Thirty Eight Hours Down in Everyday Ramblings

This is the Terwilliger Lilac Garden. I had walked by it on Sunday with just my phone and smelled the heavenly scent so I went back yesterday midday with my camera. The light was pretty intense so I was angling to get away from super saturation. Most of the shots are still too faded but I am happy with this one.

I have been thinking a lot about how to make the changes I want to in my life so that my behavior can be more in alignment with the person I experience from the inside and would like to manifest.

At the same time after forty years or so of exposure to the therapeutic model in many forms and much self-help advice generated on how to stay and be healthy and at ease from both a scientific and spiritual basis I am pretty much done with trying and striving to be a better person.

Seriously, if I am not kind and creative and attractive at this point, it is just not going to happen.

I was watching these two women walking yesterday, one was quite old, late 90’s I would say and she had a walker. Her body was kind of contorted, my guess would be from arthritis, but she was out there walking in the sun. She clearly had a lot of ornery determination and grit.

What I found most interesting was that she was gossiping about another woman who was not present with her caregiver who was walking with her.

One of the major concepts in yoga is this idea of renunciation. Tapas.

We talked about this as well as devotion in the Gita class. When I first met Mr. Finch he was quite taken with the idea of “the austerities” and they show up in both of our poems from that time. So it is something I think of often from a mythological point of view.

My teacher’s teacher Gary Kraftsow decided a few years back after his father passed away as an offering to honor his father each day to give up dairy. Not because he needed to exactly but it was a purification; a burning away, (tapas means heat or burn) of a worldly pleasure and every time he felt (feels, I don’t know if he is still doing it) that he would desire some yogurt or ice cream (or cheese, giving up cheese would be so hard for me) the little ache that pulls us towards the desired object would be a reminder of the loss of his beloved and valued father.

It is almost as if he were rewiring his brain to associate the discomfort of the craving for something he enjoys but most likely does not need because he gets the nutrients elsewhere so that the discomfort becomes a part of his ongoing recognition of loss in his life.

The first Sutra of the second chapter of the Yoga Sutras by Patanjali’s is
tapaḥsvādhyāyeśvarapraṇidhānāni = tapaḥ + svādhyāya + īśvarapraṇidhāna
tapaḥ derivative of tapas and tapa; as a verb, it means to heat; to glow; to shine; to purify; to fire; to change; to transform. In philosophical and spiritual literature, tapas refers to the practices and disciplines leading to acquiring radiance of body and clarity of mind; generally tapas refers to austerity, penance, and undertaking the practices that require putting the body and mind through hardship and thereby expanding one’s endurance.”

Resilience is one of the basic principles of aging well. One of the ways we build it is to practice it.

So anyway…after my recent experience of humanity at a profound level of disassociation early in the morning at my local convenience store, a capitalist enterprise of pandering to people’s weaknesses (including mine) that I strongly disapprove of, I have decided for now, (it may change tomorrow,) to give up Diet Coke yet again.

But this time I am going to do it as a spiritual practice. :)

So every time I experience the craving, because in me it is an addiction, my brain is wired to crave more and more of it, I am going to dedicate that little tiny experience of discomfort to all of us who are suffering and practice holding the memory of my experience as close to my open heart as I can, the knowledge that we are all made of the same “stuff” and everything is both interdependent and interconnected.

38 hours down. The rest of this lifetime to go.

Last updated April 19, 2016