June. Building wonder.
This was intended as the June Newsletter, but June got overfull and it spilled into early July. The July Newsletter is hot on its heels, but this one wanted its turn. Enjoy xx
Dear ones,
Three things:
1/
If you were to ask me right now what I am working on most diligently, I would answer, keeping my imagination strong.
I am keen to expose myself to new ideas that are working, that are expansive and generous.
The news keeps crashing in on me. Organizations and departments and their funding that I trusted to hold the complexity of our education, our economy, our food security, the way our bodies work, the way weather works - it feels jeopardized with the wrong people (by wrong I don’t mean a moral judgment, but rather those with lesser qualifications and different aims than the job requires) running the show. I find myself closing, hoarding my good so it can’t be taken. It is imperative to keep my imagination alive and elevated, rather than using its power to generate fear and anxiety.
What I believe will happen is what becomes more likely to happen. Currently feeding my soul looks like keeping my beliefs stretched and exposed to dreams and aspirations of artists, teachers, and practitioners of all kinds.
“Exercise your human mind as fully as possible, knowing it is only an exercise. Build beautiful artifacts, solve problems, explore the secrets of the physical universe, savor the input from all the sense, feel the joy and sorrow, the laughter, the empathy, compassion ad tote the emotional memory in your travel bag.” - Ryan Power, Waking Life
The 6 sessions of teaching the Kundalini Experience workshops at Tribe was such an exercise. A chance to sit and really lay out the grand philosophical underpinnings of Tantric kundalini gives a much deeper understanding of what we are doing when we come to our mats. It was (and is) designed to keep our day-to-day selves firmly connected to our meaning, our purpose, our great Selves when the day-to-day work of our world can leave us breathless and meaningless
Fundamentally, the kundalini experience is to learn how to gently peel back the veil - because truly, they are the same, the view into our miniscularity in light of the expanse of the cosmos, and the view into the rhythms of every heart-beaten moment - so that we can build an ability to, in James Baldwin’s words, “Learn to bear the Light.” There is such brilliance, all around us, running loose within us, that we tend to look away, seeking the dark just for a chance to rest our eyes. But then we get stuck there. And anxiety or calamity is met with the addictive sugar of scrolling and looking through the small lens of our phones or windscreens.
I will sing for the veil that never lifts.
I will sing for the veil that begins, once in a lifetime, maybe, to lift.
I will sing for the rent in the veil.
I will sing for what is in front of the veil, the floating light.
I will sing for what is behind the veil - light, light, and more light.
This is the world, an this is the work of the world.
- Mary Oliver, The Leaf and The Cloud
2/
How to stay with it? Always an initial zeal, a lifting of the weight, the possibility of a Solution to how I feel. And then, after a few days, weeks, the zeal dissolves. How to build the muscle to stay with what was initially so compelling? And how then does it translate to our work, our relationships, our food choices, our physical or sleep fitness? To me, this is the genius of yoga.
The 40 day sequences I offer are a salve for the modern dismantling of our attention.
Yoga is this; the practice to unify our mind, our will, our devotion to something larger than the things we fleetingly see, touch, begin, or dislike.
We are currently in the first sequence of summer, anatomically, the heart / Anahata. (May 29 - August 7)
Whether we want it or not, we are in relation to each other; not in a the sense described to us by the Romantics as an individualized flush of affection or attraction, but in the largest sense of interbeingness that Thich Naht Hahn describes as our birthright that connects us to other humans and non-human consciousness. We are held together, it is an attraction of forces, molecules, gravity. It is an essential inevitability. It’s ok to be connected. Boy, is that a thing to reconsider just now.
AND Anahata it is a connection to ourselves, the place where the mind and the body meet, the instructions from below, the inquiry from above. Through the lens of Anahata we look both in and look out.
The heart is a strong place, a strong and wise organ. The sequence is a strong series of movements, cleaning the inner gutters of the old pathways of mind, disappointments, hesitance, reluctance and all the ways these come to live in the physical form. Be ready to move.
You show up, repeat the same sequence, and receive new light every day, until it is familiar. Until it holds your days together like glue. Until you know yourself as steady and strong. It is a place to come and a thing to do with other people who are also trying daily not to fall apart in the face of their kids choices, their dental appointments, finding time for a walk or a nap.
We are ok. We just have to take the time to spend time with ourselves without interruption. And there we will be - whole, glowing, ready. 30+ years into it, I have yet to have a practice of kundalini that doesn’t set me on fire and cool my jets both at once. (Summer 2 runs August 10 - September 18 if you’d like to join)
3/
Summer reading does the same. Reading trains the mind to follow a sentence, remember a character, backtrack, refresh, comprehend and hold a narrative until it has meaning. Once in, we can be transported, we can live so many other lives. But we have to train the mind to read. It is a fitness. When we stop for a while, we lose focus, we can’t hold the names of the players, we can’t stay from page to page - something rises in our mind, doing something else bangs at the door of our attention. Stay through that.
How? Find a topic or an author you enjoy. Read a compelling story and let that be both a rest from the ordinary content of your day, AND be training for your mind to handle bigger ideas and formats.
In the summer I love a good story. Here are a few I’m into just now. I was away for a week teaching in Mexico. Biggest dilemma, which to take along to keep me company in my hammock beside the sea.
My favorites so far have been Arcadia by Lauren Groff and Land by Maggie O’Farrell.
Further Fiction that is on my bookshelf: The New Wilderness by Diane Cook, The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, Isola by Allegra Goodman
Anahata Nonfiction that I take with my notebook beside the river for daily reads: Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet by Thich Naht Hahn, Active Hope by Joanna Macy, Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin
“Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions,” writes Nick Obolenski, in Complex Adaptive Leadership. May summer be a time of rich emergence for you.
Enjoy your summer connections, your reads, your heart.
All love, Martha