Posts Tagged ‘inner yoga’

and then to nurture

kim on 12:17 pm November 28th, 2006 / 1 Comment »

this is the time of year that time seems to take over. everyone’s walking around saying, oh my gosh, i can’t believe the year is almost over, blah blah. and then it’s off to the 30-day sprint, of parties, malls, and your computer at work, to buy, celebrate, and imbibe. the economy does its little holiday dance that everyone watching the numbers enjoys, since we’re all part of it in some way.

that’s putting a lot of energy out there. this can be exhausting, and it usually is. it’s important to keep energy in as well. though we’re all still recovering from whatever happened at thanksgiving, the holiday music and deocorations in stores and starbucks will ensure that you don’t forget where you are and what you’re supposed to be thinking of from moment to moment.

that’s why i wanted to post something about feeding yourself, nurturing yourself. it would not be such a bad intention to set this season, to stop and do something every day that takes care of you. no one needs to know about it, and in fact, the act could be as small as hugging yourself when you get home from a 15-hour day.

or it could be to meditate for five minutes, three times a week. or it could be to take two long baths. or it could be to get in touch a long-lost friend you have no issues with, just to talk and remember the brightness of being a kid.

it could be anything. be clear on how you nurture yourself first: this might even be something we need to consider first — what is it to nurture myself? — before acting on this intention at all.

compassion and christ

kim on 9:44 am November 27th, 2006 / 4 Comments »

nearly every yoga or meditation teacher i’ve had talks about compassion. in yoga circles, we discuss compassion. the day after the election, my current yoga teacher led a chant about compassion.

in my own yoga classes i sometimes bring it up — but not that much, because there’s something about the word that keeps me guessing. i understand and feel it, and my intention daily is to practice it, but daily i also find that relationships and traffic and bills get the best of me. these often take me out of touch, out of focus, from what i know to be compassion, especially for myself and my perceived struggles.

so i looked the word up today on dictionary.com. i was astounded. did i know this before? had i forgotten it? could i have gone this long without knowing such an interesting word root? is mel gibson so lame that i’ve blocked it out?

[Origin: 1300–50; ME (< AF) < LL compassi?n- (s. of compassi?). See com-, passion]

we know what “com-” means. so, curiously, i loooked up passion:

[Origin: 1125–75; ME (< OF) < ML passi?n- (s. of passi?) Christ's sufferings on the cross, any of the Biblical accounts of these (> late OE passi?n), special use of LL passi? suffering, submission, deriv. of L passus, ptp. of pat? to suffer, submit; see -ion]

woah. i’m sure there’s more to this word, but based on my very unscientific relationship with dictionary.com, compassion as a word a) is old, and b) refers to a specific thing (event? person?) in a way that many other words don’t.

it’s my job to say that if you’re practicing yoga, you’re learning compassion. it’s my personal interpretation of my job to say that if you’re learning compassion, you need to understand the energy of the word and its connotations. as with all truths, compassion is easy to know, but difficult to cultivate, nurture, and practice. and you have to start inside before you can take it on the road.

what this has directly to do with jesus, well, we could blog about this until 2012. i found the coolest resource for to start this on yogajournal.com. in their top-200 sanskrit terms by georg feuerstein, compassion means:

Karuna (“compassion”): universal sympathy; in Buddhist yoga the complement of wisdom (prajna).

and then: what’s the hebrew word for compassion? how do you say it in arabic?

to consume

kim on 10:48 am November 20th, 2006 / 1 Comment »

[Origin: 1350–1400; ME (< MF consumer) < L cons?mere, equiv. to con- con- + s?mere to take up (perh. < *suzm- < *subzm- < *subs-(e)m-, equiv. to subs-, var. of sub- sub- + emere to take, buy)]

—Synonyms 1. exhaust, deplete. 4. squander, dissipate.

i am more interested in dictionary.com’s synonyms than etymology. it sounds like “to consume” is not good. is it or not? particulary for this week ahead of us, i humbly suggest we contemplate this question.

on savasana and dying grandmothers

kim on 12:36 pm November 17th, 2006 / Be the first to comment! »

as i sat down this morning to write, wishing that petworth had a latte delivery service, i was thinking about death. recently three people close to me–a good friend, my brother-in-law, and someone i work with–have all faced death with their dying grandmothers.

in talking with them about this process, especially at length last night with my friend, i’ve realized how much my perspective on life has changed through yoga. i’m open to the fact that it might also be a healthy dose of maturation, this new perspective, but frankly i’m psyched that it seems yoga has helped me become less afraid of dying.

i have been accused of being naive my whole life (did you know that word’s not in the dictionary?), and my tendency is to imagine dying as all bubblegum and lollipops: a beautiful experience that ends a beautiful life, and whether you actually go anywhere or not, shit, at least you’re not working as hard as you did on this plane.

my friend reminded me last night that dying can be ugly and painful, noisy and protracted. her grandmother chose to die over 17 days. my friend reported that at many times during that 17-day period, her grandmother, who had alzheimer’s, would suddenly tense up, look at the ceiling of the hospice room as though she were searching deeply for something, and become unresponsive to the calls of her loved ones asking her what she was looking at, or for.

during other moments, as she lay dying, she would gasp for air through her mouth, moaning in pain because her kidneys had failed her, and generally feeling, as her family observed it, pain and discontent because her body was still basically working. my friend, as she massaged her grandmother’s feet and hands, gently entreated her to let go, to give up the control she’d been used to for so many decades. how hard will that be for all of us, right?

minutes before my friend’s grandmother died, her gasping stopped. instead of rasping the breath through her mouth, this old woman started breathing in a way that my friend’s aunt could only describe as peaceful. she was breathing through her nose. the family then called in a nurse, who used a stethoscope to hear the woman’s heartbeat. after what they now know to have been her last breath, there was a pause, no exhale; the nurse told the family that she still heard a heartbeat. the family sat, rapt, waiting to see if the woman would breathe again. instead, the beat of this woman’s heart went silent.

this is why yogis call the heart region the true mind. they have been teaching for thousands of years that we come from this source, and we return to it. the eye-witness experience that my friend’s family had bears this out.

Make no mistake that you are practicing your own death, every class, in savasana, corpse pose. that’s why it’s so hard for many of us, and why we sometimes want to avoid it. you are looking into your own heart, its gentle rhythm, and letting go of attachment to your body as anything other than a pulse. you practice this as with a dress rehearsal, so that when you do it for real, you do it well.

How well you do savasana is correlated only to how well you can relax. You can’t do anything in this pose but watch your own body, and then let it go, a near-perfect analog to life itself: the idea is to stay here not as long as you can, but as well as you can.

the bottom line

kim on 12:12 am November 15th, 2006 / 6 Comments »

of the first chakra is your relationship to gravity. it’s the sensation of being both connected to, and bouyant on, the planet. the extent to which you feel or don’t feel this translates emotionally to the sensations of abundance or scarcity. a lion lolling around in the grass, fat and happy from his last kill, is feeling abundance. a lion scrounging around for the next small prey to nab because the zebras are hard to come by, is feeling scarcity.

i have learned that 98% of our DNA is the same as the rest of the animal kingdom, and to the extent this is a fact, the scarcity/abundance pendulum swing that nature experiences is mirrored in us.

the work of consciousness allows you to notice, swill around, and expand a sensation. this is what we do when we “ground” in a yoga posture: you find the strength, girth, and buoyancy in the legs, and then you notice the spine relaxing. this is moving into a feeling of stillness akin, perhaps, to the sensation of abundance. this is not the feeling of not-enough, of i need more, of i am not good enough.

you always have enough internal resources, but you have to feel them before you can know them.

yoga internal and external

kim on 4:04 pm November 10th, 2006 / 2 Comments »

after yesterday’s post, i decided it’s a good idea to distinguish in these posts between the yoga of the internal world, and that of the external experience. discussions on politics, society, living in dc or wherever, is an exploration of yoga, the uniting of the lower and higher selves, outside of us. the yoga that takes place in the classroom, on your own mat, and, inside you in any situation really, is an exploration of the inner world of yoga.

i believe we will see that the two are the same, but depending on who and where you are spiritually, physically, and emotionally, you might be more interested in one or the other.

in other news, following are good poses for a hangover:

1) child’s pose, laying on several blankets to support the belly and increase attention to breath in that area

2) pigeon pose, ditto on blankets

3) exhaling through mouth. it takes the heat out of the system and, as i’ve been taught, 70% of the body’s toxicity (i want to do more research on this because i’ve learned this 70% business in the yoga world but haven’t seen it anywhere else).

4) a lot of corpse pose, savasana