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Yoga and the Domino Effect: Inquiry and Experience #4

  Your body and mind communicate by an unspoken language. You begin class standing at attention when I suggest you lift the skirts of your inner thighs.   Your skin shifts upward like an arrow shot from ankle holsters. Your bones react and pull toward earth. Your breath migrates to the fullest reaches of your ribs; all of them. Inner thighs do not have skirts. Your mind has translated this to something else. Bravo. ~Your belly, receptive to the upward pull of the thighs moves in and up. ~Your calves, receptive to the upward pull of the thighs draw down. ~The heels root. ~The thighs rise. ~The buttocks descend. ~The chest lifts.   If the pose is set in motion correctly, the rest falls in to place. Who will begin the dialogue for the body to follow before you know the first word? The approach offered stealthily does not overwhelm the student. It is most effective when both delicate and deliberate. That is the catalyst to poetry in motion.   Your guide is the teacher who directs you with the first word. And allows the ones that follow to be uniquely your...

Savasana~Every Move You Make I’ll Be Watching You: Inquiry and Experience #3

  You are lying down, face up on a hard floor in a public place. You have completed your yoga practice which required attention and vigilance. You trained yourself to stay alert. You are used to watching out for yourself more than watching into yourself so it was a beautiful effort. When you are asked to transition from that effort to effortless relaxation your nerves grasp and rush for a place to rest that is not immediately obvious. The mind is still scanning the horizon as is its habit.   Savasana: Place a blanket with no more than an inch or so of height under the head with the edge touching the tops of the shoulders but not under the shoulders. You are connecting your head to your trunk for the sake of the nervous system which can stand down. (If your chin is jutted to the ceiling and you cannot lengthen your neck you may add height until the throat recedes below the Adams Apple. You may alternately bend your knees and rest a bolster under your thighs to soften the tight back line of the spine, pelvis or legs.) Turn the palms up and let no part of the arm touch the trunk but no farther than this necessitates. You are now un-tethered. Let the upper eyelid drop rather than squeezing the lower lid and upper lid together to close the eyes. You are more un-tethered, disconnecting one part of your skin to another. Boundaries fade and the lightness that comes may feel disorienting. You may find you need an anchor. Place something with weight on your...

Inquiry and Experience #1

  Lie down and close your eyes. What part of you feels tension, tightness, restriction, binding or discomfort? What part of you feels light, empty, easy, relaxed? Keep your mind on the easy parts as you breathe gently but intentionally. How does your attention to pleasure affect the less comfortable places? What if all your life was that manageable? Can you apply this to something happening now, beyond the...

Pull Your Socks Up

  Sharon’s mother is British. If life is making her daughter gloomy she says;” pull your socks up!” I have an image of England as a country which doesn’t approve of depression. Citizens should keep their sunny sides up by doing something pro-active rather than despairing; an attitude one cannot argue with even if it is only my imagining.   This morning I needed to pull my socks up though I didn’t notice until I was standing on my head in front of a mirror in my folk’s house.  It’s not usual to watch ourselves as we practice but the sight of yourself with your own eyes is a good idea now and again. I like to look, adjust, close my eyes to feel and then look back again. That’s how I noticed what it felt like to pull my socks up. That’s how I noticed how good it felt to keep my sunny side up.   I’ve been standing on my head for a few decades but it doesn’t mean I always know where I am because I have the common combination of flexibility and injuries that can pull the veil of illusion over any yoga pose   Headstand is one of the kindest postures on hip joints as they are unloaded. And it is liberation for the belly. When doable, one should learn to stand on legs no matter where they are in space to notice the support born from rising which is different than the support of leaning or collapsing. It is the support of oneself. It is independence.   I’m surprised to note that I’m...

Heal the Burn With Meditation

approximate reading time: 1 minute and 20 seconds   In the season of  flame red trees and burning leaves we sow what we’ve reaped from the earthly plain. It is a straightforward thing to plant a seed and harvest the plant, having clear parameters of time and direction. What we have sown or reaped also becomes a philosophical inquiry at harvest time as fall marks the beginning of a new year for the Jewish people with a ritual of reflection on our behavior to our fellow men. Less condensed, as it’s a daily practice, the underpinning of yoga requires reflection with regularity. We are sowing without pause and observing the outcomes. I had a lovely old Tantra teacher who asked me if I knew what the worst pollution was and when I failed to come up with an answer he said that it was words: You can clean the air, the earth, the water but words can never be removed.   I came upon a medical study on rejection and physical pain. An MRI (an imaging device) of the brain lit up the same area of the brain for rejection as it did for the physical pain of a burn. Rejection forms its own words in the mind of the rejected.   Rejection is the upshot of any number of actions: Being fired from a job, being fired as a lover or friend, being passed over for a post, being ignored by anyone close to us or not, with words spoken or implied. I write rejection and you’ve already remembered your own.So when we say we got burned by...

“Do or Do Not: There is No Try” ~ Yoda – Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back

    The yoga teacher is teaching a ballet bar class. She utilizes her skills where she can. Movement is beautiful in so many forms. Grace and understanding come through countless actions.   She enters the university’s room being vacated by an aerobics class. The slender aging aerobics teacher is no bigger than a girl; no body fat. She glistens with sweat. Her shirt has a message: Big Fat Writing.   Tomorrow You Can Do Better   Do the students look defeated or does the yoga teacher imagine that the humid air is perfumed with hope and sorrow?   That shirt raised my shackles.   First of all, why do you have to do better in aerobics class?   But that shirt wasn’t about aerobics class and either was my reaction. How about letting the students enjoy the fruit of today’s labor before thinking it wasn’t as good as it could be? How much better it could be, might be a dream but might also be a nightmare born of a Puritan ethic. Good people never give up. Hard work is the key to the kingdom for eternity.   Do better is the unspoken universal mantra, isn’t it? Does anyone want to do worse?   Not even for a moment does someone exist without acting. Even against one’s will, one acts by the nature-born qualities. ~ Krishna– –  Bhagavad Gita   We couldn’t do nothing even if we tried. And it might not be “nature- born” to best oneself with regularity but it is certainly bred into our culture where more is the mantra and better is mores’ companion....