yoga retreat and literature
Spent my weekend at Grassy Head on the most wonderful retreat. Naturally I commenced the weekend in a mildly adolescent grumpy manner. I always do this in new settings, am either all keen and puppylike or protective and adolescent. And instead I found enlightenment.
It was organised by Shakit Mudra and included sessions taught by a yogi? teacher/monk type person who is normally based in the ashram in Bihar, India. The best part was learning about chakras and tattwas and through performing in a play learning about how the elements link together, must be in balance and what the role of mind and ego is in this.
Our final session with our guru? gave us the opportunity to ask questions which we'd written in advance. One asked for advice on living a spiritual life and she outlined 3 things which she thought were most important
1. Faith in a higher being and reality> Whatever your religion or God is, you need to have something higher
2. Obedience. She trained by learning from her master, and the reason for the obedience was to achieve the fruitition of her faith> She pointed the examples of modern children who have no obedience and how this is causing chaos and anarchy in society
3. Service. Through service to others we actually must undertand and learn about the needs of others. IN the absence of service we are confined in the boundaries of a small life of just ourselves and maybe a family and we do not learn anything more to reach our higher consciousness. Learning about other peoples needs is very important.
She again emphasised the five elements and how they need to be in balance, and for each of us this may require a different action and effort to balance, and the role of physical activity to help ready ourselves for meditation and the quest for higher consciousness. She also explained that meditation is not for people in a heightened psychic state, that they need to be guided to physical activity and yoga movements before they try meditating.
This last point was made in response to someone's questions about psychic experiences we have during meditation, yoga nidra, sleeping. She said that no response or attention is required to these strange psychic things, we just need to observe them and move on, the beautiful dream of angels is no more or less significant than a nightmare; that our minds have thousands of psychic images to draw on... but people with very disturbed psyches are already too close this altered state to be encouraged to meditate. They need to be grounded and pay attention to the earth element through physical activity.
Ah, I'm a convert! So now I have to go away and paint the tattwa symbols.
I wasn't all good. I skipped the 6:15am yoga session this morning to sleep a little (after a cold restless night) and finish reading "THe inheritance of loss" by Kiran Desai. This book was set in north eastern India, not far from where my new guru lives and so it had a nice synchronicity. The book was great, in an engaging piece of fiction she exposed the wealth of first world citizens and how rich and greedy we were, compared to the thousands of Indians who dream of American dollars and can't afford bashmati rice. Biju is an especially poignant character, a poverty stricken expat in New York who has to keep wondering what his dream was, how he feels nostaglic for a life where he is not the only person in the photograph.
It was organised by Shakit Mudra and included sessions taught by a yogi? teacher/monk type person who is normally based in the ashram in Bihar, India. The best part was learning about chakras and tattwas and through performing in a play learning about how the elements link together, must be in balance and what the role of mind and ego is in this.
Our final session with our guru? gave us the opportunity to ask questions which we'd written in advance. One asked for advice on living a spiritual life and she outlined 3 things which she thought were most important
1. Faith in a higher being and reality> Whatever your religion or God is, you need to have something higher
2. Obedience. She trained by learning from her master, and the reason for the obedience was to achieve the fruitition of her faith> She pointed the examples of modern children who have no obedience and how this is causing chaos and anarchy in society
3. Service. Through service to others we actually must undertand and learn about the needs of others. IN the absence of service we are confined in the boundaries of a small life of just ourselves and maybe a family and we do not learn anything more to reach our higher consciousness. Learning about other peoples needs is very important.
She again emphasised the five elements and how they need to be in balance, and for each of us this may require a different action and effort to balance, and the role of physical activity to help ready ourselves for meditation and the quest for higher consciousness. She also explained that meditation is not for people in a heightened psychic state, that they need to be guided to physical activity and yoga movements before they try meditating.
This last point was made in response to someone's questions about psychic experiences we have during meditation, yoga nidra, sleeping. She said that no response or attention is required to these strange psychic things, we just need to observe them and move on, the beautiful dream of angels is no more or less significant than a nightmare; that our minds have thousands of psychic images to draw on... but people with very disturbed psyches are already too close this altered state to be encouraged to meditate. They need to be grounded and pay attention to the earth element through physical activity.
Ah, I'm a convert! So now I have to go away and paint the tattwa symbols.
I wasn't all good. I skipped the 6:15am yoga session this morning to sleep a little (after a cold restless night) and finish reading "THe inheritance of loss" by Kiran Desai. This book was set in north eastern India, not far from where my new guru lives and so it had a nice synchronicity. The book was great, in an engaging piece of fiction she exposed the wealth of first world citizens and how rich and greedy we were, compared to the thousands of Indians who dream of American dollars and can't afford bashmati rice. Biju is an especially poignant character, a poverty stricken expat in New York who has to keep wondering what his dream was, how he feels nostaglic for a life where he is not the only person in the photograph.
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