Deepest Winter Round 3 - Dropping Down into Death

MYOGA Seasons for Subscribers

In the last analysis, it is our conception of death that decides the answers to all the questions that life puts to us. ~Dag Hammarskjöld

How did a year already go by since he died?

Sheesh, that’s a big statement. Death is a difficult word and an even more difficult reality to grasp. So often we are deadened by the loss of our loved ones. Is it possible to honor them by living their best qualities while we’re still alive? Grief balanced with gratitude.

Even as much as I have experienced the deaths of others, and the deaths of my own identities or ways of being, and have shared these sorts of explorations of dying and death with folks for more than a decade, I still balk at the idea of dying. How can the ego contemplate the annihilation of itself? How is it possible that this body will stop one day?

So, what is your relationship to death? What does letting go and accepting what-is feel like in your bones, in your brain, in your breath, in your heart?

Here’s a MYOGA Restores practice in which to explore those questions.

Ages ago, it seems (but was only 2008 when I launched the Wellington studio), there was a series of photos going around that some students found amusing to send to me. To be honest, I didn’t find it funny at the time. To me, it spoke more to the challenges I faced as a “yoga missionary” in a culture of binge drinkers and folks still asking if yoga was a cult.

As you can see, the passed-out drunk men in the right hand columns have been photographed in the equivalent of yoga poses. Their bodies are unlikely to have been able (or willing) to assume these poses while sober. Yet when filled with the spirit of spirits they had no choice but to surrender.

This is the trick of these tricky poses in Round 3. We cultivate a practice of consciously, in all soberness, surrendering, and we do this by allowing ourselves to be filled with Spirit.

One way that I countered the concern that greeted me in the early days of yoga, i.e. - that it was a cult - was to define Spirit, the word that so many seemed to have an allergic reaction to. Spirit, from spiritus meaning breath (of god), is nothing more esoteric than how fully one is breathing into each moment. How in-spired are you?

Here’s a bit more on the question of how we connect to spirit (and addiction) from an article I wrote in 2012.

Surrender, in this instance, is not caving in. Rather, surrender is the skill of inner-caving.

It’s too easy to avoid what we’re actually doing. I know that sounds absurd, but it’s true that so many of us, so much of the time, are going through the motions. One of my main aims in teaching is to wake folks up and drive them home safely. Come home to yourSelf! It takes courage. Skillful surrender is not weak.

Our back body is considered the past. So to fold inwards or forwards, we need to re-lease the past held in our tissues. Re-lease from whatever is holding us back - the identities, relationships, habit patterns, traumas, you name it.

A key to liberation is loosening the shackles that you can claim.

So, once again, acceptance is required. Until we accept we have baggage, we can’t choose to re-lease it. Until we own up to the tightness, the resistance, the holding patterns, we can’t fly free or forward fold with any ease.

We jump right into our quicker circuit at the start so I hope you did Round 2 enough times that you’ll be able to find the precision at-speed in this Round! If you are in Deepest Winter, please be sure you are warm.

Keep the heat and vitality of holding yourself up off the ground even as we come down. It’s too easy sink down. Instead we want to leverage down into the ground in order to rise up and out in Paschimottasana, Maha Mudra and Bound Angle.

With each of these 3 forward folds, we establish the Sa-Ta-Na-Ma cycle from Kirtan Kriya, but expressed with our whole bodies.

First, we find how to sit tall and experience Existence with Sa.

Then, we inhabit the is-ness of Existence with our own individuated biz-ness by undulating the spine on the breath with Ta.

Next, we apply the skill of releasing from the doing by letting the upper body fold over the lower body, as we learn how to die down with Na.

Like the Oroboros’s head reaching its tail, we bridge the liminal space between the death of form and the fullness of existence by re-engaging and coming back to life out of the void with Ma, the universal sound of mother, of rebirth.

I started writing this on the Leo full moon, which made sharing the featured poem all the more fitting:

Inside this new love, die.

Your way begins on the other side.

Become the sky.

Take an axe to the prison wall.

Escape.

Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.

Do it now.

You are covered with thick cloud.

Slide out the side. Die,

and be quiet. Quietness is the surest sign

that you have died.

Your old life was a frantic running

from silence.

The speechless full moon

comes out now. 

~Rumi