Fire in this lineage
Stoke your inner fire in the beginner level śraddhā Agni medhā course beginning November.
My husband and I spent five days in the woods. It’s cold these days, and it was raining much of the time we were there. Starting, tending, and putting out the campfire was never explicitly, but absolutely implicitly, the frame of our days and nights. There is something primal to sitting around a fire that changes the way you sit, talk, and listen. There is something deeply and anciently human to the smells, the visions, the response to heat and cold, and looking out into the wider dark or spangled sky.
G knows a lot about yoga, without the pretension of ‘being a yogi’. He has his own embodiment, ethical, and contemplative practices that he’s gotten not from a yoga studio or training program but elsewhere in the school of life. He’s absorbed a lot by nature of being in relationship with me. For the most part, I think he knows more about yoga than yoga teachers, but sometimes he surprises me with questions. The surprise is often a sweet feeling: he wants to know me better. It’s often a surprise that he doesn’t already know.
He asked something about the gods of the elements, as other cultures have them, and how this ties into yoga. You know: the god of fire, spirit of water, sacred elements of wood and stone.
Yes, I said. Surprised he didn’t already know.
But no, I said, reiterating the non-monotheistic or religious nature of yoga.
I had a teacher who used to say there are three lights in the universe: the sun, fire, and our inner light. Working with the sun, or fire, ultimately helps us discover and tend to our interior heat, illumination, and combustion. We are a fire.
Fire is the most important god, the first god. Ultimately this isn’t true: Agni god of fire is no more powerful or special than any other force in the universe. Agni is only first because it is the one we can attend. Because it is us. Our will is the priest or messenger to the other gods, and it is our will that can purify the world. Fire is the first and most important ‘tool’ or technology of human history; it makes us human. Just as will is the first and most important ‘tool’ or technology in an individual human lifespan, let alone small tasks.
There are metabolic, metaphoric, literal and spiritual rabbit holes we can go down here, but it’s important to remember that ALL yoga practices come down to fire practices.
The best way to conceptualize this inner fire is exploring our willpower.
Tricky, what?
Most of us have either way too much willpower or feel we haven’t any at all. As we become more honest and self aware, we’ll start to see that we have plenty, but tend to be misusing or neglecting it. And that these tendencies to misuse our will or neglect it are so strong as to be ‘out of control’, ‘subliminal’, ‘unchangeable’.
These teachings should be more personalized than I am laying them out here. Is a person cold? Dark? Or burning themselves and everything around them? Are they ready to talk about responsibility and sacrifice? Or are they trying to spiritualize things that are not real?
In lieu of being able to give everybody a personal inquiry here, I’ll just give my own example. I’m an incredibly willful person. Think stubborn teenager, willful. For me personally, working with fire has historically and continually had to do with becoming LESS willful and more willing.
Learning and reciting the Agni Sūktam is a chance to explore that vast, vast amount of teaching around spirit fire, sacrificial fire, cooking fire, intellect and body, enlightenment and purification. It will change your understanding of vinyasa, time management, and brain. Kundalini, ‘balance’, and body. I think it’ll probably set you on fire and make you more capable, more fluid, more skillful in your life.
Besides which it’s just beautiful.
Learn more:
Beginner level! November - January. Yoga is big on lists. As you learn you understand why and how lists work. The First Thing always carries the whole within it like a seed carries a forest or an inbreathe carries all possible articulation. This list (śraddhā, Agni, Medhā) is primary, essential learning if one wants to understand the yogic path. śraddhā is generally considered 'faith'. Agni is our willpower, divinized to fire. And Medhā is the transformed, oceanic mind.