The Yoga of Poetry -Rilke

Here is another poem I happened upon as I was preparing for next week's Yoga classes.  I love the last two sentences:  "perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless
that wants help from us."

Fear of the Inexplicable
 
But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished
the existence of the individual; the relationship between
one human being and another has also been cramped by it,
as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of
endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the
bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone
that is responsible for human relationships repeating
themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and
unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeable
experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes
nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation
to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively
from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of
the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident
that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a
place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and
down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous
insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in
Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons
and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about
us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.
We are set down in life as in the element to which we best
correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of
years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we
hold still we are, through a happy mimicry,scarcely to be
distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to
mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors,
they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us;
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we
arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now
still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust
and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those
ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into
princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps
everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless
that wants help from us.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Love After Love

This was one of the first poems I heard in Savasana when I was taking David Vendetti's class back at Back Bay Yoga before I became a yoga teacher.  It really spoke to me then (2003) and again when I picked up the book "The Time Traveller's Wife" a couple of years later.  It graced the first page of the book and I remember again it's simple but potent message of coming back to ourselves.   That's when I started to read it to my classes.  I heard it again in a speech give by Jon Kabat-Zinn to Google employees a year or two ago.  Tonight it resurfaced in my brain and I thought...better share it with all of you.  You just might need to hear it.

LOVE AFTER LOVE  by Derek Walcott

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Class Musings

Happy Happy First Days of Fall!
This week in class I've been very excited to share new poses, sequences, and mudras (hand gestures) as we transition into the fall season.  Happy New Year to all my Jewish friends and of course to all the rest of you.  September really is a time of new beginnings.  It just dawned on me that I've been teaching a new mudra this week called, "Ganesh Mudra" and  Ganesh is the Hindu God who symbolizes new beginnings. He is also the remover of all obstacles.  I have been guiding students into this Mudra after our centering and meditation at the start of class.

 GANESH MUDRA

This mudra helps us meet others with COURAGE, OPENNESS, and CONFIDENCE.  For instructions on how to come into this mudra please reference: Mudras, Yoga in Your Hands by Gertrd Hirschi. It's a little gem of a book I know you'll enjoy.

How do we achieve YOGA?
I also introduced the first 4 Verses of Patanjali's Yoga Sutras.  I wanted to remind all of you what is really happening when you step onto your yoga mat.  The first verse states that "Yoga is Deliberately Stilling the Thought Waves of the Mind" and that in order to do so we must (Verse 2) "Practice"...and that Practice is "the steadfast effort to still these fluctuations.  Well, we ask, how must we practice our poses then?  What about effort?  Verse 3 states that "the Posture should be steady and comfortable."  Oh really?  You mean I don't have to painfully twist myself into a pretzel for the pose to be performed with "right effort?"  No, not at all!  According to verse 4: "Perfection in an asana (pose) is achieved when the effort to perform it becomes effortless and the infinite being within is reached.

So it sounds like when we still the mind, time and space become irrelevant and we can then achieve this infinite "being" by relinquishing over efforting and surrendering into effortlessness.  BUT, remember, it all comes down to what?  PRACTICE.  Practice doesn't mean you seek perfection but rather that you show up on your mat day after day no matter how you feel.

The poem I've been reading in class this week is from Swami Vivekenanda about finding ourselves, not in "temples or churches" not in "earths or heavens" but finding ourselves as the "nearest of the near."  (Poem from "Yoga and the Quest for the True Self")

For the rest of your week, perhaps you can think about this posting.  Ganesh: remover of obstacles...what obstacles are you currently facing?  See if you can bring the power of Ganesh into your life this week and ask that something greater than yourself take care of these hardships.

Effort: Where in your life can you release this?  Find the balance between effort and ease.  Chances are if you are over efforting, you are making your own life difficult.  Remember: Suffering is an option.  You do not have control over what happens to you but you do have a choice on how you respond.

As always, I'll see you on the mat!  But,  remember! the work you do off the mat is where your real practice shines through.

Love and Light,
Natalie