Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Contemplation

A friend of mine, who belongs to the Anglican Church in Vancouver, recently asked me to answer some questions for her that she's going to bring to her church's contemplation group. While I enjoy contemplation (though I don't "plan" to do it daily!), I never really thought of the below and I'm glad she asked. Here is what came of it...

1)What is your understanding of contemplation?

hmmmm...well, that's complex, but it's like introspection, but it's about the outter-world. We can contemplate on anything we wish to understand better. I'm assuming you're looking at it in the religious sense, so in that case it would be trying to understand the concept of God, the concept of life, the concept of the universe, the concept of creation, the concept of life after death, etc.


2) Who participates in this practise?

Whoever has a contemplative nature! As a Pisces, I seem to be very prone to it!

3) How has this changed in the last ten years?

I don't know if this makes sense, but I did so much intellectual contemplation before yoga, that now, with yoga and meditation, I let my mind "go" and I let wisdom enter and because I can differentiate and know whether it it wisdom or just my "thinking", I don't overanalyze or try to figure things out as I did before. It's a "knowing" which I touched on in my story in my new book "Stories From the Yogic Heart."

4) How does yoga support your life?

Because it gives me this "knowing", it gives me a great peace in my life due to my tendency to have an over-active mine.

6) Do you have hopes or concerns for the future concerning contemplation?

My hope, as I seem to be running into way too many over-analytical people lately (in the sense that they are hard-fast in their views), is that more people will begin practices such as yoga where they relax their body and mind, and will access not only their intuition and the wisdom of the universe and not lean so much as needing "proof" for everything, where they become less argumentative, more open-minded and more open to recognizing the mysterious and often inexplicable aspects of life.

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