Practice

with  deepest love and gratitude to my teachers, especially Erich Schiffmann and Nöle Giulini and Sam Hamill.

It’s showing up—every day—even in the smallest way.  I don’t know what the next breath will bring much less the next hour or year—so it’s a willingness to remain open, to listen, to be surprised by the never ending possibilities of what this moment reveals.

The mat is an empty page waiting for inspiration or a stubborn refusal to leave  to create some movement on it.  It’s a place of authorship.  The practice is to be in the way of what’s already available–to be in that rare intersection where the meteor lands from a billion miles away—it’s predestined to land where it will land—the idea, the revelation–its  bundle of light.  Its trajectory was launched a billion years ago, a trillion years ago.  Its trajectory began when the infinite blossomed out of nothing.  I want to be where it lands and suffer gladly the transformation brought about by impact.

Some days are better than others.  Some days the most I can do is lay my head on my pillow with my eyes closed and dream.  That too is yoga.  That too is poetry.  It’s about letting the intuitive siege engines already battering the walls of our judgments and presumptions, chipping away at the fortress we make of habit and routine, inside  to care for the vulnerable, exhausted being that calls for them.

That’s when the poems begin to flow and the movement on the mat turns into pure instinct and the meditations reaches out past the borders of the skin into the all of everything and the rare joy of being alive is underscored by a small and previously undiscovered personal angel playing lullabies on its tuba.

Ice in a glass.  Shifting and clinking and merging its way back to water—back to its true nature—its original material.  All of us—headed home.

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The popular notion that Yoga is a religion is wrong.  Yet the myth persists.  A recent article in the Seattle Times, an interview with a local pastor, equates it to demon worship.  This would be very funny if it weren’t so sad.

Probably because any activity done with a serious intention to cause no harm and to walk in grace with the natural order of things will always be seen as dangerous.  It will be presumed a form of worship that implies reverence for an inexplicable God.  Thousands of years of missionary service by the world’s largest religions have shown us that where there is a difference in a culture’s choice of deities then the enforced sell is the most effective remedy.

I think about the worse thing an individual interested in developing a relationship with God can do is read pre-existing literature on the subject–it’s mostly a bunch of by now endlessly translated male edited propaganda used to control primitive societies and work in lockstep with feudal governments.  It’s the idea of God as a franchise—with rightful ownerships allotted to those who then proscribe behaviors based on an interpretation of laws that only benefit their creators.

We don’t need intercessors nor do we need the opinion of scholars nor do we need instructions on self-flagellation–we simply need to open our hearts to love–and listen–there is no where God is not and no time when the totality of creation is silent.

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So it becomes very important to embody the practice.  As much as possible.  And to forgive ourselves every time we fail.  Because we will fail.  Forgiveness is a big part of the practice.

To live simply, eat healthily, walk in harmony with all creatures and love with abandon.   If you think particle physics is difficult or carrying a rifle into combat scary you should try listening for and living in accordance with your inner guidance.  That’s maybe the most difficult and most constructive act a single individual can offer to the collective.

So of course Yoga informs my poetry.  Not that I write like the much admired Rumi.  I don’t.  There are enough good souls writing about the light.  About the arisen beauty everywhere.  And a few good souls writing about the dark.  About the dangerous shadows that subsume us.

The response to a loving touch or a wicked prod is galvanic. And may find expression in actions that elevate or oppress.  May find expression in as many ways as there are vessels of expression.  One hand wraps around a trigger, another around a stethoscope.  One hand around a pen.

Kingdoms will fall and the old stories will die and the dust of their struggles will coat the new leaves in the old forest.  And that is both harsh and gentle in that it is truthful and the truth is unburdened by human concerns.  If we build a structure with inferior materials then the truth is it will fall. If we build well it will last.  Truth is always simple.  It’s the disagreement among its translators that introduces complexity.  The creation of the future is, like the poem, the responsibility and privilege of its authors.

“…So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow…”

This is the wonderful and inexhaustible beauty of poetry.  That it is a practice capable of providing a crucible within which the subtle connections between things are brought together with the consequences and responsibilities of seeing them.

And this is Yoga.   Bringing together the deepest true elements of body, emotion, thought, dreams and spirit into a single mindful breath—then following it with another—and another—until the poems are written—until the life is lived—

Until all the specific and unique pieces of ice finish their incremental melting back to source and for awhile we know each other as one thing.   Again.

04 Rock On Hanuman (feat. Krishna Das) by MC Yogi