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Rearrange: Make Your Own Poetry (Jai )
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A Patch of Sunlight
This morning when I went for silent worship, I was in a seat that was in a delicious, warm patch of sunlight. Like a cat in such a spot, I was perfectly content to be still and completely happy. It is good, sometimes, to have stillness come easily, especially if it has been a challenge in recent days.
When my students ask me about starting a home practice, I suggest that they start with their favorite poses. If we start with what is challenging or what we like least or what we think we need to do because we think it will be good for us, it is easy to get frustrated or to find something else to do. Better to start with what is easeful and inviting and then work in the challenging aspects then not to practice at all.
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State of the Garden (and Puja to Dakshinamurti)
Rose, nasturtium, pansy, lavender
Should I Be In Alignment or Should I Relax Completely? (and Namah Shivayah)
For the first few years I was teaching, one season a year, I would have as my overall session theme the Anusara invocation (for the words written out, click on “invocation” in the menu bar above). In so doing, I invited myself and others to contemplate at the heart level the meaning of each word, of why we were making the invocation, of how the invocation might inform not only our practice, but how we bring our practice off the mat and into our daily lives. Each time I chant the invocation–and it has been hundreds of times now over the years I have been studying, practicing, and teaching Anusara yoga–I seek to invoke into my practice the deepest qualities of the heart that it represents.
Over the winter break, when I was preparing for this session, the invocation called to me. I decided it was time to make it as a specific offering again. Last week and this week, including in the restorative workshop offered at Willow Street Yoga last Saturday, I have been exploring namah shivayah from the first line. Namah–which has the same verbal origins at the English word “name”–means to bow, to honor, to name. It forms the basis of the greeting namaste–with the light in me, I bow to the light in you. Sivayah here is our siva nature. It is variously the light within, auspiciousness, spirit, divine nature, elemental goodness.
When I was practicing in preparation for teaching the week’s classes and the restorative workshop and contemplating (practicing bhavana on) namah shivayah, I thought about a question I often get when I teach restoratives: “should I be maintaining the alignment principles or should I be relaxing completely?” When I get the question phrased this way, I look the student straight in the eye and respond, “yes.” I get a quizzical look; how could the answer be “yes” to an “either or” question? The answer is “yes” because in each pose, we are seeking to embody the fullest expression of namah shivayah. Taking the time to make sure to be in alignment when setting up for a pose, moving into a pose, reaching the pinnacle of a pose, and then moving out of or dissolving a pose, is out of loving respect for your body and the energy that courses through your body. We seek to be fully in alignment in all stages of each pose, not only to minimize the likelihood of being in pain or getting or aggravating an injury and to increase the likelihood of healing any existing injuries and expanding our capacity to feel free in our bodies, but also out of a profound respect and honor for the self, the teachings, and the practice.
Sometimes people think that focusing on getting the alignment just right is fussy or rigid and the antithesis of relaxation. In the case of restoratives especially, everyone coming to the practice wants to be at peace and feel free of effort. In the hunger to get to a place of relaxation, some hurry into the pose without honoring the alignment. Oftentimes, it is the hurry to relax and the loss of attention to the details of alignment (of both the mind-body and the props) that leads to pain or discomfort in a pose that is meant to be held for a long time, as are restoratives. When a student tells me that they are in pain in a particular posture, I invite the student to back off, set up the pose again, and far more often than not, all discomfort disappears, and the student is able to move into a blissful place. The student then experiences for herself how much the alignment enables the surrender to the exquisite opening to siva and the blissful attributes of siva (satcitananda).
One of the reasons I find restoratives to be such a powerful practice is because they require such focused attention on alignment to enable full relaxation. As such, they are a great way to understand the need for the perfect and simultaneous balance of effort (tapas) and surrender (ishvara pranadhana). So the answer is “yes;” the answer is “nama shivayah.” In everything we do, in every aspect of our practice on and off the mat, we want to be consciously in alignment. We want to use all the knowledge that has been imparted by our teachers and experienced in our own practice as a way of honoring and naming and helping to enable an unceasing, simultaneous, and full surrender to our own siva nature.
“First principle” (and akrama and krama)
When I think about the Anusara alignment principles in the context of the tattvas (see earlier posts), I think about “opening to grace” appearing in two places on the tier. As “first principle” it is the first among a larger sequence about how we come to the mat, rather than just the first of the physical principles. “First principle” not only starts the practice and the dialogue, but is already there. It is, in this sense, so fundamental that it is not part of the sequence, but is sequenceless (akrama). If you are fully conscious of “grace” and can embody it in all aspects of your physical, energetic, and mental day to day existence without further instruction, study, or practice, then there is no need for other practice or instruction (this I think is a very rare being, and certainly I’m not such a being).
The next set of tattvas — suddha vidya, ishvara, saddha shiva, and shiva-shakti (see link above), correspond to the Anusara alignment principles of “attitude, alignment, and action,” which although they are themselves described in sequence, are fundamentally sequenceless as they happen all at the same time and are more elemental than the practice of the physical/energetic alignment principles in sequenced practice.
In this way of understanding the play between the sequenceless and sequenced, we have a universal “first principle” that embodies the purpose of all we do on and off the mat. It is followed by how we want to practice, described in a way that becomes less of just a concept (which as a universal concept is akrama) and more of a practical understanding (which applies when we are in space and time and therefore in the krama of embodied existence). As we dance in this play between the sequenceless and the sequenced, we come to practice (or to do any activity) with the “attitude” of wanting to live the “first principle,” to know and experience what is fully present and not bound by time and space. We then (because we must) study and practice specific “alignment” to try and express this attitude with our “actions.”
The physical/energetic alignment principles then come in as a the way of better refining, studying, and practicing the desire to recognize with mind and body the “first principle.” The sequence of “open to grace, muscular energy, inner spiral, outer spiral, organic energy” comes then at the level of physical and mental practice to return us back to “first principle.” “Open to grace” is first in this sequence, too, but as “first principle,” for me, it is something more than the first of the alignment principles. “First principle” is not just the start of how we practice when we practice Anusara yoga, but the whole reason for practice. It is the universal, overarching, blissful element of being that draws us to the practice because of our yearning to know it.
