Tag: transformation

the writing on the wall

by L. Valdez Karl

Enjoy the silence.

A week from today I leave for my 6th trip to Ma India, my longest trip yet, 10 weeks.   My internal alarm clock goes off and my body and mind start buzzing a week before any India trip.  If you’ve been keeping up you already know with whom I’m studying and where I’m going.  I think what is making the buzz even louder is that my bones are screaming at me that this trip will not be like any other I’ve taken.  It is going to be very different.

2012-2013 will be transformative.  Maybe transitional is a better word because I feel like I am a turning point in my life.  For whatever reason a whole lot of stuff is ripening, maybe that’s the buzz I’ve been feeling for the last 6 months.  As a long-time gardener I am very in tune with a garden’s growth so a sense of fecundity is certainly not lost on me.   I recently had an amazing Tarot reading and one of the cards the reader pulled was that of a pregnant woman with a huge belly lying in a pumpkin patch entangled in thick vines…waiting to give birth but feeling like it will never happen.

For most of 2011 I felt stuck, trapped in the tired paradigm of what constitutes yoga in the modern scene, but also trapped in tired paradigms of relationships of all kinds.   How to digest traumatic experiences without having them fill our hearts with hate and despair?  I experienced despair last year that I have not experienced for a very long time.  Buddhi (intelligence) is the function of the mind that digests our experiences by wisdom so that they serve their purpose of growth and renewal.

Fecundity, growth, renewal…see a pattern?

Toward the end of 2011 I came to grips with my place in the Universe.   It’s about walking my path alone, shaking people up, turning things inside out and upside down.   You best believe I have plans for that when I return.  But that’s not an easy path and not always welcome, even in the yoga world.

The Tarot reader said that India mirrors back to me my true self, who I really am, and what I am capable of.  She said  there are many reasons I am drawn there but a major one is affirmation, people that bear witness to my work in this world.  I’ve always said that people “get” me more there than here.  Going back to India yearly re-charges, re-nourishes, and nurtures me in a way that nothing else does here.  This is the first time since 2008 that I will be traveling alone in India and I am going to relish it — no one’s agenda but my own.   Freya Stark said, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

In her book Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff Rosemary Mahoney describes how I feel when I go to India, a solo woman traveler of a certain age:

I was alone, finally, with no one to protect me. I wanted to sing for happiness — a rare, raw, immediate sort of happiness that was directly related to my physical situation, to my surroundings, to independence, and to solitude. The happiness I felt that morning had nothing to do with the future or the past, with abstractions or with my relationships to other people. It was the happiness of entering into something new, of taking the moments simply for what they were, of motion, of freedom, and of free will. I loved not knowing what would happen next, loved that no one here knew me. I felt coordinated and strong, and the world seemed huge and vibrant. It was a relief to be alone…

My happiness was a feeling of physical lightness, of weightlessness, like drifting on air…

To prepare for her trip up the Nile, Mahoney read the Egypt travel journals of Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale.  She writes that she recognized in Flaubert’s notes of 1850 the same kind of happiness she felt.  She quotes Flaubert as he witnesses the Nile:

I felt a surge of solemn happiness that reached out towards what I was seeing and I thanked God in my heart for having made me capable of such joy; I felt fortunate at the thought, and yet it seemed to me that I was thinking about nothing: it was a sensuous pleasure that pervaded my entire being.

Mahoney quotes Florence Nightingale’s reaction to a Nile sunrise:

It looks. . .so transparent and pure, that one really believes one’s self looking into a heaven beyond, and feels a little shy of penetrating into the mysteries of God’s throne…

This is the sunset taken from the top of a temple in Rameswaram and just beyond the horizon is Sri Lanka.   During that evening in 2006 as I stood at the top of that temple and stared into the limitless expanse of ocean, I began to cry as I imagined the monkey god Hanuman leaping from rock to rock to rescue Sita.   Like Flaubert, I also thanked the Universe that I was “capable of such joy.”  Such profound joy and pleasure that it indeed pervaded my entire being.

Finally Mahoney describes Flaubert and Nightingale as neither having “any desire to fit the tediously cliched expectations that society had slated for them”; that they both “prized solitude”; and both traveled Egypt during periods of “considerable personal uncertainty and self-doubt”, agonizing “over how they would use their talents and answer their natural impulses.”

I am a woman of a certain age who travels alone, relishing my solitude.  After traveling around the sun over 50 times, India was the first country overseas that I visited and if I can never return, I always carry India with me as a talisman.

I also do not suffer tediously cliched expectations gladly.

The wounds and arrows of my misfortunes sneak in sometimes when I’m not looking and I can only tend to them in the arms of the Mother.  One way of tending to them is by reading the writing on the wall and acting upon it.  The writing on the wall tells me “to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.   I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes on as fruit.”   I will not die an unlived life.

The last card the Tarot reader pulled was called the Speaker of Trees and it contained a picture of a snake rising up through the center of the tree.  The reader said that the card means power, confidence, brilliance, communication of new ideas and plans, everything coming together.

I’m going home to shed my skin.

first uploaded at http://tudodeom.blogspot.com/

reason, passion, and rasa

by L. Valdez Karl

This excerpt from Gibran’s The Prophet was at the bottom of a friend’s email and the words resonated with me. I am sorry to say that for all my spiritual reading over the years, I’ve never read The Prophet. It was a very popular book back in the day when I was a young hippie chick in high school, but I’ve always walked to the beat of a different drummer and if someone turned right, I turned left (no pun intended.) There were books that I refused to read because everyone else was reading them, such as the Carlos Casteneda books about Don Juan and the Lord of the Ring books. I think you can guess that I don’t read the books Oprah tells me to read. This hippie girl was reading the Beat Poets, Alan Watts, and trying to decipher Zen koans.

So when I read this excerpt I had to dig deeper and read the entire passage. My life up to this point has been a mish-mash of reason and passion. Yes, life needs to be about balance and as yogis this is how we are “supposed” to live our lives. But the older I get, the more I lean toward passion. Not overwhelmingly so that it would make my life spin out of control, but as my teacher Gehlek Rimpoche says, there is nothing wrong with passion — it’s the clinging to it, the attachment to it, that causes our problems. And that’s where reason comes in. Knowing when to detach from the outcome, knowing when to let go, knowing how clinging creates our own suffering, and then in that knowledge finding liberation and transformation.

I watched a program the other day with Dr. Christiane Northrup who wrote The Wisdom of Menopause and I loved when she said that the peri- and postmenopausal years of a woman’s life can be a re-birth, that during these years a woman can give birth to herself. Unfortunately, many women do not choose to “re-birth” themselves. To me, it’s all about having passion in and for life and not being afraid of it. Not running from the sensations of your passions but embracing them and using them to enliven your entire being to keep your life juicy and sweet. Using your rasa to touch your inner soul and becoming a Rasa Devi.

The Sanskrit word rasa has two meanings. Literally it means sap, juice, or fluid. The secondary meaning is extract. In Ayurveda rasa means the vital juice that the digestive system extracts from food to be converted into blood, flesh, bones, marrow, fat, and sperm. In other words, the extract that gives birth to our vital energies. In spiritual terms rasa means Divine Nectar – the taste of enlightenment.

I choose to be a Rasa Devi, resting in reason, moving in passion.

shanti

REASON AND PASSION

And the priestess spoke again and said:
“Speak to us of Reason and Passion.”

And he answered, saying: Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite. Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody. But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul. If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas. For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction. Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it may sing.

And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

I would have you consider your judgment and your appetite even as you would two loved guests in your house. Surely you would not honour one guest above the other; for he who is more mindful of one loses the love and the faith of both. Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields and meadows-then let your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.” And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky, then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in passion.”

And since you are a breath in God’s sphere, and a leaf in God’s forest, you too should rest in reason and move in passion.

free your mind for change

by L. Valdez Karl

Change is good.

Every few years or so I get into a frenzy about changing things inside my house — new furniture or changing the old furniture around, painting a light colored room something dark and rich. Of course, “change” is much more involved than just changing your furniture. Personal change, personal transformation, is much more important.

I found this while surfing around and fell in love with these words:

“Join forces with the dynamic flow of life. The African-American theologian Howard Thurman said: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.'”

mmmmmm….that really resonates with me….”what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

But to initiate change, you must free your mind, you must be open to change, whether it’s a bold new color for your bathroom or a bold new color for your soul. Maybe you’ve longed for years to take that initial step outside the life you’ve been living; maybe you’re tired of living someone else’s life and not your own. Maybe you know deep in your spirit that it’s finally time to speak your truth, to finally open that throat chakra. What are you waiting for?

I’ve written before that I get my own personal messages from The Universe (insert wink-wink emoticon here.) Some are fun, some make me go hmmmmmmm….. One from this week reads:

“Live your dreams now to any degree that you can. With every purchase. Every decision. Every hello and goodbye. Every assignment. Every conversation. Every meal. Every morning, afternoon, and evening. And never, ever, ever look back.

Reframe every thought, word, and deed from the perspective of the person you’ve always dreamed you’d be, as if your life was already as you’ve always dreamed it would be. Die to yesterday’s illusions and be reborn to the truth of your vision….”

As En Vogue sang, “free your mind and the rest will follow, be color blind, don’t be so shallow…” They were singing about race and prejudice, but the “free your mind” mantra applies to life in general.

But I’ll let the original Funky Divas kickstart your change…give a listen and give it up…open your heart and free your mind…

Kick it, ladies…

making room for new growth

by L. Valdez Karl

I received this lesson in an email from a good friend. Some food for thought…

“About a week ago, I received a white climbing rose bush from the people with whom I rent space to teach my children’s yoga classes. Those classes are now finished, and I won’t be continuing weekly classes in the fall as new opportunities have presented themselves.

I wondered where to put the bush because I have so many rose bushes already of various kinds and colors.

I found a large decorative pot, and I decided to plant the rose bush in the pot and place it on my deck where I could see the sweet white flowers while eating outside and from my kitchen window. There were several full flowers on it when I received it and the directions indicated that caution was needed when pruning it. I was a little concerned about this, and I said to myself that I would need help in pruning this rose bush.

I went away for a couple of days. Before I left I went to cut the roses that were in full bloom and then decided not to – they were too far gone, and I wasn’t sure exactly where to cut, so I left the full blooms on the bush.

I returned home and immediately noticed that the rose bush had been pruned. But by who? No one knows I have this bush. No one can see the bush from the street, and there are dozens of roses on other bushes, and none of them were pruned. Why this bush? The stems weren’t anywhere to be seen inside or outside my house.

I called my colleague, my father-in-law, and the people who gave it to me. No one in the flesh pruned the bush. At first I was concerned that someone was on my property fooling around with my plants, but that feeling quickly dissipated.

This morning I got it. I knew there was a message in this for me, but what was it? I knew it had to do with the pruning. So what does pruning mean or represent?

This past evening I felt in my entire being that I need to give my full resignation to one of my nursing positions – the one I’ve been working at for nearly 8 years. When I work there I become physically sick – not severely, but I’m not well when I leave. I also have been struggling with this knowing and procrastinating on this for several months.

The pruning of the rose bush spoke to me about clearing the unnecessary baggage in my life – I have too many balls in the air, and something has got to give – I’ve cleared a huge amount of clutter this spring, and now I knew I needed to leave this job completely, once and for all. A good personal pruning for me was in order. I couldn’t deny the sign – clearly the bush had been pruned by someone – I say by the divine beings in my life or St. Frances who stands just next to the bush. In either case, I’m listening, and I wrote my resignation today. I already left my supervisor a message, and I’ll be turning in my nurse’s bag and key on Monday.

Unless we prune (which can be painful), we can’t create space for further growth – when I looked at the bush a second time, two new buds appear on it – new growth happens quickly when we make room.”

I know exactly how this woman feels. A number of years ago I had an ovarian cancer scare and subsequently had abdominal surgery. During that experience I began to “prune” things and people from my life. Things I had collected over the years that no longer had meaning, but also people who did not nourish me, people who always seemed to be on the periphery — people who really weren’t my friends, but they were in my life. They floated in and out of my life like ghosts.

I did the same thing when I returned from India the first time because I felt changed. Indeed, I did not have to say anything or do anything, and the first thing some people said to me when they took a good long look at me was “you’ve changed.” It was literally months before I got over my culture shock of returning to white bread suburbia.

Besides a yoga teacher, I am also a certified horticulturist and I know that sometimes a plant needs to be severely pruned in order to give it new life, in order to make it stronger. The plant may look like hell for a long time, but it comes back lusher and more beautiful than before once the deadwood is removed.

Is there a lesson for you in this story? How much pruning do you need to do in your life? Are you strong enough to cut the deadwood out of your life no matter how painful it is?

shanti