Beliefs

Yoga and Buddhist meditation have been the foundational practices that have shaped my life. They are both explorations into the nature of our being, systematic methods of purification so we can progressively experience the deeper Truth underlying our ephemeral existence.
My journey has been a process of psychological rubbish removal, of peeling away thick, grubby layers of belief and conditioning that have accumulated over my formative and adult years.

The goal of this arduous journey, I believed was arrival at a place of essential purity where the ultimate Truth of existence and creation is revealed and experienced.
‘Believe’ is the word that I am investigating.
Believing there is an outcome or a destination gives meaning to what we do, otherwise we are wasting time on meaningless activity.

Learning about Aboriginal beliefs and how they lived for over 50,000 years has opened me up to a very alternative view of life and spiritual practices, not altogether incongruent with my mystical leanings. I’ve been challenged to step outside of my comfortable Yoga and Buddhist perspectives and from an objective viewpoint they look different – the sutras, noble truths, the asanas, the goals of awareness, enlightenment, Samadhi, the whole package is just another way of viewing life from which I’ve adopted a particular set of values and practices.

Viewed objectively, the work of ‘purifying one’s self’ can seem self indulgent, especially in comparison with Aboriginal beliefs. Western culture is obsessed with the individual and I cringe at the thought that my spiritual practice may have grown out of this culture of self obsession.

“The result of monasticism is that the human world is left to its own illusions and impurities, while the individual seeker establishes an isolated contact with the absolute. The “infolding” process of prayer and meditation is in stark contrast to Aboriginal spirituality which, through ever-deepening perception, opens outward to empathize and identify with every aspect of a living, active world.”
'Voices of the First Day' by Robert Lawlor

Is the process of inner purification a valid means of achieving the final goal of immersion/connection/communion with the spirit that flows through everything in this universe.
Big questions…

I love the analogy that likens conventional spiritual practices (yoga, meditation, contemplation, prayer etc) to vehicles that can take us from one place (ignorance) to another place (enlightenment/liberation).
Imagine them as boats: I’m paddling along in my boat, you’re paddling along in your boat, we’re all paddling away at our yoga and meditation practices, thinking our little boats are taking us closer to the final destination of liberation, that vast ocean of Truth where we can finally merge with the Source.
Sometimes we change boats if we see someone moving faster than we are…
Sometimes we dangerously straddle two boats that may diverge at some point…
According to the Sufis, all we need to do is discard those boats and jump into the water!
The ocean is all around us.
The belief systems and practices we adopt in an attempt to ‘get there’ are just another container separating us from immersion in God. They are like trainer wheels, keeping us earth-bound, preventing us from directly perceiving the multi-dimensional reality that we are immersed in.
Spiritual practice is necessary to bring us to this understanding, but then we must let go of attachment to our practices and freefall into the great unknowing.

20 minutes

A week seems to have passed since I did any yoga – too many commitments after work each night, an unexpected menstrual period, and it’s been too hard to get my head out of bed any earlier in the mornings than what’s programmed into it at the moment.

This morning, walking the dog just after sunrise, I was surprised to notice a tightness across my chest, as if it had somehow shrunken while I wasn’t watching. It was a reminder of how important backbends are to keep this area around the heart open.
I got home, had a shower and had 20 minutes spare to do some yoga before getting ready for work.
I wanted to stretch open this tight chest. My body needed to expand, to be woken up, to be shocked out of its comfortable slide. I hadn’t done Urdhva Dhanurasana for at least a month, maybe two...my body ached for it.
So I launched into this morning’s 20 minute practice with no warms ups or sun salutes:

Uttanasana, bending alternate knees towards my nose (this is a tiny but effective isometric challenge for my lower back)
Dog Pose with alternate leg lifts
Paryankasana
Lunges
Salabhasana
Dhanurasana
Bhujangasana
Ustrasana
3 Urdhva Dhanurasanas – the first one was appalling – I could only straighten my arms half way. I did the second one with my heels lifted and I was able to almost straighten my arms. The third one started with heels lifted and fully straightened arms then I lowered my heels and stayed for a while, bathing in the extreme stretch of every tissue in my body. I pressed into my feet and brought as much body weight as possible over my hands to accelerate the stretch through my front chest and armpits.
Uttanasana, twisting to each leg
Janu Sirsasana
Headstand for a few minutes before I succumbed to the urge to press into my forearms and lift my head off the floor in a perilous balance for a few moments.
Childs Pose

Urdhva Dhanurasana was excruciatingly joyful this morning. I loved its intensity. Once you can push up into this backbend you can nudge out the edge of your limitations endlessly, for years.
It’s back on my playlist.

Tonight is a free night so I'm looking forward to playing with the Iyengar course sequence again...

Week 26-30

This was my second attempt at the Week 26-30 sequence - I only made it half way through.

Still it was better than my first aborted attempt a few days ago:
Anticipating the Urdhva Padmasana in Sirsasana (Lotus in Headstand pose) I’d started practice with a series of Padmasana warm up poses. After 10 minutes of these I felt overcome with vertigo and had to abandon the yoga practice.
I’ve experienced this kind of vertigo a few times before (not in the past year) and I think it comes from the strong redirecting of energy that is stirred up in Padmasana poses - my head is flooded with prana (this is just a hypothesis). I do know that yoga practice gradually purifies our physical and energetic systems so that we can channel increasingly strong energies in preparation for the power surge that comes with enlightenment.

Tonight I may not have been in the best condition to try this sequence again: a long hard day at work, a half hour walk home, a one hour marathon caught at my talkative landlady’s back door in the chilly night air…I started practice at 7.15pm, hungry.

But figuring that any practice is a good one, I started…

Warmed up with Dog Pose, Uttanasana and lunges. The into Padmasana preps: the standing half lotus forward bend (Ardha Baddha Padmottanasana), the seated half lotus forward bend (Ardha Baddha Padma Paschimottanasana); seated full Padmasana, and from there I laid backwards and allowed my Padmasana legs to lift up before VERY gradually lowering them to the floor into a pose I’ll call Supta Padmasana.
This Supta Padmasana stretches open all the front groin muscles as well as the deeper internal muscles, and if I'd cupped my hands behind my head it would have simulated a horizontal replica of Padmasana in Sirsasana.

I didn’t feel physically or mentally ready to start the sequence but I did anyway.
Straight into the first pose: 15 breaths in Headstand, then the Parivritta and Eka Pada variations. I lifted back up to full headstand and spent a few moments dissolving my anxiety about the next pose Urdhva Padmasana in Sirsasana. I needed a clear, calm approach, not a scrambled one.
From Headstand, I bent my right leg into half lotus easily; although I could bend my left leg OK, my left foot just wouldn’t slip in front of my right shin into full lotus now matter what I did. I had to be content with a semi-lotus. Same story on the other side: left leg bent easily into position, but the second leg wouldn’t quite comply. I fell out of the pose landing safely.
With the hands cupped around the head in Headstand, you can’t reach up to pull the legs into the lotus position like you can in Shoulderstand. I guess the joints in my hips and knees have to become more and amenable to slip into lotus unaided.

Shoulderstand and all its variations took 15 minutes again tonight.
I made a point of trying Iyengar’s ‘legs up’ version of Urdhva Padmasana in Shoulderstand. It was more difficult for me than the Ashtanga version. Knees pointing up stretches the front groins and hip joints a lot more, and the tailbone has to move deeply into the body as the pubis slides upwards which pinched into my sacrum. Even so, this variation felt beneficial and oddly stimulating (as new poses often do). I look forward to working more on it.

Next: Jatara…then the abdominal poses…then on to the seated forward bends – nothing new here except the observation that my body is releasing a bit further into the seated forward bends.
Not wanting to burn out too early, I limited myself to 5 long Ujjiya breaths in all these poses.
Then came the four Padmasana poses and the realization that this sequence is ALL ABOUT PADMASANA.
Seated Padmasana
Parvatasana
Tolasana
Matsyasana
Four consecutive Padmasana poses doesn’t sound like much, but by the time I got to Matsyasana, I’d really had enough. My hips ached which drained my energy and I suddenly felt mentally and emotionally worn out.
On the second side of Matsyasana (with legs still in full lotus), Buffy climbed onto my lotus lap with her toy. I just flopped out of the pose and gave it all away!
I was tired and hungry.

This sequence will be a good test for my commitment because already I don’t like it. Even though I can do Padmasana fairly easily, staying in it for more than a few minutes causes strange, unearthly, unfamiliar sensations (mmm…yoga pain)

So it was only half the sequence but still a good practice even though I didn’t get to the backbends.
I’ll have to try again later this week when my evening is more settled.

Snake Dreaming

I had an unusual practice this morning. I’d already had a coffee and had been reading about the Aboriginal culture and trying to understand why it is inspiring me. I had an hour and a half before I had to be at work and decided to embark on a flowing Ashtanga practice.
I put on a tribal Didgeridoo CD, turned up the volume and stood on my mat. Although time constraints limited me, I did the 10 Surya Namaskars, all the standing poses and then the finishing inversions, but I can’t possibly describe the most extraordinary quality that pervaded this practice

As I began the Surya Namaskars I noticed my movements quickly taking on a serpentine quality. Movement and energy flowed through my body from top to bottom. It was a snakelike dance - moving in and through and out of poses was unlike anything I’ve ever been done before. It was as if I was channeling the spirit of a snake. Even when I was holding a pose, the Ujjiya breath undulated up and down my core and my body pulsed gently in unison. It was powerfully transformative and liberating to release the constraints of how I’d been taught to do these poses and allow the snake-like spirit to guide the practice.

I’ve read how the best Aboriginal tribal dancers make the best hunters because they study the animals and internalise their essential quality. The ability of Aboriginal dancers to mimic the movements of emus, kangaroos, birds etc is extraordinary. They actually BECOME that animal.

Vipassana

“Unlike many of today’s world religions, which reject the physical world and sensual experience in favour of transcendental or ideal states, Aboriginal spirituality considers the sensual experience of the physical world the only means to realize the truth, beauty and reality of the metaphysical creative powers.”
‘Voices of the First Day’ by Robert Lawlor

Practice
I spent a few hours with my son after work last night and didn’t get home til after 9.30pm. Skipped practice.

As I lay in bed flicking through the books in my current reading pile, something was bothering me. I felt a little niggle scratching away in a forgotten corner of my memory bank, an invisible tap on my shoulder…there was something unfinished that needed attention…a loose end in my dark subconscious was struggling to rise up like a sprout into the bright light of my conscious mind.
It was Urdhva Padmasana, the Shoulderstand pose with legs in Lotus, I wrote about it yesterday, but now I couldn’t remember seeing a picture of this pose in Light on Yoga.

I looked up the Week 22 -25 sequence to find the image reference number – that was when I discovered my mistake. The pose at the end of the Shoulderstand sequence was listed as Urdhva Prasaritta Padasana, but for the past week I’ve been doing Urdhva Padmasana instead, a pose that isn’t introduced until the next sequence (week 26-30).

What a poor memory. During my practice of the week 19-22 sequence I’d been doing all the correct poses including Urdhva Prasaritta Padasana, then at some point I must have misinterpreted the Sanskrit name and substituted Urdhva Padmasana.
A trivial matter really… I only mention it because I blogged so effusively about it!

Returning to my original enquiry I looked up the image of Mr Iyengar doing Urdhva Padmasana. He does it with his hand into his back and his Padmasana legs extended upwards like this. It’s a different version to the pose I did religiously at the end of the Ashtanga Primary series for years. In the Ashtanga version, the thighs are parallel to the floor, the hands support and press up under the knees, while the weight of the legs rests upon the hands like this.

I spent a moment considering the differences between the two (hard to evaluate when I can't remember doing the Iyengar version) before reading through the list of poses in the next sequence (week 26-30). There are two Urdhva Padmasanas listed – same name but they have different reference numbers: one is Padmasana in Headstand and the other is Padmasana in Shoulderstand. This sequence has a few extra Padmasana variations in the opening inversion sequence, but the only other new pose seems to be Garudasana towards the end of the practice. Also the backbends get moved to the second half of the practice, after the forward bends.

Tonight I’ll do the new sequence and test out Mr Iyengar’s Urdhva Padmasana. All the poses are familiar and the only difficult ones for me are Lolasana and the three Marichyasanas.

I’ve been doing some solid early morning standing poses to balance out the evening Iyengar sequences which focus heavily on inversions, backbends and forward bends (all floor poses). My body is craving more extreme backbends so I’ll work Urdhva Dhanurasana into my practice somewhere.

Plans
I have a few things planned for October:
- one week off work mid-October with no particular agenda, which I will probably use for a self retreat at home.
- at the end of that week I’ll take my daughter and granddaughter camping in the Flinders Ranges for a couple of days (we’re doing our best to convince my son to come as well)
- then off to the pristine wilderness of Kangaroo Island for 4 days camping at the end of October
I’m being pressured at work to use up some accumulated annual leave, so in mid December I’ve organised 2 weeks off work to do another 10 day Vipassana retreat – I think it will be my ninth Vipassana since the year 2000 – that’s one every year except for 2009.
I have mixed feelings and thoughts about doing another one…the process hasn’t felt relevant or useful to me for the last few retreats, but I’ve slogged away at it, sitting for 10-11 hours a day, unfortunately with a sense of wasting precious time.

I think my mixed feelings about Vipassana have been further eroded by my growing affinity with Nature and the desire to spend as much time as I can out in the bush, living and breathing with the trees, plants, animals, birds and insects.
Meditation can be a process of going inward and cutting off. The urge I have is to expand outward to embrace and fully experience the multi-dimensional universe with a deafening awareness.
To do this I need to cultivate an extraordinary state of pure, alive presence, uncluttered by thoughts - the opportunity to do another Vipassana retreat has rekindled my desire for uninterrupted immersion in concentrated meditation where I can develop this state.

I vividly remember on previous retreats how, after a few days sitting for long hours with a singular focus on breath or sensations, all my mental processes quietened. There were moments of extraordinary clarity, pure conscious awareness. Those moments are so potent that they bring about a great shift in consciousness. The mind expands into a new paradigm…a door opens and we enter into a completely new landscape.
Remembering that state of being, and comparing it with my current state of mind, I am talking myself into doing the Vipassana…10 days to sweep out the accumulated mental rubbish, 10 days to clean and purify the mind. With senses unclouded by filtering thoughts, we can experience this earth, this world and this universe with the uncensored clarity of the indigenous mind.

Practice Notes

Practice tonight was again the Week 22-25 sequence from Light on Yoga.

40 breaths in the Headstand sequence then 15 minutes total in the Shoulderstand sequence. Every Shoulderstand variation felt deeply comfortable and nourishing so I stayed longer than usual to soak each one of them up.
Before I went up into the first Shoulderstand, I prepared with Ardha Baddha Padma Paschimottanasana to open my hips ready for the final inverted pose Urdhva Padmasana. This is the pose where from Shoulderstand, you fold your legs into Lotus then extend your arms up to support the knees with your hands. It’s a favourite pose but not an easy one to get into at the start of practice when your body’s cold and hips aren’t pliable enough for Lotus. It was much nicer to prepare for it first and spend some quality time in it (15 long, slow, Ujjiya breaths).

Chakrasana was a very slow, carefully controlled rollover. After 15 minutes in various Shoulderstand poses with my chin pressed into my sternum, Chakrasana just tops it off, pushing Jalandhara Bandha to the max for about 2 seconds!

Although Matsyasana is the standard counterpose to Shoulderstand, in this sequence it’s Salabhasana. I don’t mind this - it’s a softer transition than countering with Matsyasana, and even more so because I normally look down in Salabhasana. I did the pose twice, focussing more on lengthening from toes to crown in the first one and adding maximum lift to the length in the second one. Mr Iyengar looks up in this pose. It was in Dhanurasana that I finally looked up and stretched open the arch, so this was a more effective counterpose to reverse all the chin locks in Shoulderstand. The deep stretching, compressing and releasing of the neck and throat in this sequence stimulates blood flow, and balances all the functions associated with the thyroid glands in the neck, as well as releasing a lot of accumulated sitting-in-front-of-the-computer tension in the neck and shoulder muscles.

I got a monkey grip, not a wrist bind in Marichy A and B, but all the Marichys put my hip joints into gripping discomfort. I imagine they’ll be problematic for quite I while. Nerve pain shoots from my lumbar to my hips in any tight knee to chest position, and in the Marichys, the pressure of my straight leg sitting bone into the floor can intensity it – the hip rotation of the half Lotus position in Marichy B lessens that pressure.

I’m not any closer to lifting off in Lolasana. If I were obsessed with improving, I’d be practising this pose daily – but I have no goals in this practice any more, except to increase awareness and presence. Still, it is fun to keep trying. Maybe my body will learn how to activate and strengthen the internal muscles needed for lift off in this pose, but 'm convinced there are damaged muscles that have completely turned off. Doing Lolasana regularly may or may not help, but what it does do is reveal any changes to the internal musculature - it's a useful pose for measuring any improvement or healing.

Tonight I did all three Lotus poses (Padmasana, Parvatasana and Tolasana) on the right side first then changed the cross of my Lotus and did all three on the left side. Being lazy? This sequence of progression was easier than folding and unfolding my legs six times which tends to stress my hips and lumbar, so I figure easy was smarter.

Marichy C is another pose that my body now has difficulty with. To sit up straight with the bent leg in its correct position is the first challenge especially n the right side. Humility, beginners mind and baby steps are required here, and I enjoy being humbled, having my Ego and expectations squashed. I am happy to just sit in the prep position and observe the myriad nerve sensations sparking through my hip and lumbar. I try to work out what is stimulating or pressing on those nerves, what is out of place, misaligned to cause the nerve pain. Probably all coming from degenerated facet joints in my spine where cartilage has worn away and bones are not articulating correctly.
Can the damage be reversed, can cartilage regenerate?
The best I could do in Marichy C tonight was to wrap my elbow around my knee and gently challenge the position of the femur into the hip joint by carefully squeezing my body closer to my bent leg.

The whole practice seemed to go for hours. I did every pose and could have sworn it was over 2 hours before I got to Savasana. My watch said 8.30pm as I was setting up for a well earned Savasana, so the sequence had actually taken me one and a half hours. I wondered if perhaps I’d started at 6pm, and not 7pm…I couldn’t remember. Time had passed very slowly during yoga tonight. I’m sure that time changes velocity – it’s subjective and relative, not linear and fixed. And as most people know, it speeds up as you get older…

“Because Indo-European language dictates that we express all our thoughts in past, present, or future tense, we have the notion that time is an abstract backdrop moving in one direction, like the hands of a clock, from past to future. None of the hundreds of Aboriginal languages contain a word for time, nor do the Aborigines have a concept of time. As with creation, the Aborigines conceive the passage of time and history not as a movement from past to future, but as a passage from a subjective state to an objective expression. The first step in entering into the Aboriginal world is to abandon the conventional abstraction of time and replace it with the movement of consciousness from dream (thought) to reality as a model that describes the universal activity of creation.”
‘Voices of the First Day’ by Robert Lawlor

Voices of the First Day

Here are a couple of excerpts from the book that has been inspiring me beyond imagination for the past 4 weeks: ‘Voices of the First Day’ by Robert Lawlor…

'All of our technology is an externalization of powers innate in the human organism.
Aerospace travel, computerization, electronic communication, the probing capacities of microscopes and x-rays, the remote viewing abilities of telescopes, and even nuclear fission are accomplishments that tribal shamans and mystics have experienced inwardly by cultivating the innate potentials of consciousness. The inner life knows none of the constrictions of time and space. The journey to other worlds and the adventure of exploring the universe beyond the earthly domain belongs to spiritual awakening, not technological development. The ancient myths assure us that when we reawaken in the reality of the Dreamtime, we will discover the expanse of cosmic time and space to be inwardly navigable and experiential."

"Every land formation and creature, by its very shape and behaviour, implies a hidden meaning; the form of a thing is itself and imprint of the metaphysical consciousness that created it, as well as the universal energies that brought its material manifestation. The metaphysical and the physical are held in symbolic integration, one cannot consider the visible and invisible worlds separately."

"The Western world denies an internal or subjective consciousness to all things and creatures except humans. The rest of nature, we believe, has no dreaming and consequently we feel justified in cutting down trees, gouging the earth, and killing and enslaving animals as if they were all empty forms. In denying the universe an internal life we imprison our own awareness, so that we live in only the shallow surface of our world."