This week I took a yoga class - my second since le vertigo hijacked most of my capacity - and the teacher said something about barnacles.
It didn’t relate, but it did stick in my mind, rolling around on my commute, while I washed dishes, and as I tried to return to sleep at 4am.
She was talking about shaking off unhelpful thoughts, like barnacles, and maybe that suits you and her and others, but I understand barnacles differently.
My practice of yoga has evolved into my teaching, which has informed much of my writing. They are different expressions of my ideas and my dharma, packaged and sold in different consumable sorts of ways, mostly by happy accident. I’ve planned sequences and bodily breath and movement, but the words are often extemporaneous which sometimes is ok, occasionally really awful, and on very rare occasions, miraculous.
That’s what keeps ‘em coming back, you know? The rare occasion where you grand slam ideas and practices, music and mood. You ride the bhav and we all spend a timeless beat in the everywhen. The miracle that isn’t you, but that occurs around and between and inside of you.
To me, barnacles are sacred teachings. Biologically they are not parasitic, because they do no damage to the host. They are symbiotic, riding along on the underbellies of whales, populating tidal areas, feeding on plankton. Their capacity to adhere is phenomenal, and so I think of them sometimes when I consider analogies to the way I teach. I want the teaching that comes through me to be sticky - to become affixed and ride with you through life rather than forgotten. To ride along for the haul.
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