Peace within and without

Yoga is - what? Stilling the fluctuations of the mind - yes this, but what does that mean and how can we describe it? 

✨ Arriving at the experience of samādhi, a bliss state of unalloyed wisdom and poise.

✨ Living such that life's sufferings are overcome.

✨ Experiencing serenity and resting in the burning light of the soul, the divine within.  

All the yogic texts and discourses have many analogies, allegories and descriptions, as indeed do other spiritual traditions. All trying to describe the indescribable. 

It can seem such a huge undertaking that we could be dissuaded from the get go! Instead, maybe we can pause and realise we are already here? We need to look behind the external experiences and conditions, which in yogic philosophy include thoughts, generated as they are in the matter of the mind. 

I was inspired to ruminate on all this through a series of workshops with long-time Iyengar yoga teacher Firooza Ali Razvi from Mumbai who visited Belfast last weekend with Iyengar Yoga Ireland. We were privileged to have this wise and thoughtful woman with her many years of yoga and philosophy practice and teaching experience. The essence of her teaching - that we do live in this life and we need to get on with those responsibilities AND we can also step out and use our breath, prāna, focus and meditation to touch into states of connection. As this interview with her says: make life beautiful, enjoy it and be happy. 

Poets can give us a taste of this, and I offer these two for inspiration. Do you have favourite poems and texts to help you touch the light within? Let me know!

Remember

Joy Harjo 1951 – present (from https://poets.org/poem/remember-0)

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Hymn to Time

Ursula K. Le Guin 1929 – 2018 (from https://poets.org/poem/hymn-time)

Time says “Let there be”
every moment and instantly
there is space and the radiance
of each bright galaxy.

And eyes beholding radiance.
And the gnats’ flickering dance.
And the seas’ expanse.
And death, and chance.

Time makes room
for going and coming home
and in time’s womb
begins all ending.

Time is being and being
time, it is all one thing,
the shining, the seeing,
the dark abounding.

Photo credit: Martina Durnin, Carlingford Yoga.