There is a vast inner terrain that we can only truly be accessed when
we quiet the external world and strive to look inward. This is
especially true in NYC where we are constantly bombarded by external
stimuli 99.9% of the time. We took a spontaneous trip to the Catskills
for some non-asanaic yoga-ing this weekend. So far, This program has
done a great job of teaching me how to relinquish all expectations,
which is basically what we had to do on the trip. It was really a blind
act of trust. We stayed at a beautiful house up in the mountains,
surrounded by nature, a complete contrast to the NYC that is home to so
many of us and to our beautiful Yoga to the People abode. On Friday, we
settled in and gotacquainted with our surroundings and the wilderness
that would serve as the backdrop for Saturday's solitude. Saturday, we
went into silence.
silence really is a beautiful thing when
you pursue it with the right intentions. Greg reminded us that there is
a difference between being silence and being in silence. There is a
difference between not talking and not allowing our minds to chatter
away. Being silence is a pursuit of the latter. Being silent, I
discovered, came naturally to me. I live a pretty meditative lifestyle
during the school (on the train, at my internship , in yoga) so I'm used
to solitude. But "being silence" is something that I struggled with. My
mind is constantly chattering away, worrying about people or things in
my life, constantly making plans. My mind is constantly on the go.
Being silence means letting go of all this constantly chatter, ofsurrendering it all in exchange for that beautiful realm of inner quiet that is so beautiful once you realize it is there.
Undoubtedly,
the most profound parts of the weekend for me were our nature walks. On
the first one, Greg had us line up with our eyes closed, hold on to the
person in front of us, and allow them to guide us up the path. When we
got to the top, we opened our eyes and discovered an incredible view of
the town (or city? I don't know how much land is spanned) below. There
were acres andacres of farmland and roads and little cars that looked
like they were the size of ants crawling along. When you looked to
either side, you could tell that it went on infinitely. It was just one
little, tiny piece of land in the vast expanse. One little, tiny
glimpse of the universe,and everything about it was so miraculously
beautiful.
This journey up the hill with our eyes closed that
ended at this beautiful mountain ledge was symbolic of our journey into
silence. Our 24-hour journey into silence was just one tiny, little
glimpse of the vast inner terrain that lies beneath and beyond the
external reality that we so often spend our days wading in. We can only
really know ourselves when we seek to look inward and expect the
unexpected. Then we can soar to great heightsnd see glimpses of the eternal, of reality as it exists within rather than without.
Our silent journey taught me a thing or two about the Koshas
that Michel introduced us to. These are the 5 layers of our being that
are thought to cover our true self (Atman in Sanskrit); physical,pranamaya
(breath...life force), mental, wisdom, and then bliss. In yoga, and in
silence, we strive to surrender our physical wants and desires and
listen to our breath in hopes that we can silence our minds and truly
know so that we might experience the bliss of accessing this true self
that lies beneath these sheaths. Being silent was a step towards
accessing this true self. Just being, and just being in nature was
glorious. Someone wrote of the spontaneous empathy thatresulted from
being thrust into a situation where we couldn't express ourselves with
words. This was the most beautiful part of the process; all these
different people coming together from all walks of life in an exercise
in survival and togetherness.
In love,
Leila
Monday, March 31, 2008
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Inspiration and All That Jazz
Wow. Lots of stray thoughts/ideas/mental wanderings that have gone undocumented since my pre-new years, pre-christmas post. I could go about this in a number of ways I imagine. I could make this a stream-of-consciousness blog in which I track the last few weeks of my life and furiously type out all the mental meanderings that I can remember in a less than structured format. I could divide each "experience" into it's own seperate paragraph and develop them in a focused, structured manner. I could focus on one aspect of my life and create a blog around that one aspect which would be even more focued and developed than any of the previous ways of documenting my ideas. Or I could not write any of them down and save them for a rainy day.
While I'm busy deciding and since I broached the topic of rainy days... why do we "save things for rainy days" as if rainy days are less substantial (or more?) than sunny days. It's as if we have unconsciously saved all the things that we can't do on sunny days because we are too busy living life for "do-nothing" days aka rainy days. It's almost as if rain puts a "damper" on our lives (haha). It wets all over our daily time-tables. And water, as we have all experienced, oftentimes makes things weaker (ie. paper, floors [because they are less able to serve the purpose of providing a surface on which we can walk], feline self-esteem). But it can also make things stronger. Society has connotated rain negatively. We have to run away from it and "kill time" because it doesn't facilitate a "valuable" day.
Weather. Days. The media. Religion. Relationships. Holidays. Family. Homes. Identity. Books. Peace Corps. School. Paint. folk Singers. Opportunities. Time. So much to write about.
How about a meta paragraph. I broached the topic of rain because
1. I wasn't sure how to go about writing this blog
2. I knew I had alot of things to write about but I didn't know which one to start with.
3. I have a gap of unplanned extra time and I want to do something meaningful with it and I want to WANT to do something meaningful with it.
4. I mentioned the word rain because I was AWARE of the cliche yet seldom consciously used phrase "save it for a rainy day"
5. I wanted to use rain as a channel of inspiration that might inspire another channel of inspiration that might in turn create a spiral of inspiration that would eventually culminate in a readable blog which would serve as a concrete manifestation of abstract mental ideas that were only real to me because they are in my own head.
I like this blog because its very existence is inspiring. It inspires me to write. It inspires me to love to write. It inspires me to learn. It may or may not inspire others in some way, shape, or form (I don't know if it does, but one can only hope and one can only write as if it does). It inspires ideas that I never knew I had. I painted my room over break. I'd been meaning to paint it for a while now. Nobody really knew that though because I never really expressed the desire to paint it to anyone so it must have seemed like a spur of the moment type thing, but since I had a whole bunch of free time I decided to capitalize on the opportunity and "go green" =). Meta-idea: I'm writing about painting my room because I've just now come to terms with a word that I painted on my wall - 'creativity,' I knew it was important when I put it up, but I didn't really realize why or the extent of it's importance until just now really. And I remembered the word because I was inspired by the mental documentation that this blog enables, to write about inspiration. So since I have creativity on the brain. I think it's important. I think it's important because it's not always easy to love where you are, who you're with, or what you are doing. It's not always easy to love your circumstances, but if you are creative than you can find a way to do so. My mom told me I had to move a shitload of tires the other day. Granted that it was something that I SHOULD do because I moved them from where they were supposed to be in the first place, I had no desire to move them. I wanted to be doing something else, so
I decided to be creative. There were about 40 big-ass tires to move and they were heavy and the route from the garage to the swimming pool area where they belonged is annoying to traverse so I told myself that 1. moving them would be a good arms/leg workout. 2. moving them would allow me to ponder 3. moving them would allow me to decide how/what to ponder. 4. moving them would allow me the opportunity to be creative. 5. moving them would allow me the opportunity to either be grateful for the experience or ungrateful for the waste of time. I went with the former obviously. Here's another one... When I went to Arizona for Thanksgiving my Uncle took me and some others out ATVing through the Arizona/Mexico mountains. We were in the middle of nowhere with nothing but nature surrounding us on the back of these load, oftentimes uncomfortable machines. We weren't driving so all we had to do really was hold on and take in our surroundings. The view was absolutely breathtaking really, but it's difficult to have your breath taken away for 8 hours straight. So I had to be creative then too. What enjoyment could I possibly derive from being on the back of this machine in the middle of these mountains which were everything and nothing at the same time? I could be grateful for the experience or ungrateful for the waste of time. I went with the former again. (see a trend?) In the last blog I wrote I talked about identity and it's 3 forms (virtual, real-world, and projective wherein the former two beget the latter - basically, yu are who you are and you cannot change that - you are born into this world and into a set of circumstances - this is your real-world identity. But you can also weave in and out of difference experiences, relationships and envelop yourself in difference circumstances which inevitably beget other circumstances - this is your virtual identity. And when you embrace both together you get a projective identity. Note that I don't quite fully understand this triad which is why I keep trying to explain it). Sooooo I envisioned myself as a writer on the back of that ATV. I created scenarios in my head about the mountains and I tried to describe them in words. I was also chewing a piece of gum while I was out there. Gum doesn't last forever so about an hour or 2 into the ride it began to disintegrate into that paper like substance that gum eventually becomes when you chew it long enough. I wanted to spit it out so bad, but I convinced myself that doing so would somehow unforgiveably tarnish the pristine environment in which I was surrounded. I also convinced myself that swalloing the gum would enable me to create an awesome metaphor and make for a great story...something like "I can still feel the weight of that gum sitting in my stomach, but it is not so much the physical evidence that weighs down on me, but the beauty that drove me to do my own little part in preserving one of nature's most beautiful gifts to mankind." For integrity's sake I'll admit that I spit the gum out. But it's cool that I was able to squeeze so much out of that experience right???
Creativity is awesome! It enables us to make something out of "nothing," or maybe realize that there really is no nothing, only a continuous stream of unrecognized somethings. So why connote a rainy day as a a not-worth it day?
This break was so cool. I painted my room. I went to this amazing Christian retreat. I met some AWESOME people. I learned a lot about relationships and about myself. I contemplated doing a bunch of things. I meditated a lot. I went to church. I saw my family. I saw other people's familys. I saw a bunch of things around me that I had never taken the time to notice. I thought a lot. I watched movies. I did some yard work. I laughed. I learned. I loved. I lived.
I think it's worth noting that time changes your perspective on things dramatically. I "killed a lot of time" over this break. But was it really killing time? I think it might of been had I not let it inspire me. I think that everything has inspirational potential. For instance, I went to the mall a lot over break. I could easily brush this off as a "waste of time type endeavor." But it's not really. I learned a lot from it. It enabled me to ponder why going to the Danbury Fair Mall is sort of the instictual thing to do when you have "nothing else" to do. Is it the familiarity of the mall? Is it the people? The stores? The food? The parking experience? What IS it that brings us back there and why is going there considered such a waste of time by so many who think that we could be doing something much more valuable with our time (me included a lot of the time)?? What are those "much more valuable" things that we could be doing? Making money? Helping people? Doing work? Learning? Granted that if we spent all of our time walking around the mall then we would probably not amount to much (???), but I think that going to the mall is important for the very reason that it has inspirational potential. Going to the bathroom has inspirational potential. Wokring as inspirational potential. Sleeping as inspirational potential. Laughing, learning, loving, realizing what we laugh at/about, what we are learaning, how we learn, what we want to learn, how we love, what we love, all of these things are so inspirational.
So now the concept of creativity which I have consciously made manifest on the wall of my room is a stream of inspiration into the whole experience of painting my room which is a segway into all of these other topics. I guess this blog is about inspiration and the inspirational potential that every single life experience has. Sometimes I complain about "missed opportunities." The very fact that I am making them manifest and mourning missed opportunites in place of current opportunities is inspirational in and of itself because it enables me to blog about it. That's just one way that it's inspirational. It may also inspire me to stop complaining about them or maybe to capitalize on them. It inspires gratification growth really. I've had the same professor for 4 of my classes, for instance. She has given the same introduction in each one of her classes. I can repeat it virtually word for word. "My name is professor so-and-so and I've been teaching here for this many years and I decided to major in communications because I wasn't allowed to watch TV and I started as a history major and blah blah blah." It's interesting really and it sheds some light on who she is. But I could have easily zoned out any number of the 3 classes in which she gave the same introducton as that first class. But instead I decided to focus on something different, not just the absorption of the words that she was saying. In one class I focused on the intonations that she used to give the introduction. In another i focused on how I, myself was absorbing the information - what grabbed my attention and what didn't. In this last class I pictured myself giving an introduction like she did and how I might introduce myself to my students.
Inspirational potential. There really is some of that in every single relationship/experience/person/object/scene/circumstance in the whole wide world!
Life is sweet. Life is awesome. It's cool that we have all these opportunities to get inspired by. It's cool when we realize that that they are there for us to get inspired by. I painted a bunch of "inspirational" words on the wall of my room over break. The process was really cool and worth noting. I went to Home Depot to the cheap paint section where they sell the paint that was mixed wrong for discount prices because one man's trash is another man' s treasure right? I thought it would be groovy if I could create something great out of what someone else saw as a mistake. And what came out was this sweet green that looked real good against the black that I wrote my words in. One person described it as "mint chocolate chip icecream." Another called it "toothpaste." I like those childish descriptions. Perfecto. Anyway, I chose a bunch of "inspirational" words (including inspiration) to spray paint in this fancy calligraphy-esque font. Love, faith, hope, generosity, delight, enthusiasm. And I think I've come to the conclusion that they are all subsets of love. It's the greatest thing!
Tommorow I'm going to go back over this blog and replace all the "I's" with some other noun to make this blog a bit less ego-centric. If I'm going to write about concepts then why not make it more conceptual? More exposable? Maybe I won't. Maybe I will.
inspiration is groovy.
While I'm busy deciding and since I broached the topic of rainy days... why do we "save things for rainy days" as if rainy days are less substantial (or more?) than sunny days. It's as if we have unconsciously saved all the things that we can't do on sunny days because we are too busy living life for "do-nothing" days aka rainy days. It's almost as if rain puts a "damper" on our lives (haha). It wets all over our daily time-tables. And water, as we have all experienced, oftentimes makes things weaker (ie. paper, floors [because they are less able to serve the purpose of providing a surface on which we can walk], feline self-esteem). But it can also make things stronger. Society has connotated rain negatively. We have to run away from it and "kill time" because it doesn't facilitate a "valuable" day.
Weather. Days. The media. Religion. Relationships. Holidays. Family. Homes. Identity. Books. Peace Corps. School. Paint. folk Singers. Opportunities. Time. So much to write about.
How about a meta paragraph. I broached the topic of rain because
1. I wasn't sure how to go about writing this blog
2. I knew I had alot of things to write about but I didn't know which one to start with.
3. I have a gap of unplanned extra time and I want to do something meaningful with it and I want to WANT to do something meaningful with it.
4. I mentioned the word rain because I was AWARE of the cliche yet seldom consciously used phrase "save it for a rainy day"
5. I wanted to use rain as a channel of inspiration that might inspire another channel of inspiration that might in turn create a spiral of inspiration that would eventually culminate in a readable blog which would serve as a concrete manifestation of abstract mental ideas that were only real to me because they are in my own head.
I like this blog because its very existence is inspiring. It inspires me to write. It inspires me to love to write. It inspires me to learn. It may or may not inspire others in some way, shape, or form (I don't know if it does, but one can only hope and one can only write as if it does). It inspires ideas that I never knew I had. I painted my room over break. I'd been meaning to paint it for a while now. Nobody really knew that though because I never really expressed the desire to paint it to anyone so it must have seemed like a spur of the moment type thing, but since I had a whole bunch of free time I decided to capitalize on the opportunity and "go green" =). Meta-idea: I'm writing about painting my room because I've just now come to terms with a word that I painted on my wall - 'creativity,' I knew it was important when I put it up, but I didn't really realize why or the extent of it's importance until just now really. And I remembered the word because I was inspired by the mental documentation that this blog enables, to write about inspiration. So since I have creativity on the brain. I think it's important. I think it's important because it's not always easy to love where you are, who you're with, or what you are doing. It's not always easy to love your circumstances, but if you are creative than you can find a way to do so. My mom told me I had to move a shitload of tires the other day. Granted that it was something that I SHOULD do because I moved them from where they were supposed to be in the first place, I had no desire to move them. I wanted to be doing something else, so
I decided to be creative. There were about 40 big-ass tires to move and they were heavy and the route from the garage to the swimming pool area where they belonged is annoying to traverse so I told myself that 1. moving them would be a good arms/leg workout. 2. moving them would allow me to ponder 3. moving them would allow me to decide how/what to ponder. 4. moving them would allow me the opportunity to be creative. 5. moving them would allow me the opportunity to either be grateful for the experience or ungrateful for the waste of time. I went with the former obviously. Here's another one... When I went to Arizona for Thanksgiving my Uncle took me and some others out ATVing through the Arizona/Mexico mountains. We were in the middle of nowhere with nothing but nature surrounding us on the back of these load, oftentimes uncomfortable machines. We weren't driving so all we had to do really was hold on and take in our surroundings. The view was absolutely breathtaking really, but it's difficult to have your breath taken away for 8 hours straight. So I had to be creative then too. What enjoyment could I possibly derive from being on the back of this machine in the middle of these mountains which were everything and nothing at the same time? I could be grateful for the experience or ungrateful for the waste of time. I went with the former again. (see a trend?) In the last blog I wrote I talked about identity and it's 3 forms (virtual, real-world, and projective wherein the former two beget the latter - basically, yu are who you are and you cannot change that - you are born into this world and into a set of circumstances - this is your real-world identity. But you can also weave in and out of difference experiences, relationships and envelop yourself in difference circumstances which inevitably beget other circumstances - this is your virtual identity. And when you embrace both together you get a projective identity. Note that I don't quite fully understand this triad which is why I keep trying to explain it). Sooooo I envisioned myself as a writer on the back of that ATV. I created scenarios in my head about the mountains and I tried to describe them in words. I was also chewing a piece of gum while I was out there. Gum doesn't last forever so about an hour or 2 into the ride it began to disintegrate into that paper like substance that gum eventually becomes when you chew it long enough. I wanted to spit it out so bad, but I convinced myself that doing so would somehow unforgiveably tarnish the pristine environment in which I was surrounded. I also convinced myself that swalloing the gum would enable me to create an awesome metaphor and make for a great story...something like "I can still feel the weight of that gum sitting in my stomach, but it is not so much the physical evidence that weighs down on me, but the beauty that drove me to do my own little part in preserving one of nature's most beautiful gifts to mankind." For integrity's sake I'll admit that I spit the gum out. But it's cool that I was able to squeeze so much out of that experience right???
Creativity is awesome! It enables us to make something out of "nothing," or maybe realize that there really is no nothing, only a continuous stream of unrecognized somethings. So why connote a rainy day as a a not-worth it day?
This break was so cool. I painted my room. I went to this amazing Christian retreat. I met some AWESOME people. I learned a lot about relationships and about myself. I contemplated doing a bunch of things. I meditated a lot. I went to church. I saw my family. I saw other people's familys. I saw a bunch of things around me that I had never taken the time to notice. I thought a lot. I watched movies. I did some yard work. I laughed. I learned. I loved. I lived.
I think it's worth noting that time changes your perspective on things dramatically. I "killed a lot of time" over this break. But was it really killing time? I think it might of been had I not let it inspire me. I think that everything has inspirational potential. For instance, I went to the mall a lot over break. I could easily brush this off as a "waste of time type endeavor." But it's not really. I learned a lot from it. It enabled me to ponder why going to the Danbury Fair Mall is sort of the instictual thing to do when you have "nothing else" to do. Is it the familiarity of the mall? Is it the people? The stores? The food? The parking experience? What IS it that brings us back there and why is going there considered such a waste of time by so many who think that we could be doing something much more valuable with our time (me included a lot of the time)?? What are those "much more valuable" things that we could be doing? Making money? Helping people? Doing work? Learning? Granted that if we spent all of our time walking around the mall then we would probably not amount to much (???), but I think that going to the mall is important for the very reason that it has inspirational potential. Going to the bathroom has inspirational potential. Wokring as inspirational potential. Sleeping as inspirational potential. Laughing, learning, loving, realizing what we laugh at/about, what we are learaning, how we learn, what we want to learn, how we love, what we love, all of these things are so inspirational.
So now the concept of creativity which I have consciously made manifest on the wall of my room is a stream of inspiration into the whole experience of painting my room which is a segway into all of these other topics. I guess this blog is about inspiration and the inspirational potential that every single life experience has. Sometimes I complain about "missed opportunities." The very fact that I am making them manifest and mourning missed opportunites in place of current opportunities is inspirational in and of itself because it enables me to blog about it. That's just one way that it's inspirational. It may also inspire me to stop complaining about them or maybe to capitalize on them. It inspires gratification growth really. I've had the same professor for 4 of my classes, for instance. She has given the same introduction in each one of her classes. I can repeat it virtually word for word. "My name is professor so-and-so and I've been teaching here for this many years and I decided to major in communications because I wasn't allowed to watch TV and I started as a history major and blah blah blah." It's interesting really and it sheds some light on who she is. But I could have easily zoned out any number of the 3 classes in which she gave the same introducton as that first class. But instead I decided to focus on something different, not just the absorption of the words that she was saying. In one class I focused on the intonations that she used to give the introduction. In another i focused on how I, myself was absorbing the information - what grabbed my attention and what didn't. In this last class I pictured myself giving an introduction like she did and how I might introduce myself to my students.
Inspirational potential. There really is some of that in every single relationship/experience/person/object/scene/circumstance in the whole wide world!
Life is sweet. Life is awesome. It's cool that we have all these opportunities to get inspired by. It's cool when we realize that that they are there for us to get inspired by. I painted a bunch of "inspirational" words on the wall of my room over break. The process was really cool and worth noting. I went to Home Depot to the cheap paint section where they sell the paint that was mixed wrong for discount prices because one man's trash is another man' s treasure right? I thought it would be groovy if I could create something great out of what someone else saw as a mistake. And what came out was this sweet green that looked real good against the black that I wrote my words in. One person described it as "mint chocolate chip icecream." Another called it "toothpaste." I like those childish descriptions. Perfecto. Anyway, I chose a bunch of "inspirational" words (including inspiration) to spray paint in this fancy calligraphy-esque font. Love, faith, hope, generosity, delight, enthusiasm. And I think I've come to the conclusion that they are all subsets of love. It's the greatest thing!
Tommorow I'm going to go back over this blog and replace all the "I's" with some other noun to make this blog a bit less ego-centric. If I'm going to write about concepts then why not make it more conceptual? More exposable? Maybe I won't. Maybe I will.
inspiration is groovy.
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