Thank you, Dave Bonta, for featuring The Wall at Moving Poems on September 7th!

Yes, I embedded his webpage in my blog post. And, not only is the videopoem playable here, but I just left a thank you note for him via this embedded page and it appeared over there simultaneously. Personally, I think it's very cool.

(If you have an email subscription or are on an RSS feed like Google Reader or whatever, you'll have to click in to the post to see this beauty.)

This is the meditation I am doing daily, the Sodarshan Chakra Kriya, and which I have begun doing a yoga set in preparation for. I find it an extremely challenging meditation, and only do it for 11 minutes. I also made a mala out of rose quartz beads for counting the mantra, so that helps (photos later).

Being obverse to guru worship, and despite being a Certified Kundalini Yoga Instructor, I've never watched a video of Yogi Bhajan before! So I found this particularly entertaining, and the way he describes the mantra far surpasses any other writings I've seen on it. I am so glad I watched!

Towards the end, though, the video goes blank, although the sound continues.




Here are the full instructions for this meditation:

Sit in an Easy Pose, with a light jalandhar bandh. Eyes: The eyes are fixed at the tip of the nose. (This meditation is not to be done with the eyes closed). Mantra: WHA-HAY GUROO.

Mudra & Breath:

a) Block the right nostril with the right thumb. Inhale slowly and deeply through the left nostril. Suspend the breath. Mentally chant the mantra WHA-HAY GU-ROO 16 times. Pump the Navel Point 3 times with each repetition, once on WHA; once on HAY; and once on GUROO, for a total of 48 unbroken pumps.

b) After the 16 repetitions, unblock the right nostril. Place the right index finger (pinkie finger can also be used) to block off the left nostril, and exhale slowly and deeply through the right nostril.

c) Continue repeating a & b Time: for 11-31 minutes. Master practitioners may extend this practice to 62 minutes, then to 2-1/2 hours a day.

To End: Inhale, hold the breath 5-10 seconds, then exhale. Stretch the arms up and shake every part of your body for 1 minute, so the energy can spread.

Comments: This is one of the greatest meditations you can practice. It has considerable transformational powers. The personal identity is rebuilt, giving the individual a new perspective on the Self. It retrains the mind. According to the tantra shastras, it can purify your past karma and the subconscious impulses that may block you from fulfilling you. It balances all the 27 facets of life and mental projection, and gives you the pranic power of health and healing It establishes inner happiness and a state of flow and ecstasy in life.

This meditation balances the Teacher aspect of the mind. It acts on all the other aspects like a mirror to reveal their true nature and adds corrections. You act as a human being not just a human doing. If the Teacher aspect is too strong, you risk a spiritual ego, which becomes too attached to the ability to detach and to be “above” normal struggles. When the Teacher aspect is too weak, you can misuse your spiritual and teaching position for personal advantage. When balanced, the Teacher aspect is impersonally personal. It starts with absolute awareness and a neutral assessment from that awareness. The Teacher uses intuition to know directly what is real and what is a diversion. You respond from the Neutral Mind beyond the positives and negatives. You are clear about the purpose and the laws of each action. A complete Teacher is not an instructor. The Teacher is the expression of Infinity for the benefit of all. You master non-attachment so that you are simultaneously in all your activities and not of them. Treat the practice with reverence and increase your depth, dimensions, caliber, and happiness. It gives you a new start against all odds. “Of all the 20 types of yoga, including Kundalini Yoga, this is the highest Kriya. This meditation cuts through all darkness. It will give you a new start. It is the simplest kriya, but at the same time the hardest. It cuts through all barriers of the neurotic or psychotic inside-nature. When a person in a very bad state, techniques imposed from the outside will not work. The pressure has to be stimulated from within. The tragedy of life is when the subconscious releases garbage into the conscious mind. This kriya invokes the Kundalini to give you the necessary vitality and intuition to combat the negative effects of the subconscious mind. There is no time, no place, no space, and no condition attached to this mantra. Each garbage point has its own time to clear. If you are going to clean your own garbage, you must estimate and clean it as fast as you can, or as slow as you want. Start practicing slowly— the slower the better. Start with five minutes a day, and gradually build the time to either 31 or 62 minutes. Maximum time is 2-1/2 hours for practice of this meditation.” - YOGI BHAJA

Sodarshan Chakra Kriya p.2 The Teachings of Yogi Bhajan ©2008

http://www.pinklotus.org/KY%20KRI/KRI%20KY%20meditations/SodarshanChakraKriya.pdf

direct link: Mother of Milk

We each have our 'mother stories' -even childless women have a mother story. For those of us who had children, though, telling our stories is, I believe, important. Women's maternal experiences is a hidden subtext in culture that only began to be spoken out loud maybe in the last 30 years. There are other ways to construe reality than the ones the dominant ideologies give us. Let's let the mother speak - seriously! The paternal story, the 'important' history needs the current of the maternal story to balance it, give it greater depth and unity.

I had once made a flippant remark about how breastfeeding taught me to meditate. And, further, how I thought men in the days of yore meditating in semi-lotus sat like women breastfeeding and were trying to discover the bliss seen on her face. My flippant remark meant that I was jovially saying that meditation arose out of men's curiosity about what they witnessed while their women breastfed their babies. And, if it's true, what a beautiful cradle for meditation to grow from. Meditation is a very self-nurturing act.

Anyway, the leader of the La Leche League in Toronto, a Waldorf mother, and my kids were at the Waldorf at that time, overheard me. Uh, oh! What I'd flippantly said would make some yogic-type men angry and a lot of women deny that there is any connection. But Erin was intrigued. Next thing I knew, I was invited to speak at a La Leche League meeting, a place of support for women breastfeeding their babes. Well, it wasn't a very coherent or articulate talk!

When ARM put out a call for papers at a conference at York University on Motherhood and Spirituality in 2003, I wrote my story, an interweaving of lifewriting and prosepoetry. Since I lived in Vancouver at the time and wasn't sure I could afford to fly to Toronto to present it in person, I recorded it on video. So glad I did! My mother paid for the trip, and rather than reading it at the conference I showed the video on a large screen and got lots of amazing feedback. The personal essay was published by Mother's Movement Online and is still available at: mothersmovement.org/essays/bclews/BClews0404.htm
___

There was a discussion in the comments at Facebook with Bent Lorentzen and Daisy Fierro, and I've drawn this commentary from my responses in that discussion.


I stand in an odd place theoretically on sexual difference, but I agree basically that there is difference. Thought not that there are 'man traits' and 'woman traits' so much as our bodily experiences shape our consciousness of the world to a greater degree than is generally believed.

My 'woman body/mother body' experiences have shaped my consciousness, and my beliefs, in many ways.

This talk is regarding that: an embodied consciousness.

Please see my Birthdance page at my website for more on this subject - particularly The Notebook of the Maternal Body for more discussion on our cultural maternal subtext, its hiddenness, and the video talk, How Can We Be Different and the Same? on sexual difference as it pertains to the maternal body (from a paper I wrote in 2004- I'm still adding images to the video to spruce it up a bit visually and will upload to YouTube when the final version is finished).

Have you changed through the years? Or have you deepened into who you are?

I'm not talking about contentment, or dissatisfaction with now, or what led to here. There are events that shape us, yes. But our identity is something deeper than what befalls us. Who we are carries us through.

Really I can only speak for myself, and, though my life is perhaps not where I would like it to be, I'd say I've become more deeply the person I want to be. I don't think I've ever been outside who I am, and I haven't ever undergone such radical change as to seem like a different person to myself.

This talk is about that. I recorded it in 2008, and though it was posted in this blog when it was made, I have created an updated HD version.


direct link: ripples

(I like that colour, but I have no idea why YouTube is presenting a still of this more muted talk in such vibrant colours.)


_
Drop of water: Free Super Slow Motion Water Droplet.
The opening and closing music is a few bars from the first song on F.T.G.'s Le puits.

direct link: Quetzalbwattio: Sammasati FullMoonSpirit II:) Trip to ChrïstmaSoül

I love this album. It inspires a meditative mood that soothes and stills the inner maelstrom. While playing Sammasati FullMoonSpirit II:) Trip to ChrïstmaSoül this afternoon, my apartment flooded. A thick mantle of water spilling over the hardwood that took a dozen towels and a mop and bucket to clean up. Quetzalbwattio's ambient meditative music played throughout and so the flood and the clean-up felt in a rhythm, the flow part of the flood of being.

I would play this in a yoga class, while painting, or staring out the window, and during floods, yes :smiles:

So many instruments creating a slow torrent of creation, a spiraling star-birth dance, particles of light overflowing the darkness, a fluidity of rhythm: sitar, drums, didjeridoo, gongs, bells, singing bowls, flutes, trance, meditation, kriya, chanting, the Ganges River, it's subtle, gentle, very beautiful.

If you read this on a RSS feed, don't hit "enclosure" because that'll start a download, just pop in to the site to view. I'm not uploading these little sessions to You Tube, they're not "serious" enough.

As the title says, more chitter chatter. Spent most of the afternoon draping my space in fabrics and recording a poetry reading and trashed the whole lot, ah well. Much to learn. This chat refers to that, and then goes off to discuss how meditation (for me) is nothing, all rather vague. But there it is.

Overexposed night scene, again. Have to do something about the lighting. But then I am middle-aged and the lighting is rather kind. As I do these videos I'm losing shame, it's true. Daylight is still too stark, and anyway who feels like chatting when the photons are pouring through the atmosphere in the masses they do during daylight?

Yes, I am wearing a red bra - the black one is drying on the rack hanging on the shower rod after being laundered earlier today. Normally I wear black with black, red with red, you understand. Gaffs.

The post I refer to in the vlog, which is a good post of substance (unlike mine) on Buddhist meditation is Dale's.

Every morning I awake in the unfolding petals of my beautiful life, my head cushioned on a soft down pillow, and I let go of everything except the ecstasy of living. Perhaps it's years of meditation, but slipping out of the slipstream of thoughts, letting anxiety go, isn't hard. Being in the joy of living, the breath, the beating heart. At night I try to go to sleep in the same state, relieved of my life so I can embrace and affirm it. I am in love, of course I am in love. How could I not be?