Dear Fellow Travellers

TO COMMIT OR NOT COMMIT, THAT IS THE

QUESTION!

Dear Fellow Travellers

I want to launch this termby talking about the ‘thing’ that I have about ‘committing’ to the weekly yogaclass & why I think it is so important.

There are so many different forms of exercise you could be doing. To a large extent, most of them might do a wonderful job of getting the body moving, the blood pumping, the muscles working but they don’t usually ask that you go within with the ultimate intent of creating a clear highway for your higher self.

The yogic perspective says something like:

‘I’m temporarily wearing a body. The body is my point of interfacing with the world. It takes the brunt of all my experiences. So anything that happens that is too much for my conscious mind to ‘field’ will register somewhere as a form of tension, constricting, tightening, blocking. This has been happening since I was born and to the extent that I brought in difficult karma from past life experiences, some tension may even have been genetically encoded into the body. When I work with the yoga postures in a slow deliberate way that starts to tune into these various ways I’ve learned to armour and fortify myself, there is a confrontation that starts to happen, for knowing/recognising something brings about the requirement to change. But within us we each have a ‘status quo’ dynamic- something within us that doesn’t like to change. Something that finds change quite disturbing and fears what might be uncovered; especially with our more deep seated patterns of tension’.

When we get to a critical mass point with our yoga, as we approach points of potential shifting and breakthrough, the status quo energy propels the body to ‘stage a coup’. We get sick, our back hurts, we have an injury etc. There will be some reason why the yoga is no longer temporarily possible until the pressure is off. It means we don’t have to work through whatever the something is that’s bubbling up. It also means that we miss out on the steady trajectory of transformation that yoga is.

For myself, when I started, I had a massive amount of multi-layered tension to work through. I was blessed in that I innately recognized it was going to be hard so I was already determined to push through but also had that as a clear expectation from my teachers. I therefore did set a bottom line for myself and did get to my classes come hell or high water. When my back packed it in and I felt like I couldn’t move, I still came to class fully prepared to lie on the floor and do the whole class in my head. When I swallowed some concrete dust from a collapsed ceiling and could barely breathe with a very severe attack of asthma, I still came to class. When I was raging with fever from severe mastitis, I came to class. Even when I broke my ankle, I came to class.

I don’t believe that it is our body that should be calling the shots. I believe that the consciousness that we each are that indwells our body, should be calling the shots; the intelligence that runs our body. I believe it should say something like: ‘body, I’m setting you a bottom line so that you can progress forward; so that you can learn that you are actually atoms and those atoms are filled with space & that space is filled with intelligence. I want you to learn that; to metabolise that awareness, so I’m requiring that you do this weekly program where you get to experience this intelligence which underpins you more fully, where you get to release some of the armouring that blocks it, where you get to capitalise on the efforts of others in the class as well as contribute to theirs, where you get to repeatedly balance the powerful chemicals that are making you over and over again and if you want to throw a tantrum, I’m going to take you regardless even if you just go and ‘sit in the corner’ so that youdo NOTlose the momentum that you start to build. I’m also going to powerfully demonstrate to my fellow humans who are caught in the treadmill where what impels them and what they prioritize, are outside forces, how to be led by an inner power.’

How else will the body learn that it is made up of the same stuff as the stars? How else will it access the wisdom of the atoms which compose it which have been circulating in the cosmos for billions of years? How will it learn the truth that it ‘cannot be lost, nor damaged, nor destroyed’ but merely transformed? My own intent re this was so clear, that when I showed up to class with my various incapacities I truthfully report that they ‘mysteriously’ disappeared!

I would like to invite you to imagine when you come to class that you are an instrumentalist turning up for the weekly rehearsal with the orchestra and to seek and value that steadiness of participation that will allow us, over time, to make the most wonderful music together for that is what can happen, and some of you, perhaps, may have already experienced that in your other classes.

I myself, for decades, had participated in a class with my fellow teachers and am blown away by the potency of that hour to completely turn me around. That power builds as we work together and that is where I’m coming from in the new structuring of my costs for the classes.

In Love and Light

Jenny Rock

Week 1

Term 4 2013

JennyRock Oct 2013