I kicked my own Asana
Deepest Winter Wrap-Up Round - ReBirth, Re-Emergence
Doing this wrap-up round of the Deepest Winter practice with the self that recorded it 10 years ago made me realize why friends and family have dubbed time with me as ‘Billington’s Bootcamp’! And while the Northern Hemisphere weather has already moved along into First Spring (and I’ll be posting some of those practices soon), I still wanted to share this longer crown-chakra-based session with you.
If you’ve received recent posts from me, you’ll know that I am now re-leasing MYOGA Seasons here and on the MYOGA YouTube channel so they are freely available. Although I attempt to send them in the timing they’re intended to be done, so they align with the external seasons, the truth is everything is out of whack isn’t it? Including the Seasons.
So any practice done at any time will hold gold for you, I’m sure of that.
Well, that is, if you can get through all the detritus!
One of the advantages of practicing online is that you can do it alone where no one will see the shape you’re in, IF you have the discipline to show up and stick it out.
I was delighted not to have anyone witness the mess I made doing this practice! Literally, I was snotting, belching, off-key-sounding, groaning, yawning, snoring, Kali-tongue-mudra-ing, and at one point I even talked back to my online-yoga-teacher-self with a loud, “No!” in protesting the thing “she” (the old me) said we’d do next.
The only grotesquerie left out was drooling!
I know, I’m not really selling it, am I?!
But let’s be honest, to get to a clear place, we have to be willing to face the gunk. To clean the cupboard, we have to pull everything out and make a mess first (very Virgo there, clearing the chaff from the nutritive wheat).
For me, astrologically, the recent Mars Retrograde has been riding through my 8th House of ‘other people’s stuff’ and bringing up issues of past life grief, death, debt and unresolvedness (whether from this life’s many incarnations of self, or actual past lives).
Fun stuff eh?!
But then, that’s winter for you. It’s a great time to cultivate the skill of letting-go.
For it takes many deaths to be ReBorn.
Ixion is the theme of today, as I write, and also a mascot, of sorts, for examining how well we do with the second chances we’re given. As it happens (and I appreciate it happening since it’s affirming), what I see is what I get.
These past 6 weeks at DPU have involved exploration of the wild-child seeker consciousness of lawless Ixion. The best place to see that is in myself, who I would hope to know well. If I don’t, then who else will go to the trouble?! And/also I’ve been imagining karmic past lives to help me better navigate the Ixionic characters I’ve encountered in this life.
While I aim to work at a more aware level of consciousness with this energy of ‘questioning whether the rules we’re playing by are the right ones’, I certainly still feel lower level expressions of it in myself—such as breaking unspoken rules just because I think I can get away with it. I’d say we’re all seeing Ixion in his lower level expression in the wider world around us, even if we’re not all yet brave enough to admit as much about ourselves. So much easier to point a finger…
Now, let’s take that big thought and match it to this season of dying down. Then carry that onwards to learning how to rise up again, while allowing the dying down to influence the ways and means of being reborn and re-emergence.
Hopefully without emergency.
Rumi may help us here, as he does in the resting phase of this practice with the poem Quietness:
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’re covered with thick cloud.
Slide out the side.
Die, and be quiet.
Quietness is the surest sign that you’ve died.
Your old life was a frantic running from silence.
The speechless full moon comes out now.
Not only do we explore what it means to embody Ouroborus in this session, we also make Sacred Geometry manifest in our forms.
The Square is evident in the video screenshot below. Over this practice we put ourselves into this angle in so many different iterations and relationships to gravity. It’s fun to see how the same right angle in the body can feel so different, depending on what’s on the Earth and what’s rising up from our mother/mater/matter.
Which brings me the Cross of Matter that is evident in our bodies through the High Lunges w/Wings and also in the Circuit where we reposition in space. In that maneuver we might learn, in our bones, that,
“No matter where you go, there you are.”
Long-ass holds also help us really know in our muscles what it means to be made of mass, matter, mater, mother.
The rigour here is in embodying the geometry over time.
It’s easy to pop in and out of poses! But to stay
and refine
and re-articulate
and self-actualize (Self actual eyes)
requires sticktoitiveness that ‘brings spirit into matter’.
Cue Quaoar, the other dwarf planet we’re exploring these weeks. We feel their energy in consistency of beat and steadiness of song that permeates even the dying down stages of our circuit (on the mat and in life-living-dying-rebirth).
The only way we can let go. Is if we trust.
In what, is up to you, but I trust it’s something bigger than human fallacy and short-sightedness. We humans are too young to know. We must look to the other critters who know
cycles, spirals, circles, circuits, seals
what is all this?
seems awareness and acceptance of whatever it is, is wisdom
In Maha Mudra, the great seal or circuit, we come to know interconnectivity and the power of the Triangle as well as the circle, oval, spiral…
Learning to let go into laughter is aided by the riDICKulousness of LDDB (last dance of the dying bug). The letting go here requires the willingness to be absurd that is often, sadly, only found in those “who don’t know any better”.
The innocent, innocenti. Just last week I had the best session of LDDB in all my years of leading it with a group of university students from Hong Kong at their week in Wild Mountains, where I’ve been volunteering. I couldn’t have stopped them laughing if I tried. I loved their willingness to persist in play.
Such power in light that stays light even in the face of not-light.
And so may you.
