Newsletter Archive |
8+1 things I learned about the body by Brandy Leary
Over the past 12 years I have moved between Canada and India to train, study, teach, perform and choreograph work that integrates the dance styles of Chhau (Seraikella and Mayurbhanj), Kalarippayattu(South Indian Martial Art) and Mallakhamb (Indian Aerial rope). All of these movement idioms pay homage to the ancient practice of yoga through their systems of training, philosophical frameworks, meditative practices, mythologies and physical vocabularies.
8+1
3. The poetry of the body springs from the finely tuned energetic system and not solely from external physicality. Inner grace fills out the physical manifestation of form.
4. Every form, every movement you create should have rasa.
5.Patience is required for opening and evolving. Practice (riyaz) is required to cultivate patience.
6.Repetition
7. Bhagavad Gita Chapter 4.18
9. There is truth in the body.
1. The body is not real.
A dynamic artist of diverse talents, Brandy is a pioneering Choreographer, Director, Dramaturge and an engaging Performer. Her work has been called soulful and sensual by John Rockwell of the New York Times, impressive by EYE weekly, fascinating by NOW Magazine, and more then thrilling by The Times of India. Seamlessly combining the ancient and the innovative, she integrates a mature use of various performance styles, combining them skillfully to create highly experimental and poignant performance experiences. She holds a BA Honors from York University where she specialized in Direction and Asian Theatre. Over the past decade Brandy has split her time between Canada and India to continue artistic training, performance and collaboration. She is an exponent of the Chhau dance form in both the Seraikella and Mayurbhanj styles. She has more than a decade of experience with the practice of Hatha Yoga and integrates both these physical languages into her innovative creations as well as serves the community as professional Yoga Instructor. She is the founder and Artistic Director of Anandam since 2000.
Creation, the Heart of Yoga
One afternoon, in a summer long ago, when the thickness of the air was cut open by a thunderstorm, I pressed through my mother and was born. Drugged into unconsciousness, she has no memory of this. Perhaps the mystery of myexistence doesn’t loom largest for me, but for her. Later that night, she remembers the nurses telling her that they’d never heard a baby cry so loud. Through my childhood, I repeatedly looked to the story of my birth for clues to my identity. But it wasn’t until I myself became the source, the force that drove my daughter through the universe to land, soft and moist and calm, between my feet, that I understood who I am.
I knew then that I wasn’t separate from the immense power and intelligence of this world.
I wasn’t separate from love. It took many more years and my meeting Mark Whitwell to know that the most sophisticated understanding of yoga is in this same knowing, the visceral feeling of the heart that comes through direct participation in life. It is simple. When we have the strength to receive life, we experience its wholeness. Integration is effortless because it is our natural state. Yoga, or union, is a Given and it is given most clearly when a woman gives birth. Consciousness moves into the world through her and as her. She is the nurturing Source, the Goddess, Shakti, Truth, Reality. Really. Literally. Because the seen and the unseen are one condition. Please let this sink in! The means to yoga is through the Feminine. Much of the yoga we practice is still rooted in a denial of the fact that we are an expression of Life in all its wholeness. The young Brahmin men who brought yoga to the west had incomplete yoga educations framed in the patriarchal paradigms of their social and religious backgrounds. They believed spiritual experience was only possible through a denial of the Feminine, a denial of sex and women and the Life that moves so clearly in the ebb and flow of our fertility. In this denial of what we are, both men and women lose the profound spiritual ground of our own embodiment and experience.
The principles of practice enunciated by Krishnamacharya recognize that yoga happens in the merge of Ha and Tha, the Masculine and Feminine polarities of Life. Of course, this is how new Life comes in. When a woman’s egg is penetrated by a man’s sperm, the egg absorbs it and the resulting fusion reinvents the universe in the form of you and me. We can enact creation daily when we let the exhalation, the Masculine, merge into the inhalation, the Feminine. In the process, our mind is absorbed into the consciousness of the body and the full force of Life is free to move through us. This is the point of yoga practice and it is also the challenge inherent in giving birth.
There is nothing to achieve by practicing yoga, only everything to feel. U.G. Krishnamurti, a good friend of Krishnamacharya’s, felt a wholeness that was obvious, both to himself and to the Hindu orthodoxy, who called him a living Buddha. Krishnamacharya said he was the greatest living Yogi he had ever met. U.G., however, rejected the idea of enlightenment because he rightly understood that it is impossible to be separate from anything. Recognizing your unity with all experience is simply the natural and rational thing to do because your unity is a fact of life. You began life as an expression of the union of your mother and father, and grew in the complete embrace of your mother’s womb. The idea that we are born “clinging” expresses the fear and trauma that so many of us are born into, not our original state.For the disintegrated Masculine, disassociated from Life, the feeling of separation from the Feminine is terrifying. Of course the mind grasps and nothing is ever enough. But we do not come into the world alone. A mother and child are born as one. Linked to our mother by the umbilical cord and rooted into her by the placenta, even our emotions are one shared experience of the same hormonal flow. Just because we leave our mother’s body at birth doesn’t mean we separate from her either. The Life force continues to weave us as one. The beauty and the wonder of this life is that we are individuals inextricably linked to one another. Midwives and doulas speak of the “motherbaby” as one entity. Breastfeeding makes the unified state of mother and child obvious but as a child grows and expresses its own autonomy, the Life force simplybecomes more refined. Life is one thing and the Feminine lives in the reality of this, enfolding the Masculine in her embrace.
Relationship then, is the condition of Life. It is real. No polarity exists independent of its opposite. When we acknowledge the union within us, the outer polarities link up too. We come into synch with everyone. Vairagya, often translated as “detachment”, is best understood, Mark says, as “freedom relative to all experience”. It does not mean to remove yourself from experience. This is impossible, and the attempt to do so will cause you and those who love you, a lot of pain. Understanding this is crucial to the relational structures we teach in, love in, birth in and raise our children in. Real relationship is peace and it is therefore crucial to the survival and well-being of our world. To be free with experience, merge with experience. Doing this in the birth process lets the healing force of Life move you into a deeper connection with all that is. Let your child pull you into Life like the moon pulls the tide, in a wash of pure love!
Death is often presented as a peak spiritual opportunity with no mention made of its original source. In having the strength to receive Life when we give birth, women have the opportunity of passing on the receptivity needed for our continued regeneration. At the end of our life, we then have something to give back. This receptivity is nourished in an intimacy of experience not accessed through conceptual philosophy or belief but in the fiercely delicate dance of relationship that sustains our world. This is yoga.
|
|
As I sit here in the humid heat of summer, my mind drifts…my birthday is next week...
Crescence teaches Yoga, works as a Doula and writes. Giving birth to her daughter at home in 1991 started it all. Two years later, she began to be with other women as they gave birth. Her intimate connection to Life is the blood and bones of her understanding of Yoga. Mark Whitwells transmission of the intellectual clarity of Krishnamacharya and the freedom of U.G. Krishnamurti supports her understanding. She only teaches what she has directly experienced. Ancient wisdom comes to life in each of us, uniquely expressed. Sharing this is strong motivation for her to get up in the morning.
