from the dalai lama

If one assumes a humble attitude, one’s own good qualities will increase. Wheras if one is proud, one will become jealous of others, one will look down on others, and due to that there will be unhappiness in society.

the yang and the yin of it.

i heard here three or four times today a quote by an unidentified woman, telling the NPR Reporter that for the downwardly spiraling economy,

there are no silver bullets here…The best the Fed can do is throw pillows down to soften the landing.”

right round baby right round

lately i’ve been thinking about karma, which evolved from a Sanskrit word whose pronunciation matches that of caerimonia, or ceremony, ritual.

On this side of the dateline, we tend to define karma as the apostle Paul did: “Man reaps what he sows.” “What goes around, comes around.”

I’ve always had trouble with the term “karma yoga” as defining good acts, because then you aren’t you still attached to getting only goodness in return? it seems to me you can do anything and still be practicing karma yoga. What if you’re ok with doing something neutral or negative, and with being prepared to experience that same thing some point in the future?

Asking for negative acts to come back to you might even been like saying “bring it” to the universe.

Lately, I am examining karma by being aware of an emotional state I am uncomfortable with, for example, depression, sorrow, anger, or frustration. I drive almost every day, and I often feel “cut off” by someone rushing to their job, home, a bar, their dying grandmother.  My heart jumps as the other driver speeds past me and into my lane, my breathing changes, and at least 50% of the time, I find myself reacting in anger. this anger comes from the fear of experiencing an accident.

as i experience this sensation, i imagine that i have done that exact thing to someone before. when i wedge in this stop sign on the road of my own reaction, a mental shift occurs:

1) My negative emotion changes or goes away.

2) I see immediately the universe’s answer to a previous demand from me entitled, “bring it”.

9 times out of 10, i can recall an instance in which i have acted toward someone in exact the way that i am currently uncomfortable with.

lackblacklack

i just got off the phone with my husband, who is buying a black winter coat, a coat he does not currently own. the jacket is 40% off its original price, which is a great deal for December. he called to discuss the purchase, and to justify it he said,

“the thing is, i lack [a] black [coat].”

i thought this was a good justification for spending money, and it got me thinking about shopping in general, since many of us will me doing a lot of it in the next 20+ days.

a good way of shopping could be to buy the item only when

1) you want to walk out of the store wearing the item you like/love it so much,

or

2) you need that specific item because you actually do not have any (or one) of them.

another thing i’ve done today is watch this live puppy cam.

navel gazing

so i thought today of an interpretation of this.

the energetic bodies of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd chakras live in and alongside the tailbone and legs; abdomen; and solar plexus, respectively. their physical properties are those of earth, water, and fire–or earth, oceans/waters, and the sun.

think of using your inner eye and looking down at your own sun, water, and earth–as from the sky–and determining how your own inner planet is doing at that moment. how hot the sun, how turbulent or calm and rhythmic the waters, how stable the ground.

transformation

yoga is one of the world’s main transformative practices of the body and mind.

the body is simple. the mind, on the other hand, has many elements, but its main purpose is to establish pattern as early as possible in order to ensure survival. for example, if every day you forgot how to eat, speak, or sleep, your life would be destructively inefficient.

too much of a good thing, however, is bad. that’s why the first, most potent, and most lasting pattern that nearly all yoga practitioners create for themselves is:

i can’t do that.

I would love all yoga students to check that statement out when they notice it emerging in the mind. the underlying context, the mind’s real statement is:

this is a new thing i’m confronted with, and i don’t understand it. therefore, i am going to stop right here and revert to the pattern of thinking i already know, which creates less immediate stress on me.

(it’s kind of like being in college, when in the freshman eating hall you sit with your dorm mates, class mates, or friends from home. it’s scary to go eat with someone totally new–omg the potential gross digestion from all that stress of talking to someone you’ve never met before!)

the real essence of any yoga class–by definition of it being called a yoga class–is the attempt to evolve, whether that’s through “relaxation,” “working hard,” or “playing your edge.” however the mind defines these terms, these terms are by definition always changing.

hello, truth!

the great bill moyers was interviewed on Npr’s fresh air today, and he recalled a conversation he’d had with joseph campbell, the popular scholar of mythology, said this:

if you want to change the world, you change the metaphor.

when a tree falls in a classroom

i was teaching a client this pose on friday, and he was doing a great job: balanced, focused, and only slightly wobbly.

right at the moment i uttered a few words like “nice job!” he fell out of the pose. like many students doing this pose, he laughed as he fell out. then he said, “you know, at that moment i felt balanced and unbalanced at the same time, kind of like zero-gravity.”

two things i took from this:

1) i love how students laugh when they are falling out of this pose. different from so many other poses, it’s pretty obvious that you are simulating something you’re not, and you’re “pretending” to be still like a tree when you feel anything but.

2) the moment just before falling out of tree is the moment we’re all practicing for. it’s that sensation of having harnessed gravity only to feel light.

and so the attention goes

last night, in the yoga class i take, we spent a longer time than usual in the first two poses, down dog and handstand. then, to prepare for some other strength poses and backbends, we did a preparation for this pose. we were near, and with our backs to, the wall, and we had to press the tops of the feet into the wall to lengthen the spine and not give way to the low back.

i found the class very challenging, and i was focused on all sorts of things. but before this class, i had gotten a pedicure, and it hadn’t dried. so in doing this pose, with the tops of the feet and my painted toes pressed firmly into the wall, i lost the superficial benefits of the pedicure.

while i was in the pose, that’s what i was thinking about. during all the other poses, when my toes were not pressed into anything, i was focused on dropping my shoulder blades, lengthening my tailbone, observing my breath — among the requisite details for maintaining a safe and energetically charged asana. but during this preparation pose, i was not focused on anything other than the “ruin” of the time and money i’d just spent.

i don’t remember what the pose felt like. after that point, i occasionally gazed regretfully down at my toes and noticed my difficulty in staying present. at those times, i was not in my body, but in my memory, and in the desire for reality to be other than it was.

so i will not be getting pedicures anymore before yoga class.

shaping up

like all animals, humans conform to the environments they live in. specifically, we conform to this shape

more than any other in our lives. it’s very likely that you are in this shape more hours than you walk or sleep combined.

that’s where yoga postures come in. the iyengar method of yoga practice pays a lot of attention to detail, and the more advanced you get, the more it suggests you drop into this pose

from a standing position. since we know that for every action there is an equal and opposite one, we could say that wheel pose, or urdhva dhanurasana, creates a shape opposite to hold ourselves most of the time outside of yoga class.

and since yoga and other mind-stilling practice are rooted  in the concept of the middle path of balance, this pose looks like a nice, yogic way to reach mind/body balance.

there are a lot of other poses to create openness in the chest and abdomen like wheel pose does. ask your yoga teacher this week about these poses.