Question of the week:
Q: What is the rarest
thing?
A: Knowing when to
stop.
I’ve been asking my students
this week to identify areas or aspects of their lives that they have trouble
practicing when to stop. Some of the
common answers were:
when to stop eating
when to stop talking and to
listen, especially when it’s a challenging conversation or argument
when to stop perseverating
an idea or thought pattern that is distracting you from living your life
when to stop nagging your
kids (including adult children) and just let them make mistakes and learn the
lesson for themselves
when to stop worrying
Everyone was very
forthcoming with their thoughts on excesses, but there are also times when we
stop too soon. In Tantra, one of the 6
attributes of the Divine is purnatva, which means wholeness or fullness. As innately divine beings we live in a state
of purnatva, a place of wholeness and perfection...and yet, as my friend Danny
Arguetty says, if we spent our lives just basking in that wholeness all the
time life would be stagnant and unproductive. We are born from
perfection into perfection…and yet we are alive, and being alive means growing
and changing. The possibility of
expansion is always, always there.
I’ve been playing Ravel’sBolero in my classes this week. It
starts with a beautiful melody played by the flute, accompanied by a steady,
quiet drum beat. He could have chosen to
just leave it at that – a beautiful melody in an of itself, like Mozart’s “Ah! vous dirai-je, Maman” (the melody
that we sing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and Baa, Baa, Black Sheep to, among
other things). But Ravel keeps building
on a beautiful melody, adding another instrument at a time, until the whole
orchestra is participating and the piece builds to a beautiful, inspiring
crescendo. He also knows when to quit –
let’s face it, the same thing over and over again could get annoying (spoken by
someone recently returned from Disney and the It’s a Small World ride…). So we see there is always room for expansion,
and yet we have to know when to quit.
On the mat we can always be
reaching to expand our poses. That
doesn’t necessarily mean doing the wildest most advanced form of the pose (although
sometimes it does) – as Jan Jeremias reminded me on Monday morning, sometimes
expanding into pose happens
energetically as we imagine ourselves moving beyond perceived limitation, or
emotionally as we let go of our attachment to the pose looking “perfect” and
just feel the joy of being alive and able to practice in whatever way we are
able to.
Here are some more ways to
embody purnatva on the mat:
Open to Grace: Breathe deeply and feel your
inner body expand with a brightness and fullness, connecting with your own
innate sense of purnatva. Feel the
perfect fullness of yourself today, right now.
Yet with each breath feel your capacity for that fullness to grow – your
awareness, your mindfulness, your self- confidence and self-worth. Each breath opens us up more for the next
breath to come.
Muscular Energy: Draw in to the feeling of
purnatva that you already are.
Inner Spiral: From the
place of fullness, open up to more and more, expand beyond your limitations,
whether real or perceived.
Organic Energy: Flow out beyond the limits
of where you've stopped before, recognizing that every pose has the capacity
for your experience to expand beyond where it reached before.
And an off the mat practice,
also suggested Danny Arguetty:
What is one area of your
life where you feel particularly full? Can you see how it might still
expand and grow and become even more full?
