February 2023 Dispatch: Devotion

Happy February, Lovers of the Galaxy!

I want to start with one of my favorite Rumi poems: Love Dogs

This version is translated by Coleman Barks, and it perfectly describes our theme this month: Devotion.

One night a man was crying,

Allah! Allah!

His lips grew sweet with the praising,

until a cynic said,

"So! I have heard you

calling out, but have you ever

gotten any response?"

The man had no answer to that.

He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,

in a thick, green foliage.

"Why did you stop praising?"

"Because I've never heard anything back."

"This longing

you express is the return message."

The grief you cry out from

draws you toward union.

Your pure sadness

that wants help

is the secret cup.

Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.

That whining is the connection.

There are love dogs

no one knows the names of.

Give your life

to be one of them.”

The way Rumi describes the longing for a spiritual connection to the divine, the romanticism of that love, and that the longing experienced is a part of what is transcendent about it is core to the idea of bhakti, or devotion, in the yoga tradition. If you’re not a religious person, no worries - this month of devotion is an opportunity to get in touch with how your earthly experiences of love, desire, loss, connection and even heartbreak longing, and loneliness can be a conduit for a connection with spirit, whether you define that as big G God, or something else. 

But maybe you’re into Prince?

Because I am. And Prince, I like to call a modern day Rumi. He’s not shy about dialogues with the divine, but he also intertwines his art with the very earthly pleasures of romance and intimacy in a way that’s pretty much unmatched by any other modern day artist.

I still remember my big sister playing me “Darling Nikki” for the first time - and not *really* knowing what was happening in that song, but knowing that I wanted to find out. In his homage to Prince from 2016, writer Toure talks about how Prince mixed and mingled the sacred and profane in a way that no other modern artist came close to. He writes: “The Judeo-Christian ethic seems to demand that sexuality and spirituality be walled off from each other, but in Prince’s personal cosmology, they were one. Sex to him was part of a spiritual life. The God he worshiped wants us to have passionate and meaningful sex.”

That intertwining of earthly pleasure and the divine is directly in line with the yogic philosophy of Tantra, which roughly translates as “woven together,”

Tantra refers not just to the systematic way the philosophy organizes the world, our bodies, our energy, and our systems of belief - it refers to the path of liberation: the goal isn’t to escape the body; the goal is to use the body as a conduit and the path to liberation and oneness. And yes, Tantra gets mostly defined by the Kama Sutra, which is not just a text on sexuality and eroticism. It’s actually mostly a text that explores the purusarthas - the four aims in life (Kama, or pleasure, is just one of them). Tantra - more than the Dualist texts like the Yoga Sutras - is the precursor to, and responsible for much of our modern yoga practice.

And… have you ever had that feeling in a yoga class?

I’m talking about the feeling that comes over you when the class flows, and the teacher is in the zone, the music (or the silence) is perfect, the atmosphere is there, and you’re working hard, but not too hard, and everything, or mostly everything, feels really good? A friend of mine calls those moments body prayers. I feel that - it’s a spiritual experience, and well outside of the quotidian rhythms of my middle-aged mom lyfe.

But more than that: to me, those moments also feel like some of the most intimate, loving, truthful, vulnerable, and transcendent moments. It’s me in intimate conversation with myself. And I experience that loving conversation through the artistic and spiritual medium of my body. And I would never experience it without the framework of the pleasure all my bodily systems are experiencing and reacting with and to. 

So now you know maybe a little too much about what I’m thinking about when I’m practicing yoga (if you follow my Instagram, you wouldn’t be surprised). I hope, for this month, we can celebrate unabashed love, passion, and devotion through the lens of our yoga practice - it may not be the only way to Big G God… but it certainly is a fun one. Rumi also says (in one of my favorite love poems of all time):

“When someone quotes the old poetic image

About clouds gradually uncovering the moon,

Slowly loosen knot by knot the strings of your robe.

Like this.”

Let's fall in love with our yoga practice. 

Like this.

Dance, Sex, Music, Romance,

Anna