Category: Yoga (Page 1 of 4)

The Mountain

If you follow the Christian calendar, this is the final call for the season of Advent, of waiting for God’s appearance. It comes about as we prepare to celebrate the birth of sweet baby Jesus in the manger, with a belief that God’s presence will return to earth.

This is perhaps my favorite of the theological concepts. Easter is the holiday of “redemption” but I find God’s action of taking human form far more redeeming to humankind. Surely, if God thought to don a suit of flesh and blood, we shouldn’t feel the shame in our shrouds. It’s been a long journey for me to reclaim this sense that our humanness is good, and nothing has helped me more than unrolling a yoga mat. That’s where I have strict orders to feel, to move, to be in this body previously declared as my foe.

Our bodies and our humanness were part of the original design, “and God saw that it was good.” The seeking of God – the less religious might call it Love or something less likely to invoke church trauma – is, I believe, a basic part of our human nature. The historian Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens that our species actually thrived beyond the capacity of other sapiens because of the evolved ability to tell a story. This quest for meaning and connection allowed us to become the dominating species of this earth, for both our benefit and, sometimes, bringing us to despair. Where can we find this sense of connection with the divine?

In ancient times, both before and during the time of Jesus, we find a belief and a practice of seeking out the divine by looking up – what writer Diana Butler Bass calls “the holy elevator” in her book, Grounded. People would climb the mountains to feel a holy presence, to the point where some mountains were seen as the literal dwelling places of God – and thus a building committee was formed, a capital campaign established, and walls went up for a new temple. People wanted access to the deities, so building a home atop the hill became common practice in many religions. The mountain was the place where humans met the divine. It was where heaven met earth.

Written into the narrative of the Jesus story (among other religious texts) is an arrival of the divine. But this version of divinity doesn’t land atop the mountain: this story begins in the basin, out back in the parking garage. And the divine meeting place doesn’t have gold-drenched altars; this holy collision comes with a sciatic nerve, a pre-frontal cortex, two lungs, a heart, and 10 toes. Being of Middle Eastern descent, I’d guess he arrived with an enviable mop of dark hair.

In the flesh. Covered in the flesh of his mother, the pasty vernix that kept him safe on arrival, that other mammals lick from the skin to allow for easy breathing. This form of divinity required a mix of proteins and carbohydrates and vitamin D and his mother likely fretted about her milk production because she had never nursed before – maybe he even had a tongue tie, we can’t be sure because the Mommy Facebook Groups didn’t exist yet.

There was a group of people 2000 years ago that believed that God would save them from their captive situation, and they believed that this God showed up unable to control his own bladder, because that is the plight of newborn creatures.

With the Jesus story of divine presence on earth, the man walked the known world leaving a trail of divinity that stuck like the glitter from a child’s Christmas craft even after he made an exit, remnants forever stuck to our existence, known to the scripture writers as spirit. Along his way, moving from common carpenter to master spiritual teacher, Jesus keeps pointing out the hidden divinity in all humans he meets along the way. His calls for peacemaking and loving neighbor aren’t just because the world works easiest when we’re all nice: it’s because he knows all people begin with a divine spark and get embedded in this earth with a body. Sometimes a covering of skin and opposing political opinions make it difficult to see that God makes a home in humans, not just the mountains. 

Among the million and one things that Jesus did showing up on earth, here’s the one that brings me to tears every time: this divine appearance means we no longer have to climb mountains.

We are the mountain.

You are the mountain.

The first yoga pose I learned to teach was Tadasana: mountain pose. You stand (or even sit) with the base of your body firmly rooted in the earth, growing and stretching up toward the heavens. You feel supported with the earth below you but you feel the spaciousness of your height. Turning your palms forward will gently rotate the shoulder blades, giving a sense of openness of the heart. If you close your eyes and draw your attention to it, you can feel the earth holding you down while heaven lifts you up. You’re connected to both places.

You are the mountain. You, your body, becomes the place where heaven and earth meet. 

No, you are not God. You bear God. You reveal God. Every day is a new opportunity to imitate our maiden Mary in miniature ways, allowing something that began with God’s breath to move through our bodies and into the world.

We no longer have to go to the mountain to know the divine. God made a home here, among us.  

 

The Life-Light was the real thing:
Every person entering Life
he brings into Light.
He was in the world,
the world was there through him,
and yet the world didn’t even notice.
He came to his own people,
but they didn’t want him.
But whoever did want him,
who believed he was who he claimed
and would do what he said,
He made to be their true selves,
their child-of-God selves.
These are the God-begotten,
not blood-begotten,
not flesh-begotten,
not sex-begotten.

The Word became flesh and blood,
and moved into the neighborhood.
We saw the glory with our own eyes,
the one-of-a-kind glory,
like Father, like Son,
Generous inside and out,
true from start to finish.

John 1:9-14 (The Message)

Against the grain

To say I’ve been buried in home renovations for the summer is a slight understatement. We took on what is not a little weekend DIY – it involved contractors, HVAC, plumbing. It will someday be beautiful. At the moment, however, it is a blend between drywall-gray and primer-white, accented with the earthy tones of plywood and subflooring. (Please, don’t be so jealous of my glamorous life.)

I simultaneously refinished our dining room table so that it will be ready when we have a dining room again. Originally I had simply spray painted the 70’s table and 8 chairs, but time and children had its way, and now I have to do a real version of painting it. Sanding, primer, primer, paint, paint, touchup, and then a good lacquer to prevent the process from needing a repeat.

Day after day as I dipped my brush in yet another can of pigment, I noticed patterns and, of course, noted the lessons. Namely, if you want the paint to cover the surface well, you need to take it across all angles. I noticed this especially in working with wood, but my ceilings and walls were no different. If you worked in only one direction, yet didn’t get good coverage, you essentially just kept adding paint and then watched it leave drip marks on your hard work. But if you applied horizontally, vertically and with a few angled strokes, the paint would blend into the entire area.

When painting my furniture and walls, my goal is not to get as much paint on the surface as possible. The goal is transformation. I want to change the space I’m living in. 

It made me think of how, on the yoga mat and in life, we so often attempt things from only one angle. We try and we try, thinking if we just do more of that thing (eat better, go more often, push harder) that we’ll reach the goal. Often, we end up with just more of the same. But the goal is never more yoga, less carbs, more learning, less toxins (or to make this more spiritual: more books, more prayer, less sin). The goal is transformation. 

If adding more of the same isn’t changing your work, perhaps take it from a different angle. Come at it sideways. Ask a question, look at it from the other side. Walk around the thing, change the lighting, maybe even ask a friend to lovingly put their fresh eyes on it to see where you might have missed.

And for heavens sake, wash the brushes thoroughly when you’re finished. The paint is harder to remove with age. (That idea begets its own separate writing. But I have to go paint another room.)

Sunday Sermon: The Passage that Changed Me

As an eternal nerd, I feel nearly everything I read leaves a mark on me somewhere. Some marks are more noticeable than others. I might notice evidence of a reading in places that no one would likely see, a more private evolution. Other passages and ideas look more like a big scar across my cheek or a limp in my gait. They change me forever.

One such reading is in the Bible, the letter to the Galatians, as Eugene Peterson translates it. (He renders it in more of a thought-for-thought medium, as opposed to literal word-for-word. While I do appreciate precision in language, his work feels much more congruent to the whole, which is why I love adding this version to my regular rotation).

This passage, in chapter 5, verses 22-23 (although the original letter lacked such demarcations), Peterson writes the words of Paul:

But what happens when we live God’s way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard — things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We develop a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. We find ourselves involved in loyal commitments, not needing to force our way in life, able to marshal and direct our energies wisely. (Emphasis mine).

This is much more beautiful, meaningful and helpful than listing the one-word Big Ideas of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self control.  At different times in my life, I’ve turned to the above reading and noticed the way God had indeed proven faithful and left the sprouts of such fruit. By and large, I now read it and hunger for the fruit he paints in this picture.

As you might guess from the emphasis I added, there’s a particular element that will continue to show up over and over and over again. A conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. Even after years of “Christian Living,” when I stumbled upon this little gem my world was shaken. But rather than a shake like earthquake that destroys everything you built, this rattle was like a trip to the chiropractor that returned my body to alignment.

A conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people. Living God’s way leads to a recognition that it all belongs to God because it was all created by God. God is in all things. I remember teaching junior high students Ephesians 2:10, “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.” Every student was given a jar of play-doh and ask to create something – anything. As we shared our handiwork, we noticed how the creator’s fingerprints were evident throughout each piece of art. The created bears the mark of the Creator. 

If it’s true of each of us, it’s true of all of us. And all things God created. Which, at last count, was every living thing. “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” (Psalm 150:6)

This sounds beautiful, but one has to wonder why this became such a game-changer for me. It seems logical, yes? I could probably say that I believed such a theory, would agree to such a creedal statement. But reading this collection of words helped me to change my modus operandi. I didn’t simply agree with such an idea. I needed to live like it was true.

Every single person, place and thing I encounter bears a mark of divinity. The cashier at Meijer has God’s fingerprints on her. The bread that I bake comes from flour, from grains of wheat, which could only grow with the sun and the rain and the natural life-to-death-to-life processes of the seed which God set into rhythm. The trees I walk beside have lived and known God’s presence long before I stepped foot on this earth.

The world is not a group of objects set before me solely for my own enjoyment. Each and every being bears a mark of divinity. To live with “goodness” means to live with a recognition and a respect. I honor my own created goodness. And I look for, seek out, point toward that same created goodness in other living beings.

Yoga finally gave me a word for this: nameste. The light that is within me sees and honors the light that is within you.

This idea, honoring all of God’s created order, is the backbone of the first testament. (And the second, for that matter.) The laws which seem obtuse and irrelevant were God’s way of asking us to consider treating his work with respect. “Eating kosher” considers the cheeseburger abominable, but it is less about the cheese and more about remembering the life of the mother calf and the baby calf that provided the meal. God is ordering us to honor the divine image in that life. For some people, this results in abstaining out of respect. For others, it’s a blessing and a recognition that the meal comes from a place outside of ourselves but bears the same created mark as that which is within us.

In the beginning, God created humankind with an imago dei, a divine image. It remains there, underneath all that we believe we “really are”, the many ways we identify ourselves. Under the good, the bad and the ugly remains the essence of God. Living with goodness means recognizing that in all things and treating them accordingly.

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