Inspiration

Dear Wayfarers and fellow travelers, I am in need of help, your fine perspicacity, your thought-filled-feedback. ‘Tis Scorpio’s season, and in her required depth charge I have returned to questioning the why of it all yet once again. It is not a serene Yogic-place.  It is swampy and stanky, filled with odors of discontent and fear. The only thing filling me with hope is that you have answers.  Please weigh in, lighten my load, lead me onward, lest I eat another jar of jam. I do believe the world is in my heart, that we are the microcosm of the macrocosm.  If that is so, why is the world so bloody -bloody?  Why is it so very different than the core of my heart/your heart? Each time I form and re-form the question; “Who am I?” Do I do it from a different understanding and perspective? Is this why the answers refuse codifying, satisfaction or completion? If the power behind any Practice is its sankalpa, its intention, then why can’t my intention show up on the mat every day? Who is the masked bandit that whimps me out? Is the following idea-evil?  ‘I am not what I desire to be, I want to be more.’  Desire is the creative pulse of life, therefore cannot be evil. Is it the idea that I am not complete, or enough, that I cannot be at one with self as I am? Is this a pathetic sin, or a big one? Are these the perceptions that blind? How do we inform our vision to perceive from heart, not from ego-mind? If questioning the truth provides no answers, but the questions themselves open toward Grace, why doesn’t Grace feel more satisfying? If ego is a sense of self in relation to the world, what is the sense of self in relation……

The dark life remembers What it lives without. The shadowed psyche undresses Strewing torn garments Across grass, flattened by first frost, As the bone white sliver, Pushed by damp clouds, Rises in twilight indigo. The imagination unfolds, Excited by lost affection, hapless wounds, Careless words of what we idolize And demonize, What we pray for – then regret. Can new seed, dug down with care, Transmute this woolly life? Can wrists and palms bent back in surrender, Too vulnerable to hold the knife, Carry weight, or shape mudra, Yet lift skyward? Can fingers, once cupped carefully Around white stones of wealth, Tingle in glimmering rituals? What celebration seeds the dark life? Who carries the shadowed psyche to the teat Where it suckles the moon and the bone white breast?

Last week the Breath was about karmic relationships, today- it’s physical relationships… of the body-type, and how we perceive those relationships among this/that/these & those. Body parts reverberate to one another in much the same way we vibrate personally to one another. Not only is the body in constant re-balancing left to right, but it correlates and adjusts diagonally across, as well as up and down. How we stand affects how we think. How we twist correlates to how we digest. How we backbend affects not only spine, therefore nervous system, but point of view, lung capacity, and the courageous configuration of the heart. Movement affects the shape of who we are, and particularly Asana re-works not only physical form, but emotional and mental shapes as well. “When we are stuck in our shapes, we are stuck in our energetic matrix.”* The breath is another body, subtle but powerful, and when the breathing/Pranayama body can’t change, it affects the many subtle layers of mind, emotion, and physical. The more consciously we are able to connect and strengthen these multiplicity of relationships, within and without, the more profound life becomes. What holds a body together? What makes these millions of relationships possible? Prana/energy. In the body, fascia is the pranic force, for it holds the form of individual muscles and bones; 72,000 silken threads connect tissue to subtle body matter such as nadis, nerves, and energy lines. When life becomes too overwhelming, when we are drowning fears from loss of control, changing just one thing offers solutions. It is the crack that lets in the light. Starting with the body is do-able. It’s like putting on a great outfit, it gives gumption to move into the overwhelm, not run from it. How are you sitting right now? Is the head forward……

This fall calls for us to be clear about who we are, to be as authentic as we know how, and to unhook from what, and who no longer represents us. Life always demands this, but if we don’t, or can’t now, we shall be lost in the tsunamis of change.  Few of us are where we’d like to be, there is not enough high ground. But hopefully we find solace in who we are, and who we love.  Perhaps in the world’s instability, our treasure becomes one another, but we cannot truly be with one another if we are not authentically ourselves.  We can facebook, but we cannot jump into the same lifeboat as the water sucks out to sea, unless we are committed.  Committed to what?  Committed to the alignment of self with self, self with other, self with the earth.  Our karmic companions, those Wily Coyotes of heart and mind, are here to change our lives. We must be in cahoots, AND we must be wily, or fail miserably. Every time we toss around the word, ‘karmic’ we are in deep waters, for karmic infers past and future relationship, as well as present. It infers profound entanglement.  How to un-tangle lead from gold? How to be in cahoots as cohorts, not desperados? How to bow to the other while holding personal integrity?  We cannot escape.  We are in the territory of Libra’s gracious requirement of partnering, plus Saturn is slowly wending its way through Libra, demanding that the structures of every relationship are ship shape. We are about to have a Full Moon face off in Aires/Libra (self in polarity to other).  I write to you with the energies of the Universe behind my pen. But even if I didn’t, this is a pivotal hour in the……

Despite the dizzying sense of speed, the structure of fall’s equinox provides a moment of stillness, a symbolic cross  road that divides the year into one of its four seasonal quadrants.  Like spring’s Vernal Equinox, along with the Summer and Winter Solstices, Autumn’s equinox  is an astrological transition when we open a door to the coming three months.  This year, September 23 is when the earth’s axis inclines neither toward, nor away, from the Sun, putting the center of the Sun in the same plane as the equator, which makes day and night fairly equal. (Latin, aequus-equal and nox-night.)  It is also moves the Sun from Virgo into Libra, signature of balanced grace. “So what?” You ask “Here’s what.” I say: As the world becomes boundary-less, we need boundaries.  We need markers to give import to chosen moments so we may stop, take note, and with any luck, decide to move forward with higher intent. It is a re-asesing view from  summer spaciousness to fall boundaries. As we race from moment to moment for more harried face-booking and texting, it’s imperative we create space not only to stop and consider what we are face-ing’ and texting, but to create the richness of ritual so we have an opportunity to imbue life with velvety-wines, and deeply connect with others of like-spirit. With the balance of night and day, we are again offered opportunity to validate the night, the feminine and receptive, the listening Goddess within –to day’s solar masculinity.  The Sun’s demand of ego and identity pushes more and more production at a faster pace.   When the earth stills this impulse by portioning light and dark, we are offered a divine gift of creating inner equilibrium. When driving a 100 miles an hour it’s important to know where we’re headed.  Some……

If “the goal of the journey is to discover yourself as consciousness,” as Joseph Campbell said, then what revelations did this summer’s wing-ding of an Astrological force-field bring you?  These past months of inner heightened intensity and emotional landmines, seen via the outer picture through ‘The Arab Spring, the Japanese tsunami and nuclear spill, the Syrian revolt, and the downfall of Khadafi, to enumerate a few, bring most bodies to new doorways. Were you engulfed?  Or were you one of the more fortunate to be merely drop-kicked out the back door? You may have see yourself changing via another, perhaps your teenager who stood with a raised fist, wrapped in a black glove? Is there a new voice within declaring greater freedom, more power over self? I’m asking because we have a few months of respite to reorganize ourselves before the next big planetary hurricane returns in the spring of 2012.  This fall and winter give us time to clean up what we could not finish over the summer.  The same issues, perhaps in a different form, will be back, with the planetary repetition, and the ‘perfection of the Pluto-Uranus square.’ What have we learned?  What needs loving repair?  What is the depth of the wound? How do we heal Self, and other? Clearing the old emotional detritus from the door of consciousness offers an unbelievably powerful appointment with our Dharma.  Our inner Arab Spring has greater chance of a long term Democratic shift if we prepare for the uprising by giving Spirit greater say, ego less.  If we can spend time on the childhood wounds, and see them as symbolic, then chances are we begin to understand them and recognize them as they come up over and over, in different forms.  What is the metaphor for the discomfort? How……