Raw vegan hot cross buns? Happy Easter Bunday

So.  Sometimes when I feel low, lost, alone, I take myself back in mind to places where I felt secure and serene.  I know, I know - one should be able to feel secure and serene anywhere - for, really, it makes no difference where one is, does it?  But still...

Yobaba Lounge was such a place.  I'd love to take you there.  It might not suit, of course - we are all different, we all have varying tastes, inclinations, desires.  But, for me, it was a refuge for the mind; a temple of the body; a sanctuary for the soul.   I knew, from the moment I got into Gertrud's campervan at the airport and she started driving to Chalabre, that here was a kindred spirit.  One of my 'tribe'.

Anyhow.  Today I am thinking of Yobaba.  I am wandering its corridors in my mind, trailing my fingers over the wooden bannisters, stretching out on that fabulous bed and snuggling into the zebra-alike throw.  I am curling up in a hammock, with a cat purring under my fingers.  I am giving myself up to the floorboards in savasana surrender in the yoga shala up under the eaves, in the Kether of the chateau.  I am floating, a pale starfish, primordial, on the lake.
If I were there now I might even be walking the labyrinth Gertud has sliced into the lawn...

Are my tastebuds tingling?  Well, I don't usually get too exhilarated about food but for Gertrud's raw alchemy I make an exception.  Can you really make a raw vegan sugar-free hot cross bun?  More to the point, one that tastes good?  Gertrud did.  Follow this link for her recipe.

And, if you want to read more about her house in France and its range of retreats, I wrote a full report for Queen of Retreats - read it here.

Oh, and if you fancy finding out more about my thoughts on the issue of 'home', you could always read my book Spirit of the Home.  Click on the cover for more.

Mapping the Kabbalistic Tree of Life onto houses, as you do...

For the last ten years or so I have had this recurring dream.  I am in a large house.  It usually starts off being The Old Rectory, the first house we lived in when we moved from London, but then I realise there are parts of it I didn’t know were there.  I walk through whole wings, endless bedrooms, hidden corridors, dusty echoing spaces.  Firstly I feel overwhelmed.  How can I cope with all this?  And then comes a feeling of mounting dread.  There is some evil hidden away here, something that mustn’t be awoken.  The feeling intensifies and it becomes a nightmare – the kind that has one waking with a gasp, heart pounding, scrabbling for the light.

As I walked into Yobaba Lounge I felt a jolt.  This place.  What was it?  Then Gertrud gave me a tour of the whole house and I realised.  This was the place in my dream.  Or very close.  The house is vast, so vast Gertrud isn’t quite sure how many rooms there actually are.  ‘I think there were fifty originally,’ she says.  ‘But now, since we took out partitions and so on?  Who knows?’  Many have been beautifully restored but even more are still slumbering.  Some rooms you can’t even access – they are blocked up.  How weird is that? 

Now I’m fascinated by houses, by homes.  So much so that I wrote five books about them (well, six if you include the illustrated version of Spirit of the Home).  I firmly believe homes have personalities just as distinct as people’s.  Even new homes, brand new places, can’t help but be influenced by the land on which they are built; by their proximity to other places; by the layout of their rooms; by the direction in which they face.  The Chinese knew this and developed the art and science of feng shui to explain it.  The Indians knew it and developed Vastu Shastra for the same reasons.  I could go on, with examples from all the indigenous traditions of the world, but you get the picture.

This one had more than a personality; it had the resonance of a temple.  And, as I lay on the hammock, idly gazing back at the house, something struck me.  The main part with its three pillars mapped out the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.  Ten windows for ten sephiroth.  Except…it didn’t quite fit.  But then…doh…the bottom sephirah is Malkuth, the Kingdom, the realm of Earth.  So, go figure, Malkuth is the Earth, the ground on which the chateau sits.  And then it all fitted perfectly.  It links neatly with tantric yoga too – with its triangles pointing up (Shiva) and down (Shakti).  And I spun it round, so it became three-dimensional and then it became a Merkaba, a divine space-time ship.   Oh, I do so love this kind of playful mind game. 

This illustration of the Tree of Life shows it pretty clearly.  So, Malkuth (Malchut, the bottom red sphere) is in the Earth.  Da'at is the 'hidden' sephirah, known as 'Knowledge' - it corresponds with the Abyss that separates the lower spheres from the supernal triangle.

It’s pretty common to look at a house with an eye to the chakras (so downstairs rooms are lively and earthy and need equally punchy earthy colours – vibrant reds and sociable oranges and energising yellows).  As you move up to the next floor, more soothing balancing colours come in – blues or greens for sleeping.  And up the top, should one have space, is the ideal place for meditation rooms (in shades of violet, indigo or pure white).   So, no wonder that Gertrud and Mangalo had placed the yoga shala up at the top of the house – in Kether, the crown chakra – and no wonder it was such a peaceful space, conducive to deep states of meditation.

Does any of this matter?  No, not really.  Does it have a practical application?  Well, only in as far as one could work with the energy of the house, by boosting the energy of certain spaces.  But mainly, it’s just cosmic play. 

And, oh…my dream house?  I found out what had been hiding in the dark corners.  Am I brave enough to tell you?  I’m not sure. 

The poustina of the yoga mat

The yoga mat can become a poustina, a place of retreat, a place in which to put aside the outside world and come back to oneself and to go out to a wider place, to expand and become one with the Everything. 
If you’re not familiar with the term ‘poustina’ (sometimes poustinia) it comes from the Russian Orthodox way and was, traditionally, a lonely place, a silent place, where one can go to listen to God.  It is a place in which to empty oneself, to enter into ‘kenosis’.  A poustina cabin or room is, effectively, a hermit’s cell – just a bed, a table, a chair, a cross and a Bible.

But the concept need not be Christian – it is, after all, purely a place of meditation, of self-expansion into dissolution.  In Spirit of the Home I talked a lot about making your home into a ‘soul’ home and yet I came to recognise that that isn’t always possible.  Usually we share our homes with other people; we cannot make them entirely suit our tastes, our inclinations, let alone our spirit.  But no matter how or where we live, we can find poustina – it could be in a chair, a corner, in the bath, on the loo. And, even if not in a physical place, then in our minds.

More and more these days, I find it on the mat.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that yoga is so generally confined and configured by the mat.  Of course you don’t need one -  you can sink into asana wherever you are – be it in the office, in the kitchen, up a mountain, in the forest, by the crashing waves on the shore. 

But there is something about a mat.  It says, ‘This is my space.  This is my world.  This is me – almost like the Vitruvian Man – stretched between Heaven and Earth, touching all points, starfish-elemented.  It becomes sacred space; hallowed space; a magic rectangle, a place of safety, of exploration, of self-awareness, of emptying, of sublimation.

It makes one become aware of one’s personal space – how we relate to other people; how far we let them in, how far we keep them out.  My yoga teacher relates how, at her training in India, they were jammed so close in class their mats nearly touched.  How, at first, it felt uncomfortable, yet – as time progressed – it became normal.  Each place was fixed, delineated, separate – and yet, from time to time, as asanas or vinyasas dictated, there was touching, adaptation, yielding, compromise.  Like stars dancing.  And, of course, everything that comes can be meditation.  No matter if it’s another person’s limb touching yours, or a shout from the road, the backfiring of a car, or a dog lying on your back.

Yes, I share my mat at home.  Curiously, the SP isn’t interested in my yoga.  Maybe he’s too much of a young soul.  But Asbo joins me every morning.  He sits at the edge of the mat as I do my warming up then joins me in a few downward and upward dogs as I salute the sun.  And this morning, as I was resting (flat on my stomach, forehead on my arms) after seven long minutes in Sphinx, he walked up and down my back (thank you, small dog, my vertebrae smiled) and then lay down neatly.

Is it still a poustina if it isn’t just you?  I don’t feel why not.  J