HARPY EAGLE!!!!!

Grace happend today and resulted in my third wild sighting of a Harpy Eagle. This time I saw it from in front of my room here at Refugio Amazonas. The Harpy is one of the largest eagles in the word with talons large enough to slay a howler monkey and that are as wide as a man's wrist at the ankle. The earth almost seems to shake when they press off of a perch to take flight. 

The sighting came about as a result of observing the signs correctly: 
1) It started raining and then the sun came out so it became a sun shower; 2) I look out the back of my room and notice I bit of a rainbow forming in the fine spray of raindrops:
3) I think to myself, hmmmm maybe if I step outside of my room and get more space in front of me I will see and even bigger rainbow!;
4) I recall the rainbow halo of many bodhisattvas;
5) I step outside and after taking 5 steps for some reason I look up in the opposite direction of where the predicted rainbow was supposed to be:
6) I see a HUUUUGE HARPY EAGLE flying to a Brazil Nut tree just on the edge of the lodge's clearing and I see it fly just moment there is a gap large enough for me to see it, identify it, and think OMFG that's a Harpy Eagle!!:
7) TIME STOPS;
8) This is one of the 1000's of reasons why I LOVE the rainforest: when you contemplate the sighting of rare and majestic creatures and the perfect serendipity of the experience, it stuns the mind with the beautiful perfection of it. 

Amazonian Yoga.

Yoga and Conservation in the Tambopata-Candamo of the Peruvian Amazon

Raw. Freshness. Change, unfolding like the stamen and pistol inside a bright yellow flower opening its heart to the world—a trumpet calling us to wakefulness if we look with the right eyes and proper attitude.

I’ve made it to the Amazon and I’m overjoyed to be here.  After a five and a half hour flight from Miami I arrived in Lima, and the following morning I flew to gateway of the Southern Peruvian Amazon, Puerto Maldonado.

Not knowing quite what to expect in terms on living conditions and work, I have now come to feel grateful for what I’ve found: community, soul, permaculture, and a sincere commitment on everyone’s part to discover what it means to live sustainably with Mother Earth.

I am currently living in the outskirts of Puerto Maldonado. I teach yoga with 2 ecolodges and work for a conservation organization doing program support and environmental economics/biological research. The region holds some of the most pristine tropical forest with some of the highest records of butterfly and bird diversity in the world. The region is teeming with wildlife, including the famous Giant River Otters, Tapir, Jaguar.  

The conservation organization is called Fauna Forever Tambopata, and I connected with them initially when I was in the region back in 2007 doing my master's research. Here's a nice promotional video about the environmental education component of the work (http://vimeo.com/30094489), and this is the website: http://www.faunaforever.org/

For the second part of my work there I'll be teaching yoga with these lodges and helping to develop their infrastructure to more readily handle retreats/immersion experiences. Kapievi Ecovillage (doing a massive update to the site): http://www.tambopataecotours.com/about-us.html. Kapievi is a small ecovillage specializaing in the “homestay experience” and experiences with plant medicine. Refugio Amazonas (deep in the Jungle, a 3 hour motor canoe up the Tambopata river from Puerto Maldonado) http://www.perunature.com/refugio-amazonas.html has pristine rainforest, brazil nuts, amazing lakes, a canopy tower, and world-class guides and accommodation.

The initial contract for this work is 5 months, so please come and visit me! As the marketing material for this yoga program gets put together (integrating conservation, sustainable development, and yoga) I'll be sure to share the fliers. If you want to stay in touch with other than just emails I invite you to join my newsletter list on my website, The Ashtanga Tree -- or just let me know and I will add you. No SPAM I promise. 

I’m leave for Refugio Amazonas lodge on Friday, June 15 for the next 10 days where I’ll be teaching yoga to travelers from all around the world. After this I’ll return to Puerto for another 10 days and then I will be heading to the field for a stint of research and to make a promotional video with the Fauna Forever team.

I teach daily at 7am for an hour and then I head off to the all-vegetarian kitchen to eat the usual assortment of fruit, granola, yogurt, eggs, bread, tomatoes, avocado, and, of course,  delicious coffee. After what usually amounts to about an hour of chatting and eating I walk next door through a regenerating forest, over a line of leaf-cutter ants, under a few cecropia trees, to arrive at the Fauna Forever house/office/think-tank/conservation powerhouse/research center and get to work.

In addition to teaching, proposal writing, and conducting research, I am supporting an initiative to bring more yoga to the Amazon. We are interested in sharing the powerful energy of mother earth, supporting sustainable development, healing, and facilitating awakening experiences in this heart center of the world. We are striving to bring international yoga attention to the region as well as fostering the development of yoga in local community. Grassroots style. 

If you have any interest in visiting, please let you know ASAP and I will be able to arrange accommodation for you. We will be able to make a special experience integrating yoga and the finest rainforest experience you can imagine. 

My heart sings in this place, but it is muffled by my wishes to see you all and longs for the next time our paths cross.

Yours,
Matthew

Meditation provides one with the ability to choose; to look at what is arising and decide "yes I want to work with this," or "no, it is not necessary to work with this." I experience this when I suffer from insomnia, where thoughts are churning out virally and preventing sleep. In learning this type of discernment we free up vast quantities of energy that allows our mind to function more efficiently and to naturally be more easeful. In this sense, it gives our experiences more space, more of a balanced context from which we can perceive emotions, thoughts, and feelings for what they really are. It also supports us to see what we need (if anything) from this patterned unfolding of the vibration (or the vritti).

The Dark

...our mind still has its darkest Africas, its unmapped Borneos and Amazon Basins.
-Aldous Huxley

Tropical Dharma

Urania Moth,  Madagascar

The wisdom of the middle path is illustrated nicely by how biology responds to the middle lands of the equator. The vast and kaleidoscopic emergence of life will emerge metaphorically in our yoga practice if we cultivate the middle path, the sweet and honey'd middle, free from extremes. With tropical 12-hour days and the balance of light and dark (prana and apana) in our own, internal planetary microcosm of the body a sort of metaphorical life explodes in response. This is the highest yoga tantra and the realization of indra's net. This is the gateway to the unlocking the ecstatic energy in the body, and for me, the beauty of the tropical landscape is an undeniably ecstatic, obvious manifestation of kundalini (even though she is everywhere).  The stillness of the weather patterns, too, over the equatorial portions of the tropical seas (the doldrums) reflects what happens when the mind is absorbed in the central axis of the body equanimously. It is the same stillness (sama), which crippled trade in the days, when the seas were only traveled by sail. The stillness that forced our predecessors us to halt and consider their place in a vast whole. It is a stillness bursting with energy.

A Tangled Bank

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

-Darwin

Highest Yoga Tantra

"Taking pleasure of beauty of nature is the most profound yoga, if no one is there to capture the perception of it."
-Daniel Odier

Gratitude

I am grateful 

for the way my soul is sometimes 

drawn to move with other souls and then separated 

from them. I observe here a law of soulmaking 

with exciting possibilities for 

understanding. 

Scenes of how it operates appear: People in arctic cold, others in the tropics. Oceans, high desert canyons, wooded valleys, all in harmony with “the One who has no partner”. There is a group that sings and moves in pure joy; another is quiet in the midst of tremendous grief and carnage. A tree bristling with thorns: jealousy, meanspirited revenge. Then the white jasmine 

flowers bud, open, and drop the 

gift of themselves. 

Why are we shown this? 

So we can appreciate the whole as given. 

When I am grieved and without hope, I accept that 

as grace, as well as the removal of pain. A deep 

knowing comes as we are shown, receive, 

and grow to love both. 

Bahauddin (1318–1389)

Split Open

--------------------------------------------

The depth of the heart can only be matched by the expanse of the universe.

Dive, or better yet surrender into the core to be shown. 

Compassion birthed from the immediacy of our own conditions of anguish,

and knowing those feelings dwell in others.  

Compassion arising from the recognition that we are all family,

and that we share the same desires for happiness, fulfillment, agency, and freedom. 

I am split open and the light comes pouring in.

Pain, Injury and the Cool Revolution of Yoga

Published on Elephant Journal here: http://www.elephantjournal.com/2012/02/pain-injury--the-cool-revolution-of-yoga--matthew-champoux/