Similar Posts

  • | | | |

    In the Garden

    ByElizabeth

    I spent a delightful couple of hours in the garden with the birds this morning before heading up to teach at Willow Street. I weeded and dead-headed and watered. The birds and I both ate grapes right off the vine. Every year since this vine started to fruit, birds that are not here the rest of the year have appeared for the few weeks the grapes are ripening. I imagine that there is a bird listserve where some bird posts that Goodman’s grapes are ready. Come and get them. Neither my presence nor the cats on the screened porch deters them. The grapes are too delicious for them to allow their natural caution to interfere with immediate access.

    Me, I know that I am a spoiled, middle-class urban gardener. If my survival depended on getting the whole harvest (as opposed to a large handful of grapes daily for three or four weeks), I would be fending off the birds instead of enjoying their presence. The squirrels and the tomatoes–that’s another matter altogether.

    Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

  • Savasana

    ByElizabeth

    When I first started teaching, one of the things I found most inspiring was seeing my students in savasana.  It is such a rare and precious things to see a group of people deeply relaxed, especially for someone who came to yoga essentially restless and who inhabits a workplace that is, so to speak, rather caffeinated.  For me, the practice of savasana has been transforming.  After 10 years of steady practice, my sleep has deepened and become more consistently restful, which has enhanced my ability to come from a yogic place off the mat.

    Savasana is in some sense for me always the so-called “pinnacle pose” of practice.  The pinnacle pose is not necessarily the most physically challenging pose in terms of combined strength and flexibility, although it is an essential component of the sequencing of any good practice to have the poses gradually open all the parts of the body needed to do the most physically challenging pose.

    When thinking about any practice and determining whether a cooling or heating, expanding or inward-going, playful or serious practice would be most appropriate, I ask whether the practice will lead to a place where is will be possible to be completely free and relaxed for 10-15 minutes?  Will the practice enable the body feel open and released, strengthened and supported, integrated and aligned, so that lying on a hard floor will seem like being on the finest bedding?  Will the focus of the practice help simultaneously free the mind of thought and burden and yet keep it focused and alert so that body and mind can surrender to the full, blissful of conscious being in the moment?  Will the practice serve to align the koshas (or sheaths) so that the outer body is soft and relaxed, the energy body full and bright, and the mind and intuitive bodies one with the anandamaya kosha (the bliss body)?

    Some teachers have said that savasana is one of the most advanced of yoga poses.  I would agree.

  • | | |

    When a Student Asks a Question (and Tensegrity)

    ByElizabeth

    When a student asks a question and I do not know the answer, I do not try to answer it then and there.  I do go home and take the time to try and find an answer.  If I find enough information to be useful, I follow up.  Last night, before the William Penn House class, a student asked whether I had received a recent mass e-mailing from John Friend in which he mentioned teaching about biotensegrity.  I knew the answer to whether I had received the email–yes, a friend had forwarded it.  I did not know, though, how John was using the term biotensegrity.  I went and did a little research.

    Buckminster Fuller coined the word “tensegrity”as the conjunction of tension and integration.  The idea of tensegrity is being actively taught by anatomy teacher Tom Myers, a student of both Buckminster Fuller and Ida Rolf and a teacher of certain of my yoga teachers.  It also bears a trademark when called “Carlos Castenada tensegrity.”    I never got into the “magical passes” of Castenada’s students turned teachers, but at some point relatively recently found a used copy of “Magical Passes.”  As I had delved fairly deeply into Carlos Castenada in my youth, I picked up the book and made it part of my library, though did not read it at the time.

    I am not surprised that John is talking about biotensegrity.  From my few hours of reading, it seems resonant with the “universal principles of alignment” that were the foundation of his Anusara teachings and also consistent with his movement towards the exploration and teaching of “sacred geometry” near the end of his Anusara days.

    Yes, I know I haven’t actually said what is tensegrity or biotensegrity in the yoga/body awareness and movement context.  But I do not teach unless I have learned something well enough to integrate it fully into mind and body such that I can articulate it in my own words, and I have not thought enough about the term tensegrity as it relates to yoga practice, though the concept makes initial intuitive sense.  If the links inspire interest, I invite you to look more deeply.  And I’m going to put “Magical Passes” on my stack of reading, though not necessarily at the top.

  • |

    What Do You Do?

    ByElizabeth

    I found myself thinking about the blessing of being able to ask this question and have a multiple answers: what do you do when your healing place/activity is temporarily or permanently no longer healthy?

    I asked this question of myself today because the poor air quality from the wildfires is not good for me, and it is not feeling good to be at the Youth Garden for the full morning. I’ve been grateful before for the panoply of practices—study, meditation (sitting and walking), breath work, asana and other movement, etc., when I have been sick or injured.

  • | | |

    A Graywater Inspiration from Friends (and opening to grace/muscular energy)

    ByElizabeth

    When we are on our mats, being open to grace — the first Anusara alignment principle — includes being open to the teachings so that we can receive and act on them in a healing and loving way.  Adding to that muscular energy by lovingly embracing skin to muscle to bone in a conscious embrace, drawing into our center to recognize our inner spirit, and drawing from periphery to the focal point brings us into optimal balance.  This pulsation serves as a way off the mat to open, inspire, and engage us in progressively more intentional and uplifting ways of living.

    Being open to inspiration from friends and about town, open to learning new ways to be kind to the earth and to ourselves, is a way of bring the principle of “opening to grace” off the mat.  Actually keeping the intention and acting on it has the attentive embrace of muscular energy, which draws us onto our inner light in a loving embrace so that we can better serve.

    I was thinking about Anusara principles off the mat, yesterday when I went visit a friend in NW one of whose roommates fosters cats.  There is a community garden in the back and the house is warm and friendly.  In the bathtub were two buckets filled with water leftover from showers.  Instead of using fresh, potable water to flush the toilet, when it is time to flush (honoring the drought axiom about yellow mellowing, etc), the house residents fill the tank with the gray water from the shower.

    Find it too complicated an idea to shower with a bucket in the bathtub with you?  You can still save water by filling your watering can or bucket when you run the water to warm up enough to get into the shower.  That will save a few gallons.  Not up to using the water to flush the toilet?  Use it to water houseplants or for cleaning floors, etc.  Or take it outside to water potted plants.

    First step is opening and witnessing the possibilities and understanding where you are ready to expand.  The second step is to try to more consistently live your inspiration.  I know when I see people living with such intention I take better care to move in that direction, even if I am not ready to go as far.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.