Thursday, December 23, 2010

Will you be a winner?

There's only one week left in the Where in the World is Swami Cat contest.  There is already one winner.  You too can be a winner if you can guess correctly the location of Swami Cat in this photo.  Reply as a comment to the post with your guess.  Good Luck!

Monday, December 6, 2010

Winner!

Last month's contest to pick Yoga Girl's logo color scheme winner is Jayadevi Petty!  Congratulations!  Looking forward to creating the Yoga Girl t-shirt in purple with gold lettering!  Thank you all who participated!

This month's contest has to do with the blog's picture-- Do you know where in the world Swami Cat is?  Leave us a comment here to enter.  If you are right, you win a copy of the most recent Yoga Life Society Satsang DVD with Sri Guruji Rev. Jaganath Carrera, entitled, "This is the Heart of Yoga."

Peace to you all during the holiday season!

Standing Barefoot Before God

I'm inspired.  All it took was a magazine article to wind me up and set me spinning, or should I say, writing again.  "Standing Barefoot Before God, The agony and the ecstasy of writing as a spiritual practice" written by Rabbi Rami was published in October's Ode Magazine.  It is written by a Rabbi which first caught my attention since  I'm reading it two months later and it is Chanukah.  I'm in need of a little bit of chutzpah to combat the graying days.

But this article is not written in a Jewish perspective it is written in a Yogic perspective, what I mean is that the author quotes the new testament, Hinduism and "The Legend of Bagger Vance."  (Great movie if you haven't seen it.) Moreover he's speaking my language-- the language of creativity.  He says that writing can be a spiritual practice if 1) You don't write what you know.  2)You can't write what you don't know.  3)You must write.  It is much like damned if you do, damned if you don't-- and he says that being damned is quite liberating!  I love this idea.  Also he says not to worry about publishing, or producing -- just write for writing's sake.  This is what I used to do years ago after I read the book, The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron.  I wrote five pages a day and have dozens of journals to prove it.  I stopped writing like this because I felt that the the destination was not fruitful.  Writing plays, articles and short stories that were not published or produced felt like little deaths and all of the tombstones were collected alphabetically in my hard drive. 

Rabbi Rami has reminded me that, "write what you know and keep at it until you at last realize yo udon't know much and what you do know is terrifyingly trite and stupefyingly boring."  Most of us who reach this point quit-- but if you stay with it, like Moses standing barefoot where he meets God, then you find liberation.

This is exactly like meditation.  "...it leaves you raw and bleeding rather than smug and satisfied.  It leaves you hanging on the cross of your own hubris..." leading to your own crucifixion and therefore absolutely free.

Beautiful.

(I'm going to go write some more offline.  Maybe it'll end up here.  Maybe not.  And that's the point.)

Om Shanti.