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Found Exhortation
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
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Midnight Yoga
Every once and a while, I find myself restless at bedtime or wakeful in the night. The following series serves to make it easier for me to go to sleep and for me to feel fully rested as if I had not been short sleep:
1. Vipariti karani (legs up the wall). Start with legs up the wall for five minutes or longer, then move legs into baddha konasana (butterfly) for several breaths, then put them back up the wall. While your legs are up the wall, first just watch the breath. Then concentrate on the breath, inviting the exhales to be twice the length of the inhales.
2. Twisted forward bend. Using a bolster and a folded blanket (or two or three folded blankets) lengthwise on your mat, place the left thigh next to the edge of the blanket pile, allow yourself to sit heavily. Staying sweetly grounded, hug your hips together to embrace your core and then draw the left waist back as you bow forward onto the support of the blanket. You can allow your forearms and hands to rest on the floor or you can bend your elbows a little more and tuck your hands between the blankets under your forehead. Keeping the attention on the breath, inhaling lovingly draw in, exhaling more fully accept the support of the blanket. Hold for a few minutes and then repeat on the other side.
3. Supported balasana (child’s pose). With your knees wide apart and the big toes together, draw the blanket pile between your knees up to mid-thigh. Place another blanket (or a pillow) across your calves. Bow forward onto the support of the blankets. Half way through, turn your head to the other side. If your thoughts are still active, just let them be and turn your attention back to the breath.
4. When you are ready to come out of balasana, tuck your toes under and lift your hips into adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog). If you’d like, you can stay here for several breaths with your head supported by the blankets. When you are ready, walk your hands back to uttanasana (standing forward bend). Quietly and mindfully get back into bed and lie in savasana.
Sweet dreams!
- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc)
Devil in the Details (and jnanam bandaha)
The second sutra of the Siva Sutras is “jnanam bandhaha” (knowledge is bondage). In the context of the Siva Sutras, this tells us that getting caught in trying to acquire knowledge of the manifest world and all of its infinite minutiae can lead us away from a sense of connection to a universal spirit.
We have the phrase in the work place that the “devil is in the details” both because getting caught up in the details can take us away of accomplishing a desired result and because the details need to be worked out to realize the result, and the details (not the theory) are the hard part. At the societal level, for example, working out the details of a health care bill and how it will actually function seems to be preventing us, as a society, from offering health care to all. On our yoga mats, we need to understand the details of physical alignment so that the practice strengthens and optimizes our health, rather than taking us physically and energetically out of alignment, but we do not want concentration on the details to take us away from heart and spirit.
The “devil may be in the details” but we cannot stop the details from being part of our existence. As much as we need not to get so bogged down in the details that we have discord, distrust, unhappiness, and ineffectiveness, we also need to cultivate knowledge of the details. As beings embodied in space and time in the manifest world, we need to cultivate knowledge so that we can recognize when the details are not in optimal alignment, so that we have sufficient knowledge, strength, intuition, and subtlety to be able to shift the details so that they lead towards good for ourselves individually and collectively.
What a devilish conundrum.
