singing bowls

just for today:

1. I will let go of anger.
2. I will let go of worry.
3. I will give thanks for my many blessings.
4. I will do my work honestly.
5. I will be kind to every living thing.

tonight, through some dumb happy luck, I found myself— beside myself— practicing with erich schiffmann and a hundred folks willing to settle their pelves into the giving ground & let their minds bloom open into stillness.

it was freeing! it was less a yoga practice than a dance— an extremely authentic movement composed by the energy that enlivens us all with the intelligence of the cosmos.

it was blissful. the bliss rolled across the studio with a force I could not have imagined into a union awakened to (remembered!) in that phenomenal silence that only a hundred bodies together in one space can create.

listening is how we join.

and we listened, and his vibrant sonorous words lit up the room.

he called our attention to the many doors to the studio— to the first, then the second, then the third, then the fourth door (and an invisible fifth, which brought the room alive with laughter).

some of us, he said, had entered through the first, some of us the second, others through the third or the fourth (or fifth, in the case of the invisible yogis among us— more on that at a later time).

but, obviously, the door each of us chose (consciously or not) to enter, was not significant. what mattered was getting into the room.

it doesn’t matter what style of yoga or what tradition of meditation one practices— not one bit. and once you’re in the room, it doesn’t matter how you entered. you’re in the room. all technique falls to the wayside, all doors are equal in value & valor. (so, it follows logically: do the kind you’ll actually do. go through the door that you like best— that way, you’ll use it, and you’ll be in the room, and we’ll all share a great laugh about the doors.)

and we are one, in our dance with the universal consciousness, awake and alight as its conscious expression.

the dance— of the breath, of the hips, of the hands as they find anjali mudra as if for the first time, then spread open like a holy book into a different kind of prayer— is how we rejoice with one another. 

a practice like this is like a morning. we stretch out our limbs in all our joy to be awake— spacious, without boundaries in this great room of light— we rise like the sun. everything is new— and the same as it ever was, in the wild, ecstatic union that blooms in deafening silence at the center of the heart of the infinite now.

after not one but two extraordinary asana practices today, stumbling out into night, a stream of tears on cheeks cooling in the dark air, the woodsmoke & the blue-cold stars pullulating with the leaves of manifold trees, so full of joy I kiss my yoga mat, I blow a kiss from my heart to a plane as it descends so close to the earth it might just brush this coconut palm, this evergreen, this highrise lit up with the warm, sweet lives of the city.

I place my hands on my partner’s head. my guides are with me. my instincts are with me. he feels my heat on his heart.

the room is full of candles, and faery lights.

our rabbit opens the bedroom door— we laugh. 

in this world of abundance, of light which we carry with us in & around the edges of this vessel of water & bone, in the sweet marrow & the salt of our blood, and which we receive in our breath and give back to the green breath of the world, which breathes the same in fiddlehead ferns & unfurling thunderheads above the perigee moon, and in us as we move together in a moon salutation, as we inhale & exhale as one with the pulse of the cosmos, as we collide again in the soft familiarity of sun yellow bedsheets, full of it now, bright with it— yes, conduits to it, making it move.

I am so blessed to have trained and become attuned through such an awesome master. 

I will, with honor, pass on this blessing through my palms and through each of my fingertips, as it has been passed through the ages of human history, before there was a north america or a japan, or an east/west dichotomy to divide them, before there were words & ways we divide, when our common ancestors lived on the green ground of the earth and laid their hands upon each other to heal, and to bless.

and I will give this blessing to the world as a gift— energy is no commodity, and has no value outside of the sacred space in which it moves, like waves, from being to pure being and back. healing is loving is living. be in touch if you need it.