Cosmic Yoga

Posted on September 2, 2015 by admin

I decided to call my Ojai classes “Cosmic Yoga”. I’d rather call them just ‘yoga’, but there are so many variations of yoga out there, some truly horrifying, that the term ‘yoga’ can be very misleading. And I figured I might get the right people’s attention with the word ‘Cosmic’. We’ll see how it goes!

What is Cosmic Yoga ? My cosmic origins go back 13.7 billion years or so, but my cosmic teaching actually began when I met Thomas Berry and his protégé Brian Swimme back in the early 1980’s. They provided a context for my life and teaching that was unlike anything I had ever experienced or even imagined.

Bea Briggs, a yoga teacher from Chicago, told me about Brian, an astro-physicist by training, who lived in the Bay Area and suggested I contact him. I did and he mentioned he was just about to begin teaching a course at Holy Names College in Oakland, a few miles from my home, and suggested I take the course. The material covered the core of Thomas Berry’s work and became the basis for Brian’s ‘Canticle to the Cosmos’ video/cd set, which I highly recommend for anyone with cosmic aspirations. Through Brian I met Thomas and my life changed dramatically. (Brian, also featured in the Science section of this site with the “Powers of the Universe’ also has played a huge role in my own unfolding.)

Thomas became a major mentor to me also, and I was blessed to spend time with him on many occasions over the years, the highlight being the week Bea Briggs, Thomas and I spent at Feathered Pipe Ranch in Montana, somewhere back in the mid 1980’s, co-teaching “Yoga and the Cosmic Creation Story”. We were a little ahead of our time, but it was a fascinating week.

Thomas was a Catholic priest, amazingly enough, but primarily a scholar of human culture. Widely read in European history, Thomas also was deeply impressed with the East and wrote books on Buddhism and the Religions of India. And most of all, Thomas was an awakened Visionary. I am still in awe at how clearly and succinctly he assessed the modern era, saw how as a species we arrived at our historical moment, and chartered a very detailed path to restore harmony and balance to the planet. He fully embodied ‘the awakening process’ in a totally unique and profound way. He was a Taoist, a cosmologist and a spiritual teacher, but he always referred to himself as a ‘geologian’, a student of the earth.

The core of the cosmic teaching revolves around what Thomas called the ‘Twelve Principles for Understanding the Universe and the Role of the Human in the Universe Process’. What follows are the 12 principles, and then my own commentary and translation for yoga people.

‘Twelve Principles for Understanding the Universe and the Role of the Human in the Universe Process’, by Thomas Berry.

1. The Universe, the solar system, and the planet earth, in themselves, and in their evolutionary emergence, constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being.

2. The universe is a unity, an interacting and genetically related community of beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time. The unity of planet earth is especially clear; each being of the planet is profoundly implicated in the existence and functioning of every other being of the planet.

3. From its beginning, the universe is a psychic as well as a physical reality.

4. The three basic laws of the universe at all levels of reality are differentiation, subjectivity and communion. These laws identify the reality, the values and the directions in which the universe is proceeding.

5. The universe has a violent as well as a harmonious aspect, but is consistently creative in the larger arc of its development.

6. The human is that being in whom the universe activates, reflects upon and celebrates itself in conscious self awareness.

7. The earth, within the solar system, is a self-emergent, self-propagating, self-nourishing, self-governing, self-healing , self-fulfilling community. All particular life systems, in their being, their sexuality, their nourishment, their education, their governing, their healing and their fulfillment, must integrate their functioning within this larger complex of mutually dependent earth systems.

8. The genetic coding process is the process through which the world of the living articulates itself in its being and its activities. The great wonder is the creative interaction of the multiple codings among themselves.

9. At the human level genetic coding mandates a trans-genetic cultural coding by which specifically human qualities find self expression. Cultural coding is carried on by educational processes.

10. The emergent process of the universe is irreversible and non-repeatable in the existing world order. The movement from non-life to life on the planet earth is a one time event. So to the movement from life to the human from of consciousness. So also the transition from the earlier to the later forms of human culture.

11. The historical sequence of cultural periods can be defined as the tribal-shamanic period, the neolithic settlement period, the classical civilization period, the scientific-technological period and the emerging ecological period.

12. The main task of the human in the immediate future is to assist in activating the inter-communion of all the living and non-living components of the earth community in what can be considered the emerging ecological period of earth development.

My notes: (watch the ‘Canticle to the Cosmos’ series if you really want to go more deeply into this.)

1.Revelation: Thomas was deeply immersed in the religious practices of India, as well as those of the Native Americans, and both were very clear that creation was sacred. This has been lost in the Judeo-Christian-Scientific West where spirit and matter were somehow cleaved apart. Heaven, and God, were ‘out there’ somewhere, and the degradation of the Earth was the result of this belief. Thomas wanted the return of the feminine perspective that creation is Divine and the primary source for Revelation, not the Bible, or written scripture.

2. Oneness: Thomas was an advaita Vedantan. That the infinite and the finite were one, not two, was implicitly obvious to him. That every aspect of creation was intertwined is also seen in the image of Indra’s Net, or Web, the Indian metaphor for wholeness.

3. A recapitulation that Creation is not ‘just material’, but has layers of reality not easily seen. This ‘esoteric’ aspect in known in Shamanic cultures as well as those who hold Creation as Divine.

4. That these are the fundamental driving forces in the universe is one of Thomas’ fascinating insights. Amazingly enough, remove any one of these three and the Universe collapses. Brian unfolds this quite beautifully in lesson 4 of the Canticle. For yoga students and yoga teachers, the question becomes “are you allowing all three of these to manifest as deeply as possible?”

Differentiation refers to uniqueness. Every iota of creation is unique, never before existing, never to appear again in the exact same way. Like snow flakes, we all have total cosmic permission to be totally unique. Your body/mind, your life, is yours alone, unique and special. We all imitate in the beginning to get started. That is why we have mirror neurons. But ultimately, trust your own individuality. As teachers, this is even more important. Can you give permission for each student to be unique while still honoring the integrity of the pose? Fundamentalist communities have serious problems with this because they control people by limiting/stifling their individuality.

Subjectivity states that every iota of creation has Cosmic depth. Each of us, from atoms to galaxies, and all beings, speak from the Infinite Depths of Mystery. Atman is Brahman. Tat vam asi. In any posture, in any and every moment, feel the infinite presence, drashtuh svarupe. Nurture this!

Communion reflects wholeness and the inextricable intertwining of all forms across space and time. Wholeness, or Oneness is not just a good idea! To dive into this one is mind boggling. Awakening allows you to draw upon many traditions and teachers where awakening is emerging. The Whole Universe is Awakening. You just have to wake up and pay attention. Cosmic clues are everywhere!

5. The explosion of a star gave birth to our solar system. The churning and shattering of volcanoes, earthquakes and typhoons actually helps replenish and refresh the life conditions, even as destruction is also needed. Kali serves this purpose on many levels.

6. Awe is the primary expression of awakening, and then celebration. To Quote Mary Oliver: “Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be Astonished. Tell about it.”

7. This begins Thomas’ instructions of how societies and cultures self organize and begins to lay out a blueprint for large scale social changes.

8. Biology is a major means for the Cosmos to carry forth learning and experience in time. Humans can see because 2 billion years ago, a cell learned how to convert solar energy to food. The chlorophyll molecule begat the retinol molecule and vision was born.

9. Culture is another means to carry forth wisdom and experience through time. Story telling, drawing, music, dance and writing are all means to convey information to future generations. And now we have ‘the cloud’.

10. The arrow of time travels in one direction in our world. For many generations humans believed that life unfolded in ever repeating cycles. Not so in the cosmos. Cycles may repeat, but they are never the same. This puts a lot more urgency in dealing with the present conditions.

11. Thomas was a cultural historian who saw history in geological terms. He described our historical moment as the termination of the Cenozoic era and the beginning of something new. The direction we go as a planet is being determined by choices humans make today.

12: What is the destiny of the human? To be determined.

Exploring and Learning from the Gift of Life

Posted on August 24, 2015 by admin

By Patrick Cunningham, LAc, BCST, FMT

I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to teach cadaver dissection classes and workshops with Stephen Cina at the New England School of Acupuncture over the past seven years, first through the Sports Medicine Acupuncture Program and later as a NESA elective course. We use unpreserved specimens that are flash frozen with no exposure to chemical preservatives so the tissue closely reveals the reality of the living body. In our classes, we utilize the specimen to the fullest extent. We examine tendons, ligaments, bones, disks, and menisci in situ and in cross section. We experience the strength of these structures by placing them under stress. I once cut through a sacroiliac joint with a scalpel, it took 20 minutes and I was dripping with sweat when finished. But this joint has a demanding job in the body, so it has to be strong. It’s amazing how well we are put together and how each structure is uniquely designed for its purpose. I’d like to share with you four things that have changed the way I look at the human body.

First

The first is the arterial system and the nature of arterial plaque. I had always imagined plaque to be similar to lard and you do find that, but when they say “hardening of the arteries,” it’s not an abstract concept. Our specimens ranged in age from 50 to 101, and most have had plaque, many to a degree that I find remarkable. Sometimes it forms pebbles embedded in the arterial wall, some small, some quite large and generally rough and lumpy. Sometimes it forms long needle-like shards of calcified plaque that are sharp as a needle and can easily pierce the skin through a glove. When you grasp the outside of an artery that contains this type of plaque and squeeze, you feel and hear it breaking under your fingers, like a muffled version of the sound of walking on thin ice on a winter sidewalk. Some of the thicker shards are strong enough that they are difficult to break with your fingers, and some of the pebbles are as dense as the pebbles in your driveway. We have seen arteries such as the common iliac or femoral artery, so densely filled with plaque that you wonder how any blood got through at all. In some cases, expansion of the artery during systole must have been the only way for blood to move past the obstruction.

One dissection was a woman who lived to the age of 90. I often discuss with the students what we’re going to see, and due to her age, I felt confident that we would see some significant arterial plaque. However, much to my delight, this 90-year old woman had beautiful arteries, they were clean, elastic and completely free of plaque. We removed the heart so students could hold it and feel the strong rubbery consistency of the heart muscle. When I held her heart, I was deeply moved. Time stood still and I could feel her spirit. Then it was time to pass the heart to the next person.

Second

I’d like to talk about the spine. There is such a remarkable difference between a healthy spine with thick disks and a spine in the advanced stages of degeneration where the disks have compressed and dried out. Healthy disks have thick, strong rings of tough annulus fibrosus with a nucleus pulposus that looks like thick creamy yogurt. In a spine with advanced spondylosis, you see the bone spurs that have tried to shore up the spine, while the disks are thin, dry and brittle. Stretching and exercising the spine is so important,

keep your disks supple and hydrated with movement and fluid intake. Sit less and move more.

Third

I’d like to talk about fascia. Through the work of Luigi and Carla Stecco (1) and many others, fascia has been analyzed to a degree never imagined just a few decades ago. During dissection, one can simply marvel at the interconnection and at the endless variation in how fascia responds to movement and muscular contraction. Fascia creates a complex web of connection throughout the body, and provides sensory and proprioceptive input to the nervous system. Fascia allows us to be far stronger than we would be with muscles alone. As many have said before me, traditional anatomy books were made by people who removed the fascia to get at the muscles, never appreciating the interdependent relationship between them.

Some muscles, like the erector spinae, vastus lateralis, and gastrocnemius have strong thick bands that resemble strapping tape. These structures provide great tensile strength and store energy when elongated, only to release it upon shortening. Fascia responds to the stresses it encounters, including elongation, compression and torsion. In one male specimen the suboccipital muscles had numerous thick bands of supporting fascia so strong they were like thin pillars of bone. I wondered if he had been a wrestler as I could imagine him doing neck bridges. In others, the suboccipital muscles are soft and almost mushy. Muscles will atrophy when not put to use. A recent specimen was from a woman inactive at the end of life, her multifidi were about 70% fat.

The infraspinatus muscle is one of my favorites for observing fascia. I always look forward to carefully exposing its surface where you often see circular swirls and curving lines of fascia going out in many different directions, to accommodate complex, multiplanar movements.

Fourth

Let me briefly mention the organs. The stomach wall is much thinner than I had imagined it. It’s thin and stretchy and the mucosal layer internally is also much less formidable that I expected. I’m more careful now not to stuff my stomach with excess food. The Chinese have a saying “eat until 80% full.” It’s good advice. The intestinal walls are much thinner than the stomach, thin enough that you can easily see through them to the waste within. When you see the intestines in all their blue-collar glory, fasting and cleansing seems like a smart idea. Abdominal fat stores toxins to a greater extent than fat in other parts of the body. People who had chemotherapy shortly before death often have greenish abdominal fat with a toxic chemical smell, while fat on the rest of the body appears normal. The greater omentum also seems to reflect overall health. It too absorbs chemical toxins, and in smokers is gray, dry and shriveled, when it should be moist, yellow and bright. In smokers you can smell the cigarette smoke as you expose the greater omentum, almost as if someone in the room were smoking. There is a vast difference in the appearance of healthy and unhealthy organs. Healthy organs are brightly colored, there is a vibrancy and integrity to the tissue. They look beautiful.

Changed My View

I lead a healthy lifestyle, but doing dissection has changed how I look at myself and how I look at others. We all have an inner reality, but we focus on the outer. At this moment, your bones, muscles, organs, (3) nerves, and arteries all have a reality that is partially hidden from you. We’ve all heard stories or had patients who suddenly experienced chest pain, went to the doctor only to find that their coronary arteries were 90% blocked. Maybe they were feeling fine up to that moment. The body does a remarkable job of coping with the constraints and stresses of life and lifestyle, until it can’t.

I’ve always been a people watcher and as a structure and movement specialist I look at how people stand, sit and move. Now there’s an added dimension, I picture what people look like on the inside. I visualize spinal degeneration, picture the pitting of osteoarthritis and the joint destruction of rheumatoid arthritis. I have seen metastatic colon cancer that colonized the entire abdomen, and the blackened lungs of smokers who died of lung cancer. I picture the many different kinds of fat in the body, how different it looks in different areas, and how much it varies between body types. I feel and imagine the fascia, resilient and protective in active athletes and less than it could be in sedentary individuals.

We begin and end every class with a ceremony of gratitude for the individual who donated his or her body to further the education of others. Maybe they did it years before death, maybe shortly before. These people took the time to think of others not only in their lives, but afterwards. If I can see into the body it is because of these generous individuals, and I am forever grateful.

Reference

1. “Fascial Manipulation: Practical Part,” Luigi & Carla Stecco, Piccin, 2009.

Patrick Cunningham is chair of the manual therapy department at the New England School of Acupuncture. He specializes in orthopedic and myofascial acupuncture, zhenggu technique, craniosacral and visceral therapy, chronic pelvic pain, and manual lymphatic therapy. He can be reached at livinganatomy@gmail.com.

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(Editors note: I have known Patrick for many years and have been the grateful recipient of many hands-on sessions with him. I was also privileged to attend one of his dissections and am still absorbing lessons from that amazing day. Those of you in the Boston area have an amazing resource in him. This article was originally published in Acupuncture Today.)

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http://www.acupuncturetoday.com/mpacms/at/article.php?id=33059&no_paginate=true&no_b=true

(apologies for the formatting; for some reason, this one has been a disaster.)

Patanjali on the Mat

Posted on August 18, 2015 by admin

An embodied yoga practice allows the possibility of decoding the Sanskrit lessons imparted in the Yoga Sutras without too many trips to the dictionary, because yoga is ultimately experiential and not a collection of ideas.

There are two great discoveries offered by Patanjali. First, we are always in direct connection with the infinite Ground of Being, known in the Yoga Sutras as Purusha, or drashtuh, the Seer. In Vedanta, this discovery is known as atma-jnanam, knowledge of the true nature of the Self. However, as humans, we tend to forget this reality, stop feeling whole and at peace, and become spiritually confused.

Therefore, Patanjali’s second great revelation is that there are many psychological, emotional and spiritual practices or disciplines available to us to help dissolve this confusion and help us return to feeling whole. These skillful means or upayas are cultivated by tapping into the wisdom of life itself, awakening the innate intelligence, aka buddhi, and discovering that embodiment of the Divine, whether as a galaxy, a star, or a human being, always involves a balance of complementary forces and energies, known as yin and yang, or the dvandvas. (II-48, tato dvandva anabhigatah)

Patanjali does not spend many sutras on atma-jnanam. He mentions it at the beginning in I-3, as drashtuh svarupe avasthanam, returns to it in the very last sutra, IV-34, and that’s about it. (The Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita offer very rich and metaphorical descriptions of embodying Self Knowledge, so perhaps Patanjali did not feel the need to replicate those.) But he does an amazing job of offering maps and models of the mind states that create problems, and practices to heal the ones that are dysfunctional. Our on the mat practice will be samyama in asana.

The most important sutras come right at the beginning, I-2 through 1-4. We will change the order slightly, (as this is how we actually experience them), and then expand upon them a bit to give us a basic overview before we get into practice. (Please refer to the Yoga Sutras Study Section for the more literal translation and additional commentary to these and other sutras.)

I-4 vrtti sarupya itaratra: Being human is not easy. Our thinking mind complicates the world unnecessarily and this leads to what the Buddha referred to as the state of suffering, or dukkha, where we forget our own infinite spiritual nature. Identification of the self with dysfunctional beliefs and thoughts is the source of this suffering, or to use Patanjali’s terminology, of not being “in Yoga”. This creates a self sense that is inadequate, constantly needing to either add or subtract something in order to find inner peace. This is of course an impossible pursuit and shows up in the body/mind as tension, fear, anxiety, stress and trauma.

I-2 citta vrtti nirodha: This dysfunctional mind activity can be transformed by resolving the energies of these activities back into the flow of aliveness. This harmonious, elegant movement rooted in the eternal is known as the Tao in Chinese and is described in the Tao Te Ching, the famous treatise attributed to Lao Tzu. Patanjali offers many skills and practices that can be called upon to alleviate the distress and shift the self identity and we will focus on one today, samyama, described in Patanjali’s third chapter, the Vibhuti Pada. We are becoming more and more clear about the neuro-science and biology of fear, anxiety and trauma, the roots of suffering, including how they arise and how they can be healed, and we will use this to inform our practice.

I-3 tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam: When the dysfunctional activity ceases, the Infinite Ground of Being shines forth, the “I AM”, the sense of self, dissolves into this, and remains stable there . There is an ‘Awakening’ to the fact that ‘I am wholeness’ that is both unimaginable and indisputable. In the Zen tradition, this glimpse into one’s true nature is called Kensho or Satori. The Japanese character for satori is depicted on the left.

However, the identification process, a specific type of mind activity, (ahamkara) often eventually reverts back to its habit of feeling separate and lacking. Thus the ‘Awakening’ is often unstable in the beginning. It may last minutes, hours, or even days, but can’t quite stick. Thus Patanjali requires the stabilizing of the awakening to be considered “being in Yoga” by using the term ‘avasthanam’. In sutra IV-27 and IV -28, Patanjali returns to the process of stabilizing the awakening.

The spiritual irony of this is that we are always connected to The Ground of Being, because that is all there is, there is only wholeness. We forget, get distracted, and before we know it, are totally lost in delusion (avidya). This is the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, the “Fall from Grace” as depicted here on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Our practice on the mat is to re-solve the dysfunctional mental patterns that manifest as thoughts and beliefs that have an immediate affect on the cells, tissues and organs. If we carry the water image further, we are dissolving, like salt into water, these patterns of mind activity (citta vrttis) into the feeling of Oneness. It is tangible, visceral opening that emerges when the organism feels totally safe and very awake. Usually our being awake carries fear or anxiety of danger, as this is the biological priming of our nervous systems. Danger lurks, and you will survive if you are on alert. And feeling safe by itself usually doesn’t take us into the spiritual breakthrough. There has to be an openness, alertness, curiosity and intention to stay present to whatever is arising known as mindfulness. Mindfulness, a mind state that gets stronger through practice, will allow us to sustain our practice through the moments when we do not feel totally safe and will allow the samyama in the postures to also strengthen.

Our first exploration on the mat will be finding the balance of weight and lightness.
(Follow the link!) From the perspective of the organism, the first question of safety is ‘where am I’. The first orientation, where to bring attention (dharana), is to the felt sense of weight. Find the felt sense of weight. Stay there. Live there. Patanjali calls this embodied state of being grounded ‘sthira‘ and is deepening our connection to Mother Earth, at all levels of reality.

The second orientation is to the space around me. I need to feel safe in my environment. I find this in movement, and through the felt sense of lightness or levity which allows me to float in grounded-ness, like a fish in water. I become 3 dimensional in perception and action. Patanjali calls this ‘sukha‘. Thus, to be fully embodied is to be both sthira and sukham, as Patanjali describes in II-46. Staying in this dynamic state of balance, of weight and lightness, roots and wings, with action, perception and intelligence flowing as an single stream, begins the samyama.

Take this awareness into the standing poses (follow the link), and we will add one more clue from Patanjali to integrate into the samyama. The first two practices Patanjali introduces, even before samadhi, are abhyassa and vairagya. On the mat these are related to how we use energy in the poses. Abhyassa is the disciplined and conscious direction of your energy towards healing. In asana, it means to deepen the stability of the samyama by bringing more cells, organs and tissues into the conscious flow. It is a choice to bring your attention to a highly refined state. Vairagyam is the complementary practice. It involves withdrawing of energies away from patterns that are hyper-tonic (excess rajas) or hypo-tonic (excess tamas). Where in my body/mind am I overworking? Too aggressive? Overly contracted? Where in my body/mind am I dull, unconscious, asleep? Take from here, add to there, all the while monitoring action and perception to feel how the changes are actually manifesting.

And all the while feeling the ever-present Divinity radiating with more and more brightness from your heart out into the world.