Thoughts on Siva and Shakti

Shakti
She dances
No matter what
She knows nothing of suffering

Siva he watches while tears fall
He cannot bear the dance
Yet he knows he must wait
For her return

But she is already there
Resting in his arms
Restless as a flame on a candle
He cannot keep her
He knows she is this wild dancing creatrix
Free as fire, light as the wind

She is a part of him like he is of her
Two sides of the same coin
One still...one alive with the play of the universe

Shakti dances
No matter what
She knows nothing of suffering

Our energy builds through our connection with stillness. In tantra stillness is symbolised by the energy of Shiva. Shiva meditating up on Mt Kailash, his eyes closed pondering the infinite nature of consciousness. Shiva however cannot exist on his own, he needs Shakti; Shakti is the energy of all creation and this is what Shiva contemplates, the beauty of Shakti, the multitudinous forms that all feed into the one.
These two qualities of Shakti and Shiva are represented in our own body as blood, Agni, the fiery rush of life through our body, it heats our digestion and creates psychic heat to burn away our avidya (ignorance) and reproductive fluid, Soma, the divine nectar that inspires life and feeds and nourishes our cells.


In life we are the natural expression of these two energies digestion, assimilation, reproduction, thinking, processing, creating etc. when does the mind and body stop? In deep sleep! We actually only get about 2.5 hrs of deep sleep a night that’s not much time… but it seems to be enough. In some yogic systems we can think of Shiva as representing a still point while Shakti is like a coil unwinding. In life the desire to move away from the centre is stronger then the desire to move back. We move back in sleep and move out in life. To build our energy we must move back to the stillness more often and this is achieved not only through a commitment to practice and observation of the breath and mental focus but through observing our habits and tendencies. If you have a habit of overdoing it, working hard, stressing out, it takes a great deal of work to break that habit. Maybe you spend years in therapy and self help workshops and still the tendency is there. Tantra likes to take the direct approach, using mantra and yantra to uproot the habit, using Shakti, physical energy, creative energy and mental energy to change the direction from moving out to moving in.

Talking about Sivananda

One of my teacher's teachers was Swami Venkatesanada. Swami Venkatesanada was an amazing yogi and scholar. he travelled the world sharing his wisdom and inspired and touched many people from all walks of life. My teacher Alan Finger got to hang out with Venkatesananda while he was growing up in his father's ashram in South Africa. Alan always calls himself a cowboy yogi, he used to lie around half asleep when the babas and gurus like Venkatesananda were giving satsang. He says he spent half his time playing in his darkroom or fixing his motorbike. I am sure he took in more then he let on as he certainly shares a deep wisdom from those early years of yoga practice with his current students. I have spent the last few years on Venkatesanada's trail soaking up as many books and talks as I can find as I am fascinated by the lineage that Alan and his father were initiated into. I am currently reading his talks on his experience of hanging out with his Guru Swami Sivananda. One of the most beautiful stories in there is of the Maha Mrityunjaya mantra. This is a mantra for healing and wellbeing. What's beautiful about this mantra is that chanting it is a totally selfless act. When you chant for your self, to relieve your own suffering, or remove an obstacle there is some part of the ego involved, but when you chant for someone else ,you get out of the way, you forget about yourself... Alan taught me the maha mrityunjaya mantra years ago in New York. I was working with some private clients and noticed a warm feeling coming from the palms of my hands when I taught or put my hands on the students to adjust them. I asked him " what should I do" should I be focussing this energy in some way , directing it? He replied that there was nothing to DO, just to let it happen and let love flow through me and when chanting the mantra , just to sense the students opening to their own profound healing energy.
Healing has nothing to do with the healer...it is love moving through ... all we need to do is get out of our own way ... the mantra does this...
last night Nyck and I chanted this mantra over and over I chanted for peace and for all those friends and strangers that are unwell or suffering in someway...

Om Tryambakam Yajamahe
Sugandhim Pushtivardhanam
Urvarukamiva Bandhanan
Mrityor Mukshiya Maamritat

photo of Swami Venkatesanada from www.swamivenkatesananda.com

Yoga Philosophy in Tokyo

I am in the steamy hot streets of Tokyo... well more in my hotel room in between my yoga philosophy lecture gig at Be Yoga Japan. Spoke for 5 hours about Tantra. Tantra a weaving together of magical threads, individual threads that hold a kaleidoscope of possibilities. In Tantra the carpet is woven yet the thread lives with the idea that its individual, its color shining brightly. This thread is choosing how it wants to play with the divine. One moment joy, another moment, suffering. How magnificent is the mind. The Japanese have the same word for heart and mind ( kokoro) To me it is saying; your mind is your heart and your heart is your mind. When your mind is clear and still, so is your heart. When your heart is open, so is your mind. Sometimes the mind gets cloudy... this can be a problem with our intelligence, but not the rational intelligence, divine intelligence. Its the mind that lives in our stomach. The senses take in everything, but its a lot to digest. If we have our heart in our mind the food of love passes through us and fertilises the soil of our lives. If our mind is in our heart and our heart is blocked then the energy of the mind lives in the solar plexus and immerses itself in the fire. When the fire is weak, the mind is dull, its hard to tune to our higher intelligence. When the fire is too strong it overheats the mind and a kind of madness ensues. Nothing can grow when the sun's heat scorches the earth.

at the moment my mind is cloudy... like the clouds that hang over Mount Fuji

Action and reaction

stayed up last night buried in Venkatesananda's talks on Karma yoga and had a major breakthrough in my understanding of karma, vasana. samskara and dharma. So here goes, bear with me if your interested or just click on to a more lightweight blog.

Consciousness spirals out from a fixed point
This fixed point is called oneness or brahman
The spiraling out is the force of shakti's split from shiva
It is in our nature to feel like we are constantly pushing away from the center in this spiral arc or being pulled back to the centre
It is in our nature to want things, to take action, to attract pleasures into our lives, to have goals
This very action is the "pulling away from the centre"
Sleep is a returning to the centre, fatigue is our exhaustion from constant goal orientation
Karma therefore is the action we take to have what we desire
As we take action or rather shoot the arrow towards our goal an impression is left
This impression can be broken down into two things:
Vasana- deep unconscious habit or a scent that stains our fingers like inscence
Samskara- the way our particular personality expresses this vasana

As soon as the arrow hits its mark we react- this is a given
The reaction is often based on our Vasana- ( habit or tendency) and our Samskara (personality patterns) for instance: I insult you and you react
If you have the vasana( tendency) to be violent and you express that in your peronality as anger you may yell at me or hit me.The reaction is there but how you express it is based on your conditioning
If I insult you and you have the habit of "turning the other cheek" then that is how you will react and you will most probbaly express your reaction in a loving way
In yoga it is not important to notice the reaction- after all it is just a reenactment of your intial action which in turn creates more action
I insult you, you hit me I insult you again and so on and so on
Whats important is to root out the Vasana while aknowledging the Samskara

In modern day therapy we mainly adress our Samskaras- the personality issues
In yoga we can use Kriyas to burn up the Vasanas and purify ourselves or as my teacher Alan Finger puts it " bake the seeds until they pop and dissapear"

What then is Dharma? Dharma is what is presented to us to work out our Karma- Its what causes us to act and react in the first place. With out the law of Dharma there would be nothing happening just stillness and bliss. But the reality is that we are moving in this outward spiral and a spiral never returns, it does not close like a circle, The spiral then is destiny ... it is the pulling away and returning back that I mentioned earlier and within that are lots of actions, vasanas, samskaras and reactions, lots of events for us to keep working out our Karma.

Venkatesanada explains that ultimately we do not have free will as it is our destiny to play out these actions and reactions which may even come from lifetimes of spiraling out from the soul of the universe.

The only thing we can do then is to return back more often to the centre until that becomes the strongest pull... we can turn back to the light, through meditation practices, be they tantric or otherwise...

These thoughts inspire me to turn back....

"He who sees inaction in action and action in inaction, he is wise among men; he is a Yogi and performer of all actions." -Gita, Ch. 4, Verse 18. From The Bhagavad GitaTranslated by Swami Sivananda, Rishikesh

Attracting what you want

My partner Nyck and I have been watching an amazing online video documentary we purchased called "The Secret". After watching it we thought, This is it...The secret we have been waiting for. For most of my adult life I have done self development work either through yoga or in the area of change consultancy. In those workshops I learned that I was a creative being and that because of that I could have whatever I wanted. However the reason why I wasn't neccesarily getting what I wanted was because I was also a creature of habit. Habits that were carved into me before birth. In yoga these are called Vasana's. These habits drive me and it takes a great deal of will to either root out the unwanted habit or to change my orientation so as to carve out what I would call a more positive habit. When I saw"what the bleep" a few years ago I was very inspired by the idea that when we think the same thought over and over again we strengthen those firing patterns of neurons in our brains. I am discovering through my meditation practice that the mind is wild and sometimes even in the observing of the mind without reaction one thought can just keep appearing. "The Secret" reveals through a similar media style to "What the bleep" how our minds work. It shares that we are magnets and we can attract not only things we want but through, negative thinking, things we don't want. Hence our suffering comes from our Vasanas. This documentary also inspires you to start to become aware of your thoughts and what you are thinking and then to start to connect more to thoughts that make you feel good, letting your feelings be a monitor for what you are attracting. A happy feeling brings what you want... a sad feeling brings what you wish to avoid. It sounds simplistic to just change like that... but I do believe its possible. It just takes vigilance and a sense of letting go. Abhyasa- Vairagya as its called in the Sutras. In tantra we are given profound tools to attract what we want through mantra and yantra. These tools suggest rituals and practices and are very relevant. If those yogis were alive today, I wonder how they might teach?

When we are open in our hearts to the potential we have as humans we might just "Grok" in a second that there is nothing to practice.... as we are that thing that we are attracting already. At the same time the rituals of life help us to strengthen and purify ourselves so our hearts can open. Life is Paradox.....

Matangi

Matangi is Saraswati in her mahavidya form. She is the goddess of the arts and of happy families. In some myths she was born from the leftover scraps of the foods of the gods. She is therefore the goddess of pollution. We do not need to be pure to express our passions for all things creative. She is the goddess of attraction, whatever she wants she can have....She plays the Vina...

Yesterday I felt her energy within me and as I put it to a friend,
"Matangi came to me this morning as I pondered the unwanted polluted parts of myself. Just had another read through David Kinsey's theoretical take on the myths of her and feel quite a
few resonances with her dark attractive powers.....hmmm don't want to be her
just shine the light on me that is her in spite of my goody goody pure seeking jnana yoga self....."

This morning after Yoga and meditation Nyck and I chanted to Lakshmi....who like the last Mahavidya Kamalatmika is the energy which manifests the ultimate joys of our creative endevours. Ho... to all you creative wise beings out there!