Resolution, change, and broken promises

We can't help but measure ourselves, wish things were different, make grand gestures and ultimatum type statements about how we want our lives to be.  This time of year it comes as 'resolutions'.  We reflect on how things have been going or what has passed and set some goals or dreams for the future.  There is good in this.  It is important to grow. There's the fact, too, that resolutions are promises broken, more often than not.  They are one more thing to beat ourselves up over.  We know what it is we need, what we need to change, but are stumped and frustrated and hurt because we don't know how to break out of where we are.  Most of the things we've been taught don't actually work very well: try harder, make a list, go on a diet, set up a schedule.

Why is it we want to change so much, but cannot?  Why is it we become our own worst enemies?  Why is honest change so hard and so rare?

Yoga has very direct answers to these human questions.  We can't or haven't changed because we have karma.  Karma being our habits of mind, feeling, and behavior.

We change our karma in recognizing the kleshas, by seeing with clarity where it is that we are stuck.  Through persistent practice, meditation and mindfulness, through clarification and purification of body, mind, and relationships we start to hack through the dense dark matter of karma.  We begin to see.

There are five kleshas or obstacles, five barriers to the self and to happiness.  They are the path, the threshold, both the obstacle and the obstacle's overcoming. They obstruct our lives and our vision.  For the next five weeks I'm going to teach each of the kleshas, as well as ways to break through them, as a way toward deeper self knowing and self practice.

Abhinivesha is fear.  Fear - or what most of us would recognize as anxiety - determines much of our presence in the world.  Seeing fear, knowing it, knowing where anxiety is in our body and how often it's seeping into our thoughts, is a cornerstone of yogic practices.

Opening ourselves up in spite of fear is both the goal and the way to the goal.

Backbends, tonight, as fear mongers and also release of fear.

In upcoming weeks, we'll look at all of the kleshas: abhinivesha (fear or anxiety), asmita (false identity or confusion about who you really are), raga (attachment), dvesha (aversion), and avidya (blindness or ignorancence; not being able to see reality).  Avidya is the source of all the other kleshas, the granddaddy of human suffering and confusion.  The way to strengthen our resolve, build our character, change our lives and practice yoga is to continually enlighten.  To transform.  To hack through or blow on or tentatively consider the idea of lifting the veil of our own blindness.

Gratitude is fierce surrender

I spoke, it being thanksgiving, of gratitude.  I said it is a particular kind of attention; gratitude is a way of seeing and being in the world.  As such, it has nothing to do with circumstances or things. It has to do with us.  Gratitude is not an attainment or a thing that happens to us; it is an innate capacity we have, a thing we practice or do not.  Like all capacities, it can flourish.  It can atrophy. This is the heart of yoga, I said.  This is the point.  The capacity to stop, shift, and pause at any given moment, in any situation, and touch on the breath.  To shunt our attention away from our habit mind into our wider mind and more vulnerable heart.

I did not say this was easy.

It is hard to let go of conditions, blame, coping skills, excuses, competition, entitlement,  and control.  It is terrifying to let those go and accept, instead and suddenly, that the path has to do with self and reality.  It goes right down the line of our sternum to our soft spots.  Self responsibility, self mastery, self soothing, self determination, self motivation, self control, self expression, self knowing.  Not selfishness - but letting the self break open and seeing what is there.

To linger, attentively, gratefully, in any moment will strip away our arrogance.  Those things for which we may be grateful - children, family, safety, food, the age we are and the health we have - show themselves for what they are: conditions, frailties, current expressions of constant change.  Little breaths of grace for which we have no real authorship and no end control.  They are given us, but might not have been.  They are not ours.  Those things for which we might be grateful but aren't swell and burgeon in their mystery: wheeling snow, the way a highway is empty on a holiday morning and you are on it.  The sunlight, the bare trees, the deafening quiet.  A moment, alone.

Listen.  I had a horrid holiday.  Things which I thought I had gotten over, things I didn't want to think about or feel, positively smacked me into stillness.  And more than stillness; they so washed over the nooks and crannies of my brain and the fibers of my body I was reduced to a seedy, snotty, sniveling depression and then ashamed of that depression.  Sex and babies and age, relationship and money and longing to be loved.  Tender spots for us all, surely.  I have a strong tendency to resist what is tender.

Let me be blunt.  A relationship that was supposed to unfold to a wedding this New Year's Eve fell apart.  In its falling apart, I am suddenly back to financial fear and insecurity, an insecurity I haven't felt for a long time and thought wouldn't come again.  A sister had a child, which rather than making me feel love and hope and generations made me feel old, made me remember children I have aborted or given to adoption.  A surge and roil of shame for the things I've been and done and seen, bitter grief for the fact I can't have those chances back, time has passed, I may never have children or partner or family,hit me blunt wise.  The anniversary of a friend's suicide, exactly on Thanksgiving, returned all sorts of memories and the unalterable fact that his presence is only an absence, now.  The birthday of an old, dear, alienated from me love intensified that thing, that aloneness, that fact that time has passed and left me standing, dumb, where I am.

All, all things I am rationally aware of and fully believed healed, processed, handled.

But when the days came, and the sudden horrible cold and dark of Minnesota winter, when that infant was actually born, my wheedling and mature mind was hijacked.  I crumpled.  Grief and depression are not concepts.  Grief is a taste in the mouth and a collapsing of the lungs.  Depression is your body, gone horribly wrong, you mind rotting and broken and unworking, and no one else knowing.  Emotion is a reality you live in, distinct from the realities of other human hearts.

Emotion is our reality, our wider mind and more vulnerable heart.

I skipped the actual thanksgiving meal because I couldn't bring myself to go.  And felt guilty for doing so.  I minced through what contact I could.  I sat, in a big empty house that is suddenly mine and mine only, and I watched the first snow of the year appear in the sky.  With my forehead on the window pane. Snow has no straight way down.

It is hard to stay with your breathing, then.  It is hard to teach yoga, hard to walk a dog, terrible to eat and to swallow.  The snow is real, you see, and the empty house, and the new born infant.  The fact is grief, but also, oddly, bellowingly, a love for that baby that is tactile and teary.  The question isn't what god in his cruelty makes this or what karma will balance it out again nor what it should be nor what it all means; the question is what happens, now? What is this, who am I, what is here?

My teaching, strange and raw, had a kind of clutch in the throat.  But also a kind of naked.  I moved, myself in practice, as if I were dying. As if I were praying.  I think, I suppose, I was.

I taught Anjayeasana.  The deep version, where it is hard to breath, where your heart pounds hard enough to drown you.  You try to lift that heart, up.  The word, anjayeasana, I forgot to say out loud as I taught, means offering.  Not perfect, not pretty, but a ripped heart, the hard to take breath, offered.

To stay has a kind of humility to it, a kind of purity, and the world breaks open with questions.  What am I to say to the sister (I love you, and it's panging)?  What am I to teach (Feel your feet, listen for breath)?  What do I do with this loneliness, these empty hands (tell someone.  Make a sound in the silence. Take the cup they offer)?  How am I supposed to live in this empty house, all mine, all empty (unpack the boxes, write the falling snow, live here and write this down)?  Why did my friend die (I don't know, and I don't know why I'm alive, am.  Alive, alive, alive.)

It is hard, at times, to be grateful.  To practice self compassion, self determination, self motivation, self knowing means surrendering without knowing where it goes.  To willingly slide into vulnerability and uncertainty.   To take reality, whole, and swallow.

Surrender is fierce.  As anything that will change us must be.  All projects, any love.   All healing.

To give our selves into the unknown is wild.  To show up.  To be changed in ways we cannot imagine, past our control, more than we intended.  This is the practice and like snow, like sky, it has no straight way down.

This kind of surrender has a way of knocking us, windless, to our knees.

Which may be the final meaning of reverence.

What I have found isn't answer.  I want to tell you how beautiful, how quiet, a highway gone empty can be.  The reverence, the ground, holds.  Your heart breaks, snow falls.  The sacred is this way; humane, snotty, captivated by snow and highways and the smell of an infant's thin and many veined skin.  Her breath, I tell you, is sweet.  My breath is sharp with longing.  We are creatures who breathe, until we can't.

Rage, fear, sadness, fatigue. The yoga of darkness.

“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” -Carl Jung I once had a student who started to drift away and began to look sheepishly apologetic when she did come to class.  She avoided my eyes and had an invisible wall around her mat.  She used to ask questions or chat after class; now she was the first out of the room and gone from the studio by the time I'd left my mat.  Eventually, though, we did talk a little.  She told me things were busy.  She talked about her kids.  Then she looked somewhere into the middle distance  and said she didn't know, really; yoga just wasn't working any more.

Sometimes, she said, all I feel in child's pose is anger and disappointment.

Yoga has a corner market on feel good words.  I recently had a massage therapist tell me we were both in the 'feel good industry'.   The promise of 'enlightenment' tends to make us think we will be more spiritual, and this somehow means we'll be a little less freakish about time, our kids, our money.  There is truth to this.  Yoga can show us how good it feels to be alive.

But yoga will also show us exactly how badly we feel.  Usually, when honest emotion starts to come up, students leave.  They skip class or decide yoga wasn't what they wanted.  They say 'it's not working any longer'.  The emotion itself keeps them away; they're 'not in the mood', 'too busy',  or 'too depressed to move'.  They will  - trust me, this is real - feel guilty for feeling so crummy when others are just trying to get their savasana on.

This doesn't indicate that the yoga isn't working, but that it IS.  The end isn't this negativity, this disappointment.  But negativity is part of the path, and it has to be gone through if you want to understand it, to understand yourself, at all.  If you don't, you'll be shutting down half of your experience of life, and probably the best strengths you'll ever find.  If you don't, you'll continue to skip, overcompensate, repeat, and lull.  You'll segue irritation into nicety, stuff it, and it will erupt later as rage toward an intimate or yourself.

Most of us have spent the majority of our lives stuffing and repressing our feelings, rationalizing them, avoiding them, or sublimating them into exercise, food, cigarettes, television, shallow relationships.  Women are taught not to feel anger because it's not nice, not feminine (or too feminine and bitchy, emotional, hormonal and out of control).  Men are supposed to feel competence, all the time.  In our efforts to feel better, many of us start  shutting it off, wholesale, in favor of pop psychology or easy spirituality.  It's called spiritual bypass.  It's an attempt to avoid painful feelings, unresolved issues, or truthful developmental needs with such words as 'everything happens for a reason',  'god's ways are not our ways', or 'choose happiness'.

There will be a yoga class, someday, online or at your local studio, where your teacher will start singing. She'll say 'exhale' as if there's something orgasmic about it.  She might allude to the goodness of your heart, your hamstrings, or the light inside.

If you are like me, this may make you clench your bandhas like a fist.  There may come a day you lower down into child's pose, "sweet, receptive, safe" child's pose and feel nothing but boredom, irritability, and dis-ease.  You keep lifting your head off the mat, looking at the clock.  There may come a day your brain starts swearing at the lovely yoga teacher saying something vapid about love in your newly blossomed chakra.

Here is the thing.  Yoga is not about bliss, but about honesty.  Spirituality is not certainty, but the longing of the heart.  Enlightenment is not 'letting go' of bad feelings, but understanding them, what they're doing to us, and how they are expressed in the body.  Non-harming and forgiveness are not about feeling generous or big enough (bigger than and condescending), but knowing the difficulty of right actions and assuming responsibility for the difficult.  Forgiveness often comes directly out of acknowledging how bloody bitter we are.  Love is not joy, all the time. Sometimes, love hurts. Love is raw.

Yoga is a love story.  Not the fluffy, romanticized love story, but the real one.  The kind that leaves you changed.

Emotions are doorways, ways in.  The goal is not to exist without shadows, to become so spiritual we no longer feel fat, bored, envious, or impatient.  The goal is to swallow hard as we take on willingness to go into the dark.

Because yoga asks you to work with both your body and your mind, the inevitable result is going to be messy.  There will be times the body itself will start in on anger, hot and fast, trembly, without the reasoning mind having a clue what is going on.  There will be days the boredom or loneliness seem so sharp they may actually wound.  There will be five thousand ways your mind will tell you it isn't worth it, it won't work, that love is not real.

Yet, yoga has probably already given you a clue to this.  You've probably already felt how love - whether it be romantic or ethical, compassion, right living, making a solidity of your name - is the only thing that is real.  The highest and best in human beings is subtle, mysterious, and tied directly to the shadows.  Life is both unbearably cruel and devastatingly sweet, often at the same time.

The shadows will show up.  Go there.  Apathy, acedia, what Christian mystics called desolation, existentials call despair, moves when we move toward it.  It isn't the passage of time that heals us, but the passing through experiences.

There are hundreds of things telling us to 'get over it', to 'think positively', or to 'let it go'.  Be wary of these as the roadside distractions that they are.

Yoga is the love story where in things fall apart.  God moves away, often at the same time he takes away the ground.  First goes this, then goes that.  Gone are the thrill of the first months of yoga class, the ease of learning something new every time you walked in the door.  Gone is the schedule that allowed you class three times a week.  Gone is the strength in your shoulders, the ability to keep on a diet.  Gone is the confidence of conversion.

And then a small movement in the heart.  And then two.

Asana: psalm of the flesh

"Enter eagerly into the treasure house that lies within you, and so you will see the treasure house of heaven...The ladder that leads to the Kingdom is hidden within you."  sixth century Christian mystic St. Issac the Syrian

I'm faced with this problem:

I teach, mostly, asana.

I tell people the asana don't really matter; yoga begins with a desire to wake up, with ethics and personal observance, with self study and commitment.

And I tell them the way is through asana.

You see the problem.  I'm contradicting myself.

We all walk into yoga knowing it has to do with postures.  A few of us figure out, along the way, that yoga has nothing to do with postures.  If we've made the commitment to a regular practice, if we keep knocking on that door of the body, if we practice when we are tired and when we've not slept well and when we don't want to, practice when we're too busy and when we're happy enough without it, eventually we feel joy come to answer the knocking.  Joy erupts as deeply as an orgasm and as incorrigibly as age.  Grace only ever happens in real time.

But those things - ethics, commitment, self study - remain abstract for most humans.  Asana offer a discipline, an opportunity, a path. Maybe a ladder.  They give a way in to meditation, to healing, and to the present moment.  Most of us wouldn't have the guts or the time to get there on our own.  Asana is the teacher, is the commitment.  Asana is the guru.

We show up and are prodded into the present moment.

The body lives in the present.  When you are aware of the body, you are connected.  To what I won't bother to say.  Maybe the global throb of life.  The on-goingness of it.  The truth of dailyness.  Eternity.  God.  An underlying okayness. The realization of how small and irreal your hang-ups are, considering reality.  How big they are, as hang-ups.  The present, via the body moving and the mind watching, will reveal the stories you tell yourself day in and day out.  If you manage to trace edges with your breath and your toes, the present will prove to you that these stories are untruths.  Half truths at best.  Signals of compromise.  Misunderstandings. 

The present, via the body, is the one place from which you can see reality.  Awareness of the body is our gateway into the truth of what is.

Pema Chodon writes "To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.  To live fully is to be always in no-man's land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.  To live is to be willing to die, over and over again."

Asana throw us directly into no-man's land.

I think that is where we need to be.

***

The simplest explanation for why, in the eight limbed path, there are asana is this: if you want to reach the inner self, you have to go through the self.  It is hard to feel alive, let alone awake, if you are stuck in a body that is unwell.  If you want to go the depths of who you are and what you are capable of, it helps if your most immediate and constant tool - ie flesh and blood - become resource rather than hindrance.

It is hard to find reality if you are unaware of your own heartbeat.

So the body itself becomes an object for meditation.  The body itself is medicinal, therapeutic.  Asana provide a genuine high and a refuge.  Asana gives us a place to go.  It lays out pathways and intricacies of mastery and skill.  They strengthen and sooth, open and release.

But there is something more than the simple explanations.

If we can manage to show up in the body, to drop in, we experience.  We feel something.  Something is known that wasn't known before.

Because it is body - or whatever it is that is real inside and outside the body -  it is not a thing of the mind.  Language can only approximate it.  Like love, asana is a thing that has to be experienced, rather than talked about.  Also like love, asana is expressed in metaphor and poetry.  It involves ecstatic release, profound rest, changed brainwaves.  Like love, the entirety of the experience can never be understood from the outside.

But we've touched something.  It's eerie at times.  The fact that there is something there.  To reality.  To body.  This isn't necessarily what we came looking for.

***

A deeper understanding reveals itself.  Our brain is everywhere the nerves go.  Heart is everywhere the blood is.  The practice of asana teaches fairly quickly that our bodies are much more complex, or perhaps more stiff, than we'd known.  What we took for granted, as reality, as limitation, proves to be conditioning or simply a  process we haven't completed, yet.  It also teaches, in little shivers of recognition, that we can know our bodies more profoundly.  Where body is, mind and heart and emotion can go.  Meditation and awareness can go deeper.  What was unconscious in us is brought closer.

If the simple reason for asana is clarification and refinement of the body, the more complex reason is the fact that bodies are our most direct route to reality and its depths.  Deep involvement and attention to asana brings us directly to (perhaps, perhaps...through...) mind and it's shadows.  You can't work physical patterns very long without banging smack up against psychological patterns. 

You cannot practice asana for long without having to acknowledge that even mind and emotion, urge and insight, knowledge and clarity, are more profound and shadowy than you thought.  In the deep silence underlying your breath, you'll recognize you're facing a door.  To enter possibility, to to turn away.  The pose begins exactly as you most want to leave it.

***

Psalms, songs, beatitudes, and prayer are all words that come to mind when I try to write about asana.  There seems to be no more literal way to commune than to examine what it is we do with our hands, or to open our heart.  To touch gratitude, acceptance, dedication.  It is one thing to understand such concepts.  Another, deeper thing, to embody it.

I teach asana.  Sometimes I can hear resistance and disbelief roaring out of my students bodies.  My foot, where?  The hell you say.  I practice asana, and I hear that same roar inside myself.  Here I am, lurching through no-man's land, all over again.  But it has been in asana, in that very place of disbelief and breath, that revelation comes.  There have been times I seem to break through in a pose I've done for years; the body shifts a millimeter, perception gets brighter, it seems there is bliss inside the hamstring. There have been other times, crumpled on the mat with my knee no where near where it's supposed to be, that fear has been revealed.  Or longing.  Absolute surrender and behind the surrender the sensations which are moody and pithy and cogent and altogether sweet.  There's the thought I didn't know I could feel this.  There are poses, too, that I have doggedly practiced - without success - for months and months and years on end without much believing I'll ever truly get there.  When suddenly, I am there.  The foot lifts.  The rib moves out of the way.  The heart stretches.

We have potential in our gristle.  The root truth is this: if we experience pleasure, pleasure is experienced through the body.  If we experience fear, grief, or longing, it is because our physicality has been shifted and touched in fine or blatant ways.  If we honestly desire health, wellbeing, contentment, it must involve the chemistry and patterns of hormones, digestive proteins, cellular structures.  If we have ever longed for god, or felt our heart clutch in some manner of loneliness, it has been a physical pang.  Therefore, we come closer by going through.  We bend back on our selves, attention revolved back toward itself, the body a mirror in which we can begin to see.

Asana is a dedicated form by which we turn the abuse and denial of the body back into humility, feeling, and meaningful gesture.  Asana is how we turn our bones to dancing, our wrinkles to poems.  Asana is a psalm made of flesh and bone.

Dissolving tension, fear, and samskara

We've all come here carrying something. What's your burden? Where are you gripping? What holds you down, or back (fear, external coping skills, stories)? We are all creators: our bodies and brains are under constant regeneration: what we are repeating or have repeated or have witnessed has released certain neurotransmitters in our brain, which lays down a pathway and the pathway will repeat itself. The body repeats its own movements, in tension, in lack of breath, in immunity shut down, in hormonal imbalance and fatigue, in digestive distress, cravings, and brain fog. Looking at my own practice/life and working to dissolve those samskaras. In body, in thought. Going to play with dissolving those tension lines in our asana tonight and tomorrow. Practice softening to take on the things we really want. There are physiological reasons why we crave, shut down, feel anxious or depressed when faced with something new or challenging or the very idea of letting go.  The psoas muscle grips, which is the thing that would allow us to run away or to curl into fetal position, contracts.  It ripples across the diaphragm, conflicting and complicating our breath.  It brushes up against our GI tract and constricts the flow there.  When the pelvic diaphragm and digestive/reproductive/elimination areas are constricted, waste management is obscured.  Which leaves us more toxic and less able to take nourishment even if nourishment comes in our mouths.  The circulation and lymphatic areas there are compromised.  Further, the vast majority of our serotonin levels is produced and circulated from the gut.  Serotonin is the hormone of satiation, satisfaction, sighing with being content.  If we compromise that, we we literally be unable to feel soothed, let alone okay, so we will rush for cigarettes, alcohol, sex, spending, sugar, naps, approval.

If we can physically touch and relieve those areas, our capacity to find our self center and our self soothing will get back on track.

Last night I asked students to remember and recall what they came for - to tap into their longing, their core strength, their center.  Tonight I'm suggesting that we cannot really tap that center (which is literally the core meridian line of the body, our core strength) until we can dissolve the gripping at the edges, the front and back superficial meridian lines.  We cannot take up those things we long for, the things we crave, our truth, until we let go of the things holding us back.

Metaphor and anatomy, both.  Your body is your poem and your destiny.

Prana. The moving.

Prana yama 1. The breath lies at the very boundary between our conscious and our unconscious selves.  It lies between our thoughts and the whole of our physical, emotional, cellular and metabolic makeup. Because it lies there, between, it is a bridge.  It is an autonomic system, like our digestion and the ticking heart.  But unlike those things, we can feel and pay attention to it directly, without a need for medical tools or machines. And unlike those things, we can choose to influence it.

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

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

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

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

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

The word ‘prana’ is usually translated to breath or life force.  ‘Yama’ is restraint, observance, practice, control, or mastery.  Hence, pranayama,  fourth branch on the eight limbed path of yoga practices , is observance and practice of the breath or life force within us.

Prana

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

A yogic sage would nod at the concept of nerves.  He would call it a nadi.  The nadis are energetic and informational pathways that course our bodies in a manner as detailed and variegated as the nerves, the lymphatic system, and the circulatory network combined.

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

**

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

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

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

Prana and the energy body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yama

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

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

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

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

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

Pranayama – practicing life’s energies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Single, Blessed Inch. Journeys and souls. (For next weekend's Jivan Mukti workshop).

"always roaming, with a hungry heart", Tennyson's Ulysses A grueling winter, this, and it is supposed to be spring.  I shiver as I set the coffee on the stove and stick my hands under my armpits to ward it off.  The meteorologist on the radio says something about record breaking. Wisecracks that we now have a winter we can brag to our grand kids about, implying a rareness of this deep, long, white season.  We are in the midst of something that will only come to us once.  Or is, at least, something the weather man thinks he needs to make jokes about.

I scowl and turn him off, peek timidly out the window to see.  There it is, the muffled, white, frozen world.  Shrouded as they once shrouded houses out of season, covering furniture and every last trace of intimacy and warmth and detail.  I drop the curtain and pad back to the coffee, willing it to boil.

Later, I leave the house with scissors.  Swathed like an arctic explorer, wielding my kitchen shears in mittens.  Two days ago and three blocks from home I spied a pussy willow or something like it along the river, tentative in this freak year, but fuzzed just the same.  The scissors, the dog, and I stumble through deep snow until I find it.  I remove mittens and touch the bark with my naked hand, slowly and questioningly.  As if asking permission, as if bark were skin, as if I couldn't possibly touch the velvet soft, living fuzz before acknowledging the branch.  I snip three twiggy boughs and hold them delicately as can be in parka and over sized mittens.  Screw the mittens, I think, and trudge home valiantly with the things held in cold hands.  The cold in the fingers is very nearly virtue.  Exhilarating, at least. As only virtue or sin can be. Coming into the house, the dog tracks snow up the stairs and I stomp into the kitchen boots-on; floors be damned.  For an instant, dark.  Then my eyes adjust.  I put the willows in a vase and sat across the room to admire them.  A still life; morning table, tufted willows, a window behind them framing the still falling snow.  For the first time this season, I feel the hope of spring.

It doesn't take much to go on a journey.  You leave a place of familiarity, encounter the world, and return changed.  The most ancient metaphor for life is a journey, and there's no dimension of experience that cannot be understood within the journey's context.  Certainly each miniscule spiritual venture (each foray into doubt, each intentional walk around the block, each worship service or meditation) is a journey, inasmuch as we are transformed, however slightly.  It takes very little for the heart to travel outside its comfort zone and be moved.

Or does it?  The bleakness of this season checks me; the reality of human lives.  If it is the nature of a soul to be moved, why is it so often a move into suffering?  And what  the hell do I mean, soul?  This has been a good year, in my life.  But it has been a year of grief for others.  Death, pain.  Murders in schools and along the Boston Marathon.  Political, social, disease.  How will we weather this?  Why do some people seem blessed, gifted, happy, while most of us begin to shrivel and cringe?  True that bit about most humans living lives of quiet desperation.  Most of us live lives of diminished returns and restraint.  Most of us die entirely bored.

When does a journey become spiritual?  What is it that moves a heart?

**

Later, still, with the sprig of willows in their vase, I trudge to the yoga studio.  Empty, since the weather prompted me to cancel classes.  I put the willows on the alter, adjusting them a bit.  Then I kneel down.  The sun in the northern windows doesn't directly light the space, but sends in chords.  The air is dry and I lick my lips.  After a few minutes, I begin to move.

I move until I feel a humidity building in the small of my back, the nape of my neck.  I feel the bones of the hand crack, and then begin to glide more smoothly, and eventually I feel the muscles in the palm change texture and the skin of the hand pinks.  I feel the pain in my low back, radiating from the spine's attachment to the sacrum to the muscles of the low back.  I bend backward and touch those muscles from inside.  They begin to change texture, as well.  I move quickly, until I feel my heart thudding in my ribcage, and then I hold.  Sweat leaves my hair and falls into my eye.  I blink.  But I still hold.

When I am done, I put back on the arctic explorer's uniform and step back into what has become a glaringly bright sun.  I'm not fooled.  It is the same day.  It is the same spring.  I have errands to do, there are still headlines coming in from Boston.  I have changed, not world.  My heart has moved.

**

There are times we set out with the intention of nourishing the soul, when we seek insight.  We go to landscape, a holy site, a guru.  We follow our longings beyond the borders of the familiar.  These journeys are conscious and deliberate; they are the equivalent of a retreat.  We expect transformation.  We open ourselves to movement.

But then there are occasions when we're blundering along without any intention of being changed and new awareness bursts through regardless.  You're in a foreign country, and suddenly American gluttony and status quo are meaningless.  Or you are struck with illness that forces you to question your life's purpose.  A certain amount of open heartedness is necessary for revelation to break in on us, the sacred and our own soul can catch us by surprise.

What begins as a trip to the grocery can leave us different.

**

They say yoga is the oldest spiritual path known to man.  It isn't hinduism; it preceeds hinduism. Yet somehow this set of practices, sounds, aphorisms and suggestions, is a thing I find myself drawn to in the middle of a snowstorm in the middling west, thousands of years later.

It was not a journey, it wasn't intended to be.  I reluctantly followed a girlfriend to a class in Brooklyn.  But yoga has changed me.

**

**

Perhaps a spiritual journey is when both your physical self and your soul move.  External changes have their counterparts in our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.  I spent years trudging around Latin America, and my sense of living a metaphor was eerie.  I was both trying to run away and trying to find something.  I'd head up into the Andes and feel my chest get tight with thin atmosphere, legs cramping, gut strained, pushing every cell of my physical capacity; inside, I scaled a mountain of loneliness as I learned to trust my abilities and my emotional limitations.  Watching the bastardized Catholicism in the Andes, I felt both confusion and longing.  Traveling that way, I knew both physical freedom and the struggle to live that freedom out or bring it home with me.  I felt the alienation of an ex-pat, the lewdness of a voyeur, the alienation of a non-believer sitting through ceremony.

Intense journeys or any sudden immersion into the new have a tinge of the pilgrimage to them.  For one thing, we're physically engaged, moving, eating, or sleeping in different ways.  This demands that we pay attention.  And it proves how limited our prior version of 'the way things are' tend to be.  Awareness in our bodies is intensified.  When we travel, or do anything with the intention of learning, we are removed from the familiar and become absorbed outside of ourselves - in the smells, language, plants, people, books and ideas or songs and rituals around us.  We're all eyes, ears, and surprised tongues.  This absorption has a childlike quality; memories of travel often have the same vibrancy as memories of childhood or early love.  The selflessness of travel can make us vulnerable and open in ways we may not comprehend until we've returned home.

In fact, it may take coming home again to fully understand where it is we've gone.

After returning from months in Ecuador, one of the girls I traveled with called me in the middle of the night.  She was crying.  She said she had been standing in the supermarket, looking at the aisle of jams and jellies, and viscerally recalled the simplicity of the tiny corner store in Saraguro.  The gaudiness of her own culture overwhelmed her.  Later she met friends for drinks and dinner and felt herself removed, abstract, feverish.  As if I were listening to them, watching them, from behind a pane of glass, she said.  As if I could no longer talk about the things they talked of.  As if I couldn't possibly explain to them what I've seen.

I knew exactly what she meant.  When I came 'home' to my apartment in Brooklyn, I felt the pain of culture shock.  I believe the pain of culture shock to be more intense in coming home than when we go away.  When we go away, we expect to be lost and confused.  We're open to not knowing what will happen next.  But when we come home, it is terrible to see the same chair propped against the wall, the same blue sweater slung over it, to hear the same voices through apartment walls.  It is painful because we have changed and our rooms have not.

**

There is a link between the tangible world of a journey and the intangible, responsive changes that occur within.

Physical journeys provide a catalyst and form - a beginning, a middle, an end.  This is mythic in quality and reminiscent of many holy stories, from Siddhartha's venture outside the palace walls to the Jews' crossing the wilderness to the Mormon's migration west.  Journeys provide narrative; we can't help but wonder what happens next.  Because we've traversed a landscape, we intuit that we've traversed a landscape of psyche or soul as well.

What if our lives had such narratives, even in our own kitchens?  Do they, or do they not?

**

In Peru, I spent weeks alone on the coast.  It is an odd coast; desert runs right up to the shore, and the desert then runs right up to the foot of the Andes.  It is a place of enormity.  One can feel small there.  I took this as a comfort.

I met an ex-pat who had been sunburning on that coast for 30 years.  I did not like him.  I didn't like his hawaiian shirts or his unshaved blond chin.  I found his unbuttoned collar and his sharktooth necklace offensive, as we sat drinking a beer together and I watched the locals pulling in their fishing nets.  I did not want to be like him.

I wasn't looking for whatever it was he was looking for.  I wasn't looking for a place to live, a way out, a chronic boozy vacation.  I was looking for something without knowing what it was.  I was looking for meanings.  I was looking for ways to live in Brooklyn that made more sense.  I was looking for hope, or reasons, or inspiration.  I suppose I was looking for my soul.

I have a few collected rosaries from that trip.  A painting.  All my photographs were lost.  There are times I wonder what it all came to; if the fact of my being there matters much at all. Or if it is one more of a long list of things, experiences, chances in life I left unfinished, couldn't do, quit.  There are times I wonder why I - a tattooed alcoholic divorcee living in her hometown in the midwest - am practicing yoga.  Isn't that offensive?  Is that possibly authentic? I wonder why it should feel more complete and soulful than those other journeys.

Maybe because I am not running away from the world, but toward it.

Maybe because I'm not running anywhere, at all.

Perhaps we can uncover the spiritual nature of a journey by asking: what changed? Bringing the pussy willow into my kitchen changed my atmosphere and altered, however slightly, my awareness of spring.  Moving my cold and pessimistic body until it shivered with exertion and warmth shifted my attention.  Change isn't always positive, of course.  Some journeys are through hell.  Even so, if we examine the transformation that occurred, comparing the 'before' with the 'after', describing and understanding the factors and details that have brought us from here to there, we touch on something essential and true.  Understanding transformation requires a patient, gentle rendering of attention.  It's just like the 'before' and 'after' photographs in diet ads; you need the comparison to appreciate the diet's success.  The significance of any journey, of any change, is measured against it's starting place.

Grounding ourselves in the consequences helps us arrive.

But what are the consequences of where we live, and who we are?

**

When I wrote that bit about the pussy willow, I didn't give the act of cutting a few branches much thought.  It was impulsive.  As I wrote it, however, I became aware of how the act changed my morning, how the branches changed the air in my room and the picture of my window.  I enjoyed the cutting, the placing them in a vase.  But why did I have the urge in the first place?  And what drew me to write about that, exactly, instead of some other thing?  It was a soulful movement.  The twenty minutes were spiritual.  But I didn't realize that until I wrote it out, until I paid attention.

We are asked to pay more attention.  Holiness likes hidden until we tend it with listening and actions.  We do not have to go far, I think.   As Wendell Berry says, "The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet and learn to be at home."  The miles we've traveled, but also the habits of our mornings, the minutes we spend on the mat, are a means for discovering that single, blessed inch.

Spring's breath: detox, saucha, resurrection.

Sometimes things touch us.  A breath of green air from an opened window after a long, cruel winter.  The combination of innocence and insouciant wisdom out of a kid's mouth.  Suddenly, a robin's song.  The bud of a flower, not opened yet, but full of kinetic energy, potency, brilliance.  The chords of a song, perhaps.  The whispers and shades of flirtation.  Briefly, suddenly, we are snapped out of our day to day lives.  We feel the pangs of longing, we desire.  To live more.  To know more.  To learn.  "Normal" is doubtful.  We hunger and thirst. Of course, other things can touch us: the death of a dear one, recognition of passing time, a diagnosis, an old pain become so pervasive you realize you are a prisoner.

Years ago, before I knew anything of yoga and while I bounced from barroom to bedroom to suicidal moments alone on my kitchen floor, a friend sat across from me in a dirty hospital room.  I was sick.  She was not.  The pity on her face made me more sick, but I didn't have the audacity to send her away.  And I was afraid to be where I was, alone.  I am so sorry for you, she said.  I don't think you know how good it is to be alive.  A few minutes later she stood up, touched my hair, and left.  This same friend, in a different crisis I'd imposed on myself, said you can't do this any longer; you won't survive.   She went on with things about self-respect, responsibility, yadda yadda.  I scowled.  How, I wondered, do you possibly begin to 'love yourself' when you hate yourself so very much?  It begins with your behaviors, she said.  Sooner or later, you just start to feel better about yourself.

She wasn't entirely right.  I did have hunches about the sweetness of a human life.  I had memories.  I had loved, once in a while.  I had known the passions of travel and art. I had a dog, once, and I had walked in the woods.  There had been times I'd felt something like the breath of spring on my body and the riptide of a mind on fire, but all I had of it at the time was echo and memory.  Memory so vague I doubted it's authenticity and disbelieved in it's return.

I once spent Easter in Guatemala.  Once, I spent it in Greece.  Once, in New Orleans.  All are places that celebrate holy week in visceral, ritual, soulful ways.  I consider myself an agnostic at best.  Yet the passion plays of bloody crosses, pilgrimage, fasting, ashes, and rebirth move me deep.  I described to a cerebral, 'life of the mind' kind of friend back in New York the way Greek widows, hunched with age and dressed in black, spend days crawling over broken streets on their knees to reach a sacred site.  She listened, with a wry look of pity and dismay, as if I were telling her about something just as human but less profound.  Abusive families, maybe.  Blue collar beer bellies.

How pathetic.  she said, and shifted the conversation.

I wondered, though.  The dark clothes a widow wears, always.  The bearing of crosses down streets.  The falling of rose petals through an Eastern Orthodox chapel.  Fasting, feasting.  Not pathetic, I thought.  Not pathetic at all.  Passionate.  Heart wrought.  An emotion I don't quite feel, but recognize.

And how can we say healing is real, that hope exists, unless it is possible out of broken family histories?  Why should not blue collar beer bellies be profound?

We long to be reborn, we humans.  Sometimes we realize that life is not 'normal', that day to day is not enough.  We ourselves want to be resurrected.

Rites of spring and rebirth are not unique to that Christian heritage.  They are earthbound and global.  With them, with spring, we have all sorts of ideas of being reborn, starting over, going further.  Cleaning house.

Detoxification, purification, are deeply embedded in this.  Now, years away from hospital rooms but not so far away I've forgotten what alcoholism and major depression are, I sometimes want to drop flowers from cathedral ceilings or blow into people's ears like spring wind.  I walk around at dawn, deeply busy and yet still in a life I love and find challenging.  This morning I heard a robin, after a very long, very cruel winter.  Brown, muddy stuff shimmers in April sun.  I want to show people, promise them, somehow reveal: this works.  This is real.  Detoxification and purification and rebirth, resurrection, are coded into you. Deep as your thumbprint and DNA.

Most human beings have no idea how good the human body, the human mind, is designed to feel.

And yet we can.  There are ways.

Saucha

The first personal observance of the yogic tradition is roughly translated as purity.  It seems to me that purity is what spring time does inside us.  It stirs and awakens our inherent, deeply human longing to live more, to taste more, to shed our pains and step into something greater.  To become, ourselves, greater.  Perhaps simply to not hurt any longer.

There are very specific practices of food, of cleansing, purification of both body and mind in the yogic tradition.  But the heart of the thing is relational.  The heart of it is recognition - sudden remembrance - of our deepest self and the beauty of aliveness.

Detoxification and purification are central tenets to natural medicine.  And yoga is medicine.  The point is simply that life and ourselves in it are good - no matter how batted about or broken or far away from 'good' we have gone.  But it is hard to enjoy life if we are trapped in a body that leaves us sick and in pain.  It is impossible to feel the fire of our intelligence and love if we are haunted by brittle thoughts and emotions.  Therefore, regular detoxification is essential to not only heath, but to love and happiness.

A frantic woman, driven by busyness and over-strain, rushed from one task to another.  Her little boy tried in various ways to get her attention.  Finally, he took her face in both of his little boy hands and held her still: you're not recognizing me, he said.

Saucha, purity, is asking us to recognize ourselves, others, our work, and the day itself without the scrim and junk of past impressions.  It is an invitation to see our bodies and our minds not from a perspective of diet, reform, control, or punishment, but with the idea of nourishing body and soul so we might drink from the depths.  To purify so that we can live more fully.

Many of us - hell, all of us - are somewhere in that foggy land of not being able to see, not being able to feel, not having a clue how to go on or move forward or be kind to ourselves.  Yogic practices are perfect, here.  It is a fact that your body hears and responds to every thing your mind says and every enviornmental factor and dietic factor you come close to.  But it is ALSO true that your mind feels everything your body does and everything you eat.  This is our way in, this is where hope is; there are things we can DO even if our mind and heart waver.  As my friend said - it starts with your behaviors.  You act.  You practice.  You do things with your body and you try to drink more water.  And eventually, suddenly, almost impossibly, you'll one day feel the green air of spring inside.  Even if you didn't really believe it was possible.

TRY THIS: Spring Detox: Food, Stuff, Heart

Food: The body is in a constant state of self detoxification, as we are exposed to both internal and external toxins and irritants.  However, when the body's self healing mechanisms are over taxed, we are prone to illness, injury, fatigue.  Our culture does not make it easy to eat well, and 'diets' are all too often unsustainable, unrealistic, and punitive.  Finding a detox that works for you a few times a year might surprise you with its results.

Spend a day or two not changing your diet at all, but noting everything that you eat.  Spend time asking me, a librarian, or google about different cleanses and detoxes.  Come up with a plan that is realistic and set it in action for three days, a week, or a month.

The cost is minimal, the efficacy is sound.

A body that has not occasionally detoxed becomes less efficient (in sleep, in sex, in attention span, in digestion...) Symptoms of an overloaded body include allergies, PMS, indigestion in all of it's forms, headaches, skin problems, sleep problems.  Diet has been scientifically proven to affect auto immune diseases, ADHD, mental health, and inflammatory issues from asthma to arthritis to fibromylagia.  Lifespan, wise, it means we age without pain or with heart conditions, arthritis, memory problems, failing joints and bowels.

The benefits of detoxification offer increased energy levels; weight loss; healthy aging; greater motivation,; better digestion and assimilation of nutrients; better concentration, memory, and focus; reduced allergic symtoms; reduced chronic pain symptoms; clearer skin and eyes; decrease or elimination of headaches, migranes, joint pain, body aches, colds, allergies, auto-immune symptoms, sleep disturbances, to name a few.

This is true for me: I did not realize or feel how sluggish and lackluster my normal was until I began to incorporate dietic practices into my life.  Things I thought of as 'just the way I am' in terms of monthly cycles, skin, digestion, concentration, and sleep have radically changed.  They radically change again when I stop eating from a wellness perspective.   Within a day.

But they are things you do not recognize, and do not understand, unless you are paying attention.

Stuff: our lives are full of messy closets, half baked plans, procrastination and dirty laundry.  All of this takes an enormous amount of physical and psychic energy to maintain (even when maintence is "I'll deal with that tomorrow").

The lightness, motivation, and sudden eruption of energy and hope and creativity that comes from one task done or one drawer cleaned is almost insulting in it's efficacy.

Look around.  Cleansing and purification will look different for everyone.  Perhaps it's an unfinished project.  Perhaps its a phone call you haven't returned, a sinkful of dirty dishes every night, a closet become chaos.

Give it fifteen minutes.  Or commit to one drawer cleaned.  Or ten minutes every night this week to clean the kitchen up before you go to bed.

You'll feel better in the morning.

Heart:

The first toxin in our lives is stress.  It is more directly related to physical illness than is any fat, sugar, or pathogen.  Just as physical clutter in our houses drains our vitality, mind clutter mucks up our sense of hope, joy, purpose.  Recognizing negativity, resentment, anger, and grudges when they come up is a first step in self-resurrection.

No diet, no asana practice, and no house cleaning will ever truly detoxify you unless and until you have also purified and healed the broken stuff inside.

I speak of forgiveness.  It has nothing to do with other people.  It has nothing to do with fair or justice.  It is much more important to realize that forgiveness and healing are things you need to do for your own damned self and beginning the hard work that it is.

Practice watching your emotions and mind in your asana or meditation practice.  Notice how often judgement, criticism, and blame come up.  Use those same practices - asana, class, meditation in whatever form you do it - to begin learning to let go, forgive, and regard others with compassion.

It is not easy.

But it is the way through.

To flow, to place mindfully. To go on. (The art and falling of sequencing).

There were questions this morning about sequencing/teaching, about where and how I learn what I teach.  Befuddling question, and I think I gave half a dozen very lame answers.  Other teachers.  My own practice.  Trying to answer student's questions and their 'challenges' or interests in the form of a sequence.  You tube.  Books. A better answer is this: I meditate on it and I work on it really hard.  The impetus or inspiration comes to me from those various sources (my practice and what I've learned.  How I learned that tree pose can be done on your hands.  What pose taught me how to use my hands to deepen forward folds.  What the big toe is for...or the day I felt my heart both breaking and healing itself by it's willingness to break in ustrasana.)  (my students and what they ask: how do I find ease in my low back?  What's wrong with my knee?  Why do I feel so vulnerable in hip openers/rageful and energetic after corework, terrified of inversions, blissy after backbends?)

The birth of a sequence is usually either a pose I want to teach, a body part I want to experience, or an idea.  An idea such as you are grounded and the floor is solid, all is okay.  Or, as in the last few weeks, exploring the yamas.  I am teaching Bhramacharya, for example.  I ponder and write and ponder more while I chop my brussel sprouts and watch pots coming to boil: what does Bhramacharya mean for us, for me?  What does it feel like when I am practicing it?  What are the things in my life that keep me from it.  Abstinance.  Chastisty.  The self as sex.  The sex as potential, as gift, as precious.  Or as waste, as promiscuity, as escape, as taken-for-granted.  To walk with god, to see body as temple.  To act and move and feel as if my every moment were holy, and doors to the sacred were everywhere.  If those feelings were a pose, which would they be?

To me, they would be deeply rooted and embodied and grounded, as the truth of every day moments has a lot to do with everyday things like floors.  Getting out of ideas and ego and dreams and coming back to the way feet touch the earth.  But from that rootedness there would be an awakening of the raw forces, powers, and pitch of passions inside.  The force of muscles and urges.  The power of a foot.  These things led me to think of tadasana, rooted like mountain, and finding tadasana in all the other poses; side plank vashithasana, on our backs, in our warriors, all through chataraunga dandasana, staff pose, purvotonnasana.  Even handstand and headstand: they are upside down, but the strong lines of energy are the same.  Just flipped.

But body as sacred also involves wild emotions, opening up, the bravery of relationship and intimacy.  The ways our bodies have slowly closed off over the years.  Physically opening them up again happens in heart, shoulder, back opening.  Emotionally opening the body up again involves feeling that heart lifting and owning it.  Being willing to explore, to give, to let go into we know not where this is going.

Kapinjalasana - partridge or bird drinking raindrops pose - is a combination of vashithasana (side plank) and padanangustha dhanurasana (extreme wheel pose).  It is an extremely challening pose - one that Iyengar rates at 43 on a difficulty scale that goes to 60.  Now, most human beings will never hit a ten.  To look at a 43 in a standard issue yoga class is damn near insane.

BUT: the elements of the pose are things that a student can experience and feel in the poses he already knows.  Tadasana.  Chattaruanga.  Dhanurasana.

The way to kapinjalasana is made of practicing those things we already know.  Just as the route to Bhramacharya is ownership and acceptance of everyday moments - floor, sex, age, body - and practicing them with an effort towards learning.  Holding them with an attitude of revenence and gratitude and ultimately, sanctity.  The burgeoning billowing ideas of life that flow from that.

St. Theresa de avila writes that the whole way to heaven is heaven itself.  We become more alive when we accept the here and now as our path, our own circumstances as our training ground.

The word vinyasa means 'to place with intention' or to place mindfully.  Like poetry, or music, vinyasa involves a very practical and scientific understanding of how poses work, that poses prepare the body for next poses, and that poses have counterposes and sister poses and relatedness.  Building a sequence is practicable and meaningful: you are learning (maybe not consciously, but on the level of muscle memory and fascial capacity) every step along the way).  This aspect of sequencing is learned: teacher training, reading endlessly, learning the ashtanga series, reading and rereading the books that break it all down.

But vinyasa is also like poetry, like jazz, in its creativity: there are many ways to approach the same end.  There is joy in suddenness and compliment and contrast.  There is revolution in challenging our stories and considering the writing of new ones.

However, sequencing is NOT choreography.  It isn't just made to look pretty, to impress, or to reach some dramatic crescendo.  There is a difference between the arts of ballet or gymnastics or even baseball and that of yoga.  The point is not to be pretty or to perform.  The point is to find that path, to re-form the body, to slip into the body and realize it is, itself, our soul.

This is what I do: I have that idea, I try to feel the idea in my body and brain, and then I try to understand how to build to that pose.  I read Iyengar and Jois again.  I journal about it endlessly.  I take long walks with my dog.

And I think about my students.  What their bodies are good at, where they hold back, what they love to do, what they are capable of.

I come up with poses that link all these things together, like breadcrumbs.  And then we wander around.

I doodle.  I go back to my books.  And I get my hands on the mat.

And then I stand in front of a class and I say things, sometimes planned, sometimes spontaneous, always more dialogue than it appears (I am speaking to YOUR left foot, oh student hiding in the second row.  Yes, I mean YOUR body holds fear and joy, you lady who will not look me in the eye).

Sometimes I horrendously screw it up.  I have to back track.  I have to let my whole wonderful jazz riff go.  I have to swallow my pride and start over again.  I have to somehow explain what my toes are actually doing in warrior one and not only explain what they are doing but what muscle groups to fire up in your legs to make them do what they are doing, and this comes off horribly.

I study anatomy.  I practice playing with my toes in chair pose for hours on end.  I walk the dog again and have a brilliant idea but forget before I get home.

It is art, and study, and practice.  It is always practice.  It is an effort at communication and intimacy.  The secret is I usually have to drop all my plans when faced with the different students in class - they want to be challenged more than I was planning, or have a sudden injury that means we can't be on our knees all class, or they are clearly wanting to do core work when I intended to play with knee alignment.  So I fail, but those very failings are what I then start to wonder about.  And that births the next class.  And we go on.

Sometimes, the head must go below

Sometimes, The head must go

below the heart.

Cutting yourself free

I was up late - okay, I didn't sleep - because I got on a roll scribbling notes for the upcoming workshop, revisiting old writing, reflecting. It is vitally important that we start asking why we are not as happy, as strong, as laughful, or as healthy as we might be.  It is important that we start to wonder about what our lives mean.  Important that we start to see yoga as yoga - not as a set of exercises or pretty choreography.

I was reading a raw foodie's insights yesterday and she spoke quite bluntly about ridding her body of toxins, pain, and cancerous cells.  Then, in the same breath and with the same context, she started speaking not of antioxidants and greens but of gratitude, generosity, reflection, and letting go.

Yoga is not the practice of postures, but the practice of living an ordinary life extraordinarily well.  To do this, you have to cut yourself free.  From envy, from old habits, from legacies of manipulation, control, or dishonesty.  You may need years of therapy to do this.  You might need a big gulp of courage.  You might need to procrastinate it for awhile.  But eventually, to do yoga, this is what you have to do.

Start with forgiveness and acts of generosity.  Forgiveness is not allowing another person's wrongs, but cutting yourself free from its track marks.  And generosity does not - never has- meant giving away from your own wealth or security.  It means sharing your most essential gifts with the world.  And thereby making them stronger.

Clarity, hard and elegant clarity, starts with these.

Whispered Wisdom

for the upcoming Praying with our Hands, Dancing with God workshop.

Whispered Wisdom, Bhakti diary

Down through time, seekers and gurus have trespassed across the ordinary and cultivated paths to wisdom.  Across traditions, deep in our ancestry, wisdom teachings have been passed like folk cures from teacher to debutante.  Every single holy book there is is a collection and transcription of an oral tradition going back thousands of years before the things were written down.  Yoga stands there, in half lit hallways of time, where individual soldiers of life have sometimes found a thing that worked for them, throwing open the doors of perception.

We know this.  Yet, strangely, a bit wonderfully, yoga is popular. You can take classes in libraries, college gyms, retirement centers and vacation line cruises.  You can download teacher wisdom.  Yoga is a practice of books, DVDs, and the world wide web.  NBA and NFL players do it.  Sexy popstars do it.  Suddenly, practices handed down across centuries are available at WalMart.

We are, ahead of anything else, practical people.  Understanding that makes the increasing popularity of yoga an obvious thing: yoga is  a very practical endeavor. It cultivates cardiovascular health.  It builds musculoskeletal strength and flexibility without the grind and shock of high impact aerobics or sport.  It peaks every organ system  – the respiratory, digestive, reproductive, endocrine, lymphatic, and nervous.  It cultivates the capacity to relax and dramatically cuts away at the negatives of stress.  Yoga instantly makes us feel better, breathe better, sleep better.  We digest better.  Many claim easing or healing of long entrenched illness.  You do not need long years of apprenticeship or training.  The effects of yoga are immediate and profound.

Still, the physical and practical benefits of yoga may mask, or at least be a superficial version of, something more.  Hang around any yoga studio for a bit and you’ll hear stories of remarkable self transformation.  People report a profound rediscovery of self and purpose.  Some claim their capacities of concentration, creativity, and  intuition blossom strangely.  People start talking like believers or religious. “Chronic” illnesses wither.  People find focus, purpose, and meaning in their lives. Some trespass across the common world of the ordinary and find the doors of perception flung wide.

It can be hard to know what to make of this.  Is that stuff ‘yoga’? And which yoga? A basic google search turns up such a wealth of philosophies and interpretations the neophyte can be overwhelmed.  There are rumors of enlightenment, hints of change.  But the incomprehensible stew of every conceivable philosophy, psychology, and metaphysic is bewildering. The ancient and the modern, the esoteric and the practical, the magical and the scientific fuse.

Or, they don’t. The deeper, promised secrets of yoga are not easily had.

As I came to yoga, I had intimations of the something else, something deeper, something profound, but very little idea if those things applied to me.  My practice involved the ‘gross physical body’: I was a hardbitten atheist, strongly attached to reason, struggling to make sense of a hurricane life.  I found that there was something in the practice that I deeply, physically, needed.  In the beginning, it was simply about hanging on and feeling better.

When I began to look into the deeper aspects of yoga, I had difficulty knowing what to make of it all.  There are a plethora of how-to books to teach the asana and breathing techniques.  And there are treasure troves of lore: mythic adventures of gods speaking to nearly godly men; fascinating accounts of levitation, knowledge of former births, bilocation, states of nirvanic bliss.  The wash and swell of Hindu texts elucidate ecstasy.  Union with the One.  Knowledge of the Absolute.  Cosmic consciousness.  Pulling back the veils of deception and the phenomena of the material world.  But it is hard to know what those things mean to me.  Are those descriptions of what’s happening during a lunch hour vinyasa class?  Where is the transformation story of a neurotic Western agnostic like me?  Is this supposed to be my story?  If so, why can't I glow?  Why are things like alarm clocks and financial fear still part of my existence?

The questions I have – and hear from others – sometimes seem quaint or simplistic.  We come to yoga hoping it will help.  It usually does.  It usually does in unexpected and stunning ways.  But it remains hard to know what that means, or to answer the questions.  ‘Can a Christian practice yoga’ sounds like a ridiculous rant out of a t.v. evangelist’s mouth, and it is, but it is also a valid question.  Where do I begin?  How much do I have to do?  What is kundalini, chakra, ayurveda?  What is supposed to happen in meditation?  If you stick with this, do you end up vegetarian, wearing mala beads, annoying your friends?  Do I have to give up french fries?

Historically, yoga is a wisdom tradition.  It is a story of journey and transformation.  Ultimately, the ‘secret’ has less to do with what is whispered than the fact of whispering: if it were just getting the answers, we could read a textbook and have done.  There would not be thousands of texts, nor millions of practitioners.  Truthfully, journeys are made with teachers and maps and guides.  We suffer from a lack of mentorship, a not quite knowing what we’re supposed to do, no clear route of initiation.  We’re not terribly sure that we even want initiation, but the wisdom is tempting.

I am coming to believe that the ‘whispered wisdom’ is a slant truth, a cunning little word play.  The texts, teachers, and mentors are helpers.  Historically they have been the lights.  In the end, though, I believe we start to hear a whispering, haunting voice inside.  The texts, the practice, and the philosophies are not the end product, not the prize: they are maps to the prize.  Maps themselves are not the terrain covered.  They are representations.  Translations.  Metaphors.

Happiness, they say, is not a thing you find one day or a constitution you are born with, even if some of us are more predisposed than others.  Happiness comes not from any specific thing, but from the building of a life in which happiness has room to come in.  Create, cultivate, the conditions, and the thing appears.  Remove obstacles.  Clear spaces.  Recognize barriers and work through them.  Give time to the things that contribute to happiness: friendships, family, intellectual expansion, spiritual growth, play. Give priority to reflection, regeneration, commitments and slow and steady growth.

Yoga is a creeping, haunting thing.  With any exposure to it, and half-assed effort, a kind of inner whispering begins.  We find there is simply more of us than we thought.  A great deal more.  More consciousness, more energy, more equanimity, more life in the body, more connection in the emotions, more fire in the depth of our emotions, good and bad.

I have always had voices in my head.  Most of my life, they have been conflicting.  There have been a number of them that echo the judgement, critique, or down right abuse I’ve taken in from elsewhere.  I began to notice a year or two ago that those voices, all that conflict and resultant paralysis, began to fade.  This in itself seemed a wonderful thing, and I was unsure exactly what had happened.

But in the last year, a different thing has begun to happen.  There is still more there – an astonishing amount of more.  More consciousness, still.  More and deeper empathy.  More energy.  More equanamity, more depth.  I continue to spy into the practices and philosophies and metaphysics.  I soak it in.  I have begun to take that happiness approach: make room, establish the conditions, let go.  The conditions mean I look for gurus and mentors.  I practice listening.  I give time and priority where it seems most appropriate.  I try to apply the ethics, restraints, observances.  I get frustrated and then I let go, go deeper.

There is suddenly a voice.  Suddenly is not the right word: I am aware that this voice was one of those earlier voices.  Some of the themes are familiar.  The songs.  There is a clarity and a surety that was never, ever there before.  An authenticity.  But it is more than just ‘my true self’, more than ‘clarity’: it’s also a tremendous and haunting reserve of beauty and wisdom.  So much wisdom, I am baffled.  Things that seemed difficult aren’t difficult any more.  I am not afraid any longer.  Situations that seemed hopeless, or hopelessly complicated, suddenly are not.  I hear voices: I am walking the dog at midnight, thinking of any random string of things, and I suddenly hear a voice ten leagues deeper than that conscious stream of thought tell me exactly what I need to do about some other thing, that I wasn’t even thinking of.  I am driving midmorning, anxious and listening to the world news on NPR, running between bank and grocery and vet, and suddenly two words sink in and everything sinks magically into perfect places.  As if magnetized.  As if tethered by strings and drawn in.  I move to a sudden understanding of world and myself.  Am changed by the understanding.

A haunting, resonant voice.  A steady knowledge that this yoga is not just practical, not purely popular.  There are strange questions and stranger answers out there.  America is suffering a crush on yoga, and like any love affair, there are ups and downs.  Any mature relationship to yoga has to acknowledge those dark places and low points.  The pushing the physical too far.  The commercialization.  The idealization of gurus.  The trade in of spiritual path for monthly membership fees.  The weird attempts to transcend realities of work, intimacy, identity.

Ultimately, the yogic path is about work, intimacy, and identity.  It goes as deep and as pithy as psychoanalysis.  It can ask questions and leave us hanging for lack of good answers.   Not transcendence, but depth.  Not overcoming, but going deeper in.

But there is that voice.  It surfaces.  It becomes more clear.  It keeps us company on the journey, through wild goose chase and moments of inner calm.  It knows why we are there.  It, too, is determined to save the only life we really can save.  When the sages say the wisdom is whispered, they mean it’s a thing you have to listen to hear.  That the listening changes who you are.

vajra - the strength of diamonds

It is cold.  Frigid.  Alienating, isolating, brilliant and sharp.  Sharp, as in the kind of cold that burns and cuts you. It is hard to move through cold.  Hard to move oneself out of bed, somedays.  It is hard to step up and do the things you need to do.

What we need, I decided, is a practice to embody this.  A practice that can acknowledge the sharp hardness but somehow make it useful.  Cultivate fire, melt with compassion, glow the hard edges of 'reality' down to a level of usefulness and wisdom.

There is a way of seeing things as they are, of 'accepting reality' that results in bitterness, cynicism, judgement and sarcasm.  This is one version of truth.

But there is also truth made into wisdom: truth that presses hardness into diamonds and moves beyond sarcasm into kindness.  It is a soul's journey from 'knowledge' into 'wisdom', a psychiatric path from neurosis into sanity.

There is a sanskrit word, Vajra, which I think means what I mean right now.  Literally, diamond.  It is a way of seeing and being that sees things as they are, rather than seeing things through the ego.  It is the ego, the selfishness, the fearbound, that makes 'reality' and our ideas of it opinionated, judgmental, sarcastic, cynics burned down to spit and hissing.  The challenge, the path, is to pierce through the fear of intimacy and embody tenderness through being vulnerable and open.  The movement from the intellectual, cold, reasoning doubt in the head to the clear sighted, vulnerable warrior of the heart.  The challenge is, as always, to stop living life from the head, and to live from the heart.

Vajra, like a diamond, can be used to cut.  But nothing can cut it or break it.  It is vajra that will give us the ability to see through and cut away from old paradigms that don't work any longer, to step away from old behaviors and old relationships that have limited or caused us harm.  It is the ability to cut oneself free from resentments, old bitterness, antiquated modes of thinking that end up in prejudice, anger, resentment, smallness, fear.  Vajra is the diamond strength that can cut through the legacies of pain and open us to the strength of vulnerability and heartfulness.   It cuts new paths.  For ourselves, for our children.  For our new day, today.

Coldness, bitterness, anger, fear: all these darknesses that seem, at first blush, to be endings.  That seem so caustic and deadended.

They prove, if we enter them honestly, to be catalysts and shining shimmery things.  They prove to be the opportunities we have been praying, or wishing, or waiting for.  Don't disparage opportunity because it doesn't look like a pony with a ribbon around its neck, or a lover the way you imagined him all rescue and romance.  Sometimes, opportunity is a really fucking cold weekend you have to spend in doors.

Opportunity is what you do with it.

of spirit

"There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for your spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day." - Pema Chodron

"And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, "This is the way; walk in it." -Isaiah 30:21

"Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; rather, seek what they sought."  Guatama Buddha

"The whole way to heaven is heaven itself."  Teresa of Avila

This sunday, if you haven't signed up yet, do.

If, anyway, you wonder what yoga has to say about spirituality and heartwork.

What all this body stuff might have to do with healing the soul.

Or what ancient practices have to teach you about your own life.

It isn't for everyone.

But it is for you if you are tired of arguing about religion and politics, tired of reading about spirituality, tired of talk-talk-talking about change or better or goals or happiness.  Tired of talking about things that matter without doing a single thing that matters yourself.

My hope is that a few of those who are looking for things that matter, trying to figure out what really matters to them, or are sick of living with what doesn't will find yoga to be an exercise of spirit and a path of heart.  Come.  Sunday January 27, 9-noon.

Please register here and click the workshops tab.

The power of fire and water inside.

I had pratice this weekend in the art of letting go.

Let me not be trite: this isn't homework nor philosophical navel gazing.  This was having my heart broken and sniveling my way through the weekend.  It wasn't the end of the world.  It was just old old family stuff, and the way you continue to look for family approval and support even when you know better. Ought to know better after 35 years.  Still, though, you go looking.  Love is a dog's heart and it begs.

And it will always hurt when it gets betrayed.  And you will continue to feel afraid and alone, so long as you are doing important things.

I know all of that, theoretically.

But I sniveled and slunk down the kitchen cabinets until I was sitting on the kitchen floor and wondered at how my eyes could faucet.  How they pour and pour.

This is the thing, the practice: It occured to me that there is an energy created by hurt.  I let go, surrendered.  Surrender gives us velocity.

The body is a threshold.  The body is a door.

More often than not, pain is the catalyst that moves us.  More often than not, we 'change' and 'grow' with varying amounts of grace and muttering.  We sputter and wince.  It hurts, this.

The art of being alive and waking up forces a certain amount of loss and grief and fear into not only our consciousness, but the fabric of our bones and the tissues of our viscera.  Letting go - into heartbreak or anxiety or joyful anticipation - revs up a kind of expansion and fruition.  It makes of us a forcefield of kinetic fire, flickering under the skin.

Movement - I mean yoga and breath and hands - are a doorway.  A threshold.  A thing to hold onto with both hands when the room is dark or the world spins.  But a creative way into your own forces.  Body, breath, hand is an alchemy of anxiety, pain, uncertainty potently changed into the very thing that helps us find our feet and know who we are.

On the whole, you'd think 'spirituality' and successs in life are built on a theory of bliss and abundance.  On propserity and getting over adversity.  Positive thinking wants to build structures so big and powerful it would take an army tank of disappointment to break through.  Or, to avoid that disappointment, we'll simplify ourself to ghosts, zen ourselves so abstract there is nothing left to lose.  Or we get so busy we don't have time to feel the losses.  We'll medicate with drugs, alcohol, food.  Sex.  Tuning out in front of the television or retreating to ordinary mediocrity.  Perhaps sales of anti depressants and anti anxiety meds are so high, and self help gurus send messages to avoid responsibiity abnd pain - because all of that is easier than looking at heartbreak and learning how to deal with it.

We know how to push through our fears and feelings in frenzied attempts to achieve goals.  But we know precious little about how to suffer gracefully and productively when we are up against forces we can't control.

I think this is an excercise - a movement - of spirit.  I think it is movement that gives us spirit.

Happiness, I think, is not an absence of pain, but an understanding of pain.  That joy is in it, somewhere.

This isn't intended to be an essay on the bleakness or the necessity of human hurt.  It is simply a noticing how powerful our fires inside are, and wonder what might happen when we open ourselves up - appropriately, for our own dancing - to vulnerability.  To seeing power where power is: in shaking hands and locked up throat.

Yoga for Athletes

Two things. First, every Thursday, every class, is themed and taught for athletes.  This does not mean you have to be an athlete to attend - it just means my teaching language and  methodology will specifically address those issues most commonly brought up by athletes.  There are two strong classes and one restorative class: something for everyone, whether looking to build strength and endurance or detox and recover post workout.

Secondly, announcing a 'Yoga for Athletes' workshop on Sunday, Feburary 17, from 9 am to noon.  This workshop will teach a strong flow targeting strength, focus, endurance, body system balance.  But it will also teach a set of restorative, detoxifying poses.  There will also be a smattering of information on why yoga can be so beneficial to modern day sport - and how to include yogic practices into your training.

Sunday February 17, 9 a.m. – Noon

$40

Return Yoga

822 ½ W St. Germain

St Cloud MN

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.  Something to sip.

Yoga is for all bodies, in any condition.  But athletes in particular have found something in the practice that makes their time off the mat more powerful.

Yoga is unique in its ability to counter-act overtraining, cross fascial lines (where many sports unbalance the areas of the body), facilitate myofascial release, and radically improve the body's ability to sleep, eat, digest, detoxify, intuit, respond, and heal on a tissue and cellular level.  All without the injurious jarring actions or expensive equipment of other exercise programs.

Learn to incorporate yoga into your game. Every class, every Thursday is a ‘yoga for athletes’ class, and this workshop is a fantastic place to begin. Karin works hard to stay on top of science's contribution to sports medicine and yogic studies, and teaches these skills in each and every class.  Recovery time is improved, the body becomes more resilient and responsive, less prone to injury; muscle memory and structural integrity are part of the process.  While this is a great class for runners, cyclists, golfers, skiers, soccer players, and any other athlete, there are also students whose primary form of 'exercise' is yoga.  Whoever you are and whatever your level, the class is intended to challenge while teaching the skills of growth and acceptance, commitment and exploration.  There is deep physical and psychological value to finding one's edge, and changing the edge.

Healing happens in the pause between breaths

This morning - New Year's Day - broke cold and crystalline.  I walked to the studio before the sun was anywhere near up and watched my breath in the air, listened to the sound of my boots on sub-zero clots of snow and sheets of ice over the pavement, wondered at the great silence of the world that is the space before dawn.  The space before anything. It is said, sometimes, that that hour is the best hour in which to do a practice.  That the veils between the worlds are thinnest.  Or perhaps only that the interruption and blare of everyday life does not have such a purchase on us.

For whatever reason, predawn is given over to those who are suffering, those who are inspired, and those who are watching the spaces between one day and the next.

This morning, I suppose, the space between one year and the next.

I lit a candle and I waited to see: who would show up for this first practice in the new year.  What moods and movements they'd bring in the door with them.  Weather I should be silly or serious, push for hand stands or take long, deeply introspective holds with our hearts and our bodies near the floor.

I listen to student's breathing, as I start a class.  And as I did so this morning I realized I didn't want to say anything much at all.  Nor did I get the sense they needed any directive at all.  Life its own self - this dawn of a new year, their dedication and ceremony shown in showing up at six in the morning before anything else can happen in their year...all that says more than enough.  What I wanted, instead, was to listen to that breathing and to invite them into the wordless spaces as well.

Over the holidays, I was given a singing bowl.  I have held it, asked it to sing at the end of a few classes.  But today I used the singing bell for the whole entire class.  I lead, silently.  I demonstrated a pose - nothing new or complex or workshopy, just going back to the beginning and practicing what we already know - the class followed.  I let them hold the pose for a deeply long, 20 breath or minute hold, 30 seconds for deep strength or balance poses.  Then I'd ring the singing bowl, signaling an end to the pose.  I'd demonstrate the next pose, they would follow, and we'd just breathe together until the bowl told us the pose was done.

As I write, now, reflecting, I notice not only the starting of thoughts that end up in typed sentences, but the spaces between the thoughts, the spaces between the words.  The spaces give meaning to the confusion and irresolution of everthought and nonsenseword.  Thoughts and words mean nothing, go nowhere, without a pause of meaning and understanding.

And I recall the spaces between our poses this morning, and hearing a teacher whisper at one point: healing happens in the pause between the breath.  Find the pause between the breath.

Years ago, when I was starting a practice, teachers told me so much about breathing I grew sick of hearing about it.  They reminded me to breathe, ad nauseum.  Yet I started to realize what they were doing was directing my attention back and back again onto my own self: they were teaching me to find the moment of pause.

The moment before reaction, before automatic thought.  The moment before I repeat old habits for the thousandth bloody time or surrender to the self sabotage or negative thought patterns.  It was in their directives, in the occasional glimpses I caught of this 'space between' that began to teach me to SEE the patterns I was caught in, as well as to witness how fleeting thoughts and emotions were.  It was in that suspension that I started to notice edges - and to notice how teaching others about that edge, that half second of crazy time when all hell is breaking loose, the half second when anger is inhaling an explosion, when fists are raised, when chaos threatens to break apart whatever stability has been patched together during the infrequent moments of calm. The suspension interrupts moments of violence, sadness, boredom, or life as automatic.  To break the cycle of despair that gets passed from generation to generation when anger wins and calm is absent.  Or the cycles adults put them through, day after day and year after year, when we know longer remember what growth and vibrancy and passions are, when we no longer learn, when we can't really say we're still living or what we're living for.

The yogic path is to slow everything down, learn how to breathe attentively, to create space between the breaths.

There was a time, years ago, when I didn't really understand this was possible.  Not really.  Pay attention to the breath, whatever.  Remember to breathe, sure.

I didn't realize there were paths away from eruptive fears and the powerful slipping of time, gone and gone and gone again.  One breath at a time,  I was taught how to breathe with attentiveness and space.

As we progress through the breadth of what we experience in this moment  - the sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories- we are able to help each other sort out the chaos, and see within the maelstroms places to hold fast. From those new vantage points, we  see paths away from the anger and towards peace; paths away from judgment and towards acceptance; paths away from fear and towards Love.

We breath and find the healing between one breath and the next, the ceremony between one day and the next.  The edge of time between night and dawn.  The moments when actual change and reflection are possible.

If you can find the pause between the breath, you can heal.  You can learn to enlarge time, find choice, repair old wounds, start whole.  You make more space to live in.  You enlarge, find meaning, understand.

Without contempalation, without pausing to look, listen, and feel out the meaning of things, without purpose, we get lost.  The passing of time is just the passing of time.  All we can do is watch.

Contemplation is the lending of purpose, the finding of meaning.  The participation in being alive.

It is the space between words that makes things into phases, sentences, understanding.  It is the pause of reflection and intention that draws lines and makes sense of things.  It is the space beneath the surface of things from which we live.

Under the superficial is the more of life.  More love.  More energy.  More hope.  More health.  More breath.

If the moving of one year into another means anything to me today, it means that paused breath, the suspiration, the sacred rite of exhale.

Resolutions, revolving.

I've talked already about the new year, about resolutions and change. There is a difference.

Resolution has something to do with appearances and surfaces.

Change is different.  Change runs deep.  Change is more about revolution than resolution and appearances and superficiality.  While many of us are comfortable spouting off resolutions, far fewer of us are actually willing or able to accomplish change.  The difference, I think, lies in resolving and wishing the world (ahem, other people) to be different or see us differently or changing our own damned selves.  Revolution, from inside.  Change is realization that nothing much has changed, ever.  That world is the same world, the relationships the same, the chemical compositions of our comfort foods are the same.  Change acknowledges, sometimes grudgingly, how little we can actually change: not other people, certainly.  Not physics.  Not the way things are.  But feel what an hour, a few simple movements can do, at the end of your next yoga class.  Notice how nothing has changed, but self; and in this change, everything is different.

Things do not change, said Thoreau.  We do.

One of the great metaphors reflected inasana practice is that of spiritual evolution. Webster’s dictionary defines evolution as “a process of continuous change from a lower or simpler to a higher, more complex, or better state”.  Simply put, evolution means growth.

And growth is rarely a linear process.

Thus, pavritta.  To twist. To evolve.  Websters suggests evolution is “a process of continuous change from a lower or simpler to a higher, more complex, or better state”.

You've heard this in class: pavritta trikonasana, pavritta parsvotonoasana.  Maybe, if the teacher is bold, pavritta paschimotanasana.

They are a classification of poses: they are twists.  They are complex.  They are subtle.  They are among the most heat producing and detoxifying of asana.  They are among the more discomfiting and challenging.

As growth is.

In order to create this movement in the body, we need to stabilize the foundation, extend or elongate the axis, and finally to actively revolve or move around this axis.

In most standing twisting poses, the foundation consists of the pelvis and the legs.

These poses require that we root powerfully through the legs and feet, and harness the core’s support.

Then we channel this energy into the spine and allow the spiral energy to be expressed through the torso.  The arms, the eyes, the hands.  The very breath, spun in widening circles.

They demand flexibility, strength, and the ability to balance while engaging complementary opposing forces.

Learn this, and new years resolutions become pale and flimsy things.  Revolution is much more impressive.

This is what we will do this week: evolve.  In downdog, in triangle.  In standing forward fold and seated forward fold.  To sundial, to bird of paradise.  Pasasana. To find our own spine and make it longer.

Root powerfully, and harness the core's strength.  Spill it.

Ahimsa. First, Ethics.

(more for the body, mind, feeling, world workshop coming up Sunday December 30th.  Come!) Ahimsa.  First, Ethic.

Karin L Burke

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?

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 – 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.  Fairy tales and palliatives.

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 ricocheted 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, satisfied 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 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 without 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.

Breathe out, look in, let go.

Forget about enlightenment.Sit down wherever you are and listen to the wind that is singing in your veins. Feel the love, the longing, and the fear in your bones. Open your heart to who you are, right now, not who you would like to be. Not the saint you’re striving to become. But the being right here before you, inside you, around you. All of you is holy. You’re already more and less than whatever you can know. Breathe out, look in, let go.

—John Welwood