Search Results for: Savasana

We can choose to perceive the mundane as a grand, and weird mystery, or a boring dump.  We can, and do, edit our viewpoints from multiple perspectives in every moment: spiritual, self-absorbed, short-sighted, hopeful, angry, in awe, confident, un-knowing, detached, add-on ad-nausea.  As Buddha said, if you are sad, wait until the next breath.   In last week’s Breath, my viewpoint struggled with personal boundaries, and short-sighted-crankyness. Buddha was not at hand, but you were.  Many took time to remind me what is important, and how to cross over old thresholds.  You held the vision until I could pick it up again for myself. I am grateful to all of you who wrote.  It helped turn the corner toward the mystery, and magical thinking held in this week’s Full Moon, or perhaps I needed to simply wait until Buddha, with my friends, came forth. Last week, another far more mysterious and seemingly difficult boundary was crossed by Steve Jobs. But since he said with his last breath, “Oh wow.  Oh wow.  Oh wow.” We might assume impossible shifts of perspective and consciousness come when we need them, and come when least expected. They come as we live.  By that, I mean, they are highly personal views and expressions.  Steve Jobs’ life was extremely passionate and full of wonder.  “Oh wow.”  Is just what his personal ‘practice’ said time and again.  When George Harrison died, his last words were, “Love one another.”  That was the sound of his life, those were the songs he put into the world year after year. Last words are the most powerful because who has time to re-think death with half truth’s and correct syntax?  The breath can only hold the core of the soul at that point.  What will you say on dying?  Where is the… Read more »

Lacuna, what a wonderful word!  It’s a particularly wonderful word at this time of year when we can be it, as well as see it.  It’s meaning is a hiatus, or blank space- possibly as in a vacation.  It can also be an intercellular space, and-or a small pit or depression, like those in the back hip bones.  What fun to say, “I’m in lacuna, or going on lacuna.” That could mean, “I’m outta here.”  Or “I am the blank page….life will write the day, not me.” There’s another wonderful word which resonates with lacuna, it’s the Sanskrit, ‘pratyahara,’ meaning “the conscious withdrawal of energy from the senses.”  Certainly one must try and do this if one is to become a blank space.  Pratyahara, as the fifth step, or limb, of Patanjali’s eight-limbed Ashtanga Yoga system, can be elusive because there is little consensus on how much withdrawal is appropriate.  Is it similar to Savasana?  Yes, but more.  Savasana is a first stage of relinquishing and letting go the body, allowing breath to take over. When working with pratyahara, is that an oxymoron?  Can you ‘work’ something of this nature?  Do we think we should, be able to disappear completely into the deepest subtle layers of the body, withdrawn from the outside world -just this side of death?  Since it is summer, and I’ve opted for profound quiet space, or more to the point, my body has demanded it, I’m interested in how far down this can go.  Lately, I’ve felt I’ve been at the bottom of a well.  It’s not a bad thing.  It’s not something I wished for, or worked for, it just is.  It’s as though the last year of going at a greyhound’s racing pace needs inner balancing. Some people might call my state a ‘walking… Read more »