Day 57: Zen in the City

I would post this while the leaves are rustling if I could. Lovely day after yoga practice.

Bringing home the mudras

There is a concentration of energy found in our hands and on the tips of our fingers. The hands have the ability to convey messages where words cannot suffice.

I do not fully understand why I am being haunted by mudras but I am opening to receive the message...

Day 43: Surya Got a Tattoo

Manila traffic with the potholes, swerving jeepneys, cabs, buses, crazy drivers, pedestrians (and pedestrians on motorbikes), traffic enforcers going opposite traffic lights, and intersections without traffic enforcers... It's a real modern day challenge to ahimsa. Deep breaths help. So Surya got a tattoo. It symbolizes us taking this yogic path (on the mat, off the mat, and even on the road).

This is also to remind me (and maybe the driver behind) to take a deep breath, stop wishing permanent Savasana on the drivers who cut us, and just... let go.

"I seem to have run in a great circle..."

and met myself again on the starting line." - Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)

The journey towards the Self is not linear. Though we are sometimes fraught with indecision, it is really not just a path filled with crossroads. I've always believed we spiral into our Self. We cannot help it. At the very end of it all, even at the height of our own self-destruction, we may survive to come closer to who we are or our bodies may die, but maybe in that last breath, we will finally understand.

As we grow older, or younger, or more beautiful or more decrepit, we seem to be going back to the center of our Selves. Even if we do not declare that we are going on a spiritual journey, we are. We cannot help it because it has been said - we are spiritual beings. We cannot be left alone. At the core of our seeming uniqueness, we are spiralling in similar circles, overlapping, intersecting. When we go back to the words, the music, the memories that sang to us and shone on our lives, there will be these fascinating souls who will share deeply the same experience. We encircle each other, concentric, we meet each other in the most opportune (or least opportune time). Nevertheless, we meet ourselves again.

* * *
And so since I seem to be spiralling into my first love, here are more quotes from Jeanette Winterson. Nothing refreshes the spiritual journey like bathing in the sunshine and shadows of the human heart and its experiences. Embrace, transcend, and if you can, embrace again...


"The Buddhists say there are 149 ways to God. I'm not looking for God, only for myself, and that is far more complicated. God has had a great deal written about Him; nothing has been written about me. God is bigger, like my mother, easier to find, even in the dark. I could be anywhere, and since I can't describe myself I can't ask for help."  
"They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it?"

"There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name."

"When I look at my life I realise that the mistakes I have made, the things I really regret, were not errors of judgement but failures of feeling."
"It's hard to remember that this day will never come again. That the time is now and the place is here and that there are no second chances at a single moment."


"What you risk reveals what you value."


"To be ill adjusted to a deranged world is not a breakdown."

"Love, they say, enslaves and passion is a demon and many have been lost for love. I know this is true, but I know too that without love we grope the tunnels of our lives and never see the sun. When I fell in love it was as though I looked into a mirror for the first time and saw myself. I lifted my hand in bewilderment and felt my cheeks, my neck. This was me. And when I had looked at myself and grown accustomed to who I was, I was not afraid to hate parts of me because I wanted to be worthy of the mirror bearer."

"I don't know how to answer. I know what I think, but words in the head are like voices underwater. They are distorted."

"He wrote on a piece of paper with his pencil.
Psychosis: out of touch with reality.
Since then, I have been trying to find out what reality is, so that I can touch it."

"Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes."

"I think now that being free is not being powerful or rich or well regarded or without obligation but being able to love. To love someone else enough to forget about yourself even for one moment is to be free."


"I was happy but happy is an adult word. You don't have to ask a child about happy, you see it. They are or they are not. Adults talk about being happy because largely they are not. Talking about it is the same as trying to catch the wind. Much easier to let it blow all over you."

And here, on love and desire...tread lightly on these lines...

"Why is the measure of love loss?"


"What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don't want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don't want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you."

"I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and knows that love is as strong as death, and be on my side forever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me."
"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like Braille. I like to keep my body rolled up away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, or tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book."


"When I say 'I will be true to you' I am drawing a quiet space beyond the reach of other desires."

"While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘Yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close."


"As your lover describes you, so you are."

"She looked at me like I was crazy. Most of my lovers do, and that's partly why they love me, and partly why they leave"

Day 38: Om in my Home

In the aftermath of my rather short practice tonight, I look around the home love has created and focus on the space filled with gifts from this blessed path...

You Are A Wanderer

We dropped by Fully Booked in Cebu, I opened Siddharta and this is the page I get. It's a good way to cap the week long workshop. I bring this message with me.

"I am on the way...what I will be tomorrow, I do not know..."

Hari Om!