i’ve just finished reading the last of boundless’s 2007-8 boundless teacher training papers, which is a requirement for graduation. omg love them! i asked the trainees first to take one page to define yoga — to put this vast word into a few paragraphs that would then serve a their thesis for the paper. here’s what one trainee wrote on p. 1:

in the modern western world, the understanding of what yoga is and how it is practiced in the mainstream has been reduced to one limb — asana. facilitated by the reductionist principles of western medicine and the fitness movement, with its focus on the physical well-being of the body separate from the emotional, mental, and spiritual body, asana has been extracted from a whole and has come to represent what was intended to be a multidimensional philosophy.

this student goes on to pose the following questions for her paper:

How does this extraction of asana and reduction of yoga affect the efficacy of the practice in stilling the modifications of the mind? What are the benefits and the possible harm induced by only practicing asana? What happens if you practice yoga with selfish or misguided intent? Do you create karma for yourself as you would if you gave to charity based on self interest? does the simple act of aligning the body and increasing your awareness and concentration make you more open to learning and seeing the world through clearer eyes? By allowing the body to function at a healthier leavel, do the mind and the heart function at a healthier level? What can a modern mainstream yogi achieve by knowing only a small part of a holistic system intended to offer a path for the balanced and healthy physical, physiological, emotional, and spiritual existence?

clearly a lot!

i just got off the phone with my husband, who is buying a black winter coat, a coat he does not currently own. the jacket is 40% off its original price, which is a great deal for December. he called to discuss the purchase, and to justify it he said,

“the thing is, i lack [a] black [coat].”

i thought this was a good justification for spending money, and it got me thinking about shopping in general, since many of us will me doing a lot of it in the next 20+ days.

a good way of shopping could be to buy the item only when

1) you want to walk out of the store wearing the item you like/love it so much,

or

2) you need that specific item because you actually do not have any (or one) of them.

another thing i’ve done today is watch this live puppy cam.

in savasana, there is an excellent opportunity to navel gaze. imagine your thighs–and indeed the bones of the thighs and legs–dropping toward the ground to such a degree that the tops of the thighs feel flat and smooth.

or at least like rolling hills. calm, rolling rounds of earth.

so i thought today of an interpretation of this.

the energetic bodies of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd chakras live in and alongside the tailbone and legs; abdomen; and solar plexus, respectively. their physical properties are those of earth, water, and fire–or earth, oceans/waters, and the sun.

think of using your inner eye and looking down at your own sun, water, and earth–as from the sky–and determining how your own inner planet is doing at that moment. how hot the sun, how turbulent or calm and rhythmic the waters, how stable the ground.

yesterday at the end of a private session with a new female client, the woman turned to me from her very first savasana (corpse pose) and said,

so, like, is this not your favorite pose? i mean, are you like the most relaxed person ever? and don’t you do this pose all the time?

i told her yes, savasana is in fact one of my favorite poses, but i don’t do it all the time, and in fact, i said,

when i’m feeling stressed out i’m actually really bad at this pose and sometimes go so far as to avoid it at the end of my practice.

this confused her. she questioned me more on how i could *not* be so totally unstressed as a result of doing yoga.

i told her that it’s not that i”m never stressed anymore–life continues to be life, and to have its natural ebbs and flows. rather, i find myself able to relax more quickly, more precisely, and more deeply.

the greatest advantage of yoga in this context, i told her, is that you begin to witness the coming stress like an arriving storm. just as you put on a raincoat, or get an umbrella, or even stay inside until the storm blows over, you observe yourself in a stressed-out state and access the breath, or do a lengthening pose here and a strengthening pose there.

using these yogic tools helps you move away from the stress response in a way that is difficult to do otherwise.

most important, practice is not at all about doing the poses *better*. it is instead about witnessing the effects the poses have on you more and more clearly.

yoga is one of the world’s main transformative practices of the body and mind.

the body is simple. the mind, on the other hand, has many elements, but its main purpose is to establish pattern as early as possible in order to ensure survival. for example, if every day you forgot how to eat, speak, or sleep, your life would be destructively inefficient.

too much of a good thing, however, is bad. that’s why the first, most potent, and most lasting pattern that nearly all yoga practitioners create for themselves is:

i can’t do that.

I would love all yoga students to check that statement out when they notice it emerging in the mind. the underlying context, the mind’s real statement is:

this is a new thing i’m confronted with, and i don’t understand it. therefore, i am going to stop right here and revert to the pattern of thinking i already know, which creates less immediate stress on me.

(it’s kind of like being in college, when in the freshman eating hall you sit with your dorm mates, class mates, or friends from home. it’s scary to go eat with someone totally new–omg the potential gross digestion from all that stress of talking to someone you’ve never met before!)

the real essence of any yoga class–by definition of it being called a yoga class–is the attempt to evolve, whether that’s through “relaxation,” “working hard,” or “playing your edge.” however the mind defines these terms, these terms are by definition always changing.

i was just thinking yesterday that the english words “meditation” and “medication” are separated by only one letter. they both come from Latin:

[Origin: 1550–60; < L meditātus, ptp. of meditārī to meditate, contemplate, plan]

[Origin: 1615–25; < L medicātus medicated (ptp. of medicāre), healed (ptp. of medicārī). See medical, -ate1]

my theory was there existed an original similarity, but in honesty i don’t see it.

what interested me was discovering that the original meaning of medicated is defined by one word, “healed.” i wondered at that point how many people taking medication today feel healed by the medication they take.

that line of thinking led me further to ask the question i ask my energy clients all the time:

what does it mean to heal? to “be” healed?

one conclusion: if we meditated more, we’d medicate less.

i was teaching a client this pose on friday, and he was doing a great job: balanced, focused, and only slightly wobbly.

right at the moment i uttered a few words like “nice job!” he fell out of the pose. like many students doing this pose, he laughed as he fell out. then he said, “you know, at that moment i felt balanced and unbalanced at the same time, kind of like zero-gravity.”

two things i took from this:

1) i love how students laugh when they are falling out of this pose. different from so many other poses, it’s pretty obvious that you are simulating something you’re not, and you’re “pretending” to be still like a tree when you feel anything but.

2) the moment just before falling out of tree is the moment we’re all practicing for. it’s that sensation of having harnessed gravity only to feel light.

last night, in the yoga class i take, we spent a longer time than usual in the first two poses, down dog and handstand. then, to prepare for some other strength poses and backbends, we did a preparation for this pose. we were near, and with our backs to, the wall, and we had to press the tops of the feet into the wall to lengthen the spine and not give way to the low back.

i found the class very challenging, and i was focused on all sorts of things. but before this class, i had gotten a pedicure, and it hadn’t dried. so in doing this pose, with the tops of the feet and my painted toes pressed firmly into the wall, i lost the superficial benefits of the pedicure.

while i was in the pose, that’s what i was thinking about. during all the other poses, when my toes were not pressed into anything, i was focused on dropping my shoulder blades, lengthening my tailbone, observing my breath — among the requisite details for maintaining a safe and energetically charged asana. but during this preparation pose, i was not focused on anything other than the “ruin” of the time and money i’d just spent.

i don’t remember what the pose felt like. after that point, i occasionally gazed regretfully down at my toes and noticed my difficulty in staying present. at those times, i was not in my body, but in my memory, and in the desire for reality to be other than it was.

so i will not be getting pedicures anymore before yoga class.

last night in yoga class with john schumacher at unity woods, i noticed in meditation how the eyes either help or hinder.

i meditate almost every day. as with last night, i often catch myself in a thought or series of thoughts that i can immediately map into an experience of stress or discontent in my body. worry is a big one: i suddenly realize i’m fretting about a conversation i’ve just had with my mother, or thinking about finances, and i can feel tension in my shoulders and a swirly, uncomfortable heat in my solar plexus.

but last night, noticing myself running along one of these stress roads, i experienced the eyes. they, too, were, running all over the place: rolling around and looking for more and more images as my mind produced the thoughts.

we are creatures of habit and, to support a system designed to live on patterns, the eyes mimic the patterns our eyes follow in response to thoughts during our waking days. indeed, if you watch someone sleep, their eyes roll around to mirror the images the brain produces in its yin state.

so, in meditation at the end of class last night, i observed my eyes relaxing, and poof! at least for a few minutes, i forgot to think. this created a state of calm i observed for some time after.

like all animals, humans conform to the environments they live in. specifically, we conform to this shape

more than any other in our lives. it’s very likely that you are in this shape more hours than you walk or sleep combined.

that’s where yoga postures come in. the iyengar method of yoga practice pays a lot of attention to detail, and the more advanced you get, the more it suggests you drop into this pose

from a standing position. since we know that for every action there is an equal and opposite one, we could say that wheel pose, or urdhva dhanurasana, creates a shape opposite to hold ourselves most of the time outside of yoga class.

and since yoga and other mind-stilling practice are rooted  in the concept of the middle path of balance, this pose looks like a nice, yogic way to reach mind/body balance.

there are a lot of other poses to create openness in the chest and abdomen like wheel pose does. ask your yoga teacher this week about these poses.

paying attention to your alignment when doing yoga postures makes sense in the same way it makes sense to feel and be quiet when are walking through the woods. if you grow still enough to notice the sounds and movements around you in nature, you find yourself able to take in all kinds of data that come in as neither overwhelming nor stressful.

When you are in a yoga class, listen to your teacher as well as the sounds of your breath. notice the look of your arm upraised in warrior 1, or the toes in seated forward fold. the more you allow yourself to take in these details as though you were part of them — like they are in and of your world, just as the trees and the ground and the bushes in the woods — the more you notice. and the more you steady yourself into relaxing.

relaxing into the world around you requires a relaxation from within. we have yoga postures in order to measure and observe our daily ability to take in that world. it’s a process, and you learn (and get better at it) only by practicing.

yesterday, after a restorative class i’d taught her, a client of mine said,

huh, that’s interesting. so restorative yoga is mostly about bending the spine this way and that way, in order to release it.

she was sitting when she said this. when she said “this way” she bent forward; when she said “that way,” she bent backward.

it was a simple moment after a simple practice. What struck me, though, was not that her observation is mostly correct–restorative yoga requires the practitioner to hold poses for long periods of time in order release through the spine in several directions. what struck me was the point my client was making about all yoga poses. the point of yoga is always to release energy through the spine. that’s what makes an asana (pose) different from just about any other practice you could engage in.

one of the markers of the west is its emphasis on the superficial. yoga, by definition, is intended to take us away from that superficiality into deeper levels of consciousness–through the unwinding of the spine. each pose has been designed over thousands of years to enable us to examine the steadiness and ease in each posture–so that we can examine the stillness, or lack thereof, in our own minds.

and thus, we engage in practice. even one of the most demanding poses you could imagine:

is meant to release energy through the spine for the same purpose as the most relaxed you could imagine:

this is what we are learning in a yoga class– how to be steady and easy no matter what the “pose.”

sometimes that’s what it takes. to peel yourself off the wall of your own patterns, to go inside and let the breath take you.

an asana (pose) actually takes a lot of control — that’s why we refine them over time and attempt more difficult ones as our practice deepens.

the more we control the body’s response to the shape, which exists outside us in nature (triangle, mountain, tree), the more we free the breath, which exists inside, to enliven us exquisitely.

this, the paradox of practice.

the first or “root” chakra, muladhara, vibrates through the bones, specifically through the tailbone, legs, and feet. in noticing this vibration, we grow more in touch with the experience of home, safety, security, all-things-in-order, and the weight and roots of mother earth.the most important sentient experience we have rising up from this lowest chakra is trust. the more we can define the bodily experience of trust versus its enemy, fear, the more we can live harmoniously with the overall rhythm of our planet, a small rock amid billions of others.

experienced in a yoga class, the first chakra comes alive in the legs, eyes, and inner ears. the stronger and more tubular the legs, the more relaxed and receptive the eyes and ears (and, by association, the rest of the senses).

try it. in your standing poses this week, imagine your legs waking up like as though they were controlled by that game litebrite some of played as kids, and see how you feel. post here to tell me what happens.

i read in my day-by-day calendar, insights from the dalai lama:

only human beings can judge and reason; we understand consequences and think in the long term. it is also true that human beings can develop infinite love, whereas to the best of our knowledge animals can have only limited forms of affection and love. however, when humans become angry, all of this potential is lost. no enemy armed with mere weapons can undo these qualities, but anger can. it is the destroyer.

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.

i am often asked how many times you should go to yoga class to experience its benefits. it’s a good question, born of the desire to improve; to feel better; to be longer, stronger, more lithe.

typically, i give a standard answer: “well, two times a week is good; three times a week is ideal when you’re starting out.” and then, typically, we talk about impediments to such a “routine,” or about what else one should do (run, workout, weights) in addition to yoga.

lately i’ve been wondering why i answer that way. giving someone concrete data (once/week = this; twice/week = that; three times/week = nirvana) can create stress, because you start thinking, shit! if i only go once, that means i’m less than good! if i go four times i’m more than ideal! personally, i don’t want to create that dialogue.

so, after talking with someone today–actually a friend of a friend trying to help boundless get its vendor credit card rates down–i’ve decided that i like this answer:

breathing is the first and last thing you’ll ever do, and in a yoga class you are essentially re-creating a relationship with your breath. years of behavior, thoughts, and (therefore) movement patterns have stifled the breath and redirected it in inefficient ways. “ideally” (here’s where the word feels so much better!), every yoga class will enable you to reexamine that relationship, such that you are aware of your breathing walking home, going to bed, getting up the morning, going to work the next day.

for some, this relationship will demand daily attention. for others, once every two weeks. still others, those at the top of the bell curve, between two and three times a week is advisable. but that’s only because we’re recreating new memories, new patterns in the system. introduce any “thing” to the mind/ego, and it will jump to the front and say, OK! i get it! i will do that again! er, um, but wait, how do i do that again? what was that thing that worked so well and felt so good? for most of us, the mind, and therefore the body, needs a reminder more than once a seven-day cycle — as in, more than once a week.

let your breath take you to class; let it remind you to start breathing, really. create a a simple intention to start feeling the prana, or qi (pronounced “chee”) flood into the system the way a flashlight bleeds through a dark room. then you’ll know how often to go to yoga class.

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.

 

 

 

thanks to the new york times article last week, i’ve reconnected with several old friends. one, from my hometown of louisville, reminded me of some conversations we had at least 10 years ago about getting to know a place. at the time, we contemplated what it would be like to stay in a place for a long time, versus traveling a lot of places to live, or stay, for only a brief while.

we can look at this concept in asanas. while my friend suggests the idea is to stay put, to look around, really, and to understand the climate, topography, and personalities of a place, my idea was that traveling was so important: how can you know anything if you don’t expose yourself, physically, mentally, emotionally, to a lot?

now i see the merit in both approaches. since the body is the only landscape we’ll ever know, why not try traveling through it quickly, alighting with the mind to experience a place–the abdominals, the calves? then, in your practice or through the classes you choose, stay for a while in a pose. try a forward fold for, like, five minutes and see what happens.

it’s this comparative, internal experience that we have right here inside us that offers myriad lessons, easily extrapolated to the outside experience. and once we realize that neither experience is actualy different from the other in the end, we begin to understand yoga, union, oneness.