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Yoga for an almost octogenarian!

For two decades, now, my too sedentary life has been something of a problem for me. In the second of those two decades I have tried variously to address the matter, and while I have been getting quite an education in fitness and health, and a look around showed me almost everybody else in the U.S. is worse off than I am, I never really managed to come to grips with this prevalent problem until last summer, when I found an RV park for my motor home which is near St. Tikhon’s monastery and seminary. After I was settled in and took stock of what was available to me, I thought, hey, I’m close to the Himalayan Institute, I can do yoga! So I did. I have piddled around with yoga at several points in my life – but last summer for the first time I caught onto what it is all about, and have made remarkable progress since.

So what IS yoga all about? I will have to back up some to answer that question, and I do not flatter myself that it is I who have discovered the answer, I believe it is God Who has opened my understanding so that I can share it with all of you.

I will have go to back to the time when, as I was writing about Orthodoxy, I wanted to share my experience with Herbert Schwartz with Fr. Thomas Hopko. This was not long before he became Dean of St. Vlad’s, and he was the only American priest I had met who I felt really had it all together. He offered me a pre-lunchtime appointment, so I seized the opportunity to come armed with a very nice luncheon which I spread out on his desk, so that in the event I got a full two hours one-on-one with Fr. Tom! Most of my readers will understand what a coup that was! Fr. Tom said he had planned to invite me to lunch in the seminary dining room, but - with apologies - the last thing I wanted was to have to spend an entire mealtime with St. Vlad’s faculty!

Of course I went into how central to Herbert’s religious formation was the ability to go out of onself in ecstasy (Greek ek stasis: stand outside), to become one with God and with one another. The popular alternative pretence to a relationship with God and others, Herbert lumped in the general category of “intellectual masturbation” – in our culture everybody is in love with their own mental constructs. Fr. Tom was fundamentally sympathetic to all I had to say about that, the question he asked me was, “are your children good, Laura?” Truly the ultimate test of a sound religious formation. And then he told me that St. Maximus the Confessor said that heaven is like an orgasm that never ends.

Well, time went on, the year 1999 came, with the effort of Secretary Albright et al to bomb Orthodox Serbia into oblivion, so that today, more than half a millennium after the Serbs’ bravely halted the Islamic incursion – Prince Lazar and all his army were lost, in fact they blew themselves up, but in so doing they destroyed the invading Muslims, so that Europe remained a Christian land. What irony that Kosovo – Kosove Pole, or “field of blackbirds”, located at the mountain pass through which the invaders sought to enter and overrun all of Europe, is now occupied by Albanians, the Illyrians of ancient times, who were among the first people to be evangelized, during the first and second centuries of the Christian era. Yet they apostasized to Islam under Ottoman rule – and are now the Kosovo government, so that not only is Kosovo effectively Muslim (except for the small Orthodox Christian Mitrovitsa enclave in the north), but the Islamic proliferation within Europe itself which Prince Lazar and his army accepted martyrdom to halt, is now well underway.

I call the Albanians’ adoption of Islam apostasy rather than religious conversion, because these people today are principally noted for their war-lord culture, their traffic in smuggling, drugs, various contraband, and other, shall we say, illicit activities. Let us not forget, moreover, our selection of Albania to serve as a hot bed of mujehadin training camps set up by our government, more specifically our CIA and retired upper-rank military, to train mujehadin to combat the Russians in Afghanistan. The Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden, who is radically MADE IN USA, being in the first of several waves of infamous graduates of these international camps run by ourselves.

Such are the Muslims we used in our attempt to obliterate Kosovo, and eliminate Serbia as an obstacle to our access to Russia’s Caspian oil. They have little in common with the genuine Islam which bloomed forth in the 13th century and is still to be found in this area, and, indeed, throughout the world - Rumi was recently even cited as being the most popular poet in America! The Persian mystic, Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Balkhi-Rum was born in Balkh, today in Afghanistan, then within the Persian Empire, near the holy city where by tradition the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and cousin is buried. Due to quarrels between different dynasties in the area, Rumi's family traveled west, eventually settling in the Anatolian city Konya, capital of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, now located in Turkey – hence the name Rumi. After his father’s death, Rumi taught in the madrasha his father had founded, and after Rumi’s death, his massive followers and his son Sultan Walad founded the order of the Whirling Dervishes so that his mystical spirituality spread throughout the entire area. He was buried in Konya and his shrine is still today a major place of pilgrimage for devout Muslims.

I don’t know enough in detail about the Whirling Dervishes to discuss them, but just by looking at their faces one knows they have the experience I describe below, and thus I came across the following:

Russia to allocate 1.5 million for support of Islam

26 June 2008, 16:18

Moscow, June 26, Interfax - A project of joint efforts has been signed by Russia's Fund for the Support of Islamic Culture, Science and Education and the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), the fund told Interfax-Religion.

The agreement provides for grants and stipends to students of Russian Islamic institutes for research, the translation and publication of books on Islam in Russian, and for material support to Islamic institutes.

In addition, the agreement provides for international seminars on "The Role of Russia and the Islamic World in Strengthening the Alliance of Civilizations."

Hopefully our country will see fit, under Obama’s leadership, to contribute to the strengthening of the alliance of civilizations – instead of contributing to the desecration and destruction of everything that contributes to civilization as we did in Kosovo.

I, myself, have always kept au courant of happenings around the world, it was part of the culture I grew up in, amid diplomats, military, educators, and others whose impact on our society was considerable, but with our bombing of brave Kosovo, the international scene became an almost fanatical focus for me, because I began to see its eschatological significance. In this I was of course by no means alone, but I have yet to find anyone else who, instead of concentrating upon the truly amazing destruction and disasters that have befallen us, one after another, each new catastrophe exploding among us before we had time to so much as catch our breath after the previous one – I honestly do not see anyone else who has taken the time to just read the Revelations at the end of our Bible, where angels warn of impending tragedies, but when God speaks it is to say: “See, I am making everything new!” (Rev 21:5)

So mine has been a voice crying in the wilderness until the Obama campaign began picking up steam – but it never once occurred to me to give up or even slack back, because of what I was taught by Herbert Schwartz, and this formation was bolstered when I learned from Fr. Hopko that such an important spiritual master as Maximus the Confessor, whose greatness is acknowledged in both the eastern and the western Church – taught the same.

Thus it was to me an amazing eye-opener when I began, over time, to come to the realization that yoga also teaches this very same thing – although experientially, not (at least not in this day and age, after Great Britain’s occupation of India for 200 years, and this after a millennium of even more brutally invasive Mughal Muslim occupation and rule) as a speculatively theological discipline.

Here is how the situation developed: I don’t think I have ever profited very much from group learning in any regard, actually, so the yoga classes were of little interest to me. But there was one class, in restorative yoga, that truly grabbed me where I was at. Our instructor would show us postures such as would open the various energy channels – and we would remain in them for however long it took to really get the energies released and flowing – and producing what I can only describe as a very heady orgasmic buzz! And in the relaxation in the “corpse” pose that concludes every yoga session, I gave way to a kind of “active” quiet such as I have known only in prayer. Although I didn’t get the point right away; it took me until now to recognize this as akin to the practice of Orthodox hesychasm: the prayer of quiet.

When the summer was over and I moved south in my motor home, and no longer had this marvelous instructor to show me the positions, so that I had to figure it all out for myself, I came across an article indicating stretch positions for the abdominal muscles in preparation for agni sara, specifically for the yoga position in which you exhale totally, and then use your ribs to draw your stomach right up into your rib cage. (“Mastering the Fire”, Dale Buegel, MD, Yoga International Reprint Series, www.yimag.com, p. 13-17.) I found that the exercises indicated in the article soon produced the sensations I had experienced in the restorative yoga class.

The next step after that was that when I began to put things together as I studied the drawing of “the muscles of the abdomen”. I had a hard time with Latin names which to me were – let’s say, not that explanatory, but I realized that they are what I – having had 7 children – know as the “parturition” muscles, because they push the baby out, and also come into play when you nurse the child. My daughter who has had 3 children, all by caesarian, payed me a visit as I was working these things out, and she was very impressed with how I had streamlined my torso to such an extent, something she has been less successful at. She is given to lamenting over my telling her that my body was always back in shape 3 months after giving birth, I never had to have “in between” clothes. I reflected on that, recalling how powerfully my muscles would contract when I was nursing, at times it was truly like giving birth all over again, and I realized that my daughter’s c-sections, plus the fact that due to allergies she was unable to nurse her babies, basically deprived her of a woman’s God-given apparatus in this regard.

The next step after that was when I moved on from this focus on the mechanics of having a baby to consider another aspect, just as crucial for the whole process from the very beginning - from the first kiss, or even just holding hands - with the future father: the hormonal facet.

I recalled having read something about oxytocin, so I did a search on what I discovered is called the “hormone of love and cuddle chemical”. As can be surmised given its central role in the bonding that draws a couple together, then in childbirth, and next in mother-child bonding – the mechanics of all these phases of our most basic relationships are, at best, going to grind like a dry and rusty machine without the lubrication of the hormone designed for this purpose by our Creator. For instance, I read: “If you want to obtain anything other than trivial amounts of milk from animals like dairy cattle, you have to stimulate oxytocin release because something like 80% of the milk is available only after ejection, and milk ejection requires oxytocin. Watch someone milk a cow, even with a machine, and what you'll see is that prior to milking, the teats and lower udder are washed gently - this tactile stimulation leads to oxytocin release and milk ejection.”

http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/hypopit/oxytocin.html

In this light I mulled over my own experiences of giving birth – and recalled how my first child was in a breech position, so that I was sedated as soon as the hard pains began. All I could remember when I woke up – and whenever I recalled the experience thereafter, were those last three pains, before I went under. They were like no pain I had ever experienced before. By contrast, with the second birth, for which the only anesthesia was inhaling a little light trilene at the peak of a really hard pain, the actual birth totally obliterated any resurgence of the feeling of pain. I understood: “A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world.” (John 16:21)
I knew that I had been in great pain because I remembered the nurse saying to me, “Miz Jones, quit yelling and BEAR DOWN!!!” But I had no more sensation of pain than if I were reading about it in a text book.

To relate my own experience of yoga to hesychast prayer, I did a search for relevant texts, and came up with one which in fact is concerned with a comparison of raja yoga and hesychasm! Trying to stuff such intimacy with God Himself into our inadequate words is very tricky, Orthodox talk about apophatic or negative theology, the theology of unknowing, this goes back to Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Paul’s Athenian disciple. (Acts 17:34) In the following passage concerned with St. Simeon the New Theologian (whose authenticity is beyond doubt: the Orthodox tradition recognizes only 3 great saints as worthy of the title “Theologian”:1) the fourth Evangelist, John the Theologian, 2) Gregory the Theologian, who dominated 2 of the 7 ecumenical councils, those in which the theology of the Trinity and the Incarnation were definitively explicitated, and 3) Simeon the New Theologian) – so in the passage that follows it is important to understand that “light” here refers to the Transfiguring Light of Mt. Tabor, you can find my discussion of this, along with the ikon of this mystery by Theophanes the Greek, the master ikonographer who was the teacher of Andre Rublev, whose own representation of the Holy Trinity is recognized as the definitive iconographical expression of this central mystery, on my website, www.mamaleh-larisa.com, just click on the ikon of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and/or “Manifesto”.

“Living by day as an ambitious young man at court, [St. Simeon] devoted a good portion of his nights to prayer. Eventually his nocturnal spiritual practices induced a phenomenon which overwhelmed him. “Suddenly there was a light.” In Symeon’s own writings he reports that the night became “as bright as day” and light “filled the whole room. And then it seemed to him as if he had left his body, the house, and the entire world. Drifting into a state of ecstasy Symeon lost all awareness of his surroundings and forgot where he was [this is the experience of the indescribably profound QUIET that I mentioned above], . . . and a fine ray flashed through my spirit faster than lightening. What appeared to me next was like a torch in the night [see Theophanes’ Transfiguration] or like a small, flaming cloud which rested upon my head, as I lay face down in prayer. Then the cloud flew off, and shortly I saw it in the heavens.” After this unexpected wonder his life thereafter became a progressive initiation, God communicating to him secretly.” An answer came to Symeon in prayer, “I am the God who, for your sake became man and since you have sought me with all your mind, from now on you will be my brother, my fellow heir, and my friend.” Symeon traces the further development of the divine light in his mystical experiences. [What follows is a faithful description of OUR Transfiguration as this plays out in our daily lives] . . . But when one has spent some time in the quest for this vision without ever turning back, it all becomes clear and open to him. . . . It is the light which does this, the same light that is within the house of the soul, I mean this earthly tent, that marvelous light enters into him, bright beyond measure, making him light. . . . From this stage he is in the light, or rather united with the light – but not as if he were in a continual state of ecstasy. Rather he perceives himself and his surroundings, and he sees his neighbor as he is. The mystic foresees and perceives the good things to come – when he will be freed from captivity. . . . when he will contemplate the unbearable light as it truly is, when he shall behold ‘what eye hath not seen nor ear heard nor human mind conceived, what God has prepared for those who love Him,’ all this will be revealed to him, because here and now the light dwells in him and makes him light.’

When one’s sexual experience follows the yogic pattern I have tried to depict, so that it doesn’t “end” in some kind of jerky and exhausting “climax” but becomes the most profound peace in the awareness of God’s presence – one understands why St. Maximus said that heaven is like an orgasm that never ends.

Which is why I am recommending yoga to other octogenarians – and, indeed, to all comers, young and old. Come, and experience how God is making everything new.

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