What’s The Point Of Yoga?

Posted by David on February 4, 2012

The more I reflect on yoga, the more I begin to wonder what exactly is it trying to achieve?

If you look at the physical postures of Hatha yoga, they appear to be aiming at training someone to become a circus act. What are the health benefits of such extreme flexibility? And, are there any longer-term dangers from practicing hyper joint and muscle extensions over many years?

And, if we take a look at the mental/spiritual side of Raja yoga, is it any better. Are the feats of mental endurance really that healthy? Or are they the an induced form of autism? A kind of spiritual ‘genius’, that is similar to the autistic savants who can perform amazing feats of mathematics. And, if so, of what value is this to your average human?

Whilst, we may well be embodied spirits, do we really need such yoga practices to realise it? Or do we need them to live in a manner that acknowledges that simple truth.

© David R. Durham
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Sound Scapes

Posted by David on January 6, 2012

Sea rolling, sweeping, flowing, bubbling onto a pebbled beach;
You remind me of my forgotten journeys.

A bright penetrating light moving down a corridor of brick archways;
You remind me of a forgotten life.

Black & white images of faces in a winter’s landscape;
You remind me of long lost loves.

The felt sense of my spinal column in alignment;
You remind me of a forgotten harmony.

My boundaries melt away and all thoughts stops;
You remind me of my forgotten home.

My awakened heart flows and flows;
You remind me that an awakened heart never closes.

Sound Scapes was inspired by Stuart Hampton’s amazing cymbals, drone, Tibetan bowls & gongs concert for the new year’s eve at Gaunts House in Dorset, England.

Divine Inspiration

Posted by David on October 2, 2011

How often does our social conditioning and early childhood patterning limit our capacity to be truly inspired?

This was brought home to me very recently when I was working on some guided meditations to do with connecting with my divine self. And in one of the meditations there was a process of going into deep inner stillness and letting divine inspirational thoughts and ideas to simply come through.

Yet here I was busily pushing the thoughts that were arising aside, in the ‘belief’ that these could not be of divine origin. They were simply too ordinary and everyday life.

Well after a few rounds of several related meditations on this subject, the penny finally dropped, that these divine ideas do not have to fit in with my limited, preconceived ‘beliefs’ as to what is worthy of being a divine idea.

And that the divine manifesting into human expression can take many, many forms and that this manifesting is in no way limited to some preconceived socially conditioned beliefs about what is ‘holy’ or ‘good’ enough for the divine to express.

© David R. Durham

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I Am

Posted by David on March 17, 2011

I am no-thing in all of this; I am every-thing.

I am the beginning; The middle; The end.

I am creator; I am victim.

I am washed up on a shore of eternity; I am the eternal.

No words touch me; I am the voice.

I am the silence at the core of our being; I sing in endless joy.

Swift is my pained anger; Sweet the simple smile of understanding.

There is no death which can touch me; I am the continual creation of decay.

I am the dignity of truth; I am the vanity of lust.

My mark touches all that I see; I pass un-noticed in this world.

My love knows no beginning and hence no end; Loveless I fall at the feet of icons.

God whispers in my ear; Men shout to me from the TV ads.

I am contained in this body; My vastness dwarfs this universe.

Words cannot walk; I stride in the mountains of my dreams.

Timeless are the sorrows of men; Eternal is the joy of God.

© David R. Durham

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All in the Bow

Posted by David on February 25, 2011

Its has been reportedly said that “It is all in the bow”.

To bow down before an icon, another being or maybe an ideal can seem a very cultural thing. An act steeped in tradition, a gesture to imagined enlightened ones, to one’s elders or maybe even to God.

Done out of duty, it can be an empty act.

Done with a sense of contrition, it can often be vain.

Done with all our humanity, it is an act of enlightenment.

When you no longer need to bow, it is possible to do so.

As long as you’re working it out, you cannot really do it fluently.

It is all in the bow.

© David R. Durham

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Cycles of Life

Posted by David on February 22, 2011

I often have the feeling that Life is our greatest teacher, that it has an almost infinite number of ways to make a point. And, if necessary, to keep bringing us back to share a lesson again and again if need be.

One of, for me, the unlikeliest learning opportunities I have recently had has come through my work with IT systems. Late last year I worked with a decommissioning of a system I’d been involved with off and on for some 12 years. It seemed a fitting end to a cycle, having been there in the early development of this particular system, and worked with it again during its maturing phase, here I was, now involved in its death; its passing away.

Yet here I am again, working on a new installation of this system. And within that new installation, I am coming face to face with parts of it that I helped to design over 12 years ago, and the memories keep coming back, of the people I worked with at the time, and the sometimes painful process we went through to design certain aspects of this system.

It is, for me, like a rebirth experience. And Life is saying, no, no, you must understand that death is not an end. Life, if Life is anything of substance at all, is full of endless intricate cycles of birth, growing, passing away and rebirth into new cycles of expression.

© David R. Durham

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Resting In Spirit

Posted by David on December 12, 2010

There is a simplicity about resting in spirit, it has a satisfying quality about it, in that it needs no embellishment and nothing taken away.

A desire-less state. Content in its own awareness.

Perhaps, also, it is a death-less state? For death only arises as a natural conclusion to the birth of a desire.

And so, resting in spirit can seem to be the opposite of human living. And desire can appear to be an un-welcome activity, and something to be suppressed or destroyed in the interests of being more spiritual.

This negative attitude to desire has some value as unbridled desire is not a pretty sight, but it is also a limited one, as it fails to acknowledge desire’s role in an ever growing consciousness.

Resting in spirit is more akin to being at the heart of the wheel of living, at the centre of the storm of desires which drive the ever unfolding growth of consciousness. And, as such, resting in spirit has a dynamic quality to it, a dynamic stillness that can be characterised by moving meditation activities, such as Tai Chi. Like a flow we embrace as a surfer riding a wave. Symbolically we can see this represented in the Ying-Yang diagram: with the active element embedded in the passive, and visa-versa.

Consciously resting in spirit gives us a breather, a pause which allows us to observe and evaluate our current state of being. It is not meant to be an escape or a solution or a superior state.

Resting in spirit is a temporary pause, before we dive once again into the second-by-second arising of multiple desire cycles, that weave the rich fabric of our human life. This pause also allows us to experience ourselves as the co-creators of our human drama.

And this is why, learning just to sit in pure stillness during meditation is so important to us: simply being without expectation; without judgement as to how we’re doing; without the craving to understand or to experience something else; without trying to modify whatever is arising.

There is a simplicity about resting in spirit.

© David R. Durham

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Dancing Snowflakes

Posted by David on November 24, 2010

If you imagine for a moment a still, cold winter’s night. A few clouds are in the sky, the frost is just starting to form and there is no breeze. Then, as if by magic, tiny flakes of snow start to float gently in the dark night’s air. Dancing down to the earth.

There is an effortless beauty about them.

Herein lies a perfect metaphor for timeless meditation. There is an effortless beauty about it.

A letting go of technique, a letting go of effort and expectation, an acceptance of all that is arising in our mind, body and whole being.

A letting go of letting go.

Resting in the eternal embrace of our creator, dancing in the ground of our being.

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Circumstances

Posted by David on November 12, 2010

We are all more, in many ways much, much more, than our circumstances.

This problem, of being constrained and over-identified with our circumstances is often seen most clearly in a therapeutic context. People with chronic health conditions can become labelled and defined by their condition. “Hi, I’m Mary and I was abused as a child.”, “Hi, I’m Mike and I have a weak heart.” OK, people don’t literally say these things (well not that often), but it is the sub-plot to how they live their daily lives.

A similar thing can happen with our whole identity: I’m Russian, therefore I think in a certain way. I come from an affluent LA suburb, hence I am this LA life-style. I am a spiritual being, so I’m a vegan.

The labels we can identify with are almost endless, yet all are limiting in some ways, all are derived in some way from our transient historical circumstances, which has helped us to define our selves, our relationship to other people and our world view.

The labels we can identify with are not, in and of themselves, a problem. To function in our human context requires them, it requires these mental constructs which we develop during our early years. It is our failure to recognise the limitations of these identities, to get stuck in them and hence fail to grow beyond them, that can create problems for us. Problems which can be hard to define: it may be a general unease or feeling of emptiness with our current life, or maybe we cannot see the point in it anymore. Unfortunately, these are problems for which our society driven solutions are not always the most healthy or appropriate (e.g. alcohol abuse, drug addition, obesity and other excesses.)

Practices such as Soto Zen meditation and Centering Prayer aim to remind us of, and re-introduce us to, the nothingness of our core being. This ‘no-thing-ness’ is impossible to stick a label on, hence it is ‘unlimited’ by mental concepts, it is the vast potential of life to be all things. It is the as yet unborn, unbecome, unformed, unmanifest.

It is deeply liberating to be reminded of the fact the we are not this label, or that label, or this other label. It gives us space to breathe, space for our being to flow and to grow.

We are all potentially so much more than any of our temporary life-style labels allow us to be.

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Eternal Union

Posted by David on November 5, 2010

There is something a little frustrating about The Buddha’s teaching. In a way, he didn’t seem to say very much. There is suffering and the cause of it are our ceaseless desires.

On a gross level, we can observe these ceaseless desires in ourselves and others from time to time. That glass of wine too many, or a wardrobe stuffed with so many clothes we cannot get the new ones we simply ‘had’ to buy into it.

However, our ceaseless desires run very deep in our psyche. The need for emotional comfort in a relationship, that extra book or course we simply must have for our knowledge to be complete, and the ‘awakened’ state of consciousness we have got to experience to be considered ‘holy’ or ‘spiritual’ enough.

What a challenge it is, first of all to notice and then to let go of our ceaseless desires. How liberating it is when we repeat this letting go process again, and again, and again, through all the levels of our complex being.

Yet, this letting go process is at the heart of all contemplative meditation traditions, this is the unfolding core of a spiritual life.

And the result, ironically, is what we have craved for all along: an end to our illusion of separateness and a peace that passeth intellectual understanding, in an eternal union with an unconditionally loving God.

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