Your body is capable of things you think - right now - are impossible and ridiculous. It isn't a question of body. It is a question of commitment, time, willingness, life. Your life, I tell you, is much bigger than your thoughts are.
Go on.
And if this is true of your body...what might be true of all those other things left buried inside you?
Written for the upcoming Body, Mind, Feeling, and World workshop. If you're interested, sign up.
“The empty sky is my witness.” – Jack Kerouac
We want peace. We want relief. We want a sense of calm and a broader opening to joy. These are universals, although they come to us in very particular and personal ways. And they are things that are promised us, in yoga, in meditation, in spiritual paths of any shape or origin.
The way in is paradoxical, and has more to do with not doing and not reacting than with a ‘practice’. It comes in stepping back and witnessing who you are.
The irony is of course that we think we know. We think we know better than anyone else does, certainly. There is a sense in which this is true: no one else knows our secrets, or is as preoccupied with our thoughts and feelings and beliefs as we are.
But there is also a larger sense in which this isn’t true at all. We don’t know who we are. We don’t have the foggiest. We have a tendency to become attached to our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs and confuse them for ourselves. And we have a tendency to stay so close we can no longer see the big picture.
Once upon a time, someone told me “your thoughts aren’t true, you know. You don’t have to believe them.” This was a revelation. It continues to be a revelation. This was the beginning of many deep changes in me, starting with a yoga practice, an exploration of mindfulness and meditation, and not a little soul searching. In any journey of healing or self work, honest appraisal of our thoughts and beliefs has to come in to play. This causes a minor eruption. A revolution, complete with burned citadels and blazing flags, from the heart outward. It results in clarity, centeredness, and purpose. It creates a sound refuge.
And it’s tremendously hard to explain, as it’s a thing of experience. Of show, don’t tell.
Sakshin, the Witness, is the you of you that is larger than your conscious thoughts or fleeting emotions.
The human animal is a thinking and reflective animal. Not only do we think, but we have the capacity to watch ourselves think. We have the gift of self awareness. The easiest way to envision this is to call up in your mind a picture of yourself, where ever you are right now. Watch as this character of your mind stands and leaves the room. You can do this whether you actually leave the room or simply use your imagination. This quality is what allows us to remember, to learn from what we remember, to ruminate and change our minds, and to create or plan.
But the camera can pan back even further, to where we see the thoughts, can start to question where the thoughts are coming from, ask who the thinker is.
Sakshin, the Witness, becomes our closest ally in our daily practice. We are ambitious, judgemental, competitive, and want to change. But we cannot create any substantive change until we know and accept what is.
Sakshin is the quiet water beneath the constant chatter and fluctuations of our everyday consciousness (citta). It is those fluctuations Patanjali wanted to quell with the practice of yoga. The fluctuations are caused by perception, thought, emotion, memory. Because of avidya – our inability to see, our mistaken ideas about dualities, our ignorance – we imagine that these fluctuations define and limit who we are. Our ignorance hurts. We suffer.
All our life, and much of our strength, is spent is assigning values to people and things. We analyze, we criticized, we compare. We feel envy. We feel lack. Or we feel pride, ambition, dedication. But we are rarely taught to accept and simply mirror what is. Sakshin engages both the outer and inner worlds on their own terms and lets them speak in their own words. It is present-centered, with no memories of the past or concerns for the future. Sakshin is self-reliant, independent of approval or disapproval, self-accepting, and big enough to hold both success and failure.
In meditation we learn to be non-reactive. There’s a thought, we let it pass without judgment or any need to follow; there’s an itch, we let it be without moving; there’s a sound, you notice and refocus on your breath; there is a surge of emotion, you feel it fully without turning it into a command or a story.
The practice is simple. Not doing. Not attaching. But it has never been ‘easy’. It teaches the vast difference between what’s actually happening and what the mind is making up. Oddly, this practice allowed me to be more engaged with ‘what’s really happening’ and with the processes of my mind. It has allowed me greater spontaneity, a relief of grief or doubt or regret, and a full appreciation of my strengths and limitations.
The paradox is that being attached to a thing – emotion, say – I neither get myself or the benefit of the emotion. Anger is a prime example: if I follow the anger, believe it as ‘truth’, I set off a chain reaction of further emotions, hormones, chemicals, and neurotransmitters. I engage my whole fight or flight response. Typically, I also recall other incidents of anger, or reflect on neutral events in the past, and suddenly ‘understand’ them in terms of this anger. Fuel to fire.
Mindfulness, however, fully engages with the emotion, feels it full on, and lets it be what it is. It gives a sort of dignity to the thing. Approaching anger with that tender, nonjudging Witness, I can often see what is making me angry (usually not what I first thought). I can see what it is that I think I need, or what I think it is I’ve been threatened with. Fears and pains are teachers. We should listen to them. Benevolent curiosity toward anger is the first teacher of compassion; I learn compassion (not pity) for myself, but also a kind regard for the other party, whose needs and motivations are often remarkably similar to my own.
Being mindful toward my anger also graces me with a kind of flexibility, generosity, and bigger than myself ness. Anger rankles and burns. It consumes. But it is also only a piece of who I am, not the whole. And it often consumes more precious and tender aspects. Mindfulness allows me the room to give anger its place without letting it hold sway.
The big, sweeping space of mindfulness is the active practice of keeping the mind focused on what you are experiencing in the present moment, moment by moment, without commentary, analysis, or judgement. Without reference to the past. Without expectations or fear. Again, oddly, the practice makes us big: by dissolving the ties we take for granted (why does he always do this? Why can’t I ever…? I hate…I wish…every man is the same…my body does this every time I get a headache) we have the room to try other approaches. We see people for who they are, rather than what we’ve come to expect from them. And we see that who we are need not be attached to who we’ve always been and the way we’ve always done it.
Typically, we use the breath as a vehicle or focusing point for our meditation. But we can apply mindfulness to anything: different sensations in the body, sounds, emotions, even thoughts.
Finding the clarity born of mindfulness, letting go of distractions, needs, and expectations that carry us away from the present, only happens with time, commitment, and a surrender to the process.
The process can be scary. We learn how little control we have over our own minds. The light we start swinging around can illuminate parts of ourselves we’d rather not know, or force us to reckon with things we’ve spent tremendous energy avoiding. When people begin a ‘meditation’ practice, they often say “I’m no good at this. You tell me to follow my breath but I can’t shut off my thoughts long enough to do that.” Depending on who we are, ease of sitting with the uncomfortable may be terrifying. Impatience, self-criticism, perfectionism, and the desire to quit or run away run deep in us.
In the end, mindfulness is not about escaping thoughts or emotions, or turning the thoughts off. Thought happens. No one can stop thought. If that were possible, there would be no reason for meditation, ‘liberation’ of yoga, or any of the self-soothing strategies humanfolk have devised over time. We don’t escape thought and feeling and what is, but radically change our relationship to them. “You don’t have to believe your thoughts.” said unnamed teacher: mindfulness and witness open the heart to possibility. It allows choice, rather than reaction. It opens a space for Right Intention to steer our lives, or true belief, or the really right thing to do.
Thoughts and emotions can overwhelm: most of the ‘problems’ in our lives have to do with our reaction to thoughts or feelings we didn’t know how to think or feel. Mindfulness won’t magically stop this, but it will bring it to light. At those times, we can begin to fall back on compassion – again, not pity – for ourselves, the great reality of where we’ve been and the greatness of the task we’ve begun. Facing demons rather than running from them. Mindful witness is a place to begin the forgiveness of self, and of our failures.
Begin at the beginning. Begin where it’s practicable. Begin with the body.
Sit back or lie down on the floor and close your eyes. Step back from your body, as you might step back from a puzzle or slightly crooked picture frame. Scan your awareness over your body’s surface. Easy. Do this from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head. Feel, for example, where your skin comes into contact with the world, the border between what’s inside and what’s out. Feel where fabric of your clothes touches your skin. Feel the heat or coolness of the floor. Feel where the air in the room moves over your body. Feel where your skin is soft, where it’s calloused. Where it’s warm or cool or cold. If you can’t stay methodical, let your awareness play. Just keep refocusing on being aware.
Begin to start scanning those places of your body where we don’t often go – with awareness, with breath, with vision. The back body is key. Notice if there are areas beyond the vision of your Witness (internal organs can be hard. Or areas of injury may simply feel ‘injured’, not detailed). Somewhere along the way, we lose large tracts of ourselves to a kind of physical avidya (ignorance or not knowing). Eventually, someday, the Witness will be the guide that brings you to those places.
Follow your Witness inside, away from the surface, toward the contents of your citta (everyday consciousness…that fluctuating mind). What do you see in there? Our brains consume more energy and more sugar and more blood than any other part of our body, but we’re largely unaware of what it’s doing. Forget the whole we only use 10% part. Generally speaking, I’m wholly unaware of that 10% I am supposedly using. Ordinarily, we identify with the fluctuations and so submerge or lose ourselves in them. We lose not only them, but ourselves. The Witness will tell us the kinds of thoughts we have. I was surprised to learn how much time I spent planning and worrying and projecting – I thought I was a lazy and sanguine kinda gal. Most of us are consumed by planning, rehashing, competing, preparing. Any and all of these have a value and a place – but if we’re not aware, we’re not even getting the benefits of worrying, planning, or preparing. Or of reflection.
Use Sakshin to step back from the contents of your mind and regard what you see without favoring any one of them, or trying to dismiss the unsavory. Appreciate that you can remember yourself and know yourself apart from these rippling thoughts, cataclysmic or therapeutic or preoccupied as they may be. Allow each its full expression without getting mired in them. They are a part of you. Wings, or limbs, or potentials. But they are not who you are.
Sakshin is the means by which we inquire into and enlighten ourselves. It asks, sometimes irreverently, sometimes compassionately, who we are. The more open we are to the Witness, the more we begin to see our ignorance/avidya; we begin to realize we don’t even know who we are. This is a gift. We have worlds of potential in us, big areas of healing that have historically looked like lost causes, huge reservoirs of flexibility, endurance, compassion, attention, and creativity that remain lost in the morass until we approach and learn, Witness as guide.
The elementary act of witnessing, and not doing anything, is enough to initiate the process of transformation. Physical transformation, emotional transformation. Revolution of spirit. When the Witness shines the light of awareness on the unnecessary or unhealthy doing-somethings we engage in, the doing-somethings immediately lose some of their potency. The grip of avidya – and hence, suffering – is weakened. Stubborn, trenchant tensions or habits or beliefs spontaneously dissolve and transformation becomes effortless. We subtly change. The authentic slips in. Breathing, and all the other things we do ‘just happens’.
Your inner being is nothing but the inner sky. Clouds come and go, planets are born and disappear, stars arise and die, and the inner sky remains the same, untouched, untarnished, unscarred. We call that inner sky sakshin, the witness, and that is, the whole goal of meditation. -Osho
“I am the goal, the supporter, the Lord, the witness, the abode, the refuge, the friend, the origin, the dissolution, the foundation, the substratum, and the imperishable seed.” -Bhagavad Gita
This, Gargi, is just that which is not changed. It is not seen, but is the see-er. It is not heard, but is the hearer. It is not thought, but is the thinker. It is not known, but is the knower. Apart from it, there is no see-er. Apart from it, there is no hearer. Apart from it, there is no thinker. Apart from it, there is no knower. Gargi, in this alone which is not changed, all space and time are woven, warp and woof.- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.8.11
“Some look upon this Self as marvelous; others speak about It as wonderful; others again hearof It as a wonder. And still others, though hearing, do not understand It at all.” ?
(Scroll to the bottom for quick info on kapha balancing poses, diet, schedule, etc). An odd winter, really. Last week friends in Chicago told me that temperatures had reached 70 degrees, and I walked the dog in a tee shirt wondering what December meant any more. Perhaps it means volatility, rushing change, sudden dark. I have no doubt that freakish weather is part of our environmental legacy and 'super storms' will continue ravishing whole cities - but I don't know what to expect of ordinary every day weather. Yesterday, suddenly, snow.
Not snow. SNOW. As though we'd been brought back to that allegorical childhood we all had, where it pillowed and drifted and blew round the corners of houses until houses disappeared, laced and dusted trees until tree became wonderful. I listened to the radio Saturday - in itself, not a thing I do any longer but remember from childhood - and watched as the traffic slowed, announcements were made of closings, predictions of school cancellations rolled in. My sister and I drove many miles across country to the extended family Christmas. There was fog and heavy air, there was miles and miles of white, disappeared fences, undulating fields. The car slid in the parking lot as we arrived and feet made that squeaking on new snow noise. It was warm, though: on the sidewalk a black water puddle and I paused, as the door opened and the riot sound of family and warmth and dozens of children I don't know rolled out the opened doorway; I paused and watched the lazy snowflake hit the puddle like some kind of haiku.
When I woke, Sunday morning, the world had vanished. It continued to vanish, all day long. There was no traffic, although I live on what I think is one of the busiest intersections in town. The neighbor boy, drippy nosed and snowsuit clad, knocked on the door and offered to shovel. I let him. It snowed on and on, and he kept shoveling. Every few hours I'd open the door and let my dog go out to join him - two black figures cavorting in on an immense canvas. A world blanched of all sound. A freezing of time and reality. He'd knock again, I'd say he really didn't have to shovel til it ended, he'd sniff and go back to his self-imposed responsibility, the shovel and snowsuit outsizing him. The winter outsizing both of us.
I sat at the table in the very quiet house and drank tea. Ate oranges. Put on more socks.
I watched a mood walk closer to me like a wall of fog approaching over a body of water.
Depression comes that way, some times.
Winter used to be my metaphor for it, depression. A wall of blank. A kind of dying. A place where everything is isolated, nothing makes a sound, and you might lose limbs if you aren't careful.
The heart might freeze inside you.
This is the thing, though: I don't slide down to those depths the way that I used to. I don't much want to die any more.
But I do notice: the moods in me like weather, like season. How real they are and how they change the timbre of my voice, the appetite on my tongue, my ability or inability to remember. I watch, too: how the smallest, dumbest things are the things that help me. Cinnamon. Light. Taking off shoes and socks and getting bare feet, bare hands, on to the mat and moving until I sweat.
Look: the ancients understood seasons - night to day, fall to winter - and they understood characters - gregarious and earth motherish, or bookworms, clowns, family centered or rogue. They understood that happiness and enlightenment come from a full on acceptance of who and where we are and living appropriately.
The practice of yoga is learning who you are and where you are (winter, family, mid west plains) and understanding. Understand that this affects your basic experience of life and learning to dance, move, adapt, thrive within it.
The boy kept knocking on the door. I gave him an orange and hot chocolate. The dog first loved the snow, then shivered. We hunkered down, and then I wrote this:
Hands and eyes and mind grow dry and numb, the fire all draws in.
Which is my poet brain striking on the truth of ayurveda of this season.
Winter begins dominated by vata and moves toward kapha. To survive, we need to balance kapha energies with food, with self care and body movements, with kapha balancing yoga practices.
Winter's short days affect us, whether we are fully Seasonally Affective Disordered or simply hungry for more light and longer days - a greater sense of awakeness and time to live. Further: holiday 
season will bring with it a sense of being frenzied, broke, over wrought, under appreciated, lonely and misunderstood no matter how fantastic your social and familial relationships are or whether or not you observe a holiday. Even the fact of NOT observing a holiday can stir up deep rooted emotional connections. The end of one year and the anxieties about a coming one contribute foreboding, a sense of shortness, or overwhelm.
Know this, and accept. Accept, and then find wild joy, anyway.
Yoga teaches us survival, and then more than survival into joy. There are things, yoga teaches, you can do. Do them. Perhaps there is a reason we humans have a hodge podge of celebrations - and all celebrations of light - in the darkest days of winter.
Celebrate ridiculously, for this is how human beings get through. Celebration, commemorate, make holy, pray, observe, and practice. Same things.
My niece has learned Christmas songs in the last few weeks. From her carseat in the back during that long drive, she kept refraining, every now and again. Let it snow let it snow. Let it. Snow.
Let it. Accept, and find deep joy in the deep snow, deep joy in the deep body.
KAPHA BALANCING PRACTICES - FOOD, SCHEDULE, SKIN, PEOPLE, ASANA
Mid to late winter tends to be dominated by kapha energies; the sky is low, often cloudy, gray and days are cold, damp and heavy. Life - even in the busiest places, moves more slowly. When in balance, kapha energy provides lubrication and structure. This has to do with joints, mucus, the texture of our skin and our hair. Kapha type people are often the strongest and have the most stamina. Kapha has to do with strength, vigor, endurance, stability of both body and mind. It is responsible for lubrication of joints, flowing of thought and emotion and ideas, moisturizing skin and fascia, maintaining immunity and lymphatic balance. Out of balance, it leads to sluggishness, fatigue, ache, mucus related illness, excess weight, negative emotions such as attachment, envy, greed (and the loud relational negatives of loneliness, comparison, jealousy which can tip into over dependence or far too much isolation). Too much kapha energy is earthiness, solidness, taken too far: a sense of being stuck in the mud, buried, dark, cold.
In general, we should follow a kapha - pacifying regimen in the winter. But dry, cold, windy weather can at times provoke vata, too, and can lead to arthritis, indigestion, etc.
FOOD - Appetite tends to become 'heaftier' during winter months - which can lead to weight gain if we answer with highly processed foods and corresponding lower excericse. However, kapha in itself is the withdrawing of energy from the extremities to the organs, and many people may lose weight in winter if they don't add proteins and grains significantly. We should not eat the same foods we ate in the summer seasons, and need bulk and warmth and spice.
Incorporate whole grains, buttermilks or cottage cheeses if you do dairy, steamed vegetables, warm soup, and spicy food into your meals. Because your appetite is heartier in the winter, eat more protein- beans, tofu, eggs- and if you’re not a strict vegetarian, chicken, turkey, and fish. Add warming spices such as cinnamon, cloves, and black pepper to promote digestion. Drinking sweet or dry wine with your meals will stoke your agni (digestive fire), improve your appetite, and increase circulation. Avoid cold drinks and opt for hot water, hot tea, hot cocoa or chai.
SCHEDULE - much like the cold wet autumnal season, a schudule can help get through the dark time of winter. Think of softening the schedule, but keeping it moving. If possible, allow yourself to wake up a little later. Avoid naps (but know they can be healing, too; just don't fall into a rut as kapha tends to over sleep and the sleep makes us more tired). Try to be active early in the day and include excercise; give yourself pleasurable activities for the late afternoon and evening - think joy and interest. Schedule something to look forward to (big: a vacation or long awaited purchase or accomplishment, small: a movie you really want to see or book to read, a lunch date with a good friend, a self indulgant purchase that won't break you in anyway but feels good). Try new things to keep your interest involved and yourself challenged.
SKIN
Think circulation. Massage, get a loofah, scrub and exfoliate. Find an oil appropriate for your skin and stimulating (bergamot, rosemary, juniper, vertiver, melissa) and indulge in it.
ASANA PRACTICE
Hard enough to sweat (ayurveda says on brow, armpits, joints and a feeling of dryness in the mouth is the point you need to get to) and challenging enough to break you out of 'stuckness' and stagnation. Aim to counter Kapha's natural tendency to feel cold and sluggish. Move through flow and sun saluations with as much a sense of speed and warmth as you can without losing connection and integrity. This will lighten and warm you.
Most standing asana are invigorating, especially if you hold them for a longer time. Try holding for 20 breath (that is much longer than you may have ever, ever done so). Backbends are also heating, and getting extesion of arms and legs (up, over head) promotes the heart to push and the circulation to flow. Open your chest and the front lines of the body as much as you can.
Kapha is said to be dominant 6- 10 am, so do some sort of asana or excercise then if at all possible. Just a few minutes. One salutation. One stretch. Just do something. Incorporate firey pranyama into the practice, especially at the beginning and close. It cleanses that heaviness, mucus, and chest gunk, as well as energizing the digestive system and balancing energy levels throughout the day.
PEOPLE:
Kapha doshas are trustworthy, stabilizing, grounded people. But they can tend to be too sentimental and nostalgic for how things were and unable to move forward. As winter and it's Kaphic tendencies set in, make sure to watch your own proclivities toward others. Keep yourself challenged and excited and avoid getting stuck in the past. Realize not all relationships need to be ideal to be rewarding. Allow yourself to be given gifts and appreciated. Practice open hearted gestures of compassion, play, service. Don't try to be oversimplistic about your feelings (guilt, depression, fear), but see them for what they are without letting them become everything. It is possible to know you feel guilty but also know you ARE not a fundamentally guilty person. Go for lightness and laughter. Watch comedies.
9 a.m. - Noon, $40
register here
"Let my prayer arise in Thy sight as incense, And the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice." Psalm 141:2
"The Incarnation establishes without a doubt, once and for all, the given-ness of union with God. We do not have to attain divine union. We do not have to climb out of our messy flesh into the pure Spirit of God. God has become man. Our flesh is his flesh. Our body is his body." -Carmelite monk William McNamara
"Our whole notion of reality has actually been topsy-turvy. Instead of God being a vast imaginary projection, he turns out to be the only thing that is real, and the whole universe, despite its immensity and solidity, is a projection of God's nature." -Deepak Chopra
There is confusion: some people say yoga is a religion. Some people say it is exercise. It is neither, but sometimes there is confusion. So: what is yoga? And why is it spiritual? Or is it not?
We tend to think of prayer, spirituality, and ourselves in intellectual ways. We are taught that 'spirituality' is a thing we find in special places, handed on by qualified others. We disregard the physical as a handicap, an embarrassment, or a weakness.
We lose out when we do this. Spirituality is not a thing to be found in churches once a week or at turning points in a life story. It is not to be found in retreats or cloisters. It is here, and it is now, or it is nowhere. Nor is it a thing taught by others, if we are honest: religion is the song of the heart. Our relationship to our body says a lot about what we think of God's creation. The most profound connection to the divine is always experienced inwardly, as something between ourselves and God.
There is a strong tendency to deny or disparage the human body, to suggest its the source of sin and weakness. Yet in the Christian tradition itself, God chose to incarnate his son. Maybe this wasn't only about suffering, but also about love.
Who are we and what are we supposed to do with this life? This body? How do we, personally, incarnate the idea of gratitude, anger, joy, salvation, devotion, or love? What is peace, and what is praise?
We go through life's stages. We know youthful play, thrills, and heartbreak. We know relationships, parenthood, and work. We know illness, trial, and loneliness. Ultimately, I think we are called to dance, and to pray. These are things that are done with bodies.
A workshop dedicated to exploring 'religion' and 'spirituality' in terms of yoga. To finding 'self', and mapping the relationship between this 'self' and God.
Wear: comfortable clothing you can move freely in, as well as a warmer shirt to cover up with/socks as we will NOT be engaged in a strong practice or move the whole time. Have something comfortable for the discussion part.
Bring: a notebook and pen, your mat if you've got one, possibly a towel or small blanket to sit on and shift around on as we discuss. (pillows, props, all welcome.) Something to sip.
Any questions? Let me know. I'm excited!
Why not give yoga? To your mom, to your boss, to your best friend?
Easy. It's elegant, it's personal, it's meaningful. (Yes, yes, I still remember the one who first got me in a studio.)
Buy a (new student) $30 for 30 days package, a workshop (every last Sunday of the month, $40).
Or, hey, ask your loved ones to buy you a month. You want that more than socks, don't you?
I have a stack of holiday cards I can fill out with the gift information for you to give to your loved one.
If you are not a student, but would like to purchase a gift, you can click on the paypal 'donate' button to make your purchase. I will add your gift to the student's account or create an account for a new student.
The point, I think, is not to live some other life but to fully live the life that we have.
It is not easy for me to swallow this. More often than not, I want things to be different. I am not entirely satisfied with the face that I have, nor that I am a middling age woman, nor with my bank account. I live smack dab in the middle of conservative suburbs in the Middling West, which is the antithesis of what I expected and worked for.
I overheard a woman in a restaraunt the other day, with a crestfallen look and her hands limp on either side of her plate: this isn't what I wanted, she said.
Which is what most of us get.
I used to teach a woman who was driven and focused as a tiger. She was beautiful and, I think, relatively 'successful' by anybody's standards. We practiced headstands one day and I saw frustration cloud her face to a cool marble tone. I'm not strong enough, she said; I'll never be able to do the variations.
I answered that it would come. But I think I answered, wrong. I think I should have said it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter whether or not she will ever find lotus and hanumanasana and pincha while standing on her hands. It is a truth that she maybe never will. We can't predict things and she may never practice again, let alone for the years more the pose might take. She might lose her limbs or her health. She may lose interest. She may never get the poses she wants.
But the practice still has a radical and precious worth. I watched her move away from the wall and knew she was more comfortable doing those poses in which she looked like a rockstar. It's enough, she said, speaking of the sweat and the work out and the core work.
But there is something, something to practicing those poses we are not very good at. Something to inhabiting the land of This Is Hard For Me.
When I was a little girl, I believed, I knew, that I was going to be a monk. I wrote silly poems that were half prayer, half song, and half magic spell and this seemed to me the most important thing I could do with my life. I felt the truth of human love and suffering and likened that somehow to god. And, it seemed to me, that if god or love exists, the only rational way to spend my life was in dedication to it. As I grew up, though, I lost my sense of god. Churches seemed ridiculous places for me to be. I lost all feeling of 'faith' without losing that first tug and pull to be what I wanted to be: a monk, serving love, writing poems, standing for healing in a broken world.
These suburbs rankle me, and newspapers bother me, and my schedule sometimes leaves me feeling very little of 'purpose' and much more of 'fatigue'. I spent the afternoon, yesterday, writing poems and daydreaming under a tree next to a monstrous bed of peonies. The poems were intoxicating and wild and breezy, the heat was dizzying, the afternoon passed slow. But I hit a wall of doubt: the notebook is so messy. The poems are not finished, not edited, not publishable let alone memorable. I looked from the black ink on the limpid paper and then to the ants, colonizing the blooming peonies. What's the point...I found myself thinking. I can't describe these flowers. No one will ever read my poems. I will never be a monk.
I stood and brushed the humid dirt from my knees and my seat, gathered my papers and headed back into the house. But as I did so I remembered some of my students, the conversations we have had, the way their movements sometimes strike me dumb and make me teary. I recalled to myself the days I am most tired, most frustrated, think myself most stupid and a bad teacher and stuck in middling america; the moment I show up, my mood no longer matters. Something happens. I let my 'self' be pushed aside and let the yoga talk, instead, I try to be present not to my wheeling thoughts but to the bodies and lives that show up in the room with me.
I wanted to be a poet monk, to stand for love, to touch beauty and heart and soul every day. It occurred to me, standing in the hot sun with my arms full of half written poems, that that is exactly what I am.
The point is not to change our lives, but to change our selves so that we can live our lives, fully. To find the precious worth of what we can do, are doing. To appreciate that we are getting the myriad benefits - postural, hormonal, strength and tissue and joint wise, now and today. That this is more real, and more beneficial, and a bigger point than the imaginary pose we might or might not someday hit. This is real, while we spend most of our lives blind and desirous of the imaginary.
To be present while moss covers our face, or the drone of suburban lawn mowers drills into the fantasy, to watch ants and peonies and be okay with whatever poems we can write.
Yoga is courage. It is the bravery to look at reality full in the face, and be touched by how deeply you love. Yoga invokes the courage to remove our absurdities and crutches and blank stares. The startling revelation of love. All the saints of history have known this. All of our great artists. This is the message of all the angels and messengers. And a few, stellar people-of-our-own-lives whom we are blessed to rub elbows with now and again.
Grief, hard knocks, and fear reveal our attachments, true. But they also show the glorious aspect of that attachment: we are woven into the fabric of the world, we are linked to everything that is.
Pain is a badge, or maybe a threadbare, greasy flag, that indicates our humanity. It waves it's gritty fibers in a soiled, but archly noble, patriotism for our homeland. This is our humanity.
And humanity is a beautiful, gorgeous, precious thing.
In asking students whether they would be a) in town and b) interested in yoga during the holidays, the only clear answer I got was yes. Yes.
So, as I'm not leaving town myself, I plan on having class both Thanksgiving day and Friday morning at 6:30 am.
I'll close Christmas eve and day, but will have regularly scheduled classes the rest of the holiday season. Including new year's eve and day. (It is good to start the year this way. It is good.)
Also, since a number of students have requested longer workshops, I've gone ahead and scheduled one. On Sunday, December 30, from 9 am to noon I will host something part movement, part dialogue, part meditation. I'm calling it 'body, mind, feeling and world: yoga and mindfulness'. More to follow.
Come, practice. The door is open.
Dear everyone, Most of you have already figured out - in the most inconvenient of ways - that classes are cancelled this week. I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience and am trying to keep you all up to date, now.
I intend to be back in the studio Monday morning - have a further dr appointment Monday afternoon, and will go from there with updates. I assume we will be 'back to normal'; if not, I will post here immediately and change the online schedule as needed.
Just over a week ago my bike and I had an unfortunately close encounter with the grill of a pickup truck. It was scary but uneventful, and in my flustered state I walked away fine. Fine, I thought, was everything.
Monday evening, though, I started to throw up. Odd, I thought, since I didn't feel sick in the least and couldn't figure anything funny in my diet. But I kept throwing up and shortly thereafter started feeling very, very dizzy and confused. Confused enough that I became scared (when minds get bleary, we start to fear losing reality pretty quick). And so tired I could hardly manage walking from one room to another. So, I went to the ER.
I was diagnosed with concussion following the bike accident and told to sit still for a week. Told that concussions are very common and usually not a big deal - that most people don't even realize they've had them. But, being a bruise on the brain, they can also be a very big deal indeed. The issue seems to be that we can't really know, but have to just wait. Sit still a week, let bruises heal, and then see.
I could tell you the whole range of awful emotions I've gone through and how I've been crying my way through the last few days. How dare I be so irresponsible to students, I thought. What kind of shoddy buisness am I running that has to close all sudden like just a month into being open? What a horrible teacher I am, after all. Let alone all the financial fears and the fact of being uninsured, the fear of what a week closed will do to a business just trying to start, what students will think...let alone the scary, mostly unspoken, but vaguely there idea that my mind and body might have to make permanent adjustments to what I've been calling 'yoga'.
But the larger point, and truth of the matter, is this: yoga is bigger than my little accidents and the studio itself is more important than what happens there over the course of one week. The studio will be just fine, in the long run. The students will be just fine. And even if I do have to make adjustments to my own practice, to acknowledge embodiment and injury and limit, I can still be an amazing teacher. I simply have to accept that I'm not so in control as I thought or wanted. That the glossy skimming on and feeling in control is more dangerous, really, than is dealing with things as they come and doing what I can.
All is well. Yoga is big. I just have to practice sitting still and not knowing for a little while.
Thank you all for your kind thoughts; they have helped and continue to help. I will see you all soon.
Namaste,
K
We know - science and brute experience both have proven - that yoga works synergistically to improve athlete's performance, recovery time, prevent injuries, and hone all of the 'mind' stuff that brings athletes to their very best. We know that any and all yoga classes hit on the same skill sets and muscle and joint groups that athletes are prone to injure or over stress. That in mind, however, and knowing there is a huge athletic community who are doing much of their community stuff on Wednesdays, I think I'm going to focus Thursday classes (all four of them) on yoga for athletes. There's a restorative class and there are strong classes. Both complement a runner's (or cyclists, or gymnast's, or ball player's) lifestyle.
Same classes, and you do not need to be a runner to benefit. But the focus - and my language and teaching directives, might tend more to the specific concerns of sports medicine, integration, recovery.
Sound good?
Autumn is ruled by the vata dosha (that which blows) and the meridians of lung and large intestine. In brief, the vata dosha provides that wind and momentum from which ideas, creativity, spontaneity come from. Vata 'rules' the nervous system (whereas Pitta is digestive fire and Kapha is the physical, solid body). In a vattic time, then, things tend to be unpredictable, dry, ungrounded, very active, and cold. To maintain our internal environment and our emotional, physiological environment, then, we apply opposites: we need to create warmth, stability, routine, and rest. To see how the lung association might apply, simply realize how your breathing constricts in cold. Shallow breathing contributes to restlessness, anxiety, a sense of business or urgency if not the whole sympathetic nervous system's fight or flight. Freeze or flee. Breath, lungs, and prana are all intimately related to circulation, which has everything to do with warm and immunity body wide.
The colon or large intestine is implicated, here, like the lungs, as a thing we need to keep in balance, a thing prone to suffer the winds of change and cold. Foods we've eaten before (ie raw or fresh vegetables, astringent and cooling foods of summer, let alone highly processed foods) will contribute to dis-ease in our bodies. Instead, focus on slowly cooked, warm foods. Whole grains. Roasted things and mildly spicy things. The ability to digest is literally the ability to digest our life, experiences, ourselves. Ayurveda sees food as medicine and medicine as food.
I've tried to gather some recipes, some practices, and some ideas that are known to be balancing to vata dosha. The beauty of such practices are you can take those things that work for you and dismiss what doesn't. If you watch, you'll notice change and shifts and you can choose what to add or what to take away. There is no need to empty your refrigerator or start some esoteric practice of yogic cleansing. But there are literally thousands of things you can do to heal, sooth, and ground yourself.
You can ease times of barrenness and transition - whether it be seasonal, or you personally have vata dosha, or you are going through a period of transition and cold in your life. You ease it by establishing ritual and routine to catch and hold you. Slowing and quieting down. Keeping warm and hydrated from skin to bone. Establishing self-care boundaries and a supportive routine.
ASANA - POSTURES - A PHYSICAL PRACTICE Poses that work on the colon (the bodily seat of vata), intestines, pelvis, lumbar spine, and sacroiliac bring energy back down into the base of the torso and keep us out of our heads, or give our heads some reality.
Spinal twists and inversions of all kinds soothe this dosha. Sitting and standing forward bends are soothing to the sympathetic nervous system, particularly for insomnia; boat, plank, staff, and plow are also powerful vata-reducers as they all engage the yogic core, cull up our strength, and tap us into stability. To support grounding, work with standing poses such as mountain, triangle, warrior, and tree. Do sun salutations S-L-O-W-L-Y, seeking out the strength, foundation, and deep inherent rhythm of the sequencing. Let child’s pose lead you back to your innate innocence and trust, again tapping the parasympathetic nervous system, lowering the head to the earth, and finding connection. End your practice with a long savasana (20–30 minutes); it is really okay to do NOTHING for a while.
Focus on breath that is full. Breath has everything to do with our nervous system and our circulatory system; keep yourself warm, calmed, and grounded with the breath rather than creating over stimulation. Use the breath to come back to being a being who has lungs, a belly, a back, and toes. Focus on being a being who breathes.
IDEAS for transitioning into fall
Keep warm, keep hydrated, eat nourishing foods, find ritual and meaning. There are thousands of personal ways you can do this. Buy yourself the most comfortable and comforting scarf you can find and make of it a symbol (or hat, or socks, or whatever).
Nourish your body with hydration from the skin, in. Go with sesame oil, coconut oil, or shea based lotions over the cooler, biting months. Recognize how 'products' can dry you out and go for natural or organic when you can afford it.
Old yogic texts say ritual can be anywhere; so does mystical Christianity, Islam, Judiasm. Rise and go to bed at the same time every day, or practice making your bed on waking as a ritual of order and self care. Meditate, somehow. Use a kitchen timer to watch your breath for five minutes, take a walk and count your steps, or write a gratitude list every night before you sleep. Return to practices that have soothed you in the past; candles or worship services or lunch dates with friends. Return to an old, beloved book.
And spend some time being purposeful. Give meaning to the things you do. Do one thing at a time and know why you do so. Stay connected to the absolute so you don't get lost in the drivel and spin.
Embrace the rituals that fall can offer - from football to apple picking to Thanksgiving and bounty. Rituals matter and inform us when we feel formless. First the gesture, then the grace.
If there are projects you can close, do so.
And find deep rest. In your asana practice, in your schedule. It is a time of retreat, poignancy, and deep center. Sleep.
RECIPES
ok, I have a juice, a link to smoothies, a chili, and a sweet potato thing but I am very tired and writing the recipe for the sweet potato thing might have to wait. All stick to the concepts: earthy, comforting, patient, non astringent. Think of it like this; in late summer and early fall we ate lots of produce, apples and pears being at their peak. Now, we eat the same foods, but we bake them and drizzle them with cinnamon and nutmeg and molasses. They are astringent and drying, raw. Good to cool you off and energize you - but at this point we are cold and scattered and need to pull in to mellowness and ripeness.
Karin's Addicted To fall juice:
I am a juicer. Not all people are. You need to have an expensive piece of culinary equipment to pull it off. But it's an amazing way to get all the nutritional benefit of fruits and vegetables before they are cooked out or lose their alkalinity (ask me what that means, if you want to know), and you can get the punch of many veggies in a single serving.
For weeks, I have been addicted to this: juice of 3-4 small beets, 3-4 small carrots, a nub of ginger (yay, warming), an apple or pear, perhaps an orange, perhaps a sprig of basil or cilantro or parsley. Juicing is impulsive and you use what you have, but this combo has me very energized, very awake, and very clean and grounded feeling all day long.
Smoothie
I'm also a smoothie -er. Check out this summerized list, which I found a few days ago: 10 best Healthy Fall Smoothie Recipes
And finally, a hearty, spicy, sweet CHILI that I kind of made up over the last week.
Butternut Squash Chipotle Chili
I have been reading Martha Graham, a visionary and classically trained dancer who profoundly changed the medium and has left echos all over dance. I think she was a yogini, although she never identified as such. In a letter, she wrote:"There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening
that is translated through you into action,
and because there is only one of you in all time,
If you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is; nor how valuable it is; nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep open and aware directly of the urges that motivate you.
Keep the channel open.
No artist is pleased.
There is no satisfaction whatever at any time.
There is only a queer, divine dissatisfaction;
a blessed unrest that keeps us marching
and makes us more alive...."
English is an indo-european language - our word yoke is a direct descendant of the sanskrit word yoga. It means - yoga - to bind or link, to connect, to unify. To be bound to.
The question is, bound to what? At its most basic, most pared down, bare as dust definition, yoga is the linking of mind, body, and movement. Our soul to our skin.
Binding the pieces of ourselves back together again. Perhaps knowing where they severed; maybe not.
This is the important point: the belief that body and mind are separate is part of our cultural, philosophic, and medical heritage. We believe when we have a mood or an anxiety we should be able to just 'snap out of it'; that diseases are strange things visited on our animal bodies, having nothing to do with our 'self'. We believe our bodies are just vehicles, handy mechanisms for wheeling the brain around from one part of the world to the other, but mostly disgusting, inconvenient, bestial. Mostly a thing to be contained, controlled, covered up and cleaned up. Managed. Hidden. Used.
Yoga, when I found it, was a life saving bridge. I didn't know it then. It wasn't what I was looking for, exactly. I didn't give much credence to the idea that what I felt and believed and thought everyday could be altered, let alone healed. I didn't believe life, or myself, could be any different. I certainly didn't suspect and would not have believed that my body would be the thing to do it. I scoffed at faith healing, energy talk, wispy and weak kneed ideas about karma and souls and manifestation. They simply didn't hold up to logic and experience.
I still scoff. But yoga's heart and very definition have very little to do with wispy and weak logic. There is nothing about auras or faith healing there. It is simply and forcefully the stated fact that our mind and our body do interface. That our body hears and remembers everything our mind happens to say.
And our mind feels, remembers, everything the body has lived through.
**
Yoga has been a bridge. It has, in ways that no political science, biology, doctor or religion or common sense self help book ever has, given me actual tools and ways and means to sort through things. Tools that work.
For as much as the mind body separation is taken as fact in our culture, we are confused about it. We say one thing but mean another. We say 'self' or 'soul' or 'personality' as if it were distinct from the bag of bones, but we suffer. And we say that ideas are more important than bodies, but we act as if bodies were something, after all. Politics is very much about bodies, what they are worth, who gets what, who gets to be where and who is excluded. We have bought and sold bodies, buy and sell them still. We pretend to be intellectual, democratic, evolved homo sapiens but when it gets right down to our hours and our relationships and our days it involves hunger, fatigue, sex, boundaries, love, anger, disgust, and longing.
Approaching my days, now, from yoga, from the starting point that mind and body are both aspects of self, I suddenly have a better way to live. Hour after hour, how I deal with hunger and sleep and posture and schedules; but also in how I understand what to do in terms of global politics, familial relationships, art and philosophy.
**
It is important to wonder how personal growth, character, phsyical sturcture, and health/dis-ease relate to one another. It is important to realize the way our body has been acted upon, cared for, regarded both by ourselves and by others are stored into our bodies on a deepset, cellular level. It is important to realize that our craving for 'something more' and sense that something missing, or ambition and hope, or hints of god and joy or simply the wishing we could know joy, are part of our human body and as real as blood is. As actual as the kneecap.
It is wonderful to realize the questions, simple stress, out and out boredom or dull abiding inner fears can be touched. Not by talking about them or popping a pill. Not by removing something wrong with you or getting over it. But by listening to your breath, lowering your forehead to the ground, spreading the fingers of the hand.
**
Many of our medical, educational, religious and philosophical institutions base themselves on the assumption that such an interfacing system and, indeed, such direct relationships do not exist.
Yet wellbeing (either purely from a physical point of view, 'success', or an intellectual/emotional standpoint) cannot be infused intravenously or ladled out by prescription. Nor can they be willed or manifested by positive thinking or die-hard pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. Health and disease do not just happen to us. They are part of a matrix, laid out on the lines of the body mind.
**
When I begin to teach, when the student is new, I repeat and repeat myself: yoga means connection, unity, binding. The mind to the body, the intention to the action, the breath to the movement, the brain to reality.
All our dis-ease, from headache to chronic illness to broken bones, to longing and depression and overwork, are disturbances of that connection. Yoga is reconnecting. Yoga is return.
**
Our bodies and our imaginations are walking autobiographies. We hardly know who we are. Yoga is reading, and writing, our own stories, our own lives.
By listening to the breath, lowering our foreheads to the ground, and spreading the fingers of the hand.
Arrival and change feel blustery, vulnerable, and rootless. They say moving is one of the most stressful events in life. After the last week, I would agree.
I caught myself, all week, being confused: this is a good thing; I am starting a yoga studio in a place that really needs it, bringing what skills I have to a people who don't have other teachers around; I am, in many ways, claiming 'my own' teaching and space and time.
So why does the good feel blustery, vulnerable, and rootless?
Because even good change is hard. It calls us out of who we have been and challenges us to be something more, to bring our best, to risk and grow.
Of course it's good, and of course it's scary, both. As the first week of classes ends this morning I'm sitting at a desk that is still unorganized and unpacked and confused, with the window open to the first day that smells like autumn, exhausted. And happy. I pushed students this morning, challenging them into an arm balance. Some are very new to yoga and had never seen it before, others have done yoga but haven't gotten themselves up into that bakasana yet, or been able to hold it very long. Therefore, there was a lot of falling. Wobbling, wavering, and trying over.
Every one of them got up. Felt both the risk (you expect me to stand on my hands?!) and the lift. If just for a second. And then we moved on.
We're all doing yoga, always.
Return is ready to open the doors at 6:30 am this Tuesday. I am eager, and I am afraid, but I have figured out that the two usually go together. That if it is really happiness, if you are really growing, there will be an element of poignant, gut grabbing panic. It doesn't mean stop. It means you're on to something important. There have been a few questions sent along. About what kind of yoga I teach, what classes will be like, whether yoga is right for all the various 'me's out there.
The short answer is this: our medicine, our psychology, and our culture have accepted yoga as mainstream. We know that it improves health and deters decline associated with aging. We know that it works to combat cardio-vascular disease (America's big number one); mitigate stress, depression, and anxiety (the numbers two and three); improve concentration and sense of wellbeing; heighten performance and reduce rates of injury and illness. It is not a religion, although it has aspects of spirituality. It is not a workout nor a diet and fitness plan, although there are elements of those things as well. Yoga is, at it's heart, a proven set of practices designed to make human beings find and follow their own highest potential and step into their authenticity.
Return practices that, over the currently popular 'power yoga' classes that will, sooner or later, lose it's fad appeal.
Because I teach that, my classes start from the belief that any body can practice yoga. You do not need to be in shape nor have a super healthy body. You do not need to have any experience. You don't need balance or flexibility and you do not need to know a thing. The 'healing' classes, in particular, are intended to be open to bodies of all shapes, sizes, and abilities.
Also because I teach a yoga of authenticity, I teach 'strong' classes that are challenging and demanding. More demanding, probably, than the power yoga class taught at the gym. You will not do crunches and we will not talk about your abs. But I will provide a framework for you to chisel out your own relationship with your body, figure out what you are capable of, and be more healthy five years from now than you are today. Keep practicing, and you will be more healthy 25 years from now than you are today. I will teach you inversions and arm balances and deep backbends. I will push and you will sweat. If you're an athlete, you'll learn how to detoxify your body post work-out and bring more proprioceptive facility to your time off the mat.
The practices are deeply healing and a private experience of accountability, growth, and self revolution. They go deep. But they also can be taken small, tiny small pieces at a time. You take what you want. You practice when you can. If what you want is an hour to yourself, it is that. If you want to sweat and stretch and literally change the edges of what you are capable of, it will be that. It will help heal what is wounded and bring your body to its most alive expression, most productive state. It will be both inspiring and soothing. A yoga practice is both solace and new challenge.
That is the yoga I teach. And I am excited to teach it in St. Cloud.
Until one is committed, there is always hesitancy The chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation There is one elementary truth, The ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; The moment one definitely commits oneself then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred.A whole stream of events issues from the decision, Raising to one’s favour all manner of unforseen accidents and meetings and material assistance Which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
Goethe
Less than two weeks from now Return will open in downtown St. Cloud. Here is what I have: 822 1/2 West St. Germain Street. 30$ for 30 days new student special. Classes are always $10 after that.
Return Yoga is a non-profit: each $10 you spend goes to help teach vets, domestic violence survivors, and at-risk kids.
Questions? Hit the interested button.
Schedule? Here you go:
A recent study of Parkinson's disease showed a gentle yoga practice, once a week, returned people's ability to balance. To stand, on their own. To walk. To hold the hand steady.
Parkinson's is a withering disease, a slow erosion of the neural pathways. The body slowly loses its capacity and the mind, I imagine, begins to close in upon itself, moving in smaller and smaller cages. The mind forgets how to relate to the body.
Painful. Frightening.
Yet I don't think it's terribly far from what most of us are living, most of the time. I think we have forgotten (mistrusted, misused, tried to hide or control or shrink) the body to the point we can no longer feel it. We have become trapped, disembodied. We have, in very real ways, forgotten how to feel and what it means to be embodied. To be alive.
It's a common experience in yoga classes to feel we're going to fall on our faces, that we're on the verge of toppling. We feel the anti-thesis of grace and beauty. When I teach, I watch this happening; feel your feet on the ground, I'll say, or notice your breath in your belly, and half the people in the room look up to the ceiling as if the answers and the sensation were up there somewhere. They crane their necks around to see what the teacher or the experienced students are doing. If I say feel your hand, from the inside, I get looks of skepticism. There's yoga teacher talking crazy again, the look says.
I am not speaking of advanced poses of gyration and balancing on one foot.
I am talking about tadasana, mountain pose. Or sitting up tall.
This is very, very hard for most of us to do.
**
We cower, instead. We hunch. We try to make ourselves small, or have a chronically puffed up chest. Old injuries, our childhoods, our belief and self esteem all cow the body into misalignment and unbalance. This isn't metaphorical, either: if you think of how a depressed or grief stricken person stands, how they breath, you can imagine the postural changes. Four or five minutes of this posture has a ripple effect on our mood and our chemistry. Ten or twenty years, and the mood and the chemistry have re-formed the body and made it hard.
Feeling violated or insecure causes some bodies to protect themselves with added weight. Anxiety and constricts the muscles around the heart, freezes the shoulders and the back into a hard shell. People who have been told to be quiet, to not draw attention to themselves, who have learned to focus all their attention outside (on alcoholic parents, an abusive partner, an unstable environment) hold a very small stance and seem to shrink in space. Even assertive, confidant, or aggressive persons have an overdeveloped strength in the neck, chest, and arms but stand on cocked legs, bowed legs, hurt their knees and their ankles over and over again.
Some of this is malicious feeling, as though we have to 'deal' with all our unresolved issues in the past. It needn't be. Similar structural changes happen simply because we over use our dominant hand, fell off a horse when we were twelve, or were rear ended five years ago.
These are only questions we can start asking ourselves, directions in which to move.
What happens inside when someone cues you to stand tall? How does it feel to occupy as much space as you can, to stretch your arms wide, to kick hard?
Do you hands shake? Why?
*
The Parkinson's study suggests yogic movement retrains the brain and neural pathways, establishes new pathways, reconnects brain and intention and nerves.
Even if parts of our brain have died and eroded, we can learn how to stand again. 
*
I feel I'm going to fall over, a student said in virabadrasana 2. If the slightest wind blew, I would fall.
How, then, do we learn to feel balanced, to feel strong and stable? What does a yoga pose have to do with our mind, our self? Where do you start?
I asked him to pay attention to his feet. In an effort to stay stable, he was unconsciously taking small steps, keeping the movements and the poses conservative.
Yoga poses begin with foundations, with the way our body comes in contact with the floor. A strong, balanced pose means the joints are stabilized, which means the muscles and connective tissue are engaged (which means tightening joints up, not flexibility).
Personal trainers and physical therapists often teach movements with a ball or a wobble board. The point is teaching the body to stabilize itself. The body does this by contracting muscles in co-ordination, creating foundation.
Yoga uses the body itself to teach stability and poise. If it is true that fear, anxiety, depression, or a car wreck fifteen years ago changes our body, than it is also true that consciously training our body to stand confidently will change our minds and our moods. It offers a way to confidence, stability, and grace that is altogether different than psychotherapy or positive affirmations. It asks us not to worry about the thoughts and feelings that happen over, and over, and over again but to pause for a moment and consider the skin of our toes and the structure of the ankles.
But to get there, we have to feel our feet on the ground. We have to know our relationship to the floor.
We have to start getting out of our heads, and into the body.
*
There is an illustration floating around the internet, that say's "When you fall, I'll be there for you" and is signed, affectionately, The Floor.
Some yogis have altered the illustration and crossed out 'floor' to read 'mat'.
This is the point I love, in yoga. The point where the idea, the philosophy, the meaning, is ripped right out of the abstract and into the real. yoga is the practice of reality.
On the one hand, this idea of the floor catching you is humiliating. It culls up images of awkwardness, embarrassment, all that learning how to walk and ride a bicycle. Let alone dancing, which most of us can not, in any impressive way, do.
On the other hand, there is a honest comfort here. Reality is the only solid ground there is. Our plans, our expectations, our heads have proven us to be silly, more often than not. They are houses of mirrors and will lead directly to suffering and disappointment, if not just a chronic sense of being numb and stuck.
Reality, though, touching our hands or our feet to the floor and learning how to build stability, has an element of power to it. I have friends who swear by the grounding effect of gardening, others who will mutter something about needing to use their hands when they start to feel overwhelmed or have to work something through. Most of us, I think, can remember a time when an emotion swelled so powerfully we had to go for a walk, had to wash the dishes or clean a closet or sweep the floor. Most of us can acknowledge the fact that a difficult to solve problem often needs us to stop ruminating and spend time doing: tinkering on a car, walking the dog, playing with a child, cooking a meal.
It isn't that there is anything wrong with thinking. Only that thinking, to be inspired and fully formed, to be genius, needs to have its feet on the ground. It needs time, ground, experience.
We will never, I mean, think our way into feeling better or more alive. We can never burn by thought alone to an answer to life's questions. We can never work through the issues of our past or our unfulfilled dreams or our nagging anxieties unless and until we experience our selves as strong, fast, stable, and breathy.
*
This is a gift. This is a promise. This is why yoga is so powerful for those of us who might feel anxious, vulnerable, or afraid.
At moments of heartbreak, overwhelm, or panic, it is possible to find our feet.
Yogic movement retrains the mind, reconnects attention and nerves, gives us the floor.
This is why yogic practice is hard, and the hardness has very little to do with physical limitations. The hardness is in our minds, in finding a willingness to let go of our thinking habits and just show up, instead. Most of us resist. Our mind insists we aren't any good at this stuff, that other people are strong and flexible and athletic but not us. The mind wants to stay afraid, says things like I'm always alone, this situation is unfair, why me, why can't I. It is packed with 'always', 'never', and doubt. It is ruthless in it's perfectionism, procrastination, blame, and fear. It becomes rapt with it's own preconceptions, prejudices, and self-preservation to the point it loses connection with reality.
Yet emotional balance, emotional intelligence, and healing are reality bound.
Remember, for a moment, those times when you were so emotionally charged you needed to move. Or how physical reality (song, walking, washing the dishes, touching something alive) has helped you work through a problem.
Now know, for a moment, that the quickest and surest route to getting out of your own fear and suffering is to consider someone else's. Wisdom practices throughout time have taught that the surest way to solve your own problems is to help someone else through theirs. The point is not altruism, per say. The point is reality. If we can, for even a moment, crawl out of the mind and into the world we come back in contact with reality and perspective.
We remember time. We know relativity. We realize we can, actually, stand up. However big our fear or panic, we'll know that there is more to life than it.
There is more to us than it.
The mind closes in on itself, moving into smaller and smaller cages. It forgets how to relate to the body.
Eventually, we learn how to feel panic or fear or uncertainty full on, but still stand. We'll know they are not constant, not solid, and that we do not actually become overwhelmed. We'll learn emotional balance, intellectual gravity, skill in life.
We experience ourselves standing tall.
I don't believe we any of us know who we really are, what we are capable of. Yet our 'identity' - the things we believe to be true about ourselves and tell ourselves - is the strongest motivating force and understanding of life that we have. So we hurt. We hurt because there is a primal discrepancy between this identity and the truth. One of the fundamental human traits is an ability to change and to grow.
Yet the nearly universal experience is a feeling of being unable to change.
The practice of yoga has the power to so drastically re-arrange our bodies and our psyches and our souls we might be startled. This isn't metaphor. It isn't self help craziness. It is the practical outcome of a very specific set of practices and observances.
I have seen persons with chronic pain become agile, joyful, active and more alive than the majority of american adults. I have seen persons work through severe trauma, anxiety, depression. I have seen people who were told they would never walk again run, dance, and jump. Others lose hundreds of pounds. I have seen a 'paralyzed' man become a gifted and compassionate yoga teacher and himself move into poses that are 'impossible'. A 'blind' man so increase his proprioceptive functioning he can see.
But here, here is the secret: it is not a thing you can think about, believe, or wish your way into. It will not be what you expect. The truth is you cannot 'will' your way out of an addiction, a depression, a panic attack, grief, hormones, or pain. You cannot 'control' your thoughts or your consciousness.
It is a thing you let go of, instead. It is an experience, not an idea. You may have to be willing to 'let go' of your old ideas and stories of identity. Some say so. I don't necessarily agree; I think it just happens. I think that we show up to meditation or a yoga studio because we want to fix a sore back, or our girlfriend made us do it, or we are intrigued enough to try. The practice itself is a biochemical change to consciousness. It is a re-ordering of our endocrine system. It is a suspension of our stories and an experience of how many other things could, actually, be possible.
When I say stories and identities, I mean the voices in our heads. The rock hard belief that 'I am not a flexible person' or 'I am bi-polar, this is just who I am' or 'I need chocolate now' or 'I can never tell this to anyone, ever'. We all have a little city inside, a whole population of 'selves'. We fill various roles (daughter, employee, born in such a such a city, American, woman, mother, shopper at Walgreens, watcher of romantic comedies). If we watch our thoughts, we'll start to know them. We'll start to see that 'mother' isn't even the end of it, we have "I'm a good mother when I..." and "I'm an awful parent when I..." inside there. We've got a holographic imprint of every experience, every conversation, every relationship covering our insides like decoupage to the bones, a library in the brain, mostly unconscious but active in us still. As instinct. As impulse. As pattern and personality. And behind all of these selves there is usually a more prominent, more 'rational' self. A kind of manager or director. It's the one who keeps all those other crazy characters in line. The one who hands out assignments and judges outcomes. It's the one we usually think of as 'me'.
But even that self is a story and an identity. Even that self can be seen as 'pattern', 'habit', 'conditioning'. It is not true. There is more to our potential and our body. Yoga is a remarkable way to begin playing in terms of that potential, that more. A way to experience biochemistry, expanded awareness, the life of life and the body of body, which alternately feels more authentic and more impersonal than any one of the 'voices' we've ever heard before.
Yoga is a delicate and probing exploration of our self. Our selves. We trace 'I am just an angry person' and 'I don't know why I did that' and 'I want to be a better person, but' to it's root source.
Yoga is revelation.
Yet you can't just read this and get it. You can't just hope for it and watch it happen. I'm a yoga teacher, for crying out loud; I know this and I've seen it happen in students over and over again and yet it's hard for me to do the truth.
Do: do. The truth is done, an action.
Yoga will not change you unless you do yoga. Meditation will not change your brain chemistry unless you meditate.
If you show up on the mat, you will change. But you must show up on the mat.
I do not say easy, and I don't say magical. I say real.