Ganesha Chaturthi: Rituals for these 10 Days

September 2nd through September 12th is a ten day celebration of the “birthday” of the Hindu God, Ganesha, the elephant headed God who removes obstacles.

First thing I did was go and get a new Ganesha statue (after having gotten rid of all my statuary when we moved to Vermont 3 years ago today, not realizing a) we’d move home again and b) I’d really want those darn statues!). I then took him to the lake’s edge and performed some simple ablutions. I also picked up a rock for my altar.

This year, I set up a really simple altar on a table in the main flow of our house so it’s always in a sight line and so I’m constantly thinking about my intentions around this time.

My altar includes: my new Ganesha statue, an incense burner, three candles, some favorite stones that are targeted toward my intention, the rock from the ablutions at the lake, and my mala that was handmade for me for my wedding.

My intention this year is about emotional obstacles — mainly whatever it is that is blocking me from really claiming my happy life. I don’t need to articulate it any more clearly than that. We don’t always need a million words of explanation for our feelings. They just are and eventually then can just change.

Each day, besides my focus on my intention, I’m spending time chanting to Ganesha, and I’m doing that by simply following along with this chant to him by Deva Premal.

My point is that none of this needs to be complicated. Do what feels right and good and have some consistency so you can naturally grow your devotion muscles.

Yoga is not of the body and how the body can take us into yoga

Yoga is not postures. And the postures you think are yoga are very young, especially compared to yoga. Was that confusing?

We keep figuring out that yoga is so much older than we think we know it is. Let’s just assume it’s 3 or 4 thousand years old at this point. Those asanas you do? Some of them are under a hundred years old.

So what the hell is yoga, then?

It’s the underlying philosophy (which is meant to be experimented with and LIVED), and some of it did include postures but that was for the sake of people who need a physical entry point.

I need a physical entry point and I think right now, in this day and age, most people do, because most people now think the body is just a vehicle for the mind and that’s about as un-yogic as it gets.

But the physical entry point is not meant to be solidified. Yoga — the real yoga — is way too smart for that. Yoga is all and all is yoga, and each human is a unique expression of that so why would we think that downdog was somehow necessary to a yogic experience? And who would think that headstands were “advanced?”

People mistaking the material for the all, that’s who. People STILL living in a world of dualism where we are separate from the flow of the divine.

But we ARE the flow of the divine and so we come to what I really want to write about…

I’ve been studying yoga for 25 years. I’ve been teaching for 10 years.

And only just a couple of weeks ago did I feel like, as a teacher and as a student, that I had finally come to START to know “my” yoga.

“My” yoga being the yoga that is natural to this body and that allows this mind and spirit to engage on the same level as body. “My” yoga being a way of moving that integrates awareness and allows me to BE ME. (Language is so constraining right here… I’m struggling to express this.)

I am a student of Tantric Yoga, and in that system of nondualism, the ultimate reality is Awareness.

Awareness has two parts: noticing and then action based on clear sighted noticing and that is unencumbered, that is free and only in the moment and of itself.

For me, to even get close to that sort of awareness, I have to dive deeply into body.

For me, to dive deeply into body, I have to enter into the most easeful flowing state of movement possible.

And so my study of yoga, my experience of yoga, is much about breath creating fluid and strong movement.

This is too big for standing in down-dog or pushing my students into triangles. We are not triangular.

We are water.

And the key to our water state is in the mobility of the spine.

And so, I bring to you what I will henceforth refer to as Water Spine Yoga. You can read more about it here.

No Sanskrit… I do not want to use language that might push people away who need this work.

(I could go into a long rant, too, about how current yoga is very heavily masculine energy yoga and how that’s not what we really need right now and how the yoga I teach is meant to strengthen our feminine energy so that we can go out into the world and be the warriors of love and compassion that we are meant to be, but I don’t really want to go into that right now. HA)

Reclaiming Feminine Mystery & Magic with Burlesque, Butoh, and Tantra Yoga

WHEN: Saturday, February 16th
TIME: 10 AM to 1 PM
WHERE: Pranayoga -- A Little Breathing Room, 1001 West 6th Street
COST: $45

You MUST preregister. CLICK HERE.

When I first started teaching 10 years ago, right after one of my first few classes, a wise, wonderful, beautiful woman came up to me and said this, which I didn't realize would be something that I would hear over and over again in the coming years:

"I was always taught that I had to pick between being smart and sexy...that I couldn't do both... So I picked smart... but now I feel like I CAN have and be both..."

Until that moment, I didn't realize how much I had internalized that same exact message.

Another woman would tell me that suddenly, after months and months of classes with me, she was letting herself buy things she thought of as "too pretty for her" and things with "sparkles!"

She was shocked and delighted by this.

So many of us have learned to turn off certain parts of ourselves to succeed or even to survive.

We've bought into so many of the myths of being a woman in a misogynistic culture: that to be pretty or sexy is to be vapid. To be "too sexy" invites "wrong attention." To be attractive means you won't be taken seriously.

To wear this article of clothing or this much makeup or this sort of shoe could even put your life at risk.

Even more insidious, of course, is that only certain types of bodies are even ALLOWED to THINK of themselves as sexy.

And it's reflected in the dance and movement arts world: only certain types of bodies are ALLOWED to perform, or on a more basic level, to even consider themselves dancers at all.

Bullshit. We all call BULLSHIT.

And yet, these parts of us HAVE been silenced and to reawaken them can be difficult and even a bit scary.

But in community it all becomes so much easier, so much more fun, so  much more joyful.

With the witness of #Treesters in a supportive circle, we can grow into our fullness in every way.

We can embrace our unique beauty and our uniquely wonderful moving bodies.

We can embrace our softness that is another kind of strong.

We can sink into the flow of our innate body wisdom, our intuitive knowing, and our empathic intelligence.

We can OWN all that has been either taken from us, hidden from us, or looked down upon as less than.

In this workshop, we'll move into these spaces within us and explore how they want to be expressed, how they NEED to be expressed, and what these desires are telling us about the kind of world we want to create around us.

We'll be using methods from Burlesque, which promote an assertive sensuality, but we'll do so with no regard for the male gaze. This is for YOU.

From Japanese Butoh, we'll use mindfulness techniques along with breath to discover the deep wells of strength that flow under the skin.

And from tantra yoga, we'll learn of our power of awareness and the paramount importance of and ritual approaches to experiencing through all of our senses with no shame.

The Meaning of Life, as taught to me by peonies

When people go through the illnesses of loved ones, they often speak of all the loving and wonderful lessons they learned.

When my father had his stroke and then needed a feeding tube inserted into his stomach and then three weeks later coded and then had to have a trach and then had to have a different feeding tube and then started having hospital psychosis and then and then and then… I didn’t think there was anything loving or wonderful I was learning at all.

I was angry.

And I got more and more confused and lost and despairing and cynical. I’ve always been skeptical, which I think is healthy, but cynicism was not my usual mode.

Fast forward over three months later, and he is home, tube free, and making more progress at a faster pace every day.

In the meantime, I started my deep dive into tantra yoga philosophy, and I really committed to that after the new year.

But I kept landing in the same dark, nihilistic corner… painted in by the banality of it all.

Wondering what could possibly be the point of being human if all there is is pain and suffering awaiting each and every one of us sooner or later.

Life is cruel. That was the only conclusion I could come to, and if there is some sort of thinking/creating God, he/she is even crueler.

I do not believe in a God or Universe who “sends us lessons.” Bullshit. First, that’s mean and if I believe in any God it is LOVE. Second, it’s illogical in the context of free will. Life happens, and if we are lucky, later, looking back, we can create meaning from suffering, we can write stories of our own making about why what happened was ultimately important or “right” or whatever, because that’s what humans are at their core — story making machines.

Thank goodness, because this capacity to create story saves us, I think, from going insane.

I’m stubborn. It’s one of my more positive traits, I believe. I believe it has saved my life over and over and this time, wrestling with these ultimate things, it would prove itself my strength yet again.

In trantra yoga, the ultimate underlying reality (worshipped as Goddess but just for the simplicity of anthropomorphism that humans respond so well to) is awareness.

All is awareness, and we, then, are ultimately that same thing — awareness.

Awareness then has experiences through our individuated material bodies.

But ultimately we are already that awareness.

And here I am sitting in that dark corner, thinking, if we are already that awareness, WHY DO THIS!?!

But I had an intuition that the answer was in this tantra stuff… if I could just pull the right thread.

Here’s the thread: Awareness is two fold and a lot of people forget the second part.

Firstly, awareness is the noticing that we expect it to be, but the second attribute of awareness is actually about ACTION.

Awareness is, by its nature, constantly creating, destroying, resting, starting over.

Sound familiar?

I STILL wasn’t getting it, until…

I was lying in bed, sick, and my husband was gently rubbing my back so I could fall to sleep, and instead I entered into a deep and peaceful state of meditation.

Suddenly my skull was full of the universe, and I realized, oh, right! It has been there all along. If awareness is this cycle of creation, destruction, rest, and starting over, it’s literally written in the stars.

And from that cycle — from the very nature of awareness — eventually we, quite simply, get to the evolutionary point from which humans arise.

Lying in bed, the universe in my head, suddenly, a PEONY flower arose and unfurled in my skull.

The peony can only be the peony. Period.

I can only be this human.

I’m not here to “be taught” or to “ascend.”

I’m here, simply, to be awareness and to allow for the natural cycles that are born of the nature of that awareness.

My peony self is teacher/dancer so that’s what I’m here to be awareness through.

And when I die, I will simply continue being the awareness I already am, but, as Ram Dass says, I will remove the too-tight coat of this human experience.

Tantra Yoga, Magic, and Depression

Magic. Truth. Beauty. Love. None of this is easy stuff. It’s not pretty. It’s not fluffy. It’s not for the faint of heart.

It’s all rather like a large body of water, especially an ocean. It can look so lovely and yet it can kill you. And when it does, it didn’t mean to. It was just being itself.

Part of my intention for this year is to dive deeply into the philosophy and practice of tantra yoga, and already, only 14 days into this new year, it is revealing a huge and unhelpful chasm in my approach to life. This is stuff I’ve always kinda known was there — we all know it’s there. But like most of us, I danced around it. I thought about it here and there. I could talk about how I was unlearning it, but in reality, it was growing in size and threatening to swallow any happiness in its path.

And all happiness is in the path of this one.

I know I’m not alone with this. I see it at play every day all around me, in particular in the number of people suffering from lifelong, debilitating, chronic depression (like myself).

William Styron wrote a great and very personal account of his lifelong depression, and he wondered if a depressed brain is born or made and he decided that it doesn’t matter, that we can never know.

Here’s what I think: I think some of us are born with a brain that is more susceptible to depression, a brain that is more “sensitive” to stimuli, but also a deeply inquisitive brain that kinda… gets lost in its inquisitive nature… a brain that follows dark lines of thought and then can’t find its way out.

Over time, this starts to look like a neurological or chemical imbalance, but like all disease, it starts elsewhere, an elsewhere that current medicine is not able to locate or understand yet. (And do NOT read this as a “blaming” of the sick. NOT. AT. ALL. My point is that we are complicated, feeling, thinking organisms for whom those thoughts and feelings play a much larger role than we currently understand, but then those thoughts and feelings meet up with environmental factors — from family to community to earth — and that’s where the complicated comes in.)

WIth my study of tantra yoga, I’m coming face to face with this: I believe that life is being DONE to me.

But this begs so many questions: By whom and for what reason and to what end?

A God who “does things” to us, including all the difficult things, to “teach us lessons” just sounds like an asshole. A human made asshole.

Humans made that God out of their observation of human assholes writ large.

I don’t want to believe in that God, but deep down, in that dark chasm, I DO.

If I’m sick, I must have been bad.

If someone dies, I am being punished.

What? It hit me yesterday that THIS — THIS — is the blackened heart, the very core of my depression. Who wouldn’t be depressed thinking that they had so little power in their life? Who wouldn’t be depressed thinking that their “God”, the larger universe was out to get them? Who wouldn’t be depressed when every little or big bad thing that happens (normal things that happen to everyone because this is LIFE) was a judgement of their value as a human being?

Tantra yoga, on the other hand, is a philosophy of nonduality. There is no “out there” God. There is only one soul of which we are all part. We are drops in an ocean of soul.

And life happens because life happens, and whether we evolve or not is about how we react to that.

Everything that happens is neutral, neither good nor bad. It’s only what we label it and our labels hold all the power. Our labels determine our experience.

I’m sick because I’ve been at the highest level of stress in my life for three months because I was helping my mother help my father to not die.

We know, more than anything when it comes to the disease process, that stress leaves us open to “catching” illness. We are not “unlucky.” or “bad” or “sickly.” We are stressed.

And THAT is something we have control over.

Again to refer to tantra yoga: the ultimate energy, the ultimate underlying reality is awareness itself. And we come from that and so we are that.

We can wake up, right now, to this reality. We can decide to embody that awareness.

It won’t be easy — there’s no magic spell here. It’s a matter of observing ourselves and catching reflex habitual thinking and asking, is that really how I see the world? Is that really the world I want to live in?

This is scary to me.

Even thinking about changing this way of thinking makes my stomach do flips. The known is comfortable. And what the hell will happen if I decide to live in a FRIENDLY and LOVING world? What will I do when “bad” things happen? If I let go of my grief and despair, who the hell am I?

I am the ocean, that’s who I am. I am the drop in the ocean, and I am the ocean.

And like I said, truth and beauty and love and magic — not easy and a whole lot scary but a life of freedom and no delusions and feeling what is and not labeling? Yes, please, because THAT sounds EXACTLY what I know when I am dancing.