Parinama

  The defining experience at the diamond-hard center of reality is eternal movement as beautiful and fearful invitation; a beckoning dynamic asking us to move from this to that. The courageous life is the life that is equal to this unceasing tidal and seasonal becoming: and strangely beneath all, stillness being the only proper physical preparation for joining the breathing autonomic exchange of existence. We are so much made of movement that we speak of the destination being both inside us and beyond us; we sense we are the journey along the way, the one who makes it and the one who has already arrived. David Whyte, Consolations   I am a pilgrim now, on a pilgrimage to the sacred place, away from the place of knowing to the land of unknowing.   I have left my shelter, a small firelit cabin of hospitality in the snowy woods where I lived alone but not without friends, a livelihood, fresh water from the well.   My cabin a retreat and then r...

    In establishing and deepening our chosen contemplative practice, we develop an ethereal love-relationship with a principle completely beyond what and who we normally take ourselves to be.....Through this process of introversion, there occurs a profound clearing. Instead of an inner labyrinth, we find an inner sanctuary - one that can be accessed for guidance and perspective at any time.  (Gitte Beschgard, The Gift of Consciousness)  Every now and then, it’s interesting to consider why we practice yoga. One, five, twenty years into practice the reasons change.   Knowing why we are practicing, why we are doing what we are doing, can help us to stay committed to the path, to know what seeds we are planting that may blossom in the future.   I signed-up for my first yoga class   - almost 30 years ago now – to get myself off of the couch in the evening.   I was near the end of a six-year doctoral program, no longer so overwh...

        The Quaker and teacher Parker Palmer uses the metaphor of the Mobius Strip to express the relationship between the inner and outer self.   Imagine a thin strip of paper, one side orange, one side green.   Let the orange side represent the inner and green the outer.   Green is what we present to the world, the image of ourselves that we want others to see, what you post on Facebook.   Orange is what lies inside that only we have access to.   If you twist the strip then join the edges you get a mobius strip.   Trace your finger around the orange and you come into the green and then back out to orange.   The mobius illustrates how our inner and outer selves while seemingly separate are intertwined.   What happens to us in the outer world touches our inner self just as our inner self colors how we experience the outer world.   But we don’t come to know this without a great amount of dedicat...