When the month started and I read my teacher David Life's essay on Spirit Guides, my first reaction was: Oh boy, I don't have a spirit guide. What can I talk about? I am not into animal spirits or having animal totems or having a particular connection with a particular species of animals! Halfway through the month, I reread the same essay, and I realized that I have a pig tattoo, and a pig charm, and I have always been drawn to pigs even as a kid. And it occurred to me that it is possible that pigs are my animal spirit guides.
I looked it up and one of the things I read is that the squeal of pigs is a cry for compassion, and coincidentally or not so coincidentally, the word compassion in Sanskrit-- karuna-- is tattooed with an image of a pig on my arm. This is in memory of a pig whom I once saw on top of a jeepney being dragged out by a few people, who was squealing for mercy, unwilling to be dragged to slaughter. I understand now that I never made the connection that pigs are my spirit animal because of the way pigs are portrayed in our society-- that they are lazy and dirty and gluttonous. Moreover, how can a pig be my spirit animal when the feeling I get when I think of pigs in general was more negative than positive? I felt so much guilt, since my relationship with pigs for much of my life was an abusive one, in that I ate them without a single thought, thinking mistakenly that they were "my food". When I look up the characteristics of pigs now, I learn that they are actually quite smart and loyal and playful. They are as smart as 3-year-old children and they don't sweat at all, which is why they cool themselves down in the mud. The reason why we perceive them as lazy and gluttonous is because this is how farms treat them. They are forced not to move, in some places they are locked in gestation crates, so they would be overweight, so there would be more flesh to sell for meat, so they could make more money out of these poor creatures. It is no secret that I am so sorry for all the pigs and all the other animals I consumed. I am truly deeply regrettably sorry. Our animal guides could be those that inspire certain qualities in us, whether it is friendliness or loyalty, compassion or virtuousness, resilience or courage etc. It could be that these characteristics are not the immediate ones we would use to describe ourselves, because it is through them that we get in touch with these parts of ourselves that were once hidden. Our animal guides could awaken us to our potential; and if we heed their call, the transformation we make could be life-changing. We could turn apathy to compassion, fear to love, anger to vulnerability, helplessness to empowerment. Our animal guides may have been with us all along; we merely have to recognize them by truly connecting to how they have affected us in every encounter we had with them, in every stage of our lives, in every unraveling of our potential to protect them and take care of them.
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Yoga has these dramatic stories, these mythologies, that attribute very human qualities to deities. They serve not merely to entertain us, but to reflect back to us our own tendencies, our own capacity and even our own power.
One of the deities is Ganesh, known as the remover of obstacles. He is half elephant half man. This is one of the versions of how he came to have his elephant head: The goddess Parvati wanted to take a bath in privacy. She asked the guard Nandi to make sure no one goes through the door. Shiva came home and wanted to go through it, and because Nandi was more loyal to Shiva than to Parvati, he was let through. This upset Parvati, not only because her privacy was invaded, but also because she realized there was no one that was loyal to her. She decided to create a boy, Ganesh, who would be loyal to her. She then asked Ganesh to guard for her, and true to her hopes and expectations, Ganesh was fiercely loyal, so much so that it ignited the wrath of Shiva, who then killed Ganesh and beheaded him. When Shiva found out, Parvati was inconsolable. Shiva then gave life back to Ganesh and replaced his head with that of an elephant's. When we think of our own obstacles, whether it is a personal struggle or a relationship issue or a financial difficulty or a moral dilemma or a health challenge etc, we may react as though it is the end of the world, feeling hopeless and paralyzed, like the lifeless Ganesh who was beheaded. But like the story of Ganesh, we can remove obstacles by finding creative ways to deal with them. Obstacles appear on our path, urging us to see possibilities and opportunities. During these times, it helps to connect to our journey guide, to see the signs that are around us when we reach a fork in the road, to look for solutions that are unconventional-- maybe even as strange as the idea of replacing a human head with an elephant head! Whether our journey guide appears in the form of an image like Ganesh or in more subtle ways like messages we see around us, we need to be humble enough to receive the message and open enough to perceive them for what they are. Obstacles need not stop us. They can help us examine the best way to forge forward, with a creative mind and a full heart, to reach the destiny that is meant for us. The world of the physical and the world of spirits used to be much more connected. Human beings respected the essence and spirit of nature more, and allowed it to serve as a guide on how we can live in harmony. As Pocahontas said, "Every rock and tree and creature has a life, has a spirit, has a name". And this is how people used to live. They looked at the sun to tell the time. Now, we just look at our iPhones. So when we hear the concept "spirit guide", we feel so disconnected, because it seems so "out there", because in this age and time that we live in buildings and shop in malls and eat food wrapped in plastic, this is what feels real, and the world of spirits just sounds so outdated. The idea that we have "spirit guides" seems far-fetched.
But spirit guides still surround us, even if it is a little harder to see, and takes a little bit more effort to make the connections. How many of us have been the recipients of kind words and deeds? How many of us have heard the right message at the right time? How many of us have felt this divine joy in the presence of another being we share this Earth with? And so, a yogi living in this contemporary time is challenged to look or listen for that divinity in places we do not expect. We are called to see the spirit of every being whom we encounter, whether in human form or animal form, and whether it is what we resonate with or resist. The yoga asana practice in many ways is a practice of embodying the spirit of nature. In child's pose, we embody the spirit of the humility of a child in receiving love and help and support. In sun salutations, we embody the spirit of the sun in moving seamlessly with grace and confidence. In inversions, we embody the spirit of all of nature in using our intuition over our calculating mind. "Spirit Guide" is the idea of connecting to what we can learn from the spirit or essence of other beings. It is to see this "sameness", the blueprint we all share living on the same planet. Our spirit guides surround us, they teach us and inspire us, challenge us and provoke us, comfort us and uplift us. Ultimately, we are not merely physical beings. We are all spiritual. We embody the "spirit" of all of life, and we are able to connect with each other and with all beings when we acknowledge this. I was preparing for this month's focus called Spirit Guides, and I was a little bit lost because I was not sure what that meant, whether I myself have a spirit guide, and how he or she would look like if I have one. I was scribbling down random notes when my little rescue kitten walked towards me and sat on top of the spiral notebook I was writing on.
I now call him the "Little One". I had found him two weeks ago meowing behind a parking lot sign at a building close to a major road. I meant to foster him, but I think my two other cats and I have fallen so much in love with him that we cannot bear to have him adopted by someone else now. And at that moment that I was wondering about spirit guides, I looked into his eyes and it was the feeling of looking into the eyes of a beloved. I thought to myself: I want to be kind to this soul. I want to take care of this soul. I want this being to be happy. And it then occurred to me that our spirit guide can be anyone, regardless of what they look like or how their soul has physically manifested in this lifetime; our spirit guides are those who awaken that potential in us to love, to feel loved, and to see beyond what we think we are capable of. When we look into the eyes of our spirit guide, we look beyond form and we see a soul. If our spirit guide is a nonhuman animal, we see not "just an animal" but a person in a different body. I think my initial resistance to animal spirit guides may come from myself being a product of our society. While yoga mythologies include a fish and an elephant and a monkey and other nonhuman animals as teachers or gurus, my conditioned mind is used to seeing the same animals used or trapped or victimized. Because we have enslaved them, we find it difficult to see the wild spirit in them that are meant to teach us about our own wild spirits. Little One, my kitten, has taught me about yoga or oneness of all being. When I took him home from the dangerous streets, I was not thinking about myself, I was thinking about him. And when we have those brief moments of letting go of our egos, when we experience and not just intellectualize non-separation, we start to act as guardians of each other. I may have appeared to rescue the Little One, but it was him who was my true teacher. He held up a mirror to me to show what I am capable of. I thank you, Little One, for being the yoga master that you are. |
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