It is good to use
best china
treasured dishes
the most genuine goblets
or the oldest lace tablecloth
there is a risk of course
every time we use anything
or anyone shares an inmost
mood or moment
or a fragile cup of revelation
but not to touch
not to handle
not to employ the available
artifacts of being
a human being
that is the quiet crash
the deadly catastrophe
where nothing
is enjoyed or broken
or spoken or spilled
or stained or mended
where nothing is ever
lived
loved
pored over
laughed over
wept over
lost
or found.

~ John Thomas Carlisle

“What if our religion was each other,
if our practice was our life, if prayer our words?
What if the temple was the Earth, if forests were our
church, if holy waters ~ the rivers, lakes and oceans.
What if meditation was our relationships,
if the teacher was life, if wisdom was self-knowledge,
if love was the center of our being?
Ganga White

The New Year is a time we often use to very consciously choose. We find ourselves setting goals, we inquire and reach into our dreams; we create!  Life is such a vast array of choice and creation, what are you choosing this year?

For me, within the myriad of choices, lies my commitment the deep communion that is my yoga practice. On the mat.  Entering asana. Entering myself. Feeling my body.  My breath. Opening, freeing limbs and spine.  Movement. Awareness.  Alive!

Will you join me in this?

This Sunday the 15th from 1-4pm at It’s All Yoga Studio we’ll be exploring a quality of spaciousness in body, heart, and mind.  Creating space around our experiences frees us to choose outside of our quick reactions – we practice welcoming what is, even when it’s hard, uncomfortable, tight – we stay with it, a vulnerable and uncertain place, no doubt, but powerful in its capacity to shape the way we relate to our experience.  In practice this weekend we’ll be inside the places that the body with scoliosis experiences as compression, tension and density; and we’ll bring to it breath, attention, patience and kindness.  We’ll elicit the creative use of props and anatomical imagery to lengthen, strengthen, de-rotate, and align.  The cost of this workshop is $45.  I do hope to see you there!

Sign up at www.itsallyoga.com on the “workshops” page or call 916-501-4692.

(special thanks to Narelle Carter-Quinlan for adaptations from her Newsletter)

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T.S. Eliot

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

Tao Te Ching

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

i thank you god for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable you?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

e.e. cummings

It gives me time to think
about all that is going on outside–
leaves gathering in corners,
lichen greening the high grey rocks,
while over the dunes the world sails on,
huge, ocean-going, history bubbling in its wake.

But beyond this table
there is nothing that I need,
not even a job that would allow me to row to work,
or a coffee-colored Aston Martin DB4
with cracked green leather seats.

No, it’s all here,
the clear ovals of a glass of water,
a small crate of oranges, a book on Stalin,
not to mention the odd snarling fish
in a frame on the wall,
and the way these three candles–
each a different height–
are singing in perfect harmony.

So forgive me
if I lower my head now and listen
to the short bass candle as he takes a solo
while my heart
thrums under my shirt–
frog at the edge of a pond–
and my thoughts fly off to a province
made of one enormous sky
and about a million empty branches.
Billy Collins

“When we start to meditate or work with any kind of spiritual discipline, we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are.  It’s a bit like saying, “If I jog, I’ll be a much better person.” “If I had a nicer house, I’d be a better person.” “If I could meditate and calm down, I’d be a better person.”  Or the scenario may be that we find fault with others. We migh say, “If it weren’t for my partner, I’d have the perfect marriage.”  ”If it weren’t for the fact that my boss and I can’t get on, my job would be just great.” And, if it weren’t for my mind, my meditation would be excellent.”

But loving-kindness – maitri – toward ourselves doesnt mean getting rid of anything.  Maitri means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry.  We can still be timid and full of feelings of unworthiness.  Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better.  It’s about befriending who we are already.  The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are.  That’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.

Curiosity involves being gentle, precise, open – actually being able to let go and open.  Gentleness is a sense of goodheartedness toward ourselves.  Precision is being able to see clearly, seeing what’s really there.  Openness is being able to let go, and open.  When you come to have this kind of honesty, gentleness, and good-heartedness, combined with clarity about yourself, there’s no obstacle to feeling loving kindness for yourself, and others as well.”

Pema Chodron

Today, I recognized that that jewel-like beauty
is the presence, our loving confusion,
the glow in which watery clay
gets brighter than fire,

the one we call the Friend.
I begged, “Is there a way into you,
a ladder?”
“Your head is the ladder.
Bring it down under your feet.”
The mind, this globe
of awareness, is a starry universe that when
you push off from it with your foot,

a thousand new roads come clear, as you yourself
do at dawn, sailing through the light.

– Version by Coleman Barks
“Say I am You”