Tuesday, July 13, 2021

Sleeping Beauty ... A VERY Contemporary Retelling

I would like to introduce you to something beautiful. Something inspired. Something profound.

Watching Advanced Ashtanga Yoga Practice and Poetry with Marie Belle will require less than 3 minutes of your day, but it might transform your conception of the female body forever.


Marie Belle PR
Taking a Trauma-Informed Perspective to Yoga with Marie Belle - Podcast

I watch it and see Sleeping Beauty … a VERY contemporary retelling.

Fairytales re-surface to be mined again and again. In the simplicity of their plot structures or “tale-types”, they are templates for unformulated experience and ripe for projection. Their motifs, symbols and themes easily arouse desires, emotions, and thoughts otherwise pushed aside or kept at a distance that yearn for expression if not embodiment.

They are also easily re-written.

Traditionally, Sleeping Beauty tells the tale of a female infant cursed to die at the age of sexual blossoming. However, life, fate, good faeries intervene. The curse is transmuted. She will not die, she will only fall into a deep sleep from which she may be awakened by a kiss from her beloved/betrothed.

And as the female infant-child-adolescent sleeps, so does the world around her.

Emergent consciousness. We are all being given the opportunity to see the world in new ways. Right now. This is happening. 

Witness: A princess, not asleep but “lost”; the female, not an infant but an adult. Enclosed within cement-concrete-metal bars and wires, high rises, palm trees, and urban sprawl —the modern dark woods or deep forest.

A sleeping populace.

On the horizon, an ocean — metaphysical source of nourishment.

The ultimate twist: “Magic” arrives in the form of a yoga mat.

A very contemporary retelling indeed.

No prince charming with soft lips to kiss. This female-princess-woman has encountered  a completely distinct — dare I say — novel Other. 

She has encountered A Practice.
I found myself falling in love, in silence, exploring, beyond the thinking mind.

Beyond the stories locked up inside of this ribcage.

I was not lost, I was being re-routed, my inner compass was redirecting me to this space of becoming more myself. 

I love this practice. 
— Marie Belle PR

Stunning.

Not only is it stunning in its poetry, its stunning in its convergence with … 

Watch the video again and ponder some of these quotes from Molly McCord’s Channeled Cosmic Messages for the Decade: 2020 to 2029.

one of the best things that  humanity can do at this time is to continue to develop our spiritual and intuitive gifts; to get out of the mind, to understand the significance of the body


as the energies within each of us evolve, we change the consciousness of humanity, and we change the matrix of energies on the planet

health and the human body are changing in this decade in a very significant way

the removal of impurities that our bodies have normalized holding: this is the energetics of the human body changing into a more pure form

the rising energies of body consciousness, respecting and loving the human body, of not taking it for granted

one of our strongest gifts at this time in our lives and in the earth’s existence is understanding the power of our hearts, the power of our bodies, the power of our intuition: how to honor all of our energies and moving away from over-reliance on the mind


Wow.

Two final thoughts.

  • Marie Belle PR is my yoga teacher. (And yes I am honored to say that!) When she speaks of Advanced Ashtanga I am most certain that she is speaking of the practice and postures beyond what is traditionally known as the Primary Series. (Uhm … those displayed in her gorgeous video!) But I experience her Advanced Ashtanga as evolved Ashtanga … an Emergent Ashtanga. An anthropologist of that particular style of yoga, she has traveled to India and studied at the source along with many diverse teachers of the lineage throughout the world. And then she takes it further. With a grounded understanding of what may or may not be right for a particular body in a particular pose. With language that allows for discovery, rather than dogmatic alignments that ultimately impose injury. With curvilinear sensibilities. Both reverent and irreverent, I strongly recommend her On Demand 200 Hour Yoga Teacher Training.

  • After watching the video, I could not help but think, in this age of #MeToo, that those wounds that are too deep, those wounds that are too entangled in the body, those wounds that leave us feeling hopeless: that they may never be fully healed. Here, a way to healing is offered. Not with words. No. Not verbally. But by a woman taking full possession of her body. The beauty, the dignity, the agency are breathtaking.
And so Sleeping Beauty awakens in a new, revelatory and extraordinary way.