Like salt in water

One path says dissolve into your experiences like salt in water. You dissolve into the world and the sense of individuality ceases. The other path says stand strong against the influence of the world like a diamond, and recognize that the world is in you. 

In either case, the destination is the same. The sense of separation melts. The world is in your awareness and your awareness is the world.

These two paths have been articulated in many ways, and it often the dogma surrounding them created by intellectualization rather than practice that causes some problems.

By practice I do not mean regimentation of a physical kind, or any kind.  One practice might be to read a line of poetry and pause and let the images begin to find a home in awareness.  Another practice might be getting angry and feeling where the anger is inside, then watch it shift.  Or you could create your own practice.

Practice becomes interesting when the objects of our desires become less interesting.  It is not something you can force or should do, anymore than falling in love.

Don't be shifty

Standing, it is common to shift weight from one foot to another. This temporarily avoids the consequences of misaligned hips - discomfort in the low back. Shifting gaze frequently moves awareness from one visual object to another without fully absorbing any one object into awareness. When we see someone shifing both weight and gaze, they appear shifty.

Holding a posture long enough to recieve the karma - the results of the action - is the opposite of shiftiness. It is said while most try to avoid consequences, the yogi seeks the causes.

Asana focus - even breath and gaze, longer holds in traditional poses.

Caught in yes or no

The mind is like a corn maze. At every intersection, there is a left or right - a yes or no. Yes creates no, like right creates left. What we seem to be seeking as yoga folk is a higher perspective. However, running through the corn maze of the mind generally only produces lefts or rights. To see the maze, you have to climb out of it and view it from above. From that vantage point, you can see what kind of game it is we’ve been playing. This would be the difference between philosophy only - the maze, and philosophy plus practise - climbing up.

Dharma - "That which holds together"

Dharma

“That which holds together”

I open my eyes

and the whole world appears.

I can take any road I choose

Drawn into my life experiences

Like puzzle pieces.

It seems like an arbitrary freedom.

Yet as the pieces I draw to me

Dovetail into the piece that is me

I become a fit for those pieces too.

Until I pull back and

the edges between pieces disappear,

then the whole picture is complete.

The last days of Coffee

I awoke and began my stomach-churning-cleansing yoga regime, cleansed my nostrils and began a few slow yoga poses to stimulate my digestion.  I’d been waiting to drink the beloved coffee until after I’d eaten, as coffee is an appetite suppressant and shuts down the digestive system.  I loved coffee.  I’d been drinking it since my first experience with espresso in Germany in 1985.  This particular morning, I poured the oily black substance into the cup and began to raise it to my lips.  Stomach churned on its own.  I tasted it and felt the gag reflex.  I’d known coffee was not so good for me for a long time, but rationalized my way out of not drinking it.  This day, looking at the coffee, I was done.  Not a suppression, not a “I really should cut down”.  It was a visceral response, as strong as repulsion is.  How could this have happened.  Coffee, how could you.

Now I can look back on my time with coffee.  “Let us go for coffee” I would say to someone I found attractive.  No more.  I’ve haunted Coffee Shops for most of my life.  What now.  It’s a wonderful cloud in the sky that has evaporated for me.  It does help to remember I’ve spent approximately $150,000 on coffee since I was 20 years old.  It helps to remember I’ll try to use the money I would have spent on coffee to experience something slightly more interesting.  Like seeing the world.  But I will miss the romance of the drink.  The artistry of a well made cappuccino.  Don’t say decaf.  I’d rathe walk than drive a horrible car.  No, I shall make my way forward alone.  Yes, alone.

How much do you like your friends?

Facebook and social media is based on a great idea.  You can stay in touch with friends and acquaintances you don’t see very often, and their friends might share interests with your friends, so you can have more friends.  Awesome.

Because there is a physical and psycological distance online, we sometimes say things we wouldn’t say if someone was right in front of us.  We can always log off a conversation on Facebook.  Can’t do that in person so easily.  Distance makes us a little more bold.

Many are now looking for “passive income” from the internet.  There is plenty of talk of “monetizing” - or “making money” somehow from a website, or your relationship with others online.

The Facebook updates I enjoy, and the friends I have online that I like to hear from generally offer humorous or interesting things when they update what is going on for them.  Sometimes they mention a party or get-togehter, or even an event they are attending that I’m also interested in.  I “like” this.  These interactions are gifts to me.

But there are other sorts of friends.  Some of these friends self-promote products and services they are offering for sale.  I’ve done this myself.  “Shameless Huckseterism” is a term I like for this kind of behaviour.  Essentially, these friends begin to use friendship to make money.  But there is a problem here.

A friend is someone who likes you - not who “Likes” you.  A friend likes you because of qualites you possess, but often they like you in spite of the qualities you possess.  They love you.  The reciprocity of friendship is a gift - it is not for sale, nor can friendship be monetized.

When we try to turn a gift into money things go wrong.  Imagine a friend gives you a gift for your birthday, just because they want to do something for you - not because they expect a gift back.  You open it and say  “Thanks - do you have the receipt?”.  A shamed silence descends over the birthday party, everyone feels awkward. Why?  Because when arbitrary value (in the form of dollars) is introduced  to try to measure the unmeasureable - love - it diminishes it.  The gift given was picked to suit the person, maybe it was even made by hand.  Money is the same for everyone.

When we try to use the internet to make money, it would be prudent to remember who your real friends are.  Your real friends would probably rather lend or give you some money than have you diminish their gift of friendship by trying to turn them into customers.  They like you.  They don’t need to “Like” you.

Not too sweet

We consume that which is already refined.  The gasoline in the tank of my car is a very potent distillation of bones, leaves, trees.  The sugar in my tea had to be worked out of a sugar cane - beating it to a pulp, processing it to squeeze out the sugars.  Not long ago a person was considered “refined” when they wore the most fashionable clothes and spoke with a certain accent and vocabulary.

The things that sustain us physically are abundant in nature and hidden within it.  Eating refined sugar causes the body all sorts of problems because the sugar enters the bloodstream too quickly.  We get an immediate high and a corresponding low, and no lasting benefit.  Eating something like a vegetable requires digestion - the participation of the body in breaking down what we eat into nutrients and waste.  

This is also the process of uncovering wisdom - taking information, often from various sources, and breaking it apart to find what nourishes us, leaving what doesn’t behind.  Your personal yoga practice is the nourishment of your teaching.  The process of practice, inquiry, digestion and deepening understanding is a radically personal one.  Taking workshops from traveling teachers can be fun and energizing - much like eating refined sugar.  That experience either moves through you quickly without digestion, as the teachings are the experience of another.  Worse, one can end up parroting the language of another teacher without the digestive process in place at all.

The process of refinement must be ours, because it is that internal processing that creates wisdom from information.

Once we’ve done that, we become nourishment for others to do the same.