Today, before going to Georgetown to volunteer at the Lantern, I went to the morning session of the weekend workshop at Yoga Shala with Ross Rayburn. It was delightful to practice with people from the Anusara days, and to witness how we have grown and shifted
My apologies. I’ve been alerted that some photos haven’t been appearing (giving one of those pesky and disappointing error messages instead) and email being sent through the website is generating a message (erroneously, I add) that my mailbox is full.
I’m doing what I can and have asked for help. In the meantime, I will do workarounds. That about sums it up.
I practiced, including a Zoom class led by my friend Suzanne Lynch, I asked for help, I expressed appreciation to various friends and colleagues, I went out into the garden at lunchtime, made several more donations, and sat under the cat. And I re-centered enough to be able to persist.
I hope you all are finding your way in this. Let me know if you want to practice–on-line.1
What if for a whole day you did every single thing with the intention of becoming blissful? If you have them, taking care of pets or kids or elders? Every thing that you did at work? How you went from one place to another? Every morsel of food and drink you selected, prepared, and ate? All your errands? Your getting dressed and undressed? Your correspondence?
Would you even need to “practice yoga” by doing postures or meditating if you were living yoga–fully unifying the day to day with the conscious intention of experiencing the full bliss of consciousness at every moment?
Why not try it for a day and see what happens? And then let us know.
Last night at group practice, after doing a centering focused on using yoga to dissolve samskaras (see yesterday’s blog post on this topic), I told the group how I had been inspired by a Facebook exchange between Noah Maze and Desiree Rumbaugh — stalwart beacons of inspiration to the Anusara community — about the benefits of doing 108 sun salutations with four two-minute handstands interspersed in the practice. I then had everyone come to the front of the sticky mat, hands in front of their hearts and began. For the first five (surya namaskar A), all I did was call out the poses and the breathing and count, though I almost never teach sun salutations without enough breaths per pose to be able to think about alignment. For the next few salutations, I started throwing in some variations. As we continued, I started asking the students to notice their alignment. Were the places where they are challenged with alignment starting to show up? (Yes, most definitely so.)
After the 16th salutation, I revealed that we could not possibly fit in 108 salutations into the practice time. I advised that we will do handstand at 16 instead of 32. We then went into handstand, with students having the option of half handstand or full handstand. I remained quiet for the first 45 seconds and then started calling out the time in 15-second intervals. For students who needed to come down, I suggested they try to go back up until the two minutes were over, even if it took multiple tries. The timed handstand generated all sorts of groaning and commentary, but it all had a light-hearted enthusiasm for being invited to a challenge.
After the handstand, we got going again. “Are your knees hyperextending?” I asked one student for whom that is a tendency. “Kidneys full?” I asked of another. “Root your index finger knuckle; shoulders up in chaturanga” was a good reminder for those getting tired. I threw in more variations to slow things down and to give more time to be careful with the alignment. There is no point in an elective challenges if it is going to cause injury.
It was becoming progressively more obvious that the more we pushed ourselves, the more the places where our bodies most habitually misaligned were starting to go (just the way our less than optimal emotional tendencies start coming into play when we are faced with upheaval and loss if we do not stay conscious and try to remain in alignment with spirit). “Are you still opening to grace?” I asked after a few more rounds. Everyone laughed and found renewed strength to stay in alignment and to keep up the practice.
After several more, with only 15 minutes remaining for the class before allowing time for meditation and savasana (final relaxation), I took the class from adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog) to balasana (child’s pose). What a rush of relief and ecstasy! “Just enjoy,” I suggested. “We need to be able to take the moments of grace, of respite, of sweetness, of pause, and not fritter them away worrying about what just happened or what is to come. Knowing how to do that is one of the blessings of yoga and one of the ways we can prevent samskaric build up.
We then moved into a cool down. With the various challenges of embodiment with which this group was working and the time limitations, a full 108 salutations with the corresponding handstands would not have been appropriate for this particular practice. But everyone left both exhilarated and more relaxed for having mindfully challenged themselves, seeking to stay aligned while not knowing just how much of that daunting number the teacher would ask of them.
I am sitting in Phoenix’s Sky Harbor International airport waiting for the plane that should already be carrying me home to finish being repaired. After having done a full hour of practice this morning in my room, having a last delicious breakfast at the retreat center, and enjoyed the two-hour ride with friends to the airport, I find myself perfectly happy to sit in the airport. I am warm and well-fed. I have bought a novel to read on the plane — Lev Grossman’s “The Magicians” — and put aside a philosophy handout to write. The handout, a translation of the beginning of Abhinavagupta’s “Tantrasara” that was given to us by Paul Muller-Ortega to support our meditation practices, teaches us to seek the power of bliss through the practices, this bliss being true knowledge and true freedom. The more we practice, the more we can draw on this power and abide in a state of true happiness. Paul Muller-Ortega sometimes says that we want to be “unreasonably happy.” As I sit here feeling perfectly content after my weekend of practice and community and watching others in the airport get progressively grumpier with the delay, I feel unreasonably happy. I also feel fully motivated to practice and study ever more deeply so that I can abide ever more steadily and this glorious unreason.
and she could count the waves…