“Be on the watch…”
Posted: January 10, 2012 Filed under: poetry, yoga 1 Comment »Tom Waits reads “The Laughing Heart” by Charles Bukowski
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This is chocolate in the peanut butter of your heart. I personally can’t believe this amazing bit of revery came out of Bukowski, but I’m overwhelming delighted that it did. “The gods wait to delight in you.” And in Waits’ voice.
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Yoga in the news
Posted: January 9, 2012 Filed under: news, yoga 2 Comments »Lately we’re having our awareness raisedabout the damage that unwise practice of yoga postures and obsessive pushing of
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ourselves can create, or “How yoga can wreck your body.” People are surprised to learn about yoga injuries, I think, because yoga is supposed to be a “healing” art. Who gets hurt from healing? Lots of people: ask the 19 people who survived from the sweat lodge incident with injuries, or all the people who’ve been on the receiving end of medication errors in hospitals.
I damaged my rotator cuff pushing my limits in Ashtanga with a teacher who told me the pain in my shoulder would go away if I just kept doing what I was doing. I stress fractured my femur – twice! – running barefoot in my late teens. Clearly, I learn slowly. And that’s really the point. How can we be surprised that in a culture of harder, faster & more, the very people who are most likely to sacrifice comfort for goals – the fitness geeks and perfectionists – push themselves past the limits of their bodies to achieve postures and feats once reserved for the decades-honed master? Really? What’s surprising is that it took so long.
The status poses have been inching further and further from the core of how yoga cultivates well-being, poise and wisdom and closer and closer to playground antics reminiscent of boom-box days and circus acts. Don’t get me wrong: if the pursuit of these body folding feats brings you joy, then more power to you. But let’s not pretend that your Astavakrasana or Tittibhasana is what makes you wise or a good yoga teacher (unless you are specifically teaching others to do those poses, in which case it is technically essential). And let’s not pretend that extreme accomplishments are without risk; it’s a simple equation in any endeavor. But let’s also not equate status poses with yoga, enlightenment or wisdom. They’re fun, gorgeous, interesting and difficult, among many other things. But the basis for human value and worth, for reverence or teaching wisdom? That’s a mistake that can only be made in culture that sees adrenaline as the hormone of enlightenment.
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“Where we touch we are twice marked, and twice alone.”
Posted: January 9, 2012 Filed under: poetry, yoga Leave a comment »
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Anne Sexton reads “The Truth the Dead Know”
Evidently I need to upgrade to embed video, and I haven’t yet. Inevitably I will, but not now.
So, until I do, I offer the link above. The text of the poem available on the web is so different that my favorite line, the one in the title of this post, ends “No one is alone” and so I include no text of the poem here.
It’s better this way, anyway, because it’s so heartbreakingly beautiful to hear her read it. I wouldn’t have gone in the hearse, either.
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yoga ain’t self-help
Posted: January 8, 2012 Filed under: yoga | Tags: Human positions, yoga Leave a comment »For years I’ve struggled to articulate the purpose of yoga in my life, a struggle that only intensified when I became a Registered Yoga Teacher. I wasn’t any more wise the day I received the certification than I was the day before. I was more wise than I’d been a year before, and 5 years and so on, but was that yoga? Well, yes… and no. Insofar as yoga was an integrated part of my life, it contributed to that growth. Would it have happened in the absence of yoga classes at a studio? Assuredly. In the absence of any practice? Perhaps not, but then I would have been a different person all together.
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Yoga is a form of exercise, a form of meditation and a form of joy. Is walking self-help? You can make it that, but you can also just really dig it (I do). Hula-hooping now has its advocates for entrance into the woo-woo pantheon. Are all children who waggle their hips in a big PVC circle tube now being inducted into a cult of hoop? Of course not. And we’re mistaken if we think that “doing yoga” is a gateway to anything but joy and flexibility. Joy and flexibility can feel a lot like enlightenment, and yoga – like sitting, walking, hooping or standing – can be used as a pathway to enlightenment, sorority, belonging or a certain physical aesthetic.
If you think you require help in an area of your life, then by all means seek: read, research, consult, adapt. This is power. We all need help, and part of embracing change as the M.O. of life is seeking it rather than pushing it away. But filing yoga – or any other art – under “self-help” underestimates the beauty and joy of simply being, studying and engaging. Doing so also underestimates our own value, worth and struggles: self-help implies not only that we’re broken, but that we can be fixed and then return to some supposed normal.
What if there is no difference between the mind and body, spirit and mind? What if the things we experience as obstacles, problems and brokenness are paths to meaning, grace and beauty? What if there is no point in doing anything except that it enhances the beauty of life? What if the solutions aren’t fixes but facts, and support is just the air we breathe when we’re taking joy in our lives, in all their maddening mundanity? Then yoga isn’t self-help, it’s nothing more or less than joyous activity. Is there anything else?
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How imperfect can a yoga teacher be?
Posted: June 19, 2011 Filed under: love, yoga | Tags: Teacher Training, Teachers and Centers, yoga Leave a comment »
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I recently heard a well-known yoga instructor say something very nearly exactly like, “You have no business teaching if you’re thirty pounds overweight.” This got me thinking about degrees of imperfections and what qualifies a person as a teacher, beyond the requisite teacher training. For instance, if you’re looking for a personal trainer or a fitness instructor, you probably do want the one with an optimal physique as proof of their pudding. Or a drill instructor: for a drill instructor, you want someone who clearly punishes themselves, too, because it’s one less thing your brain can run away with as they’re shouting in your face.
Yoga is at least in part a physical endeavor. Is it primarily a physical endeavor? Do we practice yoga to purify and cleanse the imperfection so completely from our bodies that we really believe ourselves impervious? I guess if that’s the point of yoga, we really do want only the youthful appearing, halest and fittest among us instructing it. I, for one, am disturbed by a pervasive sense that if you have the “right” personal practice, and are performing it correctly, you won’t be subject to the maladies of the flesh.
We have certain stories about progenitors of yoga-dom overcoming and healing their own maladies. These stories form part of the justification for practice, our collective mythology. Is this the corollary of that self-healing myth: If your practice does not heal you and grant you a life of perpetual wealth, peace and robust good health, it is not yoga. If you practice dutifully and correctly you will not suffer. And to go one further: If you suffer, either you did not practice or you did not practice correctly.
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Yoga: The Prophylactic for Your Inner Weiner (Part 3)
Posted: June 18, 2011 Filed under: yoga | Tags: Anthony Weiner, Sex scandal, Weinergate, yoga Leave a comment »
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continued from yesterday… If yoga isn’t going to change our pasts or our needs, well, what’s the point? What can yoga do? Well, if you have an inner Weiner (and we all do, c’mon now….) you might get to know that guy a little better by spending time on the mat. And he might tell you, “I think I’m gonna start sending disappointing pictures of my underpants to the public and completely change my image in the public eye. Yep, I think I’m definitely feelin’ it today. I know it sounds crazy, but I just feel it! It feels so sexy!”
Okay so it might not be that blatant, maybe it will only be a feeling, and a feeling you’d rather not have. But really, that’s what we’re saying when we say “I wasn’t honest with myself.” We’re saying, “I kept having that feeling, but it was icky, so I decided to ignore it until I did something really grand with it.” Well, guess what? You did. The fact that you ignored truths about yourself leading up to your grand, career defining gesture doesn’t make you more pathetic or more broken or more excusable than the next lout.
And you might just stop right in the middle of your pigeon pose, feeling a little like taking a shower. Well, don’t. Stay there, talk to that guy, write about it, cry about it, wonder about it, laugh about it. This is what practice is for. Whether you touch your toes (and eventually you will), showing up on the mat is about clarifying and becoming more and more transparent to ourselves. It’s not going to end, ever, this need to meet ourselves, and yes, it’s daily. Will you ever do anything really embarrassing or idiotic again? Yeah, probably. I do. It’s a prophylactic, and they all have a failure rate. But you’ll gain a sense of humor and understanding, an ability to own the action and your person, and never, ever to put your lack of self-knowledge above your relationships to other people, the hurt you feel above the hurt you cause.
And those yoga teachers in those sex scandal stories? Yeah, ask them how their practice was the morning they decided to become that guy or that gal. I’ll bet you an unlimited pass to home practice they didn’t show up for themselves on the mat, and that’s why “it” happened.
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Yoga: The Prophylactic for Your Inner Weiner (Part 2)
Posted: June 17, 2011 Filed under: truth, yoga | Tags: Anthony Weiner, Sex scandal, yoga 1 Comment »
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continued from yesterday’s Part 1…. Why is it that when we fail our commitments and the very relationships that give our lives shape and substance, we lead with this seeming revelation: “I’ve not been honest with myself”? In an attempt to turn a relational failure into a personal tragedy, we seem to take full and total responsibility. After all, he did say he’d made mistakes, hurt lots of people, he even named classes of them. All the while he abdicated his ownership of those very consequences and his own intentions. The lead phrase might as well say: “But the real tragedy is my lack of self-knowledge, some deep inner turmoil which allowed me to be non-transparent to even myself!” (cue collective hand to mouth gasp and cluck.)
Welcome to the human race. Seriously, this isn’t any personal tragedy or deep, intimate secret; this is what The Bible called original sin, Freud called the unconscious and the Sutras call the vacillations of the mind. Get real. This is no more revelatory than saying “I screwed up.” So what’s all this got to do with yoga as a prophylactic? I mean, if yoga teachers fall prey to the grand scandals and transient peccadilloes of the oh so maligned politicians, then isn’t this evidence that yoga doesn’t work to make us purer, better, nicer and truer?
No. See comment regarding The Bible, Freud and Sutras. If you’re going to yoga class expecting to be relieved of the maladies of being human, you’re in for a serious disillusionment: whether it happens when your teacher propositions you, underpays you or simply unloads on you, or maybe you find yourself propositioning your teacher, underpaying and unloading on your staff, you’ll come to a crisis of confidence in yoga, in your practice, in your teacher, in your ability to be purified, cleansed or saved.
But here’s the deal: yoga doesn’t save us from us from our bodies, our desires, our pasts or our possibilities. It makes them all that and more so. It makes the body more of what it was born to be, our desires grow and morph and take different forms, but they still grow from the same needs and truths and until those are acknowledged, those desires aren’t going away with your copious sweat. Our pasts and possibilities will always be inextricably linked and bound by the truths we bury or reveal in them, and no amount of twisting, dandelion cleanses, inverting or sweating is going to change their content. continued tomorrow… in part 3.
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Yoga: The Prophylactic for Your Inner Weiner (Part 1)
Posted: June 16, 2011 Filed under: truth, yoga | Tags: Anthony Weiner, Sex scandal, yoga 3 Comments »
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A week and a half later, the Weinergate jokes run their course and our fascination wanes (if we ever sustained one) … until of course the next installment or revelation. Or the next Weiner. And let’s own up, the next Weiner could be a yogi.
Go ahead and search on “yoga teacher sex scandal,” I’ll wait til you get back. If you didn’t think those words went together, you’ll probably gasp before you giggle at the titles: “Chakra full of scandal,” “Yogis behaving badly” and the titles go on. What allows someone who willingly takes a mantle of leadership to abuse the trust of those they purport to serve?
Politicians may seem a breed apart from famous (or not-so-famous) yoga teachers: so much more glad-handy, duplicitous and mendacious. So much more malleable and less principled, right? But this quote could have come from any of the yoga teachers I’ve ever taken, talked to or practiced alongside (okay, maybe minus “the media” and sub “students” for “constituents”):
Just prior to this he admits to “terrible mistakes” and “hurting” significant people in his life. Just after, he details that what was meant as a “private” direct message was accidentally posted publicly. I want to focus on the lead-in, the part you could almost act as if you hadn’t heard, the part that almost might seem to make the others excusable: “I have not been honest with myself…”
(continued…. tomorrow….)
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Online Yoga to Support Your Practice
Posted: June 8, 2011 Filed under: truth | Tags: yoga 1 Comment »
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I love Bindi Fry’s latest post about practice, grasping and surrender (my take, not her words) from which this quote hails. Short story: home practice is where the magic happens. Home practice is where the yoga happens. Want to know what “yoga” is besides “just the asana“? Engage your own home practice. Your habits, your loves, your obsessions, your truth, your hiding , your obstacles and games, your beauty: all there. Seriously, go get it, cause it’s there on the mat when you roll it out every day on your own.
Now, the best of this occurs when you’re in a self-guided practice, meaning you either have a practice that’s been given to you or you follow your body on the mat.
But among the many “dirty little secrets” of yoga teachers that we learn after teacher training aren’t so dirty and aren’t so secret is that sometimes we’re tight on time, and sometimes it’s just luscious to have someone else give the cues, and sometimes we could use some motivational oomph.
When I’m crunched on time, want a “class” and am seeking inspiration, a reminder of Beauty, an invitation to Love and a beckoning of the Truth, I have a couple of websites that are my rock solid go-to’s. One is Harmony’s Well and another for private lessons is Now Lesson. For quick classes from yogalebrities, I go to myyogaonline.com. And today they have this great giveaway! A Camel Cushion from Halfmoon Yoga Props. All you have to do is leave a comment about how you increase chest and back flexibility. Here’s mine:
My shoulders are my limiting factor, and I use this preparatory move I’ve heard called the ‘Windmill’: Prone, extend hands directly out from shoulders, palm down. Bend right elbow, tenting fingers in near right shoulder, using this only to stabilize your roll. Start rolling your right side up by engaging the core, feeling the stretch across the front of your left chest and shoulder. As you are comfortable and not before, you can reach the right hand back towards the left, bring the right leg behind the left, all to deepen the stretch.
Head over and leave yours and maybe you’ll have a new yoga prop to beckon you to the mat!
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Change and Consequences
Posted: May 27, 2011 Filed under: love, truth, yoga Leave a comment »
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Hard and soft ways to react to our experiences and hold our bodies fascinate me. One of the ways that yoga has unbiddenly shaped me is to open my eyes to all the ways I’ve hardened my own body, mind and heart and so clear a path for their softening.
The last couple of weeks I’ve been listening to some sparklingly generous Yoga Teacher Teleseminars coordinated and hosted by Tal Rachleff. Several of the teachers have been influenced by a method of life coaching associated with The Handel Group. My takeaway from listening to these teachers is that the “Method” includes writing down our mental chatter (love this, and has roots in so many traditions – more on that in another post), stating our dreams in increasingly precise, positive, present sentences and crafting plans for realizing these states of affairs. One of the surprising and innovative strategies is deciding on effective, targeted, meaningful consequences for not executing on these plans. This consequence stuff really did shock me on first hearing, and so I’ve been turning it over in my mind. On first blush it seemed so harsh, and felt like my first Ashtanga teacher who was of the ‘pain is a sign you’re on the right path’ school. On second blush it seemed so elegant and logical. My mental chatter kept bouncing from these walls. Time to get writing.
The idea, again – as I understand it, is that after you’re clear about your desire, dream and goal you break it down into steps and then decide on an action you can take right now, and do it. Very cool structure because it allows infinite fine-tuning, tweaking and considered transformation. But this adds the sentence, “And if I don’t xyz, then I’ll ….”
And then I wondered: “If I don’t xyz, then why on earth would I …???” Right? Maybe I didn’t put it on my schedule and forgot. So then, what’s to remind me of the consequence? Maybe I avoided it because it brings up discomfiting emotions. Does the consequence have to be even more discomfiting? That sucks.
My commitment was to write down my mental chatter during my morning practice. The first morning, when I got up, there was no time left for my practice. As my mind twisted around to figure out how I was going to get my pedi in that day, it dawned on me that it was my chosen consequence to forgo it. Makes sense: no time for practice, no time for pedi. Cool, this is working. I felt grown up and responsible and very, very good. Odd for someone who missed practice this morning.
I totally forgot to write the second morning. I got there on the mat, I did my usual do, and phewt! Even though I’d gotten a special journal and put it next to the mat, I totally didn’t pick up the lovely turquoise pen. Not once. Shows me how much the chatter didn’t want to be written down!
And that’s when I realized the most important component of consequences for me. While I concocted consequences for my lapses of integrity, there was an essential component for them to work, and when it’s in place, the real consequences are natural. Awareness is both the cause and the effect, and because it’s a circular relationship, it is facilitated in the context of a modern, busy life by some kind of an accountability partner. Once awareness is achieved, the presence or absence of a monetary or treat or physical consequence may or not be valuable for other reasons (for instance, if you’re a parent, it can be a great teaching tool to create these agreements for yourself in the family to show the reality of consequences to our actions) the real transformation happens in the “Aha!” moment of realizing what you’ve done and cutting through your own bullshit. The consequence is missing out on the value of what you’d promised to do. The real consequence happens when you come to the end of practice and realize you’ve not written a single word, and yet the chatter was nearly deafening. The light that turns on, really stays on.
Always looking for softer ways of doing what was once hard for me – difficult, effort-full, will-full and imposed – this truly appeals to me. I’m still turning over the value of these concocted consequences, but am more convinced than ever of the value of writing our selves down. The consequences that matter most to me are the ones I don’t manufacture but are imposed by the structure of the activity itself: I really wanted the feeling of having gotten that practice. I’m deeply curious about what would have gotten spilled in my journal that morning had I had the extra ounce of awareness to put pen to paper. And I haven’t missed a practice since. I’m not sure I’ll ever get on a mat without pen and paper nearby again, this has been so fruitful. Now it’s time for my pedicure.
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