Podcasts
Yoga for your Ears
This season Fire was in raging rebalance, she was incinerating clearing and undoing everything in her path. She didn’t see me, she couldn’t hear me and I in turn couldn’t interpret her teachings for the heat, ferocity and trauma were too much.
I live in a city that only had to deal with the smoke – friends in the south were fighting fires for months, sometimes two fronts at once….
So as February rolled in with the Earth Element and the rains I finally felt safe enough to approach Fire….
Collectively we are emerging from darkness into historic times. This summers fiery legacy will be the light it cast into the dark places of humanity and the return it sparked to the Heart and hearth of our divinity.
Music by Meditative Mind
#13 Four Chambered Heart Meditation – Live
If its gift is anything it is awareness and presence in the heart just as it is – no judgement and with nothing to perfect or improve upon. Just you and heart in heart to heart conversation about openness, fullness, clarity and strength.
Through Livers expansive vista not only are the eyes themselves clear but the path reveals itself and the Soul has the tools with which to navigate the fullness of the renewal, rebirth and becoming inherent in the potency of Spring.
We find ourselves at thunders mercy when love and hope is lost, when betrayal penetrates our skins, when hearts break, when isolation yawns – such is its power that it disturbs the air around us for 1000 miles in all directions.
I Ching hexagram 51, the power of late spring and the big stretch that is Parighasana (Gate Pose) teaches the benevolence of violent change, how it frieghtens and shocks, but also how it clears the past and inspires our greatest life insight.
The lessons inherent in this expression are of responsibility to our greatness; to hold the lessons of the grief we have endured in our quiet spaces as we step forward into the light of extraordinary times We are called forth from the enduring nature of all that we have survived into the manifestation of a new and luminescent future self.
In this edition a look at the value of wind as the harbinger of change and revolution.
Wind is a powerful force, sculpting mountains, smashing a coastline, lifting unpegged laundry gently off the line or depositing a sailor safely to shore. When we hunker down and brace against it we deny its benevolence, its capacity to bring movement and change and to redirect us in positive, life affirming ways.
#7 Late Winter seasonal energy update
Water is a powerful element, the only one that will come to bear on all other elements without exception. Its potency is like that of a seed that holds still, silent and patient in its wait for the spring. If the seed were to sprout too soon it would dissipate it potential and rob itself of its own momentum, so like a good secret, it must wait and be revealed in its strength.
The lesson? Even though we can taste winters wane we are not there yet. The seeds, the secrets, the potential we have been cultivating all these dark months no requires us to hold back the light until we cannot help but be drawn upward.
#8 Virabradrasana – The Creative – Hexagram 1
This where Virabradrasana steps up as a beacon of fortitude and endurance. The warrior plants is feet squarely on the ground, he unshackles the ghosts of his wings, spreading his arms wide, and looks, with an unending gaze toward the future.
Wherever pain, loss and betrayal has caused you to dwell on the edge of tears, wherever the ache, whatever the hurt or the casualty, this moment invites you to relinquish the victim and instead choose to prepare yourself for what lifts and illuminates.
#6 Rajakapotasana – Exhaustion – Hexagram 47 KUN
Hexagram 47 is the herald of the tired places, and Autumn brings us to the doorstep of the all that has become too heavy to bear. This synergy is the perfect portal in which to acknowledge the places where you no longer grow, and offer them back to the forest floor.
#5 Dhanurasana – Duration – Hexagram 32 GEN
Born one thing. Becoming another.
This month we take a plunge into the space in-between. Those moments during life transitions of grief and heartbreak where the past has dissolved behind and the future remains veiled and obscured. We are neither ‘there’ in our lives as they were, nor ‘arrived’ in the space in which we are becoming. We embody the archer whose bow is drawn back tight into the wisdom’s of the past, and whose arrow has not yet settled upon its target.
#4 Overcoming – Upavista Konasana – Hexagram 18 Ku
What Upavista Konasana (Wide Legged Forward Fold)seeks to show us in its difficulty is the spoiling we have woven; within our hearts and souls as within the body – for this is a challenging shape, no doubt about it. Upavista calls to all the things that must change, to the deep down, craved for realignments that sit within all of us, and to the doorstep of the journey to repair we so deeply long for. This is the shedding of old skin, this is the shimmering light of a new one, an unobscured version of yourself in Springs dawn light.
#3 The Getting of Wisdom – Supine twists – Hexagram 4 Meng
All of our edges that have folded tight as we weathered the winter begin to soften in springs fine rain and warm sun. The supine twist series offers up the perfect expression of that softening and current of expansions that live beneath it – From the seams of the temples to the soles of the feet. The I Ching counsels us to lean into Spring’s newness, to be as a beginner, to return to the wonder and awe of the child and to find joyful curiosity in not knowing in which direction we will grow when the inner body breaches the borders.
(Lord of the Fishes)