Guruvir

So, it has been a while since I have posted anything, and I could beat myself up about it, but I’m not going to. I was on a goat’s milk fast, and I don’t believe in writer’s block. As I say with this kind of creative endeavor, as with transformation, and all about-to-be-born things: sometimes, you just have to wait while it incubates.

What has been on my mind for the last month, is how to make this site a sacred site. By which I mean: first, is it possible for a website to hold some kind of sacred energy? second, can you decide to put that energy there, or do the gods just strike you with it like a flower on a million lilly pads? third, what does one do to make a sacred (web)site?

After much thought, some trips to the library, meditation and so on, I have decided that it is possible. This kind of sacred site though wouldn’t be like other sites, where upon entering you feel the vastness of the temple, the hours of prayer hanging in the air, the generations of devotion misting over your eyes. Those experiences are direct, un-mediated, we can say. You enter the temple and boom! You touch the stone and wham! — currents of existence rush from where they are being held, right into you.

I can’t have you touch my web-page you’ll get your fingerprints all over it. Moreover, I’m not really sure that there is an actual “page” anywhere to touch. I mean I know how the website happened: Wordpress, my friend Han giving me detailed explanations of how to upload content onto her beautiful design (www.yuindustries.com), me uploading content and watching it magically appear on the Internet. But where is it really? Wordpress? guruvir.com? the files on my computer? the window on your computer? or, the window on your computer? OR, the window on your computer? Well, you get it. I would say its reflection is in all of these places, like a hall of mirrors, but the thing itself is somewhere else entirely.

The thing itself: What I mean by “the thing itself” is the energetic pulse of the website, because surely it has one. Where is that? Is it in me? I don’t really think so. My sense is that this website has a pulse somewhere beyond me, bigger than me, including all of you in some kind of internet synergy. We constitute the pulse.

So, if there is a pulse, would that pulse be more of a pulse if it had a home in the physical world. Like some websites have offices where they are run with lots of people bustling around. Others are scattered between many people, in their homes, in coffee shops typing away. Others hold the energy of a particular group: astronauts, rare flower enthusiasts, cupcake makers.

What I know is that this site is definitely happening in my room as I type and mull about what I will type, and in your space as you read it, and so maybe we are a group? Kundalini yogis? People who know me? My mom? But not everyone reading does Kundalini yoga or knows me, my mom fits both. Instead, there is something more common between all of us, maybe we are all people on a path, on any path, at many stages of awareness, all seeking to do this spiritual thing, with cell phones and laptops and (shhh…coffee). Maybe this can be a modern sacred site, where all of those things can be allowed, celebrated, and engaged as pieces of our collective transformation.

So we all hold the pulse.

But still I yearn to locate it, to give it a physical home.

COMING SOON: how to initiate a sacred internet site? can you? a virtual altar?

Satsumi tangerines can be misleading. You pick one up and it is mushy, it is dirty and it is tiny. What could be inside?

After inspecting a large number of these tangerines at the Park Slope Food Coop I have found that the mushier, the dirtier, and the most unappealing of these tangerines is usually the most tasty. I’m sure this isn’t news to most readers, but these tangerines contain one of the secrets of transformation: a rotting outside doesn’t mean you are rotten inside.

Let me explain: as you move along your spiritual path, things will come up. By things I mean the ugly stuff, that no one advertises when they tell you to come to a yoga class or a meditation session.

It never says:

7pm kundalini yoga and meditation
with ample opportunity to CRY
get ANGRY
and even NEGATIVE: ROAR.

No, instead we are told we will be uplifted, energized and transformed. That can be true.

But there is also the ugly peel of transformation. It is part of being on a spiritual path and yet it gets little air time.

True, advertising these aspects wouldn’t be a big draw, except to me. I look for things that will push me to cry, because I have learned that going through this stuff is crucial, and I’m totally fine with breaking down in the middle of a yoga studio after class. Hundreds of people have seen me cry.

I share that because sometimes people get discouraged. They are doing all this yoga and they start feeling worse instead of better. And then they start feeling a lot worse because they want to cry and their friends don’t understand why and they feel isolated and so on. But I say, that’s how you know you are on the right track. Transformation is great but it usually comes with a lot of crap. So in case you haven’t gotten there yet let me tell you that you will: cry, scream, forget why you started, feel like it might never end, and want to throw a tangerine at someone. But there is a sweet sweet fruit just beyond that ugly peel. It will fall away, and you will taste something so delicious, like a satsumi tangerine, that you can’t even believe it was already in you.

If: you are someone with your finger stuck in a mushy rotten peel (Go You!), you probably are scowling at this lame little article about tangerines and crying, and that’s fine with me. Just go ahead with it, I support you. In fact you are welcome to dump some of your negativity into the comments for this website. Maybe I’ll read it.

So: remember that transformation is a process and embrace it. It is the only way to go through the ugly peel that’s keeping you from being you.

For a look at some secular support of crying please visit: www.whocriedthemost.com

There are those days where you wake and it’s just not going to happen: you are late, you are tired, you are grumpy, and most, you are tired of this incarnation. So you brush your teeth and instead of sitting down to meditate and find silence and bliss and peace, you just eat your favorite breakfast or you down a cup of coffee, and then you leave. “I’m not going to meditate this morning,” you say to yourself as you walk outside. And that’s okay because you do it every other morning, except the mornings you don’t.

So you get to the subway where upon entering a stuffy little car filled with people and all their morning grumpiness you wish you had found that silence, because even those ear buds stuck as close to your brain as you can manage, are not going to keep you in a happy place. What do you do?

What do I do?

I slowly rescroll my ipod to something more meditative: some kirtan that I can’t resist. I strategically wait for a seat and then I begin to let myself go to my place. I close my eyes, breathe deep the scent of coffee, feel the rumble of existence beneath me and begin to sway my head ever so slightly…aah meditative bliss.

Now: this is also a good chance to check-in with the “progress” of my meditation practice. Of course, I’m not doing that because I’m meditating, but if I were to take a brief moment and consciously stop meditating, I would notice, that I had been meditating, and had

1. Forgotten I was on a subway which means that I had gone deep.
2. Did not feel the stares of people, who upon opening my eyes ever so slightly, I could see looking my way because…
3. I had gone so deeply, that I began chanting under my breath and…
4. Upon realizing all of these things, was not embarassed and did not care one single bit, which means that the years of social conditioning are finally coming undone.

Noting my progress, I close my eyes again and return to the silence. Keep Reading »