a fresh start
Dear friends —
How has summer treated you? All at once we are in September, and I see the sky is the brilliant blue that comes only in this season. Our leaves are still green, though there are whispers of autumn in the evening, a hint of the crisp air coming. Even in August there were scarlet forerunners. They always surprise me, the occasional early-turning leaves — they arrive every summer, before I am ready.
I was reading yesterday in the I Ching, hexagram 32, Hêng, or “Duration.” This hexagram is made of two trigrams: The Gentle / Wind, below, and The Arousing / Thunder, above. How fascinating that two such dynamic natural forces, combined, could yield an association with union and constancy! But in this iconography, the explanation goes:
Thunder rolls, and the wind blows; both are examples of extreme mobility and so are seemingly the very opposite of duration, but the laws governing their appearance and subsidence, their coming and going, endure…
Duration is a state whose movement is not worn down by hindrances. It is not a state of rest, for mere standstill is regression. Duration is rather the self-contained and therefore self-renewing movement of an organized, firmly integrated whole, taking place in accordance with immutable laws of beginning anew at every ending. The end is reached by an inward movement, by inhalation, systole, contraction, and this movement turns into a new beginning, in which the movement is directed outward, in exhalation, diastole, expansion.**
I am happy to invite you to class once again, in this season of return-to-school, to continue breathing in and breathing out, beginning, ending, renewing, in accord with nature.
In the spirit of fresh starts, I have significantly revamped my TEACHING page. You may book classes there, and, I have set up the option to purchase bundles of 5 and 10 classes at a discount. Purchase Autumn Passes — please note, these expire December 31, 2022. All prices include HST.
Classes resume on September 10 at
Mosaic Yoga Studio, 225 Sterling Road, Toronto.
(Please note the new class start times — 10am on Wednesdays and Saturdays.)
** The I Ching, or Book of Changes, the Richard Wilhelm Translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes. 1950, Bollingen Series XIX, Princeton University Press.
