Parinama

  In Iyengar yoga, we make an important distinction between action and movement.   Movement is activity without awareness while action is activity with awareness.   In action, the intelligence (buddhi) is yoked to the movement bringing us into yoga (integration). Movement can be done without any thought, feeling, or awareness.   This is how we get around most of the time.   We get out of bed, walk to the car, take a sip of coffee, talk on the phone without thinking much at about what we are doing and saying.   We usually do not feel the different parts of the body in motion.   With action, our movements become infused with awareness of the movement and the effects of the movement on our body/minds, consciousness, and conscious.  In a recent class, Abhijata Iyengar was teaching this point with a simple example.   In the first exercise, she asked us to go from standing ( tadasana ) with arms stretched overhead to standing f...

  “I spend more time with myself now because there is more of myself to be with.” Read in a book in a bin    I feel swaddled by the long thick darkness of this season.   I am drawn in to rest after the early sunset, with yoga, with a hot bath.   I rise early to watch the sun rise in the East, some days in a burst of pink, orange, and yellow other days an easy milky blue.   Early afternoon, I watch the sun setting in the opposite window pulled into the melancholy dark blue that deepens into black. I always want the darkest blue to linger a bit longer. We have the week between Christmas and New Year’s off so my time empties during the darkest part of the year into a flow of long walks, hot tea, writing, yoga, and more hot baths. There will be visits with friends and family but no travel this year.   My life has become quieter during pandemic – and quieter still during this dark season.   I find it easy and nourishing to be w...

  During some part of everyday, most of us will feel lonely regardless of how many friendships we have, whether we are parents, have partners, are in fulfilling or awful jobs. This is because loneliness comes from inside of ourselves not from outer circumstances.   I am not talking about isolation where because of choice or situation we are cut-off from other people (like in the pandemic)!   The loneliness I am writing about is rooted in disconnection from our innermost self.     Because loneliness makes us feel estranged from others it can seem as if relationship is the antidote.   But as Carl Jung has said, we cannot be in relationship with others until we come to a mature relationship with ourselves in our aloneness.   For it is only in our aloneness that we learn to be with our wounds, the parts of ourselves that we would rather cut-off.   When we are unable to abide with our wounds, we end up looking to pawn them off on...