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.”

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’ve lately been pondering my voice and presence in a yoga class. the type of yoga i learned originally, sri swami satchidananda’s integral yoga, teaches a particular language, sequencing, and orientation for students in the class. the vinyasa style of yoga, derived from modern-day ashtanga yoga, also arranges the class (ashtanga more than vinyasa, in this case) in a particular way.

to be sure, most forms of hatha yoga have a style of teaching rooted in similar language (inhale/exhale), sequencing (standing poses before inverted poses), and orientation to what you are actually doing in the room (pray to the divine, or just notice your muscles). today what’s interesting to me is whether or how that approach gets stale if you don’t challenge yourself to renew your approach occasionally.

i wonder what other teachers and students think about the kinds of words they want to say or hear. it’s easy to be rote; you can say the same thing about the same pose every time. on the other hand, the ways of describing the body in space and time are endless — and experimenting too much maddens.

teachers: do you find yourself wanting to repeat yourself sometimes, or are you always thinking of new ways to describe the class experience? students: do you want to hear the same thing week to week, perhaps in order to learn the poses better, or do you like the language fresh and changing each time you come to class?

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!

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 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.

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

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

-gh

so the irony of this class is that yoga, a mind/body science and philosophy, was created for and by men. for at least five thousand years until recently, yoga was practiced, philosophized, and propagated mainly by men. one quick glance at the nation’s top yoga teachers, and you’ll find mostly men.

these men, of course, are teaching mostly women. there are lots of reasons for this social imbalance (post your thoughts about it here!), but for several years i’ve waited for DC to be ready for a yoga community, dominated by women, to offer a class only for guys.

this class at boundless, taught by one of our beloved (male) teachers, chaka, is mondays at 730 pm.

the fears most men have regarding yoga is that a) they aren’t flexible enough, b) they won’t be able to “best” the class in the same way they do weights at the gym, and c) they won’t get a good enough workout.

yoga is not exercise, so men, exercise elsewhere and then come to yoga. yoga is such a holistic approach to the body that it is the best cross-training series of movements you’ll find anyhwere. you’ll learn about your innate flexbilities, even though most of your forward folds will feel horrible in the beginning. you’ll learn about using your natural strength appropriately, instead of from a place of imbalance. you’ll learn why your neck and back are so tight–and, more important, how to unwind that repetitively-built-in tension, letting it go once and for all.

finally, your partners (whether men or women), will love you more for it.

i’m serious.

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.

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!

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.

several people forwarded this new york times‘ article to me over the weekend titled, “the days of wine and yoga.” the article is about yoga-and-wine retreats planned to be held in sonoma county starting in 2007.

to her credit, the journalist explores two opposing views. “‘yoga can be very serious, sure, but why not have it be really fun?’” this, the question posed by the woman whose idea it is to launch an alcohol-assisted yoga practice. “yoga purists,” apparently, take the opposite view, which is to say that “‘drinking and [yoga] don’t go well together.”‘

i’m not sure how these two views are opposite each other, because the basic problem with calling sober-yoga serious, and wine-yoga fun, is to say that drinking makes yoga more fun. or less serious.

Seriously? another proponent of wine-and-yoga asked where we draw the line: is it at “‘tylenol? refined sugar? caffeine?”’ though this question is exactly where we could stay for a while, this woman’s question also misses the point.

the point is that yoga is about purifying the body. we practice hatha yoga, and indeed all forms of yoga, to cleanse the body’s meridian (or, in sanskrit, nadi) pathways in order to give it more opportunity to absorb and utilize prana, or chi. we breathe through a pose, a yoga class, a meditation, in an effort to stay mindful of how the body operates, as a channel, in space and time.

no matter what country, vineyard, or social custom wine is associated with, it is a toxin. the body recognizes alcohol of any kind as poison. furthermore, wine does not “relax” the body; it temporarily deadens it. wine is a beautiful, delicious, and seductive poison, but a poison it is.

another downside of drinking wine (and don’t get me wrong: we just served wine at our holiday party) is lack of proper sleep. anyone who has suffered from insomnia knows that even one glass of wine up to four hours before bed can disrupt sleep.

like yoga, sleep is designed to help the body clean and heal. therefore, the yoga teacher leading these sonoma retreats, rosemary garrison, is simply wrong when she says, “‘have a glass of wine, enjoy your night, get a good night’s sleep and come to a really cleansing, vigorous practice the next morning [at the wine-and-yoga retreat].’” it’s unlikely that, since the practitioners are at a winery that has many selections of palate-stimulating wines, anyone will drink just one glass.

it isn’t that we drink wine and do yoga, or that that we take tylenol for whatever pain we have, it’s the intention to combine the two. one is a cleansing practice designed to help the person discover her/his union with the higher self; the other is a thousands-year-old invention designed a) to achieve the effect we still desire today, and/or b) to drink in place of fetid water that otherwise killed people.

one last thing. i decided that i really couldn’t comment on a wine-and-yoga practice unless i had a direct experience doing it. so, in preparation for my practice last night, i had a glass of wine. it was a nice glass of red wine.

What I noticed in my practice was how tired I was. I stayed in poses longer, without being as interested as i usually am. I found my mind wandering, particularly to topics, and relationships, that currently leave me feeling sad. I also didn’t have much focus: I usually start my practice with some idea of what my body is wanting, and in this case I couldn’t quite get to it. So I wound up relying on poses I normally do when I can’t think of anything else. in short, for me, it was a less mindful practice than normal.

from thisislondon.co.uk.

and what you don’t: this is what’s on my mind. i’m curious what problems or questions people are having in specific poses. ask here if you have questions.

plus, as you turn upside down, you simulate an aerobic environment for your body because your heart has to work a lot harder to get the clean blood out into the system since it’s not so much on top as in this case on bottom.

that’s what i’ve been taught as a yoga student. it makes sense to me. rodney yee once claimed that you could heal your body more seriously by doing a 20-minute headstand every day than by doing almost anything else.