Lisa Benner Living

02/06/2022

01/06/2022

12/31/2021

Goodnight 2021

12/29/2021

Winter Wonderland beauty ❄️

12/20/2021

You darkness from which I come,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence out the world,
for the fire makes a circle
for everyone
so that no one sees you anymore.
But darkness holds it all:
the shape and the flame,
the animal and myself,
how it holds them,
all powers, all sight —

and it is possible: its great strength
is breaking into my body.
I have faith in the night.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by

Wishing you nourishment, abundant joy, and rest this Yule.

09/20/2021

Wednesday is the Autumnal Equinox, a moment in time when we come as close as we can to experiencing equal day and equal night. A meeting of seeming opposites.

Western thought often seems to get caught in dualities. We parse — and sometimes rend — things apart in our attempt to understand them, and then we forget that the separation doesn’t exist, that we created an artificial severance where wholeness was the true state of being. I remember the shock when I learned that all of those different muscles named during anatomy were created by a scalpel. In the body, they are unified and work as one.

At the Equinox, we are also called to remember that an atom reflects a solar system. As above, so below. As within, so without. These too are statements of connection that sound like duality, perhaps because even connection is simply the joining of disparate parts. Unification is becoming a single unit.

Yoga means union, and I believe that we are being called to the middle path, a radical opening up in the centre that lies between two false choices — false choices that we created. As David Whyte says, “Sometimes you are not meant to choose; sometimes you are meant to go between things.”

Where might it be possible for you to move between rather than choose between?

09/13/2021

I was sitting with David Whyte on Sunday as part of his latest Three Sundays series, and he said, “All the experiences and wounds in your body are doorways to another constellation of living.”

I felt a catch in my breath.

A surprise doorway in. An unexpected discovery.

Like that part in the fable where the heroine collapses under the immensity of her quest — giving her full weight to the tree or standing stone or mountain side — and only because she finally gives her full weight, a new doorway opens, an unforeseen path to possibility.

I want to go on that journey, explore the universe of me, encounter the mystical vastness I contain.

As you feel your current experiences in your body, what is your doorway in? Will you give it your full weight? How do you explore the constellation of you?

📸: Saanvi Walvekar

08/16/2021

I have been feeling, lately, into vulnerability. I think often, as children, we believe that part of growing up is to become invulnerable — adult agency will make us powerful, and we learn to look for power over rather than dwelling within.

In his book Consolations, David Whyte says:

“Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.”

To me, to fully come into myself is to fully embody my vulnerability, to inhabit the full spectrum of my possibility, to root down in the mud even as I reach for the light. The art of following our vulnerability is the way it brings us into the seasonality of our lives. Former ways of feeling on top of the world become a place of stasis. The release of that attachment is the breaking down of barriers, bringing us to root down into what is actually happening. Possibility and vulnerability are irrevocably linked. The manifestation of possibility is a living that includes dying, a receiving that includes loss. The only way to fully live is to be deeply vulnerable.

What are the ways you protect yourself that hold you in stasis? How do you unfurl that holding into the blossomed presence of this current seasonality of your life?

08/02/2021

Yesterday was Lughnasadh, the first of three harvests in the Celtic Wheel of the Year. A time when we are asked to celebrate the bounty and gifts of the land and simultaneously asked to ensure that we tend to that land even as we fight and work and vie for what we desire.

Imagine that you are standing on a hilltop where you can see in all directions. Look to the east where you see newly cleared fields of grain beginning to ripen; what is coming to fruition in your life now? How is it developing?

Look to the south where you see fields thick with golden corn; what arises in you as you receive these firstfruits?

Look to the west where the grain is unhealthy and beginning to mold; in what ways may you have knowingly or unknowingly contributed to this through choices you have made?

Look to the north where there is a field ready to be cut down; what is drawing to a close in your life?

Now turn to your centre. How is your soul proceeding toward its harvest?

📷: Frank Albrecht

07/31/2021

Sage and Sumach cold infusion on it’s way!

07/28/2021

First foray into creating wild yeast!

07/26/2021

Inherent to the study and practice of yoga is svādhyāya, self study. A dear friend once said to me, “I think everything you do in your teaching is about tapas (discipline)”; my response was, “No, everything I do is about svādhyāya, tapas is simply a powerful tool in that self inquiry.”

We often consider self knowledge to be the goal, but I have been wondering lately, is self knowledge truly possible? And do I want it to be? Self study and self knowledge are not the same thing.

I have long believed that it is impossible to know everything. Even if one could know everything in one moment, the next moment, everything would not — could not — be known. The universe is not static. Each moment offers something new, something to be discovered, a mystery to be encountered and explored. Limitless possibility means the existence of miracle. Magick lives and breathes.

I long for both manifestation and potentiality. I believe this is the union of yoga — that in our incarnation we contain both. I am the known and the unknown, that which is and the limitless possibility of that which is not yet, full of growth and mystery and not completely knowable. Awareness is my pursuit through this science, not knowing, and awareness requires presence. Simple, vibrant presence. Being with what is, moment by moment, in all its steadiness and fluctuation and transformation and manifestation. Technique takes us to clarity so that we can pay attention, but then we need to be rather than do.

How do you magnify your way of paying attention?