Discussion of physical aspects of yoga (on and off the mat)
It is a great privilege to be able to travel and to experience and witness what is made especially exciting to us by virtue of its difference. If we are open to it, though, we really need go not much further than our own back yards — I use that the term back yard metaphorically as I don’t really have one — or to shut our eyes and sit for meditation to witness the wondrous.
Lunchtime walk after the storm blew through.
One of the ways I prepare for a restorative workshop is to spend some time looking for new music to play quietly in the background to enhance the fullness of the experience. In the past couple of days, I have enjoyed listening to quite a quantity of new and new to me music appropriate for my upcoming Finding the Warmth Inside: Relax Into Optimal Alignment with Anusara Restoratives on February 25th at Willow Street Yoga Center (click on the link for details and to register). Among the music I downloaded, which I am thoroughly enjoying (though it might be too upbeat for the restorative workshop playlist), is C.C. White’s “This is Soul Kirtan.”
As I was listening at my desk and swaying to the beat, I thought about the non-dual tantric philosophical principle that exhorts us to find the good in everything, to recognize that in all there is still a “divine” spark that is expressed in the creative effulgence of the universe itself. The music is joyous, delightful, offered with love, delivered with a high degree of professionalism–both the musical performance and the recording and presentation. I tried to fathom just how many centuries of human migration, suffering, oppression, bigotry, and then fighting for tolerance, education, equal rights, spirit, and freedom had to occur for this music to be able to exist at all and to be published and embraced, it being an extravagant blend of Indian spiritual/religious practice, American soul and blues (and all its history), and classical Western musical technique.
I bought in India this sweet image of ganesha. When I came home, I had the treat of going shopping for here and looking though dozens of strands of beads until I found just the right ones to complement the colors in the painting and the energy of the image. The brown and green tones of chunky turquoise felt just right. In creating the necklace, I took the time to see how the individual stones related to each other both in shape and color. Just as taking time to get in alignment can enable us to create beauty out of challenge, so to, taking the time to arrange the stones makes the difference between something merely strung together and an artistic creation.
A friend from the DC Sunday contact improv jam (one of my favorite places to play) sent this link showing a clip from a documentary in progress about the importance of play to our health. One of the things that I love most about Anusara yoga is that John Friend has always described its practice as being “seriously playful.” I was born serious nature and have worked hard in my adulthood to learn to play spontaneously, and what is being offered here resonates for me.
This is a long clip, but well worth the time. Anusara yogis, notice how familiar some of it sounds. Enjoy!
I was working with photos today and came across this shot a friend took a little over a year ago. Long gone is the memory of exactly why I did not stay fully in the pose. Perhaps this was the beginning, and I was planning to plant my hand, lift my shoulder and hug my shoulder blades onto my back, and then do enough inner spiral and kidney loop to float off the ground. Possible, as I have been known to get into asta vakrasana going from the ground up. More likely, my exit strategy of the moment was releasing all the way to the floor. What I like about this picture is that it shows me having a really good time, not me being a failure for not being perfectly in the pose. Though it is always worth striving for the best we can do, for most things in life, the best we can do is try for the full pose and then find the joy and the beauty when we don’t end up embodying our notion of what should have been.
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.
A friend wrote an email to me this morning that in a recent office move, the plaster ganesha he’s had on his wall broke. Not to worry, though, he had been given another one to sit on his computer. Ganesha, though sometimes hailed as the remover of obstacles, does not so much remove them as help us navigate through life so that the inevitable challenges and hurdles will feel less like insurmountable obstacles and more like opportunities to move in new directions.
It seemed almost everywhere I turned in India, I bumped into another image of Ganesha. He’s a powerful one. I did not attempt to photograph them all, and these are not all the photographs. One of them is not ganesha–sometimes an elephant is just an elephant, even in a sculpture devoted to the gods.
If you are enjoying one of these images in particular, click on it so that you get to it at the largest size and then right-click to make it your wallpaper or background. Enjoy!
Dear Friends,
Midnight of the new year found me sitting in a hotel room near the Chidambaram temple at festival time engaged in intense conversation while listening to wild music and chanting and the cracks and explosions of fire crackers. Quite a change from my long-standing practice of making a healthy meal, doing a long yoga practice, taking a hot bubble bath by candlelight and going to sleep well before midnight so that I can start the year rested and refreshed (an excellent way to spend New Year’s Eve if you haven’t tried it). Though I did not start this new year well rested, I wouldn’t have traded the experience I had for the world. Sometimes we need to radically break out of our old patterns to discover how much we can expand.
One of the practices at the temples we visited on the India Pilgrimage with Douglas Brooks is to take a coconut and break it open. The coconut symbolizes your head and all the preconceived notions and rules we set for ourselves that bind us into our old habits. The symbolic act of breaking open the coconut is to remind us that we sometimes need to break ourselves open in order to get at the true meat of our existence and to drink the sweet nectar of life.
Many times during the trip I thought about my first experiences attending “Advanced Intensives” with John Friend. I, like many others I know, showed up at my first Advanced Intensive wondering how I got there, asking myself whether I was worthy, and worrying that I was in way over my head and would get injured. Though I have now been to a number, each time I still have had to practice with both an absolute willingness to be open to the possibility of expansion while being impeccably mindful of my own limits. It is a subtle dance of consciousness, and part of the learning is finding the exact balance point where we can both break out of our preconceived limitations and still honor that we in fact have some.
I approached going to India with much trepidation. A friend whom I met in Peru and who I later visited in South Africa, having seen my emotional reactions to the deep poverty of developing nations had warned me off of India. As one who likes things to be quiet and clean and thrives on healthy meals and regular sleep, I knew India would be physically and emotionally challenging. But I wanted the visions. I wanted to see and experience its very “otherness,” its beauty, and the source of the yoga teachings. I packed my bags with emergency supplies, some of which I turned out to need, some of which served others on the trip, most of which I ended up donating to a village that the trip helps to support. I had to ask people to help me (one of my hardest practices) by being close when we were in dense crowds. I confess that I wore earplugs when it got really loud in the temples, which it does. And having prepared and taken care, I was exhilerated. I experienced radically more with my heart getting fuller and fuller in a short time than I thought ever possible for me. Like discovering one can do a wild yoga pose that one thought totally out of reach and then sensibly stopping before blowing past physical limits, I broke myself open and was able to drink deeply of the nectar. And yes, I did actually hurl a coconut to the ground to break it. And yes, it took two tries.
I was lucky. This time, I got to choose when and where to break open the coconut. Sometimes life does it for us and then we have the choice either to despair or to rise to the occasion. This year, I invite you to the yoga to find where you can break open and find ever more sweetness, nourishment, and delight than you ever dreamed possible. For me this includes not just the exhileration of advancing the intensity of poses, but the deepness of meditation, the precise use of alignment for therapeutics to better experience life, and the emotional depth of a long restorative practice.
Come join me as regular classes continue at William Penn House on Tuesdays, invitation group house practice for charity on Wednesdays, and gentle/therapeutics at Willow Street on Saturdays at noon in Takoma Park. All info on the classes page of the web site. Mark your calendars, too, for:
Finding the Warmth Inside: Relax Into Optimal Alignment with Anusara Restoratives, Saturday, February 25 2012, 2:30 PM – 5:00 PM, Willow Street Yoga, Takoma Park Studio, $35.00, click to Register Online or download a paper form to bring to Willow Street in person. After a little gentle stretching and self-massage to bring awareness to the breath and body, we will enjoy the exquisite application of Anusara’s Universal Principles of Alignment to restful and supported restorative postures to release old patterns and invite in the new to find greater ease of body and mind. A great workshop and practice for all levels.
I have been sharing photos and experiences of India on the blog (if you have missed them, do check them out and enjoy). Some of you have asked how you can subscribe to the blog in addition to the newsletter. Please just click here and follow the instructions to get the blog posts by email.
I look forward to seeing you through the new year and sign off expressing my ever growing love, appreciation, and gratitude for all of you and the deepening and expanding connection through the yoga, neighborhood, and all that life here in DC and in the greater yoga community brings us.
Peace and light,
Elizabeth
In Anusara yoga, one of the ways the first principle of “opening to grace” can be experienced and practiced is as a radical expansion of the capacity to receive and appreciate the very wonder of being. During my visit to India with Professor Douglas Brooks, I found myself repeatedly thinking of the concept of radical expansion and also the preamble to the Isha Upanishad (long a favorite of mine; Shantala on their first CD, Love Window, have done an exquisite rendition), which can be roughly translated as saying that adding fullness to fullness is itself fullness (fullness can also be translated here as perfection).
What I believe this is saying that being itself is infinitely full; thus, we cannot make it more infinite by adding to it. Human consciousness of the infinitude of being, though, is limited by the filters of space and time. One of the key reasons to practice yoga (including meditation) is to expand both our capacity to appreciate the fullness and to receive its full wonder by uniting our own consciousness with the infinitude. When we can appreciate ever more the wonder of our being, we will naturally be more joyous, and I believe, led to be more compassionate and generous with ourselves and others.
Day after day on the India pilgrimage, just when I thought my heart and mind were already full to bursting, there were yet more experiences of the beauty and extraordinariness of life and creativity and nature. I found myself chanting the Isha Upanishad—purnamadah, purnamidam, puranata purnamudatacyate. Fullness and fullness is fullness. “Let me expand still more to appreciate to its utmost yet more beauty,” I thought to myself again and again. Though I already thought I’d developed a fairly full understanding of the concept through study and practice, I thought, “this is what John Friend means when he is talking about radical expansion.” I look forward to studying and practicing to experience and share ever more beauty.
These stickers have been around town for awhile; I first noticed them during one of the big marches. I assume that it is meant to be ironic. The idea of fighting for non-violence, though, certainly highlights the degeneration of much of our political dialogue into an us versus them fighting stance, even for those seeking peace or social justice.
The truth of the matter is that just as we cannot realize inner peace by forcing our mind to be quiet, and we put ourselves at risk in our asana practice if we force ourselves into poses to realize external notions of advancement that mirror our conventional cultural values, so too, we will not open the way to peace if we fight for it using the paradigms of the two-party system that now serves the military-industrial complex instead of expanding recognition of the needs of all to be connected and nurtured.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.