 By
Bill Metcalfe - Daily News Staff
Inspired Lives, to be introduced at
a book launch in Nelson on Sunday, is a collection
of the best articles from the past five years of
an award-winning Kootenay based magazine which
has 9,000 subscribers in the US and Canada.
Ascent magazine began as a small newsletter at the
Yasodhara Ashram at Kootenay Bay seven years ago
(error –
seven years ago the newsletter became a newsstand
magazine). Like the Ashram itself, Ascent has been
a quiet success story, building a dedicated international
following without hype or pretense.
The articles in Inspired Lives are
not just about yoga in a narrow sense.
“The stories are about the diverse lives of yogis,
Buddhists, Christians, musicians, artists, and political
activists,” writes Clea McDougall in the preface.
McDougall, 32, is the editor of Inspired Lives and
was the founding editor of Ascent.
Some of these lives may stretch the limit of what we,
at first glance, recognize as yoga,” she writes.
“However, I feel that this is yoga in the most
truthful and relevant sense: the search for how we
can live a spiritual life in our modern world.”
The article in Inspired Lives that touches closest
to home is Nelson writer Eileen Pearkes’
‘Mary-Jo,’ which weaves together an account
of how Pearkes’
experience in a yoga teacher –training workshop
taught by Mary-Jo Fetterly, and reflections on Fetterly’s
continuing work as a yoga teacher despite being paralyzed
from the mid-spine down from a skiing accident.
In ‘Valley of the Tigers’ the famed Indian
novelist Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small
Things, is interviewed about her activism in defense
of poor rural people in India in the face of huge hydro
projects. “I don’t think everyone in the
world is an evil intentioned person. But they don’t
understand what the connection is between switching
on their light and…what happens to the people
who live on the river banks. And scaling down the lifestyle
without becoming a Gandhi or becoming a hermit…I
don’t think you need to do that…”
Canadian writer Jan Martel explains the inspiration
yoga provided in the writing of his best-selling novel
The Life of Pi. “One of the things that made
me take this spiritual stuff seriously is that involving
myself with it, in it, made me feel better, made me
feel more connected, more profoundly human…” |
Noah Levine, the son of writer Stephen Levine, in
‘Dharma Punx,’ describes a connection between
Buddhist meditation and punk music. “…both
are a desire for happiness and freedom, and seeing the
truth about life. As a kid I saw the truth about life.
I was in a lot of pain and there was suffering everywhere.
Inequality and oppression and war and racism. Capitalist –driven
media crap. I just knew that happiness couldn’t
come from that”
Tenzin Palmo, an English Buddhist nun who lived in a
Himalayan cave for 12 years, writes of how she created
a school for young nuns in northern India. “Essentially
the nuns are just servants either to the family or to
the monks. And it’s a pity because these girls
are very bright, very intelligent As soon as they’re
given an opportunity to study, then it’s like they’re
tight little buds which, if they’re given enough
sunshine and rain and fertilizer, just open up and blossom.
Soren Gordhammer, in ‘Accident Prone: Bring Yoga
to the Bronx,’
reflects on his work introducing yoga and meditation
to street youth, “The kids…come in with
enormous confusion and emotional pain. They desperately
want help but are extremely suspicious of everybody.
Whenever I start a new class there is usually a
‘feel-out’ stage. This involves the kids
insulting both the practices and me, then watching how
I respond.”
The book is an elegant blend of interviews, articles,
photos, and large-print quotes such as this one from
writer Bo Lozoff:
“What do I want is very misleading. Ask instead,
what do I think my life is about? Am I living in the
way that I feel called , that I feel drawn, that I feel
moved, that I feel inspired? Those are the relevant questions
to me.”
There are 28 articles in Inspired Lives and according
to McDougall they cover many dimensions of that difficult-to-define
concept of inspiration.
The thing about inspiration is that it is not all happiness
and prettiness and ease,” she writes. “it
is not the cosmetic niceness that we tend to desire… Inspiration
doesn’t always look the way we want it to look.
It can be chaotic and painful… But often out of
that pain and mess comes the beautiful, real stuff of
life.”
Ascent magazine moved its production headquarters to
Montreal in 1991 (error – it was 2000), but its
editorial board and its financial management still reside
in the Kootenays, at the Yasodhara Ashram. Swami Gopalananda
is on the editorial board and has lived at the Ashram
for 23 years. |
“Ascent goes back almost 50 years now,” he
says. “it started with Swami Radha (the late
founder of Yasodhara Ashram). She went to India and
she was initiated into yoga and Swam Sivananda’s
teaching’s and so on, and she came back to the
west on his instructions to teach for western people.”
“One of the things she wanted to see was a quality
magazine on the market that would go beyond the Ashram.
She said there was much more to spiritual life than we
were doing as an institution. She wanted a way for people
to tell their stories.”
Ascent magazine has been nominated five times for the
Best Spiritual Coverage award in the Utne Independent
Press awards in the US, and it won that award in 2003.
The book launch will take place from 2 to 4 pm on Sunday
at the Oxygen Studio, in the alley behind Hipperson’s
Hardware. Swami Radhananda, the President of Yasodhara
Ashram, will be leading a workshop on creative and spiritual
inspiration. There will be copies of Inspired Lives for
sale and discounted subscriptions to Ascent. |
