Searching for the Bridge

When I created my first blog I only meant to name that first article "The Brightening Bleakness". I can't imagine this can be very entertaining for my kind and supportive followers, but it is a useful place to turn when I feel myself out of alignment.

And what does this mean?

I guess right now it means several things. Spots of physical pain are cropping up all over my body, enough to make me a bit irritable. Then there is that. Irritability creates a lens that makes it hard to see the brightness. I guess I have ordered a lot of my life around this state. During times of irritability I try to do the things that will not ruffle my own feathers too much and still be productive, like laundry and putting the dishes away and walking to where there is abandoned wood.

My life feels like a mess, my surroundings cry out for more order and beauty and I do some of what needs to be done. It amuses me to spend some time dragging future firewood along a path spotted with obstacles. Mud and puddles, branches of wood no good to burn in my wood stove. I ask myself am I a bit ridiculous? Are my priorities all mixed up? How many people would do this with their precious free time? And finally, what is the most important thing for me to cultivate, to live for?

And the answer is clearly love. And this act came out of my love of life and wanting to have the least heavy impact on the environment, to reduce my dependence on oil, to reduce the cutting of healthy, beautiful trees (which I dearly love), to give meaning and purpose to the discarded maple, birch and beech trees that I drag back to my house and to ease the financial burden of the aforementioned sources of home heating. I also like the simplicity of spending time quietly doing something that helps a little bit. I think this sort of action may bring me back a little closer to alignment.

I am toying with the idea of using the "bleakness" as a bridge to the "brightness". I think this may be something my teacher, John friend would consider beneficial. I wonder, when is it better to go straight to the mat and when is it better to do something, anything that feels like it brings more order to my outer surroundings? Here is my yoga off the mat. In this moment this is it, this is the offering. It may not be exciting and I can't imagine anyone would actually want to read this, but that is really the point of this blog, to deal with the hard things to look at. Not the things that are hard because they are gruesome, but the boring, gray, dull and dim and what to do when we are faced with these.

I don't even think that there is a rasa for this. Maybe this is like getting so off the track that there is no flavor. Maybe it is an approximation of that which is tasteless. And this is sort of the kind of pain I feel most often, a dull aching all over. So, yes a little asana is clearly in order. It is probably what deters a lot of people from getting out of bed to come to class or to engage with anything at all. And oh, I just realized that what I am talking about is clearly the description of chronic depression.

When I was about 17, one of my earliest teachers was a siddha yogini who had lived at Muktananda's ashram in Ganeshwari. She knew and loved Gurumayi when she was baba's interpreter. She had found Siddha Yoga when she was a professor of psychology at Ann Arbor Michigan (or it found her, but that is another discussion). I studied astrology with her: basic astrology, karmic astrology and chart construction. Her background brought the wisdom of Carl Jung into her teaching as well as the wisdom of her Guru and his lineage of grace. She told me, while assessing my natal chart that it was important for me to realize that other people did not necessarily have my ability to pick myself up from my bootstraps. It was my sagittarius rising that she was pointing to as she told me this. In any case, I am beginning to think of this blog as one yogini's struggle with depression and figuring out how and when to pull on my bootstraps. And I hope it will somehow be of use to someone else, even if they would not be considered clinically depressed, a label which I would abhor to attach to anyone, let alone myself. I know many people feel better with diagnosis, better because they can use it to understand themselves and hopefully to find help with their "condiditon". But I resist this. Don't we all struggle with this to some extent?

I found it very helpful when one of my recent teachers, Jamie Allison, said that I had big spanda. I suppose she could have diagnosed me as manic depressive, but I prefer to think of my wide swings as a gift that I can learn to engage in the most sri way possible. By the way, if anyone has any non clinical pointers from their own experience please feel free and encouraged to chime in.

Getting back to my narrative, after collecting a bit of wood I came back and felt an urge to write. This in itself clearly represents a brightening of the bleakness I was feeling, or at least a yearning that reaches toward dragging myself out of the muck, like those pieces of future firewood that will brighten some cold moment.

Oh, I hadn't recognized the metaphor inherent in the activity! Well, if that is not a brightening moment I don't know what is.

Blessings one and all, may we find the ways to bring healing to the hardest of things and therefore learn to celebrate life more fully, to receive it more graciously and to savor every flavor as we learn the upaya, the skillful means of turning ingredients into recipes for divine bliss. And once we get there the offering can again be that of divine nectar!!! Aha, a little taste of delight and the horses are off and running from the gate.

Shanti and Sringara, neck and neck.