Tag: Patanjali

Apaḥ and the Nāga: Water and the Snake by Lenore Lowe

Image © 2024 Compilation of Lenore Lowe and Freepik.com

As I write this, water has slowly leaked in my front yard for a day. It has already turned what was dry and brown to moist and green. It seems fitting on the day of Nāga Pañcamī (worship on this particular 5th day of the half moon). It’s fitting that water—apaḥ—has gently made its way to the surface. It has wound around pipes, rocks and roots like a cobra—nāga—to come up to show itself. Though, there are financial challenges in fixing the leak, I can’t help celebrate it as a blessed omen of goodness to come.

            After all, it’s arrived for this extra auspicious day in the most favourable month of the vedic calendar. I admit some of my frivolity may be from feeling better on my 5th day of covid. (The significance of the number 5 is not going unnoticed: linked to Patañjali and the great Yoga Sutras.) My mind too feels like it’s been making its way back to the surface. The seepage also keeps bringing me back to thoughts about the watery world of emotions, and new depths of emotions seem to be rising up in me. They feel deeply personal and universal at the same time. The celebration is devotional, the auspiciousness of having this extra time off of work to bring roses to the Mother.

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Where the Dance Is . . . On Cultivating a Daily Practice by Joyce Zonana

Although Goddess traditions invite us to embrace a world of immanence and change, rather than to seek to escape into transcendence—which some yoga teachings seem to point toward—I have come to believe that the “still point,” is, as Eliot writes, where “the dance is.” In other words, daily practice might grant us the capacity to always move through the world with grace and joy. The mind will be steady as it encounters and embraces the turning world. We will be whole.

jz-headshotWhen I was growing up, I was fascinated to see my father each day recite the morning blessings mandated for Jewish men. While the rest of the household bustled sleepily—my mother in the kitchen, my brother and I taking turns in the bathroom, my grandmother slowly getting dressed—my father, still in his pajamas, would stand in the center of our small living room, yarmulke on his head, tefillin wrapped around his arm and forehead, tallit draped over his shoulders. Using a tattered old siddur he had brought with him from Cairo, he would face the east and begin the ancient Hebrew prayers: “Blessed art thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe . . .”

I never knew then the content of what my father intoned, but I knew how committed he was to his practice: he prayed every morning without fail, from the day of his bar mitvah at the age of eleven (the rabbi in Cairo had decided to initiate him early because he had lost his father as a young child) until he a few years before his death at 84, when he became debilitated by Parkinson’s Disease. Ours was not a traditionally Orthodox Jewish family—we did not observe the Sabbath or keep kosher—but my father’s faithful performance grounded him and all the rest of us, bringing us us to what T.S. Eliot called “the still point of the turning world.”

Continue reading “Where the Dance Is . . . On Cultivating a Daily Practice by Joyce Zonana”