Stillness in Motion
Studying Ashtanga in Xela is an experience I rarely talk about. Normally, I do not share my experience as a yogi and meditator. I focus mainly on publicizing my nonprofit and trying to work with social groups and individuals in a way where I can write proposals that can then be presented to universities and government organizations. However, I want to take the opportunity to write a bit about something that personally is very close to my heart.
I have been studying yoga and meditation since 2017. When I was a child, I had met a group of Tibetan monks whose smiles and kindness, despite their status as refugees from the Tibetan Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China, made such an impression on my mind that even though I was struggling with my own things at home, the understanding that I was happy by nature is to me something I found out today is attributed to a child's neuroplasticity and ability to see a negative situation and take something positive from it. Back then, I saw it as lessons, if you will. Divine lessons whose origins could only be from this great consciousness that connected us all in a perceivable and tangible way. My life became about seeing through this illusion. I would spend hours lying down in bed, staring into the shadows on my ceiling, trying to break free from the limits of my mind and touch this universal consciousness. It took a journey through grieving and psycadelics to achieve this, that led to a great and profound journey with God, but this is a story for a later date. The feeling of falling into the center of something was the closest thing to a mandala I could create at that time. I loved studying about Tibet and was sympathetic towards the situation of oppression around the world. It felt wrong that people had to be susceptible to the control and the abuse of a more powerful country, rather than allowing others to be their natural expression of the indigenous relationship they had to their land.
This brings me to something I feel comfortable speaking about, which is the connection between all things. How the environment and our planet are connected to our experience of life itself, from our health to our happiness and our abundance. Healing our planet became a focus, and it seemed that only the same patience it took the monks to sit by their front door and be able to complete a sand mandala, grain by grain, and the compassion they had to let me and my wily brother in their home to visit with both of our parents seemed the path to be the solutions for these crimes against humanity and environmental injustices.
To be undisturbed by the mind..
Why was it that we had to suffer? It was not long for me to realize that greed was a common factor in the decisions that people made that disconnected them from the true nature of reality, their souls, and those they loved around them. This idea of who we are and what our purpose was in life was stolen by industrial capitalists and nationalists who took for granted the temporary nature of this life, only to exploit everything and everybody around them in order to gain material wealth, and more importantly, a false sense of power. When nature takes over, no man can deny this. We all must surrender to the powers and forces of the universe. The spirit though, is endurable, and through this conscious awakening of the spirit could we return to the nature of the true reality that connects us all, to live in the center, fully in harmony and balance with the energies that make up who we are, the one divine energy, the cosmic force and unified field of consciousness that we make up as individuals. That ultimately, is within us, and makes up who we are.
This awakening has been taking place since the beginning of humankind. It takes place within each and every one of us, and so closely to my heart did I realize that it takes place within every living and nonliving thing. The essence to be, to exist, which is why I believe that even on an atomic level, consciousness exists. This divine being, essence, or reality exists in every dimension, and losing my best friend to a drug overdose was only one step towards feeling that truly, he was not lost, that he could not be lost, but was everywhere, and in everything. Knowing that he knew this at his core, before his passing, made it more painful for me to realize that I had lost him in this lifetime. I had to overcome the feeling of attachments in order to realize he is not gone. His love, his name, his smile, that I was still here. That the memory was only one manifested energy of this eternal existence we share. We all return to these bodies to the Earth, and our thoughts and actions become distant memories in a vast history of storytelling, yet, what would last forever was the spiritual essence of this awakening we see represented throughout time, throughout history.
I read the Mahatma letters one day during our separation, having just watched Disney's Zootopia on a small TV I kept from our old apartment, I was craving the sense that all was well, that everything would be alright. I was overwhelmed with the need to know, so I went down a rabbit hole on Wikipedia of links and PDFs that became an awareness of this knowledge since birth, this desire to put into words this feeling I knew to be true, and I became aware of how these things in life were ways of distracting myself from my true purpose, my true self, and the reality that I was temporary became something of a comfort. A little bit of knowing that true perfection came from the fact that I was a temporary being, and that my relationship with the eternal and the divine could be something I cultivated my entire life. It began with taking the path of knowing myself. Living a life dedicated to the self, from yoga and martial arts to meditation and studies. I left behind my old life, and to my horror, the greatest fear in my life came true, and I lost my friend in 2018, two days after the New Year... just days before I felt that I had the strength to reconnect with him and help him with his journey of addiction. It took him from me, from all of us, and the morning of the day it was to be told true, that he had passed away, I died in a way that could not be done a second time. I fell to the floor and stayed there for days, then finally pulled myself into half lotus pose and was ready to meditate. Meditate on knowing there was nothing to be known except for the greatness of reality that expanded before me. A true, eternal reality that could not be escaped or controlled. It felt like an inevitable hurricane. Like standing in the middle of a tempest and knowing at the center there was a pure vortex of calm.
I left behind my old life, like a snake shedding its skin, yet dies in the process. It was no longer a girl or a boy that made up who I was, it was not even about who I was. It was about what I am, and it became a process of forgetting and letting go. This Great Awakening we experience ends with the inevitable truth of our mortality, and the greatness of our humble natures: the Love we were created to be.
Why do we suffer?
There was a story I read in the Ashtanga handbook I picked up while Kevin swept the yoga room floor. As a bhakti yogi, I would practice service by helping sweep, but if he did not ask me to do it, he would correct me in telling me that it was an enjoyable part of his daily sadhana. His meditation was to sweep the floor while listening to podcasts on his MP3. Along with making sure not one error in what I deem a deformed body was made in the series, he encouraged me to read, and to be myself. He made me stronger. Kevin truly was the closest thing I knew to a father after the divorce of my parents, and the healing I underwent to break away from the hold of Stockholm Syndrome that gripped my young and vulnerable mind. Cutting off all of my hair was only one step in leaving behind my whole entire life as I had come to know it. There was no longer anything to know.
This guidebook explained that un yoga, the ujjayi breath was an extension of the phsycial postures and thoughts we took in the yogic meditation process. It was stretching the breath as it moved through the laraynx and created a pull of air that resembled the sounds of the ocean, and that each movement was initiated by the breath, as the breath itself stretched. The question admits suffering and decades of genocides and centuries of suffering and war was this, why do we have to suffer? What was the logic in it? Where could I find reasons to know this? The story goes as told:
Brahma had created the universe we know of. In that universe, one could attain Enlightenment, such as the Buddha, and be freed from the cycle of birth and death: samsara. Upon his death, the Buddha did not return to his body. Among those who attained purusha, or nirvana, the awakening of atma, were the bodhisattvas. These beings intentionally avoided perfection in order to return to the world and aid other souls in the liberation from suffering, or mukti. (It is an agreement I indeed remember making, and even in my highest levels of spiritual attainment of detachment, I could not attain this state of perfection in this lifetime.) One being by the name of Subrahmanya, known as Skanda, the God of war, was the son of Shiva and Parvati, and the brother of Ganesh. He criticized Brahma for the suffering he saw in the world and claimed that he could create a more perfect world. So, he imprisoned Brahma, destroyed his world, and created a perfect version of the world he envisioned. When Shiva came to see what Subrahmanya had created, he told his son this. "Skanda, this world you have created is motionless. There is no change, there is no movement. All is still. There is no passing of time, no creation, no growth. This goes against the nature of life. There is pleasure, and there is pain. Both are meant for the pursuit of perfection, and in this, the divine order and harmony of nature are obtained." In seeing his great error, Subrahmanya released Brahma, and the universe was restored.
Funny enough, in the week before, I had read Jack London say the same thing in his book "White Fang", after completing "Call of the Wild", when at the beginning of the first chapter, in a similar setting - the nature of the cold and freezing winter Northlands had taken the life of a wealthy musher who had attempted to seek fame and fortune in the gold mines and succumbed to the life of the Northlands, instead of in the comfort of his salon, near a large fire, surrounded by luxury and domesticity. London claimed through his storytelling that motion was an affront against nature. That nature's true goal was to still all things. To make them quiet and motionless, as this character now was being towed by a sled team and dogs.
This is contrary to yoga. Yoga is movement. As Andrew Huberman said in his earlier 2021 podcasts, we learn and gain neuroplasticity by making mistakes. While I was in standing bow pose, I felt the fluids of my brain striving to attain equilibrium in the inverted standing pose. I felt comfortable in falling and letting myself feel unsteady in the dizziness of a new inverted pose, and fell to my surprise, only a couple of times. In allowing myself to make mistakes, I attain the ability to find calm and stability in new things.
This is the nature of life. The Earth breathes around us, and as I sing the mantra OM in the depths of my mind, my body begins to resonate with the same primordial essence of the first wave of vibration to extend forth from the beginning of the universe. At the center of all things, we are consciousness, living and breathing.
Alive.
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