At Home with the Sacred – 1

Imagine coming home to a temple each night, a place with the grace and consciousness of great Tibetan Buddhist monastery or a Sikh’s ashram.  Just think about how uplifted yet calm you would feel each time you arrived at your door.

 

The monastery and the ashram are just edifices until spiritual intention is brought to them.  Likewise, your home can be more than a show of your possessions when you see the space that surrounds you as a sacred place that can nurture, restore, rejuvenate, and soothe,

 

Sacredness is not about rules or definitions.  A sacred presence is something pure, congruent, unique to this moment in time and space, something beautiful between two points, something that is not captured or bottled, but created.  It can be the space between two people, the relationship between a person and a space, or the relationship between your soul and your earth environment.

 

ref:  Laurel House and JagatJoti Singh Khalsa

Love as Absolute

Love with a capital L: That’s the Great Love, love as the source of everything, love as radical unity.  At this level, love is another name for Absolute Reality.  Supreme Consciousness, Brahman, God the Tao, the Source—that vast presence the Shaivite tradition sometimes calls the Heat.  The yoga tradition often describes Absolute Reality as satchidamanda—meaning that it is pure beingness, present everywhere and in everything (sat), that is innately conscious (chit), and that it the essence of joy and love (ananda).

 

As ananda, the Great Love is woven into the fabric of the universe, which of course also puts it at the center of our own being.  Most of us get glimpses of the Great Love at some time in our lives—perhaps in  nature, or with an intimate partner, or in the moment of bonding with our children.  We remember these experiences for year afterward, often for the rest of our lives.

 

It happened like that for me one November evening in 1970.  He was sitting  with a friend in the living room, listening to a Grateful Dead Album, when without warning, an overwhelming experience of joy welled up in him.  The state sprang up seemingly out of nowhere, a sensation of tenderness and ecstasy that seemed to ooze out of the walls and the air, carrying with it a sense that everything was a part of him.

 

This experience inspired a burning desire to get back to it and ultimately became the motive for my spiritual practice.  At the time, however, I did what most of us do when we get a glimpse of unconditional tenderness:  I projected my inner experience onto the person I happened to be with and decided (rather disastrously; as it turned out)  that he was the love of my life and the mate of my soul.

Finding Peace – 2

Surely we can all agree that war is a tragedy for all of us that live on this earth, but it is especially heart breaking for those young men and women and their families, who are putting their lives on the line day after day.  I’m not sure that there could ever be a good enough reason for this to be happening in the 21^st Century, but it is.  And it makes me feel a little bit better to know that these brave young people might be able to find some solace on the mat.

I often think about the soldiers in this picture, I don’t know who they are or how they are, but I do know that as I lay my head down in Child’s Pose, they may be doing the same thing.  And somehow, our consciousness is connecting and we are able to send good intentions via this connection—and I am able to say silently, thank you for being so brave, please stay safe.  And perhaps they are saying thank you for keeping us in your hearts.  I don’t know, but I like to think that this is so.

And I am so very grateful for the practice—and as I step into Warrior II, I make a conscious effort to be enthusiastically courageous in my relatively safe experience.