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.”

i was standing in line today at citibank, and i noticed that without irony, cyndi lauper’s money changes everything had been chosen to play through the speakers for customers waiting in line.

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.

so i learned last night how to customize my google home page, which was almost as exciting as when i found napster in the 90s. i was totally psyched, too, when, with two clicks from me, igoogle placed bart simpson’s and albert einstein’s daily quotes next to one another.

einstein’s quote for today inspired me to blog, and to let you know that i’ll be talking tonight at boundless yoga about the practice of yoga, 730-9 pm, for $10. we teach non-attachment in yoga, but especially as young, hoarding westerns, it’s hard for us sometimes to imagine ourselves not in possession of all the things we’ve accumulated, including our own intellectual “property.”

so the great man’s statement, “the search for truth is more important than its possessions,” provided me an instant, humble reminder of why i became a yoga teacher in the first place. i hope you can join me tonight. and, thank you, igoogle. you’re so cool!

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.

i found this blog post on the wall street journal today describing several methods scientists could potentially use to control the climate. why not install huge solar mirrors to divert solar radiation, some are asking? please, yes, let’s spend money to send thousands of crop-dusting airplanes to blanket the arctic with engineed “particles,” others say.

the salient issue in any yoga or meditation class always comes back to control: what is in your sphere of influence, and what is not. one of the practices of raja yoga (the yoga we do in studios, the yoga of the mind) is to consider all possibilities. maybe crop-dusting planes in the artic is actually the answer. perhaps the long view is that this practice will save the earth.

i’ll be honest, though: it’s when i get to this level of justification–save the earth–that i have to stop and ask myself what we’re really considering here. what are we doing, and what are we reacting to?

the sudden hype over global climate change is obviously justified; only the diehards at this point are calling the rest of us chicken littles. but the question is: what are we trying to change and why? does anyone seriously think that a 4.5 billion year old rock won’t balance itself out, even if that means destroying everything on the planet that we–its squatters, effectively–call life?

crop-dusting the arctic is like taping the sprained ankle of a basketball player and telling him to get back on the court. as any fan has watched, this star might still be able to play and, position depending, will block, defend, and/or shoot for the rest of the game. but playing will in fact make that ankle worse, which in turn will lengthen the icing, xrays, and rehab when the game is over.

it isn’t even that our short-term, scientific solutions won’t help–the player with the sprained ankle might win the game. it’s rather that these scientific forays, and indeed the money and resources backing them, run the risk of diverting the attention from the real issue, which is where we actually are now. as a collective group of 5 billion people, and certainly the billions before us, we have created this.

the questions, then, are: what human practices have directly caused this problem? how do we stop them? how do we all accept responsibility for the fact that “developing” to this point has necessarily been derived of selfish, greedy, short-sighted, and in fact quite brilliant behavior and decisions? most important, is it possible for us to let go of the hubris of control, and to recognize that the 100 years we’re here, and any decision we make during that time, is not really going to impact the 4.5 billion more years this rock might keep spinning around the sun?

the point i’m making is that looking outward and upward is not always the place to go. the weather problems we are experiencing, and will continue to “suffer through,” are nothing more than a slap from earth, like any of our moms disciplining us as children because we reached for too many cookies at once. mom had a point: eat too many cookies, and you’ll get sick.

i find it most difficult to practice yoga in relationships and moving vehicles. this is perhaps because at these times, i feel the least stable.

over the weekend, i flew home to visit my family. when the flight landed in louisville, i experienced an immediate sense of relief–not necessarily because i would be seeing family, but specifically because as soon as we landed we were at the gate. as soon as we left the gate we were at the bag check. and as soon as i got my bag, i was on my way home.

it occurred to me during this process that organizing society is not a small task. comparing the project of organizing a “louisville” versus organizing a “dc metropolitan area” is almost unfair. but here it is:

the reason my (literally grounding) experience in louisville felt so good was because it was uncomplicated, quiet, and quick. landing at any airport in dc, i can feel the tension increasing, not just among the people on the plane, but also in the airport employees, people picking people up, cab drivers, etc. i nearly always find myself tense when i land in DC, or as i fly out of it.

of course i am, to some degree, projecting this tension. however, i wonder exactly how we do it over here on the east coast. i drove a lot in louisville, and i caught myself anxiously looking in the rear view mirror if i was going too slow, or wasn’t sure where to turn, because i have grown used to the impatience of drivers around me, and often of myself, in this time-stretched city. sure enough, in my home town, no one seemed to care so much if i was impeding their progress forward.

my reaction to this experience was a little bit of sadness, and longing for an experience that does not include so much compression, confusion, and impatience. perhaps the anger is differently placed in the smaller of these two cities, and by definition, i guess, there is less of it. but damn, the beltway and its road rage are deep. i’m not sure there are many other places like it in the world.

i will work on this for myself. but i wonder how we all, as a community of people who barely know each other, could cooperate differently in this huge metropolitan area so that things didn’t feel so tense.

last week i said i’d be posting until the end of the month on which classes were right for you. i’ve elected to cancel tonight’s challenge class because george bush is giving his annual state of the union; the other time i canceled this class was in 2003, the night he announced our invasion of iraq. as i reconnect with my own physical practice, which i lost for much of 2006, i’ve remembered an important lesson from yoga. doing the asanas (poses), especially the basic ones once you’ve done them repetitively for a while, is like riding a bike. going through the motions is easy; your body has muscular memory associated with triangle poses, tree pose, and so on.

what’s difficult to to do, when you’re actively involved in deepening your practice, is to walk that fine line between physical and mental challenge. as the boundless teachers and i discussed at a staff meeting over the weekend, physical and mental challenge are often inversely correlated. in other words, to feel physically challenged is sometimes to be mentally checked out of what the body is really experiencing–and that’s actually very natural, since the brain deals with pain and discomfort in myriad ways. ask anyone who works in an ER: the variations between people’s perception of their own pain is astonishingly great.

therefore, as you introduce what the mind considers “pain” or “discomfort” to the body, the brain, trying to be a good muscle like all the others, assists the situation in the best way it knows how. the trick is to use your own powers of observation–this process of seeing, sensing, experiencing the moment is not the brain, but the greater awareness we all have access to, all the time. it is a much larger picture than the brain is actually capable of giving you.

so in my challenge yoga class, which i’m converting April 3 to an intensive evening class every tuesday 7-930 p, i ask the students to perform more “challenging” poses, but with a deepening knowledge of their own body in space and time. that means that the poses are just the means through which the students observe their mind. this is difficult at the end of a 10-minute headstand. it’s challenging when attempting to observe the finer details of triangle pose. it’s particularly tough in savasana (corpse pose).

but yet, there we are, taking it up a notch through the spirit of the practice, and not because we’ve become better gymnasts. flexibility and strength in a yoga pose are nothing more than a reflection of a flexible and strong mind. to be sure, i entered yoga in 1995 so inflexible that teachers would pull me off to the side during forward folds. today, i have grown so flexible that i need to get some of that unbending-ness back! it is the practice of yoga to accept that my body can swing dramatically from one extreme to the other if i let it go. then, it is my duty, and very much in my own self interest, to manage those vacillations with equanimity.

in practical terms, for challenge yoga, you need to be able to turn upside down with little fear. that means headstand, handstand, shoulderstand, forearm balance. and wheel pose. though these poses are external metaphors of internal energy, they are also practical applications of a deepening practice.

in day-to-day terms, i am canceling tonight’s class because it is the job of the yogini to observe her mind at all times. tonight’s speech, and the energy in the country (or at least in DC), is an opportunity to experience social behavior observation (yamas) and self-reflection (niyamas) that buttress the practice of yoga. if you plan on watching the state of the union as a yoga practitioner, reflect on these words before, during, and after: non-violence, truthfulness, non-stealing, moderation, non-hoarding, purity, contentment, discipline, self-education, surrender to god.

as arbitrary as time is, the beginning of a new year causes reflection. to envision a more positive 2007 for your self and community is a helpful act. envisioning reality, as both quantum physics and yoga teach, is at least half the reality occurring outside you. in other words, being clear about what you want, how you want it, and what you do with it once it happens, helps to influence the events in your immediate vicinity, if not also those farther away.

that’s why i can’t help but mention the hanging of saddam hussein. it could just be me, fascinated by the immediacy of my experience of his murder. it’s everywhere, all over the web, in hard-copy newspapers, on radio, on TV. most people i know have participated on some level in his death. thanks to modern media, everyone has witnessed this event in a place, or in a way, intimate to them.

it is difficult to answer this question: how do we pursue joy when there is this much suffering? when yoga is the science of uniting the ego self with the larger, uninterrupted, universal self (in other words: saddam is in all of us), it is yogic to honor, if not also mourn, the death of this murderous dictator. and those he killed. and those still dying and suffering.

so here we are (or at least i am, and you reading this blog), contemplating self-improvement for the new year. there is joy in life, but how do we experience it? as the adage goes, happiness is not the goal, but the path. to set your own expecations and visions for a new year, which is nothing more than a mental label for a new chapter of your own experience, you dig in, look at your response to the world around you, and decide how you want to change it.

the winter solstice is dark, literally and figuratively. it’s strange that we (is it only america?) have created such hustle and bustle during the quietest time of the year. the days are as short as they are going to be for another 365 days, and the nights as long. it is time to stay in bed longer, hug loved ones longer, and stay warm as the earth around us freezes. it’s time to contemplate what, of your daytime, out-there, yang persona, you want to bury in the cold ground.

tori is doing a vigorous practice friday, in a very american approach to the solstice. indomitable optimism is what i like to call it: she will challenge everyone to as many sun salutes as they can hack. it’s a donation class, and it starts at 415 p. the idea behind the class is that, at the moment of the solstice, you can experience the actual energy of the earth heading toward more sunlight.

and then you can go out and get drunk.

from thisislondon.co.uk.

so i was driving to the studio today to meet a client, and i was wending with the car through side streets in order to avoid any major traffic lights. love that about dc.

suddenly, as i hit the gas and drove away from a four-way stop i had just paused at (one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two), a car came barreling down the street perpendicular to mine, the driver oblivious to the stop sign she was about to run. there i was, suddenly in her line of vision and right in the middle of the crossing. she slammed on her brakes, already through her stop sign she’d just run, inches from hitting my car.

the whole thing was lucky: having my barely-accelerating car hit by another one going 30+ miles an hour would probably have sucked. i am grateful for the fact that she looked up! so, in the mini-moments i spend processing — “oh my god, what is she doing? oh my god, she is going to hit me! oh my god! she is such an idiot for driving so fast and ignoring basic traffic rules!” — i find it fascinating that i arrived at the conclusion that she was an idiot.

just before the moment that her car’s nose stopped at my car’s side, i had thrown my hand up in the air as through to stop her with my special yogic superpowers. as i began to process my anger toward her, which arose from the fear i experienced at nearly being side-swiped, i used that upraised hand to gesture at her and mouth, “what are you doing?! that’s a stop sign!” i pointed to the stop sign, reminding her of what she’d obviously already figured out; my face was in a scowl, and i’m sure i looked as afraid and angry as i felt. her face scowled back, as though it was my fault the stop sign was there.

in all, the situation was great because neither of us was physically hurt, but sucky because we both drove away with no contact, pissed at the other. how many of us have forgotten about a stop sign or nearly side-swiped someone? all of us. how many of us have almost been hit, or almost hit someone? all of us. but there this woman and i were, looking all mean at each other in a moment that arose from mindlessness, fear, and therefore anger. i drove on, and she drove on, both of us feeling bad, not least because we’d put that energy out there.

my question is: how could i have processed my fear and anger, using my powers of observation and clarity, and actually forgiven her in that moment instead of shaking an angry fist at an unwitting stop sign, and giving her the frowny-face that, at that moment, i felt sure she deserved? surely there is a better way than the character assassination that inevitably follows commuter situations such as these.

this is the time of year that time seems to take over. everyone’s walking around saying, oh my gosh, i can’t believe the year is almost over, blah blah. and then it’s off to the 30-day sprint, of parties, malls, and your computer at work, to buy, celebrate, and imbibe. the economy does its little holiday dance that everyone watching the numbers enjoys, since we’re all part of it in some way.

that’s putting a lot of energy out there. this can be exhausting, and it usually is. it’s important to keep energy in as well. though we’re all still recovering from whatever happened at thanksgiving, the holiday music and deocorations in stores and starbucks will ensure that you don’t forget where you are and what you’re supposed to be thinking of from moment to moment.

that’s why i wanted to post something about feeding yourself, nurturing yourself. it would not be such a bad intention to set this season, to stop and do something every day that takes care of you. no one needs to know about it, and in fact, the act could be as small as hugging yourself when you get home from a 15-hour day.

or it could be to meditate for five minutes, three times a week. or it could be to take two long baths. or it could be to get in touch a long-lost friend you have no issues with, just to talk and remember the brightness of being a kid.

it could be anything. be clear on how you nurture yourself first: this might even be something we need to consider first — what is it to nurture myself? — before acting on this intention at all.

as i sat down this morning to write, wishing that petworth had a latte delivery service, i was thinking about death. recently three people close to me–a good friend, my brother-in-law, and someone i work with–have all faced death with their dying grandmothers.

in talking with them about this process, especially at length last night with my friend, i’ve realized how much my perspective on life has changed through yoga. i’m open to the fact that it might also be a healthy dose of maturation, this new perspective, but frankly i’m psyched that it seems yoga has helped me become less afraid of dying.

i have been accused of being naive my whole life (did you know that word’s not in the dictionary?), and my tendency is to imagine dying as all bubblegum and lollipops: a beautiful experience that ends a beautiful life, and whether you actually go anywhere or not, shit, at least you’re not working as hard as you did on this plane.

my friend reminded me last night that dying can be ugly and painful, noisy and protracted. her grandmother chose to die over 17 days. my friend reported that at many times during that 17-day period, her grandmother, who had alzheimer’s, would suddenly tense up, look at the ceiling of the hospice room as though she were searching deeply for something, and become unresponsive to the calls of her loved ones asking her what she was looking at, or for.

during other moments, as she lay dying, she would gasp for air through her mouth, moaning in pain because her kidneys had failed her, and generally feeling, as her family observed it, pain and discontent because her body was still basically working. my friend, as she massaged her grandmother’s feet and hands, gently entreated her to let go, to give up the control she’d been used to for so many decades. how hard will that be for all of us, right?

minutes before my friend’s grandmother died, her gasping stopped. instead of rasping the breath through her mouth, this old woman started breathing in a way that my friend’s aunt could only describe as peaceful. she was breathing through her nose. the family then called in a nurse, who used a stethoscope to hear the woman’s heartbeat. after what they now know to have been her last breath, there was a pause, no exhale; the nurse told the family that she still heard a heartbeat. the family sat, rapt, waiting to see if the woman would breathe again. instead, the beat of this woman’s heart went silent.

this is why yogis call the heart region the true mind. they have been teaching for thousands of years that we come from this source, and we return to it. the eye-witness experience that my friend’s family had bears this out.

Make no mistake that you are practicing your own death, every class, in savasana, corpse pose. that’s why it’s so hard for many of us, and why we sometimes want to avoid it. you are looking into your own heart, its gentle rhythm, and letting go of attachment to your body as anything other than a pulse. you practice this as with a dress rehearsal, so that when you do it for real, you do it well.

How well you do savasana is correlated only to how well you can relax. You can’t do anything in this pose but watch your own body, and then let it go, a near-perfect analog to life itself: the idea is to stay here not as long as you can, but as well as you can.

of the first chakra is your relationship to gravity. it’s the sensation of being both connected to, and bouyant on, the planet. the extent to which you feel or don’t feel this translates emotionally to the sensations of abundance or scarcity. a lion lolling around in the grass, fat and happy from his last kill, is feeling abundance. a lion scrounging around for the next small prey to nab because the zebras are hard to come by, is feeling scarcity.

i have learned that 98% of our DNA is the same as the rest of the animal kingdom, and to the extent this is a fact, the scarcity/abundance pendulum swing that nature experiences is mirrored in us.

the work of consciousness allows you to notice, swill around, and expand a sensation. this is what we do when we “ground” in a yoga posture: you find the strength, girth, and buoyancy in the legs, and then you notice the spine relaxing. this is moving into a feeling of stillness akin, perhaps, to the sensation of abundance. this is not the feeling of not-enough, of i need more, of i am not good enough.

you always have enough internal resources, but you have to feel them before you can know them.

after yesterday’s post, i decided it’s a good idea to distinguish in these posts between the yoga of the internal world, and that of the external experience. discussions on politics, society, living in dc or wherever, is an exploration of yoga, the uniting of the lower and higher selves, outside of us. the yoga that takes place in the classroom, on your own mat, and, inside you in any situation really, is an exploration of the inner world of yoga.

i believe we will see that the two are the same, but depending on who and where you are spiritually, physically, and emotionally, you might be more interested in one or the other.

in other news, following are good poses for a hangover:

1) child’s pose, laying on several blankets to support the belly and increase attention to breath in that area

2) pigeon pose, ditto on blankets

3) exhaling through mouth. it takes the heat out of the system and, as i’ve been taught, 70% of the body’s toxicity (i want to do more research on this because i’ve learned this 70% business in the yoga world but haven’t seen it anywhere else).

4) a lot of corpse pose, savasana

Physicians until the 15th century had to also be astrologers before they could practice medicine.  astroprofile.com.

so today a friend suggested i post about the word “guru,” since a google search on “rove guru” leads you to top media sites calling karl rove “bush’s guru,” “chief political guru,” “key political guru.” a discussion on the definition of guru would be awesome.

but i don’t want to do that today. my energy is instead focused today on planting hyacinth, tulip, and daffodil bulbs in my front yard, and right now i’m avoiding doing it (not just because it’s raining but) by posting more random thoughts to keep yogibeer, ommm, laughing lotus, and, now, yogadawg, engaged in this blossoming blog.

first: i like the concept that everything is connected. should that be on the back of boundless yoga tshirts?

second: to the extent everything is connected, then every action effects (a) result. that means, for example, every sound i utter is out there somewhere until it hits a wall or a tree or something strong enough to absorb it. and then what? i think it’s still there, except hidden in the tree or the wall or the pavement. so everything i say comes back to me. does that mean i should curse less (because if so, damn, that’s going to be hard)? this makes me want to understand the words “connect” and “connection.”

third: the thing i like most about yoga is that different from other philosophical disciplines, it is an exploration of the body’s thought patterns via feeling those patterns in the body. this is my undersanding of gounding, and it means you have to experience it to understand it. moving the body around shakes shit out of it, leaving you feeling cleaner and clearer. the thing i disliked about philosophy classes in college was that all we did was sit around and talk and then write and then read and then write and talk some more.

fourth: my friend, jj gormley, suggested that women are first interested in yoga through its movement portion, asana (or the poses, yogibeer), and that men are first interested in yoga through meditation. i love that idea because i think it’s connected to the difference between men’s and women’s corpus colossums (is the real latin plural “colossi?”)