KAREEN’S YOGA by Kareen
Zebroff
In yoga, we speak of the body-mind connection. One of the ways the
mind can talk to the body is by converting thought and emotion into
a language that the body can understand. An emotional reaction thus
produces a message to which the entire body responds.
To our collective surprise, two friends and I received our “messages”
immediately upon seeing His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop
Desmond Tutu step onto the stage of the Pacific Coliseum. Eve got
a prickly feeling all over, I surprised myself by getting tears
of deep emotion and Kasey felt a great sense of calm. None of us
are Buddhists, but all of us at that moment experienced an inexplicable
feeling of ease, as did the crowd of 12,000 who stood up in spontaneous,
thunderous ovation.
The Dalai Lama chuckled, bowed, put his hands to his forehead in
greeting, and lovingly began to tease the archbishop, who gave back
as good as he got. Such reciprocal playfulness continued to be expressed
throughout the afternoon with giggles, little dances from the delightful
Desmond Tutu and thumbs-up gestures that would have seemed immature
coming from anyone else.
In these highly-evolved men it was joy incarnate. There they sat,
“throned on highest bliss” (Milton) which made all the
rest of us “thrice and four times blessed” (Virgil).
It was charming and subtle and wise, because it helped us to understand
one elementary truth: how can one be enlightened and not be chuckling?”
An immediate connection had been made between these two “fellows”
and the rest of us humans through their unassuming goodness and
explicit simplicity - the operative word in any of the conversations,
reportages or even criticisms made about the Dalai Lama over the
next few days. Is it not possible that His Holiness sounds so deceptively
simple only because he has the rare ability to appeal to the lowest
common denominator.
Books like Alice in Wonderland or Harry Potter do that in a way.
The child gets it on another level than the parent or the literary
giant. The same phenomenon occurs when the Dalai Lama speaks to
the people of the world no matter what their situation, whether
they are rich or poor, educated or not, of one race, gender, religion
or another.
Each group will have heard something different, for example, when
the Dalai Lama said ruefully about his exile, “I don’t
like this life.” None of the women I talked to after the talk
remembered that comment, yet Buddhists and believers in reincarnation
all did. Interestingly, every one of the notes that my journalist
friends and I had made independently of each other included all
the following aha-reactions.
- Compassion is better than love, because it has no bias. Both
friend and foe want happiness and an end to their suffering, and
both have that right.
- Love cannot eliminate all your problems, but it can help to
illuminate unnecessary worry and fear and give us the courage
to do, learn, and educate the heart.
- All of us on Earth are heavily interdependent nowadays (war,
economy, weather patterns, pandemics), and that means that we
are all also a part of each other.
- Our neighbour’s destruction is ours, too, as is his success.
We are all responsible for each other and the state of our global
community.
- When we meet people we hate, it is most effective to superimpose
upon them the image of God and to tell that to all youths who
hate and fear.
- When you have a negative emotion you cannot possibly see reality,
or have objectivity; therefore, analyze your strong negative feelings
and see what is good and right.
- If heartbreak comes, look at it from a different angle. Take
the attitude of now having a chance at a new and meaningful life.
All misfortune is relative, for someone else always has it worse.
- Where compassion for others is experienced in a loving childhood,
the children will not fight, because they have learned good moral
values.
- To achieve happiness it is immensely valuable to cultivate and
maintain a positive state of mind and the most effective means
of doing so is to engage in meditation
- Meditation primarily means continuously familiarizing ourselves
with positive thoughts.”
Which of the Dalai Lama’s words affected me the most? It
was his passionate conviction that human nature is basically more
gentle than aggressive, and all that this implies. In the after-glow
of his sweet presence, I vowed to become ever more peaceful in spirit;
more compassionate in action, word and thought; and, better aligned,
for strength and harmony, in mind and body, with a little help from
my yoga.
Kareen Zebroff’s classic, revised book, The ABC of Yoga
(Foulsham title: A Gentle Introduction to Yoga), as well as her
Yoga Over 40 video, may be ordered from her website www.kareenzebroff.com
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