By Mia Velez

Last Friday, I attended the New Beginnings Writing Group with Susan Ford, and it inspired me to write this blog!  I like to write.  It sorts out ideas floating in my mind.  When I write, I can complete my thoughts without interruption and be thorough with/in my expression.  I can open into new depths of ideas that I wouldn’t have reached without writing them down.  Even though the process is wrought with all sorts of obstacles; –  time, focus, grammar rules, etc. – it is always rewarding to finish a piece.  Over the last two years however, I had not finished one.  I had pages of half finished articles.  Actually, “half-written” would have been an accomplishment.  It was more like a smattering of words.

Writing had started to feel like a source of anxiety.  I don’t know when that had started, but I could figure out why:  I want to be a writer.  There, I’ve said it!  Even as I wrote that last sentence, I could feel anxiety and intimidation lurking in my psyche.  Can I really do it?

The first thing I did was tell someone.  So I could hear myself say it out loud, and also to see the reaction of the other person.  The next thing, by recommendation of a friend, was to look for a writing group.  And what a coincidence, IYI was offering one!

I met Susan Ford when she assisted at my teacher training.  She was supportive, kind and always had the right things to say to turn a situation around.  She was just the same leading the writing group.  We did some writing exercises – something I had never done before.  I felt a little silly doing them sometimes, but I was trusting the process.  After all, I was the one who was intimidated by writing.  After each exercise, we wrote, and the block that often stood in the way of my words disappeared.  Sure my first assignment was clunky, but with each new exercise, the words started a flow.

I’d like to share one of the pieces I produced at the workshop.  I’m really happy that I went and I am excited to return..hoping to see the friendly faces that were there.  Certainly, it does feel like a new beginning.

Susan chose a poem by W.S Merwin, Black Cherries, a snapshot of time for the author.  Goldfinches fluttering, the petals on the ground, the shadows of the day as he eats his cherries.

“Remember this,” he says.

The writing prompt asked: What does the poem evoke?

I think W.S Merwin might be letting on how satisfied he is with his life.  Not just at that moment, but that particular period of his life when he wrote the poem.  Appreciating the details of his surroundings like they are time capsules or landmarks of his whole human experience at the time of its writing.

I too, have intentionally created landmarks of time when I take in the moment to “remember this.”  Everything is framed to be remembered:  the lines on the floor, the light resting on objects just so, and more importantly how I’m oriented in this particular moment of life:

A six year old racing with the moon.

A teenager outsmarting god.

An exhausted young mother wrestling with her toddler.

I remember and become that person again.

Please join Mia on Wednesdays for her online Mixed Level Hatha class, Wednesdays at 7:30 AM – 8:30 AM PT

And you can also join Susan Ford’s monthly, online workshops: New Beginnings Writing Group on Fri. May 13 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm PDT. This

Mia Velez entered the Integral Yoga Sangha in 2016 through the kitchen by helping to cook Thursday community lunches and silent retreat meals. In 2018 she certified as an Integral Yoga teacher to learn more of the IYI approach and be part of the lineage. Mia is a disciple of the Moy Yat Ving Tsun Kung Fu lineage and is highly influenced by her martial arts training. After completing her first 200 hour teacher training in 2008, she began to see undeniable parallel in Yoga and Kung Fu. When she began teaching Kung Fu in 2014, she incorporated Yoga insight and principles in her classes. Her goal in teaching is to connect with the students and to facilitate a safe space for exploration and self inquiry. Yoga and Kung Fu is integrated into her daily life as a mother, a preschool teacher, and an advocate for gender, race and class equality through multiple non-profits groups.

Mia is also a trainer for the IYISF 200-Hour BIPOC Yoga Teacher Training. Please read more on our website to learn about, apply or support this scholarship based training. This training is an effort toward dismantling the structural and institutional racism that exists in wellness communities, and to increase diverse representation in Yoga. If you are BIPOC and would like to become a certified Yoga instructor, we encourage you to apply today!

by Swami Vimalananda

This is the second of three articles on Kriya Yoga

Svadhaya: Sacred study of The Divine through scripture, nature, and introspection

       The Secret Power of Yoga by Nischala Joy Devi

Study, focusing on introspection, reminds us of our goal of peace, happiness and unconditional love, and the pathways to obtaining our goal.

To begin, we must be able to observe and acknowledge our ego attachments.  Then, we can cultivate the ability to step back and analyze what our attachments are.  Over time, we replace our attachments with selflessness.

As we engage in introspection we begin to observe our inner peace.  As Sri Gurudev stated, “Whatever the thought is, if there is no selfishness behind it, it can never really bring pain to the person concerned. The result is neither pain nor pleasure, but peace. Seeing this truth, we should analyze all our motives and try to cultivate selfless thoughts. That is our first and foremost duty.”

It is the letting go of the delusion that happiness is found somewhere in the world. The letting go creates space for us to step back from the fray, and then everything can become a study of why our peace is disturbed.   After completing several years of instruction on roleplaying from a therapist.  I remember when the therapist asked me, “Did you see that dynamic?” Roleplaying trains us to see people’s emotional dynamics.  But instead of observing the person from a place of peace, I went along on the person’s ride. I cannot tell you how many rides I have been on.

How do we step back? I feel that meditation is the most direct way of developing that practice. With concentrating on one thing and letting all the other thoughts go we begin to realize that we are not our thoughts. We learn that we have the capacity just to watch our thoughts go by without the need to hook on to any of them. We then can take this witness out into the world where we observe that we are independent and that our peace and happiness are not reliant on anything outside of ourselves. We are the source of our own peace and happiness. We discover that our peace and happiness can be maintained even with all the world’s dramas. As Sri Gurudev stated, it can be like watching a movie. We hiss at the villain, laugh with the clown, cry for the lost love of the heroine, feel all the emotions expressed in the movie. But when the movie ends, we get out of our seats and walk out of the theater, knowing it’s just a drama. We enjoy it as such.

As we step back we begin to realize that all the dramas can easily go on without us.  All those movies, poems, writings, songs, etc. lamenting love, clinging to the delusion that love and happiness can be found in the world.

Growing up, my father was distant, I remember very clearly trying to win my father’s love, feeling that, if I could, I would be happy. A relative let me see her therapist.  The therapist said to me, “First of all, no one ever takes my advice. But here it is – you are hitting your head against a stone wall, you will never feel loved by him. You also do not need his love to have a good life.”  I was about 12 or 13 years old when I was told that, I’d say, looking back, I was in my 30’s before I truly got the message.

I remember a skit on TV about four generations of men going to Hawaii together. On the last day one of the wives said “Let’s take a photo for a keepsake of having all four generations of men together.”  The men lined up from the youngest to the oldest. Just as the photo is being taken, the youngest looks to his father, the father looks to his father so on to the great grandfather, who is looking straight ahead oblivious to the desires of the other men in the family. With meditation and introspection, we can begin to observe that however convoluted it may appear, ultimately the reason for many of people’s interactions is just the desire to be happy and feel loved.

Usually, though, we feel caught up in the world’s interactions, as if we are standing close to a train going by. We see it as a blur of lights, different colors, experiencing a fierce wind and loud noise, causing us to feel imbalanced. As we step back, we see our peace is not contingent on the world’s interaction.  We see the train for what it is, the locomotive, the caboose, and everything in between, and we stay balanced.

With detachment from thinking that happiness and peace is found outside of ourselves we begin to see the causes and effects more clearly.  As Ram Das stated in a title of one of his books “It’s All Grist for the Mill”.  We observe everything as a learning situation to realize our own freedom from the world’s dramas.

With the practice of stepping back we begin to feel more grounded and centered. We are capable of meeting adversities with more ease. We realize we are independent from the world and that true happiness and peace have always been in our hearts. We see the world clearly, and because of our own stability we see how the soothing balm of love is the way to be of service to others; others who are finding their way to peace and happiness.

Please join Swami Vimalananda for Satsang: Interfaith Celebration of Easter and Passover, The Divine Mystery on Saturday, April 16 from 5:00 – 6:30 pm PDT. People of all faiths are welcome.

Swami Vimalananda Ma, RYT500, is an Integral Yoga sannyasi – monk. She has been involved with Integral Yoga since 1971 and Director of the San Francisco Integral Yoga Institute from 1992-2011. She specializes in teaching yoga philosophy and spiritual counseling.

by Prajna

About 25 years ago, I attended a daylong workshop on Compassion with Christina Feldman, a teacher from England. Although she teaches in the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness, Christina’s first Buddhist teachers had been from the Tibetan school, and the compassion practice she taught that day was from their tradition.

I don’t remember many details from the workshop, but I remember that for a whole day we listened to her teaching on the importance of compassion and we recited very simple phrases. Just as with traditional loving kindness practice, we started by bringing to mind someone we have real, uncomplicated appreciation for, a benefactor figure, then moving on to a friend, then to ourselves, on to a neutral person, and then a difficult person. We began the morning with a benefactor.

“Picture them old. Picture them sick. Picture them dying.”

That’s what I remember, because that’s what we did all day. We pictured people we held in gratitude and esteem, old, sick, dying. At some point we moved on to a dear friend. We pictured them old, we pictured them sick, we pictured them dying.

What arose in that day was a big ocean of compassion. Christina is an inspiring teacher, and the way she held that energy allowed us to do something that was really very difficult. We all know that we’re subject to sickness, old age and death, but we certainly don’t like to think about it. To sit with it soberly, with our hearts open, was asking a lot of ourselves. The day went on, contained and serious, meditating, listening to teachings and moving on to picture ourselves old, sick and dying, then to picture someone who we felt neutral about old, sick and dying. Finally at the end of the day, we chose a difficult person.

I chose someone who had really been kind of horrible to me for a sustained amount of time in a work situation, someone who had caused quite a bit of difficulty for me. I knew that she was in a bad home situation, being hit by her partner, and that she was not at the top of the heap at work, but she had been in a more valued position than I was in that heap and had made a part of my life very unpleasant. To even hold her in my heart was strained, but there we were, a room of a hundred or more people on a gray weekend, picturing people old, sick and dying, and once I’d done that with the difficult person, any hard feelings I’d held onto for her were well and truly gone.

Forgiveness and compassion ask us to remember that, whatever someone has done, they’re still a creature pretty much like us, subject to old age, sickness and death. The Catholic church has a view I like to recall, although I’m probably paraphrasing incorrectly, ‘You may not be able to forgive the sin, but forgive the sinner.”

When the workshop finished, at the end of an eight hour day, as I staggered out to the parking lot, I was actually talking to myself. I had worked very hard, opening to things I would have normally avoided and resisted. I was exhausted and I was very grateful for Christina’s teaching.

I saw my difficult person one more time. I said hello to her in a book store not long after the workshop and didn’t feel anything but a big clarity and the quiet knowing of it. But a few months after that, when someone told me that my former difficult person had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, my initial response was the shock and sadness you would feel for anyone, followed by a huge welling up of gratitude for the fact that I didn’t bear her any ill will.

It was a big lesson for me. We don’t forgive necessarily for the sake of the person who hurt us. We forgive for our own sake and for the world’s. And the world includes that person.

I only pull those particular compassion phrases out now on special occasion, for when I really need them, if my heart doesn’t want to budge. But I’ve worked frequently with formal forgiveness phrases since that time. I don’t remember exactly where they came from in the Buddhist tradition, but here they are. I sometimes will start a meditation with them. They’ve been valuable to me.

If anyone has hurt me,

Advertently or inadvertently, by thought, word or deed,

May I forgive them now, to the full extent that I am able.

And if I’m unable to forgive, or to forgive completely,

May it be my intention, my desire, to do so,

For my benefit, for their benefit, and for the benefit of all beings.

And if I have ever hurt anyone,

Advertently or inadvertently, by thought, word or deed,

I humbly ask their forgiveness now, to the full extent that they are able.

And if they’re unable to forgive, or to forgive completely,

May it be their intention, their desire, to do so,

For their benefit, for my benefit, and for the benefit of all beings.

Prajna lives and practices at San Francisco IYI