Strange Yoga Strange Business

You know what? Being human is strange, stranger than yoga. "That's too yoga for me!" The German phrase suggests there's something hinky going on in some given situation, something strange or suspicious. But after all, what is the experience of being a human being if not strange?-- if you really think about it, which we never do. It's strange that we are here at all. It's strange we think we are the center of things. It's strange we fight over everything, more pie for me. And it's strange we don't even know what it means to be human. We have the power to make deliberate choices, but we often don't live with intentionality.

Years ago I met Coleman Barks, the best-known translator of Rumi in the U.S. I was teaching in a school run by his brother at the time. Here's his rendition of "Strange Business" in The Illuminated Rumi. (Rumi portrait from https://interestingliterature.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/rumi-poet.jpg)

STRANGE BUSINESS

You sit here for days saying,
This is strange business.
You're the strange business.
You have the energy of the sun in you,
but you keep knotting it up at the base of your spine.
You're some weird kind of gold that wants to stay melted in the furnace,
so you won't have to become coins.
Say ONE in your lonesome house.
Loving all the rest is hiding inside a lie.
You've gotten drunk on so many kinds of wine.
Taste this.
It won't make you wild.
It's fire. Give up, if you don't understand by this time
that your living is firewood.
This wave of talking builds.
Better we should not speak, but let it grow within.

What are you going to do with the energy of the sun within you? Some yoga to unblock the chakras could be a start, but there are other ways. Maybe a little more silence is a pre-req to an intentional life. I know there is too much talking in and around me right now. What if we all said "ONE" and meant it? We are greater than the self; we are Self.

So knowing that, what are you going to do with your self?! Rumi won't let us off the hook--“You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”