Frida Kahlo's diary and the Art of Rebuilding

Perhaps there is more insight available to us if we trust our mind-heart-hand connection and express ourselves on a page with colors. 

Consider an example of amazing emotional texture and quality from Frida Kahlo's journal:

Pages from the published diary of Frida Kahlo

I recently started keeping a notebook and drawing in it. The lines aren't just for words, I realized. One can draw on top of them and doodle in the margins. Maybe drawing opens up what words cannot say, nestled as dreams are in the imagination.

"Untitled"
gel ink on lined paper
2018

Keeping this journal with these drawings has become a hopeful, comforting anchor as I go through life's losses and stresses. The title alone of Lucia Capacchione's book was an inspiring impetus: The Picture of Health: Healing Your Life with Art. And then the drawings, phrases, thoughts Frida Kahlo colored onto paper in The Diary of Frida Kahlo: An Intimate Self-Portrait were liquid inspiration.

Page of a dispersed manuscript of the Bhagavata Purana,
(Collection at The Met)

In order to be inspired to divine love and perhaps measure how clearly we see, we can enhance our yoga practice with a deep study of wisdom texts. I have been reading the Bhagavata Purana, translated by Edwin Bryant. I also found some interesting books about yoga--asana and pranayama--at the library. Here is a quote that has stayed with me from The Yoga of Breath by Richard Rosen:

Asana is an unusual position that, like unusual breathing, introduces a novel element into our habitual ways of doing - of sitting, standing, moving - and so clarifies these habits in our awareness. This also reverses the wandering (vgutthana, swerving from right course) and turns it toward the self. All yoga practice is like this: it keeps us immersed in and delighted by the process of transformation, which we recognize is accomplished both through our own efforts and through our acquiescence to a higher power. 

Our own efforts + our bowing to a higher power

Then, another insight from Rosen, as he refers to Patanjali's verses on yoga in the Yoga Sutras. (The author begins with a translation of these three verses).

'The posture [should be] steady and comfortable [sthira-sukha]. [It is accompanied] by the relaxation of tension and the coinciding with the infinite [consciousness-space]. Thence [results] unassailability by the pairs-of-opposites.' Each posture is a skillful balancing act between making happen and letting happen. This recalls the two great wings of classical yoga, exertion (abhyasa which has the same root verb as asana) and surrender or dispassion (vairagya). When these two elements are in harmony in asana, the yogi relaxes or loosens (sithila) all physical and psychological tension; consequently the normally perceived boundaries of the body map dissolve, and consciousness begins to coincide (samapatti) with the consciousness that pervades all space, what Patanjali calls the infinite or endless (ananta).

To add to this quote, a parenthetical comment about the Yoga Sutras: As I understood from Bryant's intro to the Bhagavata Purana, it is helpful to know that Patanjali's yoga is concerned with self-realization, whereas the object and goal of bhakti yoga is of a devotional (and thus sweeter) kind.

A dear man has passed.
Dear P.S., much love and joy to you now. Enjoy your great Western book
and see you...

Om shanti