If  you were to ask the Earth how he, or she, feels about today, Earth Day, my guess is the response would be ….”One day? Out of the entire year, you have one lousy day to honor the planet that offers itself in support of your life?”

If you’d grab ahold of a yogi, someone from India or one of those really old countries, and tell him, or her, about the wave of popularity Yoga is enjoying these days ….. how some people attend three, four, five classes a week …. the old yogi might say …. “you mean for a practice that offers a roadmap of contentment, to peace in your heart, to less conflict in your mind …. four classes a week? …. what do you do with the rest of your time? What could be more important than a reduction of conflict in your life? What is more important than that? What on earth are you doing?” 

http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=9c95bf83c20a15c9c1659dd03a001d061e0b316d

Matthew Sanford was 13 when he was paralyzed in a car accident that killed his father and sister.  During his physical rehabilation he was advised as most below-the-waist-paralysis victims are adviced: to focus on what’s healthy, to work hard to strengthen his upper body.  For twelve years he followed this advice, through college and graduate school. Then, at age 25, he attended a yoga class. The yoga instructor told him to get out of his chair and spread his legs wide. 

“Tears started coming,” he said. “It was because I’d had never had my legs wide in 12 years, since my injury, because why would a paralyzed guy take his legs wide?”

The experience taught him that just because he didn’t feel his lower body didn’t mean that he couldn’t live in it and make it be part of his life.

“It’s our birthright to live in our whole body,” he said. “When we let our presence diminish within our body, our life isn’t as fulfilling and powerful. That first experience of stretching my whole body was an awakening and I want to share that with people. It’s very simple.”

In time, Sanford became a yoga instructor and began Mind-Body Solutions. Married and with an 8-year-old son, he’s also written a book about what he’s learned entitled “Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence.”

Seventeen years ago I wandered into a yoga class in New York City. I was healthy, strong, able-bodied with full use of my limbs. Only in looking back was the paralysis I was living in clear. I recall many things about that first class but one memory stands alone: While struggling in shoulderstand, with the over-muscled hump of my back crashing into my wrists, the teacher instructed us to drop our right leg by our right ear. Until then I had experienced the class as a treadmill moving too quickly: my frustration at trying to move body parts I didn’t know I had was compounded by the apparent ease with which everyone else seemed to be following along. With respect to Matthew’s struggle, I felt as cut off from parts of my body as he was from his. When I dropped my leg back, all the discomfort of the past hour vanished. I was left feeling something I never before had …. SPACE. It was like running full speed into a wall of marshmallows. I had been unaware of the death grip my life had become: lifting weights, squeezing racquets, slamming balls, writing and saying and believing stuff I didn’t believe, holding back feelings I didn’t understand — compressing space. When I dropped my leg back into eka pada sarvangasana the ripple of open sensation through my right hamstring was so intense, so liberating, as to be nearly ecstatic. Tears came to my eyes. I know those are the same tears Matthew cried during his class. The same tears I see all the time in the eyes of students who attend class. Tears of re-connectivity to something that had been misplaced but never forgotten. Matthew’s story makes eloquently clear that paralysis is a condition of the mind, not the body.  As he says, “we’re here to use the body we have.”

http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/23708299/

 

 

In case you ever were wondering what it is we’re talking about in class, this is a pretty great explanation of it from a scientific viewpoint we don’t often get. 

ttp://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

Thank you to whoever’s responsible for sharing this, and thank you Jerry for the ease of your illuminations.

Enjoy.

---

Video Series:

In the Hands of Alchemy: Art Jerry Wennstrom, Part 1 09:46 In The Hands Of Alchemy: The Art and Life Jerry Wennstrom www.handsofalchemy.com

part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG0Wil3YKK0

The story continues with a part 2 & 3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Hn_Bv9mwc

 

In the Hands of Alchemy is a delightful film, an alchemical mixture in itself of inspiration, spirituality, art and the story of a remarkable human being.”
     – David Spangler, author, Blessings; Parent as Mystic, Mystic as Parent and Everyday Miracles: The Inner Art of Manifestation

“There is a tremendous kind of courage that Jerry showed in the midst of the chaos and the individual loneliness of the Post-Modern world, to go his own way. It was the ultimate artistic step.”
     – David Whyte, author, The Heart Aroused and Crossing the Unknown Sea
more quotes…

“Generally, everyone feels compassion, but the compassion is flawed. In what way? We measure it out. For instance, some feel compassion for human beings but not for animals and other types of sentient beings. Others feel compassion for animals and some other types of sentient beings but not for humans. Others, who feel compassion for human beings, feel compassion for the human beings of their own country but not for the human beings of other countries. Then, some feel compassion for their friends but not for anyone else. Thus, it seems that we draw a line somewhere. We feel compassion for those on one side of the line but not for those on the other side of the line. We feel compassion for one group but not for another. That is where our compassion is flawed. What did the Buddha say about that? It is not necessary to draw that line. Nor is it suitable. Everyone wants compassion, and we can extend our compassion to everyone.”

Lectures on Kamalashila’s ‘Stages of Meditation in the Middle Way School

by Kenchen Thrangu Rinpoche

---

Suzuki on Weeds

Dogen said, “Although everything has Buddha nature, we love flowers, and we do not care for weeds.” This is true of human nature. But that we are attached to some beauty is itself Buddha’s activity. That we do not care for weeds is also Buddha’s activity. We should know that. If you know that, it is all right to attach to something. If it is Buddha’s attachment, that is non-attachment. So in love there should be hate, or non-attachment. And in hate there should be love, or acceptance. Love and hate are one thing. We should not attach to love alone. We should accept hate. We should accept weeds, despite how we feel about them. If you do not care for them, do not love them; if you love them then love them.

Usually you criticize yourself for being unfair to your surroundings; you criticize your unaccepting attitude. But there is a very subtle difference between the usual way of accepting and our way of accepting things, although they may seem exactly the same. We have been taught that there is no gap between nighttime and daytime, no gap between you and I. This means oneness. But we do not emphasize even oneness. If it is one, there is no need to emphasize one.

Dogen said: “To learn something is to know yourself; to study Buddhism is to study yourself.” To learn something is not to acquire something which you did not know before. You know something before you learn it. There is no gap between the “I” before you know something, and the “I” after you know something. There is no gap between the ignorant and the wise. A foolish person is a wise person; a wise person is a foolish person. But usually we think, “He is foolish and I am wise,” or “I was foolish, but now I am wise.” How can we be wise if we are foolish?  But the understanding transmitted from Buddha to us is that there is no difference whatsoever between the foolish man and the wise man. It is so. But if I say this people may think that I am emphasizing oneness. That is not so. We do not emphasize anything. All we want to do is to know things just as they are. If we know things, as they are, there is nothing to point at; there is no way to grasp anything; there is no thing to grasp. We cannot put emphasis on any point. Nevertheless, as Dogen said, “A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.” Even though it is so, this is our life.

In this way our life should be understood. Then there is no problem. Because we put emphasis on some particular point, we always have trouble. We should accept things just as they are. This is how we understand everything, and how we live in this world. This kind of experience is something beyond our thinking. In the thinking realm there is a difference between oneness and variety; but in actual experience, variety and unity are the same. Because you create some idea of unity or variety, you are caught by the idea. And you have to continue the endless thinking, although actually there is no need to think.

Emotionally we have many problems; they are something created; they are problems pointed out by our self-centered ideas or views. Because we point out something, there are problems. But actually it is not possible to point out anything in particular. Happiness is sorrow; sorrow is happiness. Even though the ways we feel are different, they are not really different; in essence they are the same. This is the true understanding; transmitted from Buddha to us.

- Shunryu Suzuki

Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Drug mules depend upon their last meal to go undigested. If even one of the hundreds of little packets of cocaine they swallowed were to open in their bellies they would die. This reminds me of some raw food people I know. Chief among their favorite topics of conversation are the contents of their bowel movments — one of several reasons why they tend to flock together. It is a source of deep discussion when they notice in awe some food that’s snuck through the many layers of digestive systems and tubing yet managed to emerge out the other end in the same shape it was when it went in. I suppose you could just clean it off and serve it again. It’s a reminder to chew food: digestion starts in the mouth, where the teeth and saliva start the extraction and disintegration process. The yogis speak much about food and two of their greatest bits are:

Treat food like medicine: eat only what’s appropriate in proportion to the body’s requirements.

Chew your liquids and drink your solids: i.e., slow down! When you’re eating … eat!

My name is Otis. I would like Cindy to pay more attention at work. When someone walks by often she doesn’t look up and say hello. I would like the cheese shop next door to give us free samples each day because many people from our office go there for cheese. I would like Mrs. Davis to see how self-absorbed she is. I used to enjoy fishing, but now I’m a vegetarian. Sometimes I still fish, but without a hook on my line. The best day of my life was catching a 15-pound bass from the Bonesboro River when they said there were no more bass there for the catching. I was nine years old.  I’m a Picses. My spiritual name is Landfill. It was given to me by Shirley, at the Temple, and it means “he that can bear the toxins of others.”  I have friends, but not a best friend, not since I left Dallas. My brother lives in Detroit. We don’t speak much. What more would you like to know?

 

 

Just for today, measure your “success” by your relationship to your breath … let that be your only yardstick. Let all other forms of measurement slide away ….. I have a friend who’s programmed his I-Phone to walk his dog, yet he still has great pain in his heart. How big is your office? How clean is your car? How many times a week can you have sex? Trillions of ways to measure, to get a an idea of how you’re doing, how’s it going in this life. For today, we’ll shrink it down to your breath. How often are you aware of it? It’s gentle ebb and flow, the perpetual context of sanity it provides.

  

Sometimes the items on our psychological checklist are going well, and other times they aren’t. So today we’ll narrow the checklist down to one thing: our breath. We don’t even have to say the checklist is a diversion, keeping us from the real question of:  to whom does this checklist appear? We won’t even say ….. it’s a checklist of vapor, of things coming and going. We won’t say it because our minds wouldn’t even want a life that didn’t include things on a checklist … to be sure the checklist has changed over the years ….. maybe we don’t think being able to drink four upside down margaritas and drive home is such a great or accurate indicator of who I am … so we replace that with …… how straight can I keep my arms in wheel pose  … how well did my son do in Algebra …. how well did I control my temper …. still a checklist full of things I keep editing to get a sense of who I am …. things outside myself that I use to discover what’s inside myself.

 

The checklist is a mental summary of a personality in flux, that is not solid.  Notice the myriad ways you seek psychological comfort, and than once noticed drop it, immediately — you don’t need that thing on the checklist to happen to be happy — remember the only thing on today’s checklist is your breath. You still engage in all your normal daily acitivites, but you’re no longer needing them to satisfy a deep-rooted sense of yourself. For that, all you need is your breath.   

 

Your mind, and other minds, will think you’re nuts. Imagine someone asks you how your day is going and you say, “wonderful, I feel each breath I take.” They’ll wait for you to get to the point. They’ll say, “Okay, okay I heard the bit about the breath, I get that you’re very deep and spiritual but how are you? What’s going on? And you say, “I finally understand what’s really going on here. I live inside a love affair between my breath and my body. This is always going on. My breath is in love with the truth of my shape.  My mind is never in love, or what it’s called love is really just a temporary relief from fear. I spend so much time seeking approval outside myself it’s never occurred to me there is this simple, beautiful love affair going on between my own breath and body.”

 

Now of course you don’t really say that out loud. That would be tedious, condescending, a real bore. Your friend would hate you. But you don’t need to say it because you’ve taken the time to investigate and really feel it. Once you feel it, you don’t need to say it. You don’t need to convince anyone anymore of anything, especially of your own happiness. You won’t need to carry such a big mental backpack because the size of your checklist has become very small. In fact it’s self-contained. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some good bits here.

http://www.robertmasters.com/newsletter/January2008.pdf

The moment of awakening may be marked
by an outburst of laughter,
but this is not the laughter of someone
who has won the lottery or some kind of victory.
It is the laughter of one who,
after searching for something for a long time,
suddenly finds it in the pocket of his coat.

-Thich Nhat Hanh

“Realization of Truth is higher than all else.
Higher still is Truthful Living.”- Guru Nanak, Sri Rag

 

---

Salt and Water

The degree of love we manifest determines the degree of spaciousness and freedom we can bring to life’s events. Imagine taking a very small glass or water and putting into it a teaspoon of salt. Because of the small size of the container, the teaspoon of salt is going to have a big effect on the water. However, if you approach a much larger body of water, such as a lake, and put into it the same teaspoonful of salt, it will not have the same intensity of impact, because of the vastness and openness of the vessel receiving it. Even when the salt remains the same, the spaciousness of the vessel receiving it changes everything. We spend a lot of our lives looking for a feeling of safety or protection–we try to alter the amount of salt that comes our way. Ironically, the salt is the very thing that we cannot do anything about, as life changes and offers us repeated ups and downs. Our true work is to create a container so immense that any amount of salt, even a truckload, can come into it without affecting our capacity to receive it.

Recognizing the power of our minds means that even as unfortunate or terrible things happen to us, we can receive them in a more spacious and ultimately more enlightened way. The Buddha taught his students to develop a power of love so strong that the mind becomes like space that cannot be tainted. If someone throws paint, it is not the air that will change color. Space will not hold the paint; it will not grasp it in any way. Only the walls, the barriers to space, can be affected by the paint. The Buddha taught his students to develop a power of love so strong that their minds become like a pure, flowing river that cannot be burned. No matter what kind of material is thrown into it, it will not burn. Many experiences--good, bad, and indifferent--are thrown into the flowing river of our lives, but we are not burned, owing to the power of the love in our hearts.- Sharon Salzberg

---

  “When your sense of self is no longer tied to thought, is no longer conceptual, there is a depth of feeling, of sensing, of compassion, of loving, that was not there when you were trapped in mental concepts.

You are that depth.”

- Eckhart Tolle

---

From: ‘Living Truth’  Jean KleinThere is nobody to look for something, because it is your
nearness. Nothing can be more near to you than what you are.
It is enough to live with this for some time, not to think about
it, not to manipulate it, but simply to live with it.

June 21, 2000

Feeling unsettled this afternoon because I’m not feeling unsettled. Went through old food hoops — got coffee and apple pie …. and green juice and fruit … and put them on the table and observed. One was clearly alive, the other a product of many various chemical processes. I knew if I chose the juice and fruit I’d feel as I have been lately, light but strong, energetic but calm, enthusiastic but non-mood swingy. If I went for the coffee and cake I’d experience a rush of sensation, taste, emotion, capillary expansion, increased blood flow – the chemical high.  I could see myself gobbling the pie greedily and sucking and savoring every last drop of coffee. And then …. there’d be lack. When the rush ended, the metabolic bottom would drop and I’d be left wanting, craving, searching, crashing. Was there a choice? Would anyone but a lunatic choose the coffee and cake? I speak about conditioning so matter-of-factly but here it is, in its most ordinary insidious form. The benign conditioning of things that don’t appear to do us harm. I mean, apple pie? How much more normal can one get? But forget what’s it’s called, forget what it harkens us back to, forget what it stands for ….. in reality all it is is some cooked wheat, crushed apples, white sugar, butter and eggs: a congealing glop of dead processed food sending haywire signals to an already overworked adrenal and digestive system.

 

The juice is simple, boring. The choice has little to do with food, nothing to do with common sense and everything to do with conditioning and nostalgia. Everything to do with synapses and endorphins.  Everything to do with getting high, feeling a rush, satisfying a need. The addiction is to that. Religious experiences are expansive, mind blowing, evocative … life altering.  But to live a religious life is quiet, silent. No one would know. A connection to the Divine, to peace, to oneself is so grounded in everday life one doesn’t require “miracles” or fancy rituals or propaganda to be convinced of the connection.

 

We can say life’s too short not to indulge in the cake. Or, life’s too short to remain at the mercy of conditioned responses. Or not say anything at all.

 

 

FROM THE VAULT II

 

In a small profile a few years back, the local news paper called me a “yoga pop star” since I play a lot of music in class. This was the response:

 

I’d like to clarify a few things written about me, Eddie Ellner, yoga pop star. In class I play other people’s music, read other people’s poetry, steal other people’s poses, share Truths I’ve gleaned from other people’s books and from sitting at the brilliant feet of …. other people. As a pop star (in whose hands a musical instrument poses a threat)  I’m a proud graduate of the Milli Vanilli school of Other People.

If I’m to be reduced to a few soundbites I’d like it to include this one: After many years of study, my definition of yoga has evolved into anything that rescues us from the violence of comparison. To teach this, the most useful instruction is “stop trying so hard.” If you can manage that one, than the next one is: “so you can feel how nothing is missing.”So deep was my belief in the “earnest struggle” that it took years for me to trust the idea that not trying so hard could be of any use. When people tried hard in class, they would clench their bellies, squeeze their throats, lose their smile and get so consumed by their own progress or lack thereof — so locked into the desperate struggle of self-improvement, that they would lose any experience of joy the moment offered –  an ironic turn of events for a practice designed to reveal one’s innermost joy. When people stopped trying so hard, their bodies relaxed and they more easily got to the place they were struggling to reach.

To learn how to stop trying so hard, listen to your breath. I’m not just saying that because that’s what yoga teachers are trained to say. Listen. In order to listen you must shut up. You have to fall out of love with what you want, and start to melt into what you have. Really. 

You’ll notice your breath is never lost or confused. The mind on the other hand is always lost and confused, or worse, certain beyond doubt and therefore tight and rigid.

Imagine the energy one would save if they followed the example of the breath, which, no matter what the circumstance, is always content with itself. Not self-satisfied, smug or indifferent. Content. A content breath hatches a curious, not desperate mind. It means in this moment of living, I’m open and available to change, but I’m no longer fighting the way things are.

Yoga is a solitary pursuit, best practiced alone, in order to observe at one’s own pace the arising knots of mental and physical tension. When you lay down and breathe, it becomes obvious what parts of your body are tense and what thoughts are spinning off into some dark, silly and always familiar fantasy. You notice how compressed and numbingly familiar life seems.

Having finally noticed that these things are happening a lot of the time, you can soften around their edges and feel the great space available to you. A miracle. Your back is wide, front is wide, palate empty, groins hollow, jaw slack, eyes soft, brain open, stomach happy. Teeth and gums in namaste. Mona Lisa smile in the back of your throat. Toes and fingers spread.  Easy things, always accessible. If what you’re being asked to do is not easily accessible you’re dealing with the subject of who you’re not, not who you are. Form is hard to change, takes great preparartion, strategy and effort. It’s effects are always temporary and subject to immediate shifts. Who you are observes the shifting forms – be it the form of manifested reality, i.e., the body, or of ideas and beliefs arising from conditioned thought. You are not your body, nor are you your ideas about your body. A two-minute handstand is not better than a 30-second handstand which is not better than no handstand at all. That’s just a thought and all thoughts, all moods, all beliefs are false, in that they change without notice. To believe in that paradigm of: form=me is to guarantee a lifetime of needless suffering. 

So stop.    

How do you stop doing the thing you’ve been doing forever? By stopping. You want to stop smoking, don’t put another cigarette in your mouth. That will guarantee to end your smoking habit, no ifs, and or butts, excuse the pun.  If you try any other method than that you will not stop smoking.

 

It’s said two things cause illness: the food we eat and the thoughts we chew. We can’t stop McDonalds from being built but we can choose not to eat there. We can’t stop thoughts from arising, but we can choose to stop chewing on them.Good teachers, an undervalued asset of every community, will shine the light in the right direction for you to explore. Well-meaning but fear-based teachers will try to fix things for you. They will tell you how things are, where they are and how to get them. Yoga’s greatest gift is that it allows us to do our own work. It offers us back the story we tell to ourselves and to others, full of angst and drama, so we can see and feel that’s not who we are. You’ve heard it many times: yoga chitta vritti nirodha …. pundits will quibble over it’s precise meaning the way Talmudic and Buddhist and Christian clerics debate over interpretation of their own scriptures. Yoga chitta vritti nirodha. Truth remains when the mind is quiet. Integration lives when separation ends. Minds separate things into categories and than argue over which category is best.

 ”When the mind isn’t filled with unnecessry things, this is the gretest season of your life.” Wu Wei. 

Pop star? No thanks. A cook maybe, if we need a label … one who doesn’t order the food around to command a taste, but instead creates the environment for the food to best express itself. Food is love, and love is the star of this practice, never the cook.