i heard here three or four times today a quote by an unidentified woman, telling the NPR Reporter that for the downwardly spiraling economy,

there are no silver bullets here…The best the Fed can do is throw pillows down to soften the landing.”

lately i’ve been thinking about karma, which evolved from a Sanskrit word whose pronunciation matches that of caerimonia, or ceremony, ritual.

On this side of the dateline, we tend to define karma as the apostle Paul did: “Man reaps what he sows.” “What goes around, comes around.”

I’ve always had trouble with the term “karma yoga” as defining good acts, because then you aren’t you still attached to getting only goodness in return? it seems to me you can do anything and still be practicing karma yoga. What if you’re ok with doing something neutral or negative, and with being prepared to experience that same thing some point in the future?

Asking for negative acts to come back to you might even been like saying “bring it” to the universe.

Lately, I am examining karma by being aware of an emotional state I am uncomfortable with, for example, depression, sorrow, anger, or frustration. I drive almost every day, and I often feel “cut off” by someone rushing to their job, home, a bar, their dying grandmother.  My heart jumps as the other driver speeds past me and into my lane, my breathing changes, and at least 50% of the time, I find myself reacting in anger. this anger comes from the fear of experiencing an accident.

as i experience this sensation, i imagine that i have done that exact thing to someone before. when i wedge in this stop sign on the road of my own reaction, a mental shift occurs:

1) My negative emotion changes or goes away.

2) I see immediately the universe’s answer to a previous demand from me entitled, “bring it”.

9 times out of 10, i can recall an instance in which i have acted toward someone in exact the way that i am currently uncomfortable with.

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.

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.

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.

the great bill moyers was interviewed on Npr’s fresh air today, and he recalled a conversation he’d had with joseph campbell, the popular scholar of mythology, said this:

if you want to change the world, you change the metaphor.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“CAM,” or Complementary and Alternative Modalities, is a healthcare movement trying to get your attention. Lobbyists and other interested parties are right now encouraging the submission of comments to the FDA regarding a “guidance” that the FDA will use, effectively, to make herbs, vitamins, and minerals “medicine.” from what i can tell on first glance, this means that our access to these earth-based (as in, naturally occurring) materials will be significantly restricted (and drive the price higher). a full copy of the proposal from the FDA is here.

i don’t understand the issue completely, but several of the emails i’ve received in the last 24 hours point to this site as an important read if you are interested in whether or not pharmaceutical companies exert a strong level of control over the FDA.

there’s also a lot on this site, including the option to send your signature on a petition to stop the FDA. to comment to the FDA directly, go here.

if you know anything more about this issue and care to explain it on this site, i am very interested. i will do more reading and post the same.

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.

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.

veternarians consider pigs as intelligent as dogs. dogs are considered as intelligent as the average two-year-old child.

from the new york times today.

i observed this sensation last night thumbing through a catalog. sometimes it’s a comfort not to fight the grain, not to be so individual as to refuse to allow yourself the pleasure of receiving the efforts of people you’ll never know–these people, who are working day in and out to assess which daybed, rug, or wall hanging you’ll buy. of course we’re discussing money, so perhaps these supply-side people don’t care. on the other hand, as i (also) learned from a car commercial recently: “you’re our top priority because you’re the one in the driver’s seat.”

this leads me to a commercial that aired late during the academy awards. the commercial was for safeway’s organics line. a couple, both aryan and smiling, were sitting on a couch with blue and yellow tshirts. the tshirts had small writing on the chest of each actor.

the tshirts listed definitions (in the format of miriam webster) of the character these actors represented. i saw the commercial twice but didn’t look closely at the definitions until i saw, the second time, “intermediate yoga” on the woman’s shirt–this, in addition to something about her being funnier than she realizes.

since i am in the business of peddling peace, specifically the peace found through the practice of yoga, i became very interested in safeway’s message. is there enough of a demographic of “intermediate” 30-something yoginis (married to and/or dating and/or snuggling with blonde dudes on couches in broad daylight) to warrant this label on international TV with the oft-cited “billion people watching”? and if this is the case, does this woman represent a demograhpic of white, organic-eating, fair-trade-coffee-drinking, intermediate yoga practitioners out there? more to the point, as much as we in the yoga world may appreciate such marketing, how do you feel about having this particular woman-character represent your attempts to eat, love, and practice discovering union inside your self?