Courageous Hearts

To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.  

~David Whyte, Consolations

One of the vignettes on One World Stay at Home concert last Saturday was of a 66 year old retired doctor who has chosen to leave retirment, put her scrubs back on and return to work at the hospital treating Covid-19 patients.  She felt deeply what was in her heart and has made herself highly vulnerable to the consequences.

Courage is expressed in physical acts like those of all our frontline essential works who put themselves at risk every day.  It is also in the willingness to feel our hearts deeply: pain, fear, grief, love.  To feel and then to act, even if that action is simply getting out of bed and doing another day at home in lock down.

In Sanskrit the word for heart is Hrdaya. While this refers to our beating physical hearts, it also refers to the heart of the world, the essence and core of anything and all things. Yoga teaches us that when we allow ourselves to rest back in our heart and all that we find therein, we ultimately rest back in the heart of all things.  This is yoga off the mat, where we connect to all beings through our vulnerability and willingness to feel.

Allowing ourselves to feel deeply is scary.  I find it terrifying.  That’s why I love this hand gesture: Abhaya Hrdaya Mudra or Courageous Heart Gesture.  A mudra is a seal, a mark or a gesture, a calling forth of what we aspire to.  I don’t know about you, but I need a lot of courage these days. 

Join me at 12:15 pm today for a FREE meditation on cultivating our courageous hearts and learn the mudra with me.  

If you miss the meditation, here’s SiannaSherman demonstrating how to do it.

Love, 

Chaya

Vicissitudes and Koshas

By Chaya Spencer

Vicissitude. I had to look this word up! It's a good word for right now. "A change of circumstances or fortune, typically one that is unwelcome or unpleasant." There is such drastic change of circumstance happening at the moment; changes that are external to us and not in our control. And, changes that are internal to us that maybe within our control.  David Whyte writes: 

Conscious or unconscious, we are surrounded not only by the vicissitudes of a difficult world but even more by those of our own making.

One way to think about gaining some control over those of our own making is the map which the philosophical yogic concept of the five Koshas offers.  According to this map, we are composed of five layers, sheaths, or bodies. Like Russian dolls, each metaphorical "body" is contained within the next:

Annamaya kosha—the physical body or food body

Pranamaya kosha—the breath or life force body

Manomaya kosha—the mental and emotional body

Vijanamaya kosha—the wisdom body

Anandamaya kosha—the bliss body

Each of these sheaths is impacted by the vicissitudes of our current situation in different ways.  Our physical bodies might be feeling stress, exhaustion, fight or flight, and so on.  Our energy Pranic body might be feeling short of breath and lacking in vitality. Our mental bodies might be feeling fear, despair, hope, and so on.  We can take heart from understanding that we are not just one of these sheaths that we might be indentifying with at a given time.  We are all of them.  They are all part of us.  And, we are more, for these are all sheaths that cover the essence of the Self, the Atman, the heart of our essential nature.

When we are able to perceive ourselves as more than a single part, and know that we are an unchanging essence that lives at the center of all five, we can craft an identity for ourselves that can enable us to live in the world we find ourselves in without feeling beset.  Rather, we can understand the parts and through them, understand the whole. 

Follow your yoga and meditation practice into the heart and essence of your identity and find an inner steadiness at the center.  You are all of it and all of it is you.

Outrageous Love

By Rachel Dewan

The saddest day of the year in my house is always the last day of summer camp.  My children come home, crying big tears and chest-heaving sobs. And what I always say to them is “I know this feels bad, but it just means that you had so much love all summer.”

Big emotions can be hard to manage and to know what to do with.  Anger is one of the emotions that has been coming up for me during these challenging weeks of quarantine, but reading David Whyte’s unpacking of what anger actually is has been super helpful. He writes:

“ANGER is the deepest form of compassion, the purest form of care, it always illuminates what we belong to, what we wish to protect and what we are willing to hazard ourselves for. What we have named as anger on the surface is the violent outer response to our own inner powerlessness, a powerlessness connected to such a profound sense of rawness and vulnerability that it can find no proper identity or voice, or way of life to hold it. What we call anger is often simply the unwillingness to live the full measure of our fears or of our not knowing.”

He then writes “Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling that there is something profoundly wrong with our powerlessness and vulnerability.” Tantra teaches that there are no “bad” emotions. Emotions just are, and when we learn to recognize them when they arise, and pay attention to what causes them to arise, they simply become another gateway to the Source. Anger is not wrong, nor is fear or vulnerability or sadness even though they may be uncomfortable for a time. If you feel any of these strong emotions it is not a failure, it just means you are human. It’s not that we have strong feelings, but what we do them that defines who we are. And whether the emotion is anger, sadness, fear, hurt, joy, compassion, generosity, at the root of all of it is love.

Yoga gives us the chance to sit and be with the vulnerability and the powerlessness in a safe way. To be with ourselves in our most raw and open state, which we are able to do because we are surrounded by a community that holds the space for us to do that. This remote yet connected way of practicing as we have been online during these weeks of Covid19 gives us an even more unique opportunity - to be in community and yet also alone in the safety of our own homes so we can truly allow ourselves to be vulnerable and befriend our powerlessness.

I see a lot of people preaching “love over fear” right now.  While on a broad level I do believe that, I also think there is great danger in the spiritual bypass. It is important to feel all the feels (but also to let them go when we are able to). Feeling fear doesn’t make you an unsuccessful yogi.  Feeling anger either. And anyone who tells you they aren’t feeling those things right now is likely not being honest with you, or more likely with themselves. I am feeling those things, but also feeling grateful, inspired, supported, and loved at the same time.  One doesn’t eclipse the other, and the most grounded and healthy people I know are the ones who understand this.  

I’d like to replace the “love over fear” refrain with the words of Marc Gafni who says: "In a world of outrageous pain, the only response is outrageous love."