Give me strength...

There is strength to open pickle jars.  Strength that can hold a twisted, inverted asana where all of one's body weight is supported across the five fingers of one hand.  And then there is the strength that burns down cities in war, of storms that rips trees from the earth, the true strength of death that makes smoldering matchsticks of us all. It was a hot, smoldering summer.  Without thunder or mercy, just the drone of dry heat.  It was easy to fall into lassitude, into believing everything would go on being the way it was.  To think of strength as the muscles, and a personal thing.  I practiced handstands.  There were many black flies.  I flicked at them, absently.

Then one day it thundered.  It roared.  Someone said 'it's fall now, so...' and I thought but no, no it isn't.  By the end of her sentence, though, it was.  September is irrevocable.  And I was snapped out of my dailyness when told I'd have to move, things are changing, I'll have to make decisions and things won't be the same anymore.

The westernest leaves of the sugar maples turned a burned red.

**

When you meet persons who have practiced yoga or meditation for a long time, you are struck by their levelness.  They have a kind of grace.  A quality of being touched, joyful.  It seems, sometimes, that they are a lucky brand of bastard whom suffering and the chaos of life hasn't touched.  Their lives must be different, less stressful than ours.

This isn't true.

When you ask, you learn that they suffer and worry just as we do.  Their lives are no less stressful than our own.  I've known yogis who battle massive depression.  Folks who weep when their parents die.  Ones who have lost money, a limb, a child.

It is not that they don't suffer or that they are immune to life's changes.  It is only that they have learned what true strength means.  It isn't that they don't age, don't hurt, don't have headaches or have to work and find time and defecate like the rest of us neurotic humans.  They suffer and struggle.

But they are not overwhelmed.  They are strong.

**

Before I practiced yoga, my life was a kind of war.  It seemed very hard.  I seemed to have to work, constantly, to hang on with both hands, to keep the whole thing going by my own efforts.  I wavered between a kind of self-pity (why can't I have a life like hers?  Why is that person so lucky?  Things would be different if I had the money, time, if I lived there, if I met the right person, didn't have to deal with this person...) where everything appeared very random and an overweening sense of importance: I would make my own life happen, I would learn the right skills, I would or would not make relationships work, have a happy life, be healthy.

Most of us spend most of our lives with this kind of erratic, frantic movement.  Where we have to juggle and keep dancing.  Where we are constantly busy or too busy, but never really seem to get anything done.

I thought of my depression (devastating, disgusting, brutalizing and wanting me dead) was a thing I had to manage and control.  I thought of my time as I thing I had to control.  I thought happiness and success were things you got if you were good enough at it, and I tried but doubted the outcome.  I thought, most of the time, that I understood The Way Things Are, whereas others seemed only to have opinions and not know The Whole Story. Relationships, just like projects, were things I had to navigate.

I rarely noticed the color of leaves or the passing of seasons.  Unless, of course, it came as a kind of insult and affront to my efforts; the passing of time making a mockery of my best intentions. The whole of 'life' being out of control and myself as powerless.

**

We forget who and what we really are, says yoga.  We are blind.

The practice is to discover strength.  Not of muscles, not of pickle jars, but the strength to be fully alive with the burning leaves and the thundering storm.  To know we are not supposed to and never can 'control' life - we can't even control our own thoughts and feelings, for chrissake -

we are supposed to live it.  To participate in power and strength, rather than fight against it.  To realize there is power and passion and awesome, more baffling strength in being than we'd ever glimpsed.  Strength is there, is real, but we've been looking for it in the wrong places.

**

Yogic strength is in attention, in showing up and watching without turning away.  We watch our thoughts...churning, not so pretty, unstoppable, sometimes just plain stupid, every once in a while deeply provocative and profound.

When we learn to watch them, we are not crippled and driven by them.  We can access the profundity.  And we learn to not be cowed by all that pettiness and drone. Attending can let it be, thoughts being thoughts, mind being mind.

When we learn to attend, we may be slapped with the shock of strength.  Craving, for example.  We slowly start to practice just watching and will notice that 'craving' is an understatement: it is an avalanche of physical sensations, sweaty palms, salivating mouth, a spreading subtle tension across the entire body of muscles, a tightening in the belly, a compression around the eyes, perhaps even a closing of the hearing; it's a ruckus of thoughts, terribly uncomfortable and pressing and insistent, and you cannot stop it.  Attempts to stop it make it worse.

Muscle, for another example.  When we learn, slowly, as we can, to literally pay attention to what stretching feels like, it might hit us like an orgasm or an drug altered state: reality is more intense, more vivid, more than it was before.  We notice not only that the muscle is tensed, but whether it is clenched or trembling or steady, hot or cold, rough in texture or smooth like water, we notice how one muscle touches another muscle, where sensation begins and ends, that sensation in one tiny part of the body spreads like ripples in water.  A clenched hand spills up the arm and into the neck, it alters our breath, it clenches the jaw, it tightens the chest, it shifts our toes, and it literally changes the way we think, shouts a change in our hormonal levels, heats or cools the skin, raises hairs, focuses or unfocuses the eyes.

Every emotion, every movement, has this powerful swell of energy behind it.  Even boredom, apathy, hunger.  Attending shows us how powerful these things are.

When we get stronger, we might be able to tolerate attending to a thing like anger, rage, depression, anxiety.

I am afraid, we will think.  And we'll have the strength to go on, anyway.

We'll realize, more and more and over and over, how much is involved in this being alive.  It's as profound, I tell you, as the ocean is deep or the cosmos is baffling.  We cannot control our minds, we cannot control our lives and our deaths.  But we can know them.

**

Do this, and the strength in you suddenly seems something out of a fairy tale or a comic book, something almost divine.  There is a reason yoga talks in metaphysics.

Oh, my god, you'll think: I LOVE this person, and your love will swell.  I am HUNGRY, you'll realize, and start to eat differently, all the colors and textures and tastes being louder than they were before.  I want to be happy, you'll know, and you'll start moving, moment by moment, into the person for whom happiness is possible.

A person of strength and grace.

It doesn't matter if I can do the pose, or not, you'll think in your yoga class.  And you'll be dumbstruck to realize you're standing on your head.

**

Life, friends, is hard.

We cannot control life.

But it is possible to be alive in it.

Walking, I notice the passing of time.  The cicadas are dying and lay on the sidewalk in alien corpses.  The air is sharper, pungent.  There was a time in my life this would be hard: to be suddenly without a place to live, to be asked all of the sudden what my plans were.  I am different, now.  I can feel the panic, like a little fist in my heart, pulling the whole body into it.  I can feel afraid, but I can also wonder and feel: I wonder at all the options, I wonder what is possible, I realize what a difference I can make, here or there.  I decide to open a yoga studio in a little town I used to know.  I do not know whether this will succeed or not.  But I can try.

The fact is, I try more now.  In relationships, in my heath, with my very body thrown upside down with a seeming disregard for things like safety and bruises.  Truth is I am more afraid, more often, than I have ever been in my life.

But the fear doesn't matter any more.

I am strong.

Return goes home. To Saint Cloud. In Minnesota.

Some already know. I've been keeping it under wraps until details like a lease and a date are finalized, but at this point I can announce: Return is opening a studio in St. Cloud in September 2012. 822 1/2 West St. Germain. Classes four times a day.  Strong classes, the sweaty ones where we learn to go upside down and challenge the very nature of our guts and endurance; but also the gentle, reverent, exploring classes that so heal and so change us and are accessible to anyone who can breathe, anyone who has a body. That's the long and the short of it... Mixed emotions, knowing that this is written half for the students I am leaving, and half for students I haven't yet met.

St. Cloud is personal; it's where I grew up, the jumping off point, the place I left in order to wander the wide world.  There is something poetic, I suppose, in going home; so many of our stories circle back that way, so many attempts to find ourselves just prove how much we need to know our own place in the world.  Still, I never thought I'd go back.

The process, the idea, is acceptance and responding to what life we do have rather than handicapping ourselves with what the ego clamors for.  If the world were to my making, I'd be opening a studio in Rio.  On a mountaintop somewhere.  Something with oceans and travel.  If the world were as I liked it, I'd never even have to open a buisness.  I'd just write poems, eat bon bons, and practice asana all day.  In between taking naps.

If yoga were how we 'expect' it to be, it'd only be romantic, esoteric, the stuff of retreats and exotic places of natural wonder.

But an honest practice isn't like that, at all.  An honest practice takes place at home, in the midst of our lives, with the stuff of our days.  Commericial, american, midwestern days. I do not do asana on beaches, and yoga is not a thing I retreat to do.  I practice where I am.  I practice in parking lots, sometimes.  Sometimes in kitchens.  On carpet, on cement.

I am not a hippy, starry eyed kinda person who believes in fates and auras and angels and strings that are pulled by forces.  But from moment I considered St. Cloud, everyone and everything has rushed to make it so.

With some of the largest social service programs in the state, and a city full of society that doesn't fall under the rubric of 'social service agencies', yoga as service couldn't be anything but a blessing, there.  With the demographic boom, the colleges, the smush of St. Cloud Sartell Waite Park Sauk Rapids St Joe all becoming one metropolis that is the metropolis of central Minnesota, it's baffling there is no studio. It's funny that I know the town so well.  There was a pretty studio space, all ready and waiting with the right time and the right price.  An apartment lease was signed, the dog is allowed.  What I thought might possibly happen someday, eventually, somehow, is happening. Happening NOW.

The moment you say yes to your life, life unfolds.

It is not what I expected.  But it makes me very happy.  It is a good.  Unexpected, out of left field, mildly confusing, and good.

I am more grateful than I know how to say.

But I am also sad to be leaving the students, classes, and teachers here behind.  Yoga has lessons for me, here, too:

The good of yoga is not something I do, I teach; I can step out of the way and students will still have the power and transformational tools that yoga gives.  There are many gifted teachers.  Students here do not need me.  I was blessed in introducing some to yoga, helping others find a way back in.  I was blessed in living and working with long time yogis and teachers who are deeply involved in their own process.  I have learned.  I have been touched.

And I will miss you.

by request..

Anyone telling you yoga is easy is lying

Or perhaps they haven't tried, they don't know. They don't know what it is to be living as you.

That is what yoga is, anyway.

Living your life.

Which is the hardest goddamned thing you will ever, ever be asked to do.

Your biceps, what are they actually capable of?

Your spine?  Not yoga girl's.  Yours.

What actually happens in your mind?

What, exactly, are you capable of doing with your life?

And are you willing to show up enough times to really know the answer to that?

Are you?

Yoga is not easy.  Hardest freaking thing I've ever done.  Ever seen.

Once you're there, though, you start flying.

Soul on Fire

"Open yourself to transformation.  You will be transformed."  The Buddha I am teaching, all week, on the burning of the dross.  The fire in the belly.  On setting our souls on fire.  What in yoga is called tapas.

Tapas is the third personal observance or niyama; following Saucha (purity) and Santosha (contentment/acceptance/serenity), we come to self-discipline.  It is translated as heat, dedication, zeal, ardor, passion, enthusiasm, burning and transformation.  It is the transformation, but it is also a willingness to be transformed.  It is the willingness to die a little bit to who we are, right now, in order to let the new be born.

It is not always pleasant.  There is a moment of panic when you walk into any new situation; a yoga studio, if you haven't done anything with your body other than feed it and clean it for ten years, if not outright abuse it and overwork it, can start all sorts of anxiety scenarios off in our heads.  There is the real possibility of flying not up into an arm balance but face down into the floorboards, removing not fear but layers of skin.  There will be moments a plenty in your practice where your legs are screaming holy hell at you and your arms tremble not with the pleasant qualities of satisfaction and strength and vibrancy but just goddanged fatigue.  Your hamstrings may feel drawn and quartered.  Your gut, in the fifth round of core work, may prompt you to wimper.  If your yoga teacher tells you to smile into it and feel gratitude for the body that you have, you may start a chorus of explitives in your head, not beatitudes.  There will be moments when you feel you will die if you do not drink water in the next three seconds.  A good yoga teacher will point that out, and remind you you will not; that it is your mind screaming at you, not your body, that water won't actually affect you for 20 minutes after you drink it and will actually just serve as a way to break your concentration.  And you will pant and scream holy fucks in your brain, you will hate the yoga teacher, you will wonder how a minute could possibly last so very long.  And you will not die.  Surprisingly.

We bring ourselves to the practice like an offering.  We express or tap into an inherent desire to be changed and become in some way more alive.  Tapas is a cultivation of the yearning in us to a fever pitch.

We learn, differently: rather than accepting teachings or wisdom we put ourselves to the test and see what comes out of it.  Knowledge becomes wisdom when it is lived personal experience.  Wisdom becomes part of our essence and structure rather than an abstraction of the mind.  Integrity, strength, perseverance, courage, patience, virtues become character traits rather than ideals.  They become who we are.

Life isn't changed, this way; we are.

Tapas is, to me, a form of dedication and prayer.  You dedicate, donate, give all to the reason you practice, to the yearning.  Perhaps it is easiest to say you dedicate yourself and each practice to god.  By giving yourself over to that greater thing, you become the greater thing. A little.  A little more like it than the person you were yesterday, anyway. Your essence is less self and more fire, more god.  When you look for god, says the poet, god is in the look of your eyes.  You yourself become enlarged.

Another poet saint says it differently: do not look for the answers, he says, you could not understand them now.  Your being is not ready to hold them.  Do not seek the answers, but the questions, live in them.  Live the questions.

**

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.  Tapas is the question, the why, the what's the point, the burning energy.  It is the way we spin straw into gold, hammer lead into precious, burnished, honey colored fire informed molten and wizened power.

Tapas is dedication or zeal for the very process, the questions.  It is impossible to say, some days, what the point of it all is.  Why we should bother doing anything.  We can't very well know the outcome, or whether there is an ultimate bend of goodness to the world, or a heaven or a god or even a point to going to work each day, growing older, being born and borning children of our own.

But we can choose to live as if the questions mattered.

As if our choices, our hours, our bodies themselves were forming cauldrons and catalysts and catharsis toward something more.

Because this is true: change.  It is inevitable and constant.  Thus we either deny it, struggle against it, fear aging and dying and the day after day horarium of toil.  Or we surrender to it entirely, form ourselves with it, iron our discipline and desire to a form that can enliven the change and be the change and contribute to the roiling on of life.  We reform our bodies into things that can hold and withstand the answers.

**

Anais Nin wrote, in one of her diaries, that she felt she was preparing for a great love.  She threw open windows and aired the house, she threw open closet doors and pulled out the richest fabrics, tableclothes, silver.  She was drawn to fresh flowers, poignant scents, richly made and delicately served foods.  Cool drinks of water.  She had her best wines ready by the time Henry Miller came around.

She intuitively knew that to welcome a great, passionate love, she had to open, everywhere.

She may or may not have known that what she was really preparing was her heart.  What she was opening was not windows but her eyes.

**

I have felt it: there is a layer of pentness, congealed and stagnant energy, bloat and dis-ease and lethargy.  You burn through that layer, often around the hips, other times bound up around the heart, sometimes a layer of gray and brown and haze around the eyes or the brain like migraine, or pessimism.  Some people's joints swell.  Some people's blood sugar turns acrid.  The veins clot and your very thoughts have to plow through layers of wet concrete just to break the surface of your mind.

You sweat and burn.

And you lay on the mat, afterwards, burnt and spent.

Something in your center made more pure.  Shining loud.  Trembling under the fire and left naked.

Everything unnecessary has fallen away. That silence is deafening.

**

The sadhus in India burn themselves alive.  In winter, they sit in the snowy mountains for hours at a time, naked but for a loincloth and the ashes on their bodies.  A bucket of water is positioned to drip a steady stream on them.  For hours.  In the summer months, they surround themselves with five fires, another in a metal container on their head.  They sit in the fire and bake.  Everyday.  For three hours.  For 45 days in a row.

There is no need for our own practices and austerities to be so daunting.  But they raise an interesting question.  Why would anyone do such a thing?  What is the point of such self control and sensory overload?

Is there anything to be learned from this tradition, at all?  What ridiculous things we do, over here across the ocean, mad as bees to feel better or cleaned or alive...what is the point of running 20 miles or 50?  Why do we eat and over eat?  What's the purpose of spending 30 or 40 years at a job or preening ourselves from adolescence on for some romance?  What is the point of marriage, or sex, or intoxication, or watching television?  We not only watch television, but watch it for large chunks of our lives.  We spend money to get the best television.  We work 30 or 40 years to pay for the best television so that we can watch an imaginary person preened to a peak for a romance that is unreal and leaves us feeling shoddy about ourselves.  What is the point of prayer?  Why would we bother buying a yoga mat and showing up in a small room that smells of incense once a week?

Just what in the hell are we putting ourselves through this for?

I think it is an effort to be a little more alive, a little less dead to our own living.  I think it is a practice of paying attention to what is possible.

I think it is practicing, so that our acts become essential, not dross.  So that our food becomes nuturance and celebration, our sex takes on meaning, our relationships become sacred and informing.  Running marathons proves nothing so much as the fact that we can start in one place and end up in another.

Tapas is a practice of remembering what aliveness and passion are.  Discipline is remembering what we really want, or at least dreaming toward something.  Tapas is the choice to find a better way and making ourselves respond.

**

Beautiful Limitation

Yoga is honest.  You cannot, past a certain superficial level, fake it.  It is literal, experience, fact: I know of few other contexts in the world in which what you say or think or desire is so patently irrelevant compared to what you do.  Of course, yoga then becomes a kind of exaggeration of what is always true, a place where the difficult to see and accept becomes obvious.  It is difficult, usually, to believe aphorisms and truisms and philosophies; we give them a passing nod as having a point, but not being practical or real.   Yoga is literal, if not brutal and simple.  You are alone there on the mat.  There will never be a graduation or a test after class, a stamp you get or a certificate that says you can move on to the next level.

This is precisely what makes a yoga practice hard.  You cannot fake it.  You cannot do yoga unless you show up.  You cannot intend to do it, say you'll do it, or desire to do it to any effect; you can only do or not do.  You cannot will yourself into a backbend, or walk into a class one day and decide to flip up into a handstand.  You can't fake flexibility or pretend strength.  You are faced, immediately, with the limitations of what you've got.

I think this is gorgeous.  Of course, it is possible to be frustrated, ashamed, beat ourselves up and compare ourselves to our younger selves or the svelte olympian on the cover of yoga journal magazine.  It is entirely possible to see the core teachings of yoga (nothing is permanent, all is illusion, limits are human) as pessimism.

I don't.  Not today.

Because I've learned that limits clearly define me and give me reality.  We don't get much reality in daily life.  Not with advertisements and those empty spiritual teachings, change your life and self help books around.  Not with this brain that ticks ticks ticks its way to expectations of grandeur or complete defeat.

Reality, when I finally found it on the mat, is comforting.

Because one actual dollar - hell, one actual dime - is infinitely more precious than are billions of hoped for ones.

The body and breath I do have are infinitely more powerful than the wispy, elusive, daydreamed body that is not.

The limits I sound out, challenge, and expand are beautiful.

A slice of the beloved....the yoga of relationships

"We are strangers.  Perhaps by chance we have met and we are together.  But our aloneness is there.  Do not forget it, because you have to work upon it." - Osho Every once in a while, I hear a yoga teacher, a counselor, a self help wonk or a how to make your life better guru promise palaver and platitudes along the lines of 'you are not alone'.

My reaction is usually along the lines of yes, actually, I am.  And every time you tell me I am not, I feel not just alone, but alien.  I feel denied.

I have had students say things like 'you don't know me', 'you can't understand'.  Once, I touched a woman's shoulders and felt her cringe.  Later, she said that she knew my good intentions.  She knew that yoga is a healing, deeply personal process of love and connection.  She appreciated the fact that I was trying to fight the good fight and be a good person in a bad world. 'But', she said, 'when you touched me, I couldn't help but recoil from the fact that the only people who care for me are people, like you, who are paid to do so.'

Teaching often breaks my heart.

*

I know loneliness.  I imagine it is loneliness that makes things like a personal god so attractive.  A true love.  A perfect family or at least one in which everything will be okay.  Someone to rescue us, or someone we can rescue.

On the one hand, it is ridiculous for something like a yoga practice to discuss relationships; this is work we do ourselves.  If anything, yoga affirms our solitude.  This is a blessed relief, to me, after so many empty spiritual teachings and false advertisements about how I should feel and that I'm not alone.  Empty spiritual teachings make it worse, not better.

On the other, yoga is relationships, and reality, to the full.  You are alone, teaches yoga.  But you are with others.  Now, what will you do?

*

It is a practice of being human, and being ourselves.  The key experience of being a self is self, which involves longing and solitude and a deep, hardwired, inner fused desire for connection, authenticity, reflection and recognition.  We ache to belong.  Specifically, we ache to belong to someone.

The experience of the self is also a root problem in most of our modern psychology and perhaps our current global experience.  We promote self-sufficiency, personal accountability, self-mastery, and do it yourself ness.  We applaud the individual and have funny concepts and philosophies about the rights of humanity and the individual, property, boundaries.  Yet we suffer, collectively, a kind of weariness of the self.  A weakness in our communication.  A fear of actually being seen and a feeling of being put upon when asked to care about (let alone, for) others.  Yes, there is poverty and war and violence and food shelves and addiction and depression and lassitude everywhere.  But what am I supposed to do about it, we say...I can't do anything about that.  That isn't, we say, my problem.

The shortest answer I have is that most of our pain comes from a failure to love, a mess and lack and violation of relationships.  Yoga is a practice of having a better life and being a better self.  If you want to practice yoga, try getting married, raising kids, starting conversations and keeping promises.  The yamas and niyamas do.  It doesn't matter how beautiful your poses are, or how long you can flow without having to take a break, how sexy you look in your capris or how many days a week you practice in a hot room.  It doesn't matter if you are vegan or meditate for an hour every day if you still can't look people in the eye and go to bed feeling something is wrong with you.

It doesn't.

Yes, yoga says, you are alone.  You must work with that aloneness.

*

The core teaching of yoga is this: nothing is permanent, everything changes, all that you are capable of loving and being attached to or longing for will, one day, be nothing.  You, yourself, will be nothing.

From this, two rather esoteric and often contradictory theories of yoga have become popular.  The first insists on a kind of global oneness, that everything is linked in essence, on a sub atomic and microcosmic level.  We are each other and every blade of grass that has ever been.  Love, universal.  The love and the beloved are everywhere, always.

Secondly, we should practice non-attachment.  We should recognize everything and everyone is an illusion, a passing moment, and learn to be non-reactive.  Cool to the touch and unmoved as a stone.

I believe, in an intellectual kind of way, both of those precepts.  But neither is an answer to our aloneness.  Neither one tells us in any real way how to live.  They are abstractions, and what we've got here is flesh and bone.

All is one, the moment is perfect, you are already divine and Jesus loves you all leave me feeling a little hollow.  I do not want a generalized love or an imaginary friend.  I want a real one.  And the second practice, of non-attachment, denies the very embodiedness that we are.  Sure, it's an illusion and temporary and imperfect.  But it also happens to be the only shot we've got.

I think honest yoga teaches ruthless honesty: to be happy, be as alive as you can, knowing full well that love is flawed.  Love anyway.

That is what you were born to do.

*

Not to be disaffected, detached, cool as a stone and unmoved as death.  But to be ripped open by our love and survive.  We survive our love by loving, more.

*

There is integrity in knowing and accepting our aloneness.  Yes, it will hurt at times.  But it will also prove to be the most potent source of power and creativity you've got.

*

Slowly, painfully at times, wrapt wondrously at others, baffling me dumbstruck with obvious truths I'd been ignoring for far too long, yoga reveals us to ourselves, and gives us life without illusions.

For some of us, it will be a dawning realization that we are lonely and have been cutting ourselves off.  For others, it will be the brutal recognition that we have completely given away our selves to others: to images, to shoulds, to family, to career, to abusive histories, to the pursuit of instant gratification, to faking it, to roles that simply don't work any longer and roll along like a tricycle with a rusted wheel when what you need is to travel hundreds of miles like an adult. We seem strange and hollow to ourselves and wonder what ever happened to us, the US in us, the person we used to be.  We'll realize we're old, and we never got around to being the person we wanted to be when we grew up. For most of us, it'll be a bit of each at different times.  Most of us are too selfish in some of our world, completely selfless and disappeared in other roles.

Just as no one is all assertive, creative, extroverted or introverted.  No one in the world is entirely right brained or right handed.  None of us are ever happy all the time or awake all the time.

If we practice, we'll start to see ourselves.  Not as we should be, or have been, or want to be.  But as we are.  Human.  This is the truth.

There are other truths: you are not just your thoughts or emotions any more than you are entirely right brained.  You are not 'always' depressed or joyful.  You are not 'always' alone.

There are moments of connection.  However small and flimsy and half assed and misunderstood and frustrating.  They are real, and human, just as you are.

Yes, you are alone.  From there, you can seek out truths in five million different ways, day after day after day.  You will have opportunities for realness with a co-worker, even if you generally hate the guy's guts.  You will have opportunities to make amends to your father, even if most of the time you still don't want to.  You can play a part in your community, or not.  You may go poking around a church, because you feel alone and miss god.  It might disappoint you, for the most part.  But you may also have two minutes of feeling relief, or a brief conversation with someone at the door.  If you can see parenting through the lens of reality, you can accept that you don't actually have control, that your children are not really your own, and that you are never either a 'good' or a 'bad' parent, but a boiling and confusing blather of both.  From there, you may spend the next few hours trying to weight the scale a little more on the generous side, or at least brush the kid's hair out of his eyes, spend half an hour listening to him speak.

No one will ever, ever know you completely or love you perfectly.

That does not mean you can't be known and loved.

By allowing your aloneness, and truth, I think we can be loved, true.  Criticisms will not whither us any longer, when we no longer depend on that other to give us our whole worth.  We can do as best we can at our job, take credit where credit is due, and apologize when we screw up, without devastation.  Some people will love our cooking or our singing or what we do at that job, others might love our humor or just the fact, if he is your dog, that you are bringer of food and taker on-er of walks.  We look for approval in appropriate places and stop looking for it in dead ended and bruise forming places.  The trick, of course, the difficulty, is that we have to chip away at dependency and control.  We have to know, since we are human, that others are too.  No one can rescue you.  And you have no business trying to rescue any other.  No one will love you perfectly, because they will get tired and disappointed in some other part of their own life.  They will have indigestion, fear about a looming bill, concern about their own necks.  They will not love you perfectly, or at all as you expected, but they will love you fiercely.

We know that the opportunities are there.  Someone in the world thinks your body is beautiful.  Someone knows how sarcastically smart you are.  Someone will appreciate your art, and hundreds of others would spend the night more comfortably if you gave the gift of your listening, a meal, or a few bucks.  Even if they are strangers.  There are friends you can chat about books with and spiritual leaders who will listen to your own soul thrashings.  Someone wants to play music with you.  There is, somewhere, a yoga class you can take.

This is true.

The difficulty is not that you are alone, but that you think you are, and you are afraid.

*

I keep coming back to the word.  Yoga.  It means union.  Connection.  This is what I know:

I have read books by persons dead 2000 years and felt my soul stand up in answer.  I have spent days feeling sorry for myself and years looking for solace in bottles or in relationships I knew, on some level, were harmful.  Afterwards I found myself wandering a gravel road with no one but a crow to love me and felt suddenly both sad and alright.  I have loved hard, have lost, but still feel that love rippling through me when certain angles of light hit a certain kind of tree, mostly in January.  I remember words my grandfather taught me, grieved the loss of that grandfather, and suddenly felt a tremendous desire to teach those words to my two year old niece.  I have laughed until my belly ached, though it was years ago and I haven't seen those friends in years.  I have cussed god out, and questioned him, and hated churches because they make me feel so alone, and envied people who seem to find some solace there; but when I have been invited to go again, I have said no.  I know the smell of the black hills, though I haven't been there in years.

I have visited paintings and cathedrals in foreign cities and felt them homecomings and diagrams to my insides. I have seen dawn over mountains and lakes.  I have laid my cheek down in the snow because it seemed the most honest and intimate thing I could possibly do.

I know people who find prayer in the dirt, planting and sweating.  I know others who find it in song.  I know people who feel closer to books or ideas or the way wood feels under their hands than they do in a room full of people.

I know this: connection is real.

Who are we to say it isn't love, because it doesn't last? To say it isn't real, because it doesn't involve face to face communication?  Who are we to say that god doesn't exist when wars have been fought over him and people dedicate their lives and their bodies to feeling him out?

None of these are perfect, or absolute, or in any way enough.  But they are, none the less, real.  Have them, practice them, in addition to the practice of family and work and friendship, and even though you may still feel lonely, from time to time, you'll have ample proof of the fact that your feelings are just as fickle as time is.

*

Every tuesday, I teach in the city.  Recently, I had a bad class.  To a yoga teacher, a bad class is one where no one seems to care how hard you've thought about what you're going to do, you're treated with all the respect a wealthy republican gives to a hotel maid who doesn't speak english, or you step into a service type class with a bunch of teenagers who have to be there and therefore don't want to be and are more than willing enough to tell you you're an arrogant cunt or a white bitch.  These happen.  I walk to the metra station to take the commuter train home and a man with no teeth waves a dirty plastic cup at me, telling me he's hungry.  He smells of baked piss and rank sweat the way sweat smells when you have to stuff newspaper and cardboard inside your clothes to keep warm.  I shook my head and hunched my shoulders and he, too, cussed me.  And then I began to cry.

I cried all the way home on the train, took the long walk home to the house, and then had to circle the block four times before I felt I could walk in without people asking what in the hell was wrong.

I didn't know, and I didn't want to talk about it.  If pressed, I think I'd weeze and sniffle 'I tried so hard...I tried.  So hard."

It didn't occur to me until the next week, after the same class, when I passed the same homeless man with what looked like the same goddamned cup.  He used the same lines, to the word.  I realized, with a wave of sadness, that he'd been saying the same line to me week after week, for months on end, every Tuesday.  I felt no matter how much I taught, how hard I tried, what kind of non-profit yoga world I try to live in, I could never change the brute facts of this world.  The man was still there, and I couldn't do anything.

This made me feel very alone, and very tired.  And I'm not even the guy who's hungry.

*

The word is connection, union.  Typically, people breezily say it means connection of mind, body and spirit.  Or moving and breathing.

I think that's bullshit.

I think connection means the way a painting affects me, and my need to write poems.  I think it is what happens when my friend gets her hands and knees dirty for hours at a time in her garden.  What other men find in music.  I think some people call it god.  I think it is the truth of the fact we have laughed, have touched sexuality, have held children, looked into a friend's eyes even if we couldn't hold it very long.

I think connection means knowing the truth of who we are, how imperfect and flailing our motions usually are, how no matter how good we get or how hard we try all of our relationships will end, someday.  The truth of the five minutes we have, five minutes at a time.

I think it means knowing I cannot make that man not hungry, but teaching anyway.  Knowing love is fleeting.  Insisting on loving, still.

Moving, into Still

I've spent weeks getting technical, workshopy, precise in my own practice and, I suppose, in my teaching.  I've taken one tiny aspect of a pose and approached it from standing, against a wall, lying down, and upside down.  I've done it over and over again.  I've practiced going in, coming out.  I've studied the anatomy and memorized terms, repercussions, hormonal shifts.  This is science, and craft, both. This morning I found myself practicing without technicalities. I woke early for it being a Saturday, the house still full of sleeping others, and without knowing why I'd woken or thinking much at all I cleared a space on my hardwood floor and I practiced. I practiced twice; after that first, whispery practice I went through my day: errands and people and breakfast and lunch and more errands, more cleaning.  Halfway though washing the windows I wanted to practice, again.  Both times I stepped into the first pose without much foresight, without a sequence jotted down or memorized.  There was no music, no plan, no reasoning.

I remembered, later, being a kid and the irrational, heady urge to simply run.  To run far and fast until my legs burned.  To swing and swing and swing until the hinges of the swing's chains seemed welded to my internal gravity and inner ear and rocking brain.  Back.  And forth.  I did this as a teenager, driving.  Just driving on and on.  I've watched others do it.  I've read about it.  Sufi mystics, those whirling dervishes, spin around and around and around until their thoughts surrender and their hearts take over and they find themselves dancing and tangled up and god. Runners talk like this.  And jazz musicians.

When you practice chanting, you repeat a word or a phrase over and over again until you chant yourself into silence.  When you practice movement, vinyasa, or flow, you move yourself into stillness.

I tend to believe all music, and all efforts at speech and communication, ultimately bend back to silence.  And all movement is wrapped up in stillness.  It is only noise, distraction, chattering mind and confusion that tell us otherwise.  We can stay caught up in the layers of noise forever, I think.  Like an argument that goes on and on, a tangled ball of yarn that can't be undone.  We can, and there is not anything particularly wrong or bad about this.  There is much to be said, and we should speak.  We should think, and reason, and plan, and create.

But we should also revere silence, and listen to it.  We can find rest in movement.  We should recognize the oxymoron of the awe-some world in which stillness is never really still, infinity is immediate, and words don't say anything at all.

I can and do often talk about what happens, on an anatomical and philosophical level, of what happens in a pose or a generalized practice.  Inversions do this, say.  Backbends open the heart and ease the spine; lateral bends tone the obliques and the intercostal and release the secondary muscles of respiration; twists press against our pancreas and thus regulate blood sucrose levels.

But it is an altogether different thing to simply say what it is I feel, when I practice.  It isn't a simple thing at all.  It can't be said, but felt.

The density of muscle and bone, a strange increase in their loudness and articulation, distinction, twitches and burns and deep releasing in places I hadn't felt at all, before.  A gravity, a heaviness, a weight and stillness and thud.  But under that heaviness a kind of rippling burn, an electrical wave of flying and thrilling and being energized.  A calm that is poised, more poised than feeling tired or spent or asleep.  But an awake that feels more firey than cocaine or coffee or fear, simple adrenalin, or any combination of them all.  There are lights inside my body, under the skin, and my stomach burns with something I don't quite know a name for.  Joy, perhaps.  It lurches and pinches.  Excitement.  Passion, surely.  It is a fire under the ass.

To practice in this way is to be lulled, to let the breath and the moving become a lullaby and the brain become mesmerized and swooned.  There is sinking, falling in, surrender.

And at the bottom of the breath there is a rising up again, more so.

When I practice this way, I hit a depth that is not always there, that seems elusive.  After a practice this way, the edges of things seem different for hours if not days afterwards.  Colors are brighter, as though my eyes had been covered with a scrim of sepia and brown, or are milky as a newborns, and suddenly I am given sight again.  The edges of pine needles, the fibers of blankets and carpets and denim, the roundness of grapes and the shout of sunshine riot as if springtime and noise had both been reinvented and updated and newly strut in their best shoes.

As if the depth sounded inside were reflected out there, too; all things have a terrible depth and profundity and it is luxurious just to dip your fingers in sudsy water or watch the droplets of water shimmering out of a garden hose.

Things have meaning, after all.

**

- expect lots of dynamic movement, moving meditation, focus on breath this week.

- practice, at least once, letting go of as much technicality and 'progress' as you possibly can, surrendering over and over and over again to moving with your breath.  Breathe more deeply.  Make your movements more full.  Give over to that place that is rhythmic and graceful and oddly, still.

- tratakam is candle watching, fire watching meditation.  Odd that such an ephemeral, never still thing should inspire such stillness and reflective states in us...and have done so throughout different eras and cultures.  Spend a few minutes staring into a flame and afterwards wonder about stillness and movement; notice how still and calm and steady and heavy the experience truly is, while not being 'still' at all.

-vinyasa your way to a dance, or while washing dishes, while walking, while rocking a child to sleep.

- pick a word, any word, and repeat it to yourself fifty times.  Or five hundred.  Until the word SOUNDS different, becomes nonsense, starts to mean something other than what you thought at first, or simply becomes silence.  Maybe because I'm a poet and words have always been magical to me, I remember doing this as a very young child.  I'd like to think all kids do it.  Maybe they don't.  If you did, remember that.

- Notice how dynamic savasana is.

- Try to keep ujjayi breath steady throughout a practice.  Notice, how at the end of practice, the breath itself has built up a momentum; it doesn't stop the moment you lie down in savasana.  It might take a few minutes to actually let that breath pattern go.  No particular lesson.  Just power.  Just awareness.  Just a new found respect for how freaking real pranayama is, outside of consciousness and what we say it is.

Manifesto

Lovely friend/mentor teacher scribbled this up, and I share:

Dandayamana Janushirasana - The Ego Stands Naked

Standing head to knee pose is hard.  It isn’t hard because it’s gymnastically difficult or requires the flexibility of a rubber band.  It’s hard because your ego gets up and stands naked in front of you, and you have to gently teach yourself to live without it.

It is possible to do the pose fairly quickly; you hold your foot and kick with it.  We all have that ego.  The one that knows it will look good if it pushes to the full expression of the posture.  The one that says oh yeah, I’ve got this.  The one that says I don’t want to look like a ‘beginner’.

But here is the truth: you cannot change where you are unless you fully accept where you are.  You do not get the benefits of the posture if you skip the beginnings.  You sacrifice happiness – all the health benefits, all the personal endurance and emotional clout, all the stuff that changes your life – by going for the fleeting pleasure of looking good for a millisecond.

Here is the rest of the truth: you get every ounce of the happiness benefits in the first baby step of the pose, if you enter it patiently.  Standing with all of the weight on one leg, locking the knee, lifting the opposite knee to parallel.

Listen to that ego, though, and the blessings of the pose drain away.

It’s what looks most simple, sometimes, that is hardest.  It’s what looks like standing still, like nothing at all, where the whole body and mind are firing with a subtle change that will leave echos and light trails behind it.  Standing head to knee pose is a catalyst of concentration, strength, trying over.  But first, it’s a posture of patience.

Once upon a time in my way back beginning of yoga world, I was strong and fairly flexible and I could do most of the postures, I thought, pretty danged well.  But I was not patient.  Nor was I listening.  And I spent months steamrolling my way from pose to pose.  One day I realized, though, that I wasn’t doing the pose at all.  In the true pose, your back rounds, your belly curls in, your whole spine extends.  Your weight is spread like a square across the four corners of your standing foot.  Your extended leg rotates in, the toes point back at your face, and your hips fall into another square of alignment.

My back was strait.  I used arm muscle strength to pull myself down, rather than core strength to hold myself up and curl over my center.  I hyper extended my standing knee, teetering in a few seconds of balance and hanging onto my foot, my foot pushing into my toes in some kind of monkey grasp to better hang on, and my breathing basically stopped.  I clung, and then I felt proud of myself.

It’s not that you fail at a yoga posture.  With a decent teacher, which most are, you can’t really do the thing too poorly without them calling you back to a better space.  I felt, realizing how off I was, that I had wasted a lot of time.  This isn’t really true: I was at the earlier, pre-early steps.  I had to do it wrong for a while to know I was wrong.  I had to be in a regular practice, feel out some safety and regularity in the room, the teachers, the atmosphere, before it got safe enough for me to let go of that ego, and start from nowhere.

I started, again.

Shift all of your weight to your standing foot.  Find that square of balance, all four corners of your feet, the ball and heel equally supporting you, your weight rising like a true plane, smooth lumber, solid grace,  from that steady floor.  Find the same square in your hips – the standing one may want to pop out.  Most of us have funny hip habits, leaning too far in, out, the pelvic girdle shifted forward or back.  You won’t even notice this, you won’t even know, until you start from nowhere.

The sacrum spreads, the hips open and ground at the same time, your frame squares off.

Then, you lock that standing knee.

(Hear my dialogue, Mr. Bikram?  Lock the knee.  Lock the knee.  Lock.  The. Knee.)

The challenge of standing head to knee creates a space for you to build concentration, endurance, and the ability to keep trying.  Learning the subtleties of the pose cues you to greater attention, awareness, appreciation for the complexity of your own body.  The skill leaves the mat with you, making you a person who notices more, can take in subtleties, notice minor distinctions, find relations.  A person who knows the value of patience.

Yoga works to balance the two hemispheres of the brain, crossing the thick barrier between them.  This feels an awake calm, stimulation and soothing all at once, quicker, clearer thoughts and improved focus.  The balance gives us ability to let go of thoughts that aren’t currently relevant or necessary.  The quality of our attention, of our conscious presence, changes.  Standing head to knee pushes that quality to the forefront of the standing series.

Oddly, the challenge, the set backs, the humility learned here turn into a kind of lightheartedness.  A return to play.  A retreat from dour seriousness.

The quality of concentration we learn in the pose harmonizes our physical and intellectual (and emotional) behaviors.  There is an element of control, of push, of fight, but there is also a subtle river letting go and release, the patience of standing back: we learn to balance between the two, to call on each according to need, to use the two forces in concert, rather than in self-defeating ways.   In practicing on one foot, then the other, we learn the differences.  All this is a learning of  when strength is a virtue, and when restraint.

Here is the truth: with years of practice, more than enough strength and flexibility, and a pretty good knowledge of the steps of the pose, it is still best for me to practice patience.  To realize, as soon as this pose begins, that my ego has stripped down, stood up, and stands hollering naked in the middle of the room.

I can feel, now, muscles and tendons and joints (sometimes I swear I feel the moving of my veins, the oxygen, the fluids, the hormonal swing), that I didn’t know existed when I began.  I know how the muscles feel in the full pose, how the knee locks, where there is length and where there is curl.

But if I practice patience, I can create those same feelings, in the first baby step of the pose.  Before my knee is lifted, while I’m still fully upright. The final expression is present from the first step.  The ego part would flaunt all that emotional gain, all those physical details, for the bare gain of looking like a hot shot.  Standing head to knee is the practice of ignoring the ego, tapping into all the other things that are there.

Surprising.  Most of us never were aware there was anything, aside from that ego.

Dandayamana Janushirasana is a map to the ocean of things outside that quibbling ego.

I feel my lower back widen and lengthen.  I feel the hips groove to a place that isn’t normal for me, but is actual alignment.  I can feel the muscles of my core take over the whole weight and responsibility of supporting me, and I can feel them pull in, massaging the organs and stuff inside, flushing me clean.  From the very, very beginning step.

The Physical Benefits of Standing Head to Knee

Anatomy

• Improves flexibility and extension of the sciatic nerve
• Contraction of quadriceps, trapezium, biceps, latissimus dorsi, and abdominal muscles
• Compression of pancreas, gall bladder, spleen, uterus and ovaries, thyroid
• extension of kidneys
• bringing the heart toward the floor mimics inversion, puts pressure on the muscle, exercising the organ by increasing the heart rate

Physical Benefits

• builds strength throughout the body
• improves flexibility and eases symptoms of issues related to the sciatic nerve (sciatica, disc herniation, degenerative disc disease, lumbar spinal stenosis)
• strengthens the tendons
• prevents wear and tear of the knee joint and cartilage by strengthening the soft tissue around the knee
• helps clear and prevent problems of digestion
• improves balance
• by compressing the pancreas, helps to regulate sugar levels
• improves tone of core, back, arms, and legs
• massages, flushes, and floods the reproductive organs with fresh oxygen and nutrients, which some say improves your sex life (hmm)
• decreases and prevents varicose veins by extending, flushing, and exercising the long vein running from heart to leg (great saphenous vein)

Listen.

Some perceive it directly in all its awesomeness; others

speak of it with wonder; others

hear of it and never know.

-Bhagavad Gita

Tonight, class.  Talking of the yamas, still, the ethics.  Tonight is the fourth.  Bramacharya.

Usually translated abstinence, chastity, purity.

But I think I've discovered the word's meaning.  Brahma - the absolute, the true, the true self, god, one.  Charya, to walk with, be with, exist in.

Thus, Brahmacharya means to walk with god.

To know, experientially, that ones body is sacred, one's heart is precious, one's life is a holy book.

No matter how much you doubt it or chide it or hate it at times.

To know, breath and skin wise, that your holy book flickers and opens, pages afire, around all these other holy books.  All sacred.  Wisdom that goes on endlessly.  Gods with thousands of faces, millions of hearts, the tissues of the world writing a great poem.

And to try, ethically, to live and walk in that holiness.  To look into the faces of others and see our gods there.  To look into the mirror, someday, without flinching, and know god is there, too.

To listen to the psalm of our breathing and dance with the drum of the heart.

To go walking with god.

Sadhana, our daily practice

Sadhana: “a means to accomplish something”.  In practice it refers to, well, practice.  The allusion is to spiritual path, but the application is firmly grounded in time, in food, in daily habits and schedules.  Sadhana is discipline, and has various formulations in Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist traditions.  In yoga, the word refers to one’s yoga practice.  Generally and loosely, yogis talk about it as one's morning practice.  It refers to getting up early, hitting the neti pot, getting through the asana and some prayerful gyrations before the sun is up.  Sadhana is what people do on yoga retreats, in teacher trainings, and every day, if they are ‘enthusiasts’ with the time and the money. But the implication of Sadhana drives deeper, out of the studio and off of the mat:  Sadhana refers to all of the efforts and attentions of our daily grind, the passing moments of the daily, the ‘hear, now’ of our actual lives.  If we think of it as an ideal practice, or something we don’t have time for, now, we lose its currency.

Unfortunately, we typically think of ‘spiritual path’ or anything remotely related to heartwork as a thing we need to retreat to do.  Spirituality occurs in churches, we’re taught.  Wisdom is a rarefied, highly esoteric, quiet thing people find on retreats and in solitude.

Yoga looks esoteric and incomprehensible to anyone outside.  Contortionist postures make normal people think the true benefits will only come to them once they can balance on two fingers and lose thirty pounds.  Getting to the mat everyday becomes the priority.  We value our practice in terms of what it does for us, how strong we become, how long we can handle a difficult posture.

I’ve been meditating on and thinking about Sadhana for the last few weeks.  Whenever the word or idea comes up in yoga magazines or conversations with yogis, I hear ‘I’m not doing enough’.  I hear people talk about how they wish they had more time for yoga; they know it helps, they need to get back to a regular practice; they enjoy their hour or two a week, but ‘know’ what they really need is more dedication and commitment.  From the hundreds of people who are interested in yoga but don’t know it at all, this comes across most clearly: they don’t know how to start.  We tend to think we get the benefits once we get ‘good’ at yoga.   But this isn’t true at all.  We get the benefits immediately.

When guides, books, or websites talk about a daily practice they usually suggest that you start small, but go on to include a list of postures, suggest that pre-dawn is the best time to practice, and generally indicate that a daily yoga practice is the way to achieve wellness, peace of mind, and personal growth.

They don’t mention that approaching yoga this way quickly turns practice into a chore, just one more thing we have to do everyday.  Nor do they take into consideration the fact that yoga begins where we are, not where we ought to be.  For those saints or gurus or single people who can afford the time and money and liesure of a daily hour of yoga, I see the point.  I fail to see the point for the rest of us.

That idea falls into the distortion of expectations and blame, and forgets where we really are.  If we buy into it, we think of ourselves in terms of accomplishments or progress.  We resent the days we simply don’t have time to get to class.  We blame ‘life’ or our lack of discipline for the un-evolution of our presence and poise.  Life happens, ala the bumper sticker.

Slowly, my sadhana has become a practice of living everyday life, not escaping from it.

As the breath is the breath is the breath: it isn’t a thing I do, but a thing that does me; it doesn’t happen in an hour long vinyasa class, but every bleeding moment of my life; there are real days when a yoga practice is all but impossible.  A toddler who’s sick, a broken down vehicle, deadlines and obligations and a headache.  The art is not to transcend life, but to really know where I am in it, to immerse myself, and to live more fully.  It took a long time, said a girlfriend, for me to realize that my kids were not an interruption of my sadhana; they are my sadhana.

Sadhana runs like a fire under the skin of everything, if I am willing to see it there.  It’s a charged thing, interested in living an ordinary life extraordinarily well.  Transforming life, not transcending it, is what matters.  Sadhana is meant for hard-working, busy people whose family lives and bills and civic duties consume them as much as it is for buddhist monks, people who can afford vipassana retreats, and teachers who practice every morning at five a.m.  Sadhana is a practice of awareness and acceptance, of being present.  Some days, what I have to be present with isn’t anywhere near a yoga studio.

Historian N. Bhattacharyya writes “religious s?dhan? prevents an excess of worldliness and moulds the mind and disposition (bh?va) into a form which develops the knowledge of dispassion and non-attachment. S?dhan? is a means whereby bondage becomes liberation”.

Sadhana has taught me.  I know the way yoga feels in my body, and I go to the mat as regularly as I can to re-create that feeling.  I know what ritual, practice, and compassion can do to heal my life.  I have learned, through pranayama, how the breath moves me, and how  I can move it.  I know that a regular yoga practice can transform a life.

But I’ve also learned that bondage doesn’t become libration by  disappearing.  Trying to be different than I am, or expecting the course of some new action in my life – whether that be yoga or a new years resolution or a promise – to magically change me. misses the point  The point of sadhana is not to change life, but to change myself in my life.  Some days, that has to do with bills and waiting in lines and not getting enough sleep.  Other days, it has to do with what happens on the mat.  We don’t escape ‘bondage’, we change it.  We don’t get new lives; we get our own, differently.  We transform fear into love.  Our weak spots, our wounds, will become our strengths.

The tools of yoga are tools.  They are effective as bricks.  We build with them.  Each posture has teachings in it.  Each time you get to a class, you change a little.  Prayer, meditation, mudras and mantras, sadhana (practice) and seva (selfless service) have been used for millenia because they work.  But the point is to find how they will work for you.

There comes a point at which you begin to change.  You’ve done the poses for a while.  You’ve felt different after a practice.  You intuit that there is something very important for you in the whole thing, though it may be hard to articulate.

We learn, at that point, to listen.  It’s when you begin to practice on your own, or maybe to make the practice your own, that you enter transformation.  Listening is the practice of yoga.  We begin to go into our own body and let it teach us.  We listen to its rythem and begin to trust it.  This is where genuine knowledge is born.  Going to class, having a community, opening yourself up to such things as pranayama or a neti pot or a change in diet all have benefits.  We need teachers and guides.  But real insight comes from simple, private listening.

PRACTICE:

• Practice listening to where you are day by day, and try to find a yoga practice that will honor it.  Some days, that may mean not practicing.  Other days, we may practice harder.  If ‘yoga is life’, than it isn’t locked in studios.  Bring your awareness to your breath while you work or before you fall asleep at night.  Use five minutes in the shower.
• Honor and respect what you hear when you start listening.  I have a tendency to push too hard, be too perfectionist, demand too much.  I showed up at my first studio one day, battle weary and over stressed and verging on a cold.  My teacher challenged me, suggesting that maybe my daily yoga was supposed to be in a long nap and a real day of rest.  She wanted me to spend as much time as I could, that class, in savasana, even while the rest of the class moved.  Just being in the room is healing, she said.  It is hard for me to let go, and I still did most of the postures.  Since then, I’ve learned to respect myself a bit more.
• Jon Kabat-Zinn says the point of mediation is to fall awake, not fall asleep.  I say the point of yoga is to wake up, and realize you are in love with your life.
• There is truth and centuries of reason behind the daily morning practice thing.  And there just as much truth and reason in the fact that its monumentally difficult for most of us to do.  The fact is, it is tremendously difficult for us to commit to even five or ten minutes of meditation everyday, let alone to a longer asana practice.  Do one thing at a time, and do it slowly.  Buy a kitchen timer, set it for five minutes, and try to work five minutes of savasana or meditation into your daily life.  Morning is good, but if it’s lunch hour, it’s lunch hour.  When I started this, it usually ended up being the last thing I did everyday.  I was committed enough to do it, but only committed enough to do it after everything else had already happened.  Start wherever you are.  But do start.
• If you do want to work your way into a daily home practice, start small.  Easiest if you have a space you can set aside and leave ready.  A little corner of a room works.  If you can’t practice one day, try to make yourself enter that space and just sit there a minute.  It’ll change you.
• Find a few postures that you can do in bed, and do them before you get up in the morning.  It feels silly and like cheating.  But it subverts all our resistances to getting into yoga gear, getting to the mat, getting away from the kids or the phone or the clock.  Do bridge pose.  Do a full body stretch.  Pull your knees to your chest, do a twist.  We most of us know that once we start, going on is easy.  Once we begin, we enjoy it.  It’s the starting that’s hard.
• One downward dog or tree pose will change your entire day.  It will take you two minutes.  Instead of going for a cup of coffee, or when you realize you’re just shuffling paper and checking emails at work, take those two minutes and do one pose.  Just one.  One is enough.

• The most common mistake in yoga is to think we’re supposed to look a certain way in a pose, that it’s about strength and flexibility.  Fact is, yoga is about listening to your body and getting it to it’s most balanced place, not getting to a picture perfect contortion.  For many people, this means backing off: a lot of people are too flexible and too strong, and do more harm than good by trying to go ‘deep’.  Start learning yourself: where are you most flexible, and should you be pushing or easing off?  Are you using strength to force yourself, rather than letting it happen?  Postures shouldn’t cause pain, and we know that, but we’re so driven we typically go for the pain anyway.  Stop this.  Stop it slowly.
• Don’t make any resolutions to practice every morning at 4:30.  Someday that might be realistic for you.  Right now it probably just causes anxiety.  But do consider waking up to watch the sunrise once in a while.  Few things resonate so powerfully.  When I do manage to practice first thing, I feel a sense of ease and control and poise throughout the rest of my day that are impossible to find in any other way.  I don’t have that practice daily.  But I do know that the sun does it, day after day after day, and will be ready for me whenever I’m able to show up.

using what you've got

Little did I know I got a writeup on a blog.  She especially likes the part where I used hymnals as props.  I do, too; there are so many mythic/poetic/physical innuendos at play.  But mostly I called it using what you've got.

Werld. Whirrled. World.

Garudasana....eagle pose...and truthfulness

If there is anything in us that is mythic, that ought to be a good place to redefine who we are.  Once upon a time, there were eagles the size of forests and men looked to them for things like strength, courage, bravery of a warrior.  Eagles who hunted.  Some say the eagle could lift a wing and the wind it made would move the sea like a hurricane, revealing the sea monsters, and the eagles would feed.

Garuda was such an eagle, with the features of a man.  He carried Lord Vishnu across the earth.  He was majestic, fierce; Garuda is usually translated to eagle but an older translation reads “devourer”, relating the warrior bird to the all consuming fire of the sun’s rays.

In the way of myth, which is more truthful than the way of common sense and opposites, Garuda was also a symbol of compassion, protection, and nuturance.  He stands over mountains, tenderly watches over temples, his hand in abhaya – (protection, do not fear) mudra.  Garuda was strong, fierce, a hunter. He devoured the serpents of the world without being harmed.  He is the conqueror of thirst.  There are few symbols in the world for that which overcomes the dangerous…the poisons, the darkness, the hooks we all catch ourselves up on.  Garuda is one.

Resolve, steadiness, that raptor’s eye and the fire of the sun transform our poisons into medicine.  Protection is compassionate.  Eagles, hawks, the raptors, are creatures of vision, observance, wisdom.

Assume the pose and you assume the qualities of the thing.  The asana invokes the mythic bird; this is the practice of strength, flexibility, endurance.  The difficultly of balance, the listing from side to side, teaches unwavering concentration, steady gaze, an eagle’s sight.  That concentration, that steadiness, is an actual calming of the mind.  A stimulant and sedative all at once: rush the awareness, steady the mind.

We have our demons and our serpents.  The physical posture of garudasana is one of compression, stimulation, and potency.  We contort ourselves, pull in, hang on.  The twisting actually serves as an opening: our wrapt arms open the wings of the shoulder blades, our bent and twisted legs activate the synovial fluid, opening hips, knees, ankles, stimulating the sex organs and seat of creativity.  Concentrate and concentrated.

This is how we transmute thirst into wisdom, how we take our poisons and make them benign.  In order to transform a thing, an emotion, a characteristic, a fact of life, we need to concentrate on it, protect ourselves from its danger, find steadiness and build our endurance.

Eagle relieves tension of the shoulders, neck and upper back.  It drives strength into the lower limbs and works the core.  Eagle coils and recoils, weaving flexibility into each of the 12 major joints in the body – ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, elbows, wrists.  The kidneys are flushed clear, oxygenated blood floods the reproductive organs.  The central nervous system is called up and focused, that brain and spinal cord who integrate the information in our body, co-ordinate our movements.  This is about balance, grace, and a steady mind.  This is about fierce potency, power, creativity, and the heart of a hunter.

Garudasana is the gargoyle protecting the heart’s temple, the egg that seeds our capacity to fly.

**

Last week I spoke of Ahimsa, nonviolence and compassion, that first principal of the first limb of the yoga practices.  Everything that comes after is informed by that commitment to compassion.  The second yama is Truthfulness, or Satya.

Like ahimsa, satya is an easy enough thing to nod at when things are easy.  Of course we should tell the truth and have integrity.  Of course.  But being truthful is no less an experiment and process we explore our whole lives than is compassion and nonviolence.  And like ahimsa, it becomes more potent the moment you begin to take it seriously, as a practice.

The truth is much like Garuda, I think.  A creature that inspires as much fear as he does contentment.  Unless we approach truth with our knees knocking, we haven't really understood the profundity of truth's power.

When we start looking for the truth, and trying to express our truth in our lives, we are faced with the complex of samskara, avidya (ignorance), fear, and all the thousand and three ways we sell ourselves short, stay stuck, settle for now.  We come face to face with all the walls and limitations we've built up over time.  Granted, we didn't lay all the brick.  Granted, life is hard.  But truth dispels the notion of victimhood right quick, and presses us to revolution and conversion.

Truth is liberating, earth shaking, ennobling and humbling all at once.  It will establish healthy boundaries for us and pull us out of the relationships that are harmful.  It will challenge us when we fall back on easy, white little lies about the way we spend time, money, make promises.

Truth will ask very difficult questions about who you are.

And we should be afraid.  Afraid is the most appropriate response there is.  This eagle is as large as a forest, and will destroy all that is safe and cozy and convenient.

And so I'm drawn to garudasana as a pose to explore the potency, the difficulty, and the transformation that is satya.  Almost as if Garuda could guard and protect our temples and sanctuaries, inside.  As though he were gargoyle.  As though simple 'niceness' isn't enough, we need also truth telling.

Because this is true.

There is a difference between being nice and being truthful.  Just as there as a difference between existing and feeling alive.

In the end, truthfulness does have the power to right wrongs and end suffering.  Truth brings renewal and change and rebirth.  Truth heals and amends, and dignifies everyone involved.  But truth isn't any easier than nonviolence is.  Just as ahimsa, satya is the practice of refining our lives.  There is much dross to be burned away.

Ahimsa: First, Ethic.

My practice began with asana.  It began in the body.  Words and understanding, all this ethics and philosophy, came later. I felt a strange, deep stirring when I practiced.  I didn't know a thing about yoga philosophy; it would be a stretch to say I 'understood' it.  Yet I intend to say exactly that:  I think that strange and deep physical stirring was ethical, what the body said and the mind heard was the beginning of understanding.  This is who you are, body said; why can't you remember?  What is it you must change? First, the body.  Later, the words. Like life its own self.

What I thought, at that point in life, was that philosophies and religions fail when you try to use them as actual tools to open jars with, relieve headache, or cope with a difficult human being.  They are pretty.  Pretty like a dress you wear on banner days when you yourself feel gorgeous and all the world is right.  But most of our lives - of my life, anyway - didn't happen in the way of lace and poetry and kid gloves.  It happened with bitten nails and chapped lips, screaming alarm clocks, and much weariness.  Makeup, and make believe, church and ethics all amounted to the same thing.

Yoga's ethics are different.  They are not an excuse or escape from the body, but an expression of the body.  They are part of the human, as skeleton is.

Harm none, honesty, purity, ahimsa are words written on and of bodies.  They are as much a part of us as is skin.  As is bicep, bone matter.  The smoke and heat of blood.

*

When I was a girl, I wrote poems.  Sometimes, lacking a notebook or simply trying to catch the moment of clarity, I wrote on the inside of my forearm.  But I don't think convenience was the whole reason I wrote there; I think it was a part of what the words were, a piece of their meaning.  It was important to have the ink there, on my flesh like that; a constant flicker of ink in corner of eye reminder.

Like a branding.

Words for the sake of argument are sterile.  Words in a book may or may not be read.  Words around ideas are just words.  As marking, though, as witness, words take on gravity and dimension.  They are a manifesto taken to bodily extremes; a manifesto of the body and for it.

One of these poems little girl me wrote described a storm and a lost man.  It got cold.  The sky poured.  The man was alone, had nothing, and there was darkness.  Over and again the poem said naked, damp, and hungry.  Every human being of us knows what that means.  All the saints and native gods of all the corners of the world have known it.  We know.

As in, This is my flesh.  Our veins are veins of compassion, not of blood.

When I was a young woman, I still had poems inside me, but my lifestyle richochted from safety and fairy tales to darker, harder places.  New Orleans Parish Prison, for one.

I thought, while sitting there one day, that I was now qualified to write folk songs.

I have a tattoo, now, woman grown, on the pale and thin flesh on the inside of that left forearm.  Yes: the place I used to scribble and ink on day after day.  It is my handwriting, this tattoo; the needle traced over what I myself had written and made it stay.  Naked, it says.  Damp.  And hungry.

When people ask, I say it's just a prison tattoo.  This makes them laugh and the conversation stray.  But it is exactly true: I laid my forearm across another woman's lap and she patiently, slowly, branded me.

When people ask about the words, all that nakedness, they usually think it's some innuendo.  All is sex.  I don't correct them.  But the words are not about lusty, satisified desire so much as they are a description of need.  These are the words we know.

Is it strange, I wonder, or delightful, that the most rigorous intellectual exercises and sublime metaphysical contortions of yogic science echo what I've felt and tried to express my whole life:

We know what the words are.  We ought to know our veins as compassion.  We ought - because we do, in a sense - have first words branded into our arms and the palms of our hands.  To have the words bless and sanctify everything we touch, mark everything we do, witness our hours; we ought to be reminded of ethics as soon as we are reminded of body.

First, ethic; first.

All two year olds know what generosity is.  And every two year old knows selfishness.  We stay infants all our lives.  Unless we decide to grow up.

*

You stand, you breath: the whole body trembles.  The nerves flash.  The breath roils.  It all says yes: yes, this has been true, all along.  This is who you are.  You were born to love, and yet you are alone.

Figure this out.  Go slowly.

*

Nonviolence is not a discrepancy or diversion of the body.  It is the logical outcome of having one.  Do this, and remember.

*

Still, I am a wordy, philosophical kinda gal.  It tickled me no end when I found the philosophy.  I found the philosophy to be a pure distillation of what I felt on the mat, knew with my hands and my eyes.  The the point of practice is not physical contortion and heavy breathing; it is a question of aliveness, is sensitivity.  Yoga is ethics, first.  If it begins as a flash of physical knowing, it holds true all the way to the most rigorous of intellectual understandings.  Compassion is a truth we know across all the different fields of knowledge.

The logic of yamas and niyamas appeals to our highest level of intelligence.  At first glance smarts isolate us, put the smart one on a different level and lead to accolades, cloisters, academia. Intelligence separates us from the fold. But this isn't the whole thing; intelligence taken to its conclusion resolves to withness and leveling. Full expression of genius lies in relation, not isolation.  I don't say easy, I just say genius.

The fully developed human being knows his own self, and where he stands.  He knows everything amounts to this: either he sees the body of every other as equal in importance to his own, or he does not.

Compassion, ahimsa, is inborn and instinctual.  But it is also - and this makes it rare - a truth the mind can find no shortness with.  Any shortness found is with the self, and not compassion.

Like god, I suppose: bigger than mind, it contradicts the mind.  This doesn't prove the smallness of god. It proves the smallness of self.

*

Ahimsa is historical. Hippocrates, father of medicine and citizen of ancient Greece, is credited with the healer's code to 'first, do no harm'.  He understood medicine holistically and humanely; illness is not the concern of wellbeing, wellbeing is.  When healers act out of their own diagnostics of what is 'wrong', they may injure the person while treating the limb.  To 'fix' a disease or wound at the cost of harming the person in some way is worthless, even if the disease is 'cured'.  To not harm, then, takes precedence over the healer's own accomplishment and the treatment of disease.

A doctor is concerned with physical pulp and tissue.  Oxygen, the grey matter of the brain, depression and anxiety and the muscle fisted heart.  From there, directly, a doctor is concerned with the soul and the being.  With communities.  With the bodies of history and the eyes of the not yet born.  Compassion, ahimsa, is the only way such disparate bodies of knowledge form a whole.

**

The body is knowledge, see?  To feel is to sense one's humanity, however jaded and limping.  To sense is to know.  To know one's own senses is to realize the mirror and shadow and echo of oneself in everyone else's body.  It feeds directly into using one's wisdom as a means of connection.  One's history and secrets and accomplishments as communication.  One's fear as the impetus to love.

The body is wild, and messy, and discordant.  There are reasons we prefer to live in our heads.  And yet to feel what one feels, moment by moment, is ultimately the kindness of telling the truth.  It demands bravery; it is frightful to see not with our expectations and ideals and shoulds and oughts and musts but with what is.

The word courage translates, in latin and old french, 'with heart'.  Compassion, as translated as the greek of the new testament, means to feel 'from the bowels and gut'.  It is not easy, no.  To face reality.  To stop living in the boundaries of our heads and enter the field of the body, where things are not so orderly and are, quite frankly, terrifying and hard to understand.

It is large and expansive, that land of what we do not understand.  To ground ourselves there we ourselves must grow huge.  We must, sooner or later, realize that courage, bravery, ethics, true self, are not things with out fear.  But a place where the fear doesn't matter any longer, where fear can be felt without leaving us paralyzed.

**

Our eyes grow gentle to see this way.

This is what eyes were capable of, all along.

You were born to love, and yet you feel alone.  Figure this out.  Go slowly.

**

If you pay attention to the breath, eventually you realize it is not you, breathing.  It is your body responding to the universe.  It is atmospheric pressure, breathing you.  The breath is, with out you.  When you end, there will still be others breathing.

This is a primordial, gut wrought, deep stirring experience.  It starts in the privacy of the body.  From there, it softens the eyes and reveals a universe, an atmosphere, a word.  It speaks. We develop like children: first in body, later in language and its brainy knowings.  If you allow yourself to feel what you feel, see what you actually do see, you resolve to fierce compassion.  Ethics are visceral.

Every human being is marked, branded.  We all have these tattoos across our foreheads, written into the lines of our hands, but the things are mostly invisible and private.  I am born to love, built of it, it says; and yet I feel alone.

We know the words by heart.

Ordinary Saints

"A saint in the Buddhist context...is someone who provides an example of the fact that completely ordinary, confused human beings can wake themselves up; they can put themselves together and wake themselves up through an accident of life of one kind or another. The pain, the suffering of all kinds, the misery and the chaos that are part of life, begins to wake them, shake them.

Having been shaken, they begin to question: "Who am I? What am I? What is happening" Then they go further and realize that there is something in them that is asking these questions, something that is, in fact, intelligent and not exactly confused." - Rinpoche

Yes

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even okay if I dont paragraph

my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I'm telling you is

Yes Yes Yes -Kaylin Haught

Yoga is like music...

..

“Yoga is like music. The rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life.” -B.K.S. Iyengar

Habits, Rituals, and Samskaras #classnotes 5/27

The human animal is a creature of habits and patterns.  You can see this in our symmetry, our schedules, and our thinking patterns.  Neurologically speaking, this has to do with neural pathways.  We 'learn' or discover a thing and the specific nerves and brain cells that were activated lay down a path, like a railroad track.  The next time the same scenario is hit on, the track gets relaid.  Deeper.  Over time, much of the process is 'skipped' as the brain adapts and makes cognitive leaps: smoke = fire, touch a hot thing and get burned, or chocolate makes me feel better.  Some of this process is available to conscious thought, but most of it happens below and inside us on a level we are not aware of...driving us to become creatures of our own habits.  On a fine, mysterious level of reward and inhibition hormones, instinct and survival, belief and cognition, our characters are laid out in patterns and whirlwinds of cycles. What western science is beginning to show, now, is that neural pathways are not the end of it; our muscle tissue and fascia, even our organs, have similar 'memory' structures.  This is how we learn to walk or throw a baseball.  This is how we can type or wash dishes or drive to work 'on auto pilot'.  It is also how we begin responding to the other sex, to family members, to times of stress or fear, to hunger.

And then we wonder why we feel stuck.  Why change is so hard.  Why we seem to do the very things we no longer want to do.  We wonder why we don't feel like 'ourselves'.

Yogically speaking, these patterns are called samskaras, or 'deep impressions'.  The image of a wheel, a knot, or again the traintrack and riverbed worn down by time are helpful metaphors.  Samskaras are energy patterns, both good and bad.  Yoga recognizes that patterns are part of what it means to be human; the point is not to 'rid' oneself of patterns (or the 'ego') but to see it for what it is.  To begin to replace harmful patterns with meaningful rituals.

For we are more than just those patterns.  There is something else.  Something under.  There is a more true self, longing for expression and connection.

A life lived on the level of samskara is superficial and alienating.  Samskara - which is sometimes addictive, sometimes coping skill, sometimes judgement, sometimes expectation or attachment - are part of the mind structure.  Most mind states (planning, recalling, worrying, even some levels of dream) are made of habits, and those very habits add up to what we call 'a life'.  Yet such a life has the sense of being caught in a wheel that spins and spins.  Our psychological and physical holding patterns keep us bound and spinning in a world of conditioned experience.  We become alienated from our true self as all we seem to experience are these superficial layers, these uncanny habits and suffering, this incorrigible self.

The practice of yoga can be hard, because it reveals our patterns so clearly.  I promise you, how you act in life is how you will act on the mat.  How you think day after day is how you will think on the mat.  It becomes louder and more obvious because we are practicing attention and awareness: it isn't making those things up, but showing you what is in there all along.  If you are a person who retreats in the face of something new, you'll probably do so when new or awkward poses come up.  If you berate yourself for illness, weakness, or fatigue, you'll do the same thing on the mat.  If you compare your self to others, you will be driven mad by those other bodies in class.  If you have a tendency to try to muscle through a hard place, just work harder to fix all problems, you'll try to practice that way, too.

This is hard.  I will never, ever say it isn't hard.

Yoga is a powerful and unstinting mirror.

But yoga is also honest and truthful, and once we see these things we can begin to accept them.  By accepting them, we begin the process of actual change.  We have the opportunity of actual choice.

There is a tremendous amount of power to samskara, and a key element of being human.  Once we truly accept this, we can begin to lay the foundations of something deeply meaningful and authentic.  We begin to study power and energy and to use it, to move with it, rather than try to control or manipulate it.  We become, this way, more effective and graceful.  We have a new skill in action.

One of the reasons people feel frustrated, stuck, or helpless is a result of ignorance of the powers and habits and patterns within us.  Instead of working with the grain, we try to invent a new grain.  We deny our actual being for what we think we should be, instead.  This is both profound and very very simple.  Human beings are not meant to sit in chairs all day long, for example.  Nor are we meant to work for 8 (or 12, or 16) hours a day.  We have internal rhythms of peak performance and recovery.  Throughout the day, about every two hours, our brain (and dominant nostril) switches from left to right.  We try to be efficient and concentrate at times when our body is trying to rest and restore, or we try to work harder when what our patterns need is to intersperse 'work' with 'gratification'.   We binge and purge, or diet and crash, or over work and get sick, or procrastinate and give up, when learning and abiding within the context of strong patterns, meaningful rituals, would make us more powerful and fulfilled human beings.

Rituals create energy, feed all our subconscious drives, sooth and restore and inspire us.  It is important to have rituals.  Rituals answer many of our deepest longings.  When one has rituals in place, the things become deeply meaningful and restorative, they affirm who we are and encourage us to full use of our capacity.  When what we have are chores, to-do lists, or 'breaking habits', we tend to deplete ourselves and run over and over and over the ground of suffering.  Our life spins out and our energy is depleted in things that are self-limiting, self-sabotaging, or simply apathetic and numb.

Think, for a moment, of things that are ritualized in your life already.  Brushing your teeth is usually an easy one: it is something you don't even think about, but miss horribly if it's interrupted.  You have a way of doing it that is absolutely unique to you...the way others brush their teeth would feel 'wrong' to you. You don't have to consciously go through the process: your inner reserves are free to wander and play and get creative while your biological needs are met and what needs to be done, gets done.

Think of other 'rituals', and how deeply they affect you.  There are songs that will bring you back immediately to old memories.  There are sights and smells that affect you deep in the gut.  There are words and images, sacred or profane, that speak straight to the soul of who you are.

What if you began to create rituals for yourself, ones that became so deeply engrained they happened like brushing your teeth?  How far toward personal change could you go?  How much energy could you restore to yourself, away from self-chastisement and blame and the belief that we need to accomplish great things perfectly and completely, all at once?  How would your day to day experience of being yourself change if you initiated and practiced rituals you believe in and adore?  Rituals of creativity, of relationship, of solitude and prayer and imagination.

Rituals of yogic practice.

Things to try or imagine:

1. When I first got sober, I was advised over and over again to focus on the simplest things.  To focus on what I could change and let go of what I couldn't.  I was told to stop thinking about 'forever' or in terms of years and lifetimes, and focus instead on doing one thing at a time.  I was told to make my bed every morning.  To pray - not in some pansy assed thinking about doing it but to literally get down on my knees and spend time there, just a few minutes, every single day.  To go to a meeting.  To call three sober women.  Yogis added there own: get to a practice; no matter what happens there or what you can or cannot do, just get there.  Drink more water.  Eat.  Rest when you need to rest.  Focus on your breath.

Oddly, things that seemed to have nothing to do with 'the point' gave me a way to 'the point'.  How making one's bed everyday should help you get over years of self-hatred and a physical addiction is mostly unconscious and uncanny, but it worked.  I learned in a very personal, very experiential way that it is not our intentions, not abstractions, and not accomplishments that matter in the end.  It is the way that we spend our time.

So, maybe practice making your bed every day.  Or stretching when you wake up.  Or taking five deep breath before you get out of the car.  It doesn't matter what it is, the script has to come from your own life.  The point is, change and happiness happen as we moment by moment align ourselves with what is and free up our creativity, love, and power.  As the clutter of samskara becomes the ornament of samskara, and the self below becomes more prominent.  Authenticity lies this way.

2. Simply watch yourself being aware of the human trait of habit and samskara.  Watch, in particular, your relationships to food, to sleep, to anger, to That Which is Hard For You.

3.  Allow, really allow, your yoga practice to become a ritual.