Pulling threads
Notes and news from the present moment, on its swift way to becoming past.
Turn the Year Retreat
A Winter Solstice Mini-Retreat
8:30–9 :30 a.m. December 27–31, 2021
As each calendar year ends, on the heels of Winter Solstice, I make a point to mark the transition with intention. There is something so delicious about retreats at this time of year. I find a sense of newness emerges by paying attention to how the natural world changes with the season, and dropping into resonance with that. There is an inward quality to the season of winter, and an outward quality to our holiday celebrations. With tempering and balance, this can be a rich time of rest, and if we are lucky, a deeply generative quality can be found in these dark, cold days.
Poiesis
The practices I have been gathering and that I share when teaching, are things I experience as methods of “homecoming” — coming to rest in being, whole. “Creative” or not, I believe we all, by the fact of living, are in the process of bringing forth what has not before been expressed, what has not before been realized. This is poeisis.
A Living Being, Feeling the Sun
I am working on a book that follows the lives of several families in the early 1900s, in a very rugged and remote part of the west coast. I have been reading widely many writers from that time period, to understand more deeply how that literature depicted it’s own time, to get a feel for how people understood the historical moment from within it. One of the writer’s I have come to read in this quest is Willa Cather, and her story of an orphaned settler boy. She writes this 10-year-old character with great tenderness, and through him, in two brief passages, Cather delivers a profound teaching that sounds like buddhist or yog philosophy to me.
Welcome Summer Retreat
When we sit together, we practice resting into our experience.
We practice sharing, and we practice listening.
In these ways, may we become skillful.
July 5–9, 2021
8:00–8:30 a.m.
Pearls of Wisdom
Working with the reflex to DO rather than BE when faced with suffering, remembering: it is skillful to bear witness, without jumping into distracting action; to listen, without dissociation, or minimizing, or denial; to return to presence when facing pain.
Context and Action
I practice what I teach, taking care and discernment with media consumption — yet I am caught in emotion with this week's news. Centered as it is around grave violence against the earth and indigenous peoples in the province where I grew up, it hits very close to home. We must hold our remembering, even if forgetting seems like it would be easier.
Using Discernment
A translation of bramacharya that works well in my mind is right use of energy. In yoga and in meditation, we spend a lot of time discerning HOW we are using our energy—on gross and subtle levels, social, interior. What is the quality of our experience, and how are are we directing our vital energy?
Compassion in Action
Study, choose, act, expand — compassion in action is one way to work with crises, near and far. I am grateful for the meditation practice that helps steady me as I embrace compassion in action.
Waves of the Mind
I have been thinking about the ways human beings find meaning in pattern, how that serves as a strategy for coping with uncertainty, and the ways this ability can be both benevolent and not.
Awakening Spring: A Meditation Retreat
With this seasonal change I will call upon an archetype of earth, the fecund and great Mother, in all her lustiness and intensity. She brings us the flowers and honey, the sweet colours of spring, and the terrific force of birth. She is one who will not be denied, and we do not control her. Join me in meeting Spring with a seasonal retreat: March 15–19, 8:00–8:30 a.m.
Smrti: Present Moment Remembering
Mind gets carried away with things. It is the nature of mind to forget it is mind, and to see thought as reality. So this question can be helpful — what is going on in my mind right now? With patience and compassion, remembering the simplest thing is not so easy.
Winter Practice
Today, just a quick note today to let you know that the Winter Schedule is live, with all classes resuming next week. You can find the details in my calendar, and described in this blog post.
I will pick up writing on the yamas and niyamas again in the coming weeks — continuing a winter-appropriate exploration of ethical precepts in the philosophy of yoga.
Turn the Year: A Meditation Retreat
It is natural to take time to reflect as the year turns — a time for meditative retreat in the darkest days after Winter Solstice. Let us close this year with a dedicated space for that reflection, to integrate and inquire…
December 28, 2020 – January 1, 2021 8:30–9 a.m.
How Spacious the Meadow
To give your sheep or cow a large, spacious meadow is the way to control him.
Zen teachings are enigmatic, the language circular and contradictory often, which creates puzzles and potential for sparks of insight. This brief line led to much thought and discussion about the nature of freedom and constraints. What are the right constraints for us to know freedom within? How spacious our meadow?
Asteya - The Yama of Non-Stealing
The third yama in Patanjali's Yoga Darshan is asteya, or non-stealing. Not committing acts of theft seems like an obvious virtue. More subtly, asteya also applies to speech and to thinking — to not claim what is not ours, to not cheat, nor misappropriate. How do we steal, how do we take what is not offered? We may do so in unawareness, unconsciously; or, more deliberately, out of a sense of not having enough, of not being enough. Could this apply to this end-of-year and a seasonal hunger for what we don't have — for the future, for the past, for things as we wish they could be?
Life Is Art Is Life
At the beginning of 2020, besides thinking about the yamas and niyamas, I chose a word to be my focal aspiration for the year. (Much more helpful than a resolution!) My word was “concordance,” which is to bring all parts together in harmony.
In Essence
Essence, harmony, truth … satya is the glue that holds the formed universe together. Precepts and seed-thoughts for thinking through…
Ahimsa and the Centipede
For a period at the beginning of this year, I framed my yoga classes with the yamas and niyamas: ten guiding principles or ethics of yoga philosophy. I listed them at the beginning of each class, and invited participants to choose the most resonant precept, the one that caught their ear, and to draw into deeper consideration of it.
The precept that continues to resonate for me through this whole year, is the one taught first, the seed of all the others: ahimsa, or non-killing, non-harming, non-violence. Read how sangha, aversion, and a big bug show up as teachers.