immersion experience

I have been simultaneously searching for and avoiding an immersion experience with a "guru" for my entire adult life.

I have friends who submitted themselves to the Susan Weed experience, and I wanted to but feared it as well and so only waded in shallowly, and now appreciate her as an author to my favorite reference books.

There was the Teaching Drum experience, which I immersed in as well as I could without giving up my personal freedom as was required for the complete training. I replaced my mental illusion of safety with their illusion of impending doom until I decided it was suffering without purpose and now consider the thing a necessary evil like prescription anti-depressants. That is, not really good for people, but helpful for some who just can't make it any other way due to the severely fucked up chain of events in their lives.

There have been others along the way, like Simon Buxton and Layne Redmond, but these did not require such personal sacrifice or mind bending for me personally as to be a sort of trap to free myself from.

Now, I am confronting this immersion again. This time, I am tangled up in a web of the heart and mind, but have freed myself of the physical responsibilities that always gave me an out before.

Yoga.

It has been the perfect teacher for me so far as it uses the body as doorway instead of the intellect. Or, my perception has made it so.

And I need to make my body busy.

If by bending my spine backwards the self becomes more flexible, if by learning to hold a difficult warrior pose without giving up at the first signs of suffering I am able to better withstand all sorts of discomfort more easily, if by calming the body and breathing intentionally I am able to approach stress while remaining collected, then this is the perfect study.

Using intellect to alter belief and action has always seemed house of cards-ish to me.

It's so easy to think oneself into and out of beliefs and religions and such that the whole process seems more like a game than a way to integrate reality.

Using the body feels like play to start and seems less pretentious.

Phew! I'm climbing out of this rabbit hole before I get lost.

So, I searched for a Iyengar trained yoga instructor in NZ to continue my education, and then looked for a wwoofing opportunity that included yoga and found them to be one and the same. And it just happens to be in the same town that I am already living in. Serendipitous!

I received an email today letting me know I was welcome there at the wwoof farm and yoga studio for this intensive immersion experience.

May this trap I am about to put myself into eventually lead to greater freedom.

On a separate note, I have been having big adventures here recently, which I'd like to soon share as soon as I grok them more completely.