Friday, March 07, 2008
The Real and the Ideal
I have been looking again at Patricia's site, this time of an unclothed woman of advanced years (seventies) doing yoga. It made me realize how so often yoga instructions offer portraits of austere Asian males with athletic bodies, or perhaps young women with lithe figures and beautiful faces, doing poses the rest of us can only dream about.
For many of us, contemplating these advanced masters of the art is like looking at films of the Olympics. Yes, perhaps we too can swim or run, but not in quite the same way. Patricia's subject reveals to us that we--as human aspirants--will look and act far different from the perfected champions of the illustrations.
Likewise, there is for kundalini both an ideal and the reality of the experience. In the descriptions (or perhaps from our teacher) we learn that kundalini rests at the base of the spine until it is awakened, and that then it rises chakra by chakra until it reaches its goal at the top of the head, the sign of enlightenment.
But kundalini has its own program for us. It is totally unpredictable. It may leap and jump, or ascend slowly, bypassing certain places, awakening others. Those of us who experience "spontaneous awakening" are caught "in medias res" (in the middle of the action), that is, in the middle of our lives. We have not practiced in caves for many years, eaten a careful diet, meditated for hours and days on end, nor renounced the activities of this world. We must struggle ahead from wherever we find ourselves. We must try to make up for all the unresolved issues remaining in our lives. In one sense, we must do kundalini backwards, arriving at a certain level and then returning again and again to clear up the remaining clutter in our lives.
Thus there is a great discrepancy between the ideal kundalini process and the actuality. For most of us, it is a struggle intermixed with bliss, joy intermingled with pain. It is a journey we make on faith, as we sense we are participants in a larger phenomenon, and we do our part simply by allowing it to happen in our own bodies.
(To see the full series of photos of this remarkable yogini, go to:
http://www.pbase.com/windchimewalker/winterwoman_yoga
