Samhain 2018 – The veils are thin…

Day 308 – How often do we go through our day-to-day lives with no sense of presence or real presence in our activity or task?  My life is busy, busy, busy, and I, too, text, answer one more email, jump from one diversion to the next (because I “have to”).  The “musts” leave us frazzled and in the quieter moments with loved ones I simply divest at times.  Wide awake and still in the morning, the busyiness of real life around me, I experience today’s topic:  dharana.

One-pointed attentiveness, concentration, whatever you want to call it, can be easy with the right yoga or dance practice, a task or activity that is important to your life’s work, or just a chore which is fueled by a greater good for the family.   Rolf writes a lot about dharana, insisting the deep connection comes from love: “We are alive in a fashion that bears only a slight resemblance to ordinary life.  We have applied ourselves tos something we love…in our fidelity, we have broken through our fear and found ourselves in a state of deep connection.”

The point of this read is to show that dharana can be cultivated and practiced and that, in turn, the qualities of this place “beyond space and time” become more real and more accessible, and that this is simply beyond words.    A good yoga practice is illuminating–it provides practice for all this and more and dharana along with all the other parts of practice that are so illusive become much more accessible.

The one surest (but not necessarily quickest) way to dharana and love is setting aside time for a daily practice followed by some reflection.  As I practiced today, I realized that dharana really isn’t something I do, but something that just happens in the flow of yoga, and that it happens more and more as I step on my mat more and more and it follows me throughout the day.

Nonetheless, dharana escapes me as I reflect upon it, caught up in the time-constraints, words of reflection, and conundrums.  I come from a place of knowledge and words, and over the past few weeks, I’ve been asked to step beyond knowledge and words, to experience and reside in dharana.  Quite an interesting process…

(to be continued)