by Mei Lai Swan | Sep 28, 2015 | Uncategorized
This is a straight from the hips offering for those who love yoga, who want to know more, and who sense that it is a path of endless discovery. Because it is.
This A to Z of Yoga is hardly definitive. It is an invitation. I hope you will be delighted and inspired to dive deeper into your own journey of yoga as a fearless adventurer, a pioneer into the frontier of the incredibly unique and unfolding experience that is you.
D is for Dying
If yoga teaches us the art of living, it also teaches us the art of dying.
In its deepest essence, it initiates us into this great mystery of life and transforms our relationship with it.
Over the past few weeks I have watched the Facebook posts of Edo Kahn, as his wife and love Jo made the transition from this earth from a painful stomach cancer, diagnosed only two months ago.
Edo and Jo offered music, yoga and seva (selfless service) with so many, as they travelled the world as a devoted, loving duo, sharing their gifts and their love at retreats, gigs, and festivals. They also founded “A Sound Life” – a charity dedicated to sharing free music and yoga with those in need. It was a perfect offering and a perfect love story.
And their grace continued through the completely unexpected, earth-shattering turn of events. Even in extreme pain, Jo continued to sing, to share her love and wisdom, and passed with an awe-inspiring grace to “return to the lotus feet of her guru”, Sakthi Amma. Even following the death of his beloved, Edo has continued sharing openly with insight, love and wisdom.
In one of her final diary entries, Jo wrote: “I asked Amma “how can the whole universe be within me? Please show me.” Amma took me on an astral travel moving from “me” to the city, to the country, world, universes, galaxies, where so many planets exist. We kept flying through space. “But Amma, how does this all exist within me?” I ask Her. Just then, the travel continues through the galaxies and then ends in my heart. “See Jo, there’s no separation, Jo is there ” pointing to the origin where I am the size of a mustard seed. “and Jo is here too” – with the entire universe within me. She took me for a good ride that night…”
Yoga – through meditation, devotion and the mysteries of grace – can give us deep insights into the nature of reality and experiences of fundamental oneness, that help to reframe our understanding of life and death, bringing us greater peace and acceptance even in the pain of departure.
This heartbreaking but grace-filled meeting of death reminds us that life is indeed a great mystery, with seemingly little rhyme or reason. That great pain and death can come ‘early’ in the most unlikely of ways, and to the most unlikely of people. In the tradition of yoga, many may call this ‘karma’ – the unfolding of cause and effect from previous lives. Whatever it may be, it is a great teaching of the power of spiritual devotion, perspective and love, and a powerful reminder to make the most of this incredible gift of life whilst we have it.
There are so many good things to do in this life, so many ways in which to continuously unfold into greater consciousness, into higher self, and into love. How could you want to live ignorantly and selfishly, and miss out on the beauty of a life lived in service, in wisdom, and in love…
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” – Mary Oliver
Hungry for more?
Here are a few more D-words to add to your yoga lexicon. Let these words take you down the rabbit hole of your own research, exploration, and contemplation.
D is for: devotion, dharma, downward dog, drishti, durga
by Mei Lai Swan | Sep 22, 2015 | Uncategorized
The A to Z of Yoga: C is for Connection
This is a straight from the hips offering for those who love yoga, who want to know more, and who sense that it is a path of endless discovery. Because it is.
This A to Z of Yoga is hardly definitive. It is an invitation. I hope you will be delighted and inspired to dive deeper into your own journey of yoga as a fearless adventurer, a pioneer into the frontier of the incredibly unique and unfolding experience that is you.
C is for Connection
Step onto the mat, into your breath, and into your body, and by the time you’re finished with the practice, there’s a sense of feeling home again, of feeling whole, of feeling reconnected.
This is the power of yoga, of uniting mind, body and breath, and expanding our awareness and states of consciousness through the practice.
From the Sanskrit root yuj – to unite, to join, to yoke – yoga is about connection. It is the connection of self to Self, of self to other, and to all of life. For ultimately, life is about relationship and our experience of self, which we come to know through the ways in which we relate to everything around and within us. As so many spiritual traditions teach us, all of life is interconnected. Through fields such as ecology and quantum physics, science has been slowly ‘proving’ what the ancient seers have revealed over thousands of years ago. In Tantra, this is known as Shiva: absolute conscious, the unified field, the underlying awareness-presence of life.
The beauty of practices such as yoga, is that they enable us to have a direct experience of this fundamental interconnectedness. And this experience of interconnectedness starts to alter the ways in which we relate to ourselves and to others, from the profound understanding that we are neither different from each other, nor inherently separate. With this understanding, we naturally begin to generate the qualities of compassion, peace, and love, and the fundamental feelings of belonging and wholeness that we all long for, as we take that essential journey from self back to Self – to arrive right where we started, perfect and complete.
And all we require is our very own body-mind, a curiosity and longing, and the heartfelt cultivation of awareness.
Hungry for more?
Here are a few more C-words to add to your yoga lexicon. Let these words take you down the rabbit hole of your own research, exploration, and contemplation.
C is for: Chakra, Chit, Consciousness, Craving, Chandra
by Mei Lai Swan | Sep 14, 2015 | Uncategorized
This is a straight from the hips offering for those who love yoga, who want to know more, and who sense that it is a path of endless discovery. Because it is.
This A to Z of Yoga is hardly definitive. It is an invitation. I hope you will be delighted and inspired to dive deeper into your own journey of yoga as a fearless adventurer, a pioneer into the frontier of the incredibly unique and unfolding experience that is you.
B is for Body, but…
But what? It’s kind of obvious in our body-conscious society that yoga is about the body, right. It’s now one of the most popular forms of exercise in the West. It’s a great way to build strength, flexibility and vitality, which also improves our mental and emotional wellbeing; and even better, it has the extra perks of ‘spiritual fitness’.
But… it runs so much deeper than that. The body really is the vehicle for awakening. This is the radical teaching of Tantra, that emerged in India only around the 5th century (remember that ‘classical’ yoga was birthed from around 500-200BC).
Departing from the dual split between matter and spirit that was the hallmark of the ancient Vedic traditions, Tantra offered a radical acknowledgement of the body, this human form, as an aspect or an expression of the divine. In Tantra, there is no separation between matter and spirit, mundane or divine. So this human body – that is both clumsy and agile, that feels aches and ecstasy, that we worship when it is slim and toned and curse when it is overweight or misshapen – is the divine form we have for experiencing and discovering life, and for awakening into all that we can possibly be.
In the words of Eckhart Tolle, “You are the universe, expressing itself as a human for a little while.”
To fully awaken into this realization starts right here, in your human form, in your body. The body is the vehicle for awakening.
This is what my pioneering teachers Tara Judelle and Scott Lyons see as the underlying principle of a genuine modern yoga practice focused on awakening (check out Embodied Flow Yoga).
It is an invitation to become ‘somanauts’ – explorers into the inner world of our very own body-mind, deep into our own experience. To not only move the outer form of the body, but to really feel and sense inside the body with the fullness of our awareness, to discover its sensations and bring alive the consciousness of our tissues, our organs, our bones, our very cells.
Why? To discover life, to discover self, to understand and experience more of this awe-inspiring reality, to become awake, literally, in all the cells and fibres of our being.
Fortunately for us, we not only have the ancient and evolving tools of yoga, but also the incredible discoveries of science (see the video link below, for example), and new forms of movement and somatic exploration such as Body Mind Centering to add to our toolbox of practices of awakening – our practice of Yoga.
Hungry for more and ready to be awed?
And, here are a few more B-words to add to your yoga lexicon. Let these words take you down the rabbit hole of your own research, exploration, and contemplation.
B is for: breath, bhakti, Body Mind Centering (BMC), bandha, Bhagavad Gita, buddhi.
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