Bob Dylan and Walt Whitman as Inadvertent Yoga Nidra Teachers and Fierce Grace and White Horse With One Ear (Drawn From Memory) / Black Horse Blues

Well my ship's been split to splinters and it's sinkin' fast
I'm drownin' in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free
I've got nothin' but affection for all those who've sailed with me
(lyrics from "Mississippi," by Bob Dylan in 2001)

It is said that Yoga Nidra helps us develop a deep capacity to meet any and all circumstances we may encounter in life.  Part of the Yoga Nidra practice is a welcoming of contrasts into awareness -- a splintered sinking ship along with a heart that is light and free and not weary, and eventually being able to experience them as one -- to experience fragmentation and wholeness simultaneously.

Throughout the decades, the songs of Bob Dylan have explored contrasts as they coexist as two necessary parts of the whole:

"She knows there's no success like failure and failure's no success at all."

(lyrics from "Love Minus Zero / No Limit, by Bob Dylan -- 1965)

"I've been meek and hard like an oak."
(lyrics from "Buckets of Rain" -- 1974)

"I came to a high place of darkness and light.  A dividing line ran through the center of town."
(lyrics from "Isis" -- 1975)

"Alarm bells were ringing to hold back the swelling tide.  Friends and lovers clinging to each other side by side."
(lyrics from "Tempest" -- 2012)


As many of you know, with my experience in 1970-1971 of having lived with a dearly loved man from the early December morning he arrived home from Vietnam until the following May, I am a veteran of that shattering aftermath of war, and I continue to come to terms with the depth and breadth of those life-changing months and am just now beginning to appreciate the Fierce Grace that came to me at a young age.   I thought I was alone in what had happened to me and the man I loved and who loved me.  Now I know I wasn't alone.  Never was.

Recent drawn-from-memory sequence with my PC's "paint" program -- printed and scanned to my MacBook:

 

A Yoga Nidra pairing of contrasts could be the above sequence of drawings, done in the present time of relative tranquility, with the drawing below where I faced ongoing emotional turmoil over three consecutive Augusts, dating the scratchboard drawing three times in frustration at not being able to find my way.  The third August was four months after the death of my beloved friend and veteran.  Nearly five years have passed since his death.

I like the way the drawings look together on this page and how they interact in the context of Yoga Nidra.

Walt Whitman could have been talking Yoga Nidra when he made this acknowledgement of the truth of human wholeness:

"Do I contradict myself?  Very well, then I contradict myself.  I am large.  I contain multitudes."

Nothing was delivered / Something was delivered / Yoga Nidra

A few days ago when walking in the woods before work, I saw a man and a woman about my age (almost 62) walking slowly with trekking poles, coming up the trail from the fishing pond in Whatcom Falls Park. We smiled and said hello as we passed on the trail. When I reached the little bridge at the far edge of the fishing pond, I stopped to look over at the water spilling over the small dam and then turned around to go back home the same way I had come. It wasn't long before I saw the couple with the trekking poles, ahead of me on the path. As I approached them, I was looking in curiosity at their trekking poles. Just as I was about to pass them, I looked up and noticed that on the back of the man's dark blue T-shirt was a fairly recent image of Bob Dylan in concert with the words "Bob Dylan" above the image.

In wonder and delight, I said, "Bob Dylan," and they both turned around to look at me. The man said that they had seen Bob Dylan in concert in the last year. He said that he loved Bob Dylan's music but that Bob Dylan shouldn't be touring anymore. He said the concert was awful, and that he felt ripped off. He said Bob Dylan should just give it up. He sounded both angry and sad.

As far as he was concerned, it was the "Nothing Was Delivered Tour" (lyrics and audio clip).

A few weeks ago, a dear friend of mine died peacefully in her sleep at 86 years old. She was a member of Alcoholics Anonymous and had been sober for the last 14 years of her full and rich life. She was one of the few women of her generation to earn a PhD and had a successful career in her field of psychology and active retirement years. She was a professed atheist, but said that even though she didn't believe in God, there was something that had removed the demons that had haunted her until 1996, at age 72, when she realized that she was a real alcoholic and, in her words, "It would be insane for me to take a drink."

Part of the Yoga Nidra meditation I have been listening to suggests considering that both of the following thoughts are true in the same moment:

Nothing needs to be done.
Something needs to be done.

Bob Dylan said:
"Nothing is better, nothing is best
Take heed of this and get plenty of rest"
(lyrics from "Nothing was Delivered")

and:

"Sometimes somebody wants you to give something up
And tears or not, it’s too much to ask."
(Bob Dylan, lyrics from "Floater (To Much To Ask)"

As Solitary Walker commented on my last post, "And 'nothing' is always 'something', after all."

And that seems to be what Yoga Nidra is about.

("The Composer," drawn with chalk pastel on paper by am in the early 1980s)