The Eleventh Face
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there were something that could relax, body, mind and soul and create inner peace? If it could bring your physical and spiritual flexibility, shifting energy blocks and putting your true essence in flow to feed your musculature and support your breathing and as such improve your entire posture so that you might feel whole and immune to the world’s nasty attacks? What if this would in turn, give you a greater sense of well-being: resolving issues as varied from insomnia to back ache, high bloodpressure and nervous disorders? And this would, next, contribute to a greater sense of self-worth and lend you a new lease on the joy of living? Wouldn’t that be something?!
Compassion on the mat
Some might say that I have just described Yoga (and indeed, I quote heavily from a Swiss Yoga site, Raum Für Yoga) but, unfortunately, modern, western Yoga won’t get you very far, no matter how much you sweat it out, or how long you camp out in Goa, or how naked you dare to get. Unless you understand the concept of Great Compassion (a supreme kindness to Self) you won’t be working on the parts that Yoga is meant to reach.
Read more about the implements, adornments (crown, bands, necklaces etc.), silks (ribbons, scarfs skirt etc) and other symbols (deerskin, wheel, lotus flower, vase etc) on a tyical thangka of the Thousand-Armed Chenrezig, Avalokiteshvara [with 11 faces], who is a Sambhogakaya Buddha manifestation, a pure, subtle manifestation that is the union of prana and mind here.
Allowing yourself to die into the Face
The eleventh face, a culmination of the ten preceding faces/qualities, represents complete Buddhahood. This face is reached after a full detox of all that is not Real Soul. Will this cure you of your terminal illness? Probably. Will it mean you won’t die of cancer anymore, I hear you shriek in disbelief? No, probably not. But what’s so terminal about dying?
Once we understand that compassion is - and only is - a way of dying with and for another out of love for all creation and forbearance with all suffering we might have an easier time of it on our mats or in our sick-beds. We might understand what so-called holistic medical practices based on Aryuvedic, Taoist Five-Elements, and Anthroposophical medical fundamentals are trying to heal, make whole, and better integrate, and never aim to prevent or fight. You can be vigilant or defiant of defeat all you like: make up your mind to be your best self and remain valiant and hopeful, without doubt or pessimism, but this won’t be to struggle against illness and discomfort. It will be to embrace yourself with compassion.
We learn from Buddhism (and maybe could glean from Chassidic Judaism) that wrathfulness is compassion turned into anger for the sake of powerfully shaking us mortals stuck in our mortality awake: REMEMBER YOUR SPIRIT!! The Deity booms with vajra-thunderbolt in hand and ready to give a loud jangle with the bell. It doesn’t take ten perfect fingers and toes and a whole bundle of talents to realise who you really are. One can be born into the spirit of life back to front if need be, all queer and wrinkly, or happy-go-lucky and singing in the rain. One can even do yoga on a chair, or in an office, or on a bus. One can hum the ghouls away or play at Saint Francis with the birds in the rowan by your back door.
Play your Self to yourself even with only three fingers on one hand
It is not easy to know what else to add to show the path of stepping stones a few thousand of us have laid (with the help of millions, hacking and polishing away). It takes an eye for it to see it. Perhaps, Yoga may help correct impaired vision; and Buddhist meditation surely has its merits.
I am neither a Yoga teacher nor a Buddhist instructor. All I can try to do is seduce you with a marriage of the violin and the guitar in Grapelli and Reinhardt; and then let you know, also, loss and divorce of self is part of one's Jazz; which is a lesson in love.
When he lost faith in his guitar playing (under the pressure of the new trends in the clubs and the demands of the record labels to keep on innovating) he turned to painting towards the end of his pretty rough or raw (gypsy) life (dying young at 43). Even when the big crush of be-bop ended his career as a musician it could not squish the Jazz out of the gypsy. And what else is Jazz but a deep respect for what a human loves to do: to be a musical being in tune with the cosmic spheres. As in his playing the guitar, we find Django painting the same woman over and over again in the same style and with the same longing to read her truly and resonate all-encompassingly.
Django Reinhardt only had three fingers on one hand because he lost his left little finger and ring finger in a fire he accidentally caused himself in his caravan, when he was 18 years old.
I leave you with additional listening:
Minor Swing
And/or
Georgia on my mind
And/or
an interview
