Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice

Discussion of physical aspects of yoga (on and off the mat)

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    108 Sun Salutations and Four Two-Minute Handstands (more or many fewer) and Samskara Revisited

    ByElizabeth

    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.

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    Fraying at the Seams (and Samskaras)

    ByElizabeth

    I have spent most of the last three days working from home so that I could be on site while repairs ensuing from the earthquake and hurricane were done.  I’ve been luckier than most in the path.  The damages I sustained from these extreme forces of nature can all can be repaired with relative ease.  The leak in the living room was from gaps between the house and the windowsill and the porch roof and the house.  The leaks in the upstairs bathroom were from screws attaching the skylight to the roof having been shaken loose.  The 100-year old gutter pulled away from the house and sprang some leaks, but can get wait another year or so with just being patched instead of replaced.  The cracks in the brick and the mortar dislodged and completely washed away call for repointing before winter, but that was going to have to be done in the next five or six years anyway.  Several more things got loosened or lifted up or away from where they were supposed to be, but that is why god made caulk guns and foam sealant in spray cans.

    What I find interesting about looking at the damage is that the worst of it was at places that previously required repairs during my 21+ years in the house; some of these, based on the way the ceilings had already bulged or cracked when I moved in were evidently chronic trouble spots perhaps since the house was built.  Why those places?  It could be the soil on which the house sits, the direction it faces, the activities of neighbors, the presence and absence of trees around the house, the minor, but daily tremor caused by the D6  bus.  If something was going to come apart at the seams in the house, it is not surprising it came apart where it is inclined to come apart and even less surprising that Hurricane Irene created more damage because the house was already fraying at the seams because of the earthquake (and the continuing aftershocks).  The places that came apart under stress were the places where the old repairs did not reintegrate fully into the integrity of the design and function of the house.   Those are still are the vulnerable spots, the places most likely to come apart in a blizzard or a hurricane or an earthquake.  The better and more thoughtfully integrated into the rest of the structure of the house a repair, though, the more likely it is to cease to be a spot for future repairs.  Some old repairs that were done mindfully have ceased even to be remembered as places where a repair was required.

    The same sort of pulling apart at the edges, at the weak spots, at the less than optimal repairs of old injuries, as happened with the house in the past few weeks, happens to me when challenges and opportunities for personal growth pile on, as they have been doing for me for the past several weeks, starting with things wholly unrelated to the weather.  Although I am taking things in stride and with ever more flexibility and openness the more I practice, I can feel my familiar default setting–anxiety and sadness–emerging at the stress points.  None of the personal things that had come up before the earthquake and hurricane, nor the impact of both and the preparation for the latter, alone would have been enough to shake me up much.  As they become a basketful, though, I can feel my old tendencies closer to the surface with each thing that gets added into the experience.

    Just like the places where the house tends to come apart, my tendency to get anxious and the triggers for the anxiety are familiar spots.  They have been there for decades.  Perhaps they came from another life.  For the house, the original spots may have started with the materials–the character of the trees and stones and mud and ore out of which the house was built.  Some of my stress points I recognize in my parents and my grandparents whether or not they come from previous lives of my own, some are related to my physical make-up, some from the exact place and time of my birth.

    These tendencies of ours are samskaras — the ingrained patterns that are the results from our actions, impressions — some deeper than others — in the very fabric of our being that shape how we behave and respond to what comes, thus creating more samskaras.  The more we respond in our habitual way, the more imbedded become the samskaras and the more they keep us from being conscious of and aligned with the fullness of being.  One of the key benefits of practicing (meditation and other practices) is to lessen how impressionable we are, that is, to make it so that new stresses do not deepen old patterns or create additional patterns that take us out of alignment with the flow of being.

    As I feel old stuff getting churned up, I seek to dissolve and benignly release it through my practices, while  steadily, and as mindfully as I can, doing what needs to be done to get on with this fully-engaged householder life at this wild time.  It is one of my intentions to practice sufficiently so that I will be able to be in the flow and respond in the highest no matter what comes.  There will likely be more and greater challenges than what I have already in this lifetime experienced.

     

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    More About Eating Local

    ByElizabeth

    Some great reminders and interesting new tidbits of information in this article/book review about globalization and Columbus.  With a little help from our friends, some dedicated scholars, and a willingness to learn, we can have a better understanding of the complicated web of being.

    It wasn’t so much the Columbian trade that did it as much as other international trade and travel, but our modern Western yoga practice has much of the same cross-culturing, ocean-criss-crossing intermingling as does our diet and agriculture.

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    Before the Rain Was Truly Earnest

    ByElizabeth

    The rain started when I was about half way to Union Station to catch the metro to Takoma Park to teach the noon gentle/therapeutics class at Willow Street.  Thanks to all the regulars, make=up students, and drop-ins for coming to practice to get ready for the storm.  The rain was steadier en route home, but I made it home before it really was coming down fully as it is now and will only get fiercer for several more hours.

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    Late Summer Newsletter–Web Version (Earthquakes, Hurricanes, and the Three A’s)

    ByElizabeth

    Dear Friends,

    After a summer of drought, we just experienced inside the Beltway the power when the earth shudders and shakes in an east coast earthquake of unusual magnitude.  Now, less than a week after the earthquake, I take appropriate precautions and follow with deep caring the unfolding predictions, photos, commentary, and human reaction on a collective and individual level to the impending traverse up the east coast of Hurricane Irene.

    Watching the hurricane reports has led me to remember what it was like when Hurricane Isabel was approaching DC in the summer of 2003.  The day before was gloriously sunny and bright–the way we want summer to be and there was no reason yet to cancel classes nor, once suitable precautions and preparations were made at home. to do anything other than enjoy the day to its fullest.  Fewer students than usual came for class; others must have been preparing or attending to other business.  The ones who came said that the impending storm made them want to practice together even more than usual.

    Though I rarely lead chants other than the Anusara Invocation in class, I was moved to lead my students in a chant to Kali–fierce goddess of destruction.  Chanting to Kali allowed us to focus our profound respect for the forces of nature and the dance of the universe throughout the whole of the practice.  Our ability to express our awe and our yearning to flow with the currents and eddies of these extraordinary forces instead of feeling powerless or angry was enhanced by sensitive and careful attention to alignment.

    Practicing the three A’s of Anusara yoga–attitude, alignment, and action–for me seems to apply profoundly to the way we want to prepare for and experience what comes with events demonstrating extreme forces of nature.  When we challenge ourselves on the mat we both honor our edge and seek to expand it.  We use the alignment principles in every aspect of a pose to express a perfect respect for the amazing concatenation of abilities and limitations that is human embodiment.  For me, taking what I have learned on the mat practicing with the three A’s has helped make it possible to shift how I am able to respond to whatever comes.  There is not much that serves as a better reminder of how much will just come, no matter how much we prepare and study than earthquakes and hurricanes.  We need to appreciate, though, that while we are not in control, we are not without power.  The power is in choosing how to respond, how we are going to put into practice off the mat, as well as on, the principles of attitude, alignment, and action.

    I believe to the very core of my being that we must have profound awe and respect for the mystery and power of the dance of the universe (put that how you will) and love for it, too.   We should be expanding and using existing knowledge of how most safely to weather a huricane or other extreme forces (I am choosing not to say “disasters”).  It is important to take care of ourselves to get into the space where we are most likely to be able to have awe triumph over fear, hopelessness, frustration, or anger because plans have been thwarted and, more important, to find the best path possible in the face of serious loss or harm.  Perhaps this is too easy for me to say, knowing that it will be mostly ok for me; my house does well in storms, and we are only on the edge.  I am more concerned for friends and family all up the east coast and especially Long Island and New York.

    In class on Saturday, with or just ahead of the first band of rain, we will be chanting to Kali.  Maybe like last time, we will all have power when the lights around us go out, but that was just a happy side effect (or coincidence, depending on how you look at it) and not the purpose.  The purpose of chanting will be to remind ourselves to prepare to the best of our abilities and then let go of outcome and hang on for the ride.

    Hope to see you in class soon.  My summer class at Willow Street goes through the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, and I will be here.  Registration is open for the fall session at Willow Street.  My Saturday noon class continues, and I will also be leading the ninth annual Thanksgiving Day fundraiser for Oxfam.

    The William Penn House class is an ever-deepening weekly adventure.  Come join us.

    May all be safe and well.
    Peace and light,
    Elizabeth

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    National Cathedral

    ByElizabeth

    As I witnessed my cozy house shaking and rattling in this my first really measurable earthquake, I got a much deeper appreciation of  just how quickly things can fall apart despite apparent solidity.  It felt clear to my very core that to be able to weather whatever comes what we need to know as unshakable  is our own deepest self.  What happens when the emblems of faith, such as the National Cathedral, are shaken by the strength and awesome power of nature?

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    Expanding Your Edge

    ByElizabeth

    Thursday night,  I took a dance improvisation workshop at Dance Exchange, the second in a series of three workshops.  One of the exercises we did was in groups of two.  The game was to do simultaneous improvisation.  Without designating a particular person as a leader, each dancer was to try and stay in synchronized movement with his or her partner.   When we were done with the exercise, some of the dancers talked about their goal having been to be in control of the lead or trying to push their partner past his or her edge.  I had been innocently (or perhaps naively) unaware of these dynamics, as I had been seeking to find where the dance could be the leader rather than either partner.

    After the workshop, when I was walking to the metro with the teacher and another participant, both of whom are performers in their 20s, I raised the issue of people trying to push others past their edge (I’d held off raising it in the group as it seemed too many were in a different space).  I said that knowing that my partner was a lot less flexible than me, though lots stronger, and knowing his competitive edge, I never would have tried to push him beyond his physical limits.

    The teacher said he liked being pushed past where it seemed like a good idea; it made him get to another place.  I agreed that it is good to try to expand, to go beyond what we think are our limits.  I have been taught, though, by my teacher John Friend, not to blow past my limits.  Rather, in the practice of Anusara yoga, we seek to be intimately and exquisitely aware of our edge at every moment, and then expand it.  The game with the partner using this paradigm would have been to find the edge and then see if the dance could expand it rather than to try and exert control or see if we could push our partner past his or her limits at our partner’s risk.   When we operate in a paradigm of straining and striving, or we push for control or try to compete with ourselves or with others, that is where we get injured.  I’ve had my share of dance injuries, I added, but to continue dancing through the decades, I cannot be blowing past my limits, though I am still growing.  I was not sure that what I said felt relevant, but I could also tell that it was information that went into the thought mix for later.

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    Quote of the Moment (and Happy Birthday Anusara)

    ByElizabeth

    Today is the 13th anniversary of Anusara yoga being officially named Anusara yoga. I am filled with love and gratitude for John Friend and all my friends and teachers who are sharing this extraordinary practice.

    In thanks for the delighted and celebratory invitation to the practice, which for me is a hallmark of the Anusara offering, I share this quote:

    “The more the yogi practices, the more visible everything becomes (yavad idam sarvam drstam).” Vedavyasa, quoted in David Gordon White, Sinister Yogis.

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