Mula Bandha

Thanks to Alisa who left a comment on the Jalandara Bandha post and asked about Mula and Uddiyana. I loved her description of the method she’d been using and tried it:

“So far, the best practice I know if is putting my hands on a sticky mat and my feet on a tray and sliding the tray backwards and forwards without bending my knees.”

What a fantastic idea! I think this process really gets to the feeling of the bandha, but maybe isn’t ideal for discriminating among the deeper layers that reveal themselves over time. David Life has  great article on the layers and how Mula Bandha relates to two distinct mudras in the same area on the Yoga Journal Page under “Practice”, called “To Infinity and Beyond!”

I usually begin to teach Mula Bandha as part of a breathing practice called kalabhati, rapid and forceful exhalations generated from rapid contractions of the low belly. When you compress the transverse abdominus which runs laterally between the pelvic crests, you naturally also lift the pelvic floor from pressure and attachments (not the egoic kind, the connective tissue kind).

From there we work imaginitively, because the most important and difficult part of this process is to actually feel with nuance this area of your own body. Most people don’t, thank you very much, and it can feel uncomfortable to refer to these areas when you’re unused to feeling them.

I begin with the usual references to Kegel Excercises, with the caveat that this is starting place. Mula Bandha begins with a contraction of the pelvic floor which is an intricate network of fascia, other connective tissue and muscles with either two or three openings, depending upon your gender. Kegel gets to the front opening. “Contract Uranus!” gets to the posterior. What we’re aiming for is a subtle lifting sensation above the perineum, and when you engage it you’ll feel instantaneously bright minded. It’s like your energy just bounced up from a trampoline.

And that is the final image I like with this exercise, usually performed sitting in Sukhasana or Virasana. Imagine a flat drum stretched from sitting bone to sitting bone, and from your tailbone up to the front of your pelvis. As your breath lands gently on this drum, it snaps gently back into the body, sending the breath upward. If in Virasana, press the knees together gently to tug the sitting bones slightly and tighten the trampoline.

Breathe, Love, Live!

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.

Reflections on Eng's take on A New Earth and Yoga

I was listening to Elizabeth Lesser’s discussion after A New Earth aired last week (I download it on iPod for my walking pleasure) and was so taken with Kim Eng’s integration of the spirit and silence evoked in the book on which the web class is based. She teaches movement based awareness, and counts yoga among her “modalities” with Chi Kung and T’ai Chi. She talked about progressing from breath, to sensation to innerbody feeling. I’ve been using this as a sort of template for myself and for my class, and the results have been, well, peaceful.

She brought people to their own silence by first suggesting a breath focus. She progressed to noticing sensation – usually tension, stress – but not naming it. Just being it, being with it.  She calls this the outer body. And finally, casting your attention, awareness, your inner gaze on your own sense of aliveness. She suggested the question “How do you know you are alive?” Answered not by words, not by concepts, but in silence, by feeling.

This corresponds in essence to a yogic view of embodiment. Since I don’t relate to yoga as a modality, but as a way of being – like the Tao – encompassing and companioning other ways, I just see the reality to which different systems point. Yogic Philosophy describes embodiment as “koshas” – sheaths. There is a purely physical, the food body, there is energy or breath, there is interactive mind, there is the wisdom body and finally just bliss. Each within and among the others. One way to say what yoga is, is to focus on allowing the alignment of these koshas, or bodies. Allowing, because it’s not a relationship that can manufactured, only facilitated. The kinks and blocks are part of the whole and awareness is alchemical element that dissolves what demands dissolution, cleanses what clings to what is not its own, awakens what is dormant and grows what is nascent.

And breath awareness is lovely, immediate access that defies conceptualization, making it an open and wide entryway into the space we all are.  Sensation really takes the open awareness and gives it a finite determined object  with which to practice open awareness. And aliveness, chi, prana, spirit: awareness opened on this vista gives rise to presence and joyful action. That’s really the point of it all.

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.

Awareness & Thinking: A User's Guide to Recursive Consciousness

Something Tolle said from the very beginning rubbed the trained Philosopher in me the wrong way: Stop Thinking. That’s like blasphemy for someone who deals in definition, analysis and understanding. Or so I initially reacted.

Tolle makes a deeply subtle distinction between thinking and awareness that helps to illuminate the nature of reflective, or recursive, consciousness. Simple on its surface, the fact that human consciousness is multileveled and that the levels are free to act independently or interact together has been the bedrock of philosophical observation since the Ancients. Plato and Aristotle used the metaphor of the tripartite soul. The Medievals related to God as the ordering principle. Descartes made a crucial, revealing and powerful error in taking as his bedrock “Cogito ergo sum” often translated “I think, therefore I am.”

Tolle directs us behind thinking, defined as unbridled naming or language using. Who is it who thinks, and thus knows “is”? (Yes, Billie, it does depend on what the definition of “is” is.) Tolle’s work is no polemic against analysis or language, but a careful understanding of its relevance, which has for so long been taken to be universal. Language depends on distinctions, on duality. The very structure of sentence making depends on the subject object distinction and is remarkably useful. We are often seduced by this usefulness, however, into mistaking description for experience. Tolle’s call is one to experience, to silence punctuating our endless naming which breaks the present apart into past, present, future, memory and expectation, subject and object.

Take breathing breaks to interupt the stream of unconsciousness and bring awareness to thinking mind. Do you know where your mind is and what it’s up to? Check in, surprise yourself.

Listen to your body: do yoga!

Yes, yes, yes! you can do yoga every day!

One of the most frequent searches that lands people on this blog is “how often to do yoga” or “how many times to repeat…” or “can i do yoga every day.”

Now, how you include yoga in your life is the real point of creativity. I know Ashtanga yogis who have a quite regimented practice for an hour and a half to two hours every day except full moon. I know yogis who attend one class a week and pay attention to their breathing on certain cues. One is at stoplights, one sets aside time at the same time each day.

What has worked for me is dispensing with pre-ordained plans, but making an encounter with the mat unavoidable. In this way, I sit down and listen and follow the signs that arise. So some days it’s quiet & gentle, some rather vigorous. Some days all chant, or all pranayama. I follow my curiosity and passion and usually have something I’ve been meaning to try, or a concept or technique with which I’m playing so this brings me to practice and practice brings me to myself.

Today I have a rather virulent case of the flu, so yoga is special, very low key. When I first got up I thought I’d go for a walk, take some Ibuprofen, do a podcast class & hustle off to work. Boy was that plan a bust.  My fever was so raging I was shaking and sweating and I realized that curtailing the work my immune system was doing would only make the flu last longer.

It’s such a commonplace, but the truth runs deep: yoga means union. So the first yoga I did today found me. I wrapped up in a blanket, then piled on four more, til I was immersed in the sound of my own breath. Have you noticed a deeper quality to your breath when you are fighting infection? Becoming profoundly connected to that rhythm, the feeling, sound, being so exhausted that the breath usurps your entire consciousness for a few minutes, this can actually be a gift. It helped me realize that fighting my own immune system would prolong and complicate a battle I really just needed to turn myself over to.

So my practice on the mat has been really restorative: quiet, gentle attention oriented pranayam, vitparita karani, lots of bolsters. Forward folding for slowing and comforting the mind, backbending for stimulating and supporting the immune system. And of course lots of water, sleep and vitamin C.

I look forward to getting back to my surya namaskar, shoulder opening, heart opening, inverting, playing, sweating practice. But even on a day like today it’s good to go to the mat and find out what I’ve got. Union means finding out what’s there before beginning to make demands, and then to desire and do things nurturing for what you actually find.

So, yes! come to the mat, find out what you’ve got today and indulge it with yoga. Whether it’s asana, pranayam, meditation, mantra responding with integrity to the needs you actually find in that moment of stripping away is really the beginning of your yoga.

Fall & yoga

So, the actual asana. Haven’t written so much about that lately. I once took a workshop with Richard Freeman (yes, if you’re a regular you’ve heard this before in which he said all of yoga could happen for us in Mountain, or Staff pose. The rest is just to distract, wear out, and discipline the mind. I paraphrase, of course. 

Not that there’s not a lot to love on the mat. It is the cause of hand and leg bending after all, which is a joy unto itself. And the more open our bodies become, the more freedom I notice we each find in our lives. And there really is something good about finally finding yourself in that pose you never thought you’d do. It may be monkey mind, but it’s a good monkey!

So with the blazing yellow of the trees just beginning to trace the New Mexico landscape, I’ve added some pranayama to my teaching. In addition to our usual friendly yogic three part breath attention, we’ve added Alternate Nostril Breathing, and depending on the day & class Skull Shining Breath beforehand.

Skull shining breath is a fast, exhale focused belly pumping breath, really excellent at creating heat, clarity & focus. If you make a diamond by joinging your thumbs and forefingers, then place it on your abdomen by putting your thumbs in your navel, you’ve framed the portion of your belly you want to be engaged. It’s the transvere abdominus, and you pump breath out in short bursts, allowing the breath to flow back in passively before pumping it out again. A slow set is one per second, fast 2 per. What keeps this from being pathological hyperventillation? Well, I actually tested myself on 300 rounds of Skull Shining Breath (Sanskrit: Kalabhati) on our capnography at work. I maintained a constant 32-35 mm Hg with good waveforms. Translation: it’s the CO2 retained by not exhaling fully that makes you pass out with hyperventillation. By focusing on deeply generated full exhalations, you maintain a balance of offloaded toxins and invited nourishments.

Start with three rounds of ten, the first at a pace of one per second. Go faster or increase your pace only as you feel comfortable and confident.

This is a great waker upper in the middle of the night, and heat generator for winter camping, among many other things.

Nadi Shodhana, or Alternate Nostril Breathing, takes this fired up breath and balances it by directing it in & out of each nostril, well, alternately.  We know from experience and scads of research on EMDR as well as cross patterning that stimulating the halves of the body alternately assists the nervous system in sorting information. Alternate nostril breathing is also really great for allergies, at least in my case.

Take your right hand and bend in the first and second finger. Place the thumb against the right nostril and inhale smoothly, slowly (say, to a count of four if that’s comfortable) through the left. Close off the left with the ring & pinkie (both nostrils are compressed right now) for  a retention of comfortable length (you might try one equal to the count for the inbreath). Release the right nostril and exhale – smoothly and slowly for the same count as the inhale – through the right nostril, and observe a rest, or kumbacha of the outbreath, at the bottom, allowing your spirit to reside in the emptiness, for a comfortable period of time, again you might try another count equal to the inbreath.

Then inhale right nostril, compress it (the left is still compressed from before, so both are closed at the top); practice a comfortable, non-straining retention at the fullness again, release the left nostril and exhale smoothly, yes, for the same count, resting in emptiness at the end of your outbreath.

This was one round and it won’t take as long to do as it does to read about. Do about four rounds to start and add as you become familiar and comfortable.

We’ve also been doing more twists and sided poses, compressing the organs and flooding them with luscious nutrient and oxygen filled blood and prana upon the release.

Does your practice change with the fall? Do you consciously plan this? Is it something you intuitively and naturally fall into?

Whatever you’re doing, make it yoga… and breathe, open, find the metaphor, embrace your meaning.

Crying as Pranayama

OK, so it wasn’t the first thing I came upon.

First, I slept ’til noon. (While I endorse indulgence, it’s not so much as it might seem. In fact I figured out – genius! – that I should do so more often, because my working plan has been to try to make myself sleep til noon days I work, and force myself out of bed early days I don’t so I “get more done.” What a doofhead.)

Then, I sat in my pajamas, ate chocolate chip cookies and watched soap operas. Followed by Law & Order & Crossing Jordan. While doing Sudoku. For reasons I find embarrassingly obvious I find the order exhibited by cop shows and number puzzles comforting.

Then I looked up job coaching on the web. And employment ads. Then I googled “I need a new job.” (Even funnier results: “I hate my f***ing job.”)

Then I put Baroque music on Itunes streaming from the computer, took my latest installation of Tantric teaching to the bath….

And then I finally started to deal.

Pranayam is consciously relating to breath. Crying is breathing with a vengeance.  Consciously Breathing With A Vengeance, now that’s yoga.

Frequency: vacillating between AM & FM

More important than Repetition: Frequency. No, not the REM song… but imagine a sin wave (the trig function…not a sudden eruption of immorality): each complete wave is a cycle, a bleep. Radio frequencies, sound frequencies of all kinds are described in Hertz (or megahertz) – cycles per second.

Each wave of practice, each cycle is complete unto itself. Perhaps it’s a day, perhaps you’ve committed to a cycle of days devoted to a single practice. What’s more important is regularity of these cycles. Some will be lower amplitude, some higher, some briefer, some longer. Regularity, return, that’s what’s important. Return. Return.

In radio the lower frequencies are on the AM dial … fewer cycles per second (or day, or month for our metaphor). But these cycles reach farther. Sometimes it takes care and attention to tune in, but sometimes it’s worth it.

FM radio sends out higher frequency and more signals, but they can peter out between cities and often contain the louder more cacophonic music.

I like listening to both. Sometimes the AM calms me down, sometimes the FM dials me in. One way or the other, I listen every day. Return.