I was raised by my Polish mother and Irish
father to be a Roman
Catholic. In the early part of my life we
were only nominally religious. We existed in
that nether realm of folk
religion that borders on superstition:
rarely going to church, but saying prayers to
saints in the hope of good things coming to us;
making the sign of the cross when passing a
church or a funeral procession; lighting a
candle for the really big requests such as
health and good fortune. It wasn’t until,
in the middle of my childhood, that we
re-embraced the religion formally. When I was
about seven or eight years old we moved to
Brazil, settling eventually in São Paolo. The
fusions of Catholicism and African faiths, known
as Macumba and
Candomblé
amongst others, were strong enough to overwhelm
even the combined Irish/Polish Catholic blend of
our family. The African/Brazilion religions are
rich and vital, and very much part of the
everyday functioning of life. Offerings and
sacrifices are openly made to bring success in
love and relationships, even in business. One
would constantly see leftover offerings on
street corners, often a bottle with a flower in
it, or plates of food. At one point, one of my
parents’ employees, whose father was a
pãe-de-santo--”father-of-saint” or a
priest of the religion--told us that someone was
doing a work against us, so we underwent ritual
cleansings and burning of candles to counter the
work. I think it eventually became too
overwhelming for my parents, so we went to
confession, took communion and began going to
Mass every Sunday.
It brought us back to familiar ground. It seemed
like the rules of what you could and could not
ask for were much simpler in the more austere
and Europeanized Catholicism than in the
abundant dance of the Brazilian faith.
My parents took Catholicism seriously enough to
send me to a Catholic boarding
school in the United Kingdom run by Benedictine
monks. As Catholic upbringings go it was only
moderately strict, with none of the standard
cliches of emotional and physical abuse. But it
was very, very serious. The idea of sacrifice
features prominently in Catholicism. Jesus
Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross was
held up to us as the pinnacle of worthy
behavior. Self-denial and ascetism in surrender
to god’s will were highly prized. We were
to abjure the pleasures of the flesh and
doggedly say our Rosary, eat fish
on Fridays and abstain from mundane luxuries
during Lent. We were to revel in the exquisite
pain of devotion to god.
It was very easy to be religious under those
conditions. The ritual of Mass--including the
setting, the chanting, the incense and the
music--entice the senses. The drama of the liturgy, played
out over and over again, shapes your emotional
responses, helping you to identify with
Jesus’ surrender and martyrdom, with
the resurrection at the end of the tale
providing a satisfying sense of completion. My
first introduction to a group yoga class was at
Jivamukti Yoga in
their old space on Second Avenue in New York.
The Jivamukti class as it was back then (I
haven’t taken class there in some years)
had its own ritual power with all the same
elements, and its own liturgical drama. The
intense physicality fit in perfectly with my
Catholic notions of mortification
of the flesh. All of that regimentation of
the breath, intense exertion, incense and
chanting produced the same buzz as High Mass on
Sundays in the abbey. But that ecstatic
connection always came, I found, with a price:
after Mass, the return to mundane existence;
after class, aches, pains, and exhaustion.
For four or five years I practiced this way: the
grand gesture of surrender and sacrifice leading to
the ecstatic high of immersion in the divine. And
then real life got in the way and my inner drama was
replaced by the real thing. First came the loss of my
father to
cancer, followed by my struggle to find work and
stay in the country. The big emotions of yoga
became an escape from the darker things that
were happening to me. One turbulence was
replaced by the other, constantly flipping back
and forth. It was exhausting.
After a bad knee injury in a Mysore-styleAshtanga
practice being put into Marichyasana 2, I
found myself unable to take class for several
moths. At the inspiration of a friend, I decided
to try the courses in the back of Light on Yoga by BKS Iyengar,
starting at the beginning and struggling through
as best I could with my lack of experience and
injured knee. It took me about a year of
dedicated practice to get through the first
course. This steady perseverance changed my
relationship to yoga completely. Small,
consistent effort produced steady, consistent
results.
When I look back over that time, I realize this was
when my thought processes first began to shift from
being more Western in outlook to taking on a truly
Eastern flavor. The Judaeo-Christian frame of mind
can be very mechanical in its way: agony now in the
hope of luxury later. Sacrifice is something you take
away from yourself. The Eastern way, or certainly
that aspect of it I have learnt though yoga, is more
of an offering. Effort is made with enthusiasm and
dedication, building joy and freedom in the present.
I see my practice now as an offering, building
awareness and balance action by action, thought by
thought, moment by moment with the certainty of
immediate and concrete results.
So I throw this back to you, dear reader: is your
practice a sacrifice or an offering?
[My thanks toDonald
Moyerand his “Heritage of
Yoga” course for the inspiration for this
post.]
