yoga is the practice of moving from the gross to the subtle. we first learn asana, and how the breath fills the physical structure that we change, pose to pose, moment to moment. once we arrive at the subtler aspects of the practice, what, then, does the practice become?

learn tonight from kim about a brief history of yoga, its basic philosophic tenets, and how the details of the inner world unfold the quieter we become. kim will discuss the value of asana, contemplation, breath, and meditation as part of the yoga ashtanga system, and she welcomes questions about the myriad ways we deepen a yoga practice, both on the yoga mat and out in the world.

get two free tickets to the green festival with a purchase of $130 or more! supply of tickets limited, so buy now!  support your favorite teacher at the festival, and learn more about all things green!

12 p chaka–hatha yoga

1 p chaka–yoga for guys

2 p stu–vinyasa yoga

3 p orly–yoga basics

4 p orly–meditation and yoga

get two free tickets to the green festival with a purchase of $130 or more! supply of tickets limited, so buy now! support your favorite teacher at the festival, and learn more about all things green!

11 a stu–vinyasa

12 p james–yoga and ki chung

1 p kristen–core yoga

2 p andrea–transdance and yoga

3 p kim–chakra yoga

4 p kim– yoga basics

5 p jeanette–vinyasa yoga

6 p jeanette–yogilates

if you’ve played music for any length of time, you’ve probably used a metronome. this what one looks like:

imagine your spine as the pendulum rod (the thing that moves) in standing poses, especially ones in which the hips are open. when we attempt to do warrior two pose (virabadrasana 2) or side angle pose (parsvokanasana),

and

, settling into the poses can feel very much like the pendulum coming to rest at its center. you might even see here how pose 1 sets the foundation for pose 2.

one of the main ways to experience this sensation is to firm the legs. for most of us, desk jobs preclude the active use of legs during the day. sitting in chairs creates bad circulation, bad backs, and weak leg muscles.

in standing yoga poses, the direct result of using the legs is freeing the spine and releasing the back muscles into more efficient, well-distributed, graceul use.

if we consider open-hipped standing poses as though the spine were able to move back and forth, in rhythm, on a stable base, eventually settling in toward center, we might then orient ourselves toward using the legs to relax the spine, the organs, the mind.

if you’ve ever crossed a bridge by foot–any bridge, even the memorial or key bridges–you can feel its give as you walk (or the cars drive) over it. a bridge is anything but rigid: its very structure is pliant and strong.

setu bandha sarvangasana, or bridge pose, offers an example of this in our own bodies. the shoulder girdle and feet ground the pose in the same way two ends of a constructed bridge are affixed to the opposite banks of a river. the pose is a backbend, and the more grounded the pose, the more open the chest, diaphragm, and breath become. bridge pose is like all poses: we are seeking to be both flexible and “stressed” simultaneously.

i asked a class last night how they defined stress. many students quickly jumped in to define what it feels like in their bodies, and the energy in the room rose even as we discussed it. as we described stress, we noticed that very stress coursing through our bodies — how else would we have been able to know it well enough to give it shape and form through our voices?

stress is a funny word. we tend to look at outside events–demanding bosses, family, and friends; world events; environmental changes; money worries–as the forces pressing in on us that then cause us to feel constricted, tight, depressed, breathless, or anxious. we wake up in the morning, rush out the door, grab coffee or tea for assistance, and roll through the day as though each change were external, beyond our control.

like a bridge, we have to have that steeliness, that stuctural resistance under conditions pressing down on us. otherwise, gravity would have its way and the universe would be an eternally imploding, never-ending black hole. on the other hand, awareness is by definition expansive, and it is a moment of awareness that enables us to realize how compressive, how “stressed,” anything is.

if we use that awareness to our advantage, we actually give in (whether physically, emotionally, or mentally) instead of resisting stress, which, hey, is strong. superficially you may think this will make you weak, but in the end, you actually bounce back into shape with more strength, form, resistance, and flexibility. it is precisely through weakness of any kind that strength occurs. strength and weakness, as a bridge demonstrates, are two peas in a pod as they conduct energy back and forth, up and down. strength is weakness, then, and vice versa.

it’s nothing more than the pulsation of energy that is happening all the time, everywhere, and nowhere at once. if you close your eyes, for example right now, and breathe, you can feel it.

we achieve awareness through meditation practice, yoga, or other mindful practices. we have to practice because gravity and intertia are strong, as anyone who has chosen to forego her regular xx-night yoga class for a drink knows. it is very easy to avoid dropping into the body by giving over to habits, usually destructive, that take us in the exact opposite direction we really need to go. that, of course, is weakness with no strength.

it is understood in modern-day ergonomics that our backs are a mess. it would be safe to say that around 2% of my students and clients claim they have loose shoulders and pain-free backs.

that’s why, whether you are an advanced student or just beginning on your yoga path–or if you are not interested in mainstream yoga but have back problems–you should try out becky’s “back to life” yoga series. it starts tonight at 730 pm, and it’s a session that runs through april 3.

becky will offer the yogic approach to healing your chronic and/or injury-based back and neck pain, and she will help you develop home and office “work” that you can do to keep yourself feeling freer in your back!

i was teaching handstand (adho mukha vriksasana) tuesday night in the 630 p open hatha class. a student, also a teacher at this studio, had settled into what my eyes told me was a quite well-executed pose. as she balanced there, i called the attention of the class to the pose because i wanted us all to observe.

as i described the various ways in which she was strong, balanced, graceful, and nearing a sensation of zero-gravity (one of the coolest side effects of any pose, and also, some would argue, the esoteric point of doing any pose in the first place), another student and yoga teacher in class commented that the back of this handstanding student’s neck looked compressed because she was lifting it to look between her hands. they wanted to know how the pose could be so well done if she was this tight in one area of her body.

the root of this observation comes from a different teaching of handstand that i, or other teachers i later discussed this exchange with, have been taught. indeed, if you look at p. 288 of iyengar’s light on yoga, or at this pose, the students (p. 288 is iyengar himself) are gazing in between their hands or further up as a point of focus.

(if you’re already bored, jump off now and save yourself).

this point of focus is called a drishti in sanskrit. drishtis have great importance in a yoga pose: the smaller the point, the greater the focus; when there is no point, there is little or no focus. this is why i have been taught to have the head raised in handstand, and also as a means of opening the chest. this can be done with no bowing of the back if the student’s core is engaged.

ana forrest, on the other hand, teaches that your head should be dropped in all poses, no matter what, as means for relaxing the neck. my understanding is that this teaching stems from modern-day issues we all have in the neck and shoulders (anyone who has studied with ana, feel free to chime in).

the teacher who questioned the head-raising-in-handstand choice and i later e-discussed this issue. showing this link and referring to a workshop where he’d learned to deepen his own inversion practice, he wrote:

The picture gives an indication of her [his example, in the link above] level of integration.During the workshop, we did a huge amount of lunge practise. One of the keys to all poses being the preparation. She was a strong believer that dropping the head was important in integrating when inverted, which then enables walking on the hands.

In my own experience, dropping the head is key. As you pointed out the cranial base and the sacro lumbar junction each require the other to release, for their [sic] to be freedom in the spine. Cranial sacral understanding of spinal fluidity seems to confer with this view. But there are no single answers and yoga requires an embrace of all possibilities.

exactly. and as i further contemplated his answer, the pose itself and, generally, what happens to the spine in inversion, i concluded, still, that in fact head dropped is unintegrated for me, and head raised is a more evolved way of looking at the pose (and, perhaps by extension, our own experience in general) for me. here are my reasons:

1) there is no such thing as a straight line. we know this from physics.

2) to this end, if the vertebrae were in fact to totally straighten (which to me the dopping of the head suggests a goal of), the spine would either implode or explode.

3) the eyes, like every other part of the pose, need to ground. that’s what relaxing into that eyes-half-closed-stare is in a drishti (think kevin smith’s mall rats: the picture of the boat)

4) when the head lifts, the heart opens. in meditation and pranayama, the idea is to keep the eyes looking downward, in an act of deference to the body and breath as guide, and to calm the nervous system. but in a yoga asana like handstand (as opposed to pachimottanasana, seated forward fold), we express our evolutionary capacity by looking up.

it’s almost as though, in this case, the heart is doing the real taking in, the actual assimilation (which by the way is where prana makes it most indelible mark). the eyes are simply two little data centers. they are ferrying in less and less distracting information by focusing on a smaller and smaller point of the outside world. this opens us up fully to the experience within.

We will be open tonight for class except for our prenatal and challenge class. these two classes will be canceled due to weather conditions.

the most common thing we hear from guys contemplating yoga is their fear over being inflexible. they’re concerned that when they get into the class, they’ll feel stupid or strange or uncomfortable trying to touch their toes when surrounded by “bendy” chicks who might as well have the floor removed under their hands because they can reach further than gravity.

here’s the news flash: bendy people are inflexible also, to such a degree that many yoga teachers, “flexible” themselves, don’t notice that, for example, a willowy woman with joints that bend like gumby is actually holding tremendous blocks in her groin, between her shoulder blades and, often, in her neck. this happens because she is so “flexible” elsewhere.

think about it as a pulse within a closed system, like the give a bridge has with all that weight traveling over it. when one spot gives, another has to tighten or else the entire structure will collapse. so make no mistake: what appears to be flexibility is often a mask for painful tightness elsewhere.

most important for most western men out there: in many ways you’re starting from a better place if you feel tight everywhere.

a) unlike the flexi-ladies, you don’t have to unlearn the pattern of being too loose in one place, and too tight in another, and

b) you are basically starting from scratch.

everything will hurt so good (thanks john cougar), and the changes in your body will appear more wide-reaching, and more pleasurable, faster. it’s easier on the mind if it has only one place to focus on (even if that one place is the entire body), versus it having to figure out what’s tight, what’s loose, and how everything works together in a more appropriately executed yoga pose.

and we’re happy to post this testimonial after the Washington Post Express article yesterday on “Downward Dudes!” i recommend reading this thoughtful, interesting account of men doing yoga (mostly at our studio!). Following are some thoughts from a male boundless student.

“I’ve tried a variety of yoga studios, in several cities and several countries, during my ongoing struggle to develop a better relationship with my somewhat inflexible, desk-bound, middle-aged male body. Boundless Yoga has been easily the best of these. What I particularly appreciate is the mindfulness BY’s instructors model for us; the adjustments that they have helped me perform — with none of the dismissive “but you’re doing it wrong!!” attitude that I have encountered elsewhere — have done not just my body but also my mind a world of good. Indeed, ‘a world of good’ would be a nice way of describing everything that BY represents.”

-gh

8-10 pm tonight

$10 at the door
Dr. Brendan Feeley launches his monthly astrology talks. come join us on this blustery winter night to learn about the astrological events influencing the month ahead.

this is a question i have been asked a lot since the beginning of the year. what is the difference, according to boundless, between an intro-to-yoga series and a beginning yoga class? further, if i am a beginner, can i take the open hatha class?

everyone learns differently, and beginning students who enjoy a step-by-step learning process will like the intro-to-yoga series. if you are a beginning student similar to the one i was when i started yoga in 1995, you will do well in a beginning yoga or open hatha class. this is because you’d rather learn more independently, as in, you’ll take the information the teacher gives you, go home or perhaps, later, to another class, and think about it. this, to you, is preferable to learning information in a packaged, more systematic way.

it’s kind of like taking the myers briggs test: if you’re a J, there’s a good chance you’ll be down with series yoga. a P, and the more random approach is for you.

put another way, learning yoga is like learning a new language, except you already know it. you’re simply allowing yourself, in whatever yoga class you take, to be reintroduced to concepts your body already understands. to the extent that poses feel weird (or, for that matter, spike your nervous system like backbends often do), that’s just your brain doing some blocking and tackling for the body. the natural flow of things is much less staccato and tin-man feeling. as you ease into this flow, the breath, and indeed the mind and body, move more freely. in short, take the class in which you know you’ll feel the most relaxed.

my practice blows. i decided that last night as i was taking a yoga class: the stresses of running a small business, in particular, and to a lesser degree my own conditioned response to take on more than i can chew, have prevented me from having a real asana (pose) practice over the past year. i have been incapable of developing space in my life to practice yoga on my own, in a way because it’s so lonely to practice that way. (therefore) i have come up with scores of other things to do, daily, other than go to my yoga room and stay there for a little bit.

like all boundless students, i am electing now to pay for what i could do, on my own, for free. i am doing this in order to practice in a community, and to put myself under the tutelage of someone who knows more than i do.

it is such a relief. i am so grateful to give myself over to two teachers (two classes a week, one in herndon, one in bethesda) who a) know what they are talking about, b) want to help me, and c) attract a group of like-minded people desiring to learn in the same way i want to learn.

in savasana (corpse pose, the last pose of class), as i struggled to be quiet and still, i was reminded of how difficult it is to relax. of course i know this–intellectually we all do. but to lie there with 30 other people and feel the whole room careen into softness, well, that’s why i titled this blog post “yoga trust.” it is critical that you feel safe in a yoga class, that your yoga teacher have the capacity to create a space in which you can, in fact, attempt to relax, and that during the more physically-based moments (learning to stand correctly, experiencing an arm balance for the first time, letting go of your self-criticisms in a forward fold) you are cared for. this caretaking might not come the way you want it; and it is up to you to determine whether the teacher is knowledgeable, ego-aware, and compassionate.

the thing is, at the end of the experience, as you relax into undoubtedly the hardest pose in the class (again, savasana), you need to feel a level of trust — that you’re in the right place, at the right time, and that it’s all good.

so i’m back in the saddle after living out of a suitcase for a month. i’ve found that traveling is oppositionally correlated to sustaining a regular blog. this is an interesting first chakra issue: when you are not grounded (and can you be, traveling? that is my question to the energy practitioners out there.), it is difficult to manifest anything, especially from your creative source.

this entry, and the ones coming up for the rest of the month, are devoted to explaining not just the types of classes we have at boundless, but our teachers and their approach. and mine. i will first start with the types of classes to answer the many questions we always receive at the beginning of every year: how should i get into yoga? how many times a week should i practice? what should i wear? what type of yoga do you teach at boundless? should i do the intro to yoga series or the beginning classes? what, in god’s name, is a “challenge” class, and how do i know if i’m up for that? can i do an open hatha class if i am a beginner? and so on.

i am recounting questions our front-desk sirens, teachers, and i have received. i’m sure there are more. start posting, start asking, and i’ll respond daily (or every other day, as i continue to unpack the suitcase) with answers explaining what class is right for you at boundless.

happy MLK day (observed)!

we are grateful and excited to introduce all these new classes to the studio starting this week! yogilates, yoga for guys, wake-up vinyasa, restorative yoga series, pranayama breath series, and more! call us or email with any questions.