REPORTS FROM THE FIELD: Yoga and Conservation in the Peruvian Amazon: February 2012

Wednesday, February 22, 2012

The Dark

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

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.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

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)