Archive for the ‘Kim’s Blog’ Category
hey princess, what’s with the lipstick
kim on 1:53 pm October 26th, 2006 / 5 Comments »
so i was leaving DC by car yesterday afternoon, and i was behind a DC bus that had an advertisement about negligent driving. it didn’t frighten me like the ad with the guy whose face is half-human, half-rabid animal (depicting aggressive not negligent driving), but i felt bad when i saw it. i actually felt defensive and angry.
is meditation happy?
kim on 1:33 pm October 25th, 2006 / Be the first to comment! »
on monday night, one of my meditation students reminded me of something i’ve been thinking about lately. the most important lesson she learned when she started meditating was that meditation does not = happiness. at least in the beginning.
that’s a big reason for avoiding it. one of my favorite teachers, paul grilley, said one of his meditation students complained that meditation made her anxious. he explained that it wasn’t the meditation that made her more anxious; becoming still in meditation made her aware of the undercurrent of anxiety in her body.
another example: when i recently increased the duration and regularity of my meditation practice, for at least three weeks i found myself crying daily at the drop of the hat.
so was i happy when i cried? was paul’s student happy when she felt anxious? the answer is maybe not. the advantage to observing these states of mind, however, is huge: thinking is the body’s way of keeping out awareness. when you meditate, you are watching the thinking mind settle down so that the awareness mind can arise. thinking and awareness occur in inverse proportion to each other. we need the former to operate in the world; we need the latter to enjoy it. if we are unable to be aware of the levels of anxiety, or sadness, or even happiness in the body, we are living a mindless life.
why wait to take vinyasa?
kim on 9:39 pm October 22nd, 2006 / Be the first to comment! »
though we recently took this languaging off the site, we’ve always recommended that boundless students, even the yoga nomads wandering in off the streets of dc and from other studios, take our beginning-level classes before doing vinyasa.
this entry serves as reentry of that language onto our site, because we recommend you know the basics of yoga asanas before you learn the basics of vinyasa yoga.
vinyasa yoga is fast, and it is rooted in one of the most popular aspects of yoga today, surya namaskar, or sun salutes. a typical vinyasa class includes a lot of these salutes, which practitioners enjoy because they can get lost in the breath instead of worrying so much about how they should be organizing their body in time and space.
the downside is that you can go too fast and hurt yourself. though there is a strong argument in the yoga world that injuries are your body’s way of teaching you, we at boundless prefer to take a little time to learn the details of poses, and then speed it up if you want to. plus, holding poses longer, whether it’s in the iyengar tradition, or its opposing style, yin yoga, can teach you a lot about the body because it forces the breath less.
and forcing the breath is what we attempt to move away from in a yoga class.
what are open classes?
kim on 12:00 pm October 20th, 2006 / Be the first to comment! »
recently we changed the names of our classes to: open hatha, open vinyasa, beginning, and challenge. thanks to feedback from boundless teachers and students, we made this change because our intention is to provide a cross-level learning environment for all shapes, sizes, and “levels.”
the practice of yoga is the point of yoga, since tooling around with your body is like doing the same with an instrument or, for that matter, a tool. i doubt anyone picks up a chainsaw without having some knoweldge about the way it works, and we certainly can’t play an octave on the piano without knowing a little bit about fingering.
it’s exhilarating to do such poses as pinca mayurasana and vasisthasana, but executing these poses without attention to the breath, ego, and the purpose of the pose itself, is like blogging to see your words on the page. plus, there is so much to learn about the poses we would otherwise avoid, we might as well go to class and get a well-rounded yoga education.
here’s how we recommend taking classes at boundless: start with beginning yoga or open hatha to learn, respectively, the basics and alignment/energy flows through longer-held poses. then, after a few months, if you want more sweat and/or endorphines, try open vinyasa, the faster-paced version of hatha yoga. if you have any other questions about what class is right for you, let me know, or talk with susan or paulette at the studio, 202.234.9642.
the difference between hatha and vinyasa
kim on 9:38 pm October 19th, 2006 / 4 Comments »
a new student at boundless asked us what classes would be right for her in the “open” environment. here’s what i responded:
“you might already know that ‘hatha,’ which means a union of ‘sun’ and ‘moon,’ is the word that describes all physical yoga. so vinyasa, ‘hot’ yoga, bikram, ashtanga, all of it is hatha.
“hatha in our day and age has come to be associated, though, with slower movements in class than the styles i listed above, with longer-held postures and a deeper attention to the breath. faster-paced styles such as vinyasa, which boundless yoga also offers, create a different kind of movement experience: more sweat, less thinking about your body in time and space, getting lost in the rhythm.
“most of our classes, which we call ‘open hatha,’ offer a learning environment with a focus on your body in time and space. we like to see how you are doing the poses, how you are breathing, how you are thinking about your body. this, we feel, helps create change that the mind can be aware of when it happens.”
