Yoga: A Great Way to Make Friends

Today four of us met to practice in the morning at Tlatalolco Park, in El Plaza de las Tres Culturas, Mexico City.
My local friend, Liliana, her cousin Malaina, and Curtis joined me in the Mexican sunshine, at the kiosk where I first practiced with Liliana and Diego nine months ago. (see blog entries from January)

Liliana goes to school, works full time, and lives in the city with her grandmother. We connected here on this visit to the City, and I was finally able to give her a decent, thick, brand new yoga mat. She practices in her small amount of spare time and space. We are yoga sisters. How fortunate then, that her cousin Malaina lives in Portland, so we have made connections which make a circle.

After our practice we had tamales at Cafe Tacuba, where the waitresses were all dressed like nuns for Day of the Dead. The setting is a gorgeous old mansion, converted into a huge, beautiful restaurant.

The friendship circle began with their cousin Diego, who I met on the street while waiting for a free yoga class. He asked me if I would teach at the park because the free class was not meeting for the holidays. My Spanish is like a blanket full of holes, and he was very forward... I almost said "Lo siento.. no....I'm sorry, I can't."  Instead I said " Si..yes, I will meet you later." I thought myself crazy at the time.

Now I am grateful to have a bit of a wild enough nature that I could take the risk of involving myself with a stranger, in a foreign country, on the street, alone and with the most minimal of communication. That is what yoga can do, it becomes a human language which can transcend the many human barriers which divide us and keep us from knowing and trusting one another.

Today in the park, while people strolled around the kiosk, the sun shone on my friends, and we were, indeed, finding and sharing our sacred selves. In a 16th century church yesterday, I saw the word 'sagrado' under a saint, and had to look it up. Sagrado means sacred. Why were we taught, in traditional Christianity, that only God, his Son, and the saints were sacred?  We are each sacred, our bodies and our souls. We have our own sacred hearts which beat the rhythm of our lifeblood. We are Sacred like our sacrum, the center of the body, the place of movement, back aches and nearness to the creation of new life.

As we approach the Day of the Dead,  Dia de los Muertos, it is a fitting time to appreciate our aliveness, even as we honor and remember wistfully those we have loved and lost.

" Make new friends, and keep the old....... one is silver and the other is gold."

Bricks and Mortar

"Bricks and mortar sing us no audible tune; the heart opens only to the human chant of being."
        ~ Paramahansa Yogananda's teacher

During a recession, these words offer a different way of knowing life.  Sages are like the lilies of the field.  They neither toil nor spin.  I believe this does not mean one should not work.  It means one's work should be indistinguishable from other parts of life. This wise man was a yogi, and the 'perfume saint'.  I like that name. If I could be a saint, I think I would be the flower saint.  What would your symbol be, if you were a saint?

My Feast day approaches soon, on October 17, the feast of St. Margaret Mary of Alcoque. The Feast day marks the day the saint died. My namesake was a nun, who, I recently learned, was anorexic.  She became so weakened from not eating that she saw visions, namely, the sacred heart of Jesus.  The ruling clerical bosses decided this was useful to the cause, and so she was canonized.

I have a copy of a painting depicting the miracle.  It is taped above my computer in order for me to be inspired as my parents wished when they gave me the name.  When I was little my mother often reminded me how special my saint was, and therefore how special that made me.

In the painting Sister Margaret Mary, dressed in the same black garb my first teachers wore, is kneeling in a chapel praying earnestly. Reportedly, the actual heart of the man Jesus is what she saw, the organ red and beating, as though the skin were pulled apart to reveal internal organs. I wonder what would happen to a young woman who claimed something similar today.

Yet, I feel somehow connected to this woman who lived a very short life and spent it in the quest for spiritual enlightenment.  I share the fever to find the meaning in life.  To see the real heart of people, and not the 'bricks and mortar' of the material world, only an illusion reinforced every day in the story we are told, the story we tell ourselves.

When we practice yoga we ask ourselves to soften the heart, open the heart to the pose, to life. In practice I like to think of chants, deep red love music of the heart, harmony in the world.