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Yogic Aphrodite/action
During a conversation with my good friend Kat, who often calls me Aphrodite, she pointed out that the Greek goddess in her original configuration is pretty neurotic and therefore not befitting my intentions for either my art or my life.
Playfully having chosen Aphrodite as my email name and, more importantly, writing about her in my work, I saw that her capriciousness, vanity, and ill temper, her neurotic tendencies, clog the intention of my project, which is to advocate for beauty, especially in the forms of creativity, love, and eros. Also, Aphrodite never grows older, and I do! Lightheartedly, Kat addressed me as “Yogic Aphrodite,” and I thank her for her humor and insight. Yogic Aphrodite is a more complex, useful, and satisfying model than is the sometimes spleenful ancient goddess.
My interest in yoga began in my early 20s, and over the decades that interest has included asana, philosophy, history, mantra, meditation, Tantra, Bharata Natyam, and ancient foundational texts.
Practices of yogic self-care and self-study are paramount for me. According to The Yoga-Sutra of Patañjali, “Yogic action has three components–discipline, self-study, and orientation toward the ideal of pure awareness” (Chip Hartranft, The Yoga-Sutra of Patañjali: A New Translation with Commentary [Boston and London: Shambhala, 2003], 21.) The Yoga-Sutra, almost 2000 years old, is practical philosophy. Patañjali sets forth 196 concise and illuminating observations about consciousness and awareness and offers techniques for freeing oneself from the pain that comes from human beings’ habitual (mis)applications of mind, which are clumsy in relation to yogic skills.
Yoga requires neither ritual nor ceremony. It is not a religion!
Analyzing, ruminating, contemplating, and theorizing remove a person from yogic awareness. They interfere with it by contracting the sensuousness and spontaneity of living in the world and in the body.
My engagement with yoga began before I graduated from college, with readings such as the Bhagavad-Gita, a sacred Hindu text in which the god Krishna gives yogic advice to the hero Arjuna, and with my boyfriend at the time teaching me hatha yoga, the physical practice that is so popular these days in the United States. Hatha yoga predates Patañjali.
Yogic Aphrodite finds that the simplicity, directness, and elegance of yoga activate the beauty of her soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body.
- July 29, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media, My work
- Comments 0
