Maybe it’s because I have tight hips and shoulders; maybe it’s because I was born at the dawn of the 1970’s, when all sorts of boundaries were dissolving; maybe it’s because the notion of liberation, moksha, which is the promise of a dedicated yoga practice seems so expansive to me… I tend to think of Yoga as opening.  Physical practice unlocks what’s stuck.  Meditation quiets the mind enough to reach outside of the individual brain.  Breath unites all beings.

I stand by all of this.  I teach it all the time.  I love it with all of my heart. But it’s only part of the story.

Yoga is always a balance, neti neti, or “not thus, not thus”- not just one thing.  While the practices of Yoga help us reach beyond our perceived physical, emotional, and energetic limits, they simultaneously draw us inward to what we end up calling the True Self, purusha, the spirit.  This light in the heart referenced in my last post is what I’m talking about. The “bliss body,” anadamayakosha, which is shaded by four other layers of the self is the same thing.

So how do you keep this balance?  How can you be sure to pull energy, prana, inward as it spirals out? Try closing the eyes or focusing the gaze. Try truly cultivating ujaii breath (not just breathing loud!). Try imagining energy moving both in and out of your fingers, your lungs, your hamstrings… Practice yama and niyama. Try to maintain equanimity, staying in your breath in the moment, not striving beyond what your body or mind allow, and not shying away from the extent of your ability.

In other words, show some restraint!

Whew! It’s been months since I’ve sat down to write. I could list all of the reasons, tell all of the stories, and justify this lapse in eloquent language if that mattered.  But the fact is that it never does. 

Writing a blog is a practice, just like learning an instrument, playing a sport or mastering asana or pranayama.   If you want to move forward, it’s going to take some discipline.  If you don’t care, it doesn’t matter.  So, ultimately, like all things, it boils down to intention.  Why run every morning? Why practice asana three times (five times! six times!) a week? Why touch the keys of your piano for at least twenty minutes a day?

We recently started offering Ashtanga Yoga at Yogawood.  Zoe Mai is leading these classes in the traditional Mysore style: making us learn the sequence by body and heart, not offering the next posture until the ones before it are memorized and fully ingrained.  Some of these shapes are really hard to achieve, and for students who are used to responding to teachers’ instructions more than following an established pattern, this is a challenge. I’m so happy to be in these classes because this structure and rigor appeals to me.

Although I’m generally really efficient when it comes to getting things that I consider work done, I have always found ways around dedicating time for practice.  Like most people, I’ve gravitated toward things that come kind of easily to me, and through repetition, my skill in these things have increased. But steady practice of things solely for my personal development has always been just outside of my experience.

When Jill and I opened Yogawood, I thought, “I’m going to practice Yoga every single day!” That hasn’t happened. But my study of Yoga has helped me understand why and has helped me move closer to this aspiration. This new Ashtanga practice has me trolling the Internet, looking for information about what makes this system different from others I’ve encountered before. The Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute posted this little gem that has been helping me understand the challenge of practice:

  “In the yoga shastra it is said that God dwells in our heart in the form of light, but this light is covered by six poisons; kama, krodha, moha, lobha, matsarya, and mada. These are desire, anger, delusion, greed, envy and sloth. When yoga practice is sustained with great diligence and dedication over a long period of time, the heat generated from it burns away these poisons, and the light of our inner nature shines forth.”

This explanation goes a little further than the explanation of the Niyama of Tapas (there a whole blog posting, here, about this) and helps me recognize the delusion of not having enough time, the sloth in sleeping the extra 15 minutes that make a full practice impossible, and the greed in wanting a full practice or nothing at all. Each time the excuses bubble up, I can name them.  And then I can roll out my mat, or sit at the computer and write, or just do whatever it is that I’m trying to talk myself out of—which is usually something that is just for myself.   

Maybe you know that there’s more to Yoga than sun salutations.  Maybe you’ve learned somewhere that there is a whole system, a whole science or philosophy, and that part of it includes Yamas or moral restraints that give the whole thing shape and the possibility of working.

One of these Yamas is Aparigraha. Greedlessness. Basically put, in order to attain real enlightenment, you might need to let go of some striving.

Think about it in your regular, physical Yoga practice. If everything is hard, if there is no sukha to balance your sthira– no ease to balance the strength, you may find yourself feeling like you’re pushing against a wall.  You may get to a certain depth in postures and either not go any further, or you may injure yourself.  Greedily pushing toward postures that are just out of reach can be dangerous.

Of course, you can take the same principle off the mat.  All work and no play can do more than make you a dull boy, right?  Get to the bottom of it and ask, “what’s all of that work for, anyway?” Money? Prestige? The maintenance of an identity that affords certain perks?

I realize that I’m writing from a fairly privileged perspective, that there are millions of people in the world who have to work unreasonable hours  for survival.  But I also know for sure that most of us could shift our priorities a little and feel a whole lot better.

How much do you need?  How much do you have that you could honestly do without?  If there is something that you feel you desperately want, what’s behind that? Just asking the questions, just allowing yourself the chance to explore the answers takes you a little closer to your true Self, a little farther from the part or version of yourself that is drawn to disparate thoughts, ideas, people and things.

And that may be plenty!

If you practice at Yogawood, or at any number of other studios in the Philadelphia area, you’ve been chanting OM at the beginning and closing of class.  Maybe you feel its resonance even after the sound has dwindled.  Maybe you’ve realized that you’ve become more conscious of your breath as a result of repeated practice.  Maybe the ritual aspect of its placement in the class sequence helps mark and expand time for you.

But what does it mean?  Why, really, do we do it?

This is one of the questions Jill and I have posed to our group of teacher trainees–just as our teachers posed the question to us.  The answers and the means of conveying this idea that we’ve heard so far have been beautiful.  Since I only have my own in writing, that’s what I’ll share here…  This is the introduction to my rudimentary explanation of OM, written in 2005:

When I was really young– younger than five, my oldest sister, Lisa, used to help me play with sound.  She would press her nose against mine so we would both look like Cyclopes and we would make tones that would flatten and bounce off of each other.  We would play like this for what seemed like hours– playing with sound and vibration and harmonics and pitch. We were basically playing OM.

 Om is the sound of the universe.  It’s the sound of the Self.  It is waking, dreaming, deep sleep and transcendence.  It is a huge sound and it is absolute silence within sound.  It is an amazing, ritualized way to start a class, to center people and to get them working together– but not just with each other.  It helps people leave the gravity-filled world and find buoyancy.

 OM can’t be sounded without breath, life force.  It’s an opportunity to make pure, big noise with your body– something very few people have a healthy or constructive way to do.  OM celebrates the Self.

Right?

What else is OM?  What is it for you in class?  Do you enjoy it or suffer through it?  What more of the lore of OM have you learned or read or experienced?  Feel free to leave comments, and to share your ideas, questions, ad wisdom!

Every student I’ve taught has had at least one pose that was completely made for their body.  For some people, it’s a forward fold.  Other people can’t be finished with a practice unless they get to do urdva dhanurasana (full wheel).  One person’s challenge is another’s window to bliss.

Personally, I love an arm balance.  The combination of strength, surrender, buoyance, and courage needed to enter and hold these postures appeals to me– and for some reason, they’ve always come very naturally.

Just as I feel very uncertain in some backbends, many of my students are dubious about their chances of mastering arm balancing poses.  Here’s my best attempt at demystifying these beautiful asanas:

• Yes, it takes some strength– but not as much as you think.  If you can do catteranga (with your shoulders back in place and your belly active, hips bouyant, collar bones stretching away from each other) I think you can do most arm balances.
• In just about every case, if you can get your elbows along your sides, pointing back toward your feet (as in catteranga), you’re golden.
• The floor is very close to your head in most arm balances.  Is that glass half empty or half full? Yes, you need to dip your head down to get your butt up.  The good news is that, if your head should end up touching the floor, it hasn’t gone very far or very fast!  Put a blanket down in front of you if you’re afraid.
• These postures often depend on physics– on playing with the teetering balance– way more than they depend on brute force hoisting your hips in the air.  Go in slow and cultivate some curiosity along the way.  Don’t rush!
• There are multiple steps to getting into each arm balance.  Take each one and let yourself be satisfied to stop along the way when you get to a movement or action that just isn’t going to happen.  Skipping a step just to do something that looks cool isn’t smart.  It probably won’t work, and you could hurt yourself.
• It helps to have open hips and a strong core.  Engage the bhandas (mula and uddhianah) and use your breath: inhalations lift you, exhalations ground you.

Easy, right?   Maybe, maybe not.  But definitely not impossible for most people.  It’s all practice.  It’s all an exercise in developing a humble sense of self awareness. These poses just give you another way to change your perception of what is possible, and to let you examine how you manage your responses to unusual circumstances.  Meet them with equanimity and grace, and see if you end up flying!

Read any good books lately?

I’ve had a number of students ask me for recommendations on books to read about the philosophy of Yoga, and I’m often kind of stuck for an answer.

There are so many books out there– some I’ve read, some I haven’t. Some try to be everything, devoting a lot of space to asana as well as historical and philosophical background. Some are really heavy. Some are kind of gross ( I remember the one I took out of the library after my first week of Yoga classes. It went into all of these Yogic cleansing practices in great detail. I closed the book and didn’t read more about Yoga for 5 or 6 years). Lately, I’ve been focusing on the ancient texts, but I don’t think that’s what people are asking me for…

Do you have favorites you can recommend?

I love this spark that ignites in people with the physical practice of Yoga: this desire to learn and grow and simultaneously sharpen the intellect and soften the edges of what can be understood.

This practice of study, of opening to the wisdom of Yoga is the practice of Jnana Yoga.  Like Karma Yoga (doing good deeds) and Bhakti Yoga (the Yoga of devotion), tapping into the philosophy of Yoga is just another way to access the source. By reading and working to wrap your head around concepts that only encourage your brain’s expansion, you use some of the same principles of discipline and surrender that you do on your mat. Just as you feel energy moving through your body in a different way after physical practice, you sense different connections being drawn in the fabric of your mind after wrestling with concepts ancient Yogis were working out thousands of years ago. It feels really good, and it gives you a sense of historical and philosophical perspective that most of the activities of everyday life never can.

Maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about and you’ll respond with some good
recommendations. Maybe this is just what you’ve wanted: a new reading list! Hopefully we’ll tap into something here and all learn something, together.

I’ve taught a couple of people recently whom I would classify as “seekers”. They’ve come
to Yogawood saying that they need something different, they’re dissatisfied with their lives, they’re unhappy, something is missing.

These students come to class a lot. They’re determined to make this work. They feel great while they’re at the studio, but they report that when they leave nothing has changed.

At what point does something change? When do the hamstrings sing open, or the does the depression lift? At what point does the alchemy of Yoga course through the bloodstream and make all things possible?

My only answer to these impossible questions is honestly “when you let it.”

We have a book at Yogawood that features prominent American Yogis describing their favorite poses and discussing what they think keeps their students from achieving them. In it, Sri Dharma Mittra says that the things that hold his students back from doing a really challenging backbend that he likes are
1.    they eat the wrong things
2.    they don’t practice enough
3.    they don’t have faith

How about it?

I’ve been kind of chuckling at this explanation since I read it a few weeks ago, but when you get right down to it, how else can any change possibly happen?

If you nourish yourself with the food, ideas, and interactions that promote the result you’re hoping for, and eschew the things that might be tempting, but will take you further from your goal, things change.

If you work steadily and with great focus toward the thing you desire, you get closer to it. You may not get to it, but you’ll get closer.

If you allow yourself to surrender to the idea of success, or at least to feel supported in your efforts, what was once impossible becomes more attainable.

So thats what it all boils down to… at least in this model goal achievement or right living. Like all worthwhile things, it’s not easy, but it could change your life.

I had to laugh the other night when a very dear student who hasn’t been to Yogawood in quite a while came in. She said that she didn’t particularly want to come to class. It was cold and dark. She was tired. But her husband told her she had to. He said he would do whatever he had to do to make it possible for her to go (I’m guessing, feed their kids, make sure homework got done, stuff like that). She was laughing as she told me this, reflecting on what she must have been projecting for him to get so serious about it!

In another recent interaction at the studio, a student bought a close friend of hers a gift certificate for some private classes, primarily because her friend hasn’t been so great to be around lately. She’s been going through a lot, and the result has been a hardening of her heart and some stray anger that is easily piqued. In our student’s words, “she needs some Yoga!”

It’s true, isn’t it? If you practice kind of regularly, you probably feel it in your body when you don’t get around to it. You may realize that you have less focus, or that your temper flairs, or that your energy level is more variable when you don’t make it to class.

Of course, the busier you are, the harder it is to make time for yourself, and the less time you make for yourself and your practice…. well you know. I’m sure that it’s with this spiraling action in mind that Corina Benner from Wake Up Yoga in Philadelphia frequently says that we do Yoga for ourselves and for the people we love.

Honoring the light that is in you and in the people in your life, Namaste.

For those of us who love Vinyasa Yoga– the style of Yoga that laces its postures together with breath and flowing movement, it can be a challenge to take the time to perfect individual postures. As we flow from upward to downward facing dog, the lift of the hips can be forgotten. As our teachers encourage a right angle in the front knee of our Virahabdrasanas, the integrity of our back knees can suffer.

So what’s a Vinyasa Yogi to do?

At a certain point, once most of the postures are no longer new, your body becomes aware of sensations while in them. Remember them. Talk to your teacher about them before or after class, or book an individual session with her or him so that you can work on them specifically. Grab an Iyengar Yoga book that has pictures and written explanations of different postures, and try them at home–or try to incorporate what you’ve read when you’re practicing in class. Maybe consider going less deeply into the postures that you’re questions–or go in more slowly so that you can really feel the proper alignment. Use Mountain pose, Tadasana, as your guide: see if you can find that stability in your lower back, shoulders, abdomen and feet in every posture.

If your favorite class moves too quickly for you to be attentive, consider taking break from it for a week or two–especially if you’re concerned that you may be really sacrificing form for flow. Go to a slower-paced class, or do some work on your own until you can find yourself in ever posture.

Namaste!

In vinyasa yoga, the style I primarily teach at Yogawood, there’s a tradition of reflecting
the rhythms of the world outside in the practice. This is possible because the practice can
change from day to day, from time of day to time of day– so a morning practice might be very enlivening, including lots of backward bending; and an evening class might be more
settled, with more poses held on the mat than on the feet.

On a rainy day, you might do more twists, letting the cleansing that’s going on outside get reflected in your own body. On a tremendously windy day like today, a couple of different ideas come to mind. As with any force, you can choose to go with it, or to counter it.

Let’s say you want to go with it. Focus on the lift of the hips from upward to downward
facing dog in a sun salutation. Almost let yourself fly! Downward dog splits with the hip
opening to the side might feel really good, and if you have the possibility of dropping
back to wheel from mountain pose in your practice, I think you’ll especially enjoy it on a
day when the wind howls.

When all of this dry energy is whirling around outside, it’s sometimes wise to work on
grounding yourself, creating a sense of balance. Seated forward folds, bridge pose focusing on the connection of the shoulders and feet to the earth, happy baby pose, and
savasana might all be good moves.

If you’re practicing on your own today, enjoy. See where your body wants to go and see
if it follows any of what I’m passing off as logic. If your practice takes you to class, see
what your teacher chooses. And if you’re body doesn’t get a chance to strike a pose at all
today, at least make a moment for a daydream, picturing yourself in whatever shape you
please.

Namaste!