*YOGA CLASS NOTES.  PLEASE READ!!!

PS:  Remember it is Queens Birthday Weekend. No Yoga, but I will be working through the school hols which are not long away.  Look at the Web Site for class times nearer the date.

TEACHER TRAINING: Yes it is on tomorrow, Sunday (Studio, 2pm to 4pm), but if you have any hesitation about your health, If you are headachy, sore or have a cough (you know the drill) , or if your job takes you into an atmosphere of unhealthy uncaring people (or if you have been in a crowded cafe/shop, or protest march,  in the last few days), please stay home this time as we have people here who are immune compromised.  The virus lives with you – with all of us – from now on , respect it and respect others.  

If you are coming, please email me if you haven’t already, I have to know how many to expect, and who is coming.

 

 

Dear Yogis (shoppers),

Shoppers?  You haven’t settled because you are looking for a “passion”, something that makes sense and is easy.  This is neither…passionate or easy,  EVER!     As I have said before, my teacher began my formal studies in meditation by alerting me to the fact this this path of study was not for the faint hearted.  This was tough stuff – suitable to be undertaken only by a warrior.  I didn’t understand it then – I do now.

In meditation, trying to remove the pain of the future self, inevitably means addressing the pain of the past and the present.  This seems to be an easy thing until you understand how much of your life is spent in denial, and blocking out the awareness of the dreadful futility of most of the things that clutter up our days.

When you have begun address your pain, the idea is that as part of your service you begin to take on the pain of others…Not just in a casual way in passing, but as a serious exercise.   We tend to dismiss the pains and discomfort of others, particularly those of older years because at some level we know in due course we will be like them.   Then sincerely motivated to remove the pain of others, and sending every living being, every single creature the wish that they might achieve their ultimate happiness,  you could (if all we are taught is true), actually learn to escape our ever encroaching ageing and death.

In doing Tonglen, the ultimate giving and taking meditation all day everyday,  then we begin to act in a different way.  We begin to act out our meditation, helping others before they know they need help and certainly before they have asked for it.  Finding ways to please the unpleaseable.  What happens then is that they begin to see you differently, and begin to look for ways to repay you for your acts of kindness and you will begin to wonder why you hadn’t acted this way in the beginning.  What was it that stopped you?

Maybe you haven’t been a Warrior.  A Warrior acts in the ways of perfections – the deeds that make you perfect.

My Raven is helping me in my quest to be a Warrior.  I believe that only a Warrior could feed a bird perfectly, and I am learning. Only a Warrior could understand that giving bread to a bird can be a perfection, knowing that the act will create paradise for the one who gives perfectly.  How do we give perfectly? Only if the heart is right can we give with perfection.  When you are in that mind, you give the best you have, whatever is the most desired.  Giving with wisdom as the bird does to me.

The highest gift we can give is the gift of understanding what it is that has created this world, and how we can turn it into a world of bliss, rather than what we have now which is a world of loss and pain.

My Raven gives perfectly the best he has.  He gives me crumpets and cakes in the winter, moss in the coldest months, and twigs when spring is on the way.  He gives me the best of what he has… to let me know what he believes I need.  Shares his crumpets and cake when the weather is cold. The best and greenest moss? – I obviously need the medicinal qualities when even he doesn’t know he needs it, but craves it, and twigs to help me nest.  The difference in our size and the fact he is a bird and I am not,  has not made any difference to him.  He still gives me the best he has.

It seems hard.  However, you have no reason to hesitate, no reason to be discouraged or to doubt.  Behind you and gone forever is only death.  Behind you is only an accumulation of pain and suffering.  You are now a yogi.  You are on the right way .. run towards it.

ENJOY THE SUNSHINE TODAY – 

NAMASTE Jahne

Dear Yogis,

We all ask ourselves – whoever brought me here.  You are not the first to ask.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I’m sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I’ll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I’m like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn’t come here of my own accord, and I can’t leave that way.
Whoever brought me here, will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I’m going to say.
I don’t plan it.
When I’m outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.      By Rumi

We all ask ourselves the question which has no answer “why am I here”….Rumi was no different – more eloquent of course, but no different.  He was closer to God and therefore closer to the answer, and we can be there.

All we have to do is to sit, and He will come.  We can strive, we can give, we can DO and DO and DO and be no closer to the truth.  When we stop and take time to hear the still small voice, we then have a chance to answer the question.  Covid is continuing to give you this opportunity.  Whether you take it, is entirely up to you.  You can long for the future when you are free, but I say you are free now, in this very minute, but you don’t know you are, and haven’t been grateful for this wonderful opportunity that has presented itself to you.  We don’t know when it will come again, so live every minute of it with gratitude.  It is wonderful.

I hope to share A couple of hours of Sunday with you – Teacher Training (and The Tarot Course on Saturday).  Bring your mind as well as your body.

LOVE AND BLESSINGS.

NAMASTE.  Jahne

 

 

Dear Yogis

As my heart is seeking it finds you in every soul I meet. – Ibn’ Arabi

https://youtu.be/56sCYO_9XfM

This morning we can consider LOVE, and the story of Rumi the Persian Poet, and his lover Shams.  It is a wonderful example of love, courage, service and duty.  Love and death.  When I listen to the words of Rumi, and the music,  my heart also calls for the desert,  but I have been put here to write to you, to be with you. I am not who you think I am.  Do you know about you?

Rumi started his adult life as an authoritarian teacher, head of a community, strong husband, feared and honoured by most. A Judge. But inside he knew this was not life.  Like the Christian Saint Peter, he was at heart a homosexual..  He had no passion, no love.   Trying to be the person his family and community wanted him to be,  he was strangling the person he was at his heart.  These things have a way of surfacing, and so they did when he met Shams, and we are told,  fell instantly in love..  (and that is another story – there are many).

This meeting with the Dervish, transformed Rumi from an accomplished teacher and jurist, to an ascetic.  He left behind everything solid, everything stable to be with his Lover.  We don’t know much about his wife and children, but at the end end he was buried with great honour in the family tomb. Reconciliation and acceptance  occurred, and his poetry changed a community,  a country, and then reached the world.  Such is life – only the angels would understand.

Shams Tabrizi,  Rumi’s love, an itinerant poet, mystic,  had travelled throughout the Middle East searching and praying for someone who could “endure my company”. A voice said to him, “What will you give in return?” Shams replied, “My head!” The voice then said, “The one you seek is Jalal ud-Din (known as Rumi) of Konya” and the music was born.

However, on the night of 5 December 1248, as Rumi and Shams were talking, Shams was called to the back door. He went out, never to be seen again. It is rumoured that Shams was murdered with the connivance of Rumi’s son, ‘Ala’ ud-Din; if so, Shams indeed gave his head for the privilege of mystical friendship.

Rumi’s love for, and his bereavement at the death of Shams found their expression in an outpouring of lyric poems, He himself went out searching for Shams and journeyed again to Damascus. There, he realised:

Why should I seek? I am the same as
He. His essence speaks through me.
I have been looking for myself!

Rumi found another companion in Salaḥ ud-Din-e Zarkub, a goldsmith. After Salah ud-Din’s death, Rumi’s scribe and favourite student, Hussam-e Chalabi, assumed the role of Rumi’s companion. One day, the two of them were wandering through the Meram vineyards outside Konya when Hussam described to Rumi an idea he had had: “If you were to write a book like the Ilāhīnāma of Sanai or the Mantiq ut-Tayr of ‘Attar, it would become the companion of many troubadours. They would fill their hearts from your work and compose music to accompany it.” Rumi smiled and took out a piece of paper on which were written the opening eighteen lines of his Masnavi, beginning with:

Listen to the reed and the tale it tells,
How it sings of separation..

Hussam implored Rumi to write more. Rumi spent the next twelve years of his life in Anatolia dictating the six volumes of this masterwork, the Masnavi, to Hussam.

In December 1273, Rumi fell ill; he predicted his own death and composed the well-known ghazal, which begins with the verse:

How doest thou know what sort of king I have within me as companion?
Do not cast thy glance upon my golden face, for I have iron legs.

Rumi died on 17 December 1273 in Konya.  His death was mourned by the diverse community of Konya, with local Christians and Jews joining the crowd that converged to bid farewell as his body was carried through the city.  Rumi’s body was interred beside that of his father, and a splendid shrine, the Yeşil Türbe (Green Tomb, قبه الخضراء; today the Mevlana Museum, was erected over his place of burial. His epitaph reads:

When we are dead, seek not our tomb in the earth, but find it in the hearts of men.

 

HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY.  The sun is shining, and there is a gentle breeze where there has been an icy wind..  beautiful.

Open your eyes, for this world is only a dream – Rumi

NAMASTE.  JAHNE