Blackstone Yoga Center Newsletter

When two Swamis (monks) came to our Blackstone Yoga Center to perform a ceremony consecrating the center (a Puja), my life here in Blackstone seemed to have come around to where it began here in 1981 when I arrived fresh from an ashram (spiritual teacher's house) in India with big dreams to teach yoga here. Not knowing where we were going next, we came to 606 South Main Street, the house my wife grew up in, to stay temporarily with her mother. We were here in Southside Virginia but we didn’t know why. In fact, I didn’t even know Southside Virginia.

But Evelyn Powell, my wife’s mother did. When I tried to put my guru pictures on the wall, her Southside resistance to foreign invaders rose up and they quickly came down. The mantra people lived by here was, “What will people think?”
But I did begin to teach a Hatha yoga (physical postures) class in the bank room of the current BB&T, and there were a few students, I remember. But I couldn’t find work here, and I began to feel that Blackstone was not where I was supposed to be. I wasn’t happy with the self that lived in Blackstone.

So here we are 27 years later with guru pictures on the wall and Swamis waving lights and offering incense in the dining room where Evelyn fed her family. How could this have happened? Who would have thought?
After giving up all desire to teach yoga, finally finding a creative job at the Courier Record, and building a photography studio, yoga came back to me and knocked on my door. “You still want to teach?” Something must have changed in me for Blackstone to move from being my cemetery to my paradise.

It didn’t matter what people thought anymore. It didn’t matter that I had not practiced Hatha yoga for 20 years, it didn’t matter that I was 70, and it didn’t matter that I didn’t know what I was going to do. What mattered was that I had come to love myself as I am regardless of the place I lived in and regardless of what people think. If you don’t need your “place” to make you happy, then you can be happy in any place. So why not Blackstone? When you are free from the world, then wherever you are is where you are. There is nothing to gain by moving because you already have everything. It is so simple we can’t see it.

The circle is complete, but the circle is not flat. When the Swamis came here (I didn’t ask them, by the way), I found myself in a spiral. When our lives have a vertical dimension and are anchored in the present moment, we constantly find ourselves coming back to previous places in our lives, but on a higher and more conscious level. We either stay on one floor in the house we are building, or we move up the spiral staircase to explore all that we can be.

The door to the upward staircase in your life has a little sign over it. It is hard to find and you are walking by it every day. Here is what it says: Accept yourself as you are in this moment, every thought, every feeling, every irritation and fear, don’t leave out a single crumb of bread or drop of wine. Forgive yourself, then feel and say, “I’m okay.” Make your communion with your Self complete and you will become your own blessing. Be your own priest, be your own mass, and be the bread and the wine, then offer yourself to God. This is Puja.

May the Swamis come to your house some day.

Thank you,
Ed
Om Peace
1/27/07
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