Showing posts with label yoga. Show all posts
Showing posts with label yoga. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Saturday, May 27, 2017
Mythic Yoga: The Story in the Body - Personal Mythology & Transformation via Body and Story
Pictures are images that bubble up from the soul. Putting together images for this movie guides you to begin to listen to the story in the body as you take a Mythic Yoga Journey™ into your own story. Use svadyaya, self-reflection, to contemplate the images while you practice yoga. The classic method of Mythic Yoga by Sydney Solis. Subscribe!
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Poetry in Motion - Yoga, Myth and the Body
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Wisdom, digital photograph of original silver gelatin print
photo collage by Sydney Solis. Part of the Personal
Mythology Series.
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Our bodies are poetry in motion. Poet Sandra Cisneros writes that a dream is a poem of the body. Mythologist Joseph Campbell says that the organs of the body are what emit energies in conflict with each other as images arise to the surface in our dreams and visions.
What happens when we listen deeply to what songs, sounds, images and invisible words our body is saying to us?
That's part of the Mythic Yoga journey undertaken at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver this January 14, 2017 as part of a new beginning series that I will be teaching there. I'm excited to bring yoga and movement to literature workshops and share the intuitive, sensing and feeling functions that have been overlooked in favor of the intellect - true yoga.
Using spoken word, yoga, dance and other movement, we will explore embodied storytelling in a disembodied age of internet, social media and virtual reality to bring us down to earth, reality and listen deeply enough to tell our Myth Poem of the Body.
OM SHANTI
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Tuesday, April 19, 2016
Mythic Imagery and Embodied Storytelling for Psycho-Spiritual Development
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| Gustav Klimt The Tree of Life 1905 |
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.
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| 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 |
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).
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| 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. |
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
Friday, April 8, 2016
Mythic Yoga Workshop May 14 at Circle Yoga and Dance, Ormond Beach, FL
THE MYTHIC YOGA STUDIO PRESENTS
Sydney Solis, RYT
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!
Wednesday, April 6, 2016
Know Thy Self: Mythic Yoga Online Classes Start Sept. 12. Early-Bird Registration and Save
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| A mythic image has one foot in reality and one foot in eternity, says Mythologist Joseph Campbell. |
Working with myths and the body stops the rational, intellectual mind and kicks in the lost connection we have to the other parts of our psyches, such as the intuitive and feeling sides. Just as in the Grail Myth the King was wounded in the thigh, the feeling function, we must restore this connection to ourselves to provide wholeness not only for ourselves, but the entire world. Because the work we do in the silent depths of our meditation, yoga asana and Mythic Yoga practice is unfathonable in influence. For it is the depths were we meet all in undifferentiated consciousness.
Mythic Yoga classes start again this fall Mondays 8 pm EST. Started in 2006, The Storytime Yoga and Mythic Yoga online classes were the first yoga classes offered online. I took my mythic journey with my kids and lived my myth, and now I am back for the mythic return to share the gifts I have acquired from my journey.
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| Mythic Yoga is deep work that goes beyond yoga asana and connects to your dreams, personal myth, imagery, and art From the Personal Mythology Series of photo and mixed-media collage by Sydney Solis |
"Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror -- but by god, you are alive," Campbell says.
Dreams, stories, myths and putting our bodies and selves into the center of the universe and aligning it with the cosmos takes us on a journey into the ineffable and toward liberation. It's raja yoga, direct.
The physical asanas are only one step, but the psycho-social and spiritual aspects of Mythic Yoga are just being known as the images from our personal mythology arise and point us into the direction of liberation and ecstatic union with the divine.
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| Listen deeply to the body and discover your personal mythology! It won't be from the head! |
• Four weeks of original Mythic Yoga online course work, group interaction in a forum to post your questions and comments, dream work, guided home work and exercises, plus a live class every week for feedback and coaching that will be recorded if you can't make it.
• I will be sharing my personal mythic journey, how I started Mythic Yoga and Storytime Yoga for Kids in Boulder, Colorado in 2003, went on a personal mythic journey in 2010 abroad with my kids after my husband's death, and losing everything three more times after that...... Loss is continual.... but what is it that lasts within? It's the Little Piece of Paradise I say. It's always with you. Use personal mythology and yoga to find it! You don't survive, you thrive, prevail, triumph!
• Contact us today to register! Price is $250 and SAVE $50 if you register by May 15!
• Includes all coursework, online platforms as well as the e-book Mythic Yoga: Ancient Hindu Myth and Personal Myth by Sydney Solis and her childhood memoir of war Outside the Concentration Camp, all to get you inspired to share your story of healing with yoga and story.
• All you need is high-speed internet access and a webcam!
• Check out all the fun Mythic Yoga The Story in the Body participants had on our 5-day Retreats held in Boulder, Colorado 2008-2010.
The original Mythic Yoga! Live your myth, don't just talk about it! Find the courage to go deep within. OM SHANTI
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| Align with your Divine. Follow your dream images and they will awaken you in all of your life and mythology. |
Suggested Reading
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (The Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) by Joseph Campbell
The Heroine's Journey by Maureen Murdock (I met her at the Mythic Journey's Conference in Atlanta in 2004)
The Heroine's Journey Workbook by Maureen Murdock
Sunday, January 10, 2016
Mythic Yoga: Epiphany
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| Mythic Yoga: Epiphany 2016 mixed media collage on recycled wood, as part of the Personal Mythology Series 2003-2016 |
When that is achieved, magic and miracles happen. Or rather, the boons of the Gods. Most definitely, healing ones appear that can affect the entire planet.
Aligning with the cosmos, reconnecting to the depths, healing the planet by healing ourselves. Mythic images take us there, as does meditation, spending time in nature or creating ritual as we participate in the seasons and delight in uniting with the powerful planetary pulls on our bodies, elements and emotions.
The Mythic Yoga process creates amazing, mysterious results. Over the years I have expressed it in art and poetry via my Personal Mythology series of mixed media collage.
I made one of my first photo paper collages in 2003 a few months before my husband died.
Remarkably, nearly 14 years later, after many years of practice and a personal mythic journey abroad, I made another one. It symbolized an end of an era. Constant renewal. A new era.
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| Rose Cross 2003. Mixed Media collage on handmade paper. Part of the Personal Mythology Series for Mythic Yoga |
So much healing. So much joy. That in all of our story, our personal myth, our history is that it brings the gifts, it renews itself in the cosmos as you. And continues to grow and once again cycle through great time and space before its ready to cast everything off once again. The eternal cycle of birth, death, rebirth. That's why letting to so powerful. Constant renewal requires constant release.
Aligning with the cosmos by celebrating the great planetary events such as solstice, puts you in deep connection with the depths. Now we continue with the year, building psychic energy with the gifts in January's winter depths. As if it were inseminated inside a womb. A seed buried in the earth. A seed sprouting along a river, in a dream, now awakening to consciousness and bliss at midwinter before it sprouts above ground, in new consciousness, birth, in the spring before yawning toward the fullness of summer, only to repeat the cycle all over again. Eternal life.
A fig, a rose, a dove, a swan, the god Rudra, as us, always transforming our lives in our dreams, our thoughts, as we become aware of them and awaken from the dream and become sat, chit, ananda, being, consciousness and bliss. OM SHANTI and happy new year, eternally.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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.
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| 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.
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
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| 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 Myth of the Eternal Return by Mircea Eliade
Sunday, May 12, 2013
Healing at the Yoga Farm St. Croix with Yoga and Story
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| Christiansted, St. Croix, USVI by Sydney Solis 2013 |
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Mythic Yoga: The Queen of Bohemia Lives in St. Croix
I kept a blog for five years while dealing with the difficulty of surviving my husband's suicide and raising my two young children.
Yoga and The Queen of Bohemia guiding myth, which is backed by Durga and Kali myths gave me the strength, courage and physical vitality of body and mind to move forward for healing and transformation.
The Queen of Bohemia Lives in St. Croix
A new cycle begins as I emerge from my egg and am reborn once again. Mythic Yoga to light and guide. OM SHANTI.
Find your own guiding myth. What is it? Here are a few websites to inspire you.
Timeless Myths
Hindu Myths
The Joseph Campbell Foundation
Upcoming Mythic Yoga classes on Powhow at the Mythic Yoga Studio. Follow me for latest updates!
Mythic Yoga: The Artemis Club
Now that her l'il yogi kids have blossomed into young adults, it's time to return to Mythic Yoga: The Artemis Club - Stories and Yoga for Young Women at Teen Yogini.com. Nurturing, protecting and empowering the young feminine is needed in this day and age to bring the mother goddess back to the world. Something sorely needed for the earth and our own psyches.
This marks the return of Mythic Yoga, which I started 10 years ago. Nobody could really understand "Mythic Yoga" back then. Storytime Yoga was hot for kids yoga, and my kids were young. So I focused on that and continued Mythic Yoga as the personal practice program for parents and teachers in the Storytime Yoga Teacher Certification. Back then the kids really needed me, I took the time off to be a mother and raise them. 10 years later, my dharma fills me with kama to move me to artha to achieve moksha! So Mythic Yoga forces its way up to top because it's ready to come up out of the dark!
Artemis commands in her character for us to pay attention to the Young Feminine and protect it In The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden: Understanding the Wounded Feeling Function in Masculine and Feminine Psychology Robert A. Johnson argues that the feeling function is the most wounded in our society. Attention must be paid to our young adults to nurture their feeling function in order to avoid the destruction that is upon us with mass shootings, eating disorders and general misogyny in the world and the destruction of the Earth.
The Myth of Artemis is powerful to contemplate in the body. A true feminist archetype, Artemis infuses us with the energy of the mother goddess permeating the body, acquiring masculine energy to balance out a badly out of balance world tilted to extreme masculine and mechanical machine, suppressing the feminine and the body, the earth. But the Goddess is back. And the masculine is coming through for women and young women to claim.
I've been having dreams of the "Dark Man," which terrified me. I read in Once Upon a Midlife: Classic Stories and Mythic Tales to Illuminate the Middle Years by Allan Chinen, M.D. about a woman embracing her animus in the Chinese story The Wife who Became King.
Although frightening and threatening at first, the male villains ultimately help the wife individuate. The men represent the essential enemy. The same theme appears in other middle ages, and crops up frequently in real life. Many women reclaim their power only when they are forced to leave a neglectful or abusive spouse. Finally abandoning the hope that a man can fulfill their needs, women strike out on their own and discover dormant strengths and talents.
Jung suggested that the animus usually plays the role of a helpful, spiritual guide for women, leading them on a voyage of self-discovery. Dangerous animus figures reflect the realities of patriarchal cultures, where men often attack women….. Because of social pressures, women are also taught to fear being assertive. Since the animus symbolizes assertiveness, he appears threatening at first. Pg. 103.
After recognizing my animus appearing in my dreams, my own masculine energy, I befriended him. He appears regularly now in my dreams, recently taking me into a new house, upstairs to a room with a great view! We can all befriend our inner masculine for union and wholeness!
Visit Mythic Yoga: The Artemis Club invite the young women in your life to join you in the mythic journey to your Self. Learn to use the archetypical energy of Artemis to reclaim your masculine, animus power in your life. Challenge the alienation of mundane life and re-mythologize it. Participate in the myth with Mythic Yoga and do your part in bringing light to the world and bring the Great Mother energy to the world for healing, life and rebirth.
The classic training in Mythic Yoga with Sydney Solis using Dream work, yoga, Hindu myth and other world mythologies, personal mythology, journaling and meditation is coming soon to Powhow.
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