Giving Thanks
Our time in Pune is drawing to a close, and Thanksgiving offered a good opportunity to reflect back on the past month. Pune is a loud, congested, and polluted city, so in many ways we are glad to be leaving it for someplace quieter and closer to nature. On the other hand, we have many things from this month to be thankful for. It has been lovely spending time with our fellow yogis from Boston, and connecting with new people. It has been inspiring taking classes at the Institute and being in such direct contact with the legacy of B.K.S. Iyengar. We have eaten delicious, nourishing food. And we have had the luxury of time: time to read, to write, to practice; time to allow our minds to decompress. For all of these things, I am thankful.
The word thanksgiving reminds me of going to church growing up. Every week we would celebrate the Great Thanksgiving, the central rite of the Eucharist (from the Greek eucharistia, meaning “thanksgiving”), in which bread and wine is consecrated and symbolically transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Food becomes body, and in doing so becomes the divine.
The body can get a bad rap. It can lead us into temptation and sin. If we care for it too little, it can lead to disease and debilitation. If we care for it too much, it can lead to narcissism and “body issues.” No matter how well we care for it, it will one day give way and fail. Thanksgiving is a harvest festival, which is a joyous occasion when you’re the one about to sit down to table for a feast. If you are the turkey, the sweet potato, or the wheat that has been harvested, things are altogether more grim. Autumn is the time of the harvest, but the autumn of our lives is the time of growing old. Like all harvest festivals, Thanksgiving reminds us of the cyclical nature of life and death.
The body is also, as John O’Donohue calls it, “the mirror where the secret world of the soul comes to expression.” The body is our home in the universe: through it we come to know everything else. The body is wise: when we tap into our intuition and listen to it’s wisdom, we can see through the illusions and obstacles that the mind often creates. The mystics teach us that the separation we create between body and soul, prakṛiti and puruṣa, heaven and earth is also an illusion. They teach us that the body is not separate from the soul, but that the body exists within the soul.
B.K.S. Iyengar’s genius was showing us how we can reach the soul through the body. He showed us that it is possible to reach the most profound levels of spiritual enlightenment through the practice of asana (yoga postures). He taught us that asana is not just a way to physically prepare the body for long periods of seated meditation. He taught us to penetrate from the external, physical layers of the body to the deeper layers of the self. He taught us that the subtler practices of yoga, dharana (concentration), dhyana (meditation), and samadhi (union with the divine within), are all available within asana. He taught us that “it is through your body that you realize you are a spark of divinity.”
One of the great joys of our time in Pune has been having simple, delicious, and nourishing food cooked for us daily at our apartment. Our meal each day would consist of a vegetable dish, dal (soup prepared from one or more of a wide variety of different dried pulses), rice, and millet and wheat chapati (unleavened flatbread), which we usually ate accompanied by yogurt and a variety of Indian pickles.
Food nourishes the body, and, as the old adage “you are what you eat” says, food becomes the body. What we eat, how what we eat is prepared, how we eat, and the state of our mind when we eat all have consequences for the way our food nourishes us. Ayurveda, an Indian system of medicine with roots that can be traced back thousands of years, teaches us that food contains prana, the vital energy found in all living things. In food that is freshly prepared from quality ingredients, prana is preserved. In food that is highly processed, prana is lost. Food is life, and when we eat that wheat or sweet potato or turkey, we absorb its life energy and incorporate it into our body.
I recently learned that one of my good friends from graduate school died by his own hand. His suffering had grown too great, and he succumbed. There are few things more sad, more tragic, than for a life to end in this way.
This Thanksgiving, I am thankful to be alive. I am thankful for my body, the home in which I live in the world. I am thankful for my breath, for the palpable feeling of prana flowing through my lungs. I am thankful for my mind, for sensation, awareness, presence. I am thankful for the feeling of the earth under my feet and the air on my skin. I am thankful for the ability to eat food, to feel it nourishing my body. I am thankful for the friends and family that also nurture me in this life. I am thankful for my teachers, and my teachers’ teacher, B.K.S. Iyengar. I am thankful for the practice of yoga, that has taught me how to penetrate to the deeper layers of the self and glimpse the spark of divinity within.
This is one of a series of posts written during our travels. You can find the first post here, and you can find the next post here. You can sign up for email alerts about future posts here.
