Welcome to Inner Workings

(waves crashing) Hi. Welcome back. So, as we begin season two of Inner Workings, I've brought some friends along. I'd like to introduce you. If I'd brought my whole altar, this entire space would be filled, so I just brought a few things.

I think I'll start with my grandma. This is my grandma in, maybe the mid-40s, in a handstand, down on La Jolla Shores beach. She used to practice yoga from TV yoga videos, Richard Hittleman, and eventually Lilias. This is my friend Shiva. Shiva's your friend too.

There are a lot of ways we can speak about Shiva, but essentially, it's easiest if we just understand him as the first yoga teacher. Sometimes you'll hear him referred to as Adiyogi. Adi simply meaning first, the first yogi. The rumor with Shiva is that he and his buddies were hanging out in the forest meditating. Him and a bunch of other rishis were just sitting, sitting, sitting.

Eventually, spontaneously, Shiva began to dance, and this posture that you see him in in this particular form, representation, this is usually more often seen in south India. Usually when you see northern Indian sculptures, he's in meditation. But the rumor of the story is that he began to dance and then (blows) would go back into stillness, and then would come out and dance and (blows) go back into stillness, and then come out and dance. Eventually, and because this is Hindu mythology, this went on for 9000 years or so, but eventually, his buddies were like, "Dude, teach us." The situation is that the person he first taught was his beloved, Parvati. The way the teachings work, when you come across the teachings of Shiva, they're in dialogue form, and his feminine consort Parvati is asking questions, asking questions, not because she doesn't know, because according to the mythology, all comes from she.

But in her infinite compassion, she draws the teachings out of Shiva. So sometimes you'll see a sculpture of him with her sitting on his lap. So this is the importance of, as a yogi, the importance of asking questions, because without the question, there's no soil in which the teaching can land. Then we have Ramana Maharshi, who's one of my favorite yogis. His style of inquiry, his suggestion, was one only needs to ask the question of, "Who am I?" And if one asks the question of "Who am I?" The Sanskrit is Ko Hum.

If one asks that question then with a sincere heart, then one might be able to experience the answer. Now this is an important point, because the rumor is that we can not know the question with the mind, but we can experience the answer with the body. Ramana Maharshi lived in, and I always pronounce this a little wrong, so please excuse me, Tiruvannamalai, and right in the middle of the city is this beautiful mountain, Arunachala, which Ramana understood as his Shiva. I have a whole other story to tell you about that mountain, but maybe another time. Now I like to have an incense stick, and I tend to use, you know, you can buy really sweet incense holders.

I like to use shells from the beach, and we're lucky enough to live and get to be here, right on the beach, so I like to have that ocean, and hopefully this will work. Ting! Mm, sometimes, not always. We have a little bit of a beach wind happening here. (blows) (ligher clicks) Ting! Ah! Success. And now Agni.

Agni is the sanskrit for fire, and Agni is the fire god. The understanding is that nothing sacred can really occur without fire. Fire, Agni, is the first god to be invoked, the first energy. We can use the word energy if that feels more comfortable than the word god. The first cosmic force.

And the rumor is that Agni, when you call on Agni, Agni has access to all of the other forces, and so, again, nothing sacred. And this particular candle that I happen to have today, which I'm super excited about, my friend Jana is a perfumer, and she just made me that candle as a scent to find out if I liked it, so we're starting with it together fresh. Okay. So these are gonna be my friends for this second season of Inner Workings, and the hope, because where season one was really exploring the inner realm and touching deeply these subtler aspects of ourselves, the hope in this season is that we can start to try to map some of the subtler elements ourselves with some of what we might call the grosser elements. Grosser is just another word for more obvious, more tangible, so playing a little bit with some of these subtle currents, and also getting to know how what we usually consider the physical realm works.

So this'll be a shorter series of lessons. I've promised my friends I'll make them shorter. This'll be a shorter series of lessons that are attempting to break things down into smaller bite-size pieces with the hope that we might be able to increase our range of seeing. So we're not just trying to see the subtle, we're trying to see the relationship of everything. So that's where we're beginning.

So, happy to be back together. Thanks for being here, and always, always, as we move into this together, please let us know how it's going, otherwise we won't know. (laughs) Namaste.