Sweet Lotus. Padmasana.

Sweet lotus. The Bhakti Diaries.

Listen: what you have been taught may no longer serve you; what you need, you already know, but have forgotten.  What we need, the way we know, is not in logic or learning.  What we need is in our stories, our posture, and in symbol.  Nothing will ever touch you so deep, and deep is where you need most to go.

In the beginning is the lotus flower.  There was nothing, and vast emptiness, and watery expanse.  And then the lotus grew.  The arch and stone of mountain sits on a petal of lotus.  The cities.  And man.

The chakras, those energy points and passages in our body, are symbolized as lotus flowers.  In particular, the heart.  The heart is a tight fisted bud, unblossomed.  The heart, wisdom, is in unfolding.  Lotus is spontaneous birth and purity.  This is divine.  And this is our center.

The lotus is perfect expression of the human condition.  That human condition is mired in the material, physical, dank world.  But its very essence, its first urge, is toward growth.  The lotus flower grows in mud, mimicking the samsara or suffering of Buddhism.  It pushes upward, through the water, mimicking the spiritual path and purification.  And it breaks the surface.  It is beauty.

In the beginning of time, yoga was not about asanas or postures or physical fitness.  Yoga was a spiritual quest.  The poses come out of the binding of the spiritual quest to the physical body. We are bodily humans, looking for something.  They learned, then, those ancients, that the most direct route to enlightenment is not over but through: body is a path, body is THE path.  In the beginning, there was only one yoga ‘pose’.  This was the lotus.  It careened into stillness, facilitated meditation, incarnated process.

Lotus is where yoga began.  It is, in many ways, where each individual begins to learn and live yoga.  It is, thus, absolute beginning.  It is always a place to start.

Lotus is the becoming that is being.  The process that is arrival.  It’s the moment when straw is spun into gold.  When we don’t escape or change who we are, but be it fully, and therefore, change.

I am a shy woman.  People don’t always believe me.  I sometimes act very brave.  I danced on a bar for a living.  But these are things from outside, ways I’ve been for others, my body as object.  I have very little internal solidity, faith, or confidence.  As a subject, I wither and hide.  Yoga has changed that.

When I first came to yoga, I came on the heels of someone else.  I dressed to hide.  I dressed at home, so that I would not have to change at the studio.  I came to yoga through Bikram, which uses a mirror as a tool.  Look at yourself, they say.  Meet your own eyes.

This was a thing I could not do.  When they said so, I’d focus on my forehead, my collarbone, or a space on the mirror.  An odd realization struck me the other day as I went to an unknown Bikram studio, peeled naked in the changing room.  I am no longer afraid or ashamed of my body.  At least, not as I was.  At least, not when it comes to yoga.  Shame and fear surface.  But now I have a place to take it, and a process to transform it.

The secret to transformation is sitting still.  The secret to yoga is that you are already there.  You already have everything you need.  Lotus is purity, and a means for us to rediscover ourselves as purity.  And lotus is also the dark, the shadow, the mud.  The hard truth is that the dark, the shadow, is an aspect of the divine.  In lotus, in yoga, we learn this isn’t only true, but beautiful.

There is a tendency to turn spiritual concepts on their heads.  To believe that ‘spiritual’, or even the more mundane process of ‘healing’ or ‘living’ or ‘getting better’, has to do with looking up.  We envision enlightenment, overcoming, ideals.  But the truth of every spiritual path begins with surrender, a kind of looking down in order to go up.

Try this

There is lotus pose, and there is lotus mudra.  Both are moving meditations.  It doesn’t matter if you can’t hit full lotus with both ankles on your thighs, pose of ease or half lotus will accomplish the same thing.  Lotus mudra is one of the more visceral and moving mudras, driving all our conscious thoughts and images into the emotional context, and weaving this with a physical expression.  Both the pose and the mudra are basic, non-obtrusive: you can do them anywhere.  They incarnate peace, purity, and blossoming and are directly connected to the heart chakra. This Mudra belongs to the heart chakra and is the symbol for purity. It is good during times of loneliness and despair.

• Put your hands together, fingers vertical, relaxed and spread out.  The lower part of the palms touches, as well as the pads of the little fingers and thumbs.
• When the hands are closed, they resemble the lotus bud.  As the hands open and the fingers splay, the lotus blossoms.
• Open your hands into the flowering lotus.  Take four deep and slow breaths, without any forcing or control.  Then close the hands back into a bud. Place the fingernails of each hand together, the fingertips curled into the palm.
• Repeat.

Touching infinity (practice).

Patience is a virtue and I do not have it.  Of course, virtues run on spectrums; I am more patient than some; I am not a saint.  I am more patient, now, with a yoga practice inside me.  I am more patient with some things than with others; with some people than others.  I am patient, very patient, in theory; I know the truth.  But practice is hard. I see an asana and I want it.  I have been playing on my hands for months, legs akimbo, expecting that if I want it bad enough I will have that handstand held for minutes at a time and the graceful lowering into chattaruanga.  I will.  I assume it's an algorithim: spend 500 minutes up there and I'll get it, say.  Do it 6782 times.  The mind wants its answers.

I watched a woman lift herself from chattaruanga to a handstand, spin around up there for what seemed ever, and then slowly lower down.  Yes: chattaraunga, a hip lift and slow drag of the feet, mid air, toward her heels before she tucked with her abs and lifted those astronaut feet sky ward.  Yes.  She broke it down with some talk of hand placement, core engagement, positioning of the hips.  But I knew all that already.  I didn't listen to her alignment.  All I could hear was my own heart saying I want that; I want to feel that; I do.

Then I heard her, though: I practiced this for 11 years, she said.

And my throat caught.  11 years.  Dear god, what does it mean to practice a thing, any thing, for 11 years?  Who among us has the patience to do the same, small, smaller movements, day after day, for 11 long years?  What could not be accomplished with that level of discipline?  I thought of serenades on baby grands, of pig latin mastered, of epic novels written.  To pour and spend one's life with that kind of devotion is admirable.  And nearly insane, really, by our usual way of thinking.

It is not how a human being typically thinks.

But this prompted, then, another bow of my head to the way things are and acceptance.  To accepting what I already know and what already is.  Yoga is not a miracle nor a party trick.  Yoga is the development of the kind of patience that becomes devotion.  Day, after day, after day.

I say, all the time in my classes, that asana are like horizon: they are never finished.  Never.  You can look at a pose, want it, work at it and 'master' it.  But the next day in class you will realize that the pose you've mastered is only the prep pose to something else.  There is actually more.  There is always, always, more.  Poses are like horizon: they are not things you reach, but things you approach.

They are important, as approach.

I heard a middle aged housewife speak in a poetry workshop, once:  Do you realize how old I will be by the time I finish a book of poems?  She had a pinch of panic in her, like smoke in her throat.  The teacher nodded and answered: the same age you'll be if you never write it.

There is a revelation about time, here: we have all there ever will be.  We lose our guts and our hope and our patience the moment we start projecting and demanding a now.  Poems, handstands, the raising of children do not happen the day we decide we want them.  It happens in the course of time, tuned to a level of patience that resembles devotion.  It is not our want that determines these things at all, our decisions.  They are larger processes, much larger and more complex than we are.  We don't get to decide.  We get, only, to participate.

The fact is we do practice things day in and day out for eleven years.  For forty years.  For whole lifetimes.  We practice smoking cigarettes or judging ourselves.  We practice pushing too hard, being overwhelmed.  We practice procrastination and hurry.  We practice 'good enough for now' and 'I'll do it tomorrow...when I have time, when I have money, when I'm ready, when I'm stronger, when I'm married, when the kids are grown."  The art of yoga is awareness, realizing we do this, and then revering the process so much we integrate new practices: drink water, slow down, be grateful, try and let go, show up.  Just show up.  Participate.  Literally touch it. Awareness lends that appreciation and turns habits to rituals. Time to reverence. Our lives to better things.

The only way to reach infinity, that endless horizon, those poses that spill out into art, is through the smallest reverent motions with our hands and our hours. We touch it by lowering our hands to the mat. One day. And then the next day.  We unfold ourselves to infinity symbols and depth.

The simple and the obscure, and yoga's ethics

Messiness: #classnotes I scribble.  I scribble on the backs of envelopes and have half a dozen notebooks going at all times.  In a pinch, I will scribble on my own skin, a habit that my mother abhorred and punished when I was a kid but that still, to me, speaks of the innate artistic urge of the human body and the relatedness between flesh and literature...

But that’s not what I mean to write, right now.  I wanted to tell you of the ridiculousness of my to-do lists.

But first I should say that writing – like art, or gardening, or prayer – is a mysterious alchemy and archeology of the soul.  It is more than conscious, I mean: it slips in bits of dream and memory and complete novelty that aren’t really part of conscious thinking.  They come from somewhere else.  Writing – or any of those other arts – helps me because it allows me to discover what it is I am thinking and feeling.  It reveals me.

Today, my to-do list read:

Give poetry and healing to the world.

Make the bed.

It occurred to me, after I laughed, that most of my writing is like this.  The impossibly large and universal paired with the hopelessly mundane, private, and functional.

And then I laughed more because I realized this was exactly what I need to talk about in my yoga class, as I try to explain the concept of an ethical life.

The yamas are a vision of the possibilities of human existence.  But they are also guideposts for skillful moment to moment choices in our daily lives.

We all want to live well, to be happy.  Yet many of us are not.  We doubt ourselves.  We blame circumstances.  We numb out with television or junk food or a good enough existence.  Some of us purchase endless self help books and may or may not read them.  Some of us try pills or booze or seek our answers in a new relationship, a new church, a new city.

Yoga answers this in uncanny ways.

At the end of the day, says yoga, it’s not how much you have or how much you’ve accomplished that counts.  What matters is how we you have participated in your own life.  The practices are an antidote to misery and garden variety unhappiness.  It is less a leap of faith than a leap into life.

Yes, life is hard.  This being human is a complicated thing.  We live with myriad conflicts both internal and external.  As human beings among other life forms, we need to navigate our needs and desires with those of the community.  We struggle to understand what the ‘self’ is and is not, where our ‘truth’ is, and often hurt when that self is wearisome, judged, or lost.

In the midst of confusion, conflict, and pain, the yamas and niyamas are like helping hands that guide us into a more meaningful life, into the depths of the possible.  They do this by teaching us to live with more skill, and more awareness.

This sounds easy, and on the level of flossing it is.  On the level of ending world pain, or even my own pain, it is not.  How do we gain mastery over our choices and thoughts when life pummels us with its ups and downs, its unending demands, its many and conflicted voices telling us what we need and what is wrong with us?  How, when we find ourselves continuing to do what we promised ourselves we would never do again?  How when we just screamed at our child and now feel lousy?  How, when the least bit of indifference or criticism from a person makes us wither and cringe?  How exactly do we gain skill when we feel stuck in a dead end job that is sucking us dry?  How do we gain awareness when we just devoured the chocolate ice cream?

The yamas and niyamas will teach us, if we let them.

They result in presence, power, and joy.  Not the joy that comes when things are going our way, before they change again and our joy is snagged out from under us, but the joy that bubbles up from deep, deep within.  The kind of joy that comes from our own sense of mastery in life no matter what life happens to be, moment by moment.  There is nothing to figure out ahead of time…only a life to life well…or not.

The yamas and niyamas confront us with the question: which are you choosing?  How are you moving, thinking, being, right now?

For this week, a simple invitation.  Journal, or meditate (or discuss.  Or all three!) on the following:

Practice courage this week by doing one thing you wouldn’t normally do.  Daily, if you can.  Maybe it’s one thing, all week long.  Or different things each day.  Simply practice.  If you are feeling brave, make that one thing something that scares you.  If you are ridiculously courageous, get excited about the fact you are scared and are doing it anyway.  See if you can discern between fear and the unfamiliar.  Watch what happens to your sense of self, your relationships with others, because you burst forth boldly and claim your life.

Ultimately we have just one moral duty:

To reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves,

More and more peace,

And to reflect it towards others.

And the more peace there is in us,

The more peace there will also be in our troubled world. – Etty Hillesum

Ashtanga: Patanjali's 8 limbed path

It is impossible to say when or where yoga started.  It exists back in shadowy pre-recorded history and was, for the most part, handed down from one teacher to one student through face to face practices, not spiritual or historical texts, and not in holy books. But we do know something of what the earliest yogis were doing and looking for, what, in essence, yoga is: it is a set of proven, tested, accessible practices for bringing our bodies and minds to their fullest capacity and to ease human suffering.  Yoga is a path of liberation and souls on fire.  It is a path, if you will, of deep healing and soul work.  But it is more than identifying or ‘fixing’ what is wrong; it is also a means to find life beautiful, meaningful, and profound.

Those practices are not strictly physical, no matter how athletic the word ‘yoga’ has become in our culture.  Yogis realized that a ‘soul awake’ was a soul unfettered by fear and interpersonal conflict; living a good life involves not only a strong and properly functioning body but a deep sense of purpose and meaning, connectedness to others, right relationship with the world.  While we spend a lot of time talking about ‘balance’, ‘strength’, and ‘flexibility’ in our practice, we might catch glimpses of the fact that we’re not speaking of the physical body, only.  The physical is a mirror and truth teller of the interpersonal, the deeply personal, and the spirit.  Don’t underestimate the value of being balanced, strong, and flexible: these are the means to sift through the false to hit on what is true and meaningful.

In Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, the path is called Ashtanga Yoga (ashta, eight and anga, limb).  The Yoga Sutra is the oldest extant text on yoga practice and philosophy, but it is understood to be a compilation or summation of practices that were already ancient when Patanjali wrote them down.

Some say the eight limbs are like a ladder one can climb toward enlightenment.  Some say that traditionally, a student would spend years mastering the first two limbs – ethics and personal observances – before he’d be ‘ready’ to begin a physical practice.  There is some truth to the idea that the limbs are progressive, as step; a student truly integrates the physical asanas only once the elements of ethics and personal practices have been glimpsed.  Many point out that the word asana, which we generally translate to ‘yoga pose’ or ‘yoga posture’ literally translates to ‘seat’, as in the seat one takes to meditate.  The point of each and every pose was to prepare the body and open it to a meditative experience.

But no spiritual path has a beginning or an end so much as it does aspects or variations on major themes, like verses and chorus of a song.  Or the inhaling and exhaling of the breath, the rising and setting of the sun. The process is organic, rhythmic, and cyclical.

Truly, one can enter anywhere.

One day, a student approached me after her very first class.  She called it amazing.  Life changing.

I believe that it is.  And I believe that she had touched and experienced many of the 8 limbs in a single class, although she wouldn’t have any reason to know that’s what she was doing or that these things have Sanskrit names, each with thousands of exercises and practices and theories attached to it.

She simply felt it.  She felt the effects of expanding and opening her body, compressing the glands in asana; she felt the immediate, energizing effect of rapid abdominal breathing and the calming, grounding effects of slow, deep, diaphragmatic breaths (pranayama); when she focused her attention on the breath in our centering meditations, she is withdrawing her mind from external stimulation (pratyahara); when I guide her to use a mantra or listen to her breathing during the holding of a pose, she is concentrating (dharana).  During the holding, if she follows her intuitive sense and my cues to stay in touch with the sensations happening in her body, her mind is absorbed and she is meditating (dhyana); there may be times during the holding or releasing of a posture when she touches on, glimpses, or is washed with the deeply healing state known as samadhi.

Interestingly enough, Patanjali starts not with promises or should and oughts.  There is no description of god or the meaning of life, no attempt to make you believe anything at all. He starts, instead, by listing the ways human beings suffer and the mental/emotional/physical ramifications or symptoms of that suffering.  Yoga, he says, is the calming of sufferings.

We touch on the experience of yoga without having to know the whole philosophical system or intending to re-wire our brain or balance our pancreas.  Those things just happen.  That student may or may not have understood that yoga is a prescription, a positive how-to list, in the treatment of anxieties and depressions and physical diseases, a path toward whole.  It is a systematic and proven process.  Yet it is enough to simply experience and know you feel better for days after a practice, and that’s maybe all any of us need.

But knowing the limbs exist invites us to a new depth of the practice, a way to circle around and around again until we hit revelation. And then start over again, because there is more revelation. It is a path, a prescription, that has been followed by billions of people; we can trust their experience.  We are given good directions and a ladder to grab on to, if not to climb.  Ladders, things to grab on to, are sometimes hard to find in our shiftless, startling world.

Over and over again, spiritual paths and spiritual truths will teach a humbling reality: it isn’t a thing you understand or philosophize about; it’s a thing you must do.

The path of yoga begins in acknowledging reality: this being human is difficult.  Like the Buddhist first noble truth (Life is Suffering) it could be seen as a bitter pill, a hard way to look at life.  It is.  But that isn’t the point.  The point is that revolution is possible.  There are ways out of suffering.  It is entirely possible to approach your own potential and fulfillment.  A purposeful, deep and richly nuanced life is both the goal and the path yoga takes us down to reach that goal.  Yoga is perhaps unique in that it doesn’t start with the origins of the universe, the ends of the world, or explaining human relatedness to the divine.  There is little point, yoga says, in trying to wrap our faulty minds around things that are larger than those faulty minds.  There is power in the here and now, in unraveling illusions and abstractions to the solid abiding ground beneath.

The First Limb: Yamas

The heart of yoga is ethical.  It recognizes the absolute truth of interrelation, connection, and disconnection.  We are hardwired to desire understanding, compassion, forgiveness, love, and laughter, as well as a sense of justice.  Most, if not all, of our pains in life come from misunderstanding our self and our connection.  Most suffering is an experience of being alone, unworthy, separate, as though we are viewing life through a window and cannot touch or hear or live as we suspect others do, or we ourselves should.

Yoga seeks to lay down palpable ways to disentangle ourselves from a sense of isolation, meaninglessness, shame, anger, and greed.  To reveal the false self for the true.

The word yama translates to restraint.  There is an element to ‘self-control’ or moderating our own desires and motives to a bigger picture, and in many ways this is hard to swallow.

But it is a way to be more happy, more free, and more in touch with our core.  They invoke a self that is confidant, unafraid, with depth of character and inner resources.  They way we behave in our relationships – and our ability to change our behaviors to act in accordance with compassion and regard – is ultimately a self-loving and self-enlarging thing to do.  As we change our behaviors and ethics, our souls are able to be more at ease.  Imagine what it would be like to walk through the world without shame.

The Yamas are five:

Ahimsa: non harming

Satya: truthfulness and non-lying

Asteya: nonstealing, not craving or keeping what does not belong to you

Bramacharya: chastity or continence, usually sexual or interrelational

Aparigraha: greedlessness, non-hording

The Second Limb: Niyamas

If the first limb concerns our relationships to others and to world, the second limb is usually seen as indicative of our relationship to our self.  It involves our private practices, our solitude, our self regard and self mastery.  Each of the niyamas can be an endless practice (or diagnostic, or exploration) on its own.  Each can be taken very strictly and literally, or endlessly unfurl into sublte layers of meaning and intention.  For example, shauca, purity, is all fine and well as an abstract concept.  But it becomes a lived thing if one actually decides to practice making one’s bed every day.  The idea is so simple as to be laughable.  But the smallest practices tend to have enormous effect on our experience moment by moment, and the tiny pepples add up to gravel that becomes a road that lead to an altogether different life.

Shauca: purity (of body, of mind)

Santosha: contentment with oneself and one’s life exactly as it is in this moment, including self acceptance

Tapas: austerity, fire, heat or zeal

Svadhyaya: self study

Ishvara-pradnidhana: surrender to the Whole, Real, God, or the It-Is.

The Third Limb: Asana

This is what most of us today tend to think of when we think of yoga; those series of postures that stretch, heal, invigorate and remodel our physical selves.  They are both a science and an art.  It is astounding how profound the study of the body can be, and how western medicine continues to realize the limitations and misconceptions we’ve had for centuries about what this being human, this human body, means.

The physical postures are one branch of an eight limbed path (similar and related to the Buddhist 8 fold path); further, while the physical practices do increase health, improve immunity, foster longevity and allow, with practice, a heightened sense of be-ing and moving in the world, the aim was not some kind of Olympic athleticism.  The aim was wholeness.  A purely physical path is not whole.

Although it is a way to begin.

A yoga teacher friend and I were chatting, and he talked for a long time about his other job as a psychotherapist.  In particular, he talked about Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the practice of learning to identify thoughts and feelings rather than be reactive to them, the power of knowing one’s own mind (and it’s false beliefs or cruelty to the self and others).  He spoke of how our emotional or cognitive set of patterns deeply affects our physical bodies.  This isn’t new.  It’s science.  The way we think changes both our immediate biochemical reality and has the power to literally form or deform our physical tissues.  The body, he said, is attentive to every thought the brain has.

Yes, I said.  But the brain is also very attentive to the body.

The secret is you can work both ways.  You can enter, anywhere.

The Fourth Limb: Pranayama

restraint or training of the breath.  Yogis recognized that the breath is both a root source of our being-aliveness and a easy way to observe and participate in that aliveness.  They learned the experiential reality that an awareness of and participation in the breath can influence our health, energy levels, and mood in ways that nutrition, exercise, and cognitive thought simply cannot do.

The Fifth Limb: Pratyahara

withdrawal of the senses.  Looking within, sensitivity to internal processes and patterns, finding the inner witness.  In a world where we constantly look without for answers and direction, where we identify ourselves as the objects and events of our lives, pratyahara is a radical practice.  It teaches the root truth of how impermanent objects and events are, and how an over identification with them leads to pain.  It also reveals a level of constancy, depth, and unchanging in the midst of chaos.  We are conditioned beings, and often react rather than respond to ourselves and our world.  We have brains that categorize, evaluate, and judge.  The practices of pratyahara teach us to step away from judgement and rest in a place that is beyond judgement and can see whole pictures, as opposed to dualities of black and white, good or bad.  With time, withdrawal of the senses leads to increased discretion, discernment, and compassion.  It is a heart of equanimity.  We become able to respond, rather than react.  Our beings become like the depth of the ocean, rather than the surface of ripples and waves.

The Sixth Limb: Dharana

Intense focus, building of concentration and discernment; the ability to think and see clearly, to heighten one’s powers of thought and cognitive ability, free us from all the layers of misperception and avidya (blindness).  It is interesting that many people think of yoga and meditative or mystic traditions as turning off the mind, when the truth is the practices aim for clarity of mind and right thinking and seeing.  Science is showing in remarkable ways that yoga actually works to change or improve our intelligence; areas of the brain we typically use or do not use actually change with eight weeks of a regular practice; ability to access ‘subconscious’ levels of intuition, insight, memory and self awareness increase.  Study after study shows that a yoga practice improves school and work performance.

The Seventh Limb: Dhyana

Related to the ability to focus and concentrate is the state of Dhyana, or meditation.  We could say that meditation is a deeper level of concentration, but that might lead to judgements of better or worse.  Instead, Dhyana implies a different way of being, not a better one.  Again, science is proving that contemplative states and mindful movements actually result in changed brain waves and cause restorative, rejuvenating processes to happen across the body and mind that are in some ways more profound than REM sleep.  The mysterious ‘gray matter’ of our brains lights up with all sorts of things we can’t identify, yet.  Theta brain waves – unconscious, according to our western science – are increased.  Areas of the brain connected to empathy and compassion flare up and stay more active for days after a practice, and long term meditators seem to have access to this state more quickly, more profoundly, and more frequently.  The hemispheres of the brain increase their communication, balancing our analytic and creative selves, our introversion and extroversion urges, our states of creativity and experiences of ease all increase.

The Eighth Limb: Samadhi

state of oneness or bliss.  We may have touched on moments in our life in which we felt ourselves absolutely alive and deeply connected or in tune with the universe.  Science calls it peak performance or the flow state.  It might be stumbled upon in the most mundane of activities or cultivated through practice.  It’s heart is a genuine recognition of ‘okayness’ and even more than okayness; an understanding or affinity for beauty, power, the order of the cosmos.  A friend describes his first experience of samadhi in the summer of his junior college year, when most of his peers were away and he was engaged to paint and upkeep a professor’s home.  The long, repetitive, rhythmic days spent alone in the sunshine, touched by the sounds and the schedules of birds and insects, drifting on the sensations of sun on his skin, summer grasses in his breath, and long periods of uninterrupted, moony thought peaked in a sense of aliveness that was both cognitive and physical.  Call it epiphany.  It is what Einstein chased after in his long hours of solitude drifting in a little sailboat.  What Beethoven heard – even though he was stone deaf – as he composed his 9^th symphony.  It is very nearly an experience of feeling ourselves more than we typically do – the human animal or soul in all its beauty.  Many experience it as a connection to god.  But it may also be a connection to an infant or a puppy or a sunset.  This state, according to yoga, is the ground of who we are.  It is true and trustworthy.  It is a recognition of oneness and a moment of living beyond fear.

On backing off and going deeper

A number of students are in the early stages of their practice, and others are in a place of having some experience and wanting, after that experience, to go deeper.  Both sets of students have been asking me about how to do that, specifically asking how often to practice and what kind of a 'daily practice' we need to have. It seems my answer is contradictory; on the one hand I want to say practice everyday, and on the other I want to say go gently.

Both have their center in the concept of commitment.  The difference is in acknowledging limits, sheer truth of the physical nature of an asana practice, and the fact that most of us spend most of our lives pushing too hard already.  It is easy to let a physical yoga practice become one more thing we ruthlessly drive ourselves with.  I watch this happen with advanced students, quote unquote, all the time; when the effort becomes focused on advancing, insisting on pushing the body to it's limits, wondering how long it will take to start balancing on our hands, and believing since a yoga pose makes us feel good, than more, stronger, intense and physically exhausting practices must be a way to feeling even better.  Feeling that unless we are sore and exhausted, afterward, there is no benefit.

I have a daily practice.  I didn't always.  There were periods of time where I was driven by three hours of workout in a hot studio, every day.  There were other periods in which I went weeks without being able or willing to get to a yoga mat.

But what I have learned is this: my yoga practice causes something deep and alchemical to happen to my body that spills over into the rest of my day.  It is important for me to do it daily.  But what I mean by 'daily' is not hours and hours and hours of sweating until my body feels beaten into submission.  A daily practice is as important to me as is brushing my teeth or putting on clothes; I know at this point that when I don't practice, I will feel off center and somehow brittle.

But a daily practice sometimes means this: stand tall, finding my feet under me and letting the spine find its full length, the shoulders open up, the head pull back in line with those shoulders.  Arch to the left, to the right, back, and forward.  Find downward facing dog.  Come to my knees and go through cat cow.  Twist, somehow.  And try, try to find a meditative space for five minutes.

All in all, that is done in less than ten minutes.  On bad days, I don't get to this until late in the afternoon.  I know myself - and the practice - well enough to know I would rocket life altering changes in my lifestyle, mood, and energy if I did this immediately on waking up.  But that simply isn't my reality right now.

So: back off.  Do not harm yourself in your practice.  But go deeper.  Find something you can commit to and then commit.

Backing Off

As I said, early in my yoga practice I was doing two, sometimes three, Bikram classes a day.  In all honesty I needed this.  It was all I could do to keep myself together.  And I had found something in yoga that was safe, strong, healing, that simply didn't exist anywhere else.

There came a point, though, where my body would refuse.  I'd show up sick and my teachers would say rest, and I wouldn't.  Or, suddenly, I would lose all desire to practice and stop for weeks at a time until the internal clutter and chaos became so loud I longed for the quiet drip drip drip of sweat and rhythmic movements of my breathing.

There came another point, that was very much a process, of my realizing what I was doing.  I was bringing all of my ruthless addictive - and resulting procrastination/quitting - right into the practice.  I was depending on the physical practice to hold my emotional self in control.  I was relying on that physical practice because it seemed like the only thing I could control, rather than taking the lessons I learned there (my thoughts are not reality, I can accomplish things if I just show up, there is no perfection, outcome doesn't matter so much as effort does, accept where you are and stay there) and learning to live them.  I was using asana to hide from real life.

There is no such thing, I think, as 'wrong' in yoga.  I wasn't doing it wrong.  I was learning where I was and what I needed.  I was learning the truth, and that didn't happen one sudden instant but with some time. I would never have had those deep insights or willingness to even CONSIDER personal responsibility and change and making honest choices that would affect not just the moment but the whole quality of my 'life', from now till death, except I was practicing.

Once I had those revelations, and had them enough times to realize they weren't going to go away and I actually needed to change if I wanted to feel different, I stepped into a different level of yoga.  Call it 'advanced' if you like.  I realized that this stuff, this yoga, was about my life and my ethics and the way I ate, the relationships I had, the way I used time and money and acted when no one else was looking.  To limit it to the physical practice was to cut off its transformation; to literally cut of my transformation.  To resist and be stubborn.

And I began, instead, to see 'daily practice' as the cultivation of all eight branches of yoga, of the meditation and the breathing, of the ethics to self and to others.  Yes, it must be physical.  There are biochemical changes in the postures.  But it is a mistake for me to see those changes only as coming after hours and hours, or to only think I 'benefit' when I am learning a new pose.

There is something biochemical happening in the first postures, repeated.  Just like brushing your teeth.

A friend is an 'advanced' yogi, and has a hard practice every single day at the crack of dawn.  The other morning we talked about our practices.  I said that I had gone gently, slowly, and almost reverently through a few simple poses with long holds and then gone into my day.  She got a funny look on her face, and said she's been feeling 'flat' and 'frustrated' in her practice.  I can't back off, she said; I can't seem to believe that if I'm not 'advancing' I'm actually getting anything out of it.  Why would I bother repeating the same things I've already done and already know?  What's the good of practicing unless your getting better?

I sympathize.  I've known that frustration, too.  But I don't know that 'better' is a word I can use for what I need and practice.  I don't know that one gets 'better' at prayer.  Or if it's simply a thing that we must do to keep ourselves fully alive.

Going deeper, getting started, making a commitment.

Most of us know that a yoga practice makes us feel better.  But in our linear, accomplishment, competitive brain we forget.  We simply don't realize that for yoga to work AND GO ON WORKING, we have to keep doing it.  It doesn't 'cure' illness or depression in one shot, or after six weeks, or fifteen years.  It will change you.  But only so long as you show up.

Developing the habit of showing up on the mat, 'stepping up to the plate', making and keeping commitment, even when you feel resistance or are just learning, makes you feel better about yourself.  Just as much as the physical postures do.  It changes your brain chemistry to make a commitment and follow through.  It alters your world.  When you willfully, consciously bring yourself to the yoga mat, especially on blah or inert days, you will feel marvelous after your practice.  You will have created change.

Perhaps the best daily practice to have is to lay the mat out and stand on it for two minutes, every day if you can.

"There is nothing more satisfying than to acknowledge to yourself that you are working through your own resistance," says Patricia Walden.  "Practicing at these times of inertia builds strength of character, confidence, self-esteem, willpower.  You are building tapas (inner fire).   As your practice becomes stronger and more stable, you become stronger and more stable.  You take that off the mat with you.  With every single moment on the mat, you are literally creating the power to break through old patterns and past conditioning.

But listen: many of us struggle with resistance, anxiety, or depression so hardwired that all this 'practice everyday' is going to be one more way to set yourself up for failure.  Realize that there will be days rolling out the mat seems literally impossible, even if it's silly said out loud.  There will be days when 'doing something good for yourself' revolts, more than inspires, you.  Lethergy and self-sabotage can run so deep we will do anything other than practice.

This is the practice: accept, acknowledge, let go.  Do the smallest thing you can think of, a thing so small it would be imperceptible to others.  Sit up in bed.  The next step may be inhaling deeply through your nose, holding that breath for a moment.  The practice may be as simple as noticing how you feel.

That is a yoga practice, noticing.

Many days I've started there, inhaled.  Like a 12 step, one day at a time kind of thing, I find that just that is enough.  With just that one step, I might find I do, actually, have the energy to stretch my arms over head.  Or take a walk.  Or count my steps.

Or touch my hands to my heart.

That is a yoga practice.  I recommend it, daily.

Trust the practice.

  Practice.  Practice.  Practice, and all is coming.  Patthabhi Jois.

Getting to the mat is hard.  We all have those days.  When we feel injured, tired, overwhelmed, or completely unraveled.  You’ve gone through a long day.  Or maybe its early in the morning, yet, but the day ahead is daunting.  You make it to the kitchen only to remember you’re out of coffee.  Your to do list is so convoluted you wonder if it might not be more responsible to skip out on your practice.  You wonder about this long enough to have wasted time you might actually have spent doing something from that to do list.  You wonder about the yogic implications of stopping at a coffeeshop on your way to class.  You wonder what in the heck you're doing, who it is you think your fooling.

But you make it to the mat.  Somehow.

Getting to the mat is hard.  Sometimes being on the mat is harder.  We all have those days when our practice feels shallow.  It reveals a hell of a lot more frustration that it does Zen.  When listening to your breath, quote unquote, makes you want to slap your teacher in the face or maybe just breakdown and cry.  You just don’t seem to be in the right ‘mood’.

You’re in exactly the right mood.

Uncovering the layers of crud and dust and disease that this being human brings is yoga.  It is hard, sometimes, to show up.  And hard to stay with the practice even while it’s happening.  But it may be hardest to realize that this is the very stuff that makes up your yoga practice.  Unraveling all the layers that are hurting us or holding us back.  Revealing exactly what our ‘mood’ is.  What reality is.  What we’re capable of.

And what we are not.

It is hard.  There is no one on that mat but your own self.  There is no test at the end of class, no multiple choice.  You never graduate.  There is no competition in yoga but the competition you yourself bring.  That is exactly what makes yoga so beautiful and powerful in our over competitive, rashly judgmental world.

But it is also what makes it so hard.

All judgments, then, all expectation, disappointments, demands are coming from your own self.  Yoga is ruthlessly personal.  Here’s a secret:  all those layers of crud and dirt prove not that you’re in a bad place, or that something is wrong, but that the yoga is working.  The process is happening.

The judgments we make – of ourselves, of the day, our teachers, other students – are part of your practice.  Just as much as asana is.  Notice the judgments you make, on and off the mat.  Try to smile at them.  Recognize them for what they are.  They are what you need to sift, work through, see.

The process is working.

You are unraveling the layers.

Trust the practice.

DIY mat spray

The basement is covered with all the mats I lug around to classes, to the domestic violence shelters, etc, for a thorough rub down and air out.  A couple of people have asked about mat cleanliness, whether or not gym mats/studio mats are cleaned (theoretically, yes, realistically, not so much), so it seems appropriate to share this recipe with you.  It's green, it'll last you a long time, and if you get a small spray bottle to tuck in your bag you can spray it right after practice, let it dry for five minutes while you gather your things.  Trust me, it adds to the joy of spreading out the mat each day if it smells clean.  And more: people have asked to borrow it when I go to studios, it smells that good. I don't measure anything.  But I'm guessing it's about like this:

1 cup water

1/4 cup witch hazel

10 drops tea tree oil

15 drops lavender oil (or other smelly one you like, or skip)

5 or 6 drops eucalyptus oil.

You can add rubbing alcohol, if you like.  But witch hazel, tea tree, and eucalyptus are all antispetic in addition to being good things for you to breathe.

Prana. Yama. The practices of life force.

#classnotes 4/29/12

Prana yama

The breath lies at the very boundary between our conscious and our unconscious being.  It lies between our thoughts and the whole of our physical, emotional, cellular and metabolic selves. Because it lies there, between, it is a bridge.  It is an autonomic system, like our digestion and the ticking heart.  But unlike those things, we can feel and pay attention to it directly, without a need for medical tools or machines. And unlike those things, we can choose to influence it.

Furthermore, there are few sensory experiences that have such an immediate effect on our nervous system – that is, our brains, our spinal cord, our nerves and neural pathways.  The nervous system is responsible for mood, instinct, fight or flight, rest and digest.  It plays a major role in our thinking and behavioral patterns.  We could change our nervous system over time with intensive therapy, drastic physical shifts, ongoing dietary change, drugs or brain surgery.  With breath, though, we can affect our brain, nerves, and spine within seconds.

Books could be written, and have, about the thousands of ways in which the breath is central to a yoga practice, but these two form a rock solid beginning.

By learning to pay attention to our breath (and, at times, to influence it), we take a step back from the thinking, ego part of who we are and directly experience our larger selves.  We literally start to play with the world of the subconscious, the dream, memory, cell structure, brain tissue, nerves standing up or calming down, the life processes of birth and decay.  There is metaphor and poetry to talking about the breath: the breath of god, the breath of life, stopping to catch a breath, you take my breath away.  It’s important to realize this is no metaphor, but truth: changing your breath changes your physical reality, immediately, in ways your conscious ‘self’ can only catch glimpses of or appreciate at a surface level.

Because the breath occupies this boundary land of conscious and unconscious, it is a unique trap door we can use.  It provides a way for the conscious self to step into and begin to influence and explore all that is unconscious and murky and so terribly influential in our lives.  It is very hard to imagine controlling the secretion of digestive proteins, say, or to willfully slow down our heart rate or participate in the life cycle of a cell.  It is nearly impossible to ‘think’ our way into feeling better or believing other than the way we do, no matter how many affirmations you repeat to yourself.  Those are all processes dominated by the unconscious; they are stubbornly resistant to will power or conscious intervention.

But the breath – the breath is something we CAN notice and even change.  It requires no fancy tools or expensive equipment, no laboratory tests or radical change in diet.  It doesn’t require years and years of study.  It is available to everyone, at any moment, and literally brings us to the gate of all those ‘subconscious’ processes happening within us.  It is proof that we are participant in those larger, shadowy processes, even though our participation is usually unconscious.

The word ‘prana’ is usually translated to breath or life force.  ‘Yama’ is restraint, observance, practice, control, or mastery.  Hence, pranayama, a branch on the eight limbed path of yoga practices (asana, or the physical practice, is the 3rd limb), is observance and practice of the breath or life force within us.

Prana

Life, physicists tell us, is energy.  I am not a physicist, and I couldn’t very well explain this to a toddler, let alone another grown adult.  All that E=Mc squared, stuff.  Yet I know and accept, on an intuitive and intellectual level, that life and cosmos are a mysterious tapestry in which our universe burst into being out of nothingness eons ago, that millions and zillions of stars are circling and exploding with materials so heavy a teaspoon’s worth weighs many billions of pounds, and the shifting of seasons is actually, on a level I cannot see, a shifting of atoms.

There is something that causes us to be alive and, after our last breath leaves us, to no longer be the same any more.  I am not a theologian, either, and I will not bother to explore concepts of afterlife.  But I will say there is something that is us that doesn’t seem to be just our bodies, since our cells change every second, but isn’t just our brains, either.

That self, the yogic tradition tells us, is one manifestation of prana.  Prana is energy.  Life is energy.

That, says the yogi guru, pointing to energy and mystery and wonder, is what you are.

**

The yogic sages were brilliant.  They were able to discover and intelligently talk about this stuff without the benefit of am microscope.

Our western medicine has identified 6000 nerves in the human body: conduits along which impulses of energy move back and forth, shifting our hormones and cell structure and chemical composition along the way.

A yogic sage would nod at the concept of nerves.  He would call it a nadi (see picture at the end of the essay).

The yogic sages say there are not 6000, only.  That is only what our microscopes see.  Some yogic maps show 72,000 nadis or energy/nerve pathways in the body.  The yogic map of these pathways is uncannily like our map of the nervous system.  Other yogic sources, though, say there are more than 350,000 energy pathways, coursing and roadmapping out the entire field of who we are.  They’d say our science is just not sophisticated, not subtle enough to see it.

**

Life is energy.  Life is prana.  And yoga is a practice or path of learning what and where energy actually is.  What has power and what doesn’t.  This sounds simple, and it is: we learn we function better when our bodies are open and cared for, when we eat well and rest enough.  But the study or practice of energy is also profound, and goes deeper and deeper the more open you become to exploring it.  It will start asking difficult questions, along the lines of why do I feel or act this way?  Why does this feel so good or bad? When I say ‘I’m feeling sad’, what do I actually mean?  Is there a physical sensation to sadness or is it a set of thoughts?  Where are those physical sensations, and can I tolerate or change them? What happens when I sit down and look fear right in the face for a moment? Why do I always feel this way after talking to so and so? How much longer will my body take this?  What IS that pain in my neck? They are difficult questions, and push us toward self-knowledge and self-mastery.   They also open into remarkable possibilities.

There is, at any flickering moment in time, a tremendous amount of power and intelligence in your body.  The human body can power up televisions, they say.  Human bodies could light up whole cities.  Every heart beat is triggered by an electrical surge.  Anger has a voltage.  So does laughter.

What yoga begins to show is that we have this huge potential, this oceanic tide of kinetic energy, even if we feel sluggish and stuck and powerless.  The power in us is often misplaced, repressed, or resisted – which causes energetic turmoil and dis- ease.  But it is there.

Prana and the energy body

Prana is life force , or breath.  It is the energy of the million, billion stars exploding and gyrating in the sky.  Human beings receive this life force directly into the body through the process of breathing.  We take it in in other ways as well: through live foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables, minerals, through fresh water, through living, breathing trees and vegetation.

I tend to think that we also take it in through the love of other people and other creatures.  We probably also take it in in more subtle ways still, through music, the sound of inspiring words, beautiful sights.  Through empathy and art (neuroscience is backing this up).  Human beings are hardwired for connection: the tug and pull of affection, inspiration, rejection, or acceptance leave tracks or stains or floods of energy inside us.  It is the emotive force, complete with its ocean of endorphins and stress hormones and sex hormones and joy, that binds us to life and makes us want to live, more.

Yoga discovered that in addition to the physical architecture of our body we have an interpenetrating and underlying sphere or tapestry of reality.  They called it the pranamayakosha (the body of vital energy or airs.  (There are five bodies.  Food for a different essay)).  The nature of this subtle structure is movement, flow, change and tidal shift.  Over the centuries, they developed not just the theory of the pranamayakosha, but the anatomy of it.  They discovered the roadmap to our emotional selves, our characters (again, see picture at the end of the essay).

The structure is shot through with these invisible channels, those nadis, through which prana flows, energizing and literally sustaining all parts of the physical and energetic and intellectual structure.  Again, a visual representation of these tracks looks very much like our representations of the nervous or circulatory systems, but many times more dense.

Many western students are loosely familiar with the term ‘chakra’ or energy wheel.  According to yogic science, these energy wheels are like grand central terminal for the railway of the nadis.  They are energetic hubs, major thoroughfares of power and information.  Interestingly enough, these chakra points correlate directly with major nerve plexuses, organs, circulatory and lympathic centers of our body.  Their observations were physiologically accurate.

The energy body is deeply intelligent, although it doesn’t exactly speak English.  Much of yoga practice is learning to develop awareness of and trust in the wisdom of this energy body.

As yogis learned to experience the energy body directly, to map the flow of its major currents, they made another fascinating discovery:

Breath has an immediate impact on the entire flowing, waving, shimmering thing.  More than anything else, it is breathing that builds and regulates the flow of prana in the body.  On the most basic of physical levels, breathing sustains and supports the metabolic processes of every anatomical system in the body.  The very life of the body’s tissues is created by and dependent on the process of the breath. A body can go more than a week without food, almost that long without water.  Without breath, we would die in moments.  Breath supports the strength, responsiveness, and ability to detoxify the bones, the muscles, and the organs.  Unhealthy breathing habits (which most of us have) cause cellular structure to weaken, become dysplastic, irregularly shaped.

The breath balances, regulates, opens, closes, controls, and channels the flow of energy across the entire field of who we are, from our core beliefs and emotions to the skin of our toes.

Yama

The word yama is translated restraint or ascetic practice.  This is a harsh word, to our modern day ears.  It rankles of renunciation, fasting, rules and regulations.  Yet the point wasn’t an embrace of suffering for the sake of suffering.  The point was to suffer less; to be oneself, more.  Yogis sought reality.  Knowledge as ‘taught’ by priests, hierarchies, rituals was not their goal; experienced truth was.  There is an element of hard truth to ‘yama’; but there is also an element of authenticity and integrity.  The practices and restraints may be thought of as cultivated habits, a dedication to right things over easy answers, or an approach to self mastery.  At its most general, practice is the effort to replace blind auto pilot with conscious choice and mindfulness.

The earliest yogis dedicated their lives to spiritual and psychological experimentation.  They investigated diet, breathing, physical exercises, ethical behavior, prayer, meditation, chanting, worship, dedication to every conceivable kind of god and goddess.  Over the course of time, some headway was made in discovering the path to a fully alive human being.  A loose tradition was born.  A set of reliable and verifiable principals and practices emerged.  At some point, these principals and practices came to be known as yoga.

Yogis used their own minds and bodies as laboratories for experiments in living.  They arrived over and over again at a series of stunning insights into the human condition.

In the final analysis, they found that it is not what you know or believe, but how you live that counts.  Yamas are rungs on a ladder, a net to catch our days and our experiences with, a guide away from suffering and into that ‘more’ we suspect is there.

Interestingly enough, yogic wisdom does not make any claim to be undertaking spiritual writing or theology.  There is no interest in founding a new religion or disabusing one from the religion one already has.  There is little of entertainment, and not much drawing on the archetypes of the religious imagination.  Instead, the yogic wisdom texts seem to say that what mature human beings require is not another or different religion.  What we require is not more theology, but a reliable practice; a training program that may help the body and the mind realize the full potential and ramifications of being human.

Pranayama – practicing life’s energies

I taught a woman in a domestic violence shelter for two months, and after she left the shelter she continued coming to some of my classes.  Over time, the change in her was so poignant, and so inarguably TRUE, that I was baffled.  Of course, I say that yoga is change and transformation all the time.  I believe it.  But to see the change so radically, right before my eyes, in a way that was not metaphor but real, was stunning.

In the beginning, she showed up in jeans, a thick sweater, and tennis shoes.  I made a general comment to the room about the sensory receptors on the bottoms of our feet, but didn’t push it.  She practiced in those clothes for months.  When I gave cues to stretch the arms or take big steps, she would either mince her way into it and then draw back to her norm, or lose all control and not be able to move her arms and legs in co-ordination.  She always took the same place in a back corner of the room.

Although her disconnection from her body was obvious, it wasn’t really any different than the disconnect most of us have.  There are variations.  But it is a difference only of degree.

Yogically speaking, we begin a personal, spiritual, and psychological change through the body.  While this may seem a bit of a stretch for western minds, to yoga this is a very valid path.  The body plays a central role in the development of our character.  When we were young, those things mostly happened to us.  When we begin to practice, however, character and psychology are things we begin to make, ourselves.  Most psychology, self help, or spirituality begins with what the yogis would call the ‘mental body’ – thoughts and feelings.  But yogis take a radical step in moving the entry point right into the body.  They understand it to be the doorway to the more subtle interior worlds.

One evening this woman showed up to class in sweats and carrying a yoga mat of her own.  She sat down and took off her shoes.  I caught her eye and she gave a slight, shy smile before she went seriously into her pre-yoga practice cross legged seat.

It was as if she knew she had found something, here.  She was willing to see what else she might find.

A week or two later, she took her yoga mat out of the back corner and found a place in the front row.

All of this was beginning to show in her yoga postures, as well.  She became intensely concentrated in her practice.  It was clear she was enjoying, especially, the standing postures and heart opening practices – the warrior poses, mountain, dancer.  She told me one day after class that she loved the sense of feeling her feet on ground.  For the first time in her life, she said, she felt strong.  I noticed that she had taken a sudden leap with her breathing: it was steady and smooth and full even when she was most tired and other students were distracted.

One day, I noticed she was crying in camel pose.  Everyone went into child’s pose, afterward, where our faces are lowered to the ground.  When I cued the class to move again, into the next pose, this woman stayed down.  I noticed that her tears had turned to a kind of quiet and slow weeping.

This has happened before in my classes.  It has happened to me.  But I was surprised when a few minutes later, the woman stood back up again.  She followed the cues and did a few more poses with all of us.  And then, all on her own, she went back into camel pose and stayed there for a very long time.

It wasn’t until weeks later that she and I processed this together.  We were able to process not just that day but all the slow weeks and months that had come ahead of it.  Yoga works that way.  There are obvious and sudden moments of epiphany.  But there is also consistent, day after day subtlety and the basic willingness to show up.

She told me much of what I myself had seen: that she felt a powerful kind of concentration in yoga, and sometimes just moving from one posture to another felt inexpressibly good to her.  She noticed how her breathing had changed and grown more steady and free, and said this was true especially in class, but was showing up in her life off the mat as well.  She said that her arms and her legs began to have energy in them, and it was like there was a burning, fiery power right behind her belly button as well.

In talking about what happened the day she cried, she shrugged. She said it was ‘weird’.  She had begun to feel very dizzy.  Her heart began to race and her vision blurred, as if there were dust motes in her eyes.  Her whole chest and throat began to feel hot, “full of heat, it really kind of hurt”.  She felt she was going to pass out.  Then she realized she was crying, and felt ‘relief’ that we were going into child’s pose afterwards.

But what happened, later, I asked?  Why did you decide to go back into the pose?

She shrugged again.  “I knew that I could.” she said; “I knew it was okay, and there was something in my chest and throat that just needed to be felt again.  I don’t know, Karin….but a few weeks ago I heard something you said in class, and I realized I felt beautiful.  I’ve never felt beautiful in my whole life.  Somehow, it seemed a beautiful thing to do to go back into that pose.”

I know that this moment was an outward and visible sign of a major shift in her practice.  She was able to touch – to literally reconnect and feel – her feelings.  Feelings are the subterranean life of our energy body.

What I saw happen in that student is a thing I have felt in different ways – and to many different degrees of intensity – in my own life.

It is a stunningly beautiful thing.  You see it happen and you feel privileged, blessed to see a human achievement so rare in our day to day life.

But honesty tells me I have seen this happen, over and over and over again.

It would take hours to discuss the ways in which yoga – and perhaps other practices or people in her life – helped this woman.  We’d launch into psychology and theories and about how healing works, how people become stronger or happy.  But all of those discussions are really diversions from the real truth: it would be impossible to articulate all that happens to us in a yoga practice, but the sum total is good.  There is something to simply watching our breath that opens doorways to the soul we didn’t know were there.  If what we need is a way to feel better, stronger, more alive and more self-assured, than theory or theology don’t matter so much as practice does.

Practice, practice.  Practice.  said Patthabhi Jois.  Practice and all is coming.

in my pocket

Pranayama or meditation on the breath

Class notes, April 22 2012 Doubt, fear, and wondering how to live our best life are essential parts of being human.  So, too, are experiences of deep love and reverence such as we feel in the face of beauty, a loved one, a stunning human achievement or a breathtaking moment of raw nature.  Those experiences, as well as all of our internal drives and longings, form what have been known throughout time as ‘spiritual paths’.

So often we experience this path as one of confusion or loneliness.  So often we find the very places we go for answers confusing or alienating because they may not answer the questions for us. This is painful.  But in pain, just as in physical illness, there is an element of healing and wisdom: we feel pain because we also know something that is not pain, even if it’s shadowy and hard to define.

One of the difficulties of spiritual paths is that we can’t take the paths of others.  There is a paradox, here: it is difficult, but also the root of its most endearing promise:  there is a spiritual path and a way that is very much ‘for us’, a way of answering our longings that is absolutely personal and unshakeable. We do best on the spiritual path, weather in a traditional religious setting or as we try to pick ourselves up off the couch, not by becoming a worshipful devotee of any particular teacher, but by seeking our own inner center and thus tapping perennial, universal wisdom directly. Ourselves.  Wisdom is not a thing that can be taught.  It is a thing we must discover and understand on our own.

One of the funniest things about human beings is that each of us possesses a vast potential for expanding our awareness in ways that bring great insight, joy, peace, and fulfillment to our lives – yet we habitually maintain our consciousness in tightly woven grooves.  We stay distanced from our deeper spiritual nature and potential.  We live in a strange kind of exile from our own true self.

The first and most obvious way to see this is by looking at our relationship to our own breathing.  It’s been known for thousands of years – known to every human culture in history – that the simple act of being aware of our breathing transforms our lives for the better.

Furthermore, there is nothing inherent in our bodies or our circumstances that stops us from devoting a part of our awareness, however small, to our breathing experience moment by moment.  We would feel better, function at higher levels, and be more efficient and healthy if we gave our breathing some attention.  But even so, most of us go around with our minds entirely oblivious to our body’s root source of pleasure and inspiration.

The word inspiration means “to be breathed” or “to be breathed into”: to have the flood of insight, intuition, god, beauty, or art, fill us up.

We are meant to be filled up.  We are meant to experience joy.  We are meant to feel a whole range of emotions and to experience ourselves as alive and inspired.

Think, for a moment, of the way your brain and your body feels after an intense period of laughter.  Or after singing your heart out while driving your car.  Or after an orgasm.  Think of the physical sensations of breathing after an intense, grief struck crying jag.  Remember the feelings that wash over you after panic or fear has passed.  It feels good to breathe then.  It may not be conscious.  It might not be something we’d think about or name.  But our breath has changed. We feel it.

**

The primary psychological insight into the power of meditation is that spiritual awakening, the flow state, and moments of feeling ‘on’ or entirely ‘with it’ only happen in the immediacy of the present moment.  In fact, all human feelings and experiences happen only here, and right now.  Even memories are a way of re-experiencing something that happened, in the present.  Fear, worry, daydreaming or planning are all ways of experiencing the future, in the present, not an actual or reliable prediction of what will actually occur.  The present moment is the only place where we encounter both the inner world and the outside world immediately and together.

And nothing grounds us so deeply and immediately in the present moment as an ongoing awareness of our breath.

**

The following brief exercises sum up and borrow from classic breath work (pranayama – the next essay will explore what prana and yama mean) or breathing meditations proven by science and thousands of years of spiritual seeking.  Every single one aims to bring you back to your own path, back to your own breath.

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The primary culprit that makes ‘meditating’ so hard and us so stressful is the tendency of the thinking mind to drift away from the here and now into memories, imaginings, plannings, judgements, or thoughts about thoughts.  We judge our own thoughts even as we are thinking them.  And we judge the input coming to us from our senses – both inner and outer experience – constantly.  Driven by our flustered ego’s attempts to navigate and control these storms, we spend most of our days and most of our lives lost in often conflicting, self-defeating, or just plain unreasonable ways of thinking.  We problem solve our way toward success, worry about the future, plan our next move, daydream about being somewhere else.

The initial challenge in meditating, then, is to learn ways to shift some of our attention away from past-future fixation and regain precious breathing space in the here and now.  To be less thrown about by the tantrums of ego, so that we can touch a bit of the ‘something more’ indicated by our questions and longings and true self.

This is not to say we should judge our minds for being minds.  Minds are brilliant.  They have tremendous power.  Mind has beauty and subtleties the most advanced computers and neuroscience are at a complete loss to understand.  The trouble is not that we have minds, but that we ask our minds to do things that are not its job.

Meditation will not take your mind or brilliant thoughts away.  It is not a disparagement of creativity or intelligence. In fact, it will hone your powers of concentration, intuition, memory, and creativity; so that when you want to think you can think more clearly.  Meditation doesn’t belittle the mind.  It just gives it a rightful role to play.

Many of us think of meditation as something we need time to do, or need a quiet mind and peaceful body to accomplish.  So we put it off.  We think of ‘meditatation’ as something Buddhist monks do, or starry eyed hippies, just as we tend to think of ‘spirituality’ as something handed down by special people or found in sacred spaces, written down in ancient books.  We don’t think of ourselves as saints or mystics.  That view, an unfortunate correlate of religion, culture, and self doubt, forgets that all spiritual insight and every vision of truth, every single yoga pose, was discovered by a human being.  You are a human being; you have this same capacity.

It might be better to think of meditation as a kind of awareness or consciousness that is a constant; it is there every moment of our lives.  It is an inborn part of us that has been forgotten, dismissed, or willfully silenced.  Meditation is simply learning to letting ourselves become a little more conscious, wheneve

whenever we want to.  While washing dishes, while practicing yoga, while walking.

Think of it as of being aware of your breathing at any time, in any situation.  Like right now, for example.

At this very moment, you are only one effortless expansion of awareness away from being on your way to the infinite.  As you continue reading, simply allow your awareness to expand.  Without any effort at all your attention can spill wider to also include the actual physical sensations you’re feeling in your nose and your mouth, as the current of air you’re breathing rushes in…and rushes out…and rushes in again…

As you continue breathing and reading at the same time, notice that you don’t need to change what you’re doing in order to experience consciousness expansion.  Nor must you make any effort to expand your consciousness a little further to include more and more of the present moment.  You can continue reading, become aware of your breath, and then become aware of your body in a particular position, a particular place, any sounds or absence of sounds around you, any movements in your body or around you.  Your breath just keeps rushing in….and rushing out…and rushing in again…

Consciousness wants to expand.  That is it’s nature.

As you read these words and at the same time experience your breathing rushing in and rushing back out again, you are meditating.  You can deepen that meditation at any time.  Indeed, for the rest of your life, no matter what you’re doing, you can develop this primal and human capacity to be aware of your breathing; you can merge breath meditation and the rest of your life into one seamless whole.

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Pause and reflect

You might want to pause a few moments after reading this paragraph, to put these words aside….let go of words for a bit…stretch perhaps to bring your awareness to your whole body…and gently become a witness to your own breathing…tune in to the actual sensations at the tip of your nose…at the upper lip…on the inner lining of the nose and into the mouth…as the air rushes in…and leaves your body completely…and then rushes in one more time…notice how each breath is slightly different….there is no one breath repeated over and over, but small shifts in fluidity, in texture, in sound, in depth…every breath you ever breathe will be unique as a snowflake…rushing in…and rushing back out of you…before it rushes in…again…and again…you may expand your awareness to include the movements in your chest, your ribcage, your belly as you breathe…give yourself permission to enjoy yourself…for the next 10 seconds…or 10 minutes…or any time you want…be open to a new experience as you are open to a new breath…not something you do…but something you simply allow  and accept as a gift…

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Yoga and breath

Imagine a spiritually focused culture.  Because we are a materially based culture, this is nearly incomprehensible and impossible to take seriously.  Try.  In this culture, the most brilliant minds of each new generation, for hundreds of generations, accepted as their primary occupation the challenge of observing, from the inside out, the workings of the human mind and body, spirit and soul.

When we explore the ancient  meditative tradition, we’re accessing the accumulated discoveries and reflections of hundreds of thousands of brilliant human beings.  Human beings who devoted their entire lives to looking inward, employing the tool of consciousness itself, to explore how it is and why it is and how different things affect it.

One of the first things the yoga tradition discovered was that most human beings do not come anywhere near living to their fullest potential.

The second thing they discovered was that virtually all human beings can.  It doesn’t require genius or wealth or physical giftedness.

Yoga is the practice of waking your soul – your very own soul - in this lifetime.

In yogic teachings, the wisdom runs from the most obvious to the most sublime and difficult to understand.  Indeed, some of the Vedic texts or the yoga sutras venture into some of the most revolutionary mystic teachings in human history.  Some of the yogic accomplishments – twisting into pretzels, walking on coals, living in the winter mountains without anything but one’s internal heat to survive – are baffling to science and yet proven by that science.  But over and over again, the teaching of yoga is that it begins at the beginning, at the most basic.  The wisdom is present at all times.  It rides on the breath.

Patanjali, said to be the author of the Yoga Sutras, suggested that at the beginning a student observe the breath experience by noticing specifically:

When you are inhaling

When you are exhaling

And when you are temporarily paused in breathing (suspension)

Pranayama as taught in traditional yoga involves concentrating on each of these three phases of the breathing experience in turn.  By observing more closely, you discover a universe of experiential subtly in each.  The art, or energy, or process of attention reveals the incredible nature of what is already there and already real in each moment.

In pranayama training, you also develop the ability to control each of the three breath phrases.  As you consciously vary the ratios (remember that you are literally intaking oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide, influencing the biomechanics of every cell and tissue in your body, starting with the brain), you learn to quickly change your energetic state.  That means you can change the levels of energy, ability to focus or concentrate, ability to relax, ability to enjoy, ability to sleep or feel or experience a piece of music…

Patanjali, following the ancient yogic formula for breath control, called the inhalation by the Sanskrit term puraka, the suspended or paused breath kumbhaka, and the exhalation rechaka.  Let’s take a moment to explore each in turn.

Inhale: Puraka

As you go on with your reading, for your next few breaths notice especially your inhales…notice how the air flows in through your nose and  the channel of your throat.  Notice how your stomach relaxes and moves outward, your chest expands, and your upper back and ribcage move outward…

The inhale is primarily a process of expansion.  Your diaphragm muscle under your lungs contracts downward, and your rib cage muscles expand to create a relative vacuum inside your two lungs, thus making air from the outside come rushing into your lungs.  Therefore, many traditions and have likened the inhale to the expansive nature of the universe.  As you develop the ability to feel more and more subtle sensations in your body, you may notice that every bone in your body externally rotates on and inhale…the whole of your skeleton is expanding…

Scientifically speaking, it is not our muscles nor our self that is breathing: it is a process of atmospheric pressure that our body participates and responds to.  It is more accurate to say that the air – the universe – is breathing us than to say “I am breathing”.  Meditations on the breath reveal us to be a part of the universal symphony, a response to the ebb and flow of cosmic shifts.  This is both humbling and, at times, beautifully empowering.

Pause and experience:

For the next few breaths, inhale strongly and deeply through the nose….feel your nostrils flare out and expand to take in more air…feel your chest expand rapidly…perhaps sit or stand more upright…notice how your physical body might change…your thoughts might shift…the physical sensation of being alive (aka your mood) changes when you breathe deeply, strongly, and fully.

The held breath: kumbhaka

The held breath occurs after the inhale or exhale is complete, and sometimes midbreath.

At the top of your inhale, a short held breath allows your lungs to absorb much more oxygen.  With that extra oxygen, your whole biochemical system becomes more energized and alert.  Holding the breath after the exhale leads to a deeper and deeper experience of emptiness.  In the Zen Buddhist tradition, the held breath after the exhale is of vital importance in letting go of ‘everything’ and being empty on a regular basis.  In our culture we tend to focus on being full and having a lot, not empty.  A regular meditation upon emptiness is of greatly liberating value.

Pause and experience:

After reading this paragraph, put the book aside and experiment with the Kumbhaka or suspended breath.  Hold your breath at the top of the inhale, simply for the count of one or two….then gently let the breath go.  Don’t feel you need to do this at the top of every breath.  Simply inhale and exhale without control or judgment for a few cycles…when you are ready, take an inhale…and allow yourself to pause just slightly, like a swing on the playground pausing at the top of its ascent before it comes down again…exhaling…so subtly there may not seem to be a ‘pause’ at all.   Experiment with repeating the hold for three inhales in a row…and then allow yourself to relax all control of your breath again…just noticing the difference.  Perhaps play with extending the pause…to the count of three or four…no more really than five…

Give yourself a minute or two to notice the effects of this and then consider exploring the pause at the bottom of the exhale…perhaps even the next time you practice, rather than now…any of these experiments can happen whenever you want them to…

Let yourself be fully empty for a slightly deeper count than you normally do…for a count of two or four…

Perhaps you want to explore holding the breath slightly at both the top and the bottom…

Whenever you feel complete or need to move on, allow yourself to let the inhales and the exhales go completely…coming and going at whatever speed they naturally want to…simply observing the breathing process for eight or ten or twelve breaths…and then letting all of it go…

The Exhale: Rechaka

The third stage of the breath, exhalation, is similar to the inhale in that it likes to be continuous and fluid.  The exhale is extremely important physiologically because it is active detoxification and connected to the parasympathetic (calming, rest and digest) nervous system.  Meditatively and philosophically, it is important because it reflects an emptying not only of the lungs but also of the mind.

As you become empty of air, and also of your usual thoughts and tendencies and self-senses, you will often experience your ego letting go its control of the mind.  This allows the wider consciousness room to breathe.  This allows more reality to enter your awareness.  It is often experienced as a unique awakening-rebirth experience that comes on the next inhale.  You can also use a focus on the exhale to breathe out (detoxify) emotional tensions, fears, doubts, or hang ups as you empty yourself of negative feelings…and experience the refreshment, the sustenance, the power of the next inhale.

Pause and experience:

After reading this paragraph, put away the book for a few moments and experiment for a few breaths as you focus on long, relaxed, exhales…and also hold the breath at the bottom of exhales, as you feel comfortable…see what it’s like to move toward emptiness…and then be empty of air…empty of thought…empty of need…empty of should and oughts…empty of your self….before the next inhale comes.

Yoga and Breathing Patterns

From that spiritually grounded Vedic culture, we have literally thousands of different breathing exercises and experiments connected with yogic practice.  Our modern science and medicine are providing their own thousands of different studies to show how breathing influences health and mood.  The practice of watching and exploring the breath is literally one that takes a lifetime.  For our purposes, here and now, it isn’t important to know all those details.  It is simply important to know that the way you breath affects you deeply, and that you can at any given moment in your life bring some awareness to how you breath and what you are experiencing.

In particular, it may help you to know that we each have a breathing ‘signature’ that is as unique to us as our handwritten signature.  While each breath is unique, we tend to have patterns.  For example, some people tend to inhale more quickly and fully than they exhale.  Others tend to breath through their mouth.  Most of us tend to breath with only the upper third of our lungs – which directly contributes to physical stress and emotional imbalance.

Generally speaking, inhales are energizing, uplifting, revitalizing; exhales are nourishing, grounding, calming, soothing.  This is not to say one is better than the other, but may help if you spend five minutes getting to know your own breathing pattern.  For example, I have lived with major depression most of my life: once I began studying my breath I realized my exhales are more than twice as long as my inhales.  Hence: grounding and calming are well and good, unless you become so grounded you are stuck in the mud and feel you can’t move, think, or speak.

One of the reasons yoga works – without you having to do or understand the science behind it – is because it balances the inhales and the exhales to a steady and equal count.

The simple (but not really so simple) act of balancing the breath will quickly generate deep reverberations throughout your being.  The most common way to balance the breathing is to inhale for a count of 4, then exhale for a count of 4, and repeat.  See if you can do this for 12 breath – so that you fully calm and balance both the inhale and the exhale.

Some find it helpful to say “puraka…rechaka….puraka…rechaka…” rather than count.  Or even “inhaling…exhaling…inhaling…exhaling…” or even more simply “in….out….in…out.”  It’s up to you to find your best speed for counting, and the best way to count.  If you practice a few times, you may notice that it is a different count on different days…or easier to say inhale exhale…or to count to 12 breaths only…

You’re always in charge of pacing your own practice.

Pause and experience:

Give this a try, for eight breath cycles: inhale for 4 counts….exhale for 4 counts…and repeat.

At some point over the next week or two, invite yourself to get to know your own breath.  Ironically, even though it is perhaps the most important aspect of being alive, most of us have never stopped to inquire into our own breathing…or what it means to be one who breathes…

Give yourself a period of at least five minutes to simply count the way you breath, without trying to change or manipulate it in anyway.  Each of us breathes differently.  Count as you inhale…notice if you pause or not…and then count again as you exhale.  If you lose track or find your mind wandering, just notice that you’ve been distracted and start again (a kitchen timer or cell phone timer might help).

There is no right or wrong to this exercise.  It’s simply one more way of knowing the parts of who you are…and knowledge is always power.  How do you inhale…and how do you exhale….

This is your resting breath; the way you typically breath when you are sitting or standing still.  You may want to experiment with noticing how the counts change while you are walking or exercising.

You may want to check in with yourself in moments of anxiety, or sadness, or anger.  How do you breath, then?

There is no right, no wrong.  There is no amount of knowledge or one trick secret or breathing pattern that will suddenly make it all make sense, either.  There is only an effort to return, over and over again, to feeling the breath in your body.  Each time you do so will take your practice, and your life, to a new level.  It will flash backwards and give you insight into what has already happened in you and your practice, your moods and your energy.  It will flash forward and make the things we do in a yoga practice more profound and more interesting, a thousand new ways to grow deeper.

You will never know everything.  You will always know a little bit more.  That is your path.  To grow ever and ever more alive, more and more yourself.

Yoga will do nothing but help you.