Kim Weeks

Welcome to Yoga Week!

When I founded Boundless over 10 years ago, I wanted to create a yoga studio that focused on the best quality instruction addressing all layers of the human body in an approachable, fun, and safe atmosphere. While Boundless has grown and changed over the years – and I’ve grown from a relatively carefree twenty-something to becoming a wife and mother of two! — we’ve stayed true to these principles. I believe we offer the highest quality yoga instruction in the city. DC Yoga Week gives us a great opportunity share the Boundless difference with others.

If you’re new to the studio this week and participating in one of our $5 classes, welcome! We are so glad you found us! We hope you enjoy your classes, learn something new about your body and breath, and we hope you come back! (And we’re offering some great Yoga Week promotions to make that easier!)

If you’re a Boundless regular, thank you! You help make the Boundless community as diverse and rich as it is. We are so happy you’ve chosen us as your yoga home and we appreciate sharing in all your energy and joy as you continue to practice with us.

This will be a fun and exciting week, culminating in Yoga on the Mall. I’ll be teaching as part of this citywide celebration of yoga on Saturday, May 19 at 3 p.m. at the Washington monument. This event is free. We hope everyone will join us for a very special practice!

Again, welcome to Boundless Yoga and welcome to Yoga Week. Let’s celebrate yoga!

Borderstan article

Hey, so our friends at Borderstan wrote this article about me, and about small business in DC. Thank you!

The biggest risk of yoga is change

I’m still thinking about that article, which I initially posted about here. Scott Stroud and I take class together on Tuesday nights, and in the car on the way home, he showed me the pictures from the article. OMG those guys, the NYT. As my teacher points out in his response, the paper is trying to increase sales and Mr. Broad is trying to sell books.

I know that’s real, but gross!

John also linked us to the best response I’ve read yet to Broad’s ridiculous piece of poorly edited journalism, from the Ashtanga Yoga Center of New York. I love every word, including his or her slam on Teacher Training Programs and that girl singing The Clash. Like the author, I remember the days of doing yoga, also in New York (for me in mid-nineties) when you could not buy a yoga mat, and when Lululemon’s owner was in Japan selling skateboards to another rich market.

Two best quotes of his/hers:

When there is a great potential for making money, quality is usually the first thing to be sacrificed. Fast food, anyone? It is unfortunate that this is exactly what we are facing now – yoga has been McDona-fied. It has been reduced from a practice that traditionally demanded dedication, discipline, sacrifice, humility, surrender, love, devotion, and self-investigation – and yes, suffering through rigorous practice – to something that one can now learn to teach in a weekend.

I would edit in “sometimes” in front of “suffering” or replace “suffering” altogether with “a lot of work”.

I also totally hearted the conclusion:

To live a life of self-examination is not always an easy thing. But that does not mean that it is not joyous, or have its own rewards, for it can be both of those things.

I made the decision several years ago to change the name of our 200-hour Teacher Training Program to be called Advanced Studies, for this is more accurate a term describing what happens in all Boundless’s Advanced Studies Programs. And, as I reminded my Boundless Yoga class last Saturday, we have been working at Boundless for 10 years to create an environment where everyone learns safely, feels challenged (both mentally and physically), and evolves. I don’t see any reason to do yoga except for these things. I want to evolve, and I want you to do that with me.

That yoga has become, for many who cannot escape the consumer trap of wanting my yoga my way, a drive-through experience, speaks to the fact that change is scary and involves loss. For those of us at Boundless — for those who teach here and who stay for a while to practice with us — we get that we’re in this body not only to own it,  but to know it. We are also in it to feel exactly what our AYNY author said, that:

feeling of freshness, of being clean and free, of feeling that a whole, new world was opening in me.

Yoga is definitely not safe

I am working on the most compassionate response to the New York Times article from January 5, but it’s difficult.

This is an embarrassment to journalism. It’s not even news: It’s a personal piece written by a man who has practiced yoga an undefined number of times, who based on his individual experience has sought out others’ views to validate his own. Reading the article was like watching Fox News Channel.

The goal of yoga postures is to address “underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injury all but inevitable.” To use the body, or NOT to use the body in this life, is to face what we come in with. Our genetic code + our parents’ way of being + early-childhood experiences + myriad other unknown influences = injury and problems. Sitting on the couch and crossing the street can be equally hazardous. Therefore, to engage in a yoga asana practice is necessarily to take on — and for some of us to take “head” on, as headstand is ominously referenced by William — the risk of living in the body.

William uses as his main source a guy who “acknowledges that he has no formal training for determining which poses are good for a student.” Does this mean Glenn Black is not a formally trained yoga teacher? If I didn’t run a yoga studio, I would have stopped reading here.

While it’s totally true that we are shaped in modern day by the chair, and not by squatting, it is a blatant misunderstanding of what the rest of us are doing in yoga class to say that “urbanites … strain and twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures.” Some do. And many don’t. Our journalist goes on to quote the untrained teacher saying, “many schools … are just about pushing people.” Some people need to be pushed, and that’s what they sign up for when they take class. Being pushed can help you lose 1o pounds. It will help you tone your abs (Hey 1045 am 1/7 Boundless Yoga class — like I said! ) in ways you won’t do on your own. It can help you feel part of a larger effort, in which everyone around you is working hard to be better.

This leads me to the main weirdness of this article by a guy who is just too worried. “The yoga community” that “long remained silent about its potential to inflict blinding pain” (is he serious with the inflicting and the blinding pain.) has in fact done just the opposite. Texts far more ancient than Black’s surgery-inducing practice warn all over the place against the dangers of yoga. It’s a serious practice, and it can f* you up if you don’t respect your teacher, and if you don’t respect yourself and pay attention — just as Black points out, and William thankfully includes early on the article.

The yoga community I am part of includes teachers who have studied for many years. Some have been injured, and just as many have not. The injuries arise for two reasons: 1) The too-trusting student is in a class with an untrained teacher who is not paying attention. This means the teacher is giving instruction to a faceless, nameless group of people that live in his/her head — s/he is really teaching to no one but himself or herself, to satisfy his/her own ego. The student trusts this person to be paying attention and “goes too far.” The student does not have enough confidence or knowledge, or OMG just inner wisdom, NOT to move toward the injury. This is a sucky reality of parts of the yoga market. Today. And yesterday. And forever, because people always want more than what they have. As people, too, teachers are fallible BUT. It is up to the teacher to take on the sacred responsibility of “paying attention” more than anyone else in the classroom, and to teach her/his students to pay attention. This can only come with training. Formal training for chrissake.

The 2) way that students might injure themselves in a yoga class is in fact if they are doing yoga in someone else’s body: a body they wish they had, one they used to have, one they will never have. They are doing yoga inside the body of the ego, which does not consist of the bones, muscle and gristle (or for that matter, the OOH SO SCARY NECK WHERE STROKES START!). Ignoring the message of the breath, which is designed to be the lie detector for the brain, they keep going, over years and years (like Glenn Black and William Broad), when their body continues to tell them to stop, or to slow down, or just to do something different. This student will injure himself/herself no matter what teacher is in front of them.

The bottom line is yoga saves lives. It is helping to save the planet. The teeny percentage of people injuring themselves in yoga are doing so because they are using the body, AND they are trying to do so in a healthier way. What could not be published in a newspaper that has fewer readers than there are yoga practitioners is that injuries can actually be OK. They are sometimes just part of the practice.

What should have been published in this article is that injuries are totally avoidable. If you align your movement with your breath, and you allow yourself to learn from a well-trained teacher, you will always use yoga to transform into being happier, healthier, and better balanced. Yoga teaches you to listen to your body, and the body never lies.

Namaste in a nutshell

Compassion is a mega emotion like fear. It can underlie all the other feelings we have. The opposite of fear, compassion is a bija, or seed, energy in the body that when present softens everything the right way. Especially the heart and eyes. When we experience compassion we can be doing anything, even (or especially when) disciplining a child. Compassion does not mean to be nicer; it means to take in totally the experience of the person or thing you are interacting with. It’s “namaste” in a nutshell.

Transformation starts with the body

I’m teaching this for four Fridays in July and August. It’s a discussion and meditation group that I am leading. Boundless’s mission is to foster transformation.

Transformation that happens anywhere starts first in your body. While there are many ways to observe and assess the universal principles of organization and chaos, I will address the topic of human bodily transformation that in turn takes root in society. I want to teach you how you can learn to observe your experience in the world, which then then necessitates positive change everywhere — foremost in your life.

I am specifically teaching you about your own dharma or destiny.  I hope you can make it!

Fold as naturally as the sun

The thing with pachimottanasana, or seated forward fold, is that it takes almost as much stability as paripurna navasana, or boat pose. I wrote about boat pose last month. Take a minute to look at both poses in the links to Yoga Journal, especially the legs. We could accurately say that the stability in the legs is quite the same in both poses, but the (re)pose in the spine is different.

In the spine especially, we are looking for a non-doing-ness as much as we’re looking for doing. Seated forward fold shows this perhaps this best of all yoga poses other than savasana, or corpse pose. The concept in Taoism is called wu-wei, or the natural timing of any action. Inasmuch as we are lifting the breastbone and calming the breath down in boat pose, we are doing the same actions in seated forward fold. Except we do this as we elongate the torso over the legs rather than away from it into space.

Seated forward fold is about letting go, about letting your own psychology of action be revealed to you in the minute or two you hang out in this pose. Most people find seated forward fold challenging, because it’s a shape — like navasana — that we hardly ever do. Sitting in chairs, oops, is our main daily action that makes extending the legs out on the floor and folding over so hard!

I recommend spending the hotter moments in July cooling down with this ultimately nourishing, calming, and (yet) spinally challenging pose. When you hit a wall, i.e., when you feel like the only way you could go “further” in the pose is by forcing the body into more “length”, relax. Seriously, observe any tension in your shoulders (and therefore) your spine, and relax. R-E-L-A-X. Spell the word out to yourself and by the time you hit “X” notice that you’re in a different pose.

Let your body forward fold this month as naturally as the sun comes up to roast you every day.

On Navasana or Boat Pose

Now that I’m pregnant with my second child, I especially miss boat pose. It is a pose of strength, grace, and calm.

Most of us don’t feel that way when we practice it. Even as a teacher, I feel myself getting tense on the students’ behalf when I instruct, “Straight legs! Lift your chest! Soften the shoulders!” This pose is challenging because it deals directly with the core body that remains so woefully unattended as we sit in chair, cars, couches, and other “slouchy” pieces of furniture. Were we to practice Mountain Pose, Staff Pose and even Half-Standing-Forward Fold, Navasana or Boat Pose would feel more easeful and steady as asanas, or poses, are meant to feel.

And yet, we love to hate this pose (or vice versa) because it *is* so challenging and makes us sore the next day. We learn from it that we need to strengthen our core and loosen up our groins, because both take a beating when we practice this pose with rigidity and fierceness, rather than focus, steadiness, and grace.

Think of how you feel when you’re sitting in a boat in calm waters. It’s so relaxing! This is literally the steadiness that your muscular body wants to offer your breath and nervous system in Boat Pose. So keep trying this pose, this one that we all love in June anyway as it’s so close to bathing suit season! Even a little bit of work in it pays off — just like a nice trip to the lake does!

petal by petal

We teach alignment in yoga asanas not out of fear that we’re doing something wrong in a pose, but rather to find the truest form of the body, a body in line with the universe, a body that becomes one with it. Looking only for misalignments is easy. We only think it’s hard in the beginning because every time we find something “wrong,” we judge ourselves: “it’s bad that I’m so tight.” “I’m not flexible enough to do this.” “I’ll never be that good at that pose.” “Slow-moving yoga is boring.” We think in yoga we have to work hard – to focus on our hamstrings in standing-forward bend, tight backs in twists, floppy arms in handstand – in order to get it right.

But it’s all “right.” It’s alright. Misalignment is simply a form of resistance, a mind/body stubbornness that shunts our spirits deeper into a body (just a shape, after all) of conditioned reactions to stress, self-protection, even ambition. We think we have to “hold it together,” when we have no choice than to do the opposite: we must unfold, piece by piece, until we are so wide open it hurts like blinding light, at which point we become the life force, the prana, that we invite in every time we inhale.

in his poem “somewhere i have never traveled,” E.E. cummings writes:

though i have closed myself as fingers
you always open petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

While we think the real difficulty is re-aligning (or, for most of us, un-misaligning), it’s relaxing into the flow that is hard – because it’s scary to let go of control, the very control that developed a body so out of step with the bigger picture in the first place.

When you do yoga, really do it, you’re stepping into this bigger picture, getting your toes wet at the edge of the ocean (realizing that your toe, 90% water, isn’t much different from the ocean at all). By getting your toes wet you’re stepping into your own understanding of the universe, which, indeed, functions only with you in it.

Move With Us!

Hi! I am excited to share that our new yoga studio will open for classes on Saturday, April 2nd. The new space is located at 13th and U Street, right across from the U Street Metro. We are offering 42 classes per week, new teachers, class styles, and workshops. Contact us if you have any questions, and we look forward to practicing with you soon!