On Yoga, Fukishima and Waking Up

To all yoga practitioners, whether you call it yoga practice, or by it's more common name "Life”

You are a master of Prakrti (everything manifest), you’ve just forgotten.  In the face of adversity you have only to remember your being-ness more intrinsic than the dis-ease of the mental plane, and from this connectedness radiate healing and unconditional love from your source.  It's that simple.

For most of us maintaining this awareness as a constant waking state is challenging.  It is easy to slip into identification with ego, body, mind.  This false identification is not without cost.  Identification with ego, body, mind has a specific "medicinal" affect on our body and bodies (physical, mental, emotional and subtle). In the physical body it is oxidizing, experienced as tight muscles, injury or disease.  The corresponding subtle aspects can be harder to describe.  For a practitioner however the greatest cost is that false identification with perceived limitations lulls us deeper to sleep.

Most of us remain in a profound waking sleep even as we move through our daily lives.  Though our physical body is located right here right now, we experience not what this is, but what the mind thinks it is; the dream of past, future, judgement and preference.  If we have a daily practice of awareness we may catch glimpses of right now, not as we think it is, but as direct perception.

I have sensed much discomfort/resistance to the relatively new consciousness arising about nuclear power, waste, radiation and its affect on us... that is every-body.   I have heard in our discourse, a sense of helplessness, seen in our actions a desire to bury our heads in the sand, to not know.  It can be easy to not want to look at what this is and instead focus on things that are more "relevant".  It could be though that how we collectively choose to address this situation is the most relevant.  As scary and confusing as what we face may seem, as practitioners what is at stake here is bigger than radiation, health, life or death.

Every choice we make has the effect of expanding our awareness or contracting it.  This phenomenon is commonly called Karma.  Karma is neither "good" or "bad".  All Karma leads eventually to liberation once we finally release resistance to "what it is" and become receptive to the experiential knowledge that is shared alike through joy and pain, sunshine, rain, this and that.

When we face adversity or joy, this or that, we have 2 choices.  We can accept it or we can resist it.  We can embrace it in unconditional acceptance, or fear it and  and try to resist.  Of coarse we can only resist for so long.  One day soon we all will surrender.  Knowing that acceptance and resistance each have a "medicinal" effect, the conscious practitioner chooses acceptance. 

There is debate in yoga circles about the correct practice in the face of "Wickedness" (Sutra I.33).  The Yoga Sutras recommend “Indifference”.  This is not to be confused with "ignoring" or “inaction”, which it is sometimes mistakenly thought to mean.

While it can be tempting to ignore or try to dull the intensity of daily life, whether that be tight hamstrings in paschimottanasana or Nuclear Meltdown, as practitioners, the medicinal affect of resistance in the form of dulling carries to great a cost.  Fear is the opposite of expansion.  Preference is the domain of ego and mind.  Mind might not “like” what it thinks it sees, but our practice of being awakened invites us to step back into unconditional love for everything and everybody.  Fear clenches and dulls awareness while acceptance and surrender open us to greater understanding, deeper appreciation.

The practitioner responds to Nuclear Meltdown, with breath and awareness, that the intensity purify and dissolve all obstacles to conscious awareness.  From our connectedness to source we the act skillfully. 

Yoga a practice of inaction.  Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita defines Yoga as Skill in action.  It is the invitation to awake from the dream of preference and be fully awake now; That our actions may be the expression of our highest intention, that our thoughts words and deeds be the outpouring of the ferocious and incomprehensible beauty of who and what we really are.  This is most challenging, relevant and medicinal in the face of great intensity like that which we are offered here today.

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