When I was in India, I met a yoga monk who was well-known for his vast wisdom of all things yogic, but especially the chakras.
So I asked him about the color of the heart chakra. “Some people say it’s a smokey green color,” I said. “What does that mean?”
When I heard Anodea Judith talk about chakras, she said that the old scrolls had been kept in temples and that they could’ve easily been damaged by incense smoke and that’s where the “smokey” in the green came from. Hmmmmm. Weren’t yogis more tuned in than that? They shouldn’t have to use old scrolls to see the color of their heart chakras anyway.
“Well,” he said. “It’s not exactly ‘smokey’, it’s more like the inside of a cabbage.”
“Oh.”
I must admit here that I left a bit disappointed.
The inside of a cabbage? That’s as exciting as the heart chakra gets?! – a cabbage! Not something slightly more exotic – like a romanescu or a durian – or even an artichoke? My heart chakra felt insulted.
Anyway, I’ve often pondered what the inside of a cabbage could possibly have to do with the heart chakra. It’s not at all smokey green, more like yellowish-white. Eventually I gave up. Clearly, in my mind at least, there was no point in making a cabbage/heart connection. The heart chakra is just green. Green is a nice color, no need to dig any deeper here.
Last week my friend Matthew was coming over for lunch and to help me with some computer stuff. So I got out some leftover black beans and rice and decided I’d cook up some carrots and a Savoy cabbage I had purchased a few days earlier. Thought I’d make some wraps for us before we got to our business of website work. Matthew is a talented, patient, spiritually advanced IT guy – clearly, a person who deserves to be fed well.
Now I don’t know about you, but typically I buy big cabbages and since my family isn’t that into cabbage anyway, I usually don’t cook it all in one go. When I cut it, I usually just slice of a hunk and then cut that piece up into smaller bits.
But this cabbage was petite. I needed to use half of it. And it was very green and fresh and pretty and crinkly. So I got out a sharp knife and cut it in half.
And then…
I fell into vegetable samadhi
After all these years of not really being able to make the cabbage connection, I finally got it. Cabbages really do have feelings because there in the middle of my cutting board was the cabbage’s exposed heart chakra.
I got out my camera for the occasion because I thought you might like to see it too. Be careful not to look too long though because you might go into vegetable samadhi too and not be able to do anything for the rest of the afternoon but dream of perfect sauerkraut.
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