Cynthia Abulafia, Author at LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health

Transformation is Life: Finding God and Love in our Imperfections

Cynthia Abulafia — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 20:08:49 +0000

Transformation in the Embrace of our Bravery

We are absolutely certain of very few things in life: that we are born into a body, that this body will die, and that in between we undergo near constant transformation in body, mind, and heart. While we are rarely afraid of our own birth, our perception of future death is a deep and common fear. However, transformation is just as terrifying to most of us, though rarely do we understand how deep and pervasive is this particular fear. In fact, I believe that we are less afraid of death than we are of the process of life. Transformation, though is found in our embrace of our bravery in the midst of our daily lives.

On many levels we recognize that transformation always ushers in death. The death of the previous self, the churning of the living present into something new and unfamiliar. If we can understand transformation, begin to love the small daily deaths, and use the steps along the way of life to listen to the heart instead of to foster fear and closure, we may just stop avoiding life. Once this great burden is understood, we may even stop fearing that final transformation and see death as just one passage amongst many.

Death does not need to be crushing. Our changing needs, attitudes, and imperfections need not symbolize great failures. On the contrary, how can we allow the very wounds, fears, and insecurities of our inner being to provide exactly that fuel that the heart has needed all along? If each one of us is an aspect of the divine that dances as life, then why does that divine allow so much pain, so much imperfection, and so much raw challenge in this tiny and fleeting life?

Waking Us Up to Our Hearts

Here is the open secret of all religious and spiritual teaching: it is not the shiny bits that wake us up. It is the hidden, the dark, and the uniquely wounded bits that wake us up to our hearts in an exploration just hard enough to remind us of the great power of that heart. Some of us need difficult reminders indeed.

The question is: Are we paying attention to our imperfections, our difficulties, and our transformations? Are we paying attention to the imperfections of those whom we love? This is the way back home to the heart.

Imperfection, whether in our relationships, attitudes, or in our own emotional maturity, is a uniquely useful tool to notice. Because imperfection signals a need to change. That transformation might come, and that the heart may need to pay better attention to the pain or triggers it holds.

Some people historically have cloistered themselves away from life in order to protect the heart from its wounds and shields. Some have gone off to caves. But most of us are still in this dynamic, loud world, washed again and again by our interactions, our emotions, our schedules, our relationships.

If life is an ocean, most of us are not tucked away and hidden in a cove, but are rather out in the open and exposed waters of life where things show up- predators, boredom, trash, delight, and the harsh elements. So use the trash, and use the delight, and use the elements for they are our greatest gifts. Because they are bringing us back home to the divine heart.

Cynthia Abulafia

Intimacy with the Unpleasant

Some stormy wind has been cutting at the water’s surface, but we have been trying to ignore it because we know that if we go close to investigate, we will have to feel what we must feel on the other side of the wave break. And if we allow that intimacy with the unpleasant, then surely we will uncover more challenge, more investigation of deep wounds, more feeling into old pains that were challenging enough the first time around. This time around, they promise that same unpleasantness plus a heady dose of fear. It’s like going in for an uncomfortable procedure more than once. The second time is harder because the element of freshness is gone and ignorance has been replaced with dread.

It’s important to be open to the process of life. It is the heart that has been sending out the sentries and tossing around the trash.

The heart is the beginning, the middle, and the expansion at the core of all human transformation.

We have all been here in friendship, in partnership, or in our family dynamic. It is never the shiny and polished persona that gets us in trouble. It is the variety of imperfections that we trip over in relationships, especially those relationships that we allow quite close to the deepest parts of our selves. We don’t like to admit it to ourselves, let alone others, but we are all deeply imperfect, are we not?

These exposures can either break us or they can heal us in ways that are unexpected, extraordinary, and transformative. But this happens only if we have the courage and the dedication to lean in to our uncomfortable places. Our relationships with others only reflect back to ourselves our great internal relationship with the heart.

It is critical that we accept our wounds. Not only accept the imperfections of ourselves, but actually see that these thoughts, patterns, and traumas are more like the bright gems surrounded by soft earth that shine and bring us reverence, clarity, and into the rich technicolor of being when they are unearthed.

If we are brave and if we notice without turning away, leaning in again and again to our process, we will at some point realize that the divine is not “out there” in the universe. The divine doesn’t stop at our skin. The divine does not ignore our small and hurried lives until we die and come up for some kind of measurement. God is this life. God is this heart, spiraling and sending tendrils outward, receiving tendrils back inward, especially from those closest to us. God is not only in here and never out there.

So we begin the arduous process of falling in love with our imperfections because this is the only way to remember the largeness of the heart.

And we all know the certainty at some level that we will have to contend with the heart sooner or later. We must not just talk about the heart. We must feel it. And we must not turn away from the heart when there is pain, but instead stop and notice its language. Why wait?

Let that point be now, and maybe we will see that our imperfections are made of the fabric of love itself. The heart is God. And our shields and imperfections are God’s knuckles knocking on the door. When we stop fearing this process we may just stop fearing transformation and even life itself. Maybe we will turn toward that which ushers in transformation with gratitude, welcoming, and joy. Let the heart knock. You know how to open the door. All it takes is to actually live.

Cynthia Abulafia

Cynthia brings an eye for detailed instruction to her challenging and creative classes. Her attention to detail brings her class deeply into the experience of the body, breath, and heart in order to tune attention to its finest point– believing that the purpose of the practice is to simply notice ever deeper into the silence that is the root of all form.

Her passion for biomechanics, non-dual self-inquiry, and the beautifully rooted grace of the yoga asanas themselves shines in her classes. She believes time on the mat should be playful, fun, sweaty, and a celebration of this amazing dance we call experience.
In addition to teaching asana she teaches courses in yoga philosophy, subtle body, human anatomy for yoga and yoga ethics.

She has been instrumental in the creation and leadership of Yoga Soup’s 200 Hour Teacher Training, is E-RYT 500, YACEP (she teaches continuing education), IAYT (Yoga Therapy), and Pilates certified, and holds a Masters in Nutrition. She has over 25 years of study with world class teachers in several schools of yoga, including Yoga Therapy, Ashtanga, Iyengar, Vinyasa Krama with Srivatsa Ramaswami, modern flow blends originating at Yoga Works in Santa Monica, and many beloved meditation, Advaita, non-dual Tantra, kundalini-Shakti, and self-inquiry teachers.

Cynthia believes strongly in educating students about Kundalini energy (not to be confused with the system of yoga in the same name). The poses of Yoga are designed to wake up our subtle body, and yet when this happens- as it inevitably does for many people- we often find ourselves without a compass or a safe community. This site will offer writings and explorations on topics related to the body, the breath, the subtle energies, non-dual literature and self-inquiry, Kundalini energy, & meditation techniques in order to facilitate understanding and conversation around these complex and beautiful topics.

www.cynthiaabulafiayoga.com

The post Transformation is Life: Finding God and Love in our Imperfections appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

It’s Time to Reinvent the Spiritual Ideal

Cynthia Abulafia — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 03:14:33 +0000

Rethinking Spiritual Practice: Do we Walk the Inner or Outer Path?

Is the spiritual path an inner one? Do we have to leave the world behind to find ourselves? If not, how can we integrate our relationship with the world? Is there an outer path to freedom? I think it is time for us to rethink our relationship with what we are taught on the spiritual path. It’s time to reinvent the spiritual ideal. Let’s start by putting this into context.

The Path of Inner Contemplation

Many modern-day spiritual practitioners are following traditions that were made for a place and time that looked quite different from the modern world. If you look at it, many of our most popular traditions were curated for the contemplative. The instructions are given for the aspirant who studied to give his or her full life to the path because of family lineage or personal calling. Teachings are often given for the ascetic. This puts many of us in a dilemma because, as important and relevant spiritual practice is in our modern lives, the spiritual ideal that has been fostered over time can actually limit us or create within us certain unrealistic images or goals.

We are busy people with full lives. However, we yearn for peace and inner quiet. We have family and appointments and careers. However, we are taught to be unattached. We move from meditation, contemplation, or prayer to the full swing of life in a matter of minutes.

When we look to our spiritual practice we can recognize that our modern-day intensity is not actually a problem. In fact, this offers us a treasure trove of lessons that can become profound material for spiritual self-inquiry.

What it Means to Reinvent the Spiritual Ideal

This is only possible if we reinvent the spiritual ideal to embrace the busy life. We can absorb the lessons of this moment no matter how challenging. What if those lessons are exactly what we need in order to open more deeply? We might then enfold that life into the practice instead of pushing away our thoughts, emotions, sensations, and perceptions as somehow invalid, problematic, or less-divine.

The spiritual self-investigation practice is about turning our attention to our own personal process of observation and awareness. When we turn inward, we can begin to unravel deep inner patterns or shields that we have created over the course our lives. We might call this investigation toward the deep heart of the Self the Inward Path. Traditionally this model of inner practice has been prized—for good reason. Contemplation and silent commitment are described as essential to discovering our reverence to the divine within.

This highly individualized practice was born of a distant world that had far fewer distractions and options. When coupled with a deep cultural bias toward individualism in the West, the emphasis on this approach has created some real problems for the spiritual seeker.

Perhaps we think we are failing in the process self-inquiry if we continue to experience nagging thoughts or troubling emotions. We think we should have more clarity, grace, and wisdom. We think we should be quieter. Or we may feel that we should not be triggered by that certain family member or friend. On the spiritual path, we may compartmentalize our busyness and schedule a retreat or covet a certain meditation ritual to recenter and step away from it all.

This misguided understanding of perfect practice is a classic half-teaching of awakening. There are so many misunderstandings when it comes to self-inquiry, particularly non-dual self-inquiry. But this one is particularly challenging for those of us who like to follow the rules and traditions passed to us.

Returning to our Willing Heart

Can we begin to see that the whole world is conspiring to bring us back to the self-discovery of our inner heart? I don’t mean this casually. For real spiritual non-dual self-inquiry understands the gravity of this truth. The dance is just complex enough, just uncomfortable enough, that it is always giving us the material that we need to return to the heart. This is only possible if the heart is willing to stand and meet the dancer as a partner.

Walking the Outward Path

It’s time to explore the Outward Path of spiritual reverence. It’s time to engage actively with our community, with our friends and family, with our work, and to do so with the same contemplative, even ritualized, care that we use when practicing the Inward Path.

We need each other for our unfoldment. We need our problems. This is just as important as our inner observation. There is a dynamic between the space we can take to notice what we notice at the point of silence and the interaction with the world around us. The two together teach us the great material that opens the heart further.

Self-inquiry on The Outward Path allows us to begin to recognize that the awakened heart needs the external world for grace and revelation just as much as it needs the internal world as an anchor. One of the mature insights of self-inquiry is that the world “out there” is also the divine, truly equal and seamless to the divine within. The ways in which we navigate our relationships with our intimates and even with strangers becomes the great meditation. This is the path of infusing the ordinary life with the extraordinary.

Cynthia Abulafia in meditation

Meditation and What We Notice in Action

We are never apart from meditation. Meditation is not a practice that we do while closed off for certain minutes of the day, dedicated to a favorite spot, seat, or time. Meditation is how we interact with the complex, living world from validated intimacy, or awareness. It is how we notice what we notice in action.

What happens when we are triggered by something someone says? We notice that. What happens when a deep pattern is opened up, leaving us feeling raw and exposed? We notice that, without pushing away we notice and we retrain ourselves to live from that validated intimate place of Self.

We must remember hold valuable the pain of life, the wisdom of our friends and teachers and living relationships, the things that stir our most hidden emotions. We need the outside world to return us home. If we cannot find the divine in our ordinary, if sometimes complex, lives, then we certainly will not find that divine sitting alone on a mountaintop.

On a level perhaps even more subtle and beautiful, we are served by understanding that the entire body of the earth is just an outer dance born of the inner, individual heart. The divine loves nothing more than waking up to itself, remembering itself, in every possible way and through every possible lens. This complex world is the dance, is the teacher, is the divine.

Practicing The Inner and Outer Paths Together to Reinvent the Spiritual Ideal

Let’s learn to play with life and have the courage and curiosity to understand that our inner meditations must pour outward into that dance with equal reverence to the inner noticing. At the end of the day, it is this outer world that we are all here to learn from as we take our places as students in a cosmic classroom.

Teacher Training at Yoga Soup

Explore the Inner and Outer Paths in the upcoming Yoga Teacher Training at Yoga Soup.

Cynthia Abulafia

www.cynthiaabulafiayoga.com

The post It’s Time to Reinvent the Spiritual Ideal appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.

Identifying Spiritual Arrogance

Cynthia Abulafia — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 03:51:10 +0000

The Ego Trap of Spiritual Arrogance

When we think about cultivating our inner faith, we do not often consider how closely faith ties into spiritual arrogance. The topic of spiritual arrogance is vast and deep. But when we feel into how this subtle aspect of ego-driven identification has unfolded within ourselves and within those around us, certain patterns can become quite clear.

Spiritual arrogance is when we believe our process of spiritual self-inquiry or unfoldment is better than someone else’s process. When we believe that what someone else is doing should be changed, shifted, or reimagined through the lens that we insist, sometimes emphatically, to be better.

In a yogic self-inquiry practice we have to be very careful of our spiritual arrogance. This is especially true for those of us who have been practicing for a long time. We have to look at how it sneaks out toward those closest to us. For like so many of the clingiest vines, it is the environment nearest us that our arrogance tends to constrict. Those sneaky tendrils can be born within even the most adept and mature spiritual seekers.

How can this look? Have you ever been in the midst of a painful process, during which you are watching closely an intimate friend or partner dealing with an intense health issue, relationship, or personal worldview, and you keep getting tripped up by your opinions of how you think that should play out, causing real rifts between you and your beloved?

Do you ever experience any version of the following thoughts?

“I cannot be near these people anymore because they are not very conscious.”

“Why isn’t everyone in a process of self-inquiry like I am? Why are they so stuck?”

“If my beloveds’ did what I’m doing, then they would surely suffer less.”

“I’ve seen that the world does not exist as I once believed and I can’t stand being near people who continue to live in the small dramas of their existence.”

Even if your intentions are noble, if you begin to expect those around you to take the courses that you are taking, to investigate the concepts that are consuming your practice, you are stealing from someone else’s process. In yoga, the practice of not-stealing is called Asteya, and it is one of the great foundations to our inner practice. (Asteya is one of the Yamas, or foundational ethics, of Yoga).

Asteya and the Spiritual Arrogance of Stealing from Others

When seen clearly, Asteya can be a beautiful lens allowing us to view how our ego often creeps in to run the show. It relates to how we steal from those around us. This can occur in time, by always being late or over-exhausting our own boundaries to flake out on showing up when promised. It can occur in agency, by trying to control and manage those around us to conform to anything from our personal dietary restrictions or political beliefs. Stealing from others can show up in spiritual unfoldment, by being totally dedicated to our own path and judging others for being “less conscious,” less spiritual, or less evolved in some meaningful way. Ouch. Who does this notion hurt more: You or the person you are judging?

Cynthia Abulafia reflecting on the lessons found through faith.

The Guidance of Faith

Can you see how faith silently sits and watches like a great big open space?

If we are unaware, we can continue to delude ourselves by stealing from those around us, judging silently or openly, and enacting our superior ways?

Do you have faith that you are the divine? That the universe does not end where your skin begins, leaving you as this great inner island that has to navigate life and either sink or swim? That, because you are the divine, so is everyone and everything “out there,” and that they too are in the same process of returning and remembering their own divine just as you are, though in their own unique way?

Of course your way is going to be different from your beloved’s way. The divine loves nothing more than uncoiling in every possible direction then walking back home to itself through the great dance of remembering in endless possibilities.

Lessons found in Examining our own Spiritual Arrogance

What we learn about our own spiritual arrogance is truly rich material. We begin to see how our own illusion and our blocks persist even after years of dedicated self-investigation. We also can begin to set some healthy boundaries into our world.

Perhaps it really is unhealthy for you to engage in relationship with someone else in your immediate world and their process at this time. When you allow someone fully their process and that person really is not interested in turning toward their divine self-remembering just yet, or their path really is causing you great pain, then perhaps it’s time for you to stop digging in so hard to do the work for that person. Perhaps it is time to then walk away compassionately, staying curious, open, and available to shifts in that road.

In this way we can see that developing compassion is not a lesson in passive disengagement with life, taking that California attitude of “It’s all good, man.”

This is a dedicated and curiously alert plunging into our own faith in our heart to return us to our deepest self, and to honor the fact that those around us are doing the same thing even if it looks queasy or horrible to our eyes. Even if someone doesn’t do the same type of meditation or mantra recitation that we do, or eat the same foods that we believe to be better, that person too is the divine slowly remembering herself.

Moving forward with Faith

These are the deeper lessons of faith. These lessons allow us more compassion, more spaciousness in our hearts, a lot less tangled up judgment towards the other, and a much smoother ride into our sense of inner boundaries and limits born of that open heart. Life gives us all of the material we need to move forward, and may we continue to do so toward that inner remembering of the stillness that has always been and will always be and that is recognized through the curious heart.

Study with Cynthia Abulafia

Cynthia Abulafia offers teacher training and continuing education focused on the subtle body.

Cynthia Abulafia

www.cynthiaabulafiayoga.com

The post Identifying Spiritual Arrogance appeared first on LA Yoga Magazine - Ayurveda & Health.