www.greatfreedom.org

thought i might as well post.
internet banking is not cooperating so... i'm drinking a ginger beer (as close as i'm gonna get to getting the real thing, not that i drink beer in canada, but one gets all sorts of strange cravings as soon as you know you can't HAVE something, aaaah, human nature).

Today I have an admission to make, i've kind of got the blues today. Don't know what my problem is exactly, but i.....

i dunno, you just have those days where... you wonder what its all for.

Now itunes wants to download an update so... again, banking is stalled out.

I know it's self-indulgent but I have this terrible case of wanting what i don't or can't have in any given moment, yearning for that which is not right in front of me, idealizing or romanticizing some experience or place that is not my current experience or place, while grossly overlooking the beauty and perfection of the moment and the place that lays right in front of me at this moment. In yoga philosophy, Stephen Cope calls this "samvega" in sanskrit. A constant dissatisfaction with life or a life only considered satisfying when a certain set of conditions or circumstances are in place (ie. found the right mate, married them, have two perfectly behaved children in a house with a view of which the property value goes up 20% each year, etc. etc.)

Currently this finds me dreaming about the sandy warm beaches of Goa in the south of India (palm trees, soft sound of the waves and fresh coconut curries included....where we will be in 3 weeks) while I huddle under layers of wool in my icy room this morning in rishikesh.

The People of India seem to have an infinite capacity to just BE where they are and appreciate the moment, without thinking it would be better sometime, some place off in the future. Maybe a little, but nothing like what I have going on.

Take for example here, india: its not the same as before. I didn't expect it to be the same but... i was on a mission before, i was searching for something, and i found it last time.

Now i don't know what i am searching for. if anything.
not searching for anything this time. don't get me wrong (marie seminuk's favourite expression (sorry about the spelling of your last name there marie) the yoga classes are great, its all great, its just.... last time i was really seeking to dig deep you know? i was so focussed, i wanted to see how deep i could go with my practice, i spent weeks in total silence, for 8 months i tried to follow the rules of the old yogis,(Swami Radha Sivananda spent only 6 months [i think, or was it only TWO?] with her teacher, Swami Sivananda, and she came back and started her own ashram after that!) to experiment and see whether there really was anything to this yoga philosophy, and not just the asanas of course, but the lifestyle, the belief system that the ancients portended would bring humankind great spiritual wealth, peace and happiness, and.... it did. It did work. The more effort and sincerity i poured into my practice, meditating, being of service, studying, eating all the right foods, cleansing, following as much as i could the yogic and ayurvedic lifestyle, the better i felt, the happier, more peaceful, balanced and fulfilled i got. When I returned home from India last time I felt like I was glowing from the inside out. I was amazed at the clarity and calm.

But then what happens when you can't sustain that level of practice, of austerity? How do you go back? Or the question I guess is... not how do you go back, but how do you sustain that level of intensity of practice?
I began to feel this tension building within myself as I watched my level of happiness and peace be totally dependent upon the intensity of my sadhana (spiritual practice). Without sustaining and even increasing my level of spiritual practice, I was unable to sustain the feeling of peace and wellbeing, so there was this constant tension in me between making good choices vs. bad ones. It seemed like... the more I knew how good the "good" choices made me feel, the harder it became to choose them.

I feel like I have been actually backsliding ever since I was 25 or 26 years old.
When I was 25 or 26, somewhere around there, i peaked. I stumbled across yoga when I was 23 and slowly began to practice a little more, a little more, asana and meditation only, and a little pranayama. Actually, some of the pranayama came naturally out of the asana work I was doing. Its a long story really, but I realize now, looking back, that i peaked at 25/26. Because of my natural inclination, my practice grew to be up to 5 hours or MORE each day, of yoga and meditation. Now that is a lot! I was so blissed out. I wanted everyonen I knew to feel as good as I did. I knew so little then about what was happening to me. i was just going with what i was feeling. I didn't even have a teacher, other than myself. I learned from a book. It just fell into me. Looking back to then, I didn't drink alcohol, we had a big garden in the backyard in clearwater, i was a vegetarian, i used to go out to the garden with a colander and a knife and cut what we would eat for the night, and then i would cook it and we would have it in our stomachs within the hour of it coming out of the ground. so much Prana in the food. I felt more amazing then than i had ever felt in my life. I would say that my journey of yoga peaked out then. Certain "powers" were even developing in me as a result of my "experiment", but i was naive, i didn't even know what i was doing or what i was happening, without a teacher to guide me. It was all progressing and happening so naturally. i was just experimenting, playing around, and my body told me what to do.
Then i went to Japan to teach english and pay off my student loan and it all went downhill from there. I stopped practicing, i began partying again in Tokyo, drinking alcohol as everyone else was too, I became lonely, lost on the beautiful island of Okinawa in the East China Sea. Somehow lost my way. Yet, it is ALL my way, it is ALL my path, even the falling off the path is the path. And i will not feel like i've failed or slid backwards. it is all as it should be and it is not my place to ask why, why i was shown or given such a natural light then, that has only proceeded to recede, to get cloudier and darker as the years go by. All i know is that it is all part of a process. some process that is meant to unfold for me.

Anyhow, back to india....
Now that i am here in India again, this seems to be the question: If we are all one, and there is no separation, as yoga philosophy portends, then having a beer is just as wholesome as say... drinking a warm milk. If it is all one, all the same, then there is no difference between meditating or watching a soap opera on daytime t.v. .... right? except there IS a difference. there is. When i meditate, i feel distinctly different, better, than after i watch a soap opera for example. (I don't watch any soap operas, this is just a totally random example) and... When I go for a walk in nature next to a body of water, I feel distinctly better than if I..... watch a scary, gory movie. So there IS a difference.

So maybe i'm barking up the wrong tree, maybe the meditation is in every moment, every moment of awareness, regardless of what you are doing, whether you are meditating on a silk cushion or cleaning the toilet on your hands and knees. The buddhists say its the same. One is not qualitatively superior of an action than the other.

It seems to me that... although I see my teacher's yoga classes work miracles on me, healing my emotions, healing my body and i see the benefits of much of the yoga asana and breathwork i've done, I am still not totally sure that it is a superior action from cleaning the toilet on your hands and knees. I mean, physically speaking, toilet cleaning can be an asana, if done with mindfulness, you can even syncronize your breath with the scrubbing motions as you do it to increase the benefits. As you lean forward with each breath you are gently squeezing and compressing your internal organs which is exactly what we do in yoga class that gives our organs so much benefit and detoxification. PLUS you get the added benefit of having the resulting toilet clean and if you clean someone ELSE's toilet then you get the additional added satisfaction of having served them, helped them, in some small way. see what i'm getting at?

so I guess what I am asking is.... it doesn't seem right to me, to lean AWAY from the things we perceive to be bad or unpleasant in life. I mean, I know in the ashram and in yoga philosophy we are taught to remove ourselves from society a little or to withdraw our senses and attachements to the material world, in order to find the quietude necessary to explore the depths of what lies inside ourselves, in order to KNOW ourselves, but once we do that, once we explore that, then shouldn't it make no difference at all if we spend all day out in the noisy street, talking to all sorts of people, exposing ourselves to all sorts of impure food and impure people, inside, we remain untouched by these outer influences, ultimately. like the lotus flower that blooms out of the mud but is untouched, unmuddied, unsullied by the mud from which it springs. That is the philosophy. So I guess its true.

I just, i watch all these yoga teachers in training at the ashram right now, and i know that was once me, too, the teacher in training, following all the rules, doing what my teacher said, and at first it seemed like the rules were stupid and there was no reason for them, i thought i knew better, and even now i watch the teacher trainees in their program right now and i wonder.... how do they/we survive on our own, when there is no one to tell us what to do, when to eat, what to eat, when to sleep, where to go?
Ultimately we have to be in charge of those things. And still maintain this .... "awareness", that seems to only come from sheltering one's self and not being too prone to distractions and entertainments that we save no time for silence or aloneness and contemplation in our lives.

now i have totally lost my point. i am not sure if there even was one.
just that some part of me intuitively feels that we can't push away all the supposed "evils" in the world: the apple martinis (notice how that one is at the top of my list, haha! ), the.... whatever YOUR equivalent to apple martinis is, the chocolate bars, the bag of chips, the cigarette, whatever your vice, whatever your guilty pleasure. To make it "bad" and struggle against it only increases its power. when someone tells me i can't have an apply turnover, by gosh, that is the only thing i can think about after that. This goes for the difficult emotions and life experiences as well. We go through life trying to increase our pleasure and decrease our discomfort, reduce our pain. We live in a state of constant tension about this: avoiding pain, trying to hold on to and chase pleasant sensations or experiences, when life is clearly overflowing with plenty of both, regardless of what we do to try to control it in our favour.

So the answer must, MUST lay in being rather equanimous or without preference for either the pleasant experiences/sensations or the unpleasant ones. Because we can't change it. People still die, we still lose our jobs, we get divorces. LIFE HAPPENS, regardless of what our point of view about it is, so why not be equanimous about it and then truly enjoy the freedom in THAT, rather than living in the suffering and fear of life changing for the worse. In the stock market of life there will be peaks and valleys, spikes and crashes. Life by its very nature is this way, is it not?

Being equanimous means that I am not constantly living in tension and dread of something bad befalling myself or someone i love. I am not constantly leaning away from life's discomforts and unpleasantness, pushing it away from me while simultaneously trying to cultivate more pleasure, more fun, more favourable circumstances. constant state of tension in doing this. striving.

I know, so deep thoughts today, right?
well what are we gonna do?
if you have any thoughts on the matter, I would love to hear them. Please feel free to comment.

love you all,
miss you all (especially since you are there and I am here, haha)