Podcasts, hearts, and yoga

Aside: recently my little black mp3 player has become a figurative black box : the display is completely out, such that I can only navigate the menus by memory and trial-and-error. However, I'm thankfully still able to listen to things, albiet in a somewhat awkward fashion.

For a while, I've known about the Rabble Podcast Network, but haven't really tuned into it too much. But recently I returned to it, and started listening to several issues of one of the podcasts, Healing the Earth, which I really enjoy. The first episodes I tuned into were about Permaculture, which I find an absolutely fascinating philosophy, a great metaphor for many kind of relationships: ecological, economic, human, biological.

The second podcast I started to tune into was about "The Lost Language of Plants and the Perceptive Heart", where the interviewee points out things such as:

• the heart is more than a pump, it is a perceptive organ (and if you a reductionist and just believe it's a bunch of chemical reactions, then you'd never see value in loving relationships, as he points out)
• in order to do it's work on a purely physical level, the heart would have to be strong enough to shoot a 100 lbs. ball 1 mile in the air, which it obviously is not, so there must be something more subtle at play here
• Western culture is the first in history to believe that the earth is nothing more than a series of chemical reations at work (which he refers to aptly as "scientism")
• humans have reliably built phychic relationships with plants, hence the massive body of ethnobotanical knowledge (which has mostly been destroyed in the crusades of Christianity and Scientism): he states the example of a woman with no prior knowledge of a particular plant having a vision of a child in a manger, and as she later found out, that plant was traditionally used to cure diaper rash

Anyway, you can just tune into it to get all the details; I was listening to these podcast with the intention of retaining and sharing the information (which I rarely do), so I just thought I'd affirm that. This is because the topics presented are at the core of my focus in life right now, which is the intersection of language (science, politics) and spirituality. In yoga, there is the bodily mechanics, but there's also something more subtle, the prana as yogis call it, and I've been experiencing it in a quite intense way lately. In the circus art like juggling and baton play, it's the same, there are the moves, but then there's the mind's focus, which is something more than just mechanical. In the field of ideas I wish to present in my performance act, there is presented is the opportunity for personal, spiritual change, and a also social/political change (for a great picture of what the integration of spiritual and socio-political change might look like, take a look at The Network of Spiritual Progressives Core Vision; another example of this vision is spiritual activism as popularized by Starhawk).

Getting back to hearts, for a long time, I've felt like my heart has been very closed, that I've been quite avioding of human relationships on the whole, constantly withdrawing into my own mental space. I'm sort of on a mission to make the best use of this (dis)ability by producing art to share with all. However, I feel like it is only because my heart has begun to open up that I feel I can do this, because I care to share. I am very thankful to have left University, as it only further exacerbated my mental mania, and also to have the opportunity to do as much yoga as I please because of my employment with the Rama Lotus.

My parents introduced me to yoga a long time ago, (probably 10 years ago), and I had tried in subsequent years to make a regular practice of it, but never managed to keep the regularity beyond a couple of weeks, and never took a class until about a year ago. I'm very thankful to have been passed on the awareness of yoga from my parents, as I may have never ended up in the practice I have now.

Yoga has been a very large part of healing for me. For the first time in my life since I can remember, I feel comfortable in my own body. Even way back in grade school, I was constantly getting stiff necks and sore backs. As I mentioned before, yoga has also "opened up my heart" and made me a much more perceptive person; I feel like I'm learning to "read people" now.

All of this came to me in a particularly strong way on Friday, which happens to be given the mythological attribution of Venus (for more details on planetary attributions of the days of the week, check out this wikipedia entry) and of course, Venus is attributed to love, and thus the heart. I recently developed a loving relationship with Fridays when I woke up last Friday singing "It's Friday, I'm in love" by the Cure, which my friend Angel, who host karaoke at this dive bar down the road called Bonkers, often sings on Friday. I have not had an intimate relationship in many years, and so to some may think this is odd, but it is my believe that I have to feel the love before it will come to me.

Even more syncronistically, I started inventing a kids song centred on the heart while at work before I started (unintentionally) listening to the "...Perceptive Heart" podcast. The following is a rough draft of it, which I wrote most of after a marvelous day of 2 yoga classes, a great Kirtan (yogic chanting), and a night of dancing with great music and great peoples.

The Heart Song

Air and care, ya care and air
Each one's near the heart
Care and air, ya air and care
Of both I am a part

There's air in care and care in air
Let me demonstrate
Both a feature of the heart
And so they do relate

When I need some care
I start with a deep breath
I know that is the first step
To put dis-ease to death

I use the air to show my care
By singing you this song
And if you care as well
Then you can sing along

The heart it hears before the brain
So trust it when you feel
Then when we come together
The truth it will reveal

Our hearts they grow like leaves so green
With each breath may they grow
In between us all is green
Like the centre of a rain-bow

Feel free to let me know what you think; I'm still pretty novice with writing songs, and I hope find some opportunities to "workshop" them before they reach the "performance stage".

Well, now it's time go make the time to share the care...