are perhaps humble enough or open enough to pull out the light that was already there. . .(Just hiding in the dark 'cuz it's scared--The Cowboy Junkies) or asleep.

As I was rubbing my jaw, having been smacked so beautifully and fiercely from this revelation, decidedly deeper than inspiration, I realized that the run up was to show the Powers that Be that I was willing. I was running into the gate of the temple, not out, when I received my revelation. It was the craft necessary to invite the muse upon my shoulder. I found that darkness is the step right before the light.

This, in part, is what our asana practice is all about. It's the step, "very arduous and humbling and joyful,/by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,/and learn to be at home." A Spiritual Journey by Wendell Berry

It's the step before the light.

See you in class!

Scott

Open the Windows and Air Out Your Soul.

Get out your running shoes. Put away your snow boots. Put away your thermals. Find your swimsuit, or at least a pair of shorts.Put away your heavy coat. Start saying your goodbyes to the the ski season. Go to Contender and tune up your bike. Store your snow shovel. Open the windows and air out your soul after a long winter of hibernating. This is our last week of a long, cold, winter.

This Friday, at exactly 11:44 am, the sun will make its grand appearance at exactly half way up the horizon. It's a foreshadowing of the hot months to come. This Friday, we will be blessed with as many daylight hours as nighttime hours as the sun rises directly east and sets directly west.

The spring equinox is one of those cosmically sacred times of the year that marks an exact quarter-turn around the sun. It's a time for us to pause and thank the Powers That Be that the sun is coming back. The warmth of brightness and hope and resolve is rising.

The spring equinox It's a great time to remember our intentions we made at the beginning of the year and see how things are progressing. If one of those intentions was to do more yoga, kindly get your asana to class.

Winter is a great time to hibernate and meditate. To make intentions. Find stillness. But now it's time to balance the mindfulness with with movement. Let's get some fresh air! In yoga, the balance between activity (Rajas) and stillness (Tamas) is called Satva. It is one of the qualities known as the Gunas. This week, I invite you to reflect on your intentions you made at the beginning of the year and asess. Make adjustments if you need to.

Come to yoga and let's practice some of this balance into Satva with a little movement, breath, and mindfulness. Let's put some action to our mindfulness and air out our soul.

See you in class!

The Power of Intention

Several months ago, I decided to move to a different place in town. I had been looking for a place to live for a while and had even committed to leave my old place by February 21st. I looked and looked and looked. Nothing. Nothing that made me feel comfortable enough to move. I soon found myself with 5 days left to find a place, sign a lease, and move and I had no real prospects. Needles to say, I began to get a little nervous.

Maybe its because I'm a slow learner but it suddenly dawned on me that maybe I wasn't finding what I wanted because I didn't even know what I wanted. So, I took literally 30 seconds and wrote down about 12 things that I really wanted in a place. I didn't compromise, I didn't hedge what I wanted. I just laid it out: how much money, how much space, where, architecture type and era. Everything. Why not?

The very next day, I found it. Not just something that sort of matched what I was looking for. Everything I was looking for, down to the neighborhood, price, and even charm factor. Oh, and it had to be clean.

I was certainly pleased but not terribly surprised. Things like this have happened to me before. One dear friend says that if I really wanted a taco (perfectly Random), all I have to do is intend it and watch as my comsic taco appears from the sky. Now I'm not so nieve as to think that I get whatever I want from life, I have my share of dissapointments, but I do see the effect of regularly setting intention manifest itself over and over in life. I feel that prayer and meditation is simply a concentrated form of setting intention.

I don't believe that I'm particulary charmed, but I do believe that it's being brave enough to ask the Universe or God for what we want. I think it has something to do with what we feel we deserve.

What do you deserve?


In yoga we call this Sankalpa. It is the practice of setting an intention like planting a seed or finding a star by which to navigate your ship through this existence. This Sankalpa is one of the ways by which, I believe, we have commerce and conversation with the world that is bigger than ourselves.

Try it out. Plant your seed of intention. Choose your star. Then devote your yoga practice and your practice of everyday living to this intention and keep your faculties of attention accute.

Whatch out for falling tacos.
I'm gone this week. I'll see you next week.

Scott

Stillness

Yoga Sutra 1:2 Yoga citta vrtti nirodhah. Yoga is the cessation of fluctuations of the mind.

One of our principle objectives in yoga is to practice mindfulness. Mindfulness is awareness. We can practice mindfulness while doing almost anything: walking your dog, riding your bike, practicing yoga, or just sitting.

Getting quiet and drawing in to stillness is necessary for any good work to happen. It's this quietness, this stillness, that allows the busy waters of our mind and emotions to settle enough for us to see what's down in the depths our being.

When we find this True Self, our work becomes effortless because we no longer feel that we are trying to affect anything from a personality we've conjured from a pretense. Rather, our work generates from this deep relationship with who we truly are. Our work is simply an extension of our deeper selves, the self that knows everything.

Our work, our medium is, as one good friend says, the loudspeaker of the soul.

To find this voice, we get quiet.

Can I suggest a stillness challenge? Give yourself 10 minutes of meditation each day this week. Devote a time, lock the door, turn off your phone, let your family members and pets know that you are having some alone time and even set a timer. Start with 10 minutes and if it feels incredible, go longer.

Here are a few simple ways to practice:

There Is Practice
Simply sit, close your eyes, and acknowledge what you sense, all of your senses. Without value or judgment, simply state what you are experiencing. Rather than identifying with the pronoun "I" simply say in your mind, "There is the sound of traffic, there is fatigue, there is worry, there is an incredible urge to rush to Hatch Family Chocolates and eat 40 pounds of truffles." You know, whatever thought, emotion, sensation occurs. Simply state what is. Try not to identify with it. Just watch it.

Count Your Breaths
Choose a number and count your exhales down from that number to zero. When you loose your place start back at that number. If you get to zero, start back at that or a different number. Keep you mind only on your breath. This is a deceptively difficult practice, I feel.

Mantra
Mantra means to transcend through the use of your mind. Simply find a phrase that means something to you, a scripture, a poem, some tidbit of inspiration, and repeat it in your mind. Words are powerful. You are your word.


Scott


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Valuing Perplexity

We all have problems. We all grapple with the unknown, about the Universe, sure, but more specifically about our own complicated life. We all want to solve our problems as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Sometimes it is only by questioning, or struggling, that we are driven to understand an otherwise hidden part of ourselves and our potential. Our questions fuel us to open our hearts, to seek for inspiration, to perform the necessary work, and more profoundly, to abandon our will to the grander wisdom of the divine. We must at once be willing to seek and do, and also sit comfortably and simply be with what we don’t know or with what doesn’t feel comfortable-happily resolved with the phrase, “I don’t know.” And sometimes to get real answers we must be willing to sit in our own darkness for a while.

This human tendency for control occurs regularly in our yoga practice as many of us strive to either know everything there is to know about yoga or try to perfect our poses; we usually eagerly fill in whatever blanks present themselves in our life’s scripts.

Instead, let us practice this week the yoga principle of Santosha, or contentment, by learning to sit with and even value perplexity.

The following poem by David Whyte seems to speak directly to learning from the darkness, instead of running from it.

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~ David Whyte ~

See you in class!


Scott

Ananda: Finding Joy, Learning to Laugh, and Not Taking Ourselves TOO Seriously

Ananda is a state of complete bliss, sometimes achieved by experienced yoga practitioners. One never achieves ananda by perfecting any certain yoga posture. You may feel that you have accomplished something if you are able to understand the principles of and manifest a technical asana, however there will always be another asana that will be too hard.

Instead, we can use the asanas simply as tools to help us strengthen our bodies, find our breath, and hone our concentration, all of which will lead us to feel good and find similar joy as the blissed out yogis. Most everyone who has been to yoga, even a few times, has experienced this bliss, to some degree, upon rising from savasana, our resting pose. Bit by bit, we may see that despite life's challenges, there is much to be happy about. In fact, it may begin to feel that joy is our most natural state of being.

If a good sense of humor isn't listed in the Yoga Sutras as a pathway to our highest selves, it should be.

You know, we don't have to be so serious all the time. Take a room full of barefooted, lycra-clad, sweaty, heavy breathers and throw in some gymnastics and breakdancing, a few droning chants and there's a lot to laugh at. Especially because you know that every one in the room at sometime or other is experiencing gas anxiety . . .(you know who you are).

My favorite (and I'm guilty of this too) is to see the yogi "look-how-awesome-my-yoga-practice-is" photo performed by being photographed in some outrageous and death-defying yoga posture at the edge of a scenic cliff. How yogic is that? They'll be saying at my funeral, "he was doing yoga right up until the end. . . literally." Then in heaven, I'll have to sheepishly tell all the other people in line to get into The Pearly Gates specifically what stupid thing I did to end up dead. They'll be undoubetedly curious and want me to show them the pose. I'll tell them that I'd like to but that " . . um . . I'm not warmed up." I can see them looking at me and then taking a long look down and say, "well, maybe not yet."

There are all kinds of yoga poses we encounter in daily life. One of my favorites is the balance-intensive, Putyourunderwearon asana. Click here and comment on what your favorite daily-life yoga poses are.

If you're feeling down (or not) and want to read something really, really, funny about yoga check out this New York Times article called Guns And Yoga by Patton Oswald. My favorite line is, "Shooting guns and taking yoga on the same day was the biggest "You got chocolate in my peanut butter!" moment I've had so far in my life."

Some people even practice "Laughing Yoga," where someone just starts laughing for no reason and it catches on until no one can stop. This happened to me last April. I couldn't stop laughing for a full 30 minutes. I think about the moment and it still makes me smile. Crazy!

Let's enjoy yoga this week.

Scott

The Essential

The Little Prince is a sacred book to me. It is about a man who is stranded in the desert and meets The Little Prince, a young man who is visiting from another planet. The Little Prince is on a journey to get a little space from what he considers some of the problems in his small world, namely a rose who needs a lot of attention.

The Little Prince also finds a few friends along the way one of whom is a fox who shares a simple yet vital secret with him. The fox tells The Little Prince, "One cannot see well except with the heart. The essential is invisible to the eyes."

A few months ago, I was on a journey of my own. I found myself sitting with a group of close friends in the living room of Gratitude, a special house overlooking the Maine coastline, while I read the fox's passage to my friends.

Just like The Little Prince, I discovered something about my world. It's perfect. Perfect because of the way I love it, the way my heart is connected to it. even with its problems. I belong to it and it belongs to me.

The formula for this understanding is simple, look with your heart.

Yoga gives us this perspective. It trains our inward vision and teaches us to trust our heart more than our eyes.

I hope to see you in yoga this week.

Scott