Posts Tagged ‘being present’

stress is not gone

kim on 4:35 pm November 20th, 2008 / 1 Comment »

yesterday at the end of a private session with a new female client, the woman turned to me from her very first savasana (corpse pose) and said,

so, like, is this not your favorite pose? i mean, are you like the most relaxed person ever? and don’t you do this pose all the time?

i told her yes, savasana is in fact one of my favorite poses, but i don’t do it all the time, and in fact, i said,

when i’m feeling stressed out i’m actually really bad at this pose and sometimes go so far as to avoid it at the end of my practice.

this confused her. she questioned me more on how i could *not* be so totally unstressed as a result of doing yoga.

i told her that it’s not that i”m never stressed anymore–life continues to be life, and to have its natural ebbs and flows. rather, i find myself able to relax more quickly, more precisely, and more deeply.

the greatest advantage of yoga in this context, i told her, is that you begin to witness the coming stress like an arriving storm. just as you put on a raincoat, or get an umbrella, or even stay inside until the storm blows over, you observe yourself in a stressed-out state and access the breath, or do a lengthening pose here and a strengthening pose there.

using these yogic tools helps you move away from the stress response in a way that is difficult to do otherwise.

most important, practice is not at all about doing the poses *better*. it is instead about witnessing the effects the poses have on you more and more clearly.

(there are many) analyst(s)

kim on 10:48 am November 14th, 2008 / 2 Comments »

particularly as i observe my mind experiencing boundless’s imminent move, which may or may not be to 14th and T, i was struck this morning when reading a commentary by swami satchidananda, who writes a potent and clear translation of the yoga sutras:

How are we to know whether our thoughts are selfless or not? We have watch carefully the moment a thought-form arises in the mind. We become analysts. This itself is the Yoga practice–watching our own thoughts and analyzing them.

Can you run a business successfully and be selfless, I wonder? This is the question I visit and revisit often.

me and the razor

kim on 11:01 am August 18th, 2008 / Be the first to comment! »

yesterday, i was shaving in the shower. i forgot that i was doing it, actually, because this is a rote task i’ve done for more than 20 years. instead, i was doing what i usually do: analyzing not the job in front of me, but rather the past few days. I was re-experiencing conversations and experiences i’d had with friends, family, and business colleagues. i was somewhere else while my body–hand and leg–were there, experiencing the deed of wicking the hair away, down the drain, and off my leg.

at the moment i came back to being aware i was shaving without any real participation in the act, i felt the line between my eyebrows furrowed. it’s a line that acupuncture calls the “inner critic;” according to ayurveda, it lies right in between the liver and spleen lines. if you’re wrinkled there, which i was–straight down the middle–you are manifesting dis-ease of those organs, and probably of the stomach, too.

i know this, of course, and i’ve known it for years. and yet, razor in hand, i was aware of having forgotten, utterly and completely, to be present. instead, i chose to stay immersed in analyzing–criticizing–past events over which i now have no control, and which, in any event, having little or nothing to do with shaving in the shower.

for the rest of the shave, i changed my focus. i started noticing each strip of hair wicked away, feeling the weight and angle of the razor in my hand, and on the feeling of the water in the shower itself. staying focused like this had an effect opposite to what many of us might think: it relaxed the line between my eyebrows. i was aware of a calm contentment that also relaxed my upper abdomen/solar plexus area, where my stomach is.

the lesson in this information is to stay present. when you are aware of being as fully involved in any experience–shaving, crying, walking, sleeping, eating–all of your cells are also involved. at the very least, they are more occupied with the mind and body both assisting you in this task. this is a preferable state to the one in which the brain sends signals–typically ones of analysis, criticism, and discontent–to the body that have little to do with what is actually in front of you at that moment.

this is also why meditation is critical in today’s world.