Trinity

Pick your favorite trinity: The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.  Brahma, Shiva, and Vishnu.  Body, mind, and spirit.  Manny, Moe, and Jack.  

They’re all good, and perhaps, all essentially the same.  So, have at the one that works best for you and experience your own experience of each in your own divine way.

As for me, I’ll take the holy trinity of yoga, cycling, and pot as the central organizing principle for my life.  It’s yoga that feeds by spirit, cycling, for my body, and cannabis, for the mind.  

Alternately, you can correlate them with the three gunas, the energetic principles that give rise to the Universe, according to the Samkhya darshana, one of the six “orthodox” schools of Vedic philosophy.  These are rajas, the active, restless principle, tamas, the principle of inertia and solidity, and sattva, the principle of purity and light.  It’s the eternal interplay among these three that bring the Universe into existence and sustains it.

Cycling is rajas, pot is tamas, and yoga is sattva.  Bike-riding is active; weed-smoking is passive; and doing yoga purifies.  The combination of the three, emphasizing one over the other two depending on the situation, makes for a life that is full and fulfilling.  And plenty fun, too!

I’ve been doing yoga asana almost every day for more than 24 years now.  I’ve smoked (and eaten, sometimes) marijuana with some regularity (not every day, though!) since I was fifteen, half a century ago.  And I’ve ridden a bicycle pretty much every chance I’ve had (often on the way to or from a yoga class and also pretty often while being stoned) since I first learned to work a two-wheeler by careening down Ravencrest Road in the Pittsburgh suburb, O’Hara Township back in 1965.

So, no doubt I’ve had plenty of experience in all three, and it’s certain that I wouldn’t be who I am today without those experiences. 

Yoga, cycling and pot = me, myself, and I.