by Hilary Lindsay | Feb 4, 2015 | Asana, Ethics, Meditation, nashville yoga, Religion, society, Tradition, Yoga, yoga class, Yoga History, Yoga Philosophy, yoga teaching |
In his opening lecture on the Yoga Sutras, Edwin Bryant PhD, Professor of Hinduism at Rutgers University, discredited the idea of a devotional aspect to the text postulated by an attending teacher. He declared that the totality of the Sutras is a call to meditation and an invitation to renunciation rather than advice to dedicate oneself to anything outside oneself. He had begun by stating that one cannot study yoga philosophy too often as the significance of the content changes with perceptions based in life experience. This teacher took comfort she said, in the idea of channeling disturbances of the mind into devotion or bhakti. Bryant shut the notion down going so far as to say that the text including the eight limbs was simply dedicated to eliminating distraction from self involvement which seems an erudite view. When the teacher cited a verse of the Bhagavad Gita to press her point Bryant made it clear that the Gita was not to be confused with the message of the Sutras. The Gita advocates duty and devotion to something outside oneself which is a direct departure from the attitude of isolation described in the Sutras. Gita’s shadow danced when I set the class for Warrior II the next day. God and War is a curious pairing without context. In the framework of modern and not so modern conflicts it’s business as usual and the business places God in awkward positions depending on whose God it is or on which side God stands. God and war in the Gita? I leave it to others to interpret as they...
by Hilary Lindsay | Jan 15, 2015 | Asana, Meditation, nashville yoga, Nature, Poetry, Prose, society, Tradition, Yoga, yoga class, Yoga History, Yoga Philosophy, yoga teacher, yoga teaching |
It exploded from comets To begin as the oceans, And borders of seas, Becoming the vapor, the clouds and the rain, And one with the earth, Becoming the rivers, the lakes, and the streams, To become most of me, I breathed it out to become part of you. Altered, transformed, shifted, ripened In time and beings, Its sparkle drew my searching eye and quenched a thirsty palette. Is there a broken line in the lineage? Does this drop contain the residue of the first drop? Some has been burnt away for sure but most remains. Like water, this yoga: To know it with intellect is a lively chase for a living art from an ancient time. Not my favorite game, but one I’ll play when the players arouse, Uninterrupted on more peaceful days I’ll stand in sensation. This yoga like water whose chemistry would not matter if the proof was my health, Would bear further examination should it rouse suspicion. I was curious and explored something apart from me, Until it was no longer apart but a part. ...
by Hilary Lindsay | Sep 30, 2014 | Meditation, nashville yoga, Nature, Yoga, Yoga and Religion, yoga class, yoga community, Yoga Philosophy, Yoga psychology, yoga teacher |
approximate reading time: 1 minute and 20 seconds In the season of flame red trees and burning leaves we sow what we’ve reaped from the earthly plain. It is a straightforward thing to plant a seed and harvest the plant, having clear parameters of time and direction. What we have sown or reaped also becomes a philosophical inquiry at harvest time as fall marks the beginning of a new year for the Jewish people with a ritual of reflection on our behavior to our fellow men. Less condensed, as it’s a daily practice, the underpinning of yoga requires reflection with regularity. We are sowing without pause and observing the outcomes. I had a lovely old Tantra teacher who asked me if I knew what the worst pollution was and when I failed to come up with an answer he said that it was words: You can clean the air, the earth, the water but words can never be removed. I came upon a medical study on rejection and physical pain. An MRI (an imaging device) of the brain lit up the same area of the brain for rejection as it did for the physical pain of a burn. Rejection forms its own words in the mind of the rejected. Rejection is the upshot of any number of actions: Being fired from a job, being fired as a lover or friend, being passed over for a post, being ignored by anyone close to us or not, with words spoken or implied. I write rejection and you’ve already remembered your own.So when we say we got burned by...
