This Moment To Be Free

I have been studying and learning about Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy – a bridge between body and soul –  a modality I am planning to learn and practice..and as part of my exploration, I took a session with a practitioner. I emerged from the session — a combination of hatha yoga, meditation and Rogerian therapy, that also reminds me of thai yoga therapy and shamanic style dream journeying — with the message from my inner self, the great teacher within, that “I can function in time”.

I am not yet at peace with time…I struggle with leaving enough time to get places. Some days I expand so much into empty space/time that I can spend a whole day just day-dreaming and emailing and computer surfing and not getting things done, and then other days I can be in the flow and efficient and move through space and time like a force of nature, accomplishing everything I want to, and feeling time is my friend.

I am lately feeling the discomfort and crawl of time spent healing – i have a knee injury and need to find time to do an hour or so of relatively boring physical therapy exercises each morning…some days I make the process into a beautiful meditation by counting “om one, om two…” as I go through the movements and other days it is a chore to get myself to do what I need to do to help my body heal. Some days I feel physically better and love the process and feel that the injury (knee cap slightly dislocated, not a serious thing, not a deep-level injury, but just enough to give pain and slow down my yoga practice) is a gift because it gives me understanding and compassion I can use to empathize with my students and later that I will be able to use with therapy clients…other times I just feel pain and cannot do the asanas I want to do and I feel time is too slow and despair of healing in time (for what?) and feel I am getting old.

So what does it mean to receive the message from inside me that “I can function in time”? For my Heart it means, “do not despair – in time, I will function just as You desire and I will soar as my Heart’s Desire  wishes and yearns to do…there will be time, there is enough time, I can function in time”. For my Body it means “don’t worry – I can function within the boundaries of time – and that means I can be with Body at the level that Body lives in — Body lives in Time — Body eats, sleeps, walks, works, eliminates, rests, and heals from illness and injury within Time and in physical, real-time Space — and there is no rushing or changing or manipulating that — only helping Body to Be and to heal in its own way, in its own time”. For my Spirit it means “I can function in Time, even though Spirit itself has no conception of what Time is…Spirit is timeless and although “I” am not timeless when I am embodied as I am now, there is a part of me that is connected to Great Spirit and in Time I can know this and feel it and live from that place”.

Meanwhile I can work on accepting all parts of me, including the artistic and creative Soul who needs to spend some time just sitting and seemingly doing nothing, seemingly “wasting time” while incubating things like this to write about…and the part that just needs to sit with the cats, and the part that can zip around town teaching and studying and getting things done with a smile on my face, and the part that can clean the house and shop and cook the meals and enjoy physical work, and the part that Witnesses it all and is grateful for the opportunity to just be here on Earth struggling and feeling love and joy and fear and anger and happiness and sadness and knowing and not-knowing…

None of this is possible without Time…I could not be having these experiences, unfolding out of myself and into my Self if it were not for being in this mortal Body and operating within the laws of physics and gravity…but there is also the magical Quantum level that I am just learning about…the time that is all times at once, and no times never, and in which time there can be multiple possible and probable outcomes…that is the Dream Time into which I will more and more expand and fly…and into which, one day, if I am blessed, I will find a way to help other people journey and serve the Light by giving my support as they, in time, heal themselves.

Om shanti, om peace.

Our love will form a bridge between our own hearts and god’s Heart within ourselves. The Heart of the universe resides in our hearts just as night follows day Our Heart beats, and our hearts beat and we breathe to the beat of  the Cosmic Heart – our breathing is to the pulse of the Heartbeat of the One, the All.

The many breathe, the many beat, the many pulse in time, in rhythm to the beat of the distant Heart Drum. Come closer. We, unknowing, beat here in the fading cusp of Darkness, pulse here as the Light dawns. Born from the ashes of our own hearts’ burning in the sacred alchemical fires that, like water, wash us all clean.

i teach yoga because i love yoga, and one of the reasons i love yoga is the neverending flow of experience and learning that comes with this practice on so many levels.

this past week i have been reflecting on the seemingly contradictory aspects of a yoga class – that of sangha, or community and soul, the individual as her own best teacher.

when people come to practice yoga together, a sangha, a spiritual community, is created – even if it is for only a short time each week, when we practice this beautiful and ancient art together we are a community. it is for this reason that teachers ask our students to chant om together at the beginning and end of class, and to all move in the same direction, or to lie with their heads facing in the same direction – to my understanding, this facilitates the energy of the sangha to join more completely in unison.

however, there is another equally powerful aspect of practice where we learn that our bodies, our own souls are our own best teachers and that the teacher herself is only a guide through the practice. in integral yoga, especially, we are taught to take what works and leave the rest  – that what the teacher says is always and only a suggestion and guide – and i love this freedom and honoring of the individual and her own needs at all times.

so in the end, we as teachers say what we feel and know will support the sangha and at the same time we honor each  individual’s choices within that structure…i teach knowing that everything i say is a way of guiding students in their own personal practice — i teach from my heart to serve each individual and to serve the sangha, the community spirit of each class. Each student must do what is right for her and each teacher must strive to create the most peaceful and joyful sangha possible.

om shanti, om peace.

“i am not my body, i’m not my mind, immortal soul am i” — is a version of the mantra a jnana yogi, one who uses reason to reach non-attachment, might repeat – i am having this experience, but I am not this experience…

whatever pain or discomfort i may be feeling at this moment is the result of my own actions, and reactions – call it karma – as i learn and grow and expand and as my heart is tenderized. sometimes the hand of god opens our chests and takes our hearts in hand and gently, or less gently touches…massages…or even pounds…open heart surgery to get us to wake up, be alive, live…

because otherwise, i am just a detached spirit who feels nothing — how else to learn to feel? how else to wake up with an open heart? Spirit needs to live on this planet embodied and mortal in order to learn compassion – for self and for others…

we do not start off compassionate – we are not angels or saints – this is a myth – we are brutal immortals who need to pass through the fire of mother earth’s gravitational and elemental orbit, to live among other embodied souls and partake in the confusion and chaos and pain – the uncertainty and mystery – the forgetting of our immortality and the smallness and vulnerability of our little lives…in order to struggle through, to sip the air and bathe in the waters and absorb the light and smell the dark clean soil and eat the food and become grateful for whatever we may be given to sustain us…we need this in order to become creatures of love…

vulnerable creatures of heart and of love…and not cold, unfeeling spirits…

so here we are passing through the tunnel from birth to death – we are not this experience but this experience changes us – hopefully for the better – hopefully in favor of love and of becoming more open and more full of heart and of light…

as my friend S. wrote of this journey toward and through awakening: “the important part is to have trust deep down.  know in your heart that it’s a process, and trust whatever forces are in this universe that things will work out”.

om shanti, om peace

namaste.