be all your infinite selves: the vajra cross
One thing you learn if you have a consistent yoga practice is how often your body and emotions shift in a given twenty-four hours.
Saturday, Sunday and Monday when I attended Marco Rojas’ yoga classes I was ecstatic to discover my synchronized breathing with the yoga postures. I welcomed a new strength in my flexibility which felt beyond ‘natural’: it was grounded, not merely stretchy.
Tuesday there is no yoga class.
Wednesday around 2:oo p.m. I began sensing this tightness shoot up and around like a grapevine hugging my legs. My adductor group of muscles around the hips coiled into an unexpected stiffness within a span of an hour. Around 3:oo p.m. I contained a completely different set of emotions within than prior to 2:oo p.m. I had no desire to move let alone attend Marco’s class in the evening. I still don’t know from where I dug the motivation but I made it to the mat.
Marco, as those who “only go to him” know and those who have been reading about him realize, takes a moment to assess the ‘energy’ of the class and then offers us some prescribed antidote to deconstruct and literally resurrect.
I was beyond annoyed with myself. I had gone from feeling like a ballerina who could float in air to a dilapidated statute that could barely walk within a span of two hours. This was at the physical level. Mentally I wanted to set fire to everything I had ever written. Emotionally I wanted to run away from NYC to….anywhere. I wanted texts and phone calls to stop coming my way yet I found myself incapable of ignoring them because only a few hours ago I was the most available and kind person.
I have had a practice long enough to know that emotions come and go. Attaching any identity to such passing emotions is dangerous. They are clouds passing, you wish it would just pour but your sky isn’t quite that full either. I just didn’t want to experience any of it. After all, who doesn’t like to feel like he or she has the reigns of sunshine in his or her control?
As soon as Marco spoke I knew he knew and we were going to work on hips.
It took FORTY-FIVE minutes of flowing through the dynamic poses to literally move ‘stuck’ energy. The next forty-five minutes felt a bit more ‘open’. Between sweat and unexpected tears there was release into some space that could contain whatever was going on. Something bigger than my body.
Marco’s words reverberated throughout the entire class: we have to evolve beyond our parents’; it doesn’t mean we don’t love them or haven’t forgiven them. The sun channel is said to govern our thought processes, while the moon channel governs our emotions. I don’t even know which side is which during class given my delirious state. The aforementioned channels also govern our attachments to our parents.
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Marco’s yoga can’t be defined: his training is in Ashtanga but then he learned Iyengar (focus on alignment) and the classes are labeled “Vinaysa” (flow). He holds poses longer than Ashtanga so we can learn alignment. No poses are that advanced; we die in the basics. He is not afraid to speak during class. He often says, “Yes, I want you to die.” He also says, “We can’t bring new imprints unless we get the old imprints out of the body; we have to literally squeeze old imprints out as regularly as possible.”
All the reasons that I and others are “regular” Marco students are exactly the same reasons others don’t like him. He makes us laugh hysterically in class (he can read our minds and speaks as if reading a teleprompter: “oh God. Don’t come assist me, please! Not me!”) and also walks away with a smile when tears can no longer remain inside the body’s memory. He is politically incorrect and makes several references to what is going on in the world and our attachments to the material things that bring us more anxiety than joy. He brings all of himself to us so we can be a little less afraid to let ourselves go beyond.
After Wednesday’s class he reminded us that there would be a guest speaker on Thursday, today, and that he highly recommends we attend. Now Marco seldom, if ever, promotes anyone, including his own workshops. “If you don’t know who Robert Thurman is you need to at least hear him speak once, and if you know who he is, I know you will be here to hear him Thursday like me,” Marco said.
I did not know who Robert Thurman was and because I trust Marco and also know how he hardly ever insists we do anything other than practice yoga regularly I decided to attend Robert Thurman’s lecture tonight at my yoga studio. When I arrived there I learned that Robert Thurman was actress Uma Thurman’s father and the first American Buddhist monk of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition.
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In the small profile space of my twitter account it says: be all your infinite selves. I have been meaning to expand on this for quite some time and today after hearing Robert Thurman speak I can finally articulate it beyond five words.
Robert Thurman began by asking us if any of us knew what the Vajara symbol meant. I couldn’t believe it: not being a formal Buddhist student I could recall the Vajara symbol!
My brother Zain had brought back this symbol for me from his trip in Nepal in July of 2009. He had enrolled in some Buddhist and meditation studies course through Berkley which took him to Nepal. Zain had shared with me:
It is called Dorje in Tibetan, Vajra in Sanskrit. It has many meanings….as a Thunderbolt, or Diamond, and can represent Compassion, Indestructibility, or the Power of Emptiness; that which cuts through everything else but cannot be cut itself. A great seal of bliss and emptiness — the ultimate symbol of enlightenment.
The Vajra Cross
Before time began, there was only darkness and the emptiness that is the Void. A gentle wind arose from the four directions that, over time, filled the Void. It began to grow in power until, after eons had passed, the wind coalesced into a substance so thick, so heavy, so solid, so immutable that it formed Dorje Gyatram, the vajra cross that is the basis of the physical universe.
The double dorje (visvavajra) is also associated with Amogasiddhi (Tibetan: Donyo drupa), who is the Karma family buddha whose name means Unfailing Accomplishment. His activity transmutes the klesha or imperfection of jealousy. His activity is the subtle one of diminishing attachment. He is green in color, his left hand rests in his lap in the mudra of equanimity and his right at chest level palm outwards in the “granting protection” or “not to fear” gesture. His consort is Damtsig Dolma, Green Tara.
The vishvavajra, (vishwa or vishva is Sanskrit for world with the connotation of “the universe as we experience it,” and it means the double dorje or crossed dorjes. It stands for the stability or foundation of the physical world. This is a mark often used as a seal or stamp and may be found impressed or incised on the plate at the base of a statue that protects and keeps prayers/relics inside. It is also the emblem of Buddhist deities whose influence encourages immoveable determination.
I was one of the few people who raised their hand; I was (sort of) familiar with the vajra cross.
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My notes as Robert Thurman spoke:
Anything will dissolve entirely under analysis. But it doesn’t dissolve into nothing because nothing is nothing.
There are people who want to get out everything by dying without realizing dying to “get out” actually involves conscious effort.
There are many things we have seen that we haven’t noticed.
Mystics tend to get attached to lazy, easy “one-ness” that results from “no body is here equals we are one.” Yet when you choose to come out of that mystic state you realize: everyone is still there. It is a lazy dualistic non-dualism.
It doesn’t take a Buddha to notice we are suffering. You are correct that you think you are real: but the problem is you think you are really real. Most suffering comes from the unrealistic expectation from the world that you are somehow apart and or above the others in the Universe.
If there is suffering there is a cause for suffering and if there is a cause then there is its antidote: education, in this instance it is a three-fold education which involves ethics, meditation, and wisdom. But wisdom can’t be achieved in some vacuum. You can’t understand reality by some manipulation theory apart from from it. But you can be understanding. In order to understand you have to let go of your attachment to identities that come and go.
Yoga simply means “to yoke,” which is to connect, a dialogue between mind and body, and an effort to integrate our dual nature.
You can train yourself to dream so you know you are dreaming to find your vajara body.
The point? The point is to become a conscious dream-er, a conscious live-er, a conscious die-er, a conscious reborn-er…
This mad search for the “real” you…as if there is a bar code that can scan the real you. There are many real yous.
Yes, it is unstable…but what other way is real? You go in and out of it and it’s okay… it is in this way you are ultimately creating yourself since there is no rigid self that you are attached to….
You are your associates, friends, and all that you are ‘vibed’ on and along: there is no non-connected piece of you.
What if we can’t really get away from each other…what if we are stuck here eternally until we understand otherwise? Don’t you want to figure out a different way of being if that is the case?
Enlightenment is not disappearing. Being aware is enlightenment. And most of us would never give ourselves the credit that we are indeed that aware that might be “enlightened” already as if that enlightenment is to happen some other time than ‘now.’
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The greatest thing about being a human being is that we are capable of anything. Murder to love. We are really malleable.
My late literature professor, mentor and friend Bud would always say: “There is no absolute except there is no absolute. Maybe love. If you asked me what color is water, Annie, I would say probably blue.”
It would take a law professor (still friend and mentor) to tell me: there is absolutely nothing wrong with you for feeling all that you feel in a span of a few hours. You are just floating on a different pace.
It would take Marco Rojas to teach me how to float: breath.
Nothing is nothing.
Most of us are able to tap into glimpses of this essence, this vajra light, every now and then.
Integration then is not a triumph over one self over another self but finding a way to consciously move between sleeping, waking, dreaming… remembering… forgetting…remembering…
I end with Robert Thurman’s words:
Listen, if you were going on a vacation to a nice island, I am sure you would make a reservation at a nice hotel, buy a plane ticket in advance, decide what to pack, have enough cash etc. Basically you would prepare, right? So how can you tell me that at the airport of death you are willing to fly anywhere in any plane without any preparation? There is nothing mystical about an after-life or a future-life. It is part of your common sense map right now. Freedom from your internal monologue is the road. You are a lot less confused now than when you were a crocodile or some other creature that wouldn’t think twice before attacking a pregnant zebra just because it was hungry where as a non-pregnant zebra would have done just fine.
It’s isn’t about why or who did this to us? It is about how many of us have this privilege to experience freedom and pass it on? The ultimate goal is to unify.
The point, if there is any, is liberation as soon as you can attempt it and now is your opportunity to attempt it.
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Be all your infinite selves. It’s okay.
~a.q.s.
Wow… what a trip Annie !
these past 3 weeks have been an intense ride for me.. from wanting to run away from everything to find true quiet…to finding out my little sister.. with whom I have a very strained relationship.. is dying of a rare leukemia… and it of course causing me to think alot of death…
your words have added to the centreing of these past few days.. thankyou..
letting the emotions of these skies flow by
I remember an interview Robert Thurman gave a few years ago about his journey to hike around Mount Kailash (described in his book, “Circling the Sacred Mountain”). As I recall, it was both an ultimate yoga practice for him and the struggle with personal physical obstacles. But he might be one of the first to agree that everyone’s Mount Kailash will be different–not everyone could or should climb mountains in the Himalayas, but everyone who undertakes a serious yoga practice or any serious practice of personal transformation will run into some pretty tall obstacle! Probably more than one. Circling around it, we see it from all angles and also have time to see ourselves and feel ourselves slow into a different rhythm.
Your account is such a pure witness. You describe what you experienced, how you felt, without too many layers of interpretation, yet you can move from this into sharing the words and ideas distilled from listening to Thurman’s talk, and they fit and inform what came before.
I will take away, and learn the most from your statement:
“Integration then is not a triumph [of] one self over another self but finding a way to consciously move between sleeping, waking, dreaming… remembering… forgetting…remembering…”
~lucy