Cleanliness.

The wisdom of my grandmothers is coming through with much clarity these days. I woke up after an evening in my paternal grandparents home. A home that collected empty margarine containers and hoarded everything that entered the door. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression and viscerally understood what it meant to be without. Their longterm response was to collect and hoard - an effort to protect themselves from being without again. How can we protect without oppressing?

Upon returning from a lunchtime walk just now, the niyama “saucha” was beckoning to be explored through the archives of Michael Stone. There was a time when I thought these inclinations were crazy and I hesitated to follow them. That time has passed. With ease, I follow these impulses because they give me a dose of vitality from feeling into the web of life that is beyond understanding.

There was one search result in Michael’s archives:

Yoga Sutra 18: Remix by Matthew Remski

An excerpt:

The first niyama (internal restraint) is called “saucha” (pronounced “sow-cha”) which I’ve defined as “purity, cleanliness and purification”. A traditional translation of verse 2.40 in The Yoga Sutra reads like this: “Through cleanliness and purity of body and mind, one develops an attitude of distancing, or disinterest towards one’s own body, and becomes disinclined towards contacting the bodies of others.”

…

The difficulty for me translating this word “saucha” is that it carries the idea that the body is dirty. There is a kind of pre-existing dirtiness, and if the body is something to be gotten away from, then you have dirt scrubbing away dirt. Perhaps one of the reasons for The Yoga Sutra’s newfound ascendency in the 19th century was the way it fit into Victorian ideals of hygiene. In Ayurvedic medicine we don’t cleanse the flesh and put the body in a bubble, we relate flesh to other flesh in the most poetic way. This is called ecology.

I am listening. Deeply listening.