Mythic Imagery and Embodied Storytelling for Psycho-Spiritual Development

Gustav Klimt The Tree of Life 1905

I performed my version of a Jewish folktale from India I call "The Tree of Gold" on the main stage Sunday Morning Closing Concert at the Florida Storytelling Festival April 3.

It's part of my personal Mythic Yoga repertoire of stories that have a significant spiritual value for me personally as well as collectively that have themes of reconciliation and renewal.

The imagery in this story pertains to many psycho-spiritual elements contained in yoga and yoga philosophy. When we listen to this story, we connect via the metaphors and archetypical images that re-link us to ourselves via the mythic dimension of our beings, largely forgotten in favor of the intellect.

Listening and creating these images internally within with our imagination activates the neglected feeling and intuitive functions of our psyche that is found and felt in the body.  Healing and answers are thus provided to our questions and ailments. "...myths are also profound dramatic descriptions of our interior emotional and spiritual experience as human beings, says Jeremy Taylor, and these myths also show up in our sleeping and waking dream life.

We become the characters, images and elements of the story, as we progress in the narrative structure and through the ritual of listening have a conscious participation in the story. We live the myth. We are the foolish king, who sends his young queen away. We are the queen abandoned and sent to the forest to live with an old man. We are the old man, those feminine qualities in masculine psychology that are expelled from our patriarchal culture. We are the tree of gold, which is constantly flowing liquid gold but always holding its shape of a tree.

The Cottonwood trees of my youth
growing up in Boulder, County
 Colorado have strong meaning for me.
Native Americans saw the tree as
sacred and was at the heart of the Sun Dance Ritual

These images activate the yoga within and reminds us something about the ineffable. That's the purpose of a mythic image, Mythologist Joseph Campbell says. It has one foot in reality and one foot in the transcendent. That is the Mythic Yoga, as stories and myths have that ability to wake us up and help us reach the goal of yoga, union with the divine.

When we act the story out with out body or take a position of a tree, I can feel immediately the Shakti, the kundalini, the chakras, the tree of life. I am at the center point, the axis mundi. I am the whole world. Tat Tvam Asi. Thou Art That. I am at one with the cosmos, the divine. My body is the container, just as the tree is, for cosmic intelligence and consciousness. The body's intelligence knows the way, we just have to realize it by hearing the stories and participating in the myth via the ritual of yoga.

For that is the purpose of myth, to help us live in accord with nature. We become Solis, the Latin word for sun. I am the sun. That is my personal mythology. And I am always amazed at the images and opportunities that present themselves in my life all because I dared to take a risk and follow my bliss. Dared to extract myself of the commodified trap American yoga has become.

 I feel the image resonate within me and it grounds me when I think of it or move with it. The Cosmic Tree is a powerful archetype of cosmic renovation. The Asvattha is the chief of trees and typifies that tree of life which is rooted in God. Great reminders during our secular life to handle all that arises and be rooted in myth and yoga in a world flattened out with just economic and political concerns rather than ecstasy and spirit.

Yama while instructing Naciketa describes the eternal Asvattha tree with its root upwards and branches downwards, which is the pure immortal Brahman, in which all these world are situated, and beyond which there is nothing else (Katha Upanishad Verse II.vi.1). But Krishna tells us that the Asvattha tree having neither end nor beginning nor stationariness whatsoever has its roots upwards and branches downwards whose branches are nourished by the Gunas and whose infinite roots spread in the form of action in the human world which, though strong, are to be cut off by the forceful weapon of detachment to seek the celestial abode from which there is no return (Bhagavad Gita Chapter XV Verses 1-4).

This tree my father bought at an end of season
 sale at K-Mart in Boulder in 1981 for .25.
 It now grows and has an uncanny look of a woman!
Folklore says that when you cut down
 a tree, you cut down a woman. 

Powerful medicine. That's the power of the oral tradition. That's the power of storytelling and listening and the oral tradition, especially when you act out the myth as ritual with yoga and it becomes the yoga. Something reading won't get you (now will following a guru. Look within for your own sat guru. It's right here all the time, like a jewel in the middle of your forehead.

Forget expensive trainings and workshops by flying all over the world. America, always trying to make a buck. Simply sit down and mediate every day and get to know thy self!  For yogic wisdom for thousand of years has been passed down in such a manner, for the transmission is a psycho-spiritual knowing via the energy of the image that guides us to knowledge and liberation. It's perfect for modern times. Just to re-acquaint yourself with this silent aspect of your being.

For this is our yoga. Mythic Yoga, using images and symbols to find union. "To transcend profane time and re-enter into mythical Great Time is equivalent to a Revelation of Ultimate Reality. Reality that is strictly metaphysical and can be approached in no other way than through myths and symbols," Mircea Eliade says in his book Images and Symbols studies in religious symbolism.

Join me May 14 at Yoga Circle and Dance in Ormond Beach for a Mythic Yoga Workshop to discover your personal mythology. Or join me online starting September 12 for the Mythic Yoga Online Training and discover your myth through dreams and journaling, yoga and the global community. Amazingly we start dreaming together, experiencing the synchronicity that arises when we connect to our depths and share our hearts. We are all one!

OM SHANTI

Mythic Yoga Workshop May 14 at Circle Yoga and Dance, Ormond Beach, FL

THE MYTHIC YOGA STUDIO PRESENTS

Sydney Solis, RYT


Mythic Yoga

Saturday May 14, 2016

1-3 pm $25

Circle Yoga and Dance

605 ½ S. Yonge St.

Ormond Beach, FL

• Discover the power of ancient myth and yoga philosophy for modern times.
• Plumb the depths of your being to develop your intuitive and feeling functions by listening to the body’s silent voice as you create a personal mythology for physical and mental wellness, and healing.
• Use the tools of world mythology, the chakras, imagery and the oral tradition to gain insight to your life and inspiration for storytelling and creative writing for self-discovery, artistic expression and posterity.
• Gentle yoga, dance, movement, yoga nidra and meditation round out the experience.  
• Bring paper, a pen and a dream. Wear comfortable clothing. No yoga experience required.

Register today at YogaCircleandDance@gmail.com

Visit www.MythicYoga.com for more information

Sydney Solis, RYT, is the Queen of Bohemia. Since 2003 she has been enchanting, educating and entertaining people of every age all over the world with her pioneering Storytime Yoga® and Mythic Yoga performances, methods and trainings. An associate of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, she enjoys sharing the ancient Power of Myth to modern audiences.

Read Sydney Solis's personal mythology developed with yoga and ancient Hindu myth in Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream: Ancient Hindu Myth and Personal Story.

Or join me online starting September 12 for the Mythic Yoga Online Training and discover your myth through dreams and journaling, yoga and the global community. Amazingly we start dreaming together, experiencing the synchronicity that arises when we connect to our depths and share our hearts. We are all one!

The Yoga of Story Residency June 22-26 in Denver with Sydney Solis - Connect Mythology with Yoga

Learn Hindu Mythology as you learn to use the oral tradition
 to teach yoga to kids, teens and adults.

Connect to the power of the oral tradition in this 5-day comprehensive and in-depth residency. Hear folktales, myths, legends and personal stories and how to tell and make your own. Connect to your own personal story and see how to help others connect too. Learn to stand out from the crowd! Teach kids, teens and adults more than yoga asana – give them the direct yoga using story and image as well as the psycho-spiritual aspects of yoga! Learn Sydney Solis’s pioneering story and yoga methods of Storytime Yoga®, Sleepytime Yoga™ and Mythic Yoga™.

Certificate of Completion given and Yoga Alliance Continuing Education Credits Available. 

Reserve your spot today. More info here!

Also coming up

• July 20-26 Buenos Aires, Argentina – Yoga para niños con cuentos! El Yoga del Cuento! The Yoga of Story and Charitable Kids Yoga Classes at Saludablemente Yoga. Contact Marcela Larrosa at Saludablemente to register.

Contact us with questions! 

Mythic Yoga: The Heroine’s Journey - Modern Feminist Mythological Guidance for Life

by Sydney Solis

The Heroine’s Journey offers women a distinctly different psychological process than the masculine Hero’s Journey. I put it to use in my mythic journey of healing when I spent three years abroad with my two children. You can take your own mythic journey too.

Inanna - The Heroine's Journey
via Mythology and Yoga

The Hero’s Journey, recognized by mythologist Joseph Campbell as found in all the world's cultures, is used time and time again to apply a mythic model as a roadmap to life. The traditional journey of having a call to adventure, gifts and then return, outline a masculine approach to the psychological experience. The Heroine’s Journey, however, is different, and this is the model I find as a woman more true to my experience and connects me to a deeper dimension of my life.

I first heard about the Heroine’s Journey at the Mythic Journey’s Conference in Atlanta in 2004. I took author and therapist Maureen Murdock’s eponymous class of the Heroine’s Journey. At Joseph Campbell’s behest Murdock created the feminine model of the mythic journey, outlined in her excellent book The Heroine’s Journey. From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey Through Myth and Legend by Valerie Estelle Frankel is another excellent book on feminist mythic journeying. I remember taking a playwriting class at CU Boulder with Laura Shamas. She, too, pointed out that there are different mythic models out there for life. One not about rising action and climactic events followed by denouement that models male orgasm, but a feminine one that features a series of events in dramatic cycles, much like the multiple orgasms of women. There really is a different feminine guiding mythology of which to view the world and live in its matrix with.

The myth Murdock called attention to in the workshop was the Sumerian Inanna, who, after shedding her posessions, descends to the underworld after she hears the cries of her sister, Ereshkigal, whose husband, Gugalanna the bull of Heaven, was murdered. Ereshkigal kills Inanna, and two creatures who descended after her showed compassion to the Ereshkigal, who moaned as if giving birth. She granted anything they wanted as a gift for their compassion. The two asked for Inanna, who was hanging on a hook like a piece of meat. The two beings sprinkled the waters of life and death on Inanna. This process of three days, much like the days before a new moon, returns Inanna resurrected to the surface world world, reborn. It’s a pre Persephone and Demeter (De- mater - the mother) myth, as well as pre-Christian. Joseph Campbell mentioned that women don’t really go “out” on a journey, because women are it. Where everybody is trying to get to. As life happens to women, such as the onset of menstruation, and a woman's body is identical to the universe, Campbell said. Whereas men have to go out on a journey and have experience special clubs and rites of action in secret societies to connect and find meaning to connect to the mysteries of life and death. 

Murdock outlined a woman’s journey, which begins with a split from the feminine. Our world is filled with many-a frustrated, angry and mean mother trapped in a patriarchal world or the isolated drudgery of housewifery. Women split from the mother aspect and identify with the father. This leads women to behave like men and value patriarchal ideals - wear the shoulder-padded suit, climb the corporate ladder, make money and be a “success.” But even when this is reached women enter a dry period or other crisis, such as an illness, Murdock says. Success and recognition fail to fill women up. Notice how many “successful women” may get breast cancer or other disease or become alcoholics in their pursuit of the masculine ideal, ignoring their feminine nature, values and processes of non-doing, nurturing and non-dollar-economy denominated work. After the “dry” period, women bottom out. A woman faces the lowest point - the abyss. That’s where the paradoxical shift comes. After that experience, woman is then on the upswing, reconciling with the mother, and then the father before ascending and returning to wholeness.

Sydney Solis and Sergeant Pepe in
St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands

Every woman is able to experience her own Heroine's Journey. I myself lived it. I used story, mythology and yoga. More than ten years ago after my husband died, I pieced together my life with what I called Mythic Yoga, attending the Mythic Journeys conferences, joining the Joseph Campbell Foundation and attending the mythological toolbox at Esalen. I began poring again through the Hindu myths my older sister and Hare Krishna yoga practitioner told me growing up. My father, who was born in the Dutch East Indies a concentration camp survivor, also pointed me on the mythic path, ascertaining throughout my life through his stories of the camp that there is no death. In order to "re-story" my life, I created my personal mythology of "The Queen of Bohemia"(In 1904 The St. Louis Dispatch ran a headline reading "The King of Bohemia" about my Czech great-grandfather Louis J. Tichacek, a Missouri senator) and started in 2009 a blog to help me deal with a difficult time in my life and, understand see myself clearly in order to forge a new identity that is healed.

As a child I never had a good relationship with my mother and did then identify with my father’s spiritual pursuits of yoga and meditation. I suffered a great deal of post traumatic stress disorder after my husband's sudden suicide in 2003 after his business went bankrupt, a casualty of post 9/11, leaving me and my 2 and 5-year-old penniless for a good month. Thereafter I bolted out into the world at hyper speed, creating the business of the Mythic Yoga Studio and Storytime Yoga® for Kids, bringing my kids with me to the kids yoga classes I taught.  I was going a mile-a-minute, doing so much I can hardly believe it now. The business grew quickly being in kids yoga and mythic yoga, including being featured in Yoga Journal magazine and on PBS. But the aridity hit. It was not easy to be a mom, run a household and a business. My kids’ were growing up and had many needs. I hit my dry period and bottomed out, had irregular pap tests and high-risk HPV. I wanted to return to being a mom and homemaker for their sake and mine. And to heal us all.

Spending time in nature leads to aesthetic arrest
and revealing maya.

I descended in true mythic fashion and just like Inanna, stripping away and selling most my possessions, putting the rest in storage, putting my business on hold and moving from my hometown of Boulder, Colorado to Buenos Aires with my kids to learn to live simply and well, by cooking from scratch, living simply and yoga home schooling them. ( Visit the Householder Yogini blog!) Together we experienced fabulous art and culture rather than the faceless suburbia Colorado and much of car-obsessed America had become. 

I practiced restorative yoga, ayurveda, meditation and ventured to every historic cafe in Buenos Aires, writing personal myth and memoir for myself and rediscovering who I really was - beyond the painful identify of a traumatic childhood and as a suicide survivor.  My personal fairy tale of the Queen of Bohemia, backed by the Hindu myth of Kali and Durga, enabled me to find courage, strength and clarity of who I was and make sense of the events in my life. I could fortify and recreate my self away from an identity of pain and trauma to one of healing and wholeness with this personal myth. For the third person narrative gives one the ability to self-reflect, svadyaya, one of the niyamas. Like meditation, it gives one distance to observe the ego self. Through story, photographs, meditation and yoga/body work, the ego mind is recognized and understood for what it is. Neti, neti. Not that, not that. Frank Bures says, "The ability to see one's life as a story is at the heart of identity. In fact, our ability to '"narrate" our life's events may even be the defining mark of consciousness." One can find thus find a transcendent state in viewing one's story, and start from there to recreate oneself after identifying with the divine. It’s used as long as needed for guidance and strength. Then, the story and image is abandoned when it's purpose as a boat to get one to the other shore is accomplished. 

After 5-months in Buenos Aires, we moved to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The kids enrolled in school there, and I continued my yoga and mythic yoga writing/story practice, isolated from the world but immersed in the resplendent nature of the garden, witnessing life and death as a constant and experiencing the nature behind it all in meditation and what Campbell would call "aesthetic arrest." I befriended a 73-year-old Puerto Rican Farmer, who I consider like a shaman, living simply but in the greatest wealth of all - the spirit. No wonder Jesus went to the garden to pray. It was a profound experience, connecting to the depths and the mystery of it all. And using Kali and Durga to slay my demons of fear, disease and negativity by uncovering stories that mythic yoga body work revealed. I had to die to one identity in order to be reborn anew with consciousness, the cosmos periodically renewing itself through me.

I found my “Little Piece of Paradise” as I call it, a piece of metaphoric real estate that is the blissful state of the transcendent.  Kali cuts off my thoughts, for as in Yoga Sutra 1.2 says, yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind, allowing the true self to arise. This unity, for me to describe it’s like watching yourself wave to yourself riding on a float in a parade, but you are also there on the float waving back! Or you are the one watching the movie of yourself from the theatre seats, all the while performing in the movie of your life on screen. That dual/one nature, the paradox, blends and melts one’s mind into the ineffable, joyful and loving experience of being. From then on I felt grounded in my little piece of paradise, to carry it with me, and to abandon my Queen of Bohemia fairy tale and myth (she is still used in kids yoga!) After living a quiet lifestyle of yoga and storytelling on my little Yoga Farm St. Croix and living off of fresh food from the garden, my pap tests returned to normal and I was free of the virus.

That deep peace and grounding that followed this experience was revealed not in a flash but through a series of practice and time, like a slow release capsule. Of course, then, there was the mythic return left. To ascend again in wholeness. And so I did. Numerous problems with St. Croix ushered in our leaving island after living there for 2 1/2 years and returning to the U.S. Mainland. The main employer, Hovensa Oil Refinery, closed a year after our arrival and decimated the local economy. A mass exodus ensued. I didn't want to return to Colorado, for I left it to leave all my past. I thought it was painful to return, as each summer that I did visit my father and family the past three years confirmed in sorrow and difficulty. The climate also bothered me; cold, dry, windy, brown, high-altitude Colorado aggravated my vata. I am much healthier and happier in a green, humid, sea-level environment.

Dream work and dream yoga
provides ample opportunity
for personal mythology and healing.
This from aboriginal peoples of Australia

The kids and I settled in DeLand, Florida based on some dreams I had. As sychronicity would have it, my neighbors are filmmakers who worked on the Power of Myth video! I did visit my home in Boulder and my father this past Christmas. I aligned my body and mind through the ritual of Advent to the sacred and by not participating in traditional American consumption of the holiday. What died away in the season was the old me, for when I visited my father, not only was he more healthy and happier than at any time I had known him in my life, but the house I grew up in, which always was in disrepair and dysfunction, was remarkably fixed up and functional. My mother's anger and upset was replaced and healed by cleanliness and orderliness - and forgiveness. My younger sister, who had committed suicide during my time abroad, also hung close and things felt more healed.

 Psychologist James Hollis says that this is the retroactive healing of the ancestors. I had always intuited this, feeling that my father and my late mother healed through my own healing. And vice versa. It healed my late sister, my grandmother, all who suffered were now healed in the depths. All the suffering was transformed and it led to faith. Faith in the Self and the eternal presence. When we do our inner work, it affects the whole world. For it is in the collective depths that it takes place and it is united in love and grace.  

There is the eternal return. Life continues and periodically has an urge to renew itself,  So life goes on. New trials await, new experiences. But I am reborn, and always behind the scenes I have taken up real estate in my little piece of paradise, and my Heroine’s Journey was infused by feminine mythology and yoga that guided me there every step of the way. 

YOUR OWN HEROINE'S JOURNEY

Create your own Heroine's Journey
with personal mythology and yoga.

There is nothing to do to start your own Heroine's Journey except start where you are. Practice yoga and meditation. Reflect on your life's story. Listen to your dreams, for Campbell says that dreams are private myths and myths are public dreams! Imagine yourself like a butterfly, dipping into and out of the dream and waking world with ease. Read and listen to the old myths. Dance, make art, sing, walk in nature as a personal ritual. Spend time with children. Attend storytelling events and start a storytelling circle. Keep a journal. Bring awareness to everything you do and turn it into the third person narrative. Make your own fairy tale and tell about your life. What myth arises? Read my example of combining Hindu Myth with my life story in the Mythic Yoga E-book, Vishnu's Dream. Use the Mythic Yoga E-course to guide you in using the myths in connection with your own personal story and in creating a personal body myth and ritual. 

Connect with others. For it is the present moment physical awareness and witness aspect of storytelling that connects us and heals us.  For mythology restores the neglected part of our psyches, the symbolic, instinctual part that has been cut off in favor of the intellect. Our mythic imagination guides us to our selves, as the universe continues to become self-aware of itself through us. It's imperative we bring mythology back to awareness for society's sake, especially youth. 

So! Start your journey! Re-imagine the world! Re-enchant it with mythology, yoga and story!

Namaste and have a magical day!

RECOMMENDED READING

The Heroine’s Journey by Maureen Murdock

The Heroine’s Journey Workbook by Maureen Murdock

From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey Through Myth and Legend by Valerie Estelle Frankel

Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer by Diane Wolkstein 

The Mythic Path: Discovering the Guiding Stories in Your Past - Creating a Vision for Your Future by David Feinstein.

The Power of Myth - Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell

Sukhavati by Joseph Campbell

The Myth of the Eternal Return by  Mircea Eliade 

Recommended Reading for Regaining the Feminine

Suggested Reading for Dream Work

Parabola Magazine

Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream - Ancient Hindu Myths and Personal Story available on Kindle!

Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream -
Ancient Hindu Myths and Personal Story
 by Sydney Solis
available on Kindle
Learn about Mythology and Yoga
and how it relates to your personal story

by Sydney Solis

I first performed Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream - Ancient Hindu Myths and Personal Story at the 2005 Boulder Public Library’s Winter Festival of Stories, recounting ancient Hindu myths and interweaving them with my personal life story. It is now available on Kindle as an ebook!

These myths, such as Vishnu’s Dream, The Fabric of Life, Durga and Kali, The Birth of Krishna and more inspire you to begin your own mythic journey and connect with the ancient symbols and metaphors. These point us to our depths to become aware of a personal myth and connection with all the universe. It leads to the ultimate boon: to appreciate your life with awe and recognize that you are one with the divine. That's the power of Mythic Yoga! 

The myths guided me to recount funny childhood stories of my Hare Krishna sister in Boulder, Colorado in the 1970s and my first encounter with yoga and the myths. They also helped me deal with to the tragedy of my husband’s suicide in 2003. It is a journey to ultimate healing using yoga and story. 

You too can find a healing journey with yoga and story by using ancient myth and telling your own story with this ebook. Vedic ayurvedic storytelling even says enlightenment comes from hearing the stories!

Mythic Yoga: Vishnu’s Dream has been used in the Mythic Yoga Studio’s e-course Mythic Yoga: the Story in the Body that is required training for Storytime Yoga® for Kids Teacher Certification. Get inspired to discover your own story in the body using myth, yoga and image. Classes start  Use it to go fishing in your depths and see your life as the dream of narrative for transformation and point you toward ultimate Self-realization and freedom. 

Namaste and Have a Magical Day!

Recommended Reading and Websites

• Receive Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream FREE when you become a member of the League of Yogic Storytellers. Receive premium content, audios and more. 

• Visit the Joseph Campbell Foundation Website.

• Visit the Mythic Journeys website.

• Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion - By Diane K. Osbon - One of my all-time favorites and chock full of great yogi wisdom from Campbell.

• The Power of Myth - The classic Bill Moyers and PBS interviews with Joseph Campbell. As fate would have it, the audio and video team that filmed the series are my next-door neighbors and landlords!

• Our Secret Territory: The Essence of Storytelling by Laura Simms

Mythic Yoga: Dreamwork - Telling the Dream Story of the Body

Mythic Yoga: Dream Work 

Dream work is one of the most powerful yogas. Self-knowledge is revealed when we listen to our dreams, connect with the symbols that bubble up out of the depths and listen to the stories they are revealing.

I have been involved with dream work my whole life, and taught it as part of the Mythic Yoga and Storytime Yoga® Kids Yoga Teacher Training, as teachers must know their own story first and experience transformation before teaching kids. And when we merge the body with the image, profound insight, awareness and healing arise. Just as Vishnu dreams the world into creation, we too awaken every morning and open our eyes and bloom the world into creation. We enter the field of time and space, dreamed by a single dreamer in which we all dream too! Mythic Yoga: Dreamwork - Telling the Dream Story of the Body online classes start Wednesdays August 21 at 8 pm EST on Powhow.com.

We use the body as a vehicle to work with the dreams, exploring the meaning and messages through movement, yoga, meditation, myths and storytelling. JOIN US! Register at the Mythic Yoga Studio on PowHow.com! 

Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body - Body Memoirs online class also starts August 24!

Here are some of my favorite books on Dream Work

• Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth by Robert A. Johnson
• The Wisdom of Your Dreams: Using Dreams to Tap into Your Unconscious and Transform Your Life by Jeremy Taylor

• An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols by J.C. Cooper - I don't believe in Dream books, as dream symbols are personal. Yet this book offers a glimpse into universal symbols and is fascinating reading.

Join the League of Yogic Storytellers and Gain Access to these Articles on Mythic Yoga Dream Work by Sydney Solis

• Mythic Yoga: Working with Your Dreams – The Beginnings of Personal Myth

• Mythic Yoga: Working with Your Dreams Video

Life and Death

Mi Chica, Palomita, y su perro, Sergeant Pepe. RIP, 2006-2013.

Forgive me. But I must express my grief. Isn''t that the real source of why we seek the comfort of myths? Isn't that the real reason we wonder beyond the grave? We should be so proud of our neo-lithic ancestors. For that moment when a little dog named Sergeant Pepe, a little black-and-white dog that meant so much to you and your little children is mauled to death by wild dogs on  St. Croix, USVI, mauled to death by dogs who are just as lost, hungry for the truth and sorrowful by abuse by the system that we are forced to find the truth. We cry out in grief. We cry for myth. We cry for healing.

Here is my blog about his death.  May we all find ways to grieve. May we all find ways to heal. May we all find meaning in betrayal, loss and love. May we all find sanctuary in yoga and stories. For they propel us to our Little Piece of Paradise. That transcendental real estate within. 

Mythic Yoga: Dream work and the Beginnings of Personal Myth

"The ability to see one’s life as a story is at the heart of identity. In fact, our ability to “narrate” our life’s events may even be the defining mark of consciousness." - Frank Bures

I have been in a dream work group here in St. Croix for the past two months. Led by my friend Nancy Ayer at her home in Estate Mt. Washington on the west side of the island, the group meets every week for two hours deep in the rainforest on beautiful plantation ruins that houses her incredible Chartes-style labryinth.

We sit in a circle, either beneath elderly trees dripping with hard, round avocados, or over by a disintegrating copper cooking vat where sugar cane was once boiled and cooked by slaves to make rum. We tell each other our dreams, and a remarkable alchemy takes place when we make the unconscious images and story lines conscious and bring it out into the world to share with others. They in turn experience the same image in their bodies and psyches, as I experience theirs. Common story lines appear and it's the making of modern myth.

We work with night time dreams, but also real life events, which when retold as story, seem as a dream. Such is life a dream and all the world a stage! Merrily, merrily we go! Paying attention to it all. No wonder the Vishnu Purana has Vishnu dreaming the world into creation, massaged by Lakshmi, who ignites the libido, the spark of divine desire to create!

How we are all creating our world! And through dreams, stories and yoga, we become self aware of this world creation. Get to know the story. Making what is unknown, known. From darkness to light, from untruth to truth. Our soul fishes in the darkness, on the edge of an iceberg, looking to hook something from the great depth below, pull it up to the surface and give it a good look in the daylight of consciousness.

Asato Ma Sad Gamaya
Tamaso Ma Jyotir Gamaya
Mrityor Ma Amritam Gamaya
Om Shanthi Shanthi Shanthi

Lead me: From untruth to truth;
From darkness to light;
From death to immortality
Om peace peace peace

If there is a divine being, I believe it to be true because I have experienced such miracles and uncanny things in my dreams. Truly that is where I experience the divine, if I am ever to believe in god at all! This relationship with the Self. The spoken words, the weaving of consciousness from daytime to night time, all interact and are smeltered in the cauldron of alchemical becoming Self-hood.

I have been doing dream work for years and years, and teach dream work in my Mythic Yoga trainings, which prepares students who want to teach yoga for kids by getting clear of their story, lest they project it on the kids they work with. It's deep work, and I noticed we all started to dream others' dreams, and this is the creation of new myths. In this present dream group on St. Croix I learned to listen to other people's day time events, as if they were dreams. The same images and story lines put us into a listening trance as the dream unfolds, much like at night time. We follow along, and have a memory of that story which took place in a realm suspended of time and space. I begin to become aware of the witness consciousness, as I question as the Chinese sage did with, "Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly. or was I a butterfly dreaming that I was a man?"

 I also learned to look at a series of dreams, not only as a stand alone. I can see patterns and a story arising. Mega growth, the future, and being introduced to a dark man, my animus,  or masculine side of my psyche, who is now taking me on a journey. A mythic journey into my Self as revealed to me by dream images that bubble out of the dream depths.

Life is but a dream, and I can change this dream world I create with conciousness and awareness, working with my dreams to understand myself and guide me thorugh life. To make my unknown known, and bring me into complete liberation. Dream work and storytelling combined with accessing deeper meaning to the symbols through yoga asana as a form of active imagination, help us reveal that story, so that we can ultimately unmask our persona and step into the  point where the projections originate and achieve ultimate liberation of union as object and observer disappear.

So I follow my dreams, work with them as a most sacred aspect of my yoga practice. It can be remarkable, mystical. I have been dreaming about small, furry rodents for a while. This picture popped up instantly as I searched for a picture to use here. He was hanging around every day at the Omega Institute where I was conducting a Storytime Yoga for Kids training one summer.  I adopted him as my symbol, my animal helper and he made it into a Woodchuck Warm-Up. I had one furry rodent, beaver like creature presented as a gift from my my once terrifying animus who now is a business man who looks like my late husband.  And I dreamed of my high school drama teacher, Darlene Beaver, in a recent dream. I read a fairy tale in the Pink Fairy Tale book an interesting tale called The Princess in the Chest about a girl who, because of magic and a difficult father, was part beaver-ish for a while. After this writing dream work session, I will follow where my beaver takes me in the dreams and guides me in my next work of creation. And play with it in yoga asana practice for some Mythic Yoga Magic! We shall see!