Just gotta write this down before I forget it...I realized something about music and vibration today. When we create any vibration - emotion, sound, thought - If our universe is truly one fabric, then we forever change that fabric every time we create a vibration. If I play a note on my guitar, the silence afterward is different - literally feels different - than if I had not played a note. This little ripple in the space/time continuum may be small, but like a stone thrown in a still pond, it's ripples continue to move outward - an there is only one pond with no shore!
So now I have a really god reason to practice.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Monday, October 4, 2010
Yoga as a tool
"Is Yoga a religion?" is a question I hear a lot. As teachers of yoga, our response is often to downplay, or to reinforce the idea that yoga is for everyone and won't get in the way of you and your religion. I'm not so sure we are being truthful as teachers when we say this. It is true yoga is a discipline and not a religion. However, as a tool yoga is so effective it's like using a titanium shovel with a homing device to dig for the truth. Religion generally puts belief first and practice second. This can lead to a real lack of inquiry. If you decide to start practicing yoga, get ready to start asking yourself some really interesting and possibly uncomfortable questions about what you hold to be true.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Communication Breakdown
Hey, girl, stop what you're doin'!
Hey, girl, you'll drive me to ruin.
I don't know what it is that I like about you, but I like it a lot.
Won't let me hold you, Let me feel your lovin' charms.
Communication Breakdown, It's always the same,
I'm having a nervous breakdown, Drive me insane!
Robert Plant-
Robert Plant is a fabulous singer, but it has to be said his best mode of communication is probably not the written word. The hard sciences are often very particular about defining terms - knowing exactly what the definition of a word is. This is a really good idea. When you are being operated on, you want your doctor to say to the nurse “hand me the scalpel” not “hand me the thingy”. Same goes for pilots, nuclear warhead...guys, and anyone else in charge of something important.
A friend of mine asked me to prepare a talk on communication for an I.C.B.C. (that’s a government insurance corporation) conference. So, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by writing a blog about what I plan to say. By the way, killing two birds with one stone would be really, really hard. Even getting close to one bird with any sizable rock is tough (I just tried). Just carrying around a rock and looking for a bird raises some suspicion apparently.
There are probably a zillion ways one could approach the topic of effective communication, but I think for brevity’s sake we can whittle it down to a few basic principles. When we communicate, we do it through the vehicle of the 5 senses:
Sight
Sound
Touch
Smell
Taste
If you are a cook, you probably use all of these to communicate. But if you are interacting with another person on the street, you’ll probably just use:
Sight
Sound
Touch
Unless you are Robert Plant. Or you are really, really friendly.
Further whittling will reveal we use language more than any of the other faculties of communication. My friend Oscar asked me to prepare something about communication from a “Yogic perspective”. So I considered that. One could say that from a yogic perspective, we’d want our communication to be:
Effective
As concise as possible
Worth listening to
So that brings us to an interesting question - what is worth saying? We use language to interact, to get things - “pass the salt”, and to describe our inner state - happy, sad, poignant, furious and so on. But to do this we need a listener. Good listeners are a very well paid bunch of folks. This is so because the act of listening literally creates space for the speaker to fill. And not only that. When we are really listened to, it encourages us to give our best as a speaker, to craft our language to be as palatable as possible, and to say what we mean. Ahhh - to say what we mean!
There are at least 8,000 homophones and homonyms in the English language. New words are being created daily - some statistics say over 20,000 English words per year are being added to our language. Some of these are scientific or medical terms that we may never use, like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis - just hope you don’t get a lung infection in an African mine. All of this makes choosing the right words pretty tough. So how is it that we do it?
I think great speakers are great listeners. They never stop listening, even while they are speaking. They have honed their sensitivity to pick up non-verbal cues from their audience of one or a hundred. I have seen this ability in all the great speakers I’ve heard, and it is a function of awareness. This awareness is present when the internal babble of our minds is quiet enough to allow us the sensitivity to really regard another and receive who they are and what they might understand and have an interest in. Great musicians have the same ability. Rock musicians. They can even be seen flicking their hair away from their ears in what appears to be a sultry way, but which is actually a very methodical and sophisticated way of listening better.
Hey, girl, you'll drive me to ruin.
I don't know what it is that I like about you, but I like it a lot.
Won't let me hold you, Let me feel your lovin' charms.
Communication Breakdown, It's always the same,
I'm having a nervous breakdown, Drive me insane!
Robert Plant-
Robert Plant is a fabulous singer, but it has to be said his best mode of communication is probably not the written word. The hard sciences are often very particular about defining terms - knowing exactly what the definition of a word is. This is a really good idea. When you are being operated on, you want your doctor to say to the nurse “hand me the scalpel” not “hand me the thingy”. Same goes for pilots, nuclear warhead...guys, and anyone else in charge of something important.
A friend of mine asked me to prepare a talk on communication for an I.C.B.C. (that’s a government insurance corporation) conference. So, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by writing a blog about what I plan to say. By the way, killing two birds with one stone would be really, really hard. Even getting close to one bird with any sizable rock is tough (I just tried). Just carrying around a rock and looking for a bird raises some suspicion apparently.
There are probably a zillion ways one could approach the topic of effective communication, but I think for brevity’s sake we can whittle it down to a few basic principles. When we communicate, we do it through the vehicle of the 5 senses:
Sight
Sound
Touch
Smell
Taste
If you are a cook, you probably use all of these to communicate. But if you are interacting with another person on the street, you’ll probably just use:
Sight
Sound
Touch
Unless you are Robert Plant. Or you are really, really friendly.
Further whittling will reveal we use language more than any of the other faculties of communication. My friend Oscar asked me to prepare something about communication from a “Yogic perspective”. So I considered that. One could say that from a yogic perspective, we’d want our communication to be:
Effective
As concise as possible
Worth listening to
So that brings us to an interesting question - what is worth saying? We use language to interact, to get things - “pass the salt”, and to describe our inner state - happy, sad, poignant, furious and so on. But to do this we need a listener. Good listeners are a very well paid bunch of folks. This is so because the act of listening literally creates space for the speaker to fill. And not only that. When we are really listened to, it encourages us to give our best as a speaker, to craft our language to be as palatable as possible, and to say what we mean. Ahhh - to say what we mean!
There are at least 8,000 homophones and homonyms in the English language. New words are being created daily - some statistics say over 20,000 English words per year are being added to our language. Some of these are scientific or medical terms that we may never use, like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis - just hope you don’t get a lung infection in an African mine. All of this makes choosing the right words pretty tough. So how is it that we do it?
I think great speakers are great listeners. They never stop listening, even while they are speaking. They have honed their sensitivity to pick up non-verbal cues from their audience of one or a hundred. I have seen this ability in all the great speakers I’ve heard, and it is a function of awareness. This awareness is present when the internal babble of our minds is quiet enough to allow us the sensitivity to really regard another and receive who they are and what they might understand and have an interest in. Great musicians have the same ability. Rock musicians. They can even be seen flicking their hair away from their ears in what appears to be a sultry way, but which is actually a very methodical and sophisticated way of listening better.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Meditation is the groundwater of being
I spend a lot of time intellectualizing when I'm not doing asana, which keeps me generally out of trouble. Meditation however, is something that did not come easily until rather recently. As teachers and practitioners of yoga, most of us have an inkling how important meditation must be. Very difficult to put into words, this experience, or possibly lack thereof - and that's too bad, because meditation is the groundwater of being. A source that nourishes life, hidden for most of us under varying layers of dust, earth, rock. It takes some drilling to get down to this essence, and it's not hard to understand why it seems initially like a lot of work with no reward. Dust flying everywhere, metaphoric drill-bits flying into pieces, with nothing to show but a sore back.
But once the layers that conceal this source of being have been worked through, something really marvelous happens. You touch the water, and it feels cool and somehow familiar. You can drink as much of it as you want and it only hydrates and nourishes. And then you realize this groundwater of being must be the same groundwater all who meditate have tapped into. And that is a very, very comforting thought.
But once the layers that conceal this source of being have been worked through, something really marvelous happens. You touch the water, and it feels cool and somehow familiar. You can drink as much of it as you want and it only hydrates and nourishes. And then you realize this groundwater of being must be the same groundwater all who meditate have tapped into. And that is a very, very comforting thought.
Friday, July 23, 2010
How to avoid death
How to completely avoid death
What does it mean to die? To die means not to change. We change from an embryo to a baby, baby to adolescent, adolescent to adult, adult to elderly, elderly to eventually moving beyond the body completely, to the unknown. We call this “life”. What we are afraid of is not death, it is unknown change. Every night when we fall asleep, we move into the unknown, where time is no longer linear and we dive deep into the unrestrained creative power of our source.
When our sense of self, when our fixed ideas and patterns of thinking become so standardized that we are no longer open to change, that is death. That is the real death before the physical body dissolves. When the mind becomes as stiff as our joints, our world becomes restricted as well. New things, new ideas that threaten our old patterns are viewed with suspicion and resistance. When the walls we choose to define our way of living can no longer be tunneled through by the power of curiosity, we inhabit a prison of our own design.
What is the cure for death? The punctuation mark at the end of the last sentence is the cure. The question mark began as a “Lightning flash, from left to right” in the early middle ages. With this simple symbol of lightning - a force that both illuminates and destroys - the foundations of our previously held beliefs can be changed, adapted, and when necessary, exploded. When we allow a current of curiosity and wonder to swirl within even the things we take for granted, the possibility of seeing them as new unfolds.
Our big fear is that what we have believed in, the foundations of our way of living and seeing the world may change completely. If that were to happen, our sense of authority and value would be threatened. So to avoid this threat, we retreat into the walls of our own beliefs, retreating to the known.
So, how to avoid death? To avoid death, create an opportunity to let your beliefs dissolve, even temporarily. We can do this daily by taking a seat, closing our eyes for a few minutes and resting in the source that lies behind all of our thoughts and beliefs.
What does it mean to die? To die means not to change. We change from an embryo to a baby, baby to adolescent, adolescent to adult, adult to elderly, elderly to eventually moving beyond the body completely, to the unknown. We call this “life”. What we are afraid of is not death, it is unknown change. Every night when we fall asleep, we move into the unknown, where time is no longer linear and we dive deep into the unrestrained creative power of our source.
When our sense of self, when our fixed ideas and patterns of thinking become so standardized that we are no longer open to change, that is death. That is the real death before the physical body dissolves. When the mind becomes as stiff as our joints, our world becomes restricted as well. New things, new ideas that threaten our old patterns are viewed with suspicion and resistance. When the walls we choose to define our way of living can no longer be tunneled through by the power of curiosity, we inhabit a prison of our own design.
What is the cure for death? The punctuation mark at the end of the last sentence is the cure. The question mark began as a “Lightning flash, from left to right” in the early middle ages. With this simple symbol of lightning - a force that both illuminates and destroys - the foundations of our previously held beliefs can be changed, adapted, and when necessary, exploded. When we allow a current of curiosity and wonder to swirl within even the things we take for granted, the possibility of seeing them as new unfolds.
Our big fear is that what we have believed in, the foundations of our way of living and seeing the world may change completely. If that were to happen, our sense of authority and value would be threatened. So to avoid this threat, we retreat into the walls of our own beliefs, retreating to the known.
So, how to avoid death? To avoid death, create an opportunity to let your beliefs dissolve, even temporarily. We can do this daily by taking a seat, closing our eyes for a few minutes and resting in the source that lies behind all of our thoughts and beliefs.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
127 keys to happiness - The first eleven
127 Keys to happiness.
1 - Stop caring what people think. Most people are too busy caring what you think of them to worry about what you are doing.
2 - Remember, eventually, we die. You don’t want to get sick and die, so resolve to die when you are healthy.
3 - Take a few minutes every day to recognize you can be a jerk, just as much as anyone else.
4 - When you wake up, say to yourself “ I am still alive!” Say it out loud.
5 - To create more personal space on the bus, practice yogic breathing, eyes closed.
6 - Good and bad are relative terms. To a wolf, tackling a weak caribou is good. To the weak caribou, it is bad. To the herd of caribou, it is good, because the whole herd’s bloodline will get stronger, but they may not know that.
7 - In the middle of any argument, crawl on the floor for 25 seconds, get up, and continue.
8 - When you happen to be crawling on the floor, have an argument with yourself.
9 - Be someone who categorizes. Create 2 categories - 2 kinds of people - those that categorize, and those that don’t.
10 - Occasionally, take a shower with all of your clothes on.
11 - Don’t do something everyday that scares you. That is bad advice. Home dentistry scares me, and I’m not about to do it.
1 - Stop caring what people think. Most people are too busy caring what you think of them to worry about what you are doing.
2 - Remember, eventually, we die. You don’t want to get sick and die, so resolve to die when you are healthy.
3 - Take a few minutes every day to recognize you can be a jerk, just as much as anyone else.
4 - When you wake up, say to yourself “ I am still alive!” Say it out loud.
5 - To create more personal space on the bus, practice yogic breathing, eyes closed.
6 - Good and bad are relative terms. To a wolf, tackling a weak caribou is good. To the weak caribou, it is bad. To the herd of caribou, it is good, because the whole herd’s bloodline will get stronger, but they may not know that.
7 - In the middle of any argument, crawl on the floor for 25 seconds, get up, and continue.
8 - When you happen to be crawling on the floor, have an argument with yourself.
9 - Be someone who categorizes. Create 2 categories - 2 kinds of people - those that categorize, and those that don’t.
10 - Occasionally, take a shower with all of your clothes on.
11 - Don’t do something everyday that scares you. That is bad advice. Home dentistry scares me, and I’m not about to do it.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
The initial motivation for belief
When we look around at Systems Of Belief, there are many. Christianity, Buddhism, Tantra Yoga, Classical Yoga, Islam. Although quite different in method, all systems of belief must share one starting point. The initial motivation for belief comes from the feeling that things are unsatisfactory as they are. Belief systems will disagree on exactly what is unsatisfactory, but it comes down to one thing in the end. We die. We die, and we don't know what happens next, if anything. This is profoundly unsettling to us. We don't want to end, so we create a belief. Hold on. What is a belief? This is one description:
Existential claim - to claim belief in the existence of an entity or phenomenon with the implied need to justify its claim to existence. It is often used when the entity is not real, or its existence is in doubt. "He believes in witches and ghosts" or "many children believe in fairies" are typical examples.
O.K. So.... we have a "belief" when we don't know for sure. None of us would say "My belief system is that I have a head". The reason that sounds so silly is that we know we have a head. We don't have to affirm a belief in it. This is important.
So, now we have a "belief" that we go to heaven, we re-incarnate, we turn into a luminous being, and so on. If we knew this, we would not have to have a "belief". Would we? So, if we believe something happens after we die, do we individually create a belief in some sort of continuation after death, or do we adopt one that already exists? Which one did you adopt?
Coming back around to my initial point in writing this, it is my assertion that belief is motivated by the ego. It is our desire to continue in some form that creates the motivation to adopt a belief system. If is sounds true to you that our adoption of belief is ego-driven, then good luck transcending the ego through spiritual practice based on belief. Uh-oh.
So, if we want our spiritual lives - strike that - if we want our lives to be based in truth, we have to start from a place of truth, and that is knowing what is and what is not. If we could, for a change, get rid of the beliefs we have about things and simply observe reality and then have a chat about it, we'd be further ahead. There may very well be re-incarnation, or heaven, or luminosity, or myriad other potentials for our energy when this form ends. But we will never discover that by adopting a belief and psychologically crossing our fingers, in the hopes that the belief we adopted is the "right" one.
Existential claim - to claim belief in the existence of an entity or phenomenon with the implied need to justify its claim to existence. It is often used when the entity is not real, or its existence is in doubt. "He believes in witches and ghosts" or "many children believe in fairies" are typical examples.
O.K. So.... we have a "belief" when we don't know for sure. None of us would say "My belief system is that I have a head". The reason that sounds so silly is that we know we have a head. We don't have to affirm a belief in it. This is important.
So, now we have a "belief" that we go to heaven, we re-incarnate, we turn into a luminous being, and so on. If we knew this, we would not have to have a "belief". Would we? So, if we believe something happens after we die, do we individually create a belief in some sort of continuation after death, or do we adopt one that already exists? Which one did you adopt?
Coming back around to my initial point in writing this, it is my assertion that belief is motivated by the ego. It is our desire to continue in some form that creates the motivation to adopt a belief system. If is sounds true to you that our adoption of belief is ego-driven, then good luck transcending the ego through spiritual practice based on belief. Uh-oh.
So, if we want our spiritual lives - strike that - if we want our lives to be based in truth, we have to start from a place of truth, and that is knowing what is and what is not. If we could, for a change, get rid of the beliefs we have about things and simply observe reality and then have a chat about it, we'd be further ahead. There may very well be re-incarnation, or heaven, or luminosity, or myriad other potentials for our energy when this form ends. But we will never discover that by adopting a belief and psychologically crossing our fingers, in the hopes that the belief we adopted is the "right" one.
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