Looking Ahead

If you come regularly to my Sunday 9 am class, you know that I have been exploring mudra for the past couple of years. Not every week, but many of them, I spend a little time researching and experimenting with a mudra that feels particularly relevant, and I often use that as the starting point when building the vinyasa flow practice that will constitute most of the class. Simply put, mudras are gestures—usually of the hands—that evoke psychological and spiritual attitudes, each with its own specific quality or signature. Mudra holds endless fascination for me, as it invites a way "in" to self and into the more interior recesses of the physical practice. My exploration is just that: I'm hardly a scholar, but I find the practice powerful enough that I enjoy sharing it with students as we sit at the beginning of class and silently repeat a suggested mantra to accompany the mudra. This week, as I prepare for the New Year's Day class, I'm searching for that mudra that will allay in some way my fears about our political reality, and that will help guide my feelings around the coming new year. Is there a mudra to address anger, sorrow and helpless rage? I search for awhile but I am, I realize, going at this all wrong. Instead, I sit for a few minutes, get centered, and then open my primary resource (Mudras for Healing and Transformation—I highly recommend it to anyone who is interested) and it falls open lightly to Samputa Mudra, pictured above. I start to read and recognize that this is a Mudra I feel drawn to as we round the corner on 2016. This mudra will help me find my own intention or "Sankalpa" on New Year's Eve. With the right hand lightly cupped above the left, "samputa", which means "treasure chest", implies a protected space of value and truth. This mudra is designed to help us connect to our own inner voice of truth. As such, it is associated with Vishuddha Chakra—the throat chakra and the place of unfettered, fearless, true expression. It suggests too a kind of receiving of guidance for life's journey. A suggested mantra for this mudra is: Aligned with the voice of my inner being I communicate clearly and truthfully. I find when I sit for meditation and explore this mudra and mantra, that it does indeed satisfy a deep if fearful longing for the strength and courage to speak truth in the coming year, to not be silenced by what I feel to be truly sinister forces amassing in our capital, and even more, to speak up and out for people who are in danger because of the climate of hate slowly boiling to the surface. Over the next few days, I hope my own intention or Sankalpa for the new year will coalesce into a thought or phrase that I can include in the practice of Samputa Mudra. In my mind's eye, I see this intention as a beautiful and strong treasure cupped safely between my hands. When the time is right, my hands will open and send that intention out into the world, in flight like a brave and beautiful bird.Happy New Year to you all; may your year and your hearts be full of light, laughter and love.Leslie