2016 - A year in blog posts. Serenity.

The highlight of the year for me, as far as the blog is concerned, has been the completion of the Krishnamacharya Yogasanagalu project (Available for Free Download here ). In 2010 I was sent photos of every page of a copy of Krishnamacharya's, long out of print, second book Yogasanagalu (Mysore 1941) in the original Kannada. At the time I was on Ramaswami TT course in LA. I showed the book to Ramaswami and he mentioned that Krishnamacharya had given him a set of the photos contained in the later editions of the book but that he had never been able to read the text as it was written in the Kannada language. A reader of the blog and Kannada native speaker, Satya Murthy, came forward and offered to translate the text, a few pages at a time. Satya translated the final chapter in October and I was able to format it and send over to my friends in Spain who printed out a copy as a thank you present to Ramaswami at the end of his 100 hour Vinyasa Krama intensive in Madrid that month.

At the end of last year we moved to Shiga prefecture in Japan, beside Lake Biwa. This rural life, the lake, has been an exploration of.... serenity, it's the word that most comes to mind.

The idea of buddha nature as I understand it is that we already have it, the lake tends to make me feel that this may well be the case or that there is at least a profound serenity beneath everything else which is perhaps the same thing. When I stand by the lake, when it's calm, everything seems to drop away, I like to think that the lake, this vast expanse of water just absorbs it all, leaving an experience of peace, tranquility, a sense of fulfilment if you will. Nothing else feels required and the challenge then becomes how to maintain this experience, to have this serenity always available. Away from the lake I guess we would call it equanimity..., poise.

It's this serenity I seek to cultivate in my Yoga practice, in my asana, pranayama, in my Sitting as well as away from the mat, away from the cushion, in my dealings with others and my day in general, one day at a time.

We slip, we lose it for, a day, a week, a month....., a year or two perhaps but it is I suspect now always there available to us. Hasn't yoga always been about letting go of the stories, of the attachments. At some point you let go of enough perhaps that you catch a glimpse of what a life without such attachments might be.

It's a constant work in progress.

The yamas and niyamas can help, reminders, a support for practice that we can keep coming back to, that we will need to keep coming back to again and again every time we slip.

Asana practice can be a support for the yama/niyamas, the discipline it engenders, the yama/niyamas can be a support for our asana practice.

And as my dear friend Kristina Karitinou reminded us we can also look to our own tradition, whichever that tradition may be, for me to the Greeks, the stoics perhaps and/or to our Christian heritage. We have our own myths, legends and stories, art , music (Bach, my god Bach!) and architecture, mysticism, philosophy, it's in the marrow of our world view.

Tolstoy suggests that religion isn't so much about metaphysics as ethics whether we believe in the metaphysics of Christianity or not he argues that the Christian doctrine is rational. It's our commitment to living in accordance to that doctrine that is actually Religion. It's a doctrine India looked to not so long ago, when Gandhi turned to Tolstoy and the Russian author's controversial reading of the gospels 'Do not resist evil with violence', the doctrine of non-violence, in the indian tradition, ahimsa. In turn America looked to India when Dr. King read Gandhi and no doubt before the next four years are up may need to turn to him again. The ethics, the doctrine or code by which we choose to live, aim to live, can provide perhaps a certain internal stability, it can make life less complicated, simpler. From this simple ground we can perhaps work.

Thank you to Richard Freeman and Mary Taylor and for their book, The art of Vinyasa, that came out last month ( see my review in December) and that has helped bring some serenity and perhaps poise back into my asana practice.

For a number of years I've been convinced that Ashtanga is a Vinyasa Krama, that we can approach Ashtanga as we might Vinyasa Krama, Richard and Mary's book make me question why I was ever in doubt or thought this might be the slightest bit controversial or surprising.

Below then some photo's from here along with some highlighted posts from each month.

A year in posts 2016

▼ 2016 (89)