Greetings and blessings dear one.
Thank you so much once again for joining us.
We continue our journey exploring words of the prophet by Cleo Gabran in this segment.
We're going to hear the prophet's reply to a hermit.
In the book it says the hermit visits the city of Orpheles once a year and he asks a question about pleasure.
And so let's go ahead and find a comfortable seat and begin to stack your spine.
Close your eyes.
Connect with your breath.
Let's take a moment or two for stillness.
Just to notice the inhale and the exhale.
We'll take a cycle of breath together.
Let's take a deep breath in and a long relaxing breath out.
And then a hermit who visited the city this once a year came forth and said speak to us of pleasure.
And he answered saying pleasure is a freedom song but it is not freedom.
It is the blossoming of your desires but it is not their fruit.
It is a depth calling unto a height but is not the deep nor the high.
It is the caged taking wing but it is not space encompassed.
I in very truth pleasure is a freedom song and I feign would have you sing it with fullness of heart.
Yet I would not have you lose your hearts in the singing.
Some of your youth seek pleasure as if it were all and they are judged and rebuked.
I would not judge nor rebuke them.
I would have them seek or they shall find pleasure pleasure but not her alone.
Seven are her sisters and the least of them is more beautiful than pleasure.
Have you not heard of the man who was digging in the earth for roots and found a treasure and some of your elders remember pleasures with regret like wrongs committed in drunkenness.
But regret is the be clouding of the mind and not its chastisement.
They should remember their pleasures with gratitude as they would the harvest of a summer.
Yet if it comforts them to regret let them be comforted.
And there are among you those who are neither young to seek nor old to remember and in their fear of seeking and remembering they shun all pleasures lest they neglect the spirit or offend against it.
But even in their foregoing is their pleasure and thus they too find a treasure though they dig for roots with quivering hands.
But tell me tell me who is he that can offend the spirit.
Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night or the firefly the stars and shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind.
Think you the spirit is a still pool which you can trouble with the staff.
Oftentimes in denying your self-pleasure you do but store the desire in the recesses of your being.
Who knows but that which seems omitted today waits for tomorrow.
Even your body knows its heritage and its rightful need and will not be deceived.
And your body is the harp of your soul and is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.
And now you ask in your heart how should we distinguish that which is good and pleasure from that which is not good.
Go to your fields and your gardens and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower but it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life and to the flower a bee is a messenger of love.
And to both bee and flower the giving and the receiving of pleasure is a need and an ecstasy.
People of Orphalese be in your pleasures like the flowers and the bees.
And it's this concluding advice the prophet that reminds me of an earlier segment on work.
In the segment the prophet said and what is it to work with love but to weave cloth with threads drawn from your heart even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with this affection even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with the breath of your own spirit.
Work is love made visible and in so doing the doing of the thing itself we find pleasure.
Mahatma Gandhi was noted as saying the surest way to find oneself is to lose oneself in the service of another.
Perhaps another sage advice to pleasure in terms of happiness.
You see when we find our purest intention it's nested in that place in our soul that transcends what we're doing so that no matter what we're doing it's united with our being our highest sense of self in this alignment this integrity of purpose thought word indeed is the source of happiness being who and what we were made to be comes from a place of love source of creation that source cannot grow and defend itself at the same time so it's only when we let go of the ego the instinct to preserve the physical self the false sense of self the false sense of self when ego prevails we build walls walls of defense protecting that thing that sometimes after time we forget exists at all and we seek without forgetting the truth within and this is why yoga hot yoga in particular hot yoga with soul is not a workout rather a work in so in this moment you sit tall spine is straight eyes are closed just breathing quietly listening practicing you are in fact practicing finding that connection again to what you know to be true and the pain sometimes must come almost as though we're tearing down the walls on a cave and the sun burns bright on the eyes it's okay to close your eyes just feel the warmth that connection to genuine and authentic and organic pleasure happiness from within that connection that resonates with your true self this is the light and love and me that honors and recognizes and sees that purest light and purest love that's within you and together we are one and for this i am truly grateful namaste
