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The Bardos of Everyday Life and Breath

Even among people who have heard of the term “bardo” or “transit state”, it’s understood to mean the state of being between one’s death in one life and one’s rebirth in the next, filled with the angels and demons of our minds.

However, in the Tibetan tradition the word “bardo” is used to mean a “gap”, a moment of uncertainty or groundlessness.

There are said to be many bardos, even a bardo between two breaths, or between two mind-moments. Within any life there are bardos, when we have lost out familiar ground of being who and what we thought we were, moments when a fixed identity cracks open into the utterly unfamiliar. They can be triggered by an illness, a divorce, a job loss, or merely the process of aging, any of which compel us to leave a known life, a known self behind.

So on these seas of uncertainty (You can tell I’ve just watched Life of Pi, in 3-D! a new classic bardo movie!), is there any way to orient oneself and navigate?

What Marriage Means

It seems to me that the debate over gay marriage has been muddled by a fundamental confusion over what we mean by marriage. We routinely confound civil marriage and sacramental marriage.This confusion roils the emotional waters and inhibits our ability to think clearly about marriage.

Civil marriage is an ancient institution, possibly arising out the the extremely long maturation period of human infants and the difficulties of caring for them. Marriage provided a way to create a fairly stable social unit, a family, within which offspring could be provided for and protected over the long term. Marriage also has always been concerned with the conservation of property and its orderly transfer from one generation to another. So legal marriage arose as a contract, like a partnership or a corporation, in which people bind themselves to each other with promises and agreements, the violations of which are subject to legal sanction.

This is the way marriage was understood for centuries, and still is in many traditional cultures. Marriages were alliances between families or groups, for mutual benefit. People understood that the strongest alliances bound families and tribes together by blood, through the production of common grandchildren. These marriages were not fundamentally oriented toward romantic love or personal fulfillment. They were about property and progeny.

iRest for Front Street Yoga

Yoga nidra is an ancient meditative practice drawn from the nondual traditions, especially the tradition of Kashmir Shaivism. Not an asana practice, yoga nidra is an aspect of the meditation limb of the eight limbs of yoga. Though it’s usually done lying in savasana, with lots of props for comfort, yoga nidra can be practiced in any position. In fact, when it’s done with soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, their bodies are often so injured that they can only practice standing up and leaning against mattresses placed against the walls.

There are several different forms of yoga nidra. Some simply address the relaxation of the physical body. Others use very specific imagery to bring awareness into different body segments. The form I teach, called iRest, short for Integrative Restoration, was developed by a yogi and psychologist named Richard Miller, who lives in Larkspur and teaches internationally. iRest works with all of what in the yoga traditions are called koshas, or sheaths. The koshas are each a kind of covering over the immaterial radiance of our true nature. The koshas include the physical body (annamayakosha), the body of breath and energy (pranamayakosha), the emotional body (manomayakosha), the mental body (vijnanamayakosha), the body of joy or bliss (anandamayakosha), and the asmitamayakosha, home of the I-thought, or the sense of personal selfhood. iRest also inquires into what the yogis call sankalpa, or intention.

Because we often work with traumatized people, especially when we take the work into homeless shelters, jails and prisons, we have added an extra step to the iRest protocol called the Inner Resource, a kind of safe space within to which we can keep returning to reconnect with a sense of security and ease whenever something in the practice, or in our daily lives, feels overwhelming and makes us long for a moment of refuge.

Solving Conflict 1-2-3

Conflict seems to pervade our lives. This political season rings in daily news of candidates not only debating together, but of savage and underhanded attacks, not only on each other's policies, but on each other’s pasts, families and fundamental characters. On TV, competition and conflict are everywhere, even on the cooking channels! And in these conflicts, the losers are humiliated and denigrated in every way, up to and including being killed, and their death becoming a viral video. Conflict is everywhere, red in tooth and claw.

Given that conflict is so upsetting, how is that it remains so enduringly popular? The simple answer seems to be that it’s inevitable. Resources are scarce, not only material resources like land or water, but non-material resources like recognition and esteem. There can be only one Design Star each year, and only the Design Star gets her own show on HGTV. Only one person will win the 2012 election (assuming we don’t get a replay of 2000), and become president. It sure looks like a win-lose world.

The Most Wonderful Question

What is your deepest heart’s desire? What do you long for most? What’s the guiding star of your life, around which you orient yourself? When you’re on your deathbed, what will allow you to let go of your life with the face of satisfied desire?

When I began the iRest work and first heard this question, I was moved to tears, as if my heart had been waiting all my life to be asked just this. I thought to myself, “What would life be like if people were asked this question, early and often?” Of course, my mind quickly seized the question and tried to turn it into a concept. I thought of the various spiritual teachings I had received about “awakening”, decided “this is it”, and moved quickly away from my heart. It took a while before I could just stay with the felt sense of heartful longing without conceptualizing it or turning it into a “goal”.