With compassion, love, and discrimination (in yoga viveka), we can do far more–for ourselves individually and for society and the planet’s ecosystem as a whole. If you haven’t already, please get out and vote.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
I participated today in the determination as to whether the noon gentle/therapeutics class at Willow Street should be cancelled due to the weather. It is hard to know when and what to decide unless the roads are absolutely unpassable or it is clear that that storm is not impacting most roads and sidewalks. Some students will have wanted to come to class regardless of the weather, even if it would have been both difficult to get the ice off of their cars if driving and very slippery going from house to car and parking spot to class. If class was held, other students would have wondered why class was not cancelled and felt it unfair that they now had to do a make-up since they were too sensible to go out in the ice. It is a balance of trying to offer the yoga as committed and making decisions about the reasonableness of trying to hold class given safety and logistical concerns. For a class with lots of physically intrepid students within walking distance, the determination is different than for one with people who are facing injuries and other challenges of embodiment, which can make it a challenge to get to class on even a beautiful day.
I’d love to get your feedback on where you think is the weather line between holding class as usual and cancelling. For me, part of the call was that within an hour of class, my porch, front stairs, and sidewalk were still solidly slick with ice. It would have been a challenge even to get to the corner, much less walk ten blocks and take the metro. Things did not really start to melt until mid afternoon.
Anusara yogini and teacher extraordinaire, Amy Ippoliti, started a “30-Day Yoga Challenge,” which she updates monthly, for students and friends who are her Facebook friends. For the past several months, the challenge has been to work towards some very challenging poses (how appropriate for a challenge). This month Amy invited students to practice without air conditioning, or for hot yoga practitioners, without extra heat. Granted, she is based in Boulder, Colorado, where it is not 101F today, but she speaks my mind. Whenever people have asked me what I think about hot yoga, I have answered that it serves some people very well, but I always find myself asking the question, whence is the heat coming and will it enhance my yoga to change the room temperature if I need to burn fossil fuels to practice?
Why is practicing without a technologically altered environment a yoga challenge? Have you ever found that if conditions aren’t right, you think you cannot do your practice? If we are truly practicing with commitment, then what we want to do is to find the practice that will fit the environment (including not just the outer environment, but the state of our mind and physical well-being) on any given day, even if it means that the practice will not meet our expectation of what our practice should be.
When we practice steadily and listen to the teachings, one of the things yoga teaches us is how to be more sensitive to our environment and to what we put into our minds and bodies. A friend complained of being terribly sleepy the other day. I said it was the heat; look at your pets; don’t you notice that they are sleeping more in the heat? What practicing in accordance with the ambient temperature means (or eating or sleeping or dressing or engaging in leisure activity) learning better how to align with the energies around us, including being sensitive to how we would optimally practice in the heat. As yogis, I believe that what we want, ever more deeply and more profoundly, is to live aligned with nature and our own being in it so that we can find better recognize the fullness and the light of being whatever challenges arise.
I’m doing a modified version of Amy’s challenge here in DC this week: at the William Penn House, I’ll take whatever air conditioning is on (which, for those of you who are wondering, can be pretty nice and cool since it is the ground floor). At the house practice, I’ll keep the house at the same 80-82F I typically keep the house when it is over 90F outside; I won’t lower it because I am practicing, but we won’t be having it over 90F. At Willow Street, I’ll go with the flow.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
