SOL Yoga Centre

Yoga is the bridge between unitive consciousness and individuated experience (infinite and finite) and Michael Jackson lived a life that clearly straddled these two realities.  He was an open channel for receiving, composing and performing music that would unite nearly a billion people in mourning his death and celebrating his life.  MJ’s  music and his story captured our collective imagination because his artistry was pure, directly downloaded from the collective mind,  and because his life was our own light and shadow amplified.  He is us and yet not us.

We all watched, with the guilty pleasure-pain of schadenfreude, his misadventures and hyperbole strained antics.  Whether or not we admit it, we watched because we recognized our own fears, our own fragility, our own inability to run that much energy through this body of flesh and bone.  When we saw how intensely he played out our own dramas, we felt ameliorated with the knowledge that we weren’t suffering so much after all.  The horror of watching celebrities crash and burn through their humanness somehow makes our own lives seem ok.  And yet we all envy them for  their power and the sheer energy of having that much attention pouring towards them. 

The triumphs that interlaced MJ’s tragedies were incredible examples of yoga teachings embodied.  Yoga is ultimately an adventure in non-ordinary realities, without having to leave this incarnation yet.   MJ’s triumphs, his X-factor of talent, originality and charisma, came not from having an ingredient the rest of us lack in our make-up but rather came from having less filters and editors than the rest of us do.  He was not like us, in that he had less limiting beliefs about what was possible musically.  He incarnated with a special mission, a Personal Legend to live, and he let nothing stop him from fully becoming Michael Jackson.  He was born to be who he was and he didn’t have a filter that would have blocked the universal, cosmic energy from fueling this destiny.  Too many of the rest of us refuse to be who we were born to be because we would rather be someone else, we lack the courage to step up or we simply believe it’s impossible.  

MJ showed us how to live in the super-human realm of infinite possibilities.  He lived in the non-ordinary reality which says that at anytime, anyone can create something that has never existed before, if it is your destiny and you are steadfast in living it.  This creativity is possible to a gentle surrendered being that channels through the grand archetypes of our souls.   MJ loved the archetype of Krishna.  His living spaces and his rides at Neverland were covered with iconic images of the playful, musical, charismatic Hindu deity, who unequivocally taught that life is supposed to fun.  His openness let him live the energy of the archetype, making him simultaneously human with all its bittersweetness and also larger than life, somehow connected to something Bigger.   The reason we are fascinated and curious is that each of as a soul yearns deeply to bridge that gap as well and live both, to be yoga.   May the life of Michael Jackson inspire us all to expand the realm of what we hold to be possible.  May the life of Michael Jackson inspire us all to live fully and fearlessly who we were born to be.