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In the middle of our life journey, I found myself in a dark wood. I had wandered from the straight path. It isn’t easy to talk about it: it was such a thick, wild, and rough forest that when I think of it, my fear returns….
Dante, The Inferno
On Saturday, October 3rd, the Inferno choreography was released into the world.
The idea for this dance has lived in me for over nine months. In the last trimester alone I poured out over 20 hours of zeal and profound love on just the physical creation of the 4 minute and 23 second dance. That doesn’t include the hours I spent reading, researching, and thinking about Dante’s heroic verses.
Before this conception there was a courtship, of course. My notes date back to August 15, 2014, when I responded to Dante’s call to his Readers:
O voi ch’avete li ‘ntelletti sani,
mirate la dottrina che s’asconde
sotto ‘l velame de li versi strani.Oh you with sound intellects,
Observe the doctrine that conceals itself
Beneath the veil of these strange verses!–Dante’s Infeno, Canto IX
That’s when I began studying Dante’s work in earnest and trying to interpret the mysterious verses. It’s astounding how a 700 year old poem continues to resonate through the work of contemporary musicians, painters, writers, singers, and other artists.
By the time of the performance, most of the choreography was set, but there were unnerving parts I had to improvise. I haven’t seen the video yet, so I don’t know how well the improvised parts went and whether I was able to express what this dance with Dante meant to me, but I do know that I learned a lot through the process of making it.
If you’re interested in seeing the images I collected to guide the choreography, they may be found through the link here on Pinterest: Inferno inspiration board
First, thank you, thank you to last week’s yogis. Donations went to the Red Cross for disaster relief in the Philippines.
There will be two more Thursday night yoga classes this year before I head into the depths of the cave for hibernation. See dates and details below.
Thursday, November 21 @ 7:00 p.m. This is a pay-what-you-can donations class with 100% of the proceeds going to the Memphis Union Mission. $50.10 will provide 30 Thanksgiving meals for those seeking food and shelter at the mission. If you have gently used coats to spare, donate those too as they are currently having a coat drive.
Thursday, December 5 @ 7:00 p.m. This is a pay-what-you-can donations class with 100% of the proceeds going to Church Health Center.
Both classes are in my cave, fireside. Expect a slow, restorative practice focused on relaxation.
For more information e-mail valetar@aol.com
Look into your own heart and discover what gives you pain and then refuse under any circumstances whatsoever to inflict that pain onto anybody else.
–Karen Armstrong
Title: Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Author: Karen Armstrong
Synopsis: Karen Armstrong, a religious historian and former nun, explores the notion of empathy and compassion that underlies and unifies the Abrahamic faiths as well as most other religious traditions.
Why I read this: A certain yogini inspired me to deepen my understanding of compassion.
What I loved about it: Armstrong’s conviction and intellect shine through every page. The depth and breadth of her scholarship was a nice change from my recent lighter reading. The language was scholarly, yet accessible, intelligible and beautiful.
What was unexpected: I was surprised by the depth beneath the self-help title and macrostructure. There really are twelve steps, but the history, spirit, and detail Armstrong provides were far more intriguing.
You might like this if you liked: The Lost Art of Compassion: Discovering the Practice of Happiness in the Meeting of Buddhism and Psychology
Fun coincidence: As I was reading this book, El Diablo was reading God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
by Christopher Hitchens. The themes and events covered often coincided. It was fun to compare notes and the authors’ vastly different perspectives: enduring optimism vs. chronically quarrelsome.
When you love you should not say, “God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.-Kahlil Gibran
Last year I rediscovered the joy of Christmas.
This year, Valentine’s Day will have a makeover. We will keep the love, but let’s expand it beyond the mere romantic, then add a lot of light, and hm….how about a tree?
Valentine’s Day Tree
Yes, a Valentine’s Day tree. It’s all about the love and light.
Shall we celebrate with yoga and tea and giving? Healthy hearts all around.
All donations for the class will go to Le Bonheur Foundation Heart Institute. If you can’t make it tonight, you can still give by clicking the blue link above or visiting lebonheur.org
If you are interested in joining us tonight, shoot me an email lunareuphoria@aol.com for directions.
HoHoYoga! Christmas “Tree” and Tea
Healthcare is more than just prescribing pills and procedures. [It is] personal stewardship of the wonderful bodies given to us by God.
–Church Health Center
Thank you, thank you, thank you to all who donated to “HoHoYoga” this month. It was an evening of bendy goodness and tastey flavors of warm tea. We created “yuletide by the fireside and joyful memories there.” With your donations Church Health Center received $222.00.
Know that your presence and giving is greatly appreciated.
To those who were not able to attend, but who dropped off donations – thank you. The stories you shared about how the Center has helped you or someone you know, confirm how well and widely the Center serves a need in the community.
I leave you with a few songs (Christmas and otherwise) from the evening…
A couple years ago, after a several year streak of holiday grumpiness, I decided to take charge of my own Christmas experience. Once I changed my approach to the holiday I found that it worked so much better for me than my old way of relating to the season.
My former approach could best be described as a frenzied scramble to meet the desires and expectations of others (or at least my perception of them) combined with my own unrealistic notions about what the season should be. You may even be familiar with the old routine — the frantic shopping for the “perfect gift” while simultaneously complaining about the commercialism and crowds of Christmas; the furtive listening to news
Peace was a blurry, distorted vision…
reports of people being trampled on Black Friday with a secret little twinge of schadenfreude; the excessive spending of money on gadgets and gifts too quickly forgotten; the overabundance of food, family, and friends at near-toxic levels.
Mixing and mingling with that off-note jingling was the most stressful time of the year in the life of an academic: the semester’s end. By December, college students are as high strung as the lights at the Rockefeller Center’s annual Christmas display. They come to your office shedding tears about their grades and their grandmothers — or worse, they sit and cry silently without telling you why at all. In class they band together and plead for another extra credit assignment, in spite of the fact you’ve told them repeatedly there will not be extra credit this semester. If you stick to your word and practice “tough love” you get creamed on student evaluations. You are an ogre and a curmudgeon and administration frowns. If you have a kind heart, extra credit makes double the work for you as you scramble to invent something for students to do at the last minute that is educational and relevant…and then scramble to grade it along with the mountain of grading you have for final projects and exams before the grades are due. After all that you’re still just as likely to get creamed on student evaluations.
It wasn’t exactly what I would call the most wonderful time of the year and definitely not the happiest season of all. Obviously, things needed to change.
So, I started working on me and my own inner Scrooge to align my deeper values with my behavior. This required a little soul-searching to work out exactly what my deeper values were. The process revealed a few changes I needed to make.
First off, the “perfect gift” ideal had to go. I had to break the shopping bag shackle to find more fulfilling experiences to share. This act alone opened up considerable space. Once I reduced the time spent in stores, and online shopping, I had more time and energy to think about and deal more productively with the end of the semester angst of my students. Freeing up that time also allowed me to pursue a much more relaxing pastime – knitting. The manual arts have a meditative, calming effect that work wonders on my disposition. I knitted in much-needed solitude and I knitted surrounded by knitwits and nutters (aka SoKaN), who provided a social support group, not to mention entertainment. Of course the manual arts also result in tangible and useable things – a happy byproduct.
I also came to the conclusion that I needed to give in ways that honored who I am at heart.
On the gift-giving front, I admit, I have become a bit more selfish. For example, *I* wanted to take a holiday carriage ride in downtown Memphis, so I forced the parents to go with me for their “present.” But maybe Ayn Rand is right and there is virtue in selfishness. In the selfish spontaneity of this carriage ride adventure, a meaningful and memorable moment unfolded. We unintentionally wound up at the place my dad proposed to my mom and I heard this story for the first time. Of course, we are talking about Nanook the Barbarian and the Angry Russian here, so their story was couched more in terms of Archie Bunker comedy than romantic rhetoric. In fact the two did not agree upon what happened at all, which is no surprise really if you know them. Theirs was not quite a love story, but it was a story of a unique love, and a Christmas gift I’ll always treasure.
The most devastating blow to my inner Scrooge came last year when I refused to listen to media reports about 
Christmas mayhem in the community and decided to start expanding my own sense of community. One of my holiday highlights last year was wrapping presents at a local bookstore for contributions to Literacy Mid-South, a local nonprofit organization that helps increase the literacy rates of adult learners. There are 125,000 adults in Memphis who read below the third grade level. Literacy Mid-South and their volunteer tutors are helping reduce that number. I have served with them in the past, but time and logistics were a barrier to continued service, so I jumped at this chance to wrap presents for donations. I drug the Indentured Servant/Resident Teologist and Nanook along for the ride and it was a beautifully wonderful morning of do-gooding awesomeness spent surrounded by books! We were all up in other people’s present buying business, wrapping gifts for stranger’s grandkids, and drinking coffee. It was GREAT! Nanook told me to pick out a book for her present to me, so I scored a copy of Jill Bolte Taylor’s book, which mom wrapped so pretty that I couldn’t bear to open it on Christmas. It stayed wrapped for a whole year before the story called to unwrap it.
Nanook’s got present wrapping skillz
This year, I am all about Christmas…but that, dear readers, is a different post.
So how about you? Any stories of Christmas past – or Scrooge slapping you have to share?
When you get to the end of all the light you know and it’s time to step into the darkness of the unknown, faith is knowing that one of two things shall happen: either you will be given something solid to stand on, or you will be taught how to fly.
–Edward Teller
In the past two months I have…
- Sold a house
- Bought a house and found Peace. Love. Home.
- Moved the contents of the old house to the new house
- Made weekly trips to the Goodwill, Salvation Army, and recycle center to get rid of the stuff the former owner left behind (we’re talking a lot of stuff here)
- Spent countless hours in the yard feeding the mosquitoes
- Talked to grasshoppers and tree frogs
- Bowed submissively to bumblebees
- Chased butterflies
- Acquired the limbs of a nine year old tomboy, adorned with scabs, scrapes, scratches, and stings
- Made mud pies
- Bled over the ferocious rose bushes
- Engaged in warfare with wasps
- Ran from a mouse
- Pulled an odd assortment of things from the dog’s mouth (including a dead mouse)
- Pondered the meaning of the closet witch the former owner left behind
left behind to guard the attic door…?
- Reveled in the Goaty Goodness the former owner left behind
Former owner left this – a blessing of Goaty Goodness!
- Resigned from my out-of-state professor gig – it was just too impossible to go back to all that after all this.
- Moved the contents of the out-of-state apartment and office to the new house
- Began taking steps to integrate my worklife into my life’s work
- Found myself overtaken by tearful fits of gratitude and joy
Keep in mind that you are making memories…..And know that if anyone ever says to you, “What will you always remember about this place?” you will know just exactly which story it is that you want to tell them.
–Pam Conrad, Our House
True Story.
One year and seven months ago I had a vivid dream. I was standing in the middle of a white room. Everything was white – the walls, the floor, the ceiling, the cabinets. There was an incredible amount of light – bright, but not blinding – reflecting off all those white surfaces. It was home.
The pole outside my dream building
After waking up from that dream, the Devil and I started our Saturday by visiting a farmer’s market,which led to a walk around the surrounding area. As we were strolling down Main Street I stopped to take a peek in the window of a building that was for sale. To my astonishment, I saw what appeared to be straight out of my dream: a solid white room. The building was formerly an art studio and it even had the prerequisite lighting. To compound the surreality of that moment, when I turned from the window to ponder this strange coincidence I spotted my friend Meredith making her way across the street towards us. She was rocking out a kimono. I wondered absently if I was still dreaming. I wasn’t.
All smiles, waves, and hugs, she approached, “Heeeeeeey! What are you two doing here?”
“Trying to figure out how to buy this building…” I said without thinking.
“Oh! Come with me.” she said.
And just like that, we followed.
A couple doors down from my dream building was another art studio. Meredith led us in, introduced us to the couple that owned the place. They gave us a tour of their apartment on the second floor. We chatted for quite some time with the couple. Hours. At some point the other neighbors were called. We met them. More time flew by. By the end of the visit I was convinced the dream building and these neighbors were meant to be mine. So began my infatuation. I saved, I planned, I plotted. I made regular pilgrimages to the place. I talked about it to real estate agents, bankers, and basically to anyone and everyone who would listen.
As it turned out, some horrible man bought the building before I could and turned it into a fitness center. Maybe he really isn’t a horrible man. Still, he bought my building. Horrible!
is this home…?
Time marched on. The home search continued. We looked far and wide in a search that spanned two states, multiple cities, and countless houses and buildings. I could have been satisfied with most of the houses we toured. The Devil would have none of it. The only two houses he liked out of the whole lot were bizarre and utterly uninhabitable for mere mortals. One had a basement that reeked so badly of mold and mildew that neither I nor the agent would even venture down there. The Devil spent a solid half hour exploring just the basement of that place, obviously plotting out the nefarious deeds he could accomplish in that lair. The other of his “likes” was a huge, dilapidated Victorian thing in Little Rock, worthy of the likes of Miss Havisham. It came with holes in the roof that allowed birds – and no telling what other manner of wildlife – to nest in the attic.
they certainly seem at home…
someone left the recipe for blueberry muffins on the pantry door of this home…
After over 12 months of all this I grew increasingly frustrated. One afternoon, the Devil took me to see We Bought a Zoo. Great movie — wonderful story. Afterwards the Devil says to me, “I want it to be that way for us. I want to have that feeling where we just walk in a place and know it’s right – to know that this is where we’re supposed to be.”
Thinking of my dream building and the dozens of other houses we’d seen that I could have worked with, but that were unacceptable to him, I replied, “Yes, that’s a nice fantasy. But let’s get back to reality…I need a place to live and work where I don’t have to keep doing this crazy state-to-state commute. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking for something that doesn’t exist.” What I thought but didn’t say is: PLEASE! Can’t we stay logical? Analytical? Task-oriented?
I ripped the nasty carpet out of one room and painted my frustration on the floor…
And finally, mid-March of this year I gave up. I was done looking at houses – completely over it. I told him so. We could just live in our existing home for the rest of our lives. We could die and rot there for all I cared. After all, there was nothing wrong our existing home. We just needed to get rid of about 17 years of stuff so we could have room to breathe within the limits of its walls. We just needed to get rid of disgusting 17 year old carpet that had outlived (I use the term loosely) two pets. We just needed to hire an exorcist to get rid of all the former versions of ourselves that haunted the shadows of every room. So I called off the house search. We would have to do what we had to do to make our existing home more happy and livable.
We agreed to begin by replacing the carpet the week I was back in town for spring break.
As the week before spring break drew to a close, the Devil came calling. He told me he wanted me to look at just one more house. He had spotted a “for sale” sign in the yard as he drove by. It had only been on the market for 12 days.
Given his strange ideas about acceptable living quarters, I was not even remotely enthused by this prospect. He was enthusiastic enough for us both. I looked at the pictures of the place online and it didn’t look horrible, so finally I acquiesced. He called our agent and set up the appointment.
The moment I walked in the door I felt it.
Peace.
Love.
Home.
…that feeling where you just walk in a place and know it’s right. So strong was the feeling I was overcome. What in the world is wrong with me? I’ve been watching too many damned movies. On the verge of tears, I stepped back outside to collect myself before anyone saw me: the crying crazy lady. The owner of the house stepped outside with me and said, “I’ve been praying for you to come buy my house.”
We spent an hour that day looking at the house and the grounds. It was amazing. As we were getting ready to leave, the owner cut her eyes at me and said again, “I’m praying you’re going to buy this house….”
I replied, “…and I’m praying you’re going to sell it to me.”
We moved in 4o days later.
Unlike my dream, nothing here is white. Everywhere you turn there is color and there is light.
Backyard Sunflowers Rejoice
Iris, Memphis Botanical Gardens
To be free to be happy and fruitful can only be attained through sacrifice of many common, but overestimated things.
–Robert Henry
~~*~~
It is morning lecture, and I have momentarily tuned out Yogi Hari. The dawning sun has reminded me of our sunrise meditation earlier in the week and I have drifted back to the memory…
A pink-orange haze spreads across the horizon as the sun struggles to break the night’s hold. The black ocean gleams with quicksilver waves that roil and churn before erupting in sporadic grey crests. Warm air pushed by the sea breeze sends tendrils of wind-damp hair to lift and tangle in my face. Cool, wet sand crunches underfoot. A large creature – more shadow than seabird – glides by overhead…
“Do not be attached to results.”
Yogi Hari’s words penetrate my beachy reverie and snap me back to the present. He has my full attention now.
In my “real” life of non-ashram, non-coastal living I inhabit a world dominated by results. The importance of quantifying results has been drilled into my head through all levels of my training – student, researcher, professor, and clinician. In fact, I was recently told by a professional mentor, “It doesn’t matter how hard you try. It matters what results you produce.”
Best efforts don’t count; results do. Introduction, Methods, Results, Conclusions – that is the natural order of things. Across the grid — standardized tests, student evaluations, experiments, treatments, diagnostic evaluations, the department’s reviews — results matter. Results of the GRE determine whether you get into graduate school. School funding is based on student test results. Careers rise or fall depending on these outcomes. Clients pay for results, not your intentions.
Yogi Hari talks on, “….the great Masters inspire us to focus all our attention on performing our duty selflessly without constantly being obsessed with the results.”
I am confounded. How can duty be detached from results? If results are so important, how can I possibly avoid obsessing over them? And besides all that, what’s wrong with obsessing? I’m really good at it.
Letting go, renunciation, nonattachment- the practice goes by the term vairagya in the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali. Sacrifice. There is a negative connotation about that word, especially in a culture that suggests you need more, not less. And nonattachment? Isn’t attachment a healthy thing? Aren’t we supposed to be doing all sorts of connecting?
Oh, so much to learn, Little Grasshopper!
The last year of my life has been a study in letting go. Some sacrifices were made silently. Other sacrifices, like releasing my inner carnivore, were made publically and deliberately. Giving up meat was a change that alternately annoyed and mystified me as well as some of the people around me. I’ve blogged a lot about the experience as a way to stay committed to the decision and as a way to try to explain a lot of it to myself. I recognize now the dietary change was largely a symbolic gesture. I gave up something I could see, taste, touch, smell, and hear — a life that my body literally consumed – as a daily physical reminder of the numerous intangible sacrifices that remained ahead on a more personal level.
There is always something to grasp at – money, love, youth, relationships, knowledge, control, anger, happiness, social status, safety, beliefs, results. None of these things define one’s essence. Still, there can be a feeling of loss when your hold on them is released. And even the feeling of loss can be something to hang on to in the choppy seas of uncertainty. But loss is just another feeling. Feelings come; they go. The tide rolls in and out. You can flail and reach for the flotsam and jetsam or take a deep breath, relax and roll on a bit lighter to the destination.
Nilla Bean
Negativity is like a virus. It infects and spreads, creating more of itself.
If you can’t free your voice, how do you expect to free your soul?
–Yogi Hari
~~@~~
Working to cultivate joy is good for you and it’s good for the world. A natural by-product of cultivating joy is that it tends to spread to those around you. Lorne Lander refers to this as resonant empathy. We have a natural tendency to reflect the emotional energy that others project. If this language is too touchy-feely and woo-woo for you, hang tight while I couch it in different terms. There is empirical evidence at the cellular level that supports this idea. In the 1980s and ‘90s a group of Italian neurophysiologists (Rizzolati, Giacomo , Lacoboni and others) discovered mirror neurons in both non-human and human primates. (Don’t monkeys make everything sound more scientific and cool?) These brain cells respond to observing behavior as if the observer is the one performing the action. In other words, if I watch you make a frowny face my own frowny face neurons fire automatically.
Now, I am the child of Nanook the Barbarian and the Angry Russian, whose battles rage as fierce as their names imply. As you may expect given this lineage, I inherited a volatile temper. I tend to bottle my anger and flee the scene so it won’t explode on anyone in a violent outburst. Sometimes I fail miserably and spew caustic nonsense. Sometimes I keep it contained and the anger turns to resentment. Figuring out what to do with this surplus of negative energy has been an ongoing struggle. It may always be a challenge I have to deal with, but I think it’s worth finding peaceful solutions to the problem.
In yoga boot camp I learned a couple practices to deal with negative emotions. One practice is to replace the negative with its opposite on the emotional spectrum. If greed is a problem, practice generosity. Give more away than you hoard. If you find yourself depressed, work to cultivate joy. Replace the anger you have with peace. Pretty simple idea. Trickier to do.
Two other practices we learned are raja and nada yoga. Raja yoga is meditation and I’ve written about it elsewhere (Be Quiet, Be Still). Nada yoga pertains to the power of sound. I’m a bit obsessed with this topic. I’ve devoted over a decade to studying the production of sound and resonance as it pertains to speech development, production, and disorder from the perspective of American linguists and speech-language pathologists. Nada yoga breathed new life into this discipline. According to this belief system, everything in the cosmos is vibrating at some frequency. Even you. Pause a moment to think on that. It’s an amazing concept. There’s your own inner music, or anahata (can you catch the strains of your own personal tune?) and the vibrations that surrounds you (ahata). You can harness the energy of both through music, mantra, and chanting. If the terms mantra and chanting don’t work for you, then replace them with the metaphor that does. Mantra – what words do you repeat over and over to yourself? Are they protecting your mind from negative energy or creating more of it? Chanting – whose words and tune are you singing? Both will affect your mood. For example, if you’re feeling depressed then singing along to Reba McEntire’s For My Broken Heart may not do much to elevate you out of your funk. Try an inspirational or devotional song and make a joyful noise. I’ve found U-2’s Beautiful Day works wonders for me.
How to radiate joy? First be responsible for the energy you project. Cultivate joy and it will naturally bubble over.
My Little Spacebook 