March 2022 Tidbits
ASANA (POSTURE)
- Pull up on your big toes with your fingers and stamp your fingers down with your toes.
- Lift your hips and lengthen your legs.
- Create your forward bend on the edge of imbalance, shift forward to a precipice and hold steady.
- Circulate prana through your body in a loop; start at your feet, go up your legs to your pelvis, and down your torso through your arms to your hands.
from Teaching Yoga With Verbal Cues by David Garrigues
(https://davidgarrigues.com/shop/teaching-yoga-with-verbal-cues)
HEALTH
…the greatest indicator of life span wasn’t genetics, diet or the amount of daily exercise, as many had suspected. It was lung capacity. (Breath by James Nestor, p. 55)
If you were to travel back in time some 5,000 years to the border of what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwestern India, you’d see sand, rocky mountains, dusty trees, red soil and wide-open plains, the landscape that now covers most of the Middle East. But you’d also find something else: five million people living in cities of baked-brick tract houses, roads meticulously constructed in geometric patterns, and children playing with copper, bronze, and tin toys. Between the cul-de-sacs, you’d see the public bathing pools with running water, and toilets piped to complex sanitation systems. In the marketplace, you’d see tradespeople measuring goods with weights and standardized rulers, sculptors carving elaborate figures into stone, and ceramists throwing pots and tablets.
This was the Indus-Sarasvati civilization, named after the two rivers that flowed through the valley. The Indus-Sarasvati was the largest geographically – some 300,000 square miles – and one of the most advanced of ancient civilizations. As far as is known, the Indus Valley had no churches or temples or sacred spaces. The people who lived there produced no praying sculptures, no iconography. Palaces, castles and imposing government buildings didn’t exist. There was, perhaps, no belief in God.
But the people here believed in the transformative power of breathing. A seal engraving unearthed from the civilization in the 1920s depicts a man in an unmistakable pose. He’s sitting erect with his arms outstretched and hands and thumbs in front placed on his knees. His legs are crossed and the soles of his feet are joined, the toes pointed down. His belly is filled with air, as he consciously inhales. These artifacts are the first documented “yogic “postures in human history, which makes sense. The Indus Valley was the birthplace of yoga.”
Things seemed to be going so well in the region, until around 2000 BCE, when a drought hit, causing much of the population to disperse. Then Aryans from the northwest moved in. These weren’t the blond-haired, blue-eyed soldiers of Nazi lore but black-haired barbarians from Iran. The Aryans took the Indus-Sarasvati culture and codified, condensed, and rewrote it in their native language of Sanskrit. It’s from these Sanskrit translations that we get the Vedas, religious and mystical texts that contain the earliest documentation of the word “yoga.” In two texts based on Vedic teachings, the Brihadaranyaka and the Chandogya Upanishads, are the earliest lessons of breathing and control of the prana.
Over the next few thousand years, the ancient breathing methods spread through India, China, and beyond. By around 500 BCE, the techniques would be filtered and sysnthesized into the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. Slow breathing, breathholding, deep breathing into the diaphragm, and extending the exhalations all first appear in this ancient text. A broad interpretation of a passage from Yoga Sutra 2.51 reads:
When a wave comes, it washes over you and runs up the beach.
Then, the wave turns around, and recedes over you, going back
to the ocean…This is like the breath, which exhales, transitions,
inhales, transitions and then starts the process again.
There is no mention in the Yoga Sutras of moving between or even repeating poses. The Sanskrit word asana originally meant “seat” and “posture.” It referred to the act of sitting and the material you sit on. What is specifically did not mean was to stand up and move about. The earliest yoga was a science of holding still and building prana through breathing. (Ibid., pgs 195-197)
WISE ACTION
It’s generally believed that hope is a good thing and to be without it is synonymous with depression or despair or some other form of unhappiness. But hope is the state of wanting things to be different than they are and as such it’s a failure to accept the present moment for what it is. Psychologically speaking it’s the other side of the same coin as fear. So it’s at least worth considering the possibility that hope is the very thing that makes real tranquility impossible.
(https://dynamic.wakingup.com/moment/SMA4427DE67)
QUOTE
“Healing is not about getting better. It is about letting go of everything that isn’t you and becoming who you are.” ~ Rachel Naomi Remen (b. 1938) - American Writer
Quote of the Day (2-15-22) from https://philosophyworks.org/
STORY
The Puranas relate the story of two brothers, Tavrit and Suvrit, to illustrate…The brothers were walking from their house to hear the Śhrīmad Bhāgavatam discourse at the temple. On the way, it began raining heavily, so they ran into the nearest building for shelter. To their dismay, they found themselves in a brothel, where women of disrepute were dancing to entertain their guests. Tavrit, the elder brother, was appalled and walked out into the rain, to continue to the temple. The younger brother, Suvrit, felt no harm in sitting there for a while to escape getting wet in the rain.
Tavrit reached the temple and sat for the discourse, but in his mind he became remorseful, “O how boring this is! I made a dreadful mistake; I should have remained at the brothel. My brother must be enjoying himself greatly in revelry there.” Suvrit, on the other hand, started thinking, “Why did I remain in this house of sin? My brother is so holy; he is bathing his intellect in the knowledge of the Bhāgavatam. I too should have braved the rain and reached there. After all, I am not made of salt that I would have melted in a little bit of rain.”
When the rain stopped, both started out in the direction of the other. The moment they met, lightning struck them and they both died on the spot. The Yamdoots (servants of the god of Death) came to take Tavrit to hell. Tavrit complained, “I think you have made a mistake. I am Tavrit. It was my brother who was sitting at the brothel a little while ago. You should be taking him to hell.” The Yamdoots replied, “We have made no mistake. He was sitting there to avoid the rain, but in his mind he was longing to be at the Bhāgavatam discourse. On the other hand, while you were sitting and hearing the discourse, your mind was yearning to be at the brothel.” Tavrit was doing exactly what Shree Krishna declares in this verse; he had externally renounced the objects of the senses, but was dwelling upon them in the mind.
(https://www.holy-bhagavad-gita.org/chapter/3/verse/6)
POEM
Kindness
Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.