Sunrise in Our Hearts

Well, The Cop is still working on seventh series. Slowly, oh so slowly. He had one of those daunting, heavy, everything-seems-impossible practices yesterday. The first he's ever had. It's hard, when the initial novelty kind of wears off and you are faced with just practicing. But he chugged along through all of primary with me. Brave man. He's at work now--working the graveyard shift for at least a month.

My Gift is also at work. Her new job. She's the receptionist at my first yoga teacher's studio. Anusara. Hold your jokes, guys. This will be a good environment for her, I think. She's had her stint working in a restaurant, then paid her dues in a retail environment. At Christmas time, no less. Now she has a nice little studio to work at. She was thrilled last night when she got home. She said "I'm used to managers who yell; now my manager hugs me at the end of the shift." She laughed her head off a few weeks ago when she first went to him for a therapeutic session. Explaining how to pull her shoulders back and open her chest, he said, "Pretend you have a sunrise in your heart."

She's kind of a tough chick, My Gift, so I think this kind of softness will be a good lesson for her. We come from tough stock--my folks are first generation Irish and Italian, brought up in Massachusetts. My siblings and I all made our ways west as soon as we could, while the whole rest of the extended family--every last aunt, uncle, cousin and grandparent--stuck tight to New England. Nick went to San Francisco, Lynne to San Diego, and me to Phoenix. We're the weirdos of our family. Fine by me. But no matter how "nutty and fruity" we got, there is still a tinge of the East Coast cynical streak. No escaping it. And My Gift, of course, inherited it. Like me, her eyes automatically roll when someone talks about the sun rising out of their heart, but secretly we're curious. It'll be good for her to experience a bit of Anusara wackiness. Rest assured, though; I will draw the line if she starts calling yoga poses "juicy" ;-)

Tonight I am reviewing a proof of my book, which looks great, and getting excited about heading over to Volleyball Guy's tomorrow morning. First Mysore since he went to the Philippines five weeks ago. I'm sure tomorrow I'll be tempted to just head into the yoga room and practice at home, but I'll pull myself out of my current routine (what a creature of habit!) and once I am at Volleyball Guy's, I'll be thrilled.

REW sent me an email during my recent break from blogging, and we chatted a bit about blogging in general. This morning, she said, "The Hatha Yoga Pradipika says specifically to keep all aspects of one's practice to oneself so as to gain the most from personal insights." Hmmm. Yoga Pradipika: right or wrong? Blogging: good or bad? Any time I am tempted to make an "either/or" judgement, I like to turn to the zen masters. I opened an arbitrary page in Cultivating the Empty Field, by Hongzhi. Here's what I read:

Fully appreciate the emptiness of all dharmas. Then all minds are free and all dusts evaporate in the original brilliance shining everywhere. Transforming according to circumstances, meet all beings as your ancestors. Subtly illuminate all conditions, magnanimous beyond all duality. Clear and desireless, the wind in the pines and the moon in the water are all content in their elements. Without minds interacting, wind and pines or moon and water do not impede one another. Essentially you exist inside emptiness and have the capacity to respond outwardly without being annoyed, like spring blossoming, like a mirror reflecting forms. Amid all the noise spontaneously emerge transcendent.