Guru Purnima Day: Teachers and Teachings(2)

Aujourd’hui, 15 Juillet 2011, nous aurons la plus grande et belle lune de l’année. Dans la tradition hindoue et bouddhiste est célébré GURU PURNIMA.

Le yoga est une pratique spirituelle, il n’y a pas de yoga sans dévotion. La fête de GURU PURNIMA est une si belle tradition! L’opportunité nous est donnée d’honorer nos maîtres spirituels.

C’est un privilège que d’avoir rencontré dans cette vie présente des êtres humains qui vous ouvrent une porte sur l’éternité. J’en suis reconnaissante au delà des mots. Infinite gratitude, love and pranams to Sharon Gannon and David Life for the gift of Jivamukti Yoga, for being living inspirations of compassion, wisdom and fearlessness. Thank you for believing that awakening is possible and that kindness will bring success. OM bolo Shri Tripura Sundari Ma, OM bolo Shri Deva Das ki JAI!

En ce jour très spécial, toute ma gratitude va aussi à mes gurubais, à toutes celles et ceux qui m’ont apporté leurs lumières et parfois leur part d’ombre (autant d’occasions uniques pour évoluer).OM bolo shri sat guru, bhagavan ki JAI! Cette foi /shradda(en sanskrit) partagée me porte -

“Faith is a way in which your are connected to the universal truth. Faith and love are intimately connected. As it is said in the Ramayana, without devotion there is no faith; without faith there is no devotion. In a way it’s the guru’s own incredible relation to God that’s the transmission of living faith, the fact that he or she is living in the light of God. That connection is love. A book doesn’t give a living transmission. It’s the light coming through the guru, the remover of darkness. Faith really comes from within you, and the guru is awakening it. Faith comes through grace. You can cultivate it by opening your spiritual heart and quieting your mind until you feel the validity of your identity with your deeper Self. The qualities of that Self are peace,joy, compassion, wisdom and love. Faith is not belief. Faith is what is left when your beliefs have all been blown to hell. Faith is in the heart, while beliefs are in the head. Experiences, even spiritual experiences, come and go. As long as you base your faith on experience, your faith is going to be constantly flickering, because your experience keep changing. The moment you recognize that faith lies behind experience, that’s just being, not the experience of being but being, then it’s just “Ah so” “ Extrait de “BE LOVE NOW, the path of the heart” par Ram Dass

Je dédie ma pratique aux gourous des mes gourous. Il y a un fil très fort qui nous relie. Je me sens plus forte d’appartenir à une famille, un lignage, Parampara . Ce lignage remonte à des temps immémoriaux qui nous ramènent à Ishvara, Shiva, le premier Yogi, notre premier gourou. OM NAMAH SHIVAYA.

Enfin, cette journée qui a apporté son lot d’annonces de décès me rappelle aussi le privilège (et la responsabilité) que nous avons d’être simplement en vie.

Every day, think as you wake up, today I am fortunate to have woken up, I am alive, I have a precious human life, I am not going to waste it, I am going to use all my energies to develop myself, to expand my heart out to others, to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings, I am going to have kind thoughts towards others, I am not going to get angry or think badly about others, I am going to benefit others as much as I can. H.H. the XIV Dalai Lama

Happy Guru Pūrṇimā गुरु पूर्णिमा

Jeanine

NB: Vous pouvez lire aussi le focus du mois de l’école Jivamukti: The guru as a mirror 

Namaste

Jeanine

Teachers and Teachings(1)

“As you meet beeings along the path,you’ll come to sense who are your teachers and who are teachings for you. Some teachers are obviously still working on themselves, and they feed you by sharing their experiences. Others serve as living examples of the detours and the pitfalls along the way, which may help you reflect on how to get on with your own path. They become teachings for you, whatever the intention when you started out.

(…)

A true guru, whether on this physical plane or not, can show you the possibility of enlightenment. That darshan,that flash of reality, gives you a perspective on the spiritual state and your psychological stuff. (…) As we begin to observe the roadblocks that impede our way, we see how we need to clean up our mental clutter and clear away the distractions.(…) Clearing the mind is a process of becoming simple, but it’s not a simple process. There’s plenty of rooms for excursions into delusion (maya).We’ve all encountered, whether in ourselves or others, the tendency to substitute piety for purity, ritual for personal experience, or concepts for consciousness.These are ways we pretend to be spiritual while maintaining the fiction that we are the center of the universe.The delusions are not good or bad, but the ego can be very subtle and convincing at “being spiritual” too. ” I’m a spiritual person”- how many lifetimes will we spend on that one? Eventually those fictions may lead us to real spiritual work anyway.

The guru acts as a mirror for your soul and at the same time reflects your impurities and attachments back to you. (…)

Of course, not everyone has a guru in a body to reflect their attachments back to them and show them where they are stuck. (…)Without somebody on the physical plane, it is easy to preserve your subtle ego defenses, in effect to stand in your own way.With a guru on the subtle plane you can too easily interpret his or her teaching to maintain your ego. I imagine I hear Maharaj-ji, and I interpret it.It’s the interpretation that’s gets me in trouble! Is it Maharaj-ji , or is my ego? I have to listen very carefully.

When a new experience presents itself, I ask, “Does it fit? Is it a teaching from the guru? Does it feel right” Your intuition, the quality of the heart that connects you to the guru, is how you validate and integrate the teachings. There is an intuitive stamp of approval. that intuition is based in the atman, so you’re using the spiritual heart as your radar. It’s not like using the intellect to judge.”

Extrait de “BE LOVE NOW, the path of the heart” par Ram Dass

Ram Dass sur le même sujet sur youtube . Son élocution est lente suite  à un avc , il n’en est pas moins fascinant de l’écouter et bien sûr de lire son dernier livre extraordinaire.

Namaste

Jeanine

Le yoga est-il pour vous? Is yoga for you?

David Life, qui a confondé le Jivamukti Yoga, nous a raconté une anecdote au sujet du ténor Pavarotti qui les a chaleureusement reçus chez lui en Italie. Pavarotti, vivement intéressé, a demandé à David Life s’il pouvait lui enseigner le yoga. Toutefois le ténor émettait de nombreuses conditions notamment le fait qu’il ne fallait surtout pas lui obliger à respirer par le nez car cela serait dramatique pour son métier. Sur ce, en riant, David lui a répondu qu’il ne pourrait pas lui enseigner le yoga.

Trêve d’anecdote, s’il est bien une question récurrente que j’entends c’est bien “Est-ce que je suis fait(e) pour le yoga?” ( sous-entendu ou parfois assorti de “je ne suis pas assez souple, mince, jeune, etc…” ). Sans la moindre référence à l’aspect physique, David Life et Sharon Gannon répondent clairement à cette question: Le yoga n’est pas pour tout le monde. Et je les cite:
“This is not for everybody. And I’m gonna say that from my heart: Yoga is not for everybody. It’s not for people who are interested in staying the same. It’s relevant for people, it’s important for people if they’re interested in evolution , if they’re interested in change, if they’re interested in making a better world.  If everything’s fine for you in your world, if you’re happy, Yoga is probably not for you.If you’re dissatisfied, if you have one grain of unhappiness in you that’s pulling you down,then you should consider it. And I wanna challenge you, are you the one it is for? Maybe …maybe, let’s see, let’s see what you can do” David Life

“Spiritually, we Americans were children when the yogis came to show us their practices, and, like children, we took them apart to examine them. In doing so we discovered some useful exercises that can improve one’s quality of life. But studying yoga as disparate useful exercises is rather like taking a camera apart and wondering why the disassembled parts aren’t enabling you to take a picture. We hope to encourage you to move beyond studying the various interesting shapes and attributes of the yoga practices and start fitting them back together. After all, the aim of yoga is not a better body or a calmer mind, even though the practices may improve your body or calm your mind. The aim is enlightenment, the state in which everything fits together.” Sharon Gannon  et David Life dans Jivamukti Yoga: Practices for liberating body and soul.

En français, nous traduirions “enlightenment” par “illumination”. Je vois d’ici le sourcil levé, la moue dubitative qui pointent peut-être… et je souris. Il y a plus de dix ans déjà, je me suis moi-même profondément ennuyée dans mon premier cours de Hatha Yoga. Outre la musique new age et le parfum de l’encens qui m’irritaient, plutôt que de suivre les consignes de l’instructeur, j’étais obnubilée par les orteils crochus de la femme enceinte en face de moi. Plus tard, je suis tombée littéralement amoureuse d’un autre type de yoga où les genevois stressés venaient transpirer à la pause de midi. Nulle trace de OM et autres religiosités dans ce cours très physique !  Plus j’explorais le yoga et ses différentes pratiques (y compris le Hatha Yoga doux et la méditation qui m’horripilaient par le passé ainsi que le kirtan que j’adore), plus je le trouvais familier. Familier c’est le mot… Et mon expérience n’est pas unique. La Bhagavad Gita (livre-référence  dans lequel le Seigneur Krishna explique le Yoga au guerrier Arjuna, voir les versets 43- 44 du chapitre 6) en parle. AHA!

Cela vous amusera (peut-être?) de visionner (il se trouve sur youtube en 8 parties) le documentaire Enlighten UP! réalisé par Kate Churchill. Derrière la caméra de Kate, le spectateur découvre les tribulations de Nick Rosen, un yoga-septique . Enfin pas exactement…car sa maman est chaman (un peu pour dire, j’ai un demi-gène “follo”). En commençant par New-York où il vit, Nick va parcourir les grandes écoles de yoga avant de se retrouver en Inde. Dans son périple,  il rencontrera plusieurs grands maîtres et yogis. J’ai particulièrement aimé le voir chez certains d’entre eux… Chuuut je n’en dis pas plus.

Namasté

Jeanine