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Gregory Ormson

Writer, musician, yoga-loving motorcyclist.

Culture Wars, Walt Whitman, Yoga and You

Walt Whitman remains America’s greatest poet of healing. His close-up witness to the tragedy of the Civil War, coupled with his robust faith in the American creed led to his majestic and compassionate poetry. I believe it was his — and is my preference — to always err on the side of compassion vs anything less.

 

In his poem, America, Whitman wasn’t describing what America was during the Civil War, but was envisioning what it could be and what the American experiment aimed to be. America, he wrote, you are the “Center of equal daughters, equal sons, / All, all alike endear’d, grown, ungrown, young or old.”

 

Whitman knew that the American Union could remain intact through the Civil War only by the inclusion of all, especially one’s enemies. It’s how we became one United States of America versus a Northern or Southern United States. Enemies were included!

 

Today, the healing prescription for cultural bitterness must adopt this vision. Today, we hear a lot of nice words and slogans that remain distant but never get bloody. But change requires hard work, like the work of a man tending to the wounded and dying in a Civil War battlefield hospital – legs and arms piled in the tent corner – shoes caked in blood-stained ground.

 

In Leaves of Grass, Whitman wrote, “For every atom belongs to me as good belongs to you.” Quantum thought posits this as true. My atoms are yours and yours are mine. Your breath is mine and mine is yours. We are not separate from, or different from one another; your wounds are mine and mine are yours.… read more...

TAPAS from YOGA SONG Coming June 21, International Yoga Day

Chapter 11, Tapas

New Year’s Eve resolutions are often made with an eye toward immediate results but without a long-term vision that includes commitment to a future that is different. Not even three full weeks into the New Year, New York University published a story stating that 90 percent of New Year’s Eve resolutions are abandoned.

It’s because changes happen by small degree and over time. It’s not by adding requirements or resolutions that our lives change; it’s by subtracting from our lives that which is unnecessary or unproductive.

This is one gift of yoga, we learn by the process of tapas to define more clearly what is necessary and leave the rest; it is yoga’s counter-intuitive mathematic, an equation suggesting that discovery and addition happens by negation and subtraction.

Yoga philosophy develops within the ebb and flow of culture, story, and time. It’s an ongoing journey of subtraction and addition. Civilizations grow, but they also burn to the ground. This is the key to yoga’s tapas, the burning away of that which is unnecessary.

More on Yoga Song, https://gregoryormson.com/writing/yoga-motorcyclingyogig/yoga-song-press-kit… read more...

Yoga’s Countercultural Mathematic YogaInspirational # 30 from Jan 24, 2016 elephant journal

By subtracting from life that which is unnecessary or unproductive, the yogi ever more clearly defines for him/herself the positive change. This is yoga’s counter-intuitive mathematic, a discovery by negation.

But for those banking on New Year’s Eve resolutions, here’s the hard truth. Tapas – the burning away – is not an overnight solution or quick path to resolution and accomplishment. It’s a matter of degree and it happens day by day.

It remakes hearts and spines by grounding the yogi deeper in self-work as they ask themselves a question sharpened wisdom in counter cultural movement and the tapas of practice, is this necessary?

In the economy of adding, subtracting and multiplying to effect change, yoga’s mathematic is Gandhian in its disciplined core, negativa in its spiritual logic and hotly shamanistic in its strategy.… read more...

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