Roam the Hub of All Sacred Places….

“The light which shines above this heaven, above all the worlds, above everything, in the highest worlds not excelled by any other worlds, that’s the same light  which is in you.” ~Chhandogya Upanishad

What if all the thinking, all the words, ideas aren’t our minds? What if they’re the covering over our minds? Don’t get me wrong – they’re great tools. But what’s overseeing the job site? They’re not the tools you’ll need if you’re looking for your true self or for a steady place to stand.

Science tells us our minds are decentralized in the body. Yoga helps us settle into our heart, where wisdom and intelligence reside. Of course when we talk about heart in yoga, we’re not just talking about the juicy pumping muscle to the left of center in our ribcages. There are a lot of bits housed around there – chemoreceptors, baraoreceptors, lungs, thymus, arteries, lymph nodes, spine, circulating blood and air, esophagus, diaphragm. When we bring our attention to this area, when we just feel what comes up, we are contacting the heart of yoga. Our yoga.

Bringing ease to the muscles and joints around this area can be the beginning or development of this process. This is where many of us Western Yogis start, with asana. Maybe a little breathing practice. Then we might start calling that pranayama. Maybe we meditate for stress reduction. Somewhere along the way we realize these pesky emotions are less pesky, the aches are less achey, the mind is less muddled.

“The heart is the resting place of the pranas, the senses and the mind. It’s your true self, which is identified with intelligence and which finds repose in the space within your heart.” ~Nikhilananada’s Intro to The Principal Upanishads

So then we explore pratyahara – sense withdrawal. But then, where do the senses go? Niky above, says to the space within your heart, your true self. Makes some sense – it’s quieter there than the head or stomach. The feelings come up, but maybe we’re in a place where we can uncouple them enough from the words and judgments to just let them be a bit.

Now we’re practicing saucha in our hearts. Saucha – cleanliness, purity. We don’t often think of it in regard to our hearts, but after we’ve gotten glimpses of the Love that lives there, it makes sense not to store our crap on the porch. If we keep the windows clean maybe it will shine more brightly. The Sanskrit word for this place – Anahata – can be translated “unstruck”. “The space within your heart  is omnipresent and unchanging.” (~Chhandogya Upanishad ) Always with us, always available for us to touch and feel is a place that is unstruck by the blows of life, unmoved by the compliments and criticisms, the lost jobs and the awards. It is always what it is. We are always who we are. Sometimes we just cover it up with judgments, which are really old experiences in new clothes. Film on our windows.

Maybe this is the impetus to poke our noses into the pesky ethical side of yoga.  But if you’ve been cleaning your windows all by yourself, and someone gives you a step ladder and an extension for your sponge, you’ll be pretty glad to pay attention. And they’re pretty simple, deceptively so. Love, Truth, Conserve your energy, Be quiet, Be fierce, Stay Open, Be present, Learn you’re not in control, Study your experience, Respect Others’ Boundaries. But Wow! try to practice ‘em all at once! That’ll give any college Ethics Professor a run for her money.

So you keep coming back to the place of quiet stillness to which your mat has become the doorway. “The heart is the hub of all sacred places; go there and roam.” ~Bhagavan Nityananda 

Shut your piehole, Watch your mind.

Is that too harsh?

Sometimes you need to interrupt. Just Stop. And watch.

And from there, we can see what’s to do. Then just do it. Not Nike style, not white knuckled, not competetively, factually, because it’s the only thing to do. You put you + this evolving situation + you watching, noting you AND the situation… soon, the thing will emerge. It will. Trust me.

And if you act before that, it doesn’t matter that it was “right”, it will be more complicated than it needed to be. It will have unintended consequences. Practice waiting for the dust to settle. I promise it gets easier, it’s quicker than you think. Even in a bonafide emergency – and there are precious few of these, really – the half breath to become present before choosing which of the myriad necessities to engage first is totally worth it. That necessity will flow into the next, because you’ve eliminated the competition between the necessities. You’ve entered the moment.

So time on the mat matters. In asana, in pranayam, in meditation. It matters. It’s a laboratory, it’s practice. Literally. It’s how you train. So show up, do it. Shhhh… your mind is talking. Watch it. Hear it. And move on. Feel your mat.

The Challenge

I’m well into the week of the Camel and some days I’ve indulged in a long Camel-centered practice, breathing length and openness into my shoulders, exploring the relation of my triceps to my shoulder girdle, using them to open more fully. (More on that in another post!) Some days I’ve had 5 minutes there of Sun Salutes, 10 of standing and busted out a camel in between.

I’m reminded through all of this that what camels do is store water. So, am I storing refreshing hydration for extended use, or shedding what has been stored because I didn’t digest it when I first took it in?

And I realize, the camel can’t drink until it creates room anew. It has to use its precious store of glistening droplets before it can drink deeply once more.

And the beauty of this pose is that I’m releasing and drinking simultaneously. I am storing sustenance. I am also letting go to make room. Exchange.

And the letting go can be hard. I’m through the initial terror I wrote about last year (see previous post) . And your responses have taught me that I have been in good company: many of us have stored scary and scared feelings in our guts, hearts and voices.

My new challenge is to release through all the layers of my existence. I’m finding that little – one might even say, petty – annoyances and feelings are coming to light. Feelings, judgments, ideas, words I thought I’d left behind. Ones that don’t bear repeating, but let me assure you they’re embarrassing to find tucked away. And they don’t just confine themselves to my mat. They help themselves to the rest of my day, too. Rude these little judgments are. See! There’s another of those rascals!

What is different is that while they register as feelings, they register as “mine” at first, I am finding it possible to let go of the embodied hooks, see them as “not mine, not not mine”, and not re-store them in new the clothes and layers of new judgments. Now, this isn’t a seamless process, and I’ll be perfecting it a long while. But I’m noticing noticing these packages I’ve left for my new self from all my old selves, and it’s allowing me to be more loving to all of them. And to let a lot go.

So that’s my challenge in the week of the Camel: to be a witness to my own experience, to not get lost in it, to let it do what experience does, which is to pass. And so to be able to fill up anew.

What’s yours?

This one is for my Brothers…

in KC. Actually for all my brothers and sisters (that’s you, gentle-fierce reader), but with the two coolest guys I know front and center in my mind.

Who would you be if you quit smoking?

(insert your habit of choice… Who would you be if you quit talking to yourself that way, avoiding that situation, multitasking or running so hard? )

You’d be you, the same you you are now. You have nothing to loose. Or do you? What do you think you might loose? How would it feel? Would it leave a hole? Would you replace that space, or leave it bare? How would it feel?

We each contemplate mortality in different ways. It turns out I’m a real lightweight.  I go to work and hold hands and sometimes ease pain, sometimes joke, sometimes breathe for someone or make the blood circulate temporarily, maybe fix a rhythm, maybe hold those left behind. Don’t get me wrong, these things touch me down to the core. I swore a long time ago I’d quit when they didn’t. But all it took for me to have the scared-in-my-sleep confrontation with my own (these words are a ficton) mortality was a really bad chest cold.

I’ve been sicker the last two weeks than I remember being since I walked around with a burst appendix 20 years ago in college (yeah, I know, body awareness came late). But being of strong stock and some healthy habits, I’ve escaped much real feeling of diminishment. I mean not just “wow I feel like crud today” but “Wow, I wonder if I’ll ever feel like myself again.” Wondering whether the deletrious habits may have caught up, may have wrought their damage, may have come home to roost.

I quit smoking last fall, I’m pretty sure for the last time (oh, yes, there were many others. there always are.) And I turn 40 this August. The key to my quitting was really sitting alongside, for the first time in an abiding way, what I was doing by smoking: stuffing my feelings as surely as a veteran member of Creampuffs Anonymous eats them. Yoga and meditation (there’s little light between the two) had paved the way with skills and tools for this transformation, and I hoped had mitigated the damage I’d done to myself.

But as I’ve recuperated, contemplating the gore I hack up from my much abused and long suffering lungs, as I inhale the medicine I’m used to seeing on the TV table next to the COPDer still sucking nicotine under a constant stream of oxygen through two prongs in their nose, I’m struck: what if I’m never up to my old tricks again? What if my old tricks have depleted my stores so relentlessly as to be unrecoverable? What if despite having stopped at least one of my deletrious habits, I’ve hit the wall?

Drama. I know. But drama is hard to avoid when describing moments so easy to contemplate in the abstract and so difficult to manufacture because their power comes from their creeping up upon – or within – us.

And then the deeper truth came: The wall exists. Whether I’ve smoked  or drank or done yoga or meditated or lived in a goddamn convent my whole life, there is The Wall. Quitting smoking didn’t dissolve one moment of The Wall. What is The Wall? The diminishment of whatever we’ve come to rely on, whatever we have taken in as part of our Selves, whatever we think we cannot do without. Energy & vitality are evidentally right up there for me. The transparent ability to process oxygen from my environment without worrying about it.

And so it turns out that being sick wasn’t about having smoked and lived the rockstar lifestyle for too too long, and it wasn’t my Waterloo either. It was about being depleted and remembering I need to restore. It was about the biology of being human and the trajectory of being a paramedic: the latter puts me among the germies, the former makes me susceptible. It’s both random and it’s wickedly determined (we should talk about free will some time…)

And it was about being thankful I’d found out who am without smoking. Ultimately we won’t change that we’ll die or that it will suck or whether it contains pain and diminishment. But we can impact how light we are when we get there, and what we bring along.

Inspiration, Instruction and Ideas for Daily Practice: Awaken in Every Moment

 

  YogaEveryDay:

Love, Truth, Beauty: Here, Now

weekly newsletter: inspiration and tips for including bliss in your day, every day

 

 

  “Why do you run towards that which you have never taken a step away from?” ~Dogen

 

 

 

New yoga class times – different locations!

Sunday evening at YogaNow! 6pm, stay after for Sangha, chanting and mediatiom  (Sangha suggested donation of $10)

Starting 5/17: Saturday Morning Mixed Level class at YogaNow! 7:30

Starting 5/19: M-W-F Morning Mixed Level classes at Ripple Effect 7:00 

Starting 5/30: Friday Slow Restorative at YogaNow! 4:15

 

Send me your yoga class wish list!

I’m adding classes and locations starting in late May. I already have some newly scheduled classes listed above, but I want to know about your dream class: time, place and format. Be as general or specific as you want!

 

off the mat: 

Office Yoga:  Once an hour stop for a moment of breath. Remember the heart opening exercise from last week, roll your shoulders onto your back, relax your eyes, temples, jaw, tongue and neck. Find a rhythm and depth in your breath, expanding your belly, chest and shoulders, releasing in the reverse order, and observing the pause at the top and bottom. Return to work with increased clarity and vigor! 

                                                                                                 

A New Earth:Chapter 7 “Finding Who You Truly Are”

Gnothi Seauton: Know Thyself

 

 Eckhart Tolle’s newest book is called A New Earth.  I have been asked to host one of the discussion groups for his ongoing web class in conjunction with Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. You can find my official site at YogaEveryDay.Gather.com with articles and comments. You can write your own article and respond to others on this website as well as join the live discussions held Tuesdays on ANewEarth.Gather.com (you do have to be a member… it’s free to sign up). I’m leading discussion this coming Tuesday, April the 8th at 10am MDT and then again Tuesday , April the 22nd and 29th 5pm MDT. 

Of course you can always check in on yogaeveryday.  wordpress.com for my reflections on reading and daily practice or yogaguide.wordpress.com for class and practice guides.

 

Asana of the week: or in this case, lots of ‘em!

 

Surya Namaskar:  Begin in mountain, standing with your hands folded, thumbs touching your heart. Exhale, drop hands, Inhale circle overhead, perhaps lifting your heart for a gentle standing backbend. Exhale, dive forward into a forward fold, knees bent so your belly rests on your thighs. Inhale, extend your head away from your tailbone, rolling shoulders onto your back looking forward. Exhale, step back with your right foot into a lunge (drop your right knee for more ease in the pose). Inhale, lengthen the rib cage away from the pelvis. Exhale, step the left leg back to plank, top of a pushup. Drop your sternum between your shoulder girdles, bringing your shoulderblades together on your back (again, drop knees for more ease). Inhale length, bringing belly toward spine, exhale down to knees – chest – chin (inchworm).Inhale, roll your shoulderblades up and onto your back, pressing  your low belly and tops of feet into ground, raise your head and shoulders away from the ground for cobra. Exhale, pressing into the thumb sides of your hands & rolling your toes under, lift the hips back and up, turning your sitting bones to the sky for downward facing dog. Take five, luxurious breaths and on your fifth exhalation, bring the right foot forward between your hands for a lunge on the other side. Inhale lengthen your tailbone away from your head. Exhale step left foot forward next to right for a forward fold. Inhale, circling the arms up and out come up with a flat back (belly toward spine!) to upward hands, looking up, open heart. Exhale hands back down midline to your heart. Stay here until your breath normalizes, repeat, starting with left foot back, ending with left foot up.

 

Mountain

uphands

forward fold

flat back

lunge

plank

inchworm

cobra

downdog

lunge

forward fold

uphands

Mountain

 

Try 20 minutes of sun salutations in the morning and see how supple and energized you feel!

 

Pranayama of the week:

 Begin with three part yogic breath (above). At the end of an exhalation bring your imagination to your tailbone. Now, imagine on your inbreath that you can drink your breath up your spine from tailbone to skull. Feel the breath on your soft pallette at the back and top of your throat, pulling it upward, sipping the breath up your internal core. Exhale, feel it drain back downward. Feel an energizing connection between your soft palette and pelvic floor. Try for a minute, increasing if you want, any time you want relaxation, connection, awareness.            

 

My mission is to inspire and support you in your daily yoga practice. Relax! Remember, It’s all yoga: you’re always breathing. Sometimes you even know it! For questions, comments, to find out more about practices or ideas mentioned here or how you can get more yoga into your week, call me, Christine Stump, at 505-506-0136 or email me at yogaguides@gmail.com. Namaste.

 

Sometimes yoga just means getting out of the way…

If you’ve been reading here for very long, you know one of my careers is Paramedicine. Street medicine draws on my ability to discern, do, organize, energize – emphasis on the “do!” – turn around and do it again. Again! (think claymation baby dinosaur…

There’s great flow and joy available in this groove. Remembering its a groove though, among other curvy, smooth, deep grooves is the trick. So it’s a blessing when I’m reminded of what I call yoga-mind (you may call it tao-mind, Christ-mind, Spirit or Bob) or union. It’s so easy to get caught up in the role-ness of our careers: I am a …. And then the world conspires to remind us that the activity and the flow are all, and that the special designations and lines we sometimes draw for our own comfort, the ones that identify “me” and “mine” (think furry blue cookie monster) are fictions, fudgible and dispensible – in fact dispense-worthy!

When I count these moments throughout the day as yoga time I find that they don’t substitute for mat time, they inspire it, I want more, I give more, I do more and I yoga more. Then the “I” falls out.

Love, Bodies, and Demons

I’ve been listening to Iyengar’s Light on Life, read by Patricia Walden (yes, I’m inseperable from my iPod). I’m not an Iyengar practitioner and have always been disturbed by the stories of striking students and denigration of the body. All third (or twenty-seventh) hand, mind you, but repetitive none-the-less. His dualistic perspective seems to me evident from Light on Yoga, and is not one towards which I gravitate.

But I was listening to Lara’s last YogaPeeps show (yay Lara! see my blogroll for a link…) Light on Life was one of the books highlighted at the end. And it was one of those turns of phrase that tells you, “hey, that’s something to check out.”

So here I am, listening to a book I’ve passed over many times before. And I am not only impressed, but awash in his wisdom. These are not, to my ear, the words of a body denigrating yogi. In fact, the bath of tears I find myslef taking when Walden reads his words about loving every cell of your body, putting love into every cell of your body, tells me the shoe may have been on the wrong foot.

I’ve been engaged in a practice aimed at dissolving obstacles recently. I began with exterior obstacles. I quit smoking. I’ve created healthier routines. I’m rearranging my work life to align with my creativity. All well and good. And then I became aware of some stirrings of internal obstacles, stirrings of bonds being shaken. Old bonds. Strong bonds. And then there was fear protecting those bonds. And I was able to dissolve some of that. All the while, mind you, I’m still not sure what the bonds hold, only that it’s part of me and that the binding is keeping it hidden. Also, this is taking weeks. Slow, wordless, sometimes dubious process.  I plod on.

And slowly I am aware of a subtle rumbling, an undercurrent of unhappiness. Not with this or that. In fact this and that all are well. Slowly I find it’s with myself. It’s a secret, long hidden but ever-active seemingly endless cavern of self loathing. That’s right. Self-loathing yoga teacher. if you want to put a label on it.

And actually this is where labels are helpful. Because when I’m teaching I feel the farthest thing from self loathing. I feel transparent and powerful and awed by my students’ power all at the same time. I feel beautiful.

But when I look at myself or find myself wearing the role of yoga teacher (as in “what does your wife do for a living? Oh, how interesting! kind of role) deep feelings emerge that don’t fit with my pictures. Unsettling feelings, feelings familiar from long ago, from things and times I thought I’d processed and released. The ugly little girl (not the truth, but my picture of myself). The chubby girl. The athletic girl (not used as a compliment). They’re all here with me once more.

And Iyengar’s wisdom in Walden’s voice is helping me to care for them, to love every cell of them. To enjoy all my steps, to realize my samskara, meet it with tapas, svadyaya, surrender and find samtosha. My bonds are little by little being released, and the prisoners are escaping. They didn’t need to be locked up. Only to be acknowledged and loved.

Fall back into your Self

Yesterday my practice was crunched between writing and dog walks and getting off to work, quick sun salutations to warm and move me. The familiarity helps me connect to contentment and stay open for the surprises of my body and my day.

I’d just finished writing on Gather about the pain body Eckhart Tolle talks about, so this way of relating to pain and perceived burdens was much on my mind. As I entered the rhythm of practice and my mind began to clear of such entanglement, I rose from the forward bend at the end of a cycle, arms circling wide, dropping my tailbone to raise my heart. The heaviness of these thoughts lifted and I sensed them as a cloud gathering from my root, up my core and coalescing in front of my third eye. As my hands rose and I lengthened my side bodies in Urdva Hastasana I felt lightness and clarity. And as I brought my hands together in front of my third eye to trace down my midline to touch my heart, it was as if my hands had come together to form a knife’s edge which dissipated the cloud.

Try it for yourself, intentionally imagining what weighs on you as a cloud in front. Standing, circle your arms up and out, coming together and slicing through the pea-thick murkiness. See how you feel.

In some cultures the Self is believed to live in the back of the body, around the spine. I was told this when I first had the bodily sensation of falling back into myself years ago. As if I’d been living out in front, disconnected, and becoming present felt like finally coinciding with myself. Fall back into yourself today. Take a quiet moment, ask what will bring you back. Even if you’re not sure what the “right” answer is, try your first idea and see how it feels, if it gives you another idea, or if you just want to stay with the feeling you’ve now found. Fall back into your Self today, again, and again.

What does Eckhart Tolle's book _A New Earth_ have to do with yoga?

  The focus of this book is precisely yoga, only he uses different terminology. He approaches union with self from a truly philosophic – wisdom loving – perspective, discussing time relationship, elements of consciousness, relation of self to its capacities and authenticity.  Like philosophy used to be done, when it was a practice in community, in times we only now have drama and poetry to record (think Plato, among others).

In the web class held every Monday night  he and Oprah begin each live broadcast with silence. Silent meditation. In communion with 100s of 1,000s of others. 

This last week the discussion was about what he calls the pain body. The pain body refers to the stored up energy of all the emotional experiences we haven’t had the time, consciousness, energy or resources to process. The pain body in itself is not a  problem; it simply holds the remnants we have not let go. We can come back to them in the present moment and finish digesting in our own time. But as long as the remnants are being held by the pain body, they are juicy temptation to the ego. They are, after all, the stuff of stories, of drama and of entanglement when properly spun. And that is what the ego does. It spins. Stories, time, past into future, mistaking the past for the present. It’s your own personal spin doctor, running double time in your ears, not even the phone tapped, just runnin’ your world.

Until…. until you drop in. Drop in to the present moment. Drop in to your body. Become present, here, now. (Yes, I believe you will find Love, Truth and Beauty this way: Here, Now. Notice I didn’t say pleasure. That’s fickle. LTB, though, that’s guarunteed.)When you drop in, become present it interupts the sound track, if only for an instant. It inserts a sacred doorstop between the streaming banners and the open space you’ve stepped into. You can watch, observe. Now don’t get caught up in judgment, that’s just more spin: Just be. Offer your own loving presence to yourself for this moment. This one moment. The only one there is.

In yoga this digestion of experience is said to occur through tapas, a fierce, firey focus on practice. We build the fire in the belly through practice, repitition, focus, concentration, meditation, pranayam, and that fire is the digestor of our food as well as our experience. It allows us to move through the world in real time, acting and reacting to things as they are, in the moment and completely experience it, so that like ducks we can shake off the unuseful remnants and remain fresh in the present moment.

Sustained Practice

By sustained practice of all the component parts of yoga, the impurities dwindle away and wisdom’s radiant light shines forth with discriminative knowledge.

Sutras of Patanjali II.28(tr. Stiles)

Wait…. let me get the last of this sand out of my ears… oh, never mind, I kind of like the reminder. Just returned from a vacation on one of the Georgia islands, the highlight of which was yoga on the beach, so close to the surf that I caught a wave at one point! “Gorgeous” doesn’t begin to touch the experience. “Oneness” might… if it weren’t a word.

What does this have to do with “sustained practice of all the component parts of yoga”?  Everything and Nothing.

I’ve been engaged in an experiment in balance the last few months, and the plate I’ve been dropping is blogging.  I could give you all kinds of reasons. Suffice it to say that I’ve fallen in love with regular sleep since switching to a day shift – luscious, deep, dark descending sleeps of eight and ten hours – and this has required choices.

One of the choices has required me to investigate the role of words in my life: do I use them to reveal or conceal? And how? What I’ve learned is that I conceal by what I don’t talk about. Sometimes I conceal from myself by my story about “needing” to blog.

So I’ve chosen regular practice instead of blogging mostly and have revealed a deep need to shift the priorities of  my life. I’m scaling back on my career, or maybe I’m switching. I’ll let the radiant light reveal which in time. I’ve been working on patience. I’ve been listening to my internal monologue, creating  space for it. I’ve been practicing mantra japa. Reflecting on the yamas and niyamas. I’m finding Ahimsa – nonviolence – really difficult in ways that have shocked me. I’m thinking of tapas – fierceness – having a role in forgiveness. I’m processing a lot Eckhart Tolle’s book.

Oh, yeah, and I’m keeping up certs in stuff like Pediatric Advanced Life Support and stuff. Oh, and vacay.

Going to go practice some saucha and clean up more of this sand we’ve managed to treck back across six states and two airplanes What have you been up to? What has your practice revealed?

Stay tuned for practice tips, links to podcasts, reviews of awesome (and, yes, satya urges me to say so, too) and not so awesome yoga books. And of course, reports from the mat on the state of the mat. But that’s the part that doesn’t change as the impurities dwindle away….