Nurturing ourselves

Greetings Yogis and Yoginis,

This week in class we are considering nurturing ourselves.

Love feels no burden, thinks nothing of trouble, attempts what is above its strength. . . . It is therefore able to undertake all things, and it completes many things, and warrants them to take effect, where one who does not love would faint and lie down.

                                                                   -Thomas a Kempis

Without a tank full of gas, no car can drive very far. The mind, too, needs a full tank of vitality to draw on for patience, resilience, and creativity. Filling that tank every morning is one of the most practical purposes of meditation. The test of your meditation is: How long can you be patient with those around you? In the beginning, you should aim to make it at least to noon acting like the proverbial angel.

Most of us, however, even if we start with a full tank, have little control over the thousand and one little pinpricks that drain vitality as we go along: worry, vacillation, irritation, daydreaming. By lunchtime the indicator may be hovering around empty.

Then it is that you have to be acutely vigilant. The tank is nearly empty, but by sheer effort and deft defensive driving, and using the mantram, you manage to coast through to the end of the day without any serious accidents.

The more effort you make, the more endurance you gain. The next day you may find the tank itself a little larger; you start the next day with a greater capacity for love and patience than before.

Words to Live By: Inspiration for Every Day – Eknath Easwaran

Note: A mantram is a powerful spiritual formula which, when repeated silently in the mind, has the capacity to transform consciousness.  Learn more at http://www.easwaran.org/.

The homework is to learn what it takes to “fill your tank.”  Use the awareness you cultivate through your Yoga practices to notice when your “tank” is becoming low and recognize when it is time to nurture yourself.  When you find yourself loosing your patience do whatever works for you to find patience, love and compassion.

Blessings,

paul cheek
Rushing Water Yoga

417 NE Birch St., Camas, WA 98607
360.834.5994

www.rushingwateryoga.com
info@rushingwateryoga.com

Serving Yoga to Camas, Washougal, and Vancouver Washington since 2003

Character Development

Greetings Yogis and Yoginis,

This week in class we are considering character development.

It is the mind that makes one wise or ignorant, bound or emancipated.

                                                                   -Sri Ramakrishna

Mental habits are like ditches in the mind. They have to be dug laboriously. But they can also be filled in and new channels can be dug. Take resentment for example. It does not burst full-blown into the mind; it grows. At first you simply expect people to behave towards you in a particular way. If they behave in their own way instead, you get surprised, then irritated. You are digging a little channel in consciousness.

In the early stages, this channel may be only an inch or so deep. Thought may flow down it, but it may also flow somewhere else. Also, the walls are still soft and crumbly; they may cave in and fill the channel a little - for example, when someone you dislike says something kind. There  is an element of choice. But every time we respond to a situation with resentment, the channel gets a little deeper. Finally there is a huge Grand Canal in the mind. Then anything at all is enough to provoke a conditioned resentful response. Consciousness pours down the sluice of least resistance.

We can dig new mental channels - kind ways of thinking instead of resentful ones, patience instead of anger. Every time you try to return good will for ill will, love for hatred, you have dug your new, beneficial channel a little deeper. Transforming character, conduct, and consciousness is not a moral problem. It's an engineering problem.

Words to Live By: Inspiration for Every Day – Eknath Easwaran

The homework is to use the experience of your Yoga practices to work on transforming your character.  Use the breath to remind you that you have a choice in how you respond and use the same level of concentration (dharana) you bring to your asana practice to notice when you need another second or two to make an informed decision to be in the moment and choose a beneficial path.

Blessings,

paul cheek
Rushing Water Yoga

417 NE Birch St., Camas, WA 98607
360.834.5994

www.rushingwateryoga.com
info@rushingwateryoga.com

Serving Yoga to Camas, Washougal, and Vancouver Washington since 2003

What is discriminative intelligence ?

Greetings Yogis and Yoginis,

This week in class we are considering discriminative intelligence.

Mind is consciousness which has put on limitations. You are originally unlimited and perfect. Later you take on limitations and become the mind.

                                                                   -Ramana Maharshi

Much of our daily behavior is conditioned by forces deep below the conscious level of our minds. This means we are limited to a conditioned, automatic way of thinking and responding to the events of life around us. When such a conditioned behavior is strong, we think of it as a fixed part of the personality. Othello is jealous, Hamlet indecisive, Macbeth ambitious; that, we say, is their nature. To many biologists, this is something that is built into our very genes.

I do not agree. Jealousy, vacillation, competition, and the rest are not permanent mental furniture; they are a process. A mental trait is a thought repeated over and over a thousand times, leading to words repeated a thousand times, resulting in action repeated a thousand times. At the beginning it is only a burgeoning habit of thought; you do not necessarily act on it. But once it becomes rigid, it dictates behavior. It is possible, through the practice of meditation and the other disciplines, to go against these conditioned ways of thinking and actually change ourselves from the inside out.

Words to Live By: Inspiration for Every Day – Eknath Easwaran

The homework is to evaluate areas in our lives where we are holding on to rigid ways of being that are not healthy for us or those around us. See if you can use your Yoga practices as a way to challenge this rigidity and create positive change.  Start by challenging yourself when your mind encourages you to avoid a posture or come out of a pose.  Instead of following your mind see if you can observe the thought and use your discrimination (viveka, see Patanjali's Yoga Sutra II:26) skills to make a more informed decision about what you want to do.  Then generalize this discriminative intelligence to situations off of the mat.

Blessings,

paul cheek
Rushing Water Yoga

417 NE Birch St., Camas, WA 98607
360.834.5994

www.rushingwateryoga.com
info@rushingwateryoga.com

Serving Yoga to Camas, Washougal, and Vancouver Washington since 2003

Oneness

Greetings Yogis and Yoginis,

This week in class we are considering oneness.

"This is myself and this is another." Be free of this bond which encompasses you about, and your own self is thereby released.

                                                                   -Saraha

To love completely, it is not enough if I care deeply; I must also be detached from myself. To know what is best for someone, I have to be able to step aside from my own prejudices and preconceptions, slip into that person's shoes and become one with her temporarily, looking at life through her eyes rather than my own. When I step back again, I will have seen her needs from the inside; only then can I see clearly how to serve those needs with detachment and compassion.

Why, then, do we find it so difficult to get ourselves out of the way? The reason, quite simply, is that we live rather superficially, on the surface of life. On the surface, we feel that it is natural for people to quarrel, for nations
to go to war. "It's only human," we say. Only in the depths of the soul can we realize that quarreling and fighting are not natural at all. What is natural is loving everybody, seeing everybody as one.

Words to Live By: Inspiration for Every Day – Eknath Easwaran

The homework is to consider that the practices of Yoga are centered around the idea of oneness.  Oneness in the pose, oneness with our environment, oneness with each other, oneness with God.  Learn for yourself how practicing the eight limbs of Yoga moves you towards a state of detachment and how that places you in a position to experience oneness.  What would this experience of oneness be like?

Blessings,

paul cheek
Rushing Water Yoga

417 NE Birch St., Camas, WA 98607
360.834.5994

www.rushingwateryoga.com
info@rushingwateryoga.com

Serving Yoga to Camas, Washougal, and Vancouver Washington since 2003