Knitting a Rainbow
A friend from my yoga therapy program is having surgery today for bladder cancer, and as quick as I can, I want to knit up a shawl that will be warm, soft, and a rainbow of color for her.An asraya is an object of meditation. It should be positive, and by focusing consistently on that object or visualization or idea, one may begin to take on the qualities of the asraya. Just the way that, if you spend time with a pessimistic person, you may begin to find yourself being all doom and gloom. Or if you take a hike in the woods in the fall and see the leaves changing and the colors of the trees and feel the crisp air, you will begin to feel that sense of time passing, beauty being immediate but ephemeral, how good it feels to take a deep breath of the air outside. 
In Sutra III.24, Patanjlai notes that samyama -- or the stage in meditation where your consistent and complete focus creates a link between the object of meditation and the meditator -- on the physical strength of an elephant can give one that strength. Not literally, but in the sense that if you consider the elephant's strength, his great weight, his ability to uproot a tree with his trunk, and so on, you may begin to feel, in yourself, a strength of your own.
A rainbow as yantra, or image to meditate on, is about joy, hope, the way in which something beautiful and full of color comes out of darkness and gloom and rain, and it is a sign of prosperity (our pot of gold at the end of the rainbow), and dare I say, abundance (a very overworked word in the yoga lexicon), and I want to send all of that to Kim.
The yarn is Noro Taiyo in color 5. (Okay, that's just freaky. I just went to the link page and color 5 is called...Rainbow. I had no idea.) The pattern probably will be the Shetland Triangle Shawl by Evelyn A. Clark or something that I, a not-so-fast knitter (I admit it, I am carrying around the memory of those little girls from Tennessee watching me knit slooooowly, at least to them), can possibly work up by Monday and get it in the mail to Canada.
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