Although the whole practice of 108 sun salutations is a meditation in itself, especially with the specific dedications preceding each of the nine rounds of 12 salutations, I felt compelled to start our fall 2020 practice with this “undoing” meditation. The practice of yoga, which means union, is really a practice of undoing because never having separated from God, we don’t need to strive for union but we do, as A Course in Miracles teaches, need to remove “the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance.” I find inspiration in music, and am often moved by either the whole song or just a single line. When we truly listen, teachings and inspiration are everywhere. The Holy Spirit speaks to an open mind, a mind willing to listen, through very ordinary and everyday things. In this meditation, I used lines from some of the songs in the fall 2020 sun salutations playlist, which I included below. May this “undoing” meditation touch your heart as much as sharing it with you touches mine.
Welcome this practice of undoing.
What will be undone are the false perceptions you have of yourself, of the world, of God, of Love. The undoing of the conjured up brings about the remembrance of the Real and the Eternal.
You have been called to this practice of undoing eons ago. A still, small voice of comfort and peace has been whispering to you tirelessly, but fearful of letting go of dreams, you have ignored the call for far too long, or paid it very little attention. The world seemed too important, too harsh, too tempting, very real and tragically inescapable. But deep in your heart of hearts, you already have decided to heed the call. The undoing has already started. You have already declared:
No matter what it takes, I’m coming home.
And thus the undoing has begun. You’re about to face deeply cherished illusions about yourself head on, finally having mustered the courage to come to terms with them, reinterpret them and forgive them.
In restless dreams I walked alone.
You mistakenly believed you were this finite person, this mask, veiling your true face of Innocence and Light. You asked, and rightfully so:
Am I more than just the sum of every high and every low?
And this question was the beginning of the answer. Something inside had shifted. You asked for help to carry on, to use your heart and not your eyes to navigate the darkness.
And the help came and will never, ever abandon you. Your call cannot be unanswered.
Once you had chosen to rise above the noise and confusion, to get a glimpse beyond this illusion, a whole new world, yet an ancient one, had opened up.
The angel opens her eyes.
And you see, and you remember that
It’s times like these you learn to live again,
It’s times like these you give, and give again,
It’s times like these you learn to love again,
It’s times like these, time and time again.
The fear is no longer the terror of knowing what this world is about.
The world is forgiven, as all your dreams pass before your eyes of curiosity. Just like dust in the wind.
Now the world has become a place where trouble melts like lemon drops. Not because the world is at peace but because your mind is. Not because you’re waiting for the world to change, demanding it become Heaven on earth, but because you have tasted Heaven within, you have touched your inner Light.
You know now that it takes an inner dark to rekindle the fire burning in you. So you welcome the fire. You welcome it all, whatever comes; and you release it all, whatever goes. Knowing that Love is the higher law, the only law, you can finally show yourself, destroy your fears and release your mask.
You have started ascending the stairway to Heaven. There’s nothing left to fear and everything left to forgive. And now your heart sings the sweetest melody of Home:
I’m free. I’m free. And freedom tastes of reality.
Coming Home, Pt. II by Skylar Grey
The Sound of Silence by Disturbed
White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane
I Can’t Escape Myself by The Sound
Crawling in the Dark by Hoobastank
Times Like These by Foo Fighters
Down to the River to Pray by Alison Krauss
Dust in the Wind by Kansas
Stand by Me by Florence + The Machine
You Say by Lauren Daigle
Under Pressure by Queen & David Bowie
One by Johnny Cash
Carry On Wayward Son by Kansas
The Light by Disturbed
Lightning Crashes by LIVE
Somewhere Over the Rainbow by Israel Kamakawiwo’ole
The winter solstice is the acknowledgement and the celebration of the darkest night of the year. Yet most traditions and most people focus today on the return of the light. Why are we uncomfortable with and afraid of darkness?
Yes, light is what we are in reality. And in reality, there’s nothing but light. But within the illusion of time and space and separation, we have made darkness real and therefore it is real for us.
And it will be so until we stop repressing and denying our shadow and start simply looking at it with the eyes of patience and compassion.
The darkness in us is not an evil force but simply parts of ourselves that we mistakenly judged as bad and sinful and wrong, and out of fear of facing those parts, we threw them into the basement of our being and locked the door.
Going back into the basement and turning on the light, we see that there are no monsters there at all.
But to get to the point of turning on the light, we have to first face the fact that there is a basement to begin with, and then go into it and face the darkness. Only then can we turn on the light and see that the monsters were real only in our imagination.
Darkness is not the problem, but our denial of its existence is. Darkness is not to be integrated, but simply looked at from a different perspective. Once the light is turned on, darkness is gone, just like a dream is gone once we wake up.
As A Course in Miracles teaches, “The light is in you. Darkness can cover it, but cannot put it out.”
There’s nothing to fear. Time to start the uncovering.
On this last day of fall, contemplating confusion and clarity. On the heels of the old, at the threshold of what’s to come… Do I give in to restlessness or simply rest in ambivalence? Do I take the mind’s haziness as a mistake, something in need of fixing, or do I stay patient and trust this soul incubation process? Does the heart really care what thoughts pass by, when the heart only knows the gentle embrace of compassion and love? I’d rather wait in confusion than bask in the false glory of my fear based conclusions. Clarity doesn’t come from the mind that so fervently seeks it, but from the heart that surrenders to the end of seeking. Is clarity then really much different than confusion? The mind that separates those two is the cause of all turmoil. The mind that separates anything in two is the devil on my shoulder. But that same mind, provided it yields to the guidance of the unbound heart, is also what sets me free. I can see a coin with two sides. Or I can just see a coin. Maybe clarity is nothing but the total acceptance of confusion. What could love do, other than see through the veil of illusion and separation and love it all? What will you and I do, once we see through that same veil? What else will be there to do but let love be, no matter what form it seems to take? Clarity at last.
A few days ago, after the winter solstice 108 sun salutations practice, a few of the first timers to this intense class told me that they felt off, disoriented and agitated afterward, although they also felt exalted and inspired. I assured them that this is a good sign because the practice encourages the deeply buried to come up to the surface. We would never wonder whether the feel good energies are normal, or even physical exhaustion or fatigue, but when it comes to mental and emotional stirrings we default to feeling that there’s something wrong, either with us or with the practice. That’s because we’re conditioned to avoid, deny and cover up the uncomfortable and the dark and instead focus, often artificially, on the feel good and the light.
Carl Jung said: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.” The second sentence in this quote brings the power of the quote home for me because it tells us the way we operate: we just don’t want to look at our shadow side. Why not?
Just look at most celebrations of the winter solstice and you’ll see that they stress the return of the light, which happens AFTER the longest night of the year. Why do we conveniently skip over the longest night part? Why are we so afraid of darkness? Does the night make us uncomfortable because we’re afraid to look at our own shadow? What would happen if we faced the darkness within ourselves? Would we find an evil monster and an unworthy sinner within, as we subconsciously fear, or would we maybe, just maybe, give ourselves a chance to reintegrate a part of ourselves that we disowned long ago by extending love and compassion to the places from which we once withdrew love and compassion? (We do have an unlimited supply of love within ourselves, after all.)
What if this becoming enlightened is way simpler than we think (and I’d say that everything is way simpler than we think), and all we have to do is make the darkness conscious, like Jung said. Making the darkness conscious means that we first have to acknowledge that there is darkness within, and that’s where we get hung up. But I’ll tell you a secret, which is not a secret at all: you and I and everyone else who walks on this earth has a shadow side because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be here. The shadow side is not the problem, but denying that it exists is. How can I offer up something to the light when I keep suppressing it deeper into the abyss of my unconscious?
We can’t possibly embrace the light, even though we may conceptually know that light is what we are, until we set free whatever we have hidden from the light. And what is darkness but temporary absence of light? Once light shines on darkness, darkness disappears. But the darkness has to be brought up to the altar of light first.
The first step, then, toward making the darkness conscious is an honest look at all the convoluted ways we have employed to deny that the darkness exists. The second step is a decision to offer up that darkness to the fire of the light. The third step is developing trust that this process will take time, patience and discipline, or, in other words, the third step is repeating the first two steps over and over again.
In celebration of the winter solstice, I invite us all to relentlessly embrace our own darkness. Yes, we ask to be led from darkness to light, but without an honest look at the darkness and our acknowledgement of its existence, we can’t possibly be led into the light. May the time of self denial and spiritual bypassing be over, and may our hearts have the courage to stand up to our conflicted minds and lead us into the basement of our being so that we can recover, with love and compassion, all the light-starved parts of ourselves. This is our journey home.
Several people came to me this week, saying the same thing, more or less: “I just feel so confused. I have no clarity right now.” I didn’t think I could possibly inspire or console anyone because I felt the same way. Wave after wave of stupid and senseless violence had me thinking I was back in Bosnia, a child in the middle of a war, trying to understand how humans and the world and life can be so damn cruel…
After the violent incident in Las Vegas, which shook up the whole state, I even doubted whether I should keep teaching yoga and owning a yoga studio because all I wanted to do is hide from the world, preferably after letting myself scream every variation of the F word because of my frustration and disappointment with the said world.
This one hit home more than I expected, maybe because Nevada is my home now. Maybe because as a child I witnessed humans turn into monsters overnight, brutally killing anyone who opposed their sick agenda. Maybe what disturbed me most is seeing how effective the fear-based conditioning and propaganda has been since we seem to be turning against each other in ways that are increasingly soul mutilating for all.
If there would have been a way to get “beamed up” and out of here, I think I would have taken that option on.
But as always, teaching yoga and doing my best to be a space holder for others — even and maybe especially on days I feel like I’m not qualified to be that — turned out to be the magic trick for getting my head out of you know where. Yes, we were sad, disturbed, angry, disappointed and scared. But we also were, and still are, warriors of LIGHT.
Consider this: If the dark could have won, it would have won by now. Throw your darkness at me and you may disorient me for a moment, “But still, like dust, I’ll rise,” as Maya Angelou said.
For me personally, this was a reminder to go back to my study and a practice of A Course in Miracles. I had drifted away from it a bit, not because I didn’t fully resonate with its teachings but because my ego tripped me up and I dropped back into being attached to the ways of the world, although I fully know that the world is nothing but a projection of our fear based thoughts of separation. Something that is based on fear, like this world, can only produce fear. And my fear reaction to anything happening in the world just perpetuates the whole illusion.
It is so easy to get carried away by the insanity of duality. It may not be as easy to get ourselves out of the whole mess of having followed the ego down the rabbit hole, but it’s also not impossible. It’s actually very much possible and in reality, all of us are already outside of this silly dream of separation and fear but we haven’t yet woken up to our own reality.
Knowing this, what else is there to do and what else could I possibly strive for other than remembering fully what I am because once I know what I am, everything else will take care of itself.
So here is my message to us all (including myself, of course):
Don’t expect to make sense of an insane world.
Your lack of clarity about the world is a sign of your recognition of the nonsensical and fear based nature of this illusion we have mistaken for our home.
Embrace your feelings of confusion and even helplessness, and ask for a different way to interpret these feelings. This new way will help you see that all acts of violence, hatred and fear are disguised calls for love by those who have completely forgotten what they are. It’s up to you to remember what YOU are, and forgive those who are still in the dark, “for they know not what they do,” as a beautiful brother of ours taught so long ago.
Remember this: You are not here in reality at all, but while seemingly within this dream, your job is not to understand the world, or to figure out why it is the way it is. You are here for one reason only: to remember what you are. Your mission of self remembering, once started, is the greatest gift you can give to the world and the most powerful — and only — catalyst for change.
