Blessed cycle days (and a few hours from this holiday) bring me time for svadhyaya. I am reading Yoga For A World Out Of Balance by Michael Stone. I found one copy in Bibliarch yesterday as we went to have the printer repaired. These rare book finds, to me, are like sign posts, and when open to the messages, a whole new road opens.
This book looks at how we can appreciate more deeply and truly apply yama in our current context. The tone is scholarly but heartfelt, practical and engaging. It reads like a good lecture and I look forward to sharing this with friends who are with me on this path.
"Whenever I begin working with students who want to establish a well-rounded practice, we always begin with the first limb of practice, the yamas, as a means of setting a foundation for what spiritual practice means and how it ripens in contemporary life. This approach helps dismantle our lofty associations with the term "spiritual" so that practice begins grounded in the material. When we begin with the five yamas, our yoga practice grows roots in the intricate and infinite web of living relationships and thus presses the yoga practitioner not to turen away from the world but to tune in to and be tuned by the life of relational existence. How we relate to ourselves, other humans, plants, animals, architecture, city planning, the growing of food, and the daily tasks in the household is part and parcel of the path of yoga practice."
"The yamas help us understand and refine our behaviour. As we watch our own ecology - how it connects, disconnects, inhales and exhales, falls apart, rights itself - we come to see a life that exists in a much wider field than the purely personal."
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