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How Not to Wreck Your Body

ByElizabeth

The New York Times just published a lengthy article on “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body.”  The response of one of my fellow certified Anusara yoga instructors was “duh!”  This conversation greets me as I am about to offer a free gentle and therapeutic yoga class at Willow Street Yoga to invite new and continuing students to discover the power of the Anusara alignment principles to heal and transform challenges of embodiment.  If I were not highly confident in the power of Anusara yoga to heal when practiced mindfully, I might be worried that the article would keep away potential students.  Instead, I welcome the “news” as a way to broaden the invitation to discovery.

As I have blogged about before, at an intensive, John Friend once compared advanced asana to digitalis–depending on dosage and circumstances of the individual digitalis is at once the deadliest plant in the garden and one of the most powerful medications to heal the heart.  We don’t read much about digitalis in the news, but we are constantly bombarded with contradictory news flashes about the health risks and benefits of lots of things — coffee, red wine, vitamins, running, anything that has been either held out as either a cure all or an evil that is ubiquitously practiced or imbibed.  Why?  I think it is because we in this society are hungry for panaceas, for effortless solutions, for the latest thing, for something to save us from emptiness and ill health, without actually having to work at it.  It is newsworthy that yoga bears risks precisely because we (the general societal we) wanted it to be a perfect solution without actually requiring any change how we live the rest of our lives (including diet, exercise, relationship to others) and to bring to yoga the mindfulness, determination, and steadiness that it requires to bring the peace, harmony, and healing it offers.

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    The Terracotta Warriors of Emperor Qin (and Iccha Shakti)

    ByElizabeth

    I went today with my younger sister and brother-in-law to see the Terracotta Warriors exhibit at the National Geographic Museum.  Even with only a few of the warriors and photographs of the site, it is possible to imagine the sheer magnitude of the vision of thousands of these life-sized images living underground at the tomb of the Emperor.  I then thought of how vast must have been the Emperor’s yearning for power and the wildness of his vision of this extraordinary tomb for it to have become manifest.  Trying to expand my imagination to understand the reality of such ambition and creativity I thought of the principle of iccha shakti.  Iccha shakti is the very will of consciousness to be, to creatively manifest, to become diversified embodiment out the universal.  Ego and will are not themselves bad, but our very freedom allows us to choose a path that is out of alignment with the principles of joy and unity.

    The Terracotta Warriors show the immense possibilities of exercising will.  In their very existence and the manner of their coming into being, they evidence both enormous cruelty and disdain for life and a wondrous manifestation of human creativity, collaboration, and effort.  One of the goals of yoga, in teaching us the possibilities of our own freedom and creativity, is to lead us to choose a life that is progressively better aligned with nature and with all of beings.  This is the path of one who practices, and I find it ever a challenge.

  • Sauca (and freecycle)

    ByElizabeth
    The first of the niyamas or ethical restraints set forth by Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras is sauca, which means cleanliness or purification.  BKS Iyengar in his Light on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali says that sauca is both internal and external and that mastery of yoga is unrealizable without observance of the ethical principles of the yamas and niyamas [non-harming, truthfulness, non-stealing, aligning with the good, greedlessness, cleanliness, contentment, fire for practice, self-study, and acceptance — my definitions] is not possible.
    What does cleanliness mean in this time in our society?  Scrubbing the kitchen and bath with toxic cleaners and slathering ourselves with chemical products and taking long showers may make our house and body look and feel clean, but it is soiling the earth.  It is definitely easier to practice in a neat room than a messy one, but we need to learn how to be clean also keeps the earth’s environment clean as well.
    Earlier this week, I started cleaning out the “art closet.”  I have always created visual art, and before I shifted to teaching yoga, I spent a number of years creating at a wild pace (partly at the encouragement of a live-in partner), using a room in my house as a studio, and exhibiting and selling my work.  One side effect of that intense period of creation (and one of the key reasons I shifted away from it), was that it created a lot of stuff — for every painting or photograph I sold or gave as a gift, another five or eight accumulated in the house.  When I entered yoga teacher training, I turned the art studio into a yoga studio.  I was unable at that time to make a decision as to what to keep and what to discard.  Thus paralyzed, I put it all in a closet — art works and extra supplies alike.
    Having a closet full of stuff long untouched and only some of which was wanted makes a house energetically stale.  Finally, this week, I cleaned out most of the painting materials.  I even decided not to keep images that I did not want to sell or exhibit again.  It was tempting just to break everything up and put it out on the curb for trash.  But the stretchers for the canvas are completely reusable by a working artist.  So I took the paintings apart and and then did a posting on “freecycle dc” offering the art supplies.  If you are not familiar with freecycle, it is pretty simple.  You join the group in your area and let people know what you have to give away.  Nothing is for sale.  Nothing is bartered.  The point is to transfer something you no longer want to someone who wants/needs it.  The recipient is local, so only limited fossil fuels are used to transfer the goods.  What you no longer want is saved from the landfill.
    I’ve cleaned my closet.  Another artist will be creating new art with old materials instead of new.  Less goes into the landfill.  That’s a great example of sauca.

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