.::Women's Yoga for Healing::.
{Full Moon in Cancer}
featuring Live Harp & Vocals
by Mariah McCammond
MoonDay, 1/9/17, 7-8:30pm
148 S 4th Avenue - at Tucson Yoga Studio
I've chosen to invoke the Hindu Goddess Lakshmi as the theme for tomorrow night's Women's Yoga Love offering.
Like the natural flow of breath, the natural action of the Lakshmi Shakti expresses itself in the fine balance of giving and receiving. In Vedic times, this idea was expressed through the fire sacrifice (yajna) in which the fruits of the earth were offered into a sacred fire along with mantras and prayers. The fire ritual was both a physical ritual and a metaphor for keeping in the right relationship with the Earth, the ancestors, and society itself.
In the Bhagavad Gita, one of the most potent texts on right living in religious literature, Krishna - Vishnu's avatar - explains the unspoken contract between Humanity, the physical world, and the higher powers of the subtle worlds as a mutuality of giving and receiving. The heavens offer gifts to the earth – both the physical gifts of Sun and rain that make crops grow, and also the subtler gifts of fertility and growth and happiness that we can feel inwardly when we tune into the Soul of the natural world.
In return, human beings conserve the earth and offer back gifts to the Shaktis that play as the world. You give with your body – giving part of your wealth to others, offering service where it is needed. You give with your speech – saying kind words, or sincere praise, or chanting mantra us, or giving blessings. And you give with your mind – maybe through prayer, by dedicating whatever you do to the benefit of others, or perhaps by starting your meals remembering all the living organisms who worked or gave up their lives so that you could eat. You express not only gratitude, but also the hope that the food nourishes you so that you can, in turn, nourish life.
It is in the balance that Lakshmi manifests. Without receiving, you feel dry and undernourished. Without giving, you become narcissistic, arrogant, and entitled. When you can allow yourself to receive with the feeling that you deserve the gifts of life, and then give with the feeling that others deserve them also, you find yourself in an auspicious state of mind, the state where Shri is simply flowing through you. You feel Lakshmi's presence s internal abundance and also as gratitude and I has the desire to bless others. It's then that you can begin to feel Lakshmi's energy as your own.
Come, join me in tapping into the healing energy being offered up by the upcoming Full Moon in Cancer, our first Full Moon of 2017!
