Kartikkeya

 My son is lucky enough to have several grandmas.  He has his expected two, from his dad and me.  Then he has a great-grandma that’s still living, and another one that passed when he was eighteen months old.  He has a ‘local’ grandma in Brooklyn, whose face jumped out at me from a whole slew of people who responded to my care.com ad for part-time sitters.  There are probably a couple more who would claim him, giving him a good seven, but we’re not in close contact with them.  We’ll call the ones he has his mythic seven and leave it at that for now.   

I’m in my second round of studying Skanda (also known by many names to his many mothers).  His ‘birth’ story involves six sparks being emitted from the brow of his father, Shiva.  But since there were five more seeds than usual to make a child, six ‘mothers’ were required to receive them.  We won’t go through all the mothers here, but let’s just say that we’re using this term loosely.  There was even an extra mother, Agni, who served as a sort of father-mother in the way that a boy needs a male outside of his father who can nurture him and teach him. 

One of the mothers who held and nursed this energy that became this beautiful, successful boy is the seven stars of the Pleiades.  (Which are actually a huge cluster of stars.  There are seven sister stars, but two more are often named with them, who are their mythic parents.  The 7+2 thing is cool symbolically, too, since we’re always looking for 7 primary flavors or tones of life, plus shanta and sringara, the peaceful and passionate.) 

Anyway, they are called the Krittikas in Hindu lore, and they are the wives of the Saptarishis, the seven sages.  Now, the point of being a sage is to help humanity thrive, and it’s the wives of the sages who are the power behind them.  They are called jyestha, elder or wise women, often depicted with pendulous breasts.  They are grandmas, past their own child-bearing years, yet they managed to nurse him and raise him. When he's their son, he's Kartikkeya. 

Back last summer, my friend Lenore recommended Woman: An Intimate Geography, by Natalie Angier.  Chapter 13 is “There’s No Place Like Notoriety: Mothers, Grandmothers, and Other Great Dames.”  In it, the author explores theories behind menopause.  Why do women stop being fertile, yet continue to live?  An anthropological study of the hunter-gatherer Hadza elderly women suggests that they live not just to see their youngest offspring out the door, but also to make sure that their grandbabies have enough to eat.  As their daughters have babies and attend to the demands of their new infants, grandma comes along and forages for the no-longer-nursing toddler.  Without her help, the older siblings might very well go hungry.  Grandma makes sure you’re well-nourished.  

Thankfully, I can still attest to the benefits of having a grandmother, or ‘mamaw’ in Kentucky-speak.  Without her, life would be much more bare-bones.  With her, there can be a certain kind of generosity that your mother often can’t give you directly.   

The way you’re nursed by an old lady is how you thrive.  Mamaw can’t hold you in her womb, because that’s already done for her.  She holds you in her heart.  Saum is the seed mantra for the heart-womb.  Any time you need a pendulous breast to rest in, listen for this sound.  When you are mothered by a grandmother, you are Kartikkeya.  

This is my fat baby with my Mamaw Clan in the summer of 2009.  She had mothered seven of her own children, plus her own grandchildren and many others that she babysat over the decades.  She had advanced dementia, but she told us that that baby wanted to come to her. 

Obligations and Frivolity

 Post (from my friend Harrison): I just finished one of those gargantuan yet utterly banal tasks that had it not been done would have wreaked havoc and having now been completed is more or less unnoticeable by anyone other than myself.

Response (from one of Harrison’s friends I don’t yet know): You just described every day of my life since becoming a stay-at-home-mother.

My response: Nityakarmas

Nityakarmas are the things you gotta do.  They are obligatory.  Doing them rarely gets you a pat on the back.  Not doing them raises stakes you’d probably rather not be raising.  The goal is to not spend a lot of time worrying about them.  Their ‘opposite’ is called kamyakarma, the acts that are born of desire.  They are indulgences, extras.  As tantric yoginis, we have little problem with desire.  Desire is how we all got here.   

I am a mom of a toddler and a yoga teacher of all kinds of people, including expectant moms.  I especially love to teach these mommas, who have chosen to do one of the more expensive, non-necessary actions that an individual human can do. (Having a child, I mean.  Yoga class isn’t that expensive.)  As my Mamaw pointed out when I told her that I was pregnant, we no longer have to have children to work the farm anymore.  There are plenty of people in the world without me making more.  Mamaw has a way with words, and she loves her great-grandson dearly, and she is so happy that he is here.  But it’s true that our population was in no danger of collapsing without his birth.   

Once sweet baby is born, indulgence dissipates (or just gets re-defined).  Even though the baby and parents may be surrounded with beauty and love, the reality of the daily requirements permeates every attitude, thought, and deed.  This can be wearing.  Any ritual, regardless of its object, has a tendency to dry up in the absence of desire. 

Our yoga asks us to be not in just one thing or the other.  It asks us to hold two things together, often seeming opposites.  This is how we live meaningfully in the world, in the midline.     

I recently went to the baby shower of a dear friend.  She is so ready for this baby, and the party was a very special occasion.  All of us moms talked about our pregnancies and births, those subjects that make the men glad they don’t usually get invited to such events.  The shower is a metaphor for the pregnancy, a special time set aside to mark what is important.  As guests, we let her know that we’re here to support her through a transition, to help her align to her new role.  It’s a non-required requirement. 

We call these special occasions naimittika karma, to be done as and when a need arises.  When a friend visits and we take special care of him or her, this is naimittika.  It’s like sitting with the divine.  Hopefully your practice feels this way, a midline or alignment between what you want to do and what you have to do.  It’s what I try to offer as a yoga teacher, particularly for prenatal students, who often are either trying to work up ‘til the very end or take care of another littlun (that’s Kentucky for ‘little one’).     

Babies are desire.  They want, and we want them.  They are obligation.  Not taking care of them results in dire consequences.  They are also naimittika.  I’m using the word ‘commitment’ to describe this midline.  Our commitments are that which we choose to tend to out of the importance and primacy of relationship.  May our practice be that.

I teach prenatal yoga at Abhaya Yoga in Dumbo, Brooklyn on Mondays at noon.  I also teach a couple of other classes on that schedule, too. 

Partnership

Here’s a triad of terms that I’ve been thinking about for the past eighteen months or so: Lust, Relationship, Partnership.  I’ll put it right out there and say I’ll be doing a series of classes on this idea on Fridays at 6PM in February at South Mountain Yoga in New Jersey.  For the sake of the flier, I’ve swapped the word ‘attraction’ for ‘lust’, but you get the idea. 

After seven years of studying this tradition (that’s a common-law marriage where I come from), with a few more years of practicing in the tradition of ‘gym’ thrown in, I’ve realized the value of gaining a bit of knowledge and holding it for some time before I actually know how to use it in a sentence.  Well, a teaching sentence at least. 

In the beginning, all the new ideas were coming at me through the fire hose, and I took what I could and it was all so beautiful and magical.  But, through time, I felt at home with more ideas than not, and the sparks just didn’t fly as fast and furious as they did in the beginning.  There’s still practice and commitment, and it works and it’s sweet and healthy, but it’s also all those things that are regular, everyday, normal, and can dull you out.  I could go days and go through motions and not look directly at what I’m doing.  I know what that looks like.  I’ve seen it a million times. 

Some days, though, I find myself meeting eyes in the mirror with that same commitment.  We’re just brushing our teeth together, same as every day, but then there’s that moment of silently saying to each other, “I’m so glad you live with me.”  And then there’s that other, shockingly electric part of the feeling, where you react in the way you imagine you would to an illicit lover.  Really?  We can still do this to each other?? 

That this is lust, which implies a sense of going out and getting something external and taking it.  Oh, yeah.  Lust is at its most desirous when the thing you’re taking is not yours.  This is not problematic in and of itself.  None of us would be here without the power of attraction, of urgency toward something we want. 

But it turns problematic when we think that that’s all there is.  We become like the god Indra, whose successes always come from conquering something external.  When success is only externally-generated, all there is to do is to repeat, vicious-cycle style.  Materialism applies to people, things, even spirituality.  Regardless of how many trainings you do or lovers you have, if you’re only taking – not receiving – you’ll just end up doing the same thing over and over.  No matter who else is there, if you’re taking it’s always still just you, all by yourself. 

Beyond lust lies relationship.  If lust is taking, then relationship is give-and-take.   It’s you and the mirror, which tells you something about how to align, how to make the sacred.  It’s all of the drawing of boundaries and learning “This, not that.  Here, not there.  Now, not then.”  Relationship is the generic term that we use any time two people (or a person and a thing) are in close proximity to each other.  Sometimes, relationship is there regardless of whether any lust is or not.  It can be dessicated and still be a relationship. 

But what it does do, juicy or not, is show us more about ourselves.  We can learn and grow and reap value.  We become successful at what we’re doing, but the peril is that we might get to the point where we go, “Oh, I get it.”  There can be a tendency to look at something in the mirror and see what we think we already know.  Everything fits, nothing more to see here. 

This third term in the triad is partnership.  This is the model of getting up and feeling and aligning again today and knowing that you’ll do it again tomorrow.  It’s not one party taking, it’s a mutual taking.  By receiving another person, we are received.  And sometimes it’s not until the millionth-and-one-time of hearing something that you actually know how to use it.  It becomes wisdom.  For instance, I’ll enter my second decade of marriage with my spouse this year.  It’s been only since just last year that I figured out that he loved me unconditionally.  He’s always been doing it.  I just now knew that I knew it. 

I’m real proud of how far we’ve come as a greater community with ending friendships and marriages and ties to schools of yoga.  I see a lot of great co-parenting and blended extended families that have dealt with divorce.  My parents’ divorce in the eighties was the classic nightmare – my dad lived three miles away but he might as well have been across the country.  When people go separate ways these days, they write beautiful letters to each other and stay friends on Facebook and make business collaborations.  And maybe that’s a certain way of being a good partner, too. 

Partnership firms things up by enduring.  It makes us more powerful by making us more than ourselves.  The partnership model invites us to not just acquisition and success, but to greatness, which is a demanding place to be.  Whatever you want, whatever you align to, there you will find success.  Greatness is the opportunity to savor that success, day after day. 

Which sense do I use for this?

It’s January, it’s cold, and Van and I are watching a lot of Sesame Street.  We’re watching more than our fair share of all of the ‘Preschool on TV’ shows.  They all take a theme and come at it in as many different directions as they can.  Today’s Sesame Street was about the 5 senses.  The characters go through various exercises in deciding how best to experience their outer world.  Oscar the Grouch has a sardine sundae.  Taste!  Radar the Teddy Bear.  Touch tells us he’s soft.  Etc.  

Unless you’ve recently been around a little one, you forget that you, too, had to learn to articulate to yourself that it was your sense of smell that told you it was time for a shower or your sense of hearing that told you that Car Talk is on.  We also have combinations of senses: touch-see (crucial for that satisfactory shopping experience for me), smell-taste (often absent in cold season).  Just try ‘tasting’ banana Laffy Taffy without seeing that fantastic yellow color.  The multi-layered sensory experience gives the world depth and texture and often more information that would otherwise be obvious to us.  It’s seamless now, but there was a time that we could do all this stuff without being able to tell ourselves or share with others what we were doing. 

It’s so important to teach the little ones how to use their senses and describe how they got their experiences.  We teach them which questions to ask and how to go about asking those questions with their senses.  As grown-ups, we often think that we’re done with all that or get frustrated when what we want to get to just won’t come.  We have the sentient capacity to know our hearts, but we often haven’t reviewed how to go about doing just that. 

Through the process of yoga, in one form or another, we learn how to turn these sensitivities inward.  We have techniques for tasting our inner experience as much as our outer one.  We feel, hear, smell (this one’s harder, but try for memory here, especially place memory), and see parts of ourselves that are sometimes hard to reach.  And, just as Van is consciously making smell memories of NYC and letting the visual and physical layout of our home deeply imprint on his brain, I’m doing the same thing in practice and meditation.  Simultaneously making sensory connections and memories, so that in a moment that I seem far from my soul I can know how to get there again. 

Van watches Elmo see and hear and feel, while I do Harshada’s Seven Chakra meditation on Yogaglo.  It strikes me that we’re doing the same thing.  I’m learning how to use my different energy centers to feel around my subtle body.  (Harshada was talking about ‘centers’ and I mis-heard ‘senders’.  Which is cool, too.)  Van is learning that it’s his skin that tells him about the state of his outer body.  The questions seem so simplistic to me, and I almost want to answer them out loud for him.  But then I think that I’m something like a toddler (well, maybe an adolescent) in this spiritual education.  I have a lot of stuff memorized, but I’m still working on what facts and techniques to apply in which case.  I’m still getting my wits about me. 

Prakasha/Vimarsha

On this day, I think of Janus, the Roman god of thresholds, bridges, and new beginnings, whose image is dominated by his two faces.  One looks forward, and one looks backward.  He gives his name to January, which we will make much to-do over in the course of the next days.  Like the Hindu Ganesha, who reigns in the same areas of our experience, they are each the first gods invoked in their respective cultures.  They are the gateway to and the boundary between where you are now and where you’re heading. 

That’s all well and good, and I love Ganesha as much as the next WASH (thanks, Eric).  But Janus’s image really does it for me today.  He is the depiction of prakasha (shining forward) and vimarsha (the light back as reflection).  If you made it to this blog, chances are that you’ve already made it through some others, some Oprah, and some yoga classes.  We understand that we’re each other’s reflections, what with our mirror neurons and all.  What you’re getting is a result of what you’re putting out there.  In a way, though, we can let ourselves off the hook a bit because we’re reflected and refracted through the individual lenses of other, radically free entities.  Sure, it messes us up when we see our insecurities and need to have the last word right out there in the open.  It touches that place inside of us that we’ve been taught to believe doesn’t belong.  But, with other people, we can also tell ourselves that we’ve been doing our own work and that we have very little to no jurisdiction over other people’s behaviors, expressions, and voices.  So there.  You can use it.  Or not.   

Now, turn it around.  When we direct the light toward ourselves, the vimarsha is what comes out as our actions.  When you’re hard on someone else, check in on how hard you’re being on yourself.  When no one can please you, in what way are you unable to please yourself?  When something’s wrong with everyone else on the planet, chances are you’re directing that same attitude toward yourself.  (Take a few breaths with this one, especially if you’re telling yourself that you’re getting it ‘right’ here.)  The point is, you’re always keeping company with yourself and your actions.  Give yourself a break.  Give other people a break.  You will go a long way toward happy. 

Let’s move on.  Janus is more than just forward/backward…

He is two-faced, duplicitous.  When we sit with him, we’re of two minds, loving the leaving while at the same time wanting to keep everything from before.  That attitude, that injury, that habit.  I mean, we never really leave them behind, anyway.  We just crowd them in nooks and crannies, possibly never seeing them again until it’s time to move out of this house (and on to the next?). 

He shows us that we’re more than one person.  We’re all the authentic guises we can handle, the fractalizing making more of us rather than less.  But in order to learn and love, we must not just make more of the same.  We must let in more than just the same. 

Janus’s faces don’t face each other, looking past each other in to the middle distance.  Nor are they side-by-side, looking opposite directions.  They are back-to-back, leaning and merging into each other.  The same, but different.  Just like today and tomorrow.

Solstice Puja

 This afternoon, in the moments preceding the longest, darkest night of the year, my son is taking a long, dark nap.  I’ve been using the time to look through some old notebooks and remember some of the things I’ve learned over the years.  Much of what I wrote down was in the tone of someone who knew she would turn around and teach the ideas to people who – for the most part – have not heard any of this before.  Over the past couple of weeks writing this blog, it’s felt really good to stretch my writing muscles and return to a practice that I’d left off for a few months.  But the truth is that so far I’ve played it safe, a little self-conscious about all the other blogs and teachers out there who have no doubt written very similar posts in much more skilled styles.  What I’ve just learned – again – is that I need look no further than right in front of me for worthy inspiration.  It can be uncertain here in the dark, seemingly alone, but there’s always at least a tiny light.  Sit with that little bit, and notice how you are when you’re not obligated to be anything else.  The extended darkness is a free pass to dive into the expansion of your heart.

Breath - If you’ve been out of your heart for a little while, there’s a swan/goose that will take you from your head to that place.  It’s called hamsa.  Don’t think of it like this magical, mystical creature.  Think of it as this sturdy, workhorse bird.  (It’s what I named my bike, the biggest, steadiest old girl that feels safe and secure.)  She will always do her job, and once the breath takes you to the heart, you’ll feel the tug of a narrative that longs to be remembered. 

Deva (Light) - Then, the notebooks that live right beside your bed will become more than just things to dust every week.  Divine inspiration is right in front of you.  It’s whatever you’ve managed to bring close by, for many years or just for today.  It may be something that everyone else already has.  If it draws your attention, it’s worthy.  Let it bring you a little light on a dark afternoon. 

Mantra - Even though you’re alone, there’s a universal chant that’s vibrating.  That it’s a chant (not a song) invites you to listen first, and blend your vibration to the one that’s already happening.  You don’t have to re-invent everything.  Just let it work on you.        

Mudra – My tantric friends and I like to ‘turn our kleshas in to lakshmis’ (turn our blemishes in to beauty marks).  Similarly, we can turn our samskaras in to mudras (our ruts in to receptive imprints).  How can you do the thing you always do, but make it a vessel for experience rather than a dessicated habit? 

Nyasa – This is how!  You’ve probably read/heard all these other terms before, but nyasa might be a new vocabulary word.  It means ‘placing’, as in the way you lay the puja upon yourself.  Start inside, then bring everything outside through mantra and mudra, then lay it back on your own body.  The idea conveys an element of style, and it’s kind of the point.  You have taken yourself down some rabbit hole or other, be it reading, writing, sitting, throwing things in fires, or doing full king pigeon pose.  As far as this is, it’s still just getting you in to a basic story, song, structure.  It’s still what everyone else is doing or has already done.  The rest is articulation and embellishment.  Take it upon yourself to  inspire yourself to inspire others. 

Crossing the Threshold

"Take a comfortable seat, soften your eyes, put your attention on your breath, and bring your hands together in front of your heart in anjali mudra."  Did you even realize that this was a sequence?  It seems every single yoga class in the world begins like this.  This process had been so deeply embedded in this manner and in this order that I almost didn’t even notice it as a thing I did any more.  And, in a way, that’s kind of the point.  It gets us ‘in’ efficiently.  No muss, no fuss.

But once we get to the point that we have a sequence so deeply ingrained that we do and accept it without thinking about or questioning it, there we have an opportunity to pull on some of the threads and open them up.  Not for the sake of dismantling the traditional way, because if it works, it works.  But for the sake of a more meaningful and evocative experience. 

Sit.  You’re in the exact place that you belong.  And also, there’s this little thing we do when you know something or someone good is coming.  Even if it’s ‘just’ your sweetie or your child, you do a sort of energetic equivalent of re-arranging the furniture.  It’s not about making yourself uncomfortable or less comfortable than you already were.  Just place your chair so that you can make eye contact with the person you’ve been waiting all day to see. 

Eyes.  Soften them, so that everything gets a little blurry around the edges.  (Contrast this feeling with ‘piercing’ eyes.)  Here’s a funny story: one of my best girls wears really cute glasses.  She always needed to wear them, but she didn’t always wear them.  In this way, she saw her friends (and herself) without blemish, dream-like, and wondrous.  I was around her quite a bit when she started to wear her new glasses regularly.  She was shocked at what everything ‘really’ looked like.  But her brain had already memorized another version of me, in which so much of who I was to her was informed by her other senses.  She heard me.  She felt my energy.  And when she could see me ‘correctly’, she still had the benefit of all that other experience.  Then she adjusted my side bodies in the sweetest way.

Breath.  Honor the gift of your life in a ritualized way to re-commit yourself daily to your highest calling.  Do what makes you heave and sigh, and you’ll be a long way toward doing yourself and others a great service. 

Hands.  Then, as you bring the hands together, palms softly pressing in front of the heart, the threshold is both created and crossed over.  The gesture brings the inner world outside and the outer world inside. 

And so we enter in to the process of doing what we’ve been doing all along, just in a way that invites us to reveal more of ourselves to ourselves.