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.

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 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.

so we (boundless teachers and staff) are finalizing our agreement on boundless’s values. we’ve got the mission down (see right if you are reading this on the home page), but we have been debating and discussing the values. they will be up this week.

if you can vote or give me info on this piece; i think it’s an important thing to reflect on:

• honoring the body as our first home, and trusting it at all times

versus

• honoring the body as our first home, and keeping it safe at all times

because sometimes we need to feel a little unsafe in order to effect
change, right? surely a butterfly emerging from its cocoon doesn’t feel
totally SAFE, but i would suggest that it feels TRUST. when we are facing
our demons in meditation, or handstand, or in a deep backbend, playing the
edge of safety is, in effect, deepening your TRUST in the fact that it’s
all good.

the purpose of this bullet is to identify the importance of rooting into
the first chakra, or (in a combined first/second chakra) MOTHER EARTH. i
don’t think we feel SAFE in a hailstorm, but we have to TRUST that she’s
throwing ice down on us for a reason.

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.

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.

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.

i was driving back from vacation in upstate new york last night and i thought it was a joke. i’d been on 15 north most of the time; it’s a road that takes you through neighborhoods, strip malls, and, the other half of the time, a pseudo-highway. i quite like it, because most of the time it feels homey.

it was late, around 11 pm, by the time i hit I-270. all of a sudden, as though a switch had been turned on, every car on the road was hurtling past me at 20 miles over the speed limit. i was already speeding — my self-justified, cop-friendly, nine-miles-an-hour-in-excess — so i, too, was one of these speeders. but as perhaps is the underlying debate on drunk yoga, it seemed a matter of degrees. we were all still going very fast, and as we all know high speeds in any car at any time are dangerous, but the shock of being passed by court-worthy speeders was an interesting experience.

at 11 pm at night, our bodies are designed to rest. having spent a week away from this city, to then be introduced to it at a time when the sun had been down for a good six hours, was a jolt.

it got me thinking: just how out of balance are we? when there is that much movement, so unremitting and close to you, how closed can you be from it? at this particular moment, i noticed my heart beat increase, my palms sweaty, and my brow slightly furrowed. perhaps because i practice yoga, perhaps because i’d been away, or perhaps because you just can if you want to because it’s really not that hard, i slowed everything down: my mind, my heart, my car.

it was in the moment i felt tremendous gratitude for the ability to recognize how i felt, and for the tools to get down off the ledge — one that shows up as though you’re in a video game — out of nowhere.

one of my intentions for the new year is to slow down and, in doing so, notice if i can actually be present in my body more often. i plan to do this because i think it is healthier, and though i’m not sure how long i will live, i want to do so well.

to keep up your practice over the holidays, visit a yoga studio you trust at home, or where you are visiting. or, try basic poses such as: down dog, legs up the wall, child’s pose, lying down twist, or a few warriors (1, 2, or 3). don’t worry about whether you are doing the poses “correctly;” just enjoy them and keep the prana moving during a consumptive, busy, and often stressful holiday season!