miss taurus

well, buddy, i know it's best to agree with the bulls in my
life, so it's fortunate how often i agree with you.

i have contemplated your words in your most recent
beautiful, inspired, fresh out of a john friend workshop posting,
and all i have to say is...exactly.

let's practice soon.

love!

practice, and all is coming

oh beard...i cannot wait to get my hands on an i-yoga session with you. fresh from john friend and in the midst of a swirl of a relationship entering the shiva phase, i find many many opportunities to practice yoga.

john's light was bright, and on it. i am hungry to get in the class and pass the torch around. i think as a teacher we have the power to empower, not just to cajole and ease and guide, but, as they say here, 'give her!'. because the practice is not always to surrender - it is always to participate. it's a dance with shakti, constantly, every moment - and on us to inspire and to be inspired. the opportunities are there: in a leaf, in a spider catching its prey, in the way that water moves - this one in particular is speaking to me. so beautiful how it flows, and it hits a rock and just continues with its flow, under the law of gravity and momentum, but effortless and easy in its course of nature. and if we could just participate like that - with clarity and beauty. water isn't trying to be something else - it doesn't try to turn itself into a rock. it sparkles and flows and reflects and shimmers, and it's beautiful, perfect, and clear all by itself. and we are too: we are beautiful. we are perfect. we are clear, all in our own rite. we were fashioned in the likeness of The Is. what more could we possibly ever be?

reminds me of the parable from a commentary on vedanta that i dug up - this man frantically searching for his glasses, tearing his house apart, yelling at his family, struggling and searching to find them, just as we search for happiness, perfection, ease, bliss, sukhum - how do we get it? more yoga! more meditation! be kinder, more compassionate! but in the end, the glasses are right there, resting on the top of our heads - we are yoga, we are meditation, we are kind beyond kindness, and compassionate beyond compassion.

sat nam.

i am that.

truth is your identity.

keepin it real funwick

missmev,

you can only imagine my confusion when i started reading your
last posting thinking that the title was 'catholic catharsis.' but
for real, Hail Mary Full of Grace! Anytime we are struggling such
as you were, we are simply veiled in the cloak of maya, covered
in such a way that we cannot see the light of our own heart and
the beauty of the grace that is shining within us and all around us.
each month women not only cleanse their bodies, but also their
emotions (not that the emotions are separate from the body,
they are a part of it). anything that needs to release, flow through
us that maybe has been blocked will at that special time with the
3 letter abbreviation have the opportunity to come out, fortunately
for me, you let it out in the most graceful, hilarious way.

I love your description of bc, and I understand such a connection
to place. Soon as I crossed into Cape Cod last weekend, tears streamed
down my face, that light quality! OCEAN AIR!!! Slipping back into the
crack that is Nantucket was such a joy, and I too rocked the disheveled
hair all weekend in yoga letting it fly around freely in every direction,
til Julie looks straight at me as I'm coming up from a deep uttanasana
with hair veiling my face and says, "Hi, Cousin It." I love her!

Uni-verse, the one song, we are all a part of that Supreme Consciousness,
known as Siva. and it's all very real. that your brother may go or may
not go to Iraq, that our human family is there fighting right now, is all
a part of it, and it's not separate from us. We are in this ocean of
nectar together, and nesting, serving, creating beauty in your
own home is the first place and from there you can go out, maybe
cleaning up mother earth after the hippie festival, maybe not. I like
to ask in the mornings, 'what do you have for me? i am willing.'
there was a little tapping on my window this morning at 4:30 am and
as i listened, i awakened to find your messages as my first gift of the
day.

did i answer to everything buddy?

cathartic catharsis

morning sunshine!

just to give you a glimpse of my setting - and sorry to any followers who are actually following, as i tend to write as though in a letter to a. beard. i awoke this morning with heavy sensey boobs and with it that heavy feeling of pms. i just have to say, i fucking hate pms. i feel like it's such bullshit, and a lot of times i think women use this as a valid excuse to fall into their own selfish bitchy mire. but then, it happens to me. laden with sadness - and the why being secondary, as i follow my mind into whatever sad thought will validate it. first i thought of my brother, going to iraq, or maybe not going to iraq. it made me teary-eyed. in meditation this morning, the image of a suicidal corpse on a funeral pyre found its way into my consciousness...this isn't something i often recall, but i feel like my mind just grabbed it: 'aHA! HeRE's something we can validate our shitty mood with.' insert kali growl here. and as soon as is surrender to the cantakerosity of it all, that kali rage takes over and says, no way! fuck that! - and now i'm angry at the mood itself.

neuroses, dude! duuuuude, neuroses like maya all over the place!

and of course there just so happens to be a program on the canadian talk radio dealing with depression, and they ask, 'is it our dUty to be happy?' our anonymous duty to the universe to be kind. [as always, it comes down to that simple but hard-as-all-fuck concept from the buddha-buddy: self-cherishing leads to all suffering. cherishing others leads to all happiness.] and isn't pms and moodiness just a way to cherish oneself, to look inside and feel so sorry for this piteous existence? we're such poor things, to have all of our faculties, to know the joy of a backbend, to have friends and families who love us - and love always being sort-of imperfect, but maybe that's what makes it all different shapes and sizes and perfect in that right.

take another step back to cherishing others - ah oui! our place in the Universe, not just in Little LaLa HeatherLand. oh right, doh! there's a whole fucking Un-i-verse out there, of which i am a part, and not only that, but a par-ti-ci-pant [that was michael fukumura's over-annunciation] - so do we have a duty? to participate, hell yes mama, we do.

**sorry for all the f-bombs, it's just been that kind of a day and i'm keepin' it real aB.