I saw a movie recently that I found very engaging: Adaptation, with Nicolas Cage and Meryl Streep. The movie deal with finding love and passion in life. If you like writing or plants the movie will have an extra appeal. Its about an author trying to write a screenplay adaptation or a book about plants and for the very movie you are watching.

The relevant issue to yoga is held in the following lines from the script.

CHARLES: I loved Sarah, Donald, it was mine that love, I owned it. Even Sarah didn’t have the right to take it away.”

DONALD: She thought you were a nerd, Charles, she was making fun of you.

CHARLES: That was her business not mine.
You are what you love, not what loves you…that’s what I decided a long time ago.

–from “Adaptation”

Sujantra

Someone said that the only constant is change…and yet those who practice deep meditation have the experience of finding an unchanging reality of peace and calm. On the surface the two statements seem to contradict each other. How can there be two realities existing simultaneously? A reality of constant change and a changeless reality.

any thoughts?

The famous writer Albert Camus said something most notable (recently relayed to me by a friend and fellow yogi:) “… people expend tremendous energy just trying to appear normal.”

How true that is. Society defines what is “normal” and then most of us set out to conform to those norms. I remember walking the halls in high school and the strong sense of self consciousness that I had. So much was about what other people thought about me and what I was doing, wearing etc: pier pressure. It was during that time that I learned an important antidote to this great concern for how we appear to others (which is the root of the fear of public speaking.) The secret for me was learning to laugh at myself.

One day I realized that I was taking myself way to seriously. I did something that was not “normal” and was slightly ridiculed for it. Out of nowhere I just started to laught at the situaltion and what I had done. That proved to be a turning point in my life.

If you can learn to laugh at yourself then you can learn to shake off “failures and defeats” and take them instead as great learning experiences. Don’t take yourself to seriously…it feel good!

If anyone wants a beautiful insight into the Indian (East that is) culture and view of life I recommend a movie called The Namesake. It is a story that spans two generations and shows the great cycle of life that is at the heart of Indian philosophy.

On a personal note: I usually give a movie twenty minutes to draw my attention. I figure if you can’t create an interesting character or plot in the first twenty minutes you don’t know how to tell a story, which I think is always at the heart of a good film.

Anyway, this one got me pretty quick….

One of the Buddha’s central teaching was the importance of seeing that all of life is transient.  Emerson, the 19th century luminary, offerred his words on the same topic: “The things we now esteem fixed shall, one by one, detach themselves like ripe fruit from our experience and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows wither.” (The Over-Soul)

We often look to the East for spiritual wisdom, yet in Emerson and Thoreau we have all the wisdom necessary to attain illumination. Thoreau’s yoga was walking. He spent four hours a day walking in nature. That was was his asana, done in the temple of Nature.

“Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not whence.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Over-Soul

The practice of yoga offers the possibility to connect with the experience of “our being descending into us.” It is through breath that life flows through us and yoga is all about breath awareness. As the breath is always changing so are we also in a constant state of change, and yet amidst all of the change we each have a constant “sense of self.” To watch the breath is the key to entering into the “stream” of which we are all apart.

The most ancient of the yoga texts are written in “sutras” which are short concise statements. These sutras have been passed down for thousands of years both orally and in writing. To me they are poetry. I recently came across a few lines by the modern poet W.H Auden (1907-1973) that felt like yoga in words, albeit with a certain melancholy tint…kind of like the feeling right beforethe first sun salutation on a sore morning:

“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the oceans and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.”

After a few sun salutations the bliss of life eclipses those sentiments, but still they have their time….

There are ends and there are means. Yogic disciplines are the means. Oneness-a feeling of connectedness with ourselves and all of existence-is the ends.The path of yoga is a path of guidelines which are general and through which we all find our unique path. Great teachers make a clearing which makes our journey more sure, yet the only guarantee of our progress is our sincere effort.

Thoughts? Help me here folks!