Writing To The Big Sky

(What is left of the Cosmo's after a beautiful October rain in LA!)

I heard something beautiful the other day... "There are no words for the sound of the rain." I thought to myself how true this observation is. We all know what the sound of the rain is like from our own perspective and bag of experiences. But what does the rain sound like to a person who is deaf? I know my deaf dogie smells the rain and feels the soft droplets on her body. What does the rain sound like for a leaf or a flower? What wondrous oblivion to have small water droplets fall out of the sky in a rhythmic pattern hitting the ground creating the music of rain. Nice.

I have been wandering around in my own wondrous oblivion to come to the conclusion that I have only just begun to push the limits of my mind. I have had some very cool epiphanies that have helped me to better understand my relationship to the Universe.
I have been intrigued by things that have a defined purpose in the world like worms! The world can't work without worm's. How about bee's! The world does not work with out bee's! The Universe is built on relationships. At first glance they look like relationships of diversity but in reality it is unity that is underlying and holding the diversity together. I kind of hit a wall when I turned the question back on myself and asked what is my relationship with the world? I drew a blank! Tears came to my eyes because I started to despair that I did not know what my human relationship was in the world. What do I bring to the party?

The other day it hit me while I was out in the front garden. I was hesitating about pulling out the field Cosmo's I have growing. I was puttering around in the garden and I noticed that 7 beautiful little birds with brightly colored yellow bodies and brown wings had climbed deep into the flowers and were eating all the dead flower buds. I looked across the street to see that the old bread I had thrown around had been discovered by Mr. Squirrel and 4 crows. they were busy staking out bread rations. Mr Squirrel was busy burring them in the leaves. 4 crows were at the other end of the bread scatterings collecting what they could. It hit me! I was part of the whole thing.

I did not take out the flowers even though they have seen better days because the beautiful yellow birds need them, the bee's need them, The sun needs them,...I need them. Unity in diversity!

I Am

(Janaki 1968 in her back garden on Franklin Street in Napa CA)

I remind myself that Yoga is a philosophy, a way to live ones life within the flow of the Divine.

Religion sadly can be very easily boiled down to Fundamentalism, Dogma, and Ideology and therefore losing the essence of the Divine within the limitations and or restrictions of the words in which it is delivered.

Spirituality is to feel or have the awareness of the Divine in ones heart and to cultivate that love by working it backwards to One.

I have come to the conclusion that Hinduism is a lovely collection of Myth that teaches and guides it's aspirant through the practice of Yoga to reach Truth! I love the Gita for this and I am very devoted to the teachings of the Gita but I do not feel the need to constantly be putting labels on 'Being' by calling it Hinduism or Yoga but instead choose to let the words fall away to reveal Brahman.

In short I do not call my Self a Hindu or Yogini... although I am aspirant of both.. Perhaps even these concepts are too limiting. I try and reach for "I Am".

Soham.

The Road of Contemplaition

(I'm on the left my little sister Teri on the right.. Taken by my Uncle Roger in 1969 at my nice granny's house. I'm 4 years old. I think that I'm wearing my Uncle Mikes shirt!)


It’s Saturday morning… I woke up to my body pleading with me not to get out of bed and to go back to sleep. I really don’t sleep in anymore I’m awake pretty much at 7am. This morning I threw open the French doors that are off the back of my bedroom and had deep gratitude for the beautiful birch tree in the back garden and the color of the morning beach light. I could hear the dew dripping off the roof of the house onto the deck in a sweet song of droplets.

I have not been this tired in a long time. I try to do too much and I have a hard time with taming my desire to leave a legacy of peace. Lots of things are coming fast and quick and I see that I need to cocoon and just let things sink in. I have not made time for my meditation practice…. I have been in contemplation a lot. I suppose this is not a bad place to be and in reality I’m exactly where I need to be. I have found for myself that contemplation brings me much closer to love and compassion. It’s a process that requires a lot of energy and I think that this might be in part why I feel a little tired. If I were to add a little more meditation into the equation then I would probably feel a little less empty. I should note that I am not completely neglecting my mediation it’s just that I have not been consistent breaking a very important rule of mediation… consistency!

Contemplation has led me to my past. It has made me look at my past actions and correct "my wrongs". Not in an atonement kind of way. I think that atonement is an unachievable value because one can not go back and just say I’m sorry and have everything go back to what it was… No, you can atone for past transgressions but know that I will never change the past. That die has been cast. I think the correction of “my wrongs” is to my thinking! Change my thoughts to higher thinking and that will be reflected back on me. This for me means not to hold on to anger or to my father and his mother but to let go and just be me for them. I cannot go back and make up for all the lost time. That is truth the time is gone and that’s ok. It’s not to dwell on it and get upset with what could have been but accept what is and move forward with that knowing that it will never be more than what it is. Let go of the ideology that family is perfect. Family is the greatest teacher of all! This is where the real pain and struggle happen and it is what you do with that lesson. I turned my back on it for about 20 years only to come to realize that yes I did not need them but THEY needed me.

I have accepted that this is my failure however it is my failure to learn from and in that respect perhaps it’s not a failure at all. Perhaps everything is exactly as it should be… From here I can grow I can move forward with awareness and know the power of my own actions. With this power I can become a wiser woman and make better choices using this experience as part of my arsenal of life experiences.

The Golden Rule has come full circle for me in this lesson. Do to others as you would want them to do to you. I know this sounds overly simple but how many of us really live by this rule? Contemplation has led me to the high road and to the thought that we don’t have to hold on to our thoughts we can choose to let them go and be free of the dogmas they create. We don’t even know that we do these things but we do. And with a swimming motion I push tamas out of the way and reach for Satva…

Never stop reaching higher.

Invisible Treadmill

(Our newly painted house with a very happy garden!)


I had a very strange dream last night. I was walking on an invisible treadmill... The treadmill represented all the efforts that I put in at the center. I had to keep getting on and off of the treadmill to take care of other things like "life" I would have to return to the treadmill and try and find it by feel or looking at the air moving around the belt and jump on it while it was moving.

The treadmill represents my spiritual practice - never ending and running in perpetuity. I dive deep into Hinduism it has the appearance of a brilliantly colored kaleidoscope... One that holds my attention with rapt fascination leaving me wondering where I will end up next or what message it might deliver to me. The messages come in both plain and colorful boxes begging me to open and experience them. But it's not all in the experience. I can now see that it is just as important to observe the one experiencing. In doing this I do not feel the need to put my opinion on everything. I don't worry about good/bad, like/dislike, its all the same, kind of like vanilla and chocolate ice cream when they melt together in a dish and become mixed-up ... No longer chocolate or vanilla but just one flavor. That is how I'm starting to experience the world. Please don't misunderstand it's not that I don't still have preferences it's just that I'm not so worried about servicing them. It's a nice feeling to not be caught up in this kind of desirous thinking because it is such an energy waster and you don't realize how crazy making it is until you let go of the idea that you need to have an idea. Following this pattern of thinking "not needing to have an opinion" I have been able to chip away at my attachments. It's not as easy as it sounds because as you move one out of the way you find two or three more underneath it! Many many little ripples upon the surface of the mind.

What am I attached to? *Sigh* Life!... I can't help but want to live a long life. I don't wish for this in a "I'm afraid of dying" kind of thing but more in I want to try and plant as many positive karma seeds as I possibly can. I think that I should also admit that I think that I might be attached to my home, family, work and the little life I have eked out for us. But what does that mean? Truthfully if I can figure that out I would be able to let go of all of it in a non-attached way. I just want to say that this is not renouncing. Renouncing means to let go of ones ego not the world. I need to be be in the world but not get hung up or attached to the world... I suppose to get to this point ego needs to be renounced.

The downside is I sometimes feel a little slow when people are talking really super fast like they just can't vomit out their opinions, words and ideas quick enough. I'm left in their dust wondering why the words, opinions and ideas seem so important to them? Haha! I can't even focus on what is being said because I'm so not interested. I don't mean that in a mean way but in a removed sort of way. I have moved my mind aside and am not worried about big brain moments I just want to focus my energy on dogs,flowers,family,and of course Yoga!

Life is good.

Experiements With Truth

(Peace Pilgrimage on Mt Baldy, Aug 2009)

I did a write up for a fellow blogger about integrity. It was a very interesting challenge for me because as I took the virtue apart I realized at the heart of integrity was Truth.... Not as in "I'm telling the truth" but as in the Universal Law - Truth. I started to put some very big blocks of knowledge together for myself and came to the simple realization that everything and I do mean everything in it's purest form goes back to the Universal Law. What I realized is if we fail to work everything back to Code of Universal Law then what we are left with is a form of ideology, fundamentalism or dogma. If we wipe away the latter then we are no longer identifying with the right , the left, blue state or red state, we are simply humanity... My suffering is your pain and your suffering is my pain. The moment that we cease to have this compassion for one another then we have separation also known as the dualities of Maya (hence right, left, blue, red).

What if find intriguing about the dualities of Maya is how easily they snag people into the trap of thinking in the pattern of likes and dislikes. A great example of this is people who believe that the only way to God is their point of view be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu. It makes me think of a wonderful story told by the Dali Llama. He teaches that all religions lead to God if practiced correctly just as in all boats lead to the other side or the river and if piloted correctly. The point is to get on a boat and be happy with it. Don't taunt or throw rocks at the other boats and say they are not as superior as yours. That's not the point of being on the boat! The point of the boat is to get to the other side... But we are so quickly distracted into worrying about what is going on on the other boats! Religion's are nothing more than the vessels that transport us to the other side. If navigated correctly we get delivered safely to the other side. But if misused or misunderstood we get stuck in the water and perhaps sink and drown in our own duality. They are not meant to be weight down in our likes and dislikes.

So where has our focus on Universal Law gone? How can any of us say that we have any integrity at all when we bundle integrity up into our fundamentalism? Anytime we subscribe to "I'm this or I am that" we have just cut ourselves off from compassion. It's as simple as saying, "I'm Hindu..." The moment that I start to identify with this statements then I lose compassion for the person whom may not understand or care about Hinduism. But if I choose to look at things from the the perspective of Universal Law or the Golden Rule "Do unto others as I would have done unto me" then I'm choosing to look at the world from a point of view that ALL faiths or non faiths boil down to this simple point:

We are all the same. We just walk different paths to the same end.