Hazel's Magic Lantern ハシバミの幻灯.

Sometimes its all so muddy and messy and dirty and stinky I can't stand it.  Then I am reminded to live like the lotus.  This is the key symbol for the spiritual aspirant.  The lotus flower has its roots in the muddy waters but it blooms above, untouched by the murky waters below.   

 

Something has shifted inside me since our weekend with Richard Miller in his yoga nidra training.  Just a couple days before I had been feeling decimated by issues of global poverty, war and over consumption.  What I learned in this weekend training -or rather had an experience of, was that I was fused with the perception.  We have experiences and perceptions and feelings.  This is the stuff of humanity.  Yoga nidra and other yogic practices teach us -scientifically - to pull back the focus on our lens so we are not so tightly gripped by our circumstances and all the waves that flow through our lives; fear, hunger, craving, sluggishness, confusion, anger, images, words, feelings, sounds, thoughts.  The practice is like a big floaty toy.  Instead of being tossed up and down, to and fro by every wave that comes along, spittering and spattering as it all splashes in our face, we begin to rise above the tumult.

In the practice of yoga nidra, we don't push away the experiences, perceptions and feelings but instead welcome them in for tea and cookies.  Once we welcome in the sensation, we can observe it and welcome in its opposite.  The mind can't hold the two opposites - hot and cold for example - so it at some point dissolves into the radiant sensation of the body and we can hold both fear and joy, confusion and clarity, hot and cold in the spacious awareness of our Beingness.   We don't fuse any more.  Can you imagine?  Someone yells, but not at you.  From spaciousness we welcome  in their anger, ask them more about it and allow a space for it to dissipate.  How does that work for world hunger?  I'm not sure yet but this is my project.

It all equals life. The lotus flower wouldn't bloom at all if it weren't for the muddy water and we're all one lotus flower.  We grow up through the muddy waters together and unfold as one beautiful flower.  I don't surface until you do.  This is why the practice is to ungrip ourselves and then work tirelessly to support others in ungripping themselves. It becomes impossible to turn our backs on anyone's suffering as soon as we see it as inextricably linked to our own. I guess this is how it works for world hunger.  When we all get shaken a bit loose from our grip on this illusion of separateness, a natural compassion arrises and it becomes easy to make choices that are sustainable and humane.

As a kid, I spent much of my life in water.  I loved to drop things to the bottom and dive down to pick them up.  I loved to then swim towards the surface with my eyes open as the light expanded and all the shapes would become more and more clear until I broke the surface of the water. That's us now and we are about to bloom. 


 
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