Gray spaces between bliss and heartbreak
WHEN THE MOON RIPENS FULL IN MAGHA
HERE WE ARE: WIZARDS NAVIGATING DUAL FORCES, SOMEWHERE BETWEEN KING ARTHUR & A MOUSE.
Yesterday’s Moon fully ripened with an elusive majesty permeating the air as the Moon shone vividly and waltzed past the star cluster Magha, fully expressing these days. It’s regal quality echoes Magha's symbol, the palanquin, and is juxtaposed with the headless serpent of Ketu, a reminder of the body (minus the pesky head—as Bessel van der Kolk implores us, it’s not the head but the body that “keeps the score”).
This cosmic tapestry speaks to the ways that our very existence is deftly held, fed, supported, and reflected by the beings around us. We are born into and borne along currents without beginning or end, tributaries leading us toward and back to one big dream shared by ancestors of past and future.
Magha's ruling deity is these ancestors, known as Pitris. Singular yet plural, the fore-fathers of humanity are seen as our guides on life’s journey. The Wizard in The Wizard of Oz (1939) illustrates Magha currents, for Magha is also the Magi, the magician.
On the one hand: a powerful projection of ominous majesty ruling the land. On the other: a loud show run by a little guy behind the curtain. Most of us fixate on the stage: the material world, the externally-oriented gaze, the force of genetic inheritance, familial bonds. (MAGA is a clear example of Magha clinging to representations rather than truth.)
And lo, the little guy—a frail, awkward stagehand quietly tinkering in the shadows. Here we also meet ourselves, equally frail and awkward. Here we have access to the subtle forces of intuition, to the great teaching of Magha, to the tune of the mycelial current, and the effulgent spark of this full moon.
Magha's majesty captures the radiant beauty of life-on-Earth, a beauty inextricable from the simple truth that this mortal coil will inevitably drop away, revealing—what? Recall the King in David Lowery's The Green Knight (2021): a stunned ghost gussied up in the trappings of power and pageantry. Recall Owsley "Bear" Stanley's meat diet: an alchemical LSD magi with his head in the ether and his body grasping for a carnal anchor.
Mooshika, the mouse or rat, is Ganesha's vehicle and the animal associated with Magha. A gorgeous conceptualization of the material as a small, humble, nimble, utterly practical beast. Ganesha, then, embodies the force of the spiritual in all of its elegance, amplitude, and holy glory. The easily overlooked, undervalued material as a means of conveyance for loftier aims.
There are no classes this week.
Peace,
-[s]
To keep up with this year’s moon cycles, and while there’s still a few left, I wholehearted suggest that you grab this year’s 2022 Hatha Yoga Calendar from David Andreas’s Samaritan Press, whose work you’ve seen in collaboration with Om, Sleep, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and many others. This year’s mythic imagery helps us to focus upon and resonate with a new cycle of auspicious frequencies. Procure a lovely handmade item (+1 for tangible things! 🌝), and support an artist working in an industry that continues to endure the pandemic’s economic slowdown. | Samaritan Press
But I want you to know that most of your life will happen in the gray spaces between bliss and heartbreak, between having everything lock into place and having it all fall apart…You have to get out of your own way and write your own story—and not be forced into the narrative that you think will give you the easiest path to success or the most likes. I want you to live in the space that’s your own, your own delicious mess.
— Laura Dern in a letter to Jaya, her daughter | Letters of Note
EATING THE SKY
All times listed below are in Pacific time.
Yesterday’s Full Moon ripened amidst a backdrop of the Magha nakshatra, a.k.a., the Regulus star cluster, revealing shape and texture and insight to our emotional minds during these days, this lunar month.
Astronomically the full moon always happens when the Moon appears 180° opposite from the Sun—a full expression of polar forces.
The Moon often represents our emotional mind, a field onto which rationality, desire, action, and learning are built.
Sun is both a singular light that we all share in and revolve around as a planet, and is also seen as the soul within each being. This month the Sun is within proximity of Jupiter; we can tap into the soulful, expansive, nearly non-dual inclusiveness of our permeating yet individual life.
Venus is still very bright in the eastern sky just before dawn. And you can see Mars nearby, as well. Go see for yourself!
Forthcoming: Mahāśivarātri 2022 happens on Monday, February 28, the last evening of the month. More on this in the next email.
New Moon: Wednesday, March 2, 9:35am.
While I teach specific routines and practices within a yoga tradition—and there are benefits for these practices—a little bit of anything will still go a long way. | Popular Science, Five Stretches You Should Do Every Day
Science & sleep: Nightly our neurons still & quiet, bathing in a pulsing flow of cerebrospinal spinal fluid
When we sleep the cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) flushes out in pulsating waves—and your neurons will go quiet. Research at Boston University reveals the first-ever images of cerebrospinal fluid washing in and out of the brain during sleep.
“It’s such a dramatic effect,” says study coauthor Laura Lewis. CSF pulsing during sleep “was something we didn’t know happened at all, and now we can just glance at one brain region and immediately have a readout of the brain state someone’s in.” | Are We “Brain Washed” during Sleep?
Haṭha yoga resonances
In the 11th century Amṛtasiddhi, the earliest "source text" for Haṭha yoga, bodily postures and breath control are depicted as a means to preserve and regulate the pulsations of what might actually be CSF. It is called amṛta or bindu (vital energy) in the Amṛtasiddhi, and is said to live in the head (the "moon") where it drips down the central channel, and is burned by our normal, daily activities—thus called the fire (the "sun") that lives the perineum.
In some of the more far-out contemporary therapies, like Cranial Sacral Therapy, the relationship between the soul and the cerebral spinal fluid is seen poetically to be like the influence of the Moon upon the waves of the ocean. | New Mexico School of Natural Therapeutics, The Soul Swims in the CSF
I haven’t done much work in researching the parallels between yoga and the relationship between sleep and wakefulness, as discussed in the study above. Do you have some thoughts or textual references to share on this?
It is probably a betrayal of the feminist literary tradition to pronounce the final episode of “Ulysses,” “Penelope,” the best—the funniest, most touching, arousing, and truthful—representation of a woman anyone has written in English. But it is, and the eight long, unpunctuated, and outrageous sentences of Molly Bloom’s silent monologue make much of the feminist canon look like a sewing circle for virgins and prudes. In what is often described as a gush of thought, she thinks of her husband, her past lovers, Boylan, her childhood, her children—of every experience of life.
If the earliest feminist critics of “Ulysses” were, for better or worse, struck by Molly’s eroticism, then today I am struck, and moved, by how her sexual frankness and fluidity circle around her fear of pregnancy and, nested within that fear, the death of her baby boy. Molly and Bloom share a certain horror at reproduction. “Fifteen children he had,” Bloom thinks of Stephen’s “philoprogenitive” father—the blind rutting with which people bring children into a world that cannot provide for them. In Molly’s mind, reproduction is tied to the one and only memory she actively refuses to brood upon: “I suppose I ought'nt to have buried him in that little woolly jacket I knitted crying as I was but give it to some poor child but I knew well Id never have another our 1st death too it was we were never the same since O Im not going to think myself into the glooms about that any more.”
—Merve Emre in The New Yorker, “The Seductions of Ulysses”
Many luminous, unthanked spirits feed this gesturing, musing, wrestling mind. Many shards shared above where snagged from passing streams from folks like Melanie Jane Parker, Dr. Concrescence, Sasha van Aalst, Erik Davis, Emily Leon, Roberto Maiocchi, and others. Thank you for sharing, sharing some light. Peace.