Archive for June 22nd, 2008

Open

Posted in ashtanga yoga, raw food on 06/22/2008 07:18 pm by karen

Workshop with Volleyball Guy, just returned from India. He was sitting outside as I walked up the driveway.

“Happy to be back?” I asked.
“No.”

He’s a traveler — of the Paul Bowles Sheltering Sky variety.

Still, lovely to have him back. And to see the familiar faces of the other Ashtangis who waited inside. Lots of hugs all around.

106 today and we practiced without any air conditioning. Plus, it was noon; I’d had a light breakfast. Ideal conditions for a super open practice. And it was.

Primary and the first third of intermediate. I was psyched to get adjusted in kapotasana. As I went back and over, my upper back felt totally open and stretchy and gooooood, and my lower back felt open and released and… kind of really scary. I talked a little recently about the un-puffy feeling one gets when eating a raw diet. As if there is no padding between muscle and nerve and bone. That is absolutely what my lower back felt like — open and unpadded. And it opened right up on the right side, less on the left. I grabbed the balls of my feet comfortably.

I felt a little shaken afterward, as if I’d been a bit abandoned in my entry. It makes me a bit nervous, the unevenness of the opening, but I don’t think there’s much to be done about it, beyond persevering.

 

Rock on, Grammarians

Posted in ashtanga yoga, poetry on 06/22/2008 09:02 am by karen

From Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies: The Philosophy of the Grammarians:

Abhinavagupta recognized the similarity between aesthetic experience and the mystical experience, but points out the boundary line that separates the two. The mystical experience of the ultimate reality is total and complete, and the yogin is far beyond any form of discursive thought. Aesthetic experience gives bliss only temporarily and cannot be considered supreme bliss, though it is superior to the worldly joys.

Later Jagannatha Panditaraja, aithor of the Rasagangadhara, states that rasa (aesthetic pleasure) is identical with consciousness or Brahman, and aesthetic experience, in its truest sense, is the realization of that consciousness by the removal of the veils covering it.