Bit of an eclipse, sans vampires

Tags

acupressure points, banana bread, Broken heart, eclipse, energetic patterns, evil frickin’ genius, expectation of further injury, foxhole, Hanuman, Healing, heart meridian, Kinesiology, meridians, solar eclipse, unstuck, vampires, Yoga

Last Sunday (11^th July) the world experienced a total solar eclipse – and here’s a Vedic perspective on such things, if you’re interested.

An eclipse is a very interesting time – the earth being bathed shadows when there’s normally full daylight (even if we aren’t in the right geographic location to see it personally). Energetically, it’s a bit of a turnaround from our normal experience of the world. For example, consider how some plants and flowers close up at night, or how jetlag impacts us (different time zones and exposure to light when our body isn’t expecting it).

So I tend to interpret an eclipse as a bit of a pregnant pause and perhaps a resetting of certain energetic patterns in the world.

And in this sandhi, this time of change, I went back for my second week of yoga teaching, hoping that at least some of the people who called during the week would show up. They did!

Well, two of them did, anyway. There were meant to be teenage boys joining in, but they had that “yoga, yeah right!” look on their faces. So their social worker left a sixteen year old girl in my care while she and the boys did something else. The other lady was possibly in her 50’s and hadn’t done any yoga for around ten years.

It was so much fun! I’d arrived early to set things up (lighting some incense because the room – while bright and spacious – is a bit musty, music and getting my notes ready), but my students turned up early, too.

Teehee! I have students! 😀

So I didn’t have time to get nervous and we started with a bunch of questions – what’s yoga, what is it used for etc. I was a little surprised that even though I’d written a fairly short class plan, we didn’t get through it all. There was a lot of stopping to demonstrate things, and talk through frustrations (I’m 16; I should be more flexible than this!). I taught them how to enunciate “Aum” properly, the KYM-style breathing, some asana and we finished with a little meditation. The hour just flew by! Hopefully they are both coming back next week, and I’ve had two more calls from people wanting to come this week. So yay!

Right after that I cycled straight home as fast as I could, and caught a lift to the city with a friend who was also attending Nadine and Kerry’s yoga and kinesiology workshop. WHOOP-WHOOP!

The purpose of the workshop was to help us all get “unstuck”. Energetically, emotionally, physically – whatever we needed.

Given the imminence of the eclipse, I have to say nice work with the timing, ladies!

Nadine and Kerry opened by sharing stories, which I think is a lovely way to ease people into the vibe that’s being created. They spoke of the preparation for the workshop, their own stories of coming to yoga and kinesiology and some of the emotional/mental health issues they’d each faced.

It was a brilliant way to oh-so-gently say: Just like you, we’ve had (and sometimes still have) stuff that keeps us stuck. And it can and does get better!

Message received loud and clear, chicas!

Earlier in the week, we were asked to complete a survey focusing on the areas in our life where we feel stuck. As a follow up once we got started, we were asked to draw our “stuck”.

Then we got into the yoga portion of the day, led by Nadine. Some standing poses and sun salutations (creating heat and energy in a little room packed with yoginis!). Next, some more specific asana held for longer periods of time, specific to various meridians within the body that help us access our fears, frustrations, anger, implementing the plans of our heart (I LOVE that!), self-acceptance and love.

During this, I realised that my ongoing-nagging-refusing-to-get-better shoulder injury is tied into the heart meridian that runs out along both arms. Left side of the body is the feminine, right?

My broken heart and I have been working together for a while now, trying to plug all the gaps and heal every last drop of the pain…

BUT what I’ve suddenly realised just as I’m sitting here right now, is that there’s still a part of me that resists complete healing. Although I want to be free of this broken-ness, there’s a vocal minority somewhere in my body that says:

No! Don’t completely heal! We don’t want to go back to that really bad place again!! Right here, well, it’s manageable. So don’t go rocking the boat, okay?

Oh! So there’s an expectation of further injury. And lower than low expectations for any sort of lasting romantic happiness. Oh.

I guess it makes sense then, to create a blockage along the heart meridian in the form of a cycling accident. I mean, that’s one sure way to keep things nicely as-is.

[Excuse me while I take a moment to process this and let the tears pass]

…The same thing, I think, goes for my body’s refusal to lose weight. I mean, I do yoga, I swim, I cycle. I’m mostly a healthy eater. Regardless, my body is holding on to some of its external protection. And so I feel unattractive, which is just another way to stay safe from men being interested in me. That vocal minority of mine is an evil frickin’ genius!

Okay… let’s get back to describing the workshop now…

After a short break, Kerry took the reins for the kinesiology part. This involved holding certain acupressure points for each of the meridians we’d just accessed (kidney, liver, gall bladder, heart), and helping us tune into our own energetic states and blockages.

Before we moved on from holding one acupressure point to the next, Kerry asked us to repeat some affirmations. Some of those were harder to swallow than others (i.e. “I deserve to love my life”, “I forgive myself”, “I accept myself”, “I know I am enough”). Hmmm…

By the end of the workshop I felt very relaxed and quiet. My friend told me that “my face looked really open”. I have no idea what that means, but hey! All I said to her was that I needed to go home and write (duh!!).

After thanking Nadine and Kerry for a wonderful afternoon, my friend and I left. She was going out, but I was heading back to my warm and cozy foxhole.

That night I just wanted to sleep, and the same with the next night.

I knew that whatever was going on with me as a result of the workshop hadn’t yet surfaced. And although I started this post on Monday, I haven’t really looked at it for the last couple of days. Guess I needed more time to marinate!

Little did I realise that it was in writing about the workshop that the full realisations would come. And here they are. Probably with more to come.

So I’m just going to… ummm… go and make some more tea. Eat some (freshly made) banana bread and be a little quiet for a while.

~Svasti

Dreams, death, transformation & labels

Tags

blood, crocodiles, death, Dinosaurs, Dreams, Labels, sharks, Transformation, transmutation, vampires

Dreamt of death last night/this morning/whenever-it-was, which never means what it seems to mean, of course. And transformation, too. The death was not mine, though often in my dreams it has been. But the transformation was.

Been thinking about that for a while, coz I’ve got this working theory that all these crazy-seeming things I’m interested in are actually about that, too. Vampires for certain. It’s not the blood or the sexiness or even the immortality thing that I like (I suspect like many, that would get a little old eventually, harhar!). Nope, it’s the transmutation from one thing to another. Same reason I like sharks and crocodiles, too, although in a different way. I mean, they’re time-travelers, aren’t they? From an aeon when we were little more than food for dinosaurs. Yeah…

So in this dream I became something but not someone else. I was still me, and having a hard time explaining all the outward signs of change to my family – suddenly taller, different coloured hair (pink) and skin (ochre), new abilities (strength, flying), although the inward signs were way more significant. They couldn’t see those of course, and there in the midst of dealing with the death scenes in my dream, I was once again not what I should be according to those whom I’m related to by blood!

And then this morning, reading something else I laughed out loud. Because I remembered.

Those who seek labels for others (or label themselves) are missing the point. Not in a new age-y dude, don’t stick your labels on me kinda way. Not like that at all. The only way for us to describe what we see is to use words, but what we forget to remember is how those descriptors are all so very temporary.

We’re always changing, transmuting, decomposing and reforming, even if we don’t know it. And mostly we don’t.

And in the tradition of transmutation, we need to snip those labels loose, tear them into tiny pieces and send them flying ten miles out to sea, remembering that in the end they’re just words, words, words…

Someone might have said it to us once (or even many times over), but it is our fear, shame, sadness, embarrassment, guilt and pain that empowers the labels, those places where we hurt. We hide words and labels in our bodies like wounds we need to defend and in doing so, regenerate our pain points.

But all we need to do is set them free.

They don’t mean anything.

They aren’t personal.

I have to remember this, too. That’s why I’m writing this here. To remind myself when I forget, because I do forget and often.

~Svasti

Kudos & house guests

Tags

antique coffin, bellydance, blog award, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, cat flu, Cleo, cranky horse, cursive writing, Dead Can Dance, Egypt, Espy Hotel, handwriting, house guest, Interview with the Vampire, late night contemplation, Meme, Miss Cleopatra the Cat, pyramids of Giza, Rockwiz, snoring, True Blood, vampires, whoosh, Yulunga

Its been busy over here in Svasti-land, where yoga teacher training swallows my Saturdays whole (takes the rest of the week to digest every succulent morsel), and a family visit on Sunday which should’ve taken up only 65% of my waking day instead took the whole dang thing (result of train break downs and seemingly generous offer of a ride from parental unit, but oh, we’ll drop you and your bike off at a train station as close as possible to us and as far as possible from your place). Its my fault, I shouldn’t have assumed they’d do otherwise.

Yup, the weekend went whoosh!

Consequently, not much writing was done, even though on Friday my wonderful-super-special-lotus-book arrived (from the marvellous Karin). I love it!! And to introduce it to its new home, I’ll take it sightseeing (for inspiration) and some happy snaps of my little treasure seeing some of the landmarks of Melbourne-town.

Here it is this morning, catching a tram to work with me… more photos to come (in another post)!

(You can click on all pics to enlarge)

It was rather foggy this morning

And… for the next week I have a house guest! He’s the 23 year old son of one of my fellow yoginis. In fact, she and I shared a bamboo hut together for four weeks in Thailand last year where I inflicted her with my snoring on a nightly basis, poor thing. Maybe sending me her son is payback?

Nah! 😉

He’s here from Brisbane (major climate difference to deal with) doing some work experience in sound engineering, interning with the Guy in Charge of Sound for Rockwiz – which is filmed in the iconic and handily positioned Espy Hotel.

Lucky thing!

He arrived Monday night, so there’s been plenty of good hostess duties going on and yup, not much time for writing (except when I’m at work where there’s little else to do! Haha…)

Blog lurvvvve

Seems I’ve won the jackpot of blogger-friend love, with BlissChick, Brooks & Linda-Sama all listing me as fellow blog award folks for the exact same award!

This is it!

Personally, I think that’s kinda cool to be triple tagged. They’re all very special chicks, so I am honoured!

And I also think that given this warm three-sided embrace (nothing dirty here folks, move along!) I should respond. But hey, you’re only getting one lot of seven things from me.

Tidbits about me I haven’t told you before (I think) x7

1. Call it the curse of being taught cursive writing in primary school, but I have two types of “E”, “s” and “F/f” that I produce in my handwriting. I never know which one I’m going to use until it arises. This is what they look like…

Notice the variations on F, S and E! (This is really how I write)

2. Sunday night when I really needed some sleep, instead I was kept wide awake with contemplations on the nature of fire, fiery natures, anger and sex. All topics I’m chewing on at present. There might be a post or two in there somewhere and I’ll share with y’all sometime (perhaps).

3. I’ve got a bit of a thing for vampires and own the entire series of both Buffy and Angel on DVD. Plus season one of True Blood (awesome show). I dream of them every now and then, and it’s always an adventure.

4. I was once stood on by a very cranky horse. While I was on holiday in Egypt, believe it or not. We were planning a jaunt around the pyramids of Giza – my boyfriend on a camel and me on a horse. I’d been persuaded this particular horse was okay to ride even though I really didn’t think he was. So we start riding and the horse was definitely not okay. He veered away from where we were meant to be going, wouldn’t respond to riding commands, dumped me in a puddle and came back around to stand on my left inner thigh. For the rest of the trip, I had an enormous bruise which was a little tough to explain at the swimming pool!

5. My very first ever belly dance performance was held as part of a very fun dress up night one of my ex-boyfriends and I organised when the movie Interview with the Vampire premiered (see point 3). We organised approximately forty people to head to the movie all dressed up like vampires, arriving in style in stretch limos.

Yes, I'm in this photo somewhere...

After the movie we wandered a few blocks from the city to Darlinghurst. There, we’d booked out the entire upstairs area of a fantastic Indian restaurant in a gothic styled building. A friend brought an antique coffin (of course) as a center piece.

A coffin, candelabra & plenty of gothicness

We had a quartet of violinists (buskers we’d met on the street) playing as people arrived. And my debut bellydance performance was there, among that environment. I danced to one of my favourite tunes, Yulunga by Dead Can Dance, and I absolutely loved it!

That's me with the veil!

6. As a result of much dancing, performing and teaching others, I developed a theory about human movement (I later realised its not an original observation at all – just tapping into existing knowledge in the world). Its especially clear when people dance – most people either move with their head/neck/genitals/limbs only, or head and heart plus limbs/genitals. Very few people move with their whole body, or sense their lower torso. Even fewer have the ability to isolate the muscles in this area.

Its no coincidence that the lower torso is where we store suppressed emotions and fears. They live in the body until we work with them, and/or they make us sick. Bellydancing especially is great for liberating that part of the body and its one of the reasons I like teaching men as well as women to shake their thang.

I also firmly believe that all kids should be taught to dance and learn at a young age so they avoid feeling self-conscious.

7. Last week Miss Cleopatra (Cleo) the Cat decided it was a good time for a dose of cat flu. Which caused a lot of worry and necessitated a trip to the vet. The vet of course, informed me she also needs approximately $500 worth of dental work in the next couple of months. Sigh.

Payin’ it forward…

You’re also meant to pass this on to seven other people. For the first time in ages, I’m playing along. But only coz there’s some people I’d like to learn a little more about…

• Holly from Earth to Holly
• Christa from Giggle On!
• Amanda from Anthroyogini
• Mama Dharma
• Clinically Clueless
• Caroline of Laughing Yogini
• Jaliya of A Post-Cynical Seer (and a couple of other blogs too)

~Svasti