Heart Full

I’ve always been a big fan of journaling, I feel it gives you some much needed time for introspection. I find that writing things down helps me add clarity to some otherwise very muddy thoughts. So it makes sense that journaling is part of our training, but with that special Lotus twist. We’re encouraged to POUR out our thoughts, “don’t lift the pen from the paper if you can help it“. So for 2-5 furious minutes some yogis are frantically writing, while others like myself are drawing blanks. But the questions resonated with me, so even if we’re not in class, I took them home and thought about them. Each one is deserving of pages and pages of journaling but one haunted my mind, because I couldn’t answer it, “why do you teach?”. Such a simple question that you would think I’d have answered by now seeing as I am IN the 300 hour teacher training program.

The answer for the 200 hour program was so clear, I wanted to learn how to teach my friends and family, so that maybe they could experience the healing powers of yoga the way I did. I wanted them to feel the ecstatic liberation of a pain free body, the deliciousness of a sweet svasana, or the beauty in the movement. Were these still my reasons? Yes, my friends in family are in fact my best students, I love waking up and teaching them. But do I really need to be in a studio to teach them? Probably not.

The easiest answer for me is because I want to share what I’ve learned with others. I don’t know if that’s totally true. If I truly wanted to share there are probably better ways to do it, for example I’m probably reaching more people with this blog than I am in my still not-very-populated classes. I think I’m teaching for myself, because by learning how to teach I’m able to offer something more, more of myself, more of a service. And that has been making me feel whole.

I’ve been hearing about the Rubin Museum of Art for a long time. They have exceptional exhibits (Carl Jung currently), and apparently their Friday nights are not to be missed. I don’t know why it took me so long to get here, it’s one of those items on my to-do list that somehow kept getting de-prioritized. But this past lazy Saturday I finally did make it.

I thought I’d start at the top floor, (the sixth) and work my way down. Figuring that I’d peruse / quickly browse as I do for most museums — peppered with a couple extra minutes on special items, but all in 2 hours, two and half tops. I underestimated, or had too much faith in my perusing abilities. I spent an hour on the sixth floor alone. I thought maybe it was me, that finally seeing artifacts embodying my beloved asanas (yogic poses), texts detailing the yogic traditions of people inspired me, naturally I would spend awhile here. But it wasn’t just me. I noticed scattered throughout the floor were other people who “came around the same time”, and were equally fascinated. I couldn’t even get my hardly-comes-to-yoga-class husband to leave. We were all captivated.

The fifth floor showcased Mandalas, and it was equally hypnotic. It traced the gentle progression of mandalas, focusing on tantric Buddhism.  The two dimensional circular patterned image (not unlike a kaleidoscope) I had in my mind of a mandala, were not these. These were breathtaking. Not just meditation pieces, but art rich enough to fill your imagination. In one room, there were mandala’s in every direction surrounding a golden majestic Buddha, it felt magical. Later, I discovered the *three* dimensional mandala. Three! It was gold and it seemed to rise from pure divinity.

I didn’t make it to the fourth floor and below. Our time was up. We had spent close to three hours just on the fifth and sixth floors, and the book store. I firmly believe that the energies of the objects affect the beholder, a mild kind of empathic connection. And in this museum each beholder is given a vision of peace, devotion and yearning. It wasn’t so much an educational experience to be in the company of this art, as it was a meditation.

My teacher slyly told us, that as long as we practice yoga, it’s teachings “get in there”. I wasn’t entirely sure what she meant. Did she mean the guilt, that I don’t do more volunteer work, or that I’m often judgmental and snippy and I should know better. I figured all of the above.

But I think she meant a lot more than just the slow re-adjustment in attitude that happened so gradually for me, it was a shock. One day, I couldn’t deny it, I was morphing into the dreaded “granola girl”, the smelly hippie. I would soon be “one of those oddities” people like my friends wrinkle their noses at. We’ve all seen them, vegans who somehow always find a convenient guitar in a park and/or campsite and sing about mother earth.  But here I am, trying to eat less red meat, looking at labels, whining to my husband about organic food, and that we *really* need to go miles out of our way, to spend more money and get less food at WholeFoods. I am a truly blessed that he relented (under the condition we never buy anything NOT on sale).
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It was someone’s birthday, our instructor seemed excited that the birthdayee was spending it in her class. She smiled, “it’s wonderful … it fits perfectly with my dharma talk”. I assumed this meant she was going to talk about the wonder and the miracle of life, always an inspiring topic, but nothing new. I closed my eyes, ready to meditate on the beauty of life. Instead, she spoke about Halloween, or ‘All Hallows Eve’, as it was formerly called. All Hallows Eve and All Saint’s Day, is a time, when we as a culture turn our attention to the other side, the spirits. The spirits during these holidays, wander perhaps a little longer and a little more freely than they do on other nights of the year. Interesting … but still not quite getting it.

Some of these spirits are what various eastern cultures call “hungry ghosts”. I’d heard of hungry ghosts growing up, I had always just assumed these ghosts were noisy, not too friendly, and ‘hungry’ in a sense for our soul. Not so, she explained that these spirits had a head as small as the top of a needle, and mouths even smaller than that, but with stomachs unimaginably large, gigantic. These were hungry ghosts, ghosts who could not satisfy their hunger, because their mouths were too small to nourish them. These people had been greedy in life, and this was the form to work out that karma.
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