Easter Chickens and Lotus Flowers...

Happy Easter, Shanti-towners! 

It's amazing to me that not until my 30th year did I get around to having a conversation with someone about why the Easter Bunny lays eggs.  Why did I never notice that?  Bunnies don't lay eggs, people.  Chickens lay eggs!  I would like to officially begin, here and now, the campaign to elect a chicken to the role of Easter harbinger.  We've had enough of you, you weird egg-laying rabbit.  All hail the coming of the Easter Chicken!!

My apologies if you were a student in one of my classes this week, because you're about to witness me ripping myself off to write this blog post.  That's right, I'm stealing from myself.  (Cut to me, buffing my fingernails on my lapels.)

I am not going to pretend that I KNOW much about Easter...I was raised without religion (gasp!) and so my Easter knowledge stops at the following: Jesus died.  He rose again.  Ta-da!! Happy Easter!

But as I was thinking about it this week (trying to pull some fun class themes out of it)...thinking about transformation and about rebirth, I kept coming back to the symbol of the lotus flower.  You've seen this, yes?  You can find depictions of the lotus flower splattered all over religious iconography from the east...the Buddhists definitely lay more claim to it symbolically than the yogis, but you can find many a Hindu deity balanced on, and many a yogi's backsides emblazoned with, the lovely lotus.  It is, in my mind, one of the best symbols for transformation, and here's why:

The lotus, this gorgeous, pristine, floats-on-water flower is famous, not just for its beauty, but because of its roots. Literally...its roots.  The lotus flower spends its gestation period in the mud and muck at the bottom of ponds. Until, when it's ready to bloom, it grows up from the dank and mud, through the pond's depth, and finally opens, brilliantly, on the surface of the water.  Contained in the bloom of this little guy is not, then, just clarity and purity and perfect petals, but also muck and gunk and the remnant of it's long passage through the water.

What better symbol for transformation than something that began in darkness, that struggled from the grips of darkness, and then had to hold it's breath, just keeping faith that the surface was somewhere above it, probably unaware all the while that its destiny was to become this floating beauty.

Sound familiar? 

I don't know, maybe you're reading this and you're already in your float-y lotus stage...maybe you've left the muck far behind you and if so, could you please call me?  I have some questions I'd like to ask you.

But maybe you don't feel that way.  Maybe you feel like you're just bouncing back and forth between the mud and the upward struggle through the water, and never breaking the surface, and if so, then maybe the lotus could teach you (me) a thing or two:

Like that transformation can not come without something to be transformed from.  Like that a lotus flower without its roots in the mud would just float away, or get pulled under and drowned, or plucked up by some wayfaring bird.  But that a lotus who decided that the mud was good enough, or all that there would ever be...isn't a lotus.  And that change requires direction, it requires consistent motion and faith that there is a surface to break through.  No lotus is going to carve a zig-zap course through the water--zooming up half-way and then deciding the journey is futile and turning back.  It's up, up, up, with that sweet friend faith...just waiting for the water to part around your rising petals.

So, even though the Easter Chicken has come and gone by now, there is still time to channel your inner lotus.  To notice, at least, whether you're in the mud, or swimming towards the surface...or (lucky devil) already bobbing on the glassy water, and to take your next steps accordingly.  I believe, with all my heart, that there is clear water above you, and a surface above that, just waiting for you to break through it.

Ta da!! Happy Easter!

Jillian Michaels, I Am Not the Biggest Loser...

 So, occasionally my subconscious gets completely fed up with me, and instead of filling my nights with complicated dreams full of knotted imagery and up-for-interpretation kinds of input, she just throws her little symbolic hands in the air and BREAKS IT DOOOOOWN for me.

The other night I had this dream...and in it, I'm a contestant on The Biggest Loser (more on that in a bit)--which, if you don't know, is a show in which life-threateningly obese people participate in a glorified weight-loss competition, all under the watchful eyes of two very yell-y trainers, Bob and Jillian.  The Jillian in the equation is a one miss Jillian Michaels, a super fit, tom-boy hot, ass-kicker of a woman who has been known to, on more than one occasion, climb all over contestants like a cardio-crazy monkey in order to urge them on toward that last half-mile on the treadmill.  She is fiiiiiiiiiierce.  But, like all inspiration reality show cast members, she cares a lot and will often coo a "good job, sweetheart" at a sweating collapsed contestant immediately after ravaging them.

In short...I sort of dig her.  (Don't tell.)

So, okay, I'm a contestant on The Biggest Loser and I'm running some kind of race...it's a mid-way through the hour kind of challenge, and though I don't know exactly what the goal is, I know I'm supposed to run back and forth a few times on a long stretch of track.  And I'm supposed to win.  Mind you, I'm not overweight in the dream.  Nor are there any other overweight people running this race.  It's just me and an elderly man.  And in the dream I'm thinking to myself, I have got this. I am going to kick this old man's butt.  There is just no way that I'm not going to be able to run faster than this geezer.

So I'm plowing along, running as fast as I can (which, in that weird dream way, is just not very fast at all) and I think I'm beating the old guy, but after a couple of laps, Jillian steps in.  (And here, people is where the "my subconscious has given up" part comes in.  It's sort of like she always starts out giving me dreams that are like art films, and if I'm not catching on she sort of has to keep dumbing it down for me until eventually I just get accosted in no uncertain terms by a reality show television personality.   It's a little humiliating, frankly.)

Anyhow...Jillian Michaels stops me.  She puts a hand on either one of my shoulders and she looks at me in that really meaningful 'close-up on the eyes' way and she says to me:

"You have to pause.  You're not going to win if you just keep running and running.  You have to take a pause and catch your breath.  THAT's how you're going to win."

Um...

CONFUSED about that, anyone?  Anyone unclear as to what the secret hidden mystery message of my dream might be?  Anyone need to rewind and watch that again to get the full import...the true subtlety of that little missive?

What's doubly interesting about this is that the dream came during a week when I had spontaneously found myself teaching about a very similar thing.  For whatever reason, I had planned a theme for my classes, but had stumbled into talking sort of deeply and specifically about the breath.  I think my theme had been about enjoyment, about sneaking discipline in via enjoyment, but somehow I'd wound my way around to talking about the pause in the breath.  About how there is this inhale, and then an exhale, and then there is this...pause.  I was talking about what a doorway that pause is, and how it's an opportunity, built into the breath, for total stillness.

And as I was teaching I remember thinking about how easy it is to forget that the pause even exists.  So much of breath work and talk, and certainly the breath in the yoga practice, is about either the inhale or the exhale, at any given moment, but rarely are we asked to even turn our attention to this stillness that exists also as part of the breath cycle.  And I thought about how if we ONLY had the inhale and the exhale...my god, it makes me anxious just thinking about it.  We would just be in constant motion.  It's that stillness that really can determine so much.  Our breath dissolves, over and over again, into this state of just...nothingness.  Of sweet full emptiness.  It's like this very quiet message built into our physiology...yes, open up, yes, turn in, but also...pause.  It's really quite beautiful.  And I must have been thinking about it more deeply (or less so?) than I realized, because my dream seemed to be a big resounding DUH!! on the subject, from my subconscious mind.

What does it really mean about our lives, about what the proper balance of our lives is, if built into our breath there is not just expansion (inhalation) and contraction (exhalation), but also this total, biochemical SILENCE?  How many of us are conducting our lives as if we only had an inhale and an exhale?  Or if, rather, maybe we have a year of inhales and exhales, and a week or two where we allow that pause.  What would change in our lives if we abided by the necessity of regular, consistent and necessary...stillness?

I don't know.  I'm giving it a whirl.  I figure if I don't it's only a matter of time before my psyche just gives up on me altogether and turns the reigns over permanently to Tyra Banks...