Mara Bishop, an artist as well as shamanic practitioner and teacher, wrote Inner Divinity: Crafting your Life with Sacred Intelligence to share ways to develop harmony. With chapters on relationships, environment, intuition, health, and other aspects of life, she explores the concept of inner divinity, which simply means “your natural state of being,” the healing abilities and wisdom we have within us when we can quiet ourselves and listen. She’s spoken at places like Duke about her extensive studies and experience with a variety of traditional healing practices that address as one unit the mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health of a person.
FOR CREATIVE YOGIS:
Here’s 3 ideas from the book that intersect with the idea of making space:
1) Are your thoughts nurturing? The awareness we cultivate during a yoga class is instrumental in noticing how we feel and what prompts those feelings. As we come to understand the subtle shifts in our energy, we can make space for what’s helpful and clear out what’s not: “A clear sense of what it feels like to be you – alone, inside your body – is important. If you have this baseline conception of yourself, it can help you understand why you feel certain things at certain times.” (Page 78) Sounds like yoga, yes?
2) Is your community nurturing? It’s funny how our moods are affected by other people around us. Calm people can calm us and agitated people can agitate us: “We communicate with each other all the time, engaging with each other’s bodies and energies… If you are sensitive and don’t make an effort to protect yourself from other peoples’ energy, you will pick up thoughts and emotions from everyone you are near.” Again, that awareness we cultivate in yoga, that baseline conception of ourselves, will help us notice when we’re being drained by other people: “Half the battle is simply acknowledging that you are picking up other people’s energy. If you can identify that influence, you can choose who you want to let close and when.” (Page 78).
3) Is your environment nurturing? Consider the space in which you live, create, or do yoga. Examine the functionality and aesthetics, and remove blocks by removing clutter: “Clearing out your space makes room energetically and physically for what is important to you now… Keep what feels good to you and give away the rest.” (Page 99) We can easily underestimate the way our physical space can affect how we feel… a window or a clean work surface can make a huge difference.
This book is pretty inexpensive on the kindle
For more, also check out Mara Bishop’s website
And a Video interview with Mara… I like how she has a manner of stopping and thinking before she responds. This comes from a 2011 interview from a site called ReawakenYourBrilliance.com, where they appear to have a big collection of “Body Mind Spirit Expert Interviews.”
GROUNDING YOGA 