I’ve become more and more dedicated to the inner practice of Yoga Nidra, something I had been interested in years ago through connection with Swami Rama. When I saw that the YWCA in Vancouver, an unlikely spot for inner yoga work, was featuring a class on Tuesday afternoons on Yoga Nidra, I was very excited and have been a regular attendee. The gym is filled with people lying down in savasana, covered in blankets, perfectly still and practicing Yoga Nidra.

Innerly, the process is extremely useful and can be a very high meditation. It also gives equillibrium, great peace of mind, stress relief and profound relaxation. The instructor for the class is very knowledgeable and gives clear, direct and no-bullshit instructions. There is no overlay of the kind of so-called spiritual advice, but rather a direct guidance to the straight goods, for you to find out for yourself.

After taking the class regularly, I interviewed Yogachaitanya, the instructor, for the project I was working on at the time, Open Source Spirit (this site is now in transition.) I’d include a video here, but wordpress.com won’t let me post it. You can find a link and CDs of the instructions for this Yoga Nidra, here at his site.

This practice of Yoga Nidra has been particularly helpful to me in the past few months, when my mother was so ill, and I was travelling back and forth, visiting her at the hospital and then at the hospice, and then after her passing. I just followed the instructions on my ipod and there was immediate relaxation and peace of mind that persisted within me through the days during one of the most stressful and intense times of my life. Using these instructions from the CD was a godsend, and kept me in the spirit of the process at its most meaningful, and the practice has remained helpful to me to this day.

Normally, I am not a fan of guided meditations, which I feel are more a form of hypnosis than training, and there comes to be a reliance on them, rather than self-aware involvement that is your own. In this situation however, I was very grateful for the assistance, and the leading of my conscious awareness into the openings of spirit.

I’ve been heartened by the expansion of urban gardening, food growing, here in Vancouver, which has been visible more than ever this summer. This year I’ve grown a some veggies on the roof (more on that in another post) – more than a few tomatoes and basil this time around! – and I’m considering ways to grow lettuce and kale hydroponically in the winter.

Cuban urban gardens are a terrific model for everyone these days. Check out this BBC video:

And more lyrically, here is Andrew Lavigne’s video on the Pine St. garden in Vancouver. (You’ll have to click through the links, my wordpress blog doesn’t seem to embed.)

Pine St. Community Gardens from Andrew Lavigne on Vimeo.

Over the past month I’ve been integrating the transitions and transformations of the first month since my mum passed away. And indeed, life goes on. I’m ready to continue with my blog, and some of the other activities of life, not at the same pace perhaps, but with renewed enthusiasm for everything that matters.

We gathered for the memorial service at St. Michael’s Anglican Church in Canmore.
During the service, Mike spoke, James read a poem and we played some of dad’s music, Muff Mattson’s combo – including I Don’t Know Why I Love You Like I Do. I said these words:

Thank you all for coming here today to remember Georgie and how she touched your life.

• She loved us all very much
• She was fun and playful
• She awakened my creativity
• She loved words and wordplay
• She gave me a sense of human worth and dignity and responsibility

Mum told me that her father, Ernest A Colebrook, embodied dignity and civility, and her mother, Edith Ellen Colebrook, embodied humility. Mum’s message was love and the connections that create love.

I’d like to share a little of what happened at the end, when she was in the hospice. We moved into the hospice to be with mum, sleeping there and making ourselves at home. (Mike, Kris, James, Rosie and I all stayed there for the week.) We talked to her, read to her and lived close as a family. The entire hospice experience gave us a depth of meaning and light during what could have been the darkest time. As mum passed, those of us who were present were coached by the nurse. We stood around mum with our hands touching her if we could, visualizing and talking about the mountains that had always been home to her. (This we did between the last breath and the final heartbeat.)

Mike mentioned Sunday School. It was family lore that I quit going very early on because the teacher couldn’t tell me what God made the world out of. (Mum had marginally better luck with Mike, but she didn’t force me to go back.) Now more and more it seems the world is made of Love in all its many forms.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to live as a little family again before we spiral back out into our private lives; now enriched through mum’s incredibly transformative transition, released to evolve new forms in our life’s dance, taking new roles in the circle of love that is our particular family pattern.

Sometimes only poetry can speak what is in the heart. Here are the final lines of Eliot’s Four Quartets.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

And this is what I wrote this morning

Today I am in ruins
Wandering, crying, and calling for my mother
I know we felt the golden light
together
I remember how we laughed and loved.
But today
this day
I am in ruins
Calling for God to hold my mother
and all of us
within Love’s golden light.

Art for the people

Shared via AddThis

In late June we installed some new hanging lights.
See them here:

I’m back in Vancouver briefly, feeling like I’m “on leave” from the front lines – visiting my mum in Foothills Hospital. I’ll be going there again this weekend and am just posting a few videos I did during breaks.

James is working on this mural for a wall in Edmonton next week, with an opening event on the 19th. Here’s the invitation, and if you happen to be in Edmonton, please come by.
If you follow the link to the site for the project, you can see a slideshow of the work so far.

Free Rain

A 16’ x 16’ public mural

by Vancouver artist James K-M

Opening Sunday, July 19, 2009

3 – 5 PM

at 9206 95th Avenue (west wall)

Edmonton, Alberta

For more information call Joe Clare at 780-913-5447

RSVP at project web site: http://strathearnmural.net

About the artist:

James K-M lives in Vancouver, B.C. and has exhibited internationally since 1978.

His most recent exhibition of paintings was at the Simon Fraser University Teck Gallery in 2008

His next exhibition will be in Camagüey, Cuba in December 2009. Artist web site is at http://jameskm.wordpress.com

“Out of extremely objective systemization comes extreme subjectivity”

Bill Jeffries, SFU Gallery Curator

A public mural commissioned by Joe Clare

RSVP: Free Rain Mural Opening

16.

Empty your mind of everything.

Let the mind rest at peace.

The ten thousand things rise and fall while the Self watches their return.

They grow and flourish and then return to the source.

Returning to the source is stillness, which is the way of nature.

The way of nature is unchanging.

Knowing constancy is insight.

Not knowing constancy leads to disaster.

Knowing constancy, the mind is open.

With an open mind, you will be openhearted.

Being openhearted, you will act royally.

Being royal, you will attain the divine.

Being divine, you will be at one with the Tao.

Being at one with the Tao is eternal.

And though the body dies, the Tao will not pass away.

- Tao Te Ching

Everything old is new again. I’m drying laundry outside, not using the electric dryer anymore. The clothes smell fresher and it is much gentler way of life. Why use electric machines to do what the sun and air do naturally?