1. The breath lies at the very boundary between our conscious and our unconscious selves.  It lies between our thoughts and the whole of our physical, emotional, cellular and metabolic makeup. Because it lies there, between, it is a bridge.  It is an autonomic system, like our digestion and the ticking heart.  But unlike those things, we can feel and pay attention to it directly, without a need for medical tools or machines. And unlike those things, we can choose to influence it.

2.  Furthermore, there are few sensory experiences that have such an immediate effect on our nervous system – that is, our brains, our spinal cord, our nerves and neural pathways.  The nervous system is responsible for mood, instinct, fight or flight, rest and digest.  It plays a major role in our thinking and behavioral patterns.  It is also intimately related to the way we age, the way we process internal and external stressors, and our ability to remember, imagine, create.  We could change our nervous system over time with intensive therapy, drastic physical shifts, ongoing dietary change, drugs or brain surgery.  With breath, though, we can affect our brain, nerves, and spine within seconds.

Books could be written, and have, about the thousands of ways in which the breath is central to a yoga practice, but these two form a rock solid beginning.

By learning to pay attention to our breath (and, at times, to influence it), we take a step back from the thinking, ego part of who we are and directly experience our larger selves.  We literally start to play with the world of the subconscious, the dream, memory, cell structure, brain tissue, nerves standing up or calming down, the life processes of birth and decay.  There is metaphor and poetry to talking about the breath: the breath of god, the breath of life, stopping to catch a breath, you take my breath away.  It’s important to realize this is no metaphor, but truth: changing your breath changes your physical reality, immediately, in ways your conscious self can only catch glimpses of or appreciate at a surface level.

Because the breath occupies this boundary land of conscious and unconscious, it is a unique trap door we can use.  It provides a way for the conscious self to step into and begin to influence and explore all that is unconscious and murky and so terribly influential in our lives.  It is very hard to imagine controlling the secretion of digestive proteins, say, or to willfully slow down our heart rate or participate in the life cycle of a cell.  It is nearly impossible to think our way into feeling better or believing other than the way we do, no matter how many affirmations you repeat to yourself.  Those are all processes dominated by the unconscious; they are stubbornly resistant to will power or conscious intervention.

But the breath – the breath is something we CAN notice and even change.  It requires no fancy tools or expensive equipment, no laboratory tests or radical change in diet.  It doesn’t require years and years of study.  It is available to everyone, at any moment, and literally brings us to the gate of all those ‘subconscious’ processes happening within us.  It is proof that we are participant in those larger, shadowy processes, even though our participation is usually unconscious.

The word ‘prana’ is usually translated to breath or life force.  ‘Yama’ is restraint, observance, practice, control, or mastery.  Hence, pranayama,  fourth branch on the eight limbed path of yoga practices , is observance and practice of the breath or life force within us.

Prana

Life, physicists tell us, is energy.  I am not a physicist, and I couldn’t very well explain this to a toddler, let alone another grown adult.  All that E=Mc squared, stuff.  Yet I know and accept, on an intuitive and intellectual level, that life and cosmos are a mysterious tapestry in which our universe burst into being out of nothingness eons ago, that millions and zillions of stars circling are and exploding with materials so heavy a teaspoon’s worth weighs many billions of pounds and the shifting of seasons is actually, on a level I cannot see, a shifting of atoms.

There is something that causes us to be alive and, after our last breath leaves us, to no longer be the same any more.  I am not a theologian, either, and I will not bother to explore concepts of afterlife.  But I will say there is something that is us that doesn’t seem to be just our bodies, since our cells change every second, but isn’t just our brains, either.

That self, the yogic tradition tells us, is one manifestation of prana.  Prana is energy.  Life is energy.

That, says the yogi guru, pointing to energy and mystery and wonder, is what you are.

**

The yogic sages were brilliant.  They were able to discover and intelligently talk about this stuff without the benefit of a microscope.

Our western medicine has identified 6000 nerves in the human body: conduits along which impulses of energy move back and forth, shifting our hormones and cell structure and chemical composition along the way.

A yogic sage would nod at the concept of nerves.  He would call it a nadi.  The nadis are energetic and informational pathways that course our bodies in a manner as detailed and variegated as the nerves, the lymphatic system, and the circulatory network combined.

The yogic sages say there are not 6000, only.  That is only what our microscopes see.  Some yogic maps show 72,000 nadis or energy/nerve pathways in the body.  The yogic map of these pathways is uncannily like our map of the nervous system.  Other yogic sources, though, say there are more than 350,000 energy pathways, coursing and roadmapping out the entire field of who we are.  They’d say our science is just not sophisticated, not subtle enough to see it.

**

Life is energy.  Life is prana.  And yoga is a practice or path of learning what and where energy actually is.  What has power and what doesn’t.  This sounds simple, and it is: we learn we function better when our bodies are open and cared for, when we eat well and rest enough.  But the study or practice of energy is also profound, and goes deeper and deeper the more open you become to exploring it.  It will start asking difficult questions, along the lines of why do I feel or act this way?  Why does this feel so good or bad? When I say ‘I’m feeling sad’, what do I actually mean?  Is there a physical sensation to sadness or is it a set of thoughts?  Where are those physical sensations, and can I tolerate or change them? What happens when I sit down and look fear right in the face for a moment? Why do I always feel this way after talking to so and so? How much longer will my body take this?  What IS that pain in my neck? They are difficult questions, and push us toward self-knowledge and self-mastery.   They also open into remarkable possibilities.

There is, at any flickering moment in time, a tremendous amount of power and intelligence in your body.  The human body can power up televisions, they say.  Human bodies could light up whole cities.  Every heart beat is triggered by an electrical surge.  Anger has a voltage.  So does laughter.

What yoga begins to show is that we have this huge potential, this oceanic tide of kinetic energy, even if we feel sluggish and stuck and powerless.  The power in us is often misplaced, repressed, or resisted – which causes energetic turmoil and dis- ease.  But it is there.

Prana and the energy body

Prana is life force , or breath.  It is the energy of the million, billion stars exploding and gyrating in the sky.  Human beings receive this life force directly into the body through the process of breathing.  We take it in in other ways as well: through live foods such as fresh fruits and vegetables, minerals, through fresh water, through living, breathing trees and vegetation.

I tend to think that we also take it in through the love of other people and other creatures.  We probably also take it in in more subtle ways still, through music, the sound of inspiring words, beautiful sights.  Through empathy and art (neuroscience is backing this up).  Human beings are hardwired for connection: the tug and pull of affection, inspiration, rejection, or acceptance leave tracks or stains or floods of energy inside us.  It is the emotive force, complete with its ocean of endorphins and stress hormones and sex hormones and joy, that binds us to life and makes us want to live, more.

Yoga discovered that in addition to the physical architecture of our body we have an interpenetrating and underlying sphere or tapestry of reality.  They called it the pranamayakosha (the body of vital energy or airs.  (There are five bodies.  Food for a different essay)).  The nature of this subtle structure is movement, flow, change and tidal shift.  Over the centuries, they developed not just the theory of the pranamayakosha, but the anatomy of it.  They discovered the roadmap to our emotional selves, our characters (again, see picture at the end of the essay).

The structure is shot through with these invisible channels, those nadis, through which prana flows, energizing and literally sustaining all parts of the physical and energetic and intellectual structure.  Again, a visual representation of these tracks looks very much like our representations of the nervous or circulatory systems, but many times more dense.

Many western students are loosely familiar with the term ‘chakra’ or energy wheel.  According to yogic science, these energy wheels are like grand central terminal for the railway of the nadis.  They are energetic hubs, major thoroughfares of power and information.  Interestingly enough, these chakra points correlate directly with major nerve plexuses, organs, circulatory and lympathic centers of our body.  Their observations were physiologically accurate.

The energy body is deeply intelligent, although it doesn’t exactly speak English.  Much of yoga practice is learning to develop awareness of and trust in the wisdom of this energy body.

As yogis learned to experience the energy body directly, to map the flow of its major currents, they made another fascinating discovery:

Breath has an immediate impact on the entire flowing, waving, shimmering thing.  More than anything else, it is breathing that builds and regulates the flow of prana in the body.  On the most basic of physical levels, breathing sustains and supports the metabolic processes of every anatomical system in the body.  The very life of the body’s tissues is created by and dependent on the process of the breath. A body can go more than a week without food, almost that long without water.  Without breath, we would die in moments.  Breath supports the strength, responsiveness, and ability to detoxify the bones, the muscles, and the organs.  Unhealthy breathing habits (which most of us have) cause cellular structure to weaken, become dysplastic, irregularly shaped.

The breath balances, regulates, opens, closes, controls, and channels the flow of energy across the entire field of who we are, from our core beliefs and emotions to the skin of our toes.

Yama

The word yama is translated restraint or ascetic practice.  This is a harsh word, to our modern day ears.  It rankles of renunciation, fasting, rules and regulations.  Yet the point wasn’t an embrace of suffering for the sake of suffering.  The point was to suffer less; to be oneself, more.  Yogis sought reality.  Knowledge as ‘taught’ by priests, hierarchies, rituals was not their goal; experienced truth was.  There is an element of hard truth to ‘yama’; but there is also an element of authenticity and integrity.  The practices and restraints may be thought of as cultivated habits, a dedication to right things over easy answers, or an approach to self mastery.  At its most general, practice is the effort to replace blind auto pilot with conscious choice and mindfulness.

The earliest yogis dedicated their lives to spiritual and psychological experimentation.  They investigated diet, breathing, physical exercises, ethical behavior, prayer, meditation, chanting, worship, dedication to every conceivable kind of god and goddess.  Over the course of time, some headway was made in discovering the path to a fully alive human being.  A loose tradition was born.  A set of reliable and verifiable principals and practices emerged.  At some point, these principals and practices came to be known as yoga.

Yogis used their own minds and bodies as laboratories for experiments in living.  They arrived over and over again at a series of stunning insights into the human condition.

In the final analysis, they found that it is not what you know or believe, but how you live that counts.  Yamas are rungs on a ladder, a net to catch our days and our experiences with, a guide away from suffering and into that ‘more’ we suspect is there.

Interestingly enough, yogic wisdom does not make any claim to be undertaking spiritual writing or theology.  There is no interest in founding a new religion or disabusing one from the religion one already has.  There is little of entertainment, and not much drawing on the archetypes of the religious imagination.  Instead, the yogic wisdom texts seem to say that what mature human beings require is not another or different religion.  What we require is not more theology, but a reliable practice; a training program that may help the body and the mind realize the full potential and ramifications of being human.

Pranayama – practicing life’s energies

I taught a woman in a domestic violence shelter for two months, and after she left the shelter she continued coming to some of my classes.  Over time, the change in her was so poignant, and so inarguably TRUE, that I was baffled.  Of course, I say that yoga is change and transformation all the time.  I believe it.  But to see the change so radically, right before my eyes, in a way that was not metaphor but real, was stunning.

In the beginning, she showed up in jeans, a thick sweater, and tennis shoes.  I made a general comment to the room about the sensory receptors on the bottoms of our feet, but didn’t push it.  She practiced in those clothes for months.  When I gave cues to stretch the arms or take big steps, she would either mince her way into it and then draw back to her norm, or lose all control and not be able to move her arms and legs in co-ordination.  She always took the same place in a back corner of the room.

Although her disconnection from her body was obvious, it wasn’t really any different than the disconnect most of us have.  There are variations.  But it is a difference only of degree.

Yogically speaking, we begin a personal, spiritual, and psychological change through the body.  While this may seem a bit of a stretch for western minds, to yoga this is a very valid path.  The body plays a central role in the development of our character.  When we were young, those things mostly happened to us.  When we begin to practice, however, character and psychology are things we begin to make, ourselves.  Most psychology, self help, or spirituality begins with what the yogis would call the ‘mental body’ – thoughts and feelings.  But yogis take a radical step in moving the entry point right into the body.  They understand it to be the doorway to the more subtle interior worlds.

One evening this woman showed up to class in sweats and carrying a yoga mat of her own.  She sat down and took off her shoes.  I caught her eye and she gave a slight, shy smile before she went seriously into her pre-yoga practice cross legged seat.

It was as if she knew she had found something, here.  She was willing to see what else she might find.

A week or two later, she took her yoga mat out of the back corner and found a place in the front row.

All of this was beginning to show in her yoga postures, as well.  She became intensely concentrated in her practice.  It was clear she was enjoying, especially, the standing postures and heart opening practices – the warrior poses, mountain, dancer.  She told me one day after class that she loved the sense of feeling her feet on ground.  For the first time in her life, she said, she felt strong.  I noticed that she had taken a sudden leap with her breathing: it was steady and smooth and full even when she was most tired and other students were distracted.

One day, I noticed she was crying in camel pose.  Everyone went into child’s pose, afterward, where our faces are lowered to the ground.  When I cued the class to move again, into the next pose, this woman stayed down.  I noticed that her tears had turned to a kind of quiet and slow weeping.

This has happened before in my classes.  It has happened to me.  But I was surprised when a few minutes later, the woman stood back up again.  She followed the cues and did a few more poses with all of us.  And then, all on her own, she went back into camel pose and stayed there for a very long time.

It wasn’t until weeks later that she and I processed this together.  We were able to process not just that day but all the slow weeks and months that had come ahead of it.  Yoga works that way.  There are obvious and sudden moments of epiphany.  But there is also consistent, day after day subtlety and the basic willingness to show up.

She told me much of what I myself had seen: that she felt a powerful kind of concentration in yoga, and sometimes just moving from one posture to another felt inexpressibly good to her.  She noticed how her breathing had changed and grown more steady and free, and said this was true especially in class, but was showing up in her life off the mat as well.  She said that her arms and her legs began to have energy in them, and it was like there was a burning, fiery power right behind her belly button as well.

In talking about what happened the day she cried, she shrugged. She said it was ‘weird’.  She had begun to feel very dizzy.  Her heart began to race and her vision blurred, as if there were dust motes in her eyes.  Her whole chest and throat began to feel hot, “full of heat, it really kind of hurt”.  She felt she was going to pass out.  Then she realized she was crying, and felt ‘relief’ that we were going into child’s pose afterwards.

But what happened, later, I asked?  Why did you decide to go back into the pose?

She shrugged again.  “I knew that I could.” she said; “I knew it was okay, and there was something in my chest and throat that just needed to be felt again.  I don’t know, Karin….but a few weeks ago I heard something you said in class, and I realized I felt beautiful.  I’ve never felt beautiful in my whole life.  Somehow, it seemed a beautiful thing to do to go back into that pose.”

I know that this moment was an outward and visible sign of a major shift in her practice.  She was able to touch – to literally reconnect and feel – her feelings.  Feelings are the subterranean life of our energy body.

What I saw happen in that student is a thing I have felt in different ways – and to many different degrees of intensity – in my own life.

It is a stunningly beautiful thing.  You see it happen and you feel privileged, blessed to see a human achievement so rare in our day to day life.

But honesty tells me I have seen this happen, over and over and over again.

It would take hours to discuss the ways in which yoga – and perhaps other practices or people in her life – helped this woman.  We’d launch into psychology and theories and about how healing works, how people become stronger or happy.  But all of those discussions are really diversions from the real truth: it would be impossible to articulate all that happens to us in a yoga practice, but the sum total is good.  There is something to simply watching our breath that opens doorways to the soul we didn’t know were there.  If what we need is a way to feel better, stronger, more alive and more self-assured, than theory or theology don’t matter so much as practice does.

Practice, practice.  Practice.  said Patthabhi Jois.  Practice and all is coming.

I’m faced with this problem:

I teach, mostly, asana.

I tell people the asana don’t really matter; yoga begins with a desire to wake up, with ethics and personal observance, with self study and commitment.

And I tell them the way is through asana.

You see the problem.  I’m contradicting myself.

We all walk into yoga knowing it has to do with postures.  A few of us figure out, along the way, that yoga has nothing to do with postures.  If we’ve made the commitment to a regular practice, if we keep knocking on that door of the body, if we practice when we are tired and when we’ve not slept well and when we don’t want to, practice when we’re too busy and when we’re happy enough without it, eventually we feel joy come to answer the knocking.  Joy erupts as deeply as an orgasm and as incorrigibly as age.  Grace only ever happens in real time.

But those things – ethics, commitment, self study – remain abstract for most humans.  Asana offer a discipline, an opportunity, a path. Maybe a ladder.  They give a way in to meditation, to healing, and to the present moment.  Most of us wouldn’t have the guts or the time to get there on our own.  Asana is the teacher, is the commitment.  Asana is the guru.

We show up and are prodded into the present moment.

The body lives in the present.  When you are aware of the body, you are connected.  To what I won’t bother to say.  Maybe the global throb of life.  The on-goingness of it.  The truth of dailyness.  Eternity.  God.  An underlying okayness. The realization of how small and irreal your hang-ups are, considering reality.  How big they are, as hang-ups.  The present, via the body moving and the mind watching, will reveal the stories you tell yourself day in and day out.  If you manage to trace edges with your breath and your toes, the present will prove to you that these stories are untruths.  Half truths at best.  Signals of compromise.  Misunderstandings. 

The present, via the body, is the one place from which you can see reality.  Awareness of the body is our gateway into the truth of what is.

Pema Chodon writes “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.  To live fully is to be always in no-man’s land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh.  To live is to be willing to die, over and over again.”

Asana throw us directly into no-man’s land.

I think that is where we need to be.

***

The simplest explanation for why, in the eight limbed path, there are asana is this: if you want to reach the inner self, you have to go through the self.  It is hard to feel alive, let alone awake, if you are stuck in a body that is unwell.  If you want to go the depths of who you are and what you are capable of, it helps if your most immediate and constant tool – ie flesh and blood – become resource rather than hindrance.

It is hard to find reality if you are unaware of your own heartbeat.

So the body itself becomes an object for meditation.  The body itself is medicinal, therapeutic.  Asana provide a genuine high and a refuge.  Asana gives us a place to go.  It lays out pathways and intricacies of mastery and skill.  They strengthen and sooth, open and release.

But there is something more than the simple explanations.

If we can manage to show up in the body, to drop in, we experience.  We feel something.  Something is known that wasn’t known before.

Because it is body – or whatever it is that is real inside and outside the body -  it is not a thing of the mind.  Language can only approximate it.  Like love, asana is a thing that has to be experienced, rather than talked about.  Also like love, asana is expressed in metaphor and poetry.  It involves ecstatic release, profound rest, changed brainwaves.  Like love, the entirety of the experience can never be understood from the outside.

But we’ve touched something.  It’s eerie at times.  The fact that there is something there.  To reality.  To body.  This isn’t necessarily what we came looking for.

***

A deeper understanding reveals itself.  Our brain is everywhere the nerves go.  Heart is everywhere the blood is.  The practice of asana teaches fairly quickly that our bodies are much more complex, or perhaps more stiff, than we’d known.  What we took for granted, as reality, as limitation, proves to be conditioning or simply a  process we haven’t completed, yet.  It also teaches, in little shivers of recognition, that we can know our bodies more profoundly.  Where body is, mind and heart and emotion can go.  Meditation and awareness can go deeper.  What was unconscious in us is brought closer.

If the simple reason for asana is clarification and refinement of the body, the more complex reason is the fact that bodies are our most direct route to reality and its depths.  Deep involvement and attention to asana brings us directly to (perhaps, perhaps…through…) mind and it’s shadows.  You can’t work physical patterns very long without banging smack up against psychological patterns. 

You cannot practice asana for long without having to acknowledge that even mind and emotion, urge and insight, knowledge and clarity, are more profound and shadowy than you thought.  In the deep silence underlying your breath, you’ll recognize you’re facing a door.  To enter possibility, to to turn away.  The pose begins exactly as you most want to leave it.

***

Psalms, songs, beatitudes, and prayer are all words that come to mind when I try to write about asana.  There seems to be no more literal way to commune than to examine what it is we do with our hands, or to open our heart.  To touch gratitude, acceptance, dedication.  It is one thing to understand such concepts.  Another, deeper thing, to embody it.

I teach asana.  Sometimes I can hear resistance and disbelief roaring out of my students bodies.  My foot, where?  The hell you say.  I practice asana, and I hear that same roar inside myself.  Here I am, lurching through no-man’s land, all over again.  But it has been in asana, in that very place of disbelief and breath, that revelation comes.  There have been times I seem to break through in a pose I’ve done for years; the body shifts a millimeter, perception gets brighter, it seems there is bliss inside the hamstring. There have been other times, crumpled on the mat with my knee no where near where it’s supposed to be, that fear has been revealed.  Or longing.  Absolute surrender and behind the surrender the sensations which are moody and pithy and cogent and altogether sweet.  There’s the thought I didn’t know I could feel this.  There are poses, too, that I have doggedly practiced – without success – for months and months and years on end without much believing I’ll ever truly get there.  When suddenly, I am there.  The foot lifts.  The rib moves out of the way.  The heart stretches.

We have potential in our gristle.  The root truth is this: if we experience pleasure, pleasure is experienced through the body.  If we experience fear, grief, or longing, it is because our physicality has been shifted and touched in fine or blatant ways.  If we honestly desire health, wellbeing, contentment, it must involve the chemistry and patterns of hormones, digestive proteins, cellular structures.  If we have ever longed for god, or felt our heart clutch in some manner of loneliness, it has been a physical pang.  Therefore, we come closer by going through.  We bend back on our selves, attention revolved back toward itself, the body a mirror in which we can begin to see.

Asana is a dedicated form by which we turn the abuse and denial of the body back into humility, feeling, and meaningful gesture.  Asana is how we turn our bones to dancing, our wrinkles to poems.  Asana is a psalm made of flesh and bone.

]]> http://www.returnyoga.org/2013/05/08/asana-psalm-of-the-flesh/feed/ 0 http://www.returnyoga.org/2013/04/20/a-single-blessed-inch-journeys-and-souls-for-next-weekends-jivan-mukti-workshop/ http://www.returnyoga.org/2013/04/20/a-single-blessed-inch-journeys-and-souls-for-next-weekends-jivan-mukti-workshop/#comments Sat, 20 Apr 2013 01:12:16 +0000 admin http://www.returnyoga.org/?p=878 “always roaming, with a hungry heart”, Tennyson’s Ulysses

A grueling winter, this, and it is supposed to be spring.  I shiver as I set the coffee on the stove and stick my hands under my armpits to ward it off.  The meteorologist on the radio says something about record breaking. Wisecracks that we now have a winter we can brag to our grand kids about, implying a rareness of this deep, long, white season.  We are in the midst of something that will only come to us once.  Or is, at least, something the weather man thinks he needs to make jokes about.

I scowl and turn him off, peek timidly out the window to see.  There it is, the muffled, white, frozen world.  Shrouded as they once shrouded houses out of season, covering furniture and every last trace of intimacy and warmth and detail.  I drop the curtain and pad back to the coffee, willing it to boil.

Later, I leave the house with scissors.  Swathed like an arctic explorer, wielding my kitchen shears in mittens.  Two days ago and three blocks from home I spied a pussy willow or something like it along the river, tentative in this freak year, but fuzzed just the same.  The scissors, the dog, and I stumble through deep snow until I find it.  I remove mittens and touch the bark with my naked hand, slowly and questioningly.  As if asking permission, as if bark were skin, as if I couldn’t possibly touch the velvet soft, living fuzz before acknowledging the branch.  I snip three twiggy boughs and hold them delicately as can be in parka and over sized mittens.  Screw the mittens, I think, and trudge home valiantly with the things held in cold hands.  The cold in the fingers is very nearly virtue.  Exhilarating, at least. As only virtue or sin can be. Coming into the house, the dog tracks snow up the stairs and I stomp into the kitchen boots-on; floors be damned.  For an instant, dark.  Then my eyes adjust.  I put the willows in a vase and sat across the room to admire them.  A still life; morning table, tufted willows, a window behind them framing the still falling snow.  For the first time this season, I feel the hope of spring.

It doesn’t take much to go on a journey.  You leave a place of familiarity, encounter the world, and return changed.  The most ancient metaphor for life is a journey, and there’s no dimension of experience that cannot be understood within the journey’s context.  Certainly each miniscule spiritual venture (each foray into doubt, each intentional walk around the block, each worship service or meditation) is a journey, inasmuch as we are transformed, however slightly.  It takes very little for the heart to travel outside its comfort zone and be moved.

Or does it?  The bleakness of this season checks me; the reality of human lives.  If it is the nature of a soul to be moved, why is it so often a move into suffering?  And what  the hell do I mean, soul?  This has been a good year, in my life.  But it has been a year of grief for others.  Death, pain.  Murders in schools and along the Boston Marathon.  Political, social, disease.  How will we weather this?  Why do some people seem blessed, gifted, happy, while most of us begin to shrivel and cringe?  True that bit about most humans living lives of quiet desperation.  Most of us live lives of diminished returns and restraint.  Most of us die entirely bored.

When does a journey become spiritual?  What is it that moves a heart?

**

Later, still, with the sprig of willows in their vase, I trudge to the yoga studio.  Empty, since the weather prompted me to cancel classes.  I put the willows on the alter, adjusting them a bit.  Then I kneel down.  The sun in the northern windows doesn’t directly light the space, but sends in chords.  The air is dry and I lick my lips.  After a few minutes, I begin to move.

I move until I feel a humidity building in the small of my back, the nape of my neck.  I feel the bones of the hand crack, and then begin to glide more smoothly, and eventually I feel the muscles in the palm change texture and the skin of the hand pinks.  I feel the pain in my low back, radiating from the spine’s attachment to the sacrum to the muscles of the low back.  I bend backward and touch those muscles from inside.  They begin to change texture, as well.  I move quickly, until I feel my heart thudding in my ribcage, and then I hold.  Sweat leaves my hair and falls into my eye.  I blink.  But I still hold.

When I am done, I put back on the arctic explorer’s uniform and step back into what has become a glaringly bright sun.  I’m not fooled.  It is the same day.  It is the same spring.  I have errands to do, there are still headlines coming in from Boston.  I have changed, not world.  My heart has moved.

**

There are times we set out with the intention of nourishing the soul, when we seek insight.  We go to landscape, a holy site, a guru.  We follow our longings beyond the borders of the familiar.  These journeys are conscious and deliberate; they are the equivalent of a retreat.  We expect transformation.  We open ourselves to movement.

But then there are occasions when we’re blundering along without any intention of being changed and new awareness bursts through regardless.  You’re in a foreign country, and suddenly American gluttony and status quo are meaningless.  Or you are struck with illness that forces you to question your life’s purpose.  A certain amount of open heartedness is necessary for revelation to break in on us, the sacred and our own soul can catch us by surprise.

What begins as a trip to the grocery can leave us different.

**

They say yoga is the oldest spiritual path known to man.  It isn’t hinduism; it preceeds hinduism. Yet somehow this set of practices, sounds, aphorisms and suggestions, is a thing I find myself drawn to in the middle of a snowstorm in the middling west, thousands of years later.

It was not a journey, it wasn’t intended to be.  I reluctantly followed a girlfriend to a class in Brooklyn.  But yoga has changed me.

**

**

Perhaps a spiritual journey is when both your physical self and your soul move.  External changes have their counterparts in our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.  I spent years trudging around Latin America, and my sense of living a metaphor was eerie.  I was both trying to run away and trying to find something.  I’d head up into the Andes and feel my chest get tight with thin atmosphere, legs cramping, gut strained, pushing every cell of my physical capacity; inside, I scaled a mountain of loneliness as I learned to trust my abilities and my emotional limitations.  Watching the bastardized Catholicism in the Andes, I felt both confusion and longing.  Traveling that way, I knew both physical freedom and the struggle to live that freedom out or bring it home with me.  I felt the alienation of an ex-pat, the lewdness of a voyeur, the alienation of a non-believer sitting through ceremony.

Intense journeys or any sudden immersion into the new have a tinge of the pilgrimage to them.  For one thing, we’re physically engaged, moving, eating, or sleeping in different ways.  This demands that we pay attention.  And it proves how limited our prior version of ‘the way things are’ tend to be.  Awareness in our bodies is intensified.  When we travel, or do anything with the intention of learning, we are removed from the familiar and become absorbed outside of ourselves – in the smells, language, plants, people, books and ideas or songs and rituals around us.  We’re all eyes, ears, and surprised tongues.  This absorption has a childlike quality; memories of travel often have the same vibrancy as memories of childhood or early love.  The selflessness of travel can make us vulnerable and open in ways we may not comprehend until we’ve returned home.

In fact, it may take coming home again to fully understand where it is we’ve gone.

After returning from months in Ecuador, one of the girls I traveled with called me in the middle of the night.  She was crying.  She said she had been standing in the supermarket, looking at the aisle of jams and jellies, and viscerally recalled the simplicity of the tiny corner store in Saraguro.  The gaudiness of her own culture overwhelmed her.  Later she met friends for drinks and dinner and felt herself removed, abstract, feverish.  As if I were listening to them, watching them, from behind a pane of glass, she said.  As if I could no longer talk about the things they talked of.  As if I couldn’t possibly explain to them what I’ve seen.

I knew exactly what she meant.  When I came ‘home’ to my apartment in Brooklyn, I felt the pain of culture shock.  I believe the pain of culture shock to be more intense in coming home than when we go away.  When we go away, we expect to be lost and confused.  We’re open to not knowing what will happen next.  But when we come home, it is terrible to see the same chair propped against the wall, the same blue sweater slung over it, to hear the same voices through apartment walls.  It is painful because we have changed and our rooms have not.

**

There is a link between the tangible world of a journey and the intangible, responsive changes that occur within.

Physical journeys provide a catalyst and form – a beginning, a middle, an end.  This is mythic in quality and reminiscent of many holy stories, from Siddhartha’s venture outside the palace walls to the Jews’ crossing the wilderness to the Mormon’s migration west.  Journeys provide narrative; we can’t help but wonder what happens next.  Because we’ve traversed a landscape, we intuit that we’ve traversed a landscape of psyche or soul as well.

What if our lives had such narratives, even in our own kitchens?  Do they, or do they not?

**

In Peru, I spent weeks alone on the coast.  It is an odd coast; desert runs right up to the shore, and the desert then runs right up to the foot of the Andes.  It is a place of enormity.  One can feel small there.  I took this as a comfort.

I met an ex-pat who had been sunburning on that coast for 30 years.  I did not like him.  I didn’t like his hawaiian shirts or his unshaved blond chin.  I found his unbuttoned collar and his sharktooth necklace offensive, as we sat drinking a beer together and I watched the locals pulling in their fishing nets.  I did not want to be like him.

I wasn’t looking for whatever it was he was looking for.  I wasn’t looking for a place to live, a way out, a chronic boozy vacation.  I was looking for something without knowing what it was.  I was looking for meanings.  I was looking for ways to live in Brooklyn that made more sense.  I was looking for hope, or reasons, or inspiration.  I suppose I was looking for my soul.

I have a few collected rosaries from that trip.  A painting.  All my photographs were lost.  There are times I wonder what it all came to; if the fact of my being there matters much at all. Or if it is one more of a long list of things, experiences, chances in life I left unfinished, couldn’t do, quit.  There are times I wonder why I – a tattooed alcoholic divorcee living in her hometown in the midwest – am practicing yoga.  Isn’t that offensive?  Is that possibly authentic? I wonder why it should feel more complete and soulful than those other journeys.

Maybe because I am not running away from the world, but toward it.

Maybe because I’m not running anywhere, at all.

Perhaps we can uncover the spiritual nature of a journey by asking: what changed? Bringing the pussy willow into my kitchen changed my atmosphere and altered, however slightly, my awareness of spring.  Moving my cold and pessimistic body until it shivered with exertion and warmth shifted my attention.  Change isn’t always positive, of course.  Some journeys are through hell.  Even so, if we examine the transformation that occurred, comparing the ‘before’ with the ‘after’, describing and understanding the factors and details that have brought us from here to there, we touch on something essential and true.  Understanding transformation requires a patient, gentle rendering of attention.  It’s just like the ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs in diet ads; you need the comparison to appreciate the diet’s success.  The significance of any journey, of any change, is measured against it’s starting place.

Grounding ourselves in the consequences helps us arrive.

But what are the consequences of where we live, and who we are?

**

When I wrote that bit about the pussy willow, I didn’t give the act of cutting a few branches much thought.  It was impulsive.  As I wrote it, however, I became aware of how the act changed my morning, how the branches changed the air in my room and the picture of my window.  I enjoyed the cutting, the placing them in a vase.  But why did I have the urge in the first place?  And what drew me to write about that, exactly, instead of some other thing?  It was a soulful movement.  The twenty minutes were spiritual.  But I didn’t realize that until I wrote it out, until I paid attention.

We are asked to pay more attention.  Holiness likes hidden until we tend it with listening and actions.  We do not have to go far, I think.   As Wendell Berry says, “The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our feet and learn to be at home.”  The miles we’ve traveled, but also the habits of our mornings, the minutes we spend on the mat, are a means for discovering that single, blessed inch.

The diagnosis was this: you hurt, you have brain difficulty, there are questionable and various causes, it will always be this way.  My response: no shit, thanks much.

My pain – breaking, physical, unexplained – ran right alongside my depression – breaking, physical, consuming.  It was and is entirely possible that I do not have fibro, but my symptoms are caused by my major depression.  Or that I have fibro, for whatever reason, and this has played a role in my depression.  Throw in active alcoholism and I was just plain broken.  Why would I take up the diagnosis of chronic pain when I already lived with the chronic depression and the chemicals?  I didn’t.  Other than to know in the back of my head that body, brain, pain are things I seem unable to explain to others.  That medicine has no very good answers.

And that from the earliest days of my yoga practice I began to feel better.  Not cured.  Not fixed.  But breathy and sweaty and tolerable.

Some days, though, I hurt profoundly.  I hurt like my muscles have been soaked in battery acid and my bones are ashy.  I hurt, today.

I want to write about pain, and yoga, but I’m not exactly sure how.  If you look for answers or help, you are hit with a daunting arrayof ‘conquer the pain’ and ‘pain free’ and ‘beat the pain forever’ palaver and self help books.  These set you on a cycle of hope and deeper despair when they don’t work.  If you talk to doctors, you are overwhelmed with inadequate answers and the frightening realization that medicine doesn’t know much and won’t necessarily help you.  More despair.  I do not want to contribute to that cycle.

I don’t want to say yoga will make the pain go away.  But it does help.  It can.

Three days ago, at the tail end of my teaching week, I came home exhausted and having a hard time thinking clearly.  I tried to list to myself the errands.  I tried to gather the laundry.  I began to cry.  It was too much, I was too tired, I could not do laundry.

Go ahead.  Say that’s melodrama.

I eventually did do the laundry.  Not that day.  But I did it.  And walked around like a cripple, using chairs and walls and countertops to support me, hunched like a centenarian, placing my fingers and feet gingerly.  I started to berate myself.  Myself, yoga teacher.  Myself, woman who stands in front of the room and glides through sun salutations.  Myself, crying because the bed hurts.  Sound hurts.  Clothing hurts.

Whatever.  I limped through it.  I worked harder.  I recognized I wasn’t eating very well, but shrugged it off because at least I was eating.  I woke up and wanted to sleep.   To sleep for days.  I ‘conquered’ tasks in two minute segments followed by half hour cringes.

Yesterday, I went to a family thing.  I hurt.  I held my niece, I laughed with cousins.  We joked about the spring that doesn’t seem to come.  On the drive home, battling my tiny car over roads that were blown with icy snow, I hurt more and more.  I couldn’t move my wrists well.  My shoulders burned.  And my spine felt like it was breaking, down along each vertebrae.  I stopped the car, stood as best I could and stretched, then drove again.  I stopped, I cried and cussed, then drove again.  I stopped, used both hands to heft myself out of the driver’s seat, laboriously set both feet on the highway, held the car with both hands, and vomited because it hurt.  I don’t know what hurt.  All.

I want to remove limbs.  I shake.  I want whiskey.  I want cigarettes.  This is stupid; I haven’t had a drink in four years.  But I want it, just the same.

In the vernacular of chronic pain, this is a ‘flare up’.

Indeed.

Somehow, though, it is okay.  It’s too familiar.  I know it, by now.   And I knew, sitting crouched alongside a tiny blue car in the middle of a snow ice storm on a landscape blown to invisible, that I want to write about it for all those students who have told me about pain, too.  I want to say it hurts like blinding light, the body seems rot and spoil, but it is okay.

I made it home, I slept for fifteen hours in a sleep that was more exhausting than nurturing.  And then I read some little checklist for fibro flare ups.  A possible causes kind of thing.

• cold or wet winter weather
• too much or too little physical activity
• stess
• poor sleep

Which is as unhelpful as was that original diagnosis.  But, honestly, true.  There I was in the middle of an ice blizzard, after having taught seventeen classes a week for months on end.  I’d just navigated my way through a move, tax season, and a few familial stresses which were okay, but emotional none the less.  And I don’t get any more than four or five hours of sleep on any given weekday.  Check, check, and check.

Still, I say it’s okay.  This is life.  I want more of it.

My theory that doesn’t mean anything, unless you’re in it

I say yoga works.  It works through breath, movement, system wide, meditation based, give us a reason to go on ways. I don’t have the degree or the credential to say why.  But I have this body.  I can make it fly, sometimes.  My theory is that yoga works in ways nothing else will, but it will change your ideas about who you are and what life is.

There is a growing body of research that shows yoga and meditation can help with chronic pain.  For a long while, these studies suggested they help with ‘coping’, that is, they do not lessen the symptoms at all but give us some modicum of tolerance for what hurts like hell.  Now, though, studies are beginning to show that symptoms themselves may be reduced.

Most studies suggest restorative and gentle yoga.  I believe in restorative and gentle yoga.  I believe there is a style and appropriate yoga for any body.  For me, however, a stronger, sweatier, more intense practice is downright crucial.  I need to go upside down.  I need to challenge the muscles, elongate the nerves.  When I don’t for a day or two, ‘symptoms’ start popping up like ghosts.  I believe ‘restorative and gentle’ yoga are prescribed because most people don’t have any experience with yoga.  If that’s the case, it’s a good place to start.

Yoga works with the breath.  Breath is immediately connected to the nervous system and the muscular-skeletal system.  Breathing as done in yoga speaks to our tissues and the formation of cells.  I’m not a scientist nor a doctor, but it seems to me those cells are fevered and over taxed and inflamed during pain; to breath as we do in yoga immediately turns on the parasympathetic nervous system, which facilitates healing, balance across our biochemical field, and the processes of healing, building, rejuvenation. Pain responds to the breath.

Nerves.  Oddly, pain doesn’t happen in the brain but the experience of pain is considered to be mental, cognitive, brain based.  Let’s skip the brain for a moment and go instead to the nerves.  The body scattered map as finely drawn as a universe.  Yoga stretches nerves (they stretch, just as muscle tissue does).  Yoga improves proprioceptive and reflex type things.  It is a way to recalibrate, soothe, and reconnect with reality – here and now demands on the body, sensation, awareness in space, texture and elongation and movement.  It improves communication between nerves and spine, nerves and brain, nerves and endocrine system, nerves and immune system, nerves and hormones.  If all of this is true, and ‘pain’ is a haywire backfire of those things, than yoga helps.

Inflammation.  Yogically speaking, any ‘disease’ or ‘suffering’ manifests somewhere in the body as inflammation.  Swelling, fever, indigestion.  Yogic practices alternately invert, compress, and massage us on a tissue and cellular level.  This processes the gunk of work outs, indigestion, stress hormones.  It directly stimulates improved circulation and lymphatic movement, promotes hormonal balance, begins to work through backlogs of old stress in the digestive and muscular and fascial networks.  Asthma, arthritis, anything rheumetoid is inflammation.  Studies have proven that yoga reduces inflammation.

Brain, but more than brain.  As a culture we roughly understand that depression, fear, wellbeing have something to do with neurotransmitters.  Serotonin, GABA, et al.  Some studies have shown that women have less serotonin then do men, and that fibro patients have serotonin deficiencies.  We tend to think of this stuff as brain based, and certainly they are.  But the stomach and digestive tract produce more serotonin than does the brain.  Our heart and psoas muscles seem to produce chemical reactions much like neural pathways.  And our fascial system, the base from which all chemical reactions across the body mind happen, conduits biochemical reactions in a way more nuanced and less understood than do the axons and dendrites of brain cells.  Again, yoga has been proven to balance mood, prbably balance chemicals, definitely to speak to the release of hormones.  So, if pain signals to the body have something to do with neurotransmitters and biochemical processes, then yoga helps.

Mind body. philosophy, gut experience.  There is something inarticulate about yoga.  At it’s heart, it directly speaks to our human condition.  Somehow, it manages both to acknowledge and accept the limitations, sufferings, and pains we human beings face AND to give us a sense of freedom and resurrection.  Unlike self help books, miracle cures, and most religions, the philosophy and lived experience of yoga is an experience of grace under fire.  A strange blend of yes, it hurts to be human and to one day die, but living itself is precious.  There are thousands of books and memoirs about this.  Read those others.  I hurt to much to try to explain it just now, but I believe yoga has given me validation of my individual life and the experience of that individual life as rare and raw and beautiful.  It has given me the ability to face pain and love anyway.  Not to get over it, but to go through it.  And to feel, most days, as if I am dancing.

Let’s make up a list of fifteen (that is arbitrary and random) things I know to be true: ie, tips and tricks, advice and how to, or just some tools you can cling to:

-When I teach students or answer questions about chronic pain (or, hey, weight loss or sore knees) I am often stuck: I cannot promise a danged thing.  I can’t promise yoga will solve your infertility problems or that it will help you lose twenty pounds.  I can’t promise the pain will go away or your knee will work.  But I usually do try to insist yoga will make it better.  This gets harder: most of us want a ‘cure’.  We want three classes and then forever relief.  Yoga doesn’t work that way.  Yoga will give you very specific things that will help.  But they are intended to be used.  If I do not practice for a few days in a row, the bad comes back.  If you want the yoga to work, you have to do the yoga.

- Consistency.  Don’t go looking for a three hour yoga practice once a month, or fall into the yoga honeymoon of a season and then run away, or do the on again off again practice.  If you want to see what yoga is, do it every day.  It does not have to be much. It can be ten minutes.  But go for everyday.

-What kind of yoga.  Again, I believe there is a style of yoga for any and everyone.  Keep looking until you find a teacher who works for you, a style that works for you.  In group classes, DO NOT hesitate to make the practice your own and do wildly different styles than the rest of the room.  Most recommendations for chronic pain point to a gentle or restorative practice.  I can see the merit of this.  I know when I hurt like hell even gentle is near impossible.  However.  Those I know with chronic pain that has become manageable are people who manage it with Bikram yoga, running, Ashtanga yoga, or power yoga.  These are considered to be ‘intense’ or ‘strong’ forms of physical activities.  We can’t do 100% all the time.  But we do push hard and do ‘advanced’ type things.  Don’t assume that you can’t do strong things – chances are you already do.  You’ve probably had children, or moved furniture at some point.  Having a diagnosis does not mean you can’t do physical activity.  In my life, and those I know who have a grip on this pain thing, the intensity of a regular run or a hot yoga room is essential to our management.

-For some reason, movement helps.  Fascial studies are showing that a changing practice goes further than repetive, gym style movements.  Because ‘trigger points’ and fibro pain seems to have something to do with a pain ‘remembered’ though not actually really present in the moment, moving IN NEW WAYS and in different planes seems to ease and sooth and, for me, show me the parts of my body where pain is okay.  think of adding flowing movements, it doesn’t have to be vinyasa but flowing from bridge to the floor, in addition to any repetitive (ie cycling, lifting, runner’s movements).  Explore sensation, and find those that are good and interesting.  Try inversion, backbend, forward fold.  Do different things on different days.  Have favorites, but keep learning.  Relish the moments of ‘hey, this is sweet’.

Food/supplement things that I’ve randomly found to work, and when I don’t have, I will begin to slip:

-Avoid processed foods, refined flours and processed sugars.  Just do.  Do a little.  It gets easier.

-Eat more vegetables.  Three times more than you think.  Be aware that meat, dairy, wheat are all inflammatory and harder to digest.  Don’t kick them, just balance them, and eat more green stuff.

-Figure out what ‘inflammatory foods’ and ‘anti inflammatory foods’ are.  Don’t try to reinvent your kitchen.  Just try to add one of the soothers, notice if it’s working, and add another.

-tumeric. you can find this in supplement form.  You can cook with it. I get the root at a little Vietnamese grocery and I put it in my juice.

-oral aloe vera.

-vitamins b and d.

-fish oil

-epsom salt baths.  lavender.  clove.  vertiver.

Blessed Be.

I do not like my pain.  I am too tired.  I want to teach, I want not to disappoint, I want to muscle through.

But, there is also a level on which my pains are acceptable.  They keep me honest.  They slow me down when I try to be too much to too many people, when I begin saying yes all the time.

And more than this, they have softened me to beauty and appreciation.  Yes, I hurt today.  But most days I’m playing with handstands, and able to teach others to play with handstands.  And I can cuss it all I want to, but it has given me a deep and abiding sympathy when I see the pain of others.  And the fact is, we all have pain, somewhere.  The fact is, we turn our lurching, mincing movements into dance.  We have to, or we get bitter and resentful and destructive.  Beethoven couldn’t hear a thing when he composed his ode to joy.  The strongest people I know have survived things that would kill most animals.  And yet they hold children with a tenderness like the dawn creeping into the night sky.  They have bodies that hang together, against the odds.  They manage to get degrees, paint paintings, sing songs.

We are not perfect beings.  But we are good.

So I say blessed be the cracked, for they let the light in.  Blessed be the weary, for they are honest.  Blessed be the sore, for we are all sore, and we go on breathing anyway.

And the White Horse Tavern is next door, for post class adult beverages or really good deep fried green beans.

Namaste, y’all.  Let’s go.

Of course, other things can touch us: the death of a dear one, recognition of passing time, a diagnosis, an old pain become so pervasive you realize you are a prisoner.

Years ago, before I knew anything of yoga and while I bounced from barroom to bedroom to suicidal moments alone on my kitchen floor, a friend sat across from me in a dirty hospital room.  I was sick.  She was not.  The pity on her face made me more sick, but I didn’t have the audacity to send her away.  And I was afraid to be where I was, alone.  I am so sorry for you, she said.  I don’t think you know how good it is to be alive.  A few minutes later she stood up, touched my hair, and left.  This same friend, in a different crisis I’d imposed on myself, said you can’t do this any longer; you won’t survive.   She went on with things about self-respect, responsibility, yadda yadda.  I scowled.  How, I wondered, do you possibly begin to ‘love yourself’ when you hate yourself so very much?  It begins with your behaviors, she said.  Sooner or later, you just start to feel better about yourself.

She wasn’t entirely right.  I did have hunches about the sweetness of a human life.  I had memories.  I had loved, once in a while.  I had known the passions of travel and art. I had a dog, once, and I had walked in the woods.  There had been times I’d felt something like the breath of spring on my body and the riptide of a mind on fire, but all I had of it at the time was echo and memory.  Memory so vague I doubted it’s authenticity and disbelieved in it’s return.

I once spent Easter in Guatemala.  Once, I spent it in Greece.  Once, in New Orleans.  All are places that celebrate holy week in visceral, ritual, soulful ways.  I consider myself an agnostic at best.  Yet the passion plays of bloody crosses, pilgrimage, fasting, ashes, and rebirth move me deep.  I described to a cerebral, ‘life of the mind’ kind of friend back in New York the way Greek widows, hunched with age and dressed in black, spend days crawling over broken streets on their knees to reach a sacred site.  She listened, with a wry look of pity and dismay, as if I were telling her about something just as human but less profound.  Abusive families, maybe.  Blue collar beer bellies.

How pathetic.  she said, and shifted the conversation.

I wondered, though.  The dark clothes a widow wears, always.  The bearing of crosses down streets.  The falling of rose petals through an Eastern Orthodox chapel.  Fasting, feasting.  Not pathetic, I thought.  Not pathetic at all.  Passionate.  Heart wrought.  An emotion I don’t quite feel, but recognize.

And how can we say healing is real, that hope exists, unless it is possible out of broken family histories?  Why should not blue collar beer bellies be profound?

We long to be reborn, we humans.  Sometimes we realize that life is not ‘normal’, that day to day is not enough.  We ourselves want to be resurrected.

Rites of spring and rebirth are not unique to that Christian heritage.  They are earthbound and global.  With them, with spring, we have all sorts of ideas of being reborn, starting over, going further.  Cleaning house.

Detoxification, purification, are deeply embedded in this.  Now, years away from hospital rooms but not so far away I’ve forgotten what alcoholism and major depression are, I sometimes want to drop flowers from cathedral ceilings or blow into people’s ears like spring wind.  I walk around at dawn, deeply busy and yet still in a life I love and find challenging.  This morning I heard a robin, after a very long, very cruel winter.  Brown, muddy stuff shimmers in April sun.  I want to show people, promise them, somehow reveal: this works.  This is real.  Detoxification and purification and rebirth, resurrection, are coded into you. Deep as your thumbprint and DNA.

Most human beings have no idea how good the human body, the human mind, is designed to feel.

And yet we can.  There are ways.

Saucha

The first personal observance of the yogic tradition is roughly translated as purity.  It seems to me that purity is what spring time does inside us.  It stirs and awakens our inherent, deeply human longing to live more, to taste more, to shed our pains and step into something greater.  To become, ourselves, greater.  Perhaps simply to not hurt any longer.

There are very specific practices of food, of cleansing, purification of both body and mind in the yogic tradition.  But the heart of the thing is relational.  The heart of it is recognition – sudden remembrance – of our deepest self and the beauty of aliveness.

Detoxification and purification are central tenets to natural medicine.  And yoga is medicine.  The point is simply that life and ourselves in it are good – no matter how batted about or broken or far away from ‘good’ we have gone.  But it is hard to enjoy life if we are trapped in a body that leaves us sick and in pain.  It is impossible to feel the fire of our intelligence and love if we are haunted by brittle thoughts and emotions.  Therefore, regular detoxification is essential to not only heath, but to love and happiness.

A frantic woman, driven by busyness and over-strain, rushed from one task to another.  Her little boy tried in various ways to get her attention.  Finally, he took her face in both of his little boy hands and held her still: you’re not recognizing me, he said.

Saucha, purity, is asking us to recognize ourselves, others, our work, and the day itself without the scrim and junk of past impressions.  It is an invitation to see our bodies and our minds not from a perspective of diet, reform, control, or punishment, but with the idea of nourishing body and soul so we might drink from the depths.  To purify so that we can live more fully.

Many of us – hell, all of us – are somewhere in that foggy land of not being able to see, not being able to feel, not having a clue how to go on or move forward or be kind to ourselves.  Yogic practices are perfect, here.  It is a fact that your body hears and responds to every thing your mind says and every enviornmental factor and dietic factor you come close to.  But it is ALSO true that your mind feels everything your body does and everything you eat.  This is our way in, this is where hope is; there are things we can DO even if our mind and heart waver.  As my friend said – it starts with your behaviors.  You act.  You practice.  You do things with your body and you try to drink more water.  And eventually, suddenly, almost impossibly, you’ll one day feel the green air of spring inside.  Even if you didn’t really believe it was possible.

TRY THIS: Spring Detox: Food, Stuff, Heart

Food: The body is in a constant state of self detoxification, as we are exposed to both internal and external toxins and irritants.  However, when the body’s self healing mechanisms are over taxed, we are prone to illness, injury, fatigue.  Our culture does not make it easy to eat well, and ‘diets’ are all too often unsustainable, unrealistic, and punitive.  Finding a detox that works for you a few times a year might surprise you with its results.

Spend a day or two not changing your diet at all, but noting everything that you eat.  Spend time asking me, a librarian, or google about different cleanses and detoxes.  Come up with a plan that is realistic and set it in action for three days, a week, or a month.

The cost is minimal, the efficacy is sound.

A body that has not occasionally detoxed becomes less efficient (in sleep, in sex, in attention span, in digestion…) Symptoms of an overloaded body include allergies, PMS, indigestion in all of it’s forms, headaches, skin problems, sleep problems.  Diet has been scientifically proven to affect auto immune diseases, ADHD, mental health, and inflammatory issues from asthma to arthritis to fibromylagia.  Lifespan, wise, it means we age without pain or with heart conditions, arthritis, memory problems, failing joints and bowels.

The benefits of detoxification offer increased energy levels; weight loss; healthy aging; greater motivation,; better digestion and assimilation of nutrients; better concentration, memory, and focus; reduced allergic symtoms; reduced chronic pain symptoms; clearer skin and eyes; decrease or elimination of headaches, migranes, joint pain, body aches, colds, allergies, auto-immune symptoms, sleep disturbances, to name a few.

This is true for me: I did not realize or feel how sluggish and lackluster my normal was until I began to incorporate dietic practices into my life.  Things I thought of as ‘just the way I am’ in terms of monthly cycles, skin, digestion, concentration, and sleep have radically changed.  They radically change again when I stop eating from a wellness perspective.   Within a day.

But they are things you do not recognize, and do not understand, unless you are paying attention.

Stuff: our lives are full of messy closets, half baked plans, procrastination and dirty laundry.  All of this takes an enormous amount of physical and psychic energy to maintain (even when maintence is “I’ll deal with that tomorrow”).

The lightness, motivation, and sudden eruption of energy and hope and creativity that comes from one task done or one drawer cleaned is almost insulting in it’s efficacy.

Look around.  Cleansing and purification will look different for everyone.  Perhaps it’s an unfinished project.  Perhaps its a phone call you haven’t returned, a sinkful of dirty dishes every night, a closet become chaos.

Give it fifteen minutes.  Or commit to one drawer cleaned.  Or ten minutes every night this week to clean the kitchen up before you go to bed.

You’ll feel better in the morning.

Heart:

The first toxin in our lives is stress.  It is more directly related to physical illness than is any fat, sugar, or pathogen.  Just as physical clutter in our houses drains our vitality, mind clutter mucks up our sense of hope, joy, purpose.  Recognizing negativity, resentment, anger, and grudges when they come up is a first step in self-resurrection.

No diet, no asana practice, and no house cleaning will ever truly detoxify you unless and until you have also purified and healed the broken stuff inside.

I speak of forgiveness.  It has nothing to do with other people.  It has nothing to do with fair or justice.  It is much more important to realize that forgiveness and healing are things you need to do for your own damned self and beginning the hard work that it is.

Practice watching your emotions and mind in your asana or meditation practice.  Notice how often judgement, criticism, and blame come up.  Use those same practices – asana, class, meditation in whatever form you do it – to begin learning to let go, forgive, and regard others with compassion.

It is not easy.

But it is the way through.

A better answer is this: I meditate on it and I work on it really hard.  The impetus or inspiration comes to me from those various sources (my practice and what I’ve learned.  How I learned that tree pose can be done on your hands.  What pose taught me how to use my hands to deepen forward folds.  What the big toe is for…or the day I felt my heart both breaking and healing itself by it’s willingness to break in ustrasana.)  (my students and what they ask: how do I find ease in my low back?  What’s wrong with my knee?  Why do I feel so vulnerable in hip openers/rageful and energetic after corework, terrified of inversions, blissy after backbends?)

The birth of a sequence is usually either a pose I want to teach, a body part I want to experience, or an idea.  An idea such as you are grounded and the floor is solid, all is okay.  Or, as in the last few weeks, exploring the yamas.  I am teaching Bhramacharya, for example.  I ponder and write and ponder more while I chop my brussel sprouts and watch pots coming to boil: what does Bhramacharya mean for us, for me?  What does it feel like when I am practicing it?  What are the things in my life that keep me from it.  Abstinance.  Chastisty.  The self as sex.  The sex as potential, as gift, as precious.  Or as waste, as promiscuity, as escape, as taken-for-granted.  To walk with god, to see body as temple.  To act and move and feel as if my every moment were holy, and doors to the sacred were everywhere.  If those feelings were a pose, which would they be?

To me, they would be deeply rooted and embodied and grounded, as the truth of every day moments has a lot to do with everyday things like floors.  Getting out of ideas and ego and dreams and coming back to the way feet touch the earth.  But from that rootedness there would be an awakening of the raw forces, powers, and pitch of passions inside.  The force of muscles and urges.  The power of a foot.  These things led me to think of tadasana, rooted like mountain, and finding tadasana in all the other poses; side plank vashithasana, on our backs, in our warriors, all through chataraunga dandasana, staff pose, purvotonnasana.  Even handstand and headstand: they are upside down, but the strong lines of energy are the same.  Just flipped.

But body as sacred also involves wild emotions, opening up, the bravery of relationship and intimacy.  The ways our bodies have slowly closed off over the years.  Physically opening them up again happens in heart, shoulder, back opening.  Emotionally opening the body up again involves feeling that heart lifting and owning it.  Being willing to explore, to give, to let go into we know not where this is going.

Kapinjalasana – partridge or bird drinking raindrops pose – is a combination of vashithasana (side plank) and padanangustha dhanurasana (extreme wheel pose).  It is an extremely challening pose – one that Iyengar rates at 43 on a difficulty scale that goes to 60.  Now, most human beings will never hit a ten.  To look at a 43 in a standard issue yoga class is damn near insane.

BUT: the elements of the pose are things that a student can experience and feel in the poses he already knows.  Tadasana.  Chattaruanga.  Dhanurasana.

The way to kapinjalasana is made of practicing those things we already know.  Just as the route to Bhramacharya is ownership and acceptance of everyday moments – floor, sex, age, body – and practicing them with an effort towards learning.  Holding them with an attitude of revenence and gratitude and ultimately, sanctity.  The burgeoning billowing ideas of life that flow from that.

St. Theresa de avila writes that the whole way to heaven is heaven itself.  We become more alive when we accept the here and now as our path, our own circumstances as our training ground.

The word vinyasa means ‘to place with intention’ or to place mindfully.  Like poetry, or music, vinyasa involves a very practical and scientific understanding of how poses work, that poses prepare the body for next poses, and that poses have counterposes and sister poses and relatedness.  Building a sequence is practicable and meaningful: you are learning (maybe not consciously, but on the level of muscle memory and fascial capacity) every step along the way).  This aspect of sequencing is learned: teacher training, reading endlessly, learning the ashtanga series, reading and rereading the books that break it all down.

But vinyasa is also like poetry, like jazz, in its creativity: there are many ways to approach the same end.  There is joy in suddenness and compliment and contrast.  There is revolution in challenging our stories and considering the writing of new ones.

However, sequencing is NOT choreography.  It isn’t just made to look pretty, to impress, or to reach some dramatic crescendo.  There is a difference between the arts of ballet or gymnastics or even baseball and that of yoga.  The point is not to be pretty or to perform.  The point is to find that path, to re-form the body, to slip into the body and realize it is, itself, our soul.

This is what I do: I have that idea, I try to feel the idea in my body and brain, and then I try to understand how to build to that pose.  I read Iyengar and Jois again.  I journal about it endlessly.  I take long walks with my dog.

And I think about my students.  What their bodies are good at, where they hold back, what they love to do, what they are capable of.

I come up with poses that link all these things together, like breadcrumbs.  And then we wander around.

I doodle.  I go back to my books.  And I get my hands on the mat.

And then I stand in front of a class and I say things, sometimes planned, sometimes spontaneous, always more dialogue than it appears (I am speaking to YOUR left foot, oh student hiding in the second row.  Yes, I mean YOUR body holds fear and joy, you lady who will not look me in the eye).

Sometimes I horrendously screw it up.  I have to back track.  I have to let my whole wonderful jazz riff go.  I have to swallow my pride and start over again.  I have to somehow explain what my toes are actually doing in warrior one and not only explain what they are doing but what muscle groups to fire up in your legs to make them do what they are doing, and this comes off horribly.

I study anatomy.  I practice playing with my toes in chair pose for hours on end.  I walk the dog again and have a brilliant idea but forget before I get home.

It is art, and study, and practice.  It is always practice.  It is an effort at communication and intimacy.  The secret is I usually have to drop all my plans when faced with the different students in class – they want to be challenged more than I was planning, or have a sudden injury that means we can’t be on our knees all class, or they are clearly wanting to do core work when I intended to play with knee alignment.  So I fail, but those very failings are what I then start to wonder about.  And that births the next class.  And we go on.

Shiva – in all his hundreds of incarnations a fierce, effortful kind of god – sweat and moaned his grief out.  He vowed to avenge his wife’s death.  A drop of sweat left his forehead and sprang into a fierce warrior (also, therefore, an incarnation of Shiva).  In Dr. Svoboda’s dynamic book The Greatness of Saturn, he describes Virabhadra as looking “like a flaming fire, having many heads and many eyes, and tens of thousands of arms and legs. The embodiment of concentrated might…” he is elsewhere described as having a thousand heads, a million eyes, and wielding a thousand clubs.  He dresses in tiger skin.

In my experience, warrior two is one of the most beloved and most hated of poses: often the very same people who hate the pose somehow kind of love it.  Myself included.  I hated it for years.  It called up too much.  It demanded too much from my body, for being such a deceptively simple pose.  However, in the middle of all my head groanings when the pose is called out, there is also a surge of revelation: I know this, I can do this, I know.

Few poses are as all over body strengthening and stretching.  Few release the ‘secondary muscles of respiration’ so much, leaving us able to take a truly full breath and inviting us to sit with it.  If you have ever even read about yoga, you know something about how important breath is to whole mind-body-soul complex.  Breathe correctly, and you heal, find courage, find insight, find calm.  Breathe poorly, and you jump up anxiety and depression, wrack your immunity, screw your digestion, distort your posture and place terror on shoulders, neck, spine (and therefore hips, knees, ankles).  Few poses fire up all the major muscle groups so effectively as this does, and few provide the whole body opening and lengthening and reclaiming this will.  Most of us mince around our lives, fitting into roles and bad shoes and corners.  Most of us have never, ever, allowed our bodies or ourselves to take up as much room in the world as we are capable of.

As posture and body is mind – practice of Vira two can remind us of our power, cultivate our determination and sense of inherent rights, and give us the power to stand on our own two feet, seeing clearly out of our lifted face and open eyes.

Too many of us shut down our own lights, and our truest feelings, in order to fit in.  Patterns learned from family, or from high school.  Too many of us have had to deny our passions in order to ‘be realistic’, to not rock boats, to avoid violence.  If yoga is anything, it is an opportunity to reclaim our truths and find truth if we haven’t the foggiest.  It is actual strength, actual muscle and bone, that we reveal on the mat.  It is not something borrowed nor even something taught; it is something revealed.  True warriorship involves standing in our own light and on our own words.  True warriorship, to paraphrase Tibetan teacher Trungam Rinpoche, means not being afraid of your own strength.  Not being afraid of who you are.

Benefits

Muscles – Strengthens whole shoulder and arm, torso and belly, erector spinae, and larger muscles of the back, as well as all the muscles of the legs.

Joints – improves alignment and can ease knee injury and help with rehabilitation.  Improves range of motion and stability in hips, knees, ankles and feet.  Also tremendous shoulder opener, easing and recuperating shoulder injuries or counteracting years of slouch or cringe.

Warrior two is one of the best “hip openers’ there is in the whole field of yoga.  Easing hips open directly leads to relief of back pain, encourages hamstrings to elongate, improves posture and gait and alignment.  Hips are also associated with the psoas muscle, which is sometimes considered to be the second most emotional muscle in the body (after the heart).  That is, the psoas reacts to messages of ease, panic, well being, fear, attraction and aversion.  Also, that issues with the psoas muscle probably send messages of ease, panic, well being, fear, etc.  It directly touches on our digestive tract and our diaphragm, which does some thing to our ‘nervous stomach’ and our panic or anxious breath.  And stomach and breath directly affect psoas.  Release the hips and you release, in a sense, some soul.

Lymph – This position is fantastic for lymph, and immune system heath. Warrior II puts emphasis on the hip and knee, two of our biggest joints. Lymph collects in our joints and has a hard time moving freely if we don’t move about. Healthy lymph flow means a healthier body.

Breath – encourages the ‘secondary muscles’ of respiration, ie the stuff we normally use to breathe and carry ourselves around all day, to let go of the breath.  I mean shoulders, neck, and back muscles that are not supposed to do the work of breathing except in emergency, but often in our lives do it all the time.  This kind of breathing creates issues to the breath, but also to those very muscles.  Also, cumulatively, to our mood and endocrine system.  The alignment of warrior two releases the shoulders and encourages full movement of the diaphragm, which is an immediate doorway to the nervous system.  Movement of the breath is encouraged to the lower lobes of the lung, where the majority of the blood vessels are.  Thus, detoxification and oxygenation improve, body wide.  With this, circulation improves, and whole body absorbtion/detoxification/communication.  Breathing is the doorway to balance, wellbeing, and feeling ourselves strong enough.

Spine – warrior two eases length back into the spine, counteracting sciatic pain, SI joint pain, inflammation issues, and compression on nerves and discs.  It eases pregnancy strain.  It invites realignment of the nerves and releases compression on discs and nerves.

Technique -

take a four to five foot stance on your mat, with right foot facing the front of the mat and left toes turned out to the left, at about 45 degrees.  Classic alignment has the front heel bisecting the back arch, if you look under neath you.  This is one of the longest/widest stances in yoga.  When your arms extend out over either leg, your feet are directly underneath your hands.

Then, root down through the back leg, engaging the muscles.

Begin to ‘sink’ your entire pelvis down to the earth, lowering your body, which will result in bending the front knee.  Align that front knee directly above the ankle, and keep the kneecap pointed slightly ‘behind’ your body, rather than sinking in.  The cue to ‘bend the front knee to 90 degrees, so thigh is parallel to the floor’, is more descriptive of what the pose looks like after you are in it than how to get there; think of sinking down and the knee following the flexion in ankle and hip.

Turn your torso to face the ‘open’ side (here, left) of the body and the long edge of the mat, extend arms out over either leg, palms facing down to the floor.  Then begin to turn your chin back to the front of the mat, chin toward right shoulder, gaze out over your fingertips.

Find the stability in your strong legs.  From there, find the length of the torso, spine, sides.  Find that length coming from your core, as you begin to let the shoulders relax down away from their chronic lifting up to the ears position, so the scapula begin to slide flat onto the muscles of the back and slightly toward one another and the spine.  That will help open the collarbones of the front body.  Lift through the pubis, belly button, notch of lowest ribs, and heart as you allow the spine and back body to lengthen.

Hold your depth in the pose for a few breath, building up to two minutes in the pose.  When you are ready to come out, either step left foot back forward to meet the right in tadasana (mountain) or uttanasana (standing forward fold).

So a handout seemed needed.  Here ’tis.  Vira Two to follow.

Virabhadrasana 1 (pronounced veer-uhb-huh-DRAAH-suh-nuh) is also known as Warrior 1. Virabhadra is the name of a powerful mythological warrior. According to legend, when one of his hairs dropped to the earth, from it a great army arose.

I once had a little girl ask me why, if yoga is about peace, so many of the poses are named after warriors.  This gave me pause.  But in light of the facts of our lives, in which we struggle, I think the archetype and practice makes perfect sense.  It makes visceral sense.  We are soldiers of peace, strivers for freedom from suffering. A warrior is someone who aims to live their life with compassion and strength.  The ancient stories of personal transformation often involve warrior heros – those who have to figure out right from wrong and stand their ground once they’ve found it.  The warrior stands for dedication, zeal, power, focus, and a revelation of strength.  We are each called to discover and then express our strengths, shedding obstacles and holding patterns along the way.  We are all, essentially, on the warrior’s path.

In her book The Places That Scare You, Pema Chodron teaches:

 “Wherever we are, we can train as a warrior. The practices of meditation, loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity are our tools. With the help of these practices, we can uncover the soft spot of bodhichitta. We will find that tenderness in sorrow and in gratitude. We will find it behind the hardness of rage and in the shakiness of fear. It is available in loneliness as well as in kindness.”

Benefits of Virabhadrasana

Warrior poses require quite a bit of strength. But they also require that the chest and heart area remain open. The pose teaches, seeks for, and reveals the merging of strength and softness.  Every pose that ‘demands’ strength is also giving you strength (here – in the legs, the torso, the back, the shoulders, pretty much a whole body strengthener as well as a stabilizer of ankles, knees, and hips).  In trying to literally open through our chest and heart, we discover both our limitations and our abilities.  We spark up potential.

Warrior one stretches – elongates – the muscles of both front, side, and back bodies.  It ‘opens’ everything from the feet to the throat.  It is also activating core strength, leg strength, foot and ankle and knee and hip stability, and strengthening the heart muscle.

Virabhadrasana 1 develops  stamina and endurance in your thighs and the muscles of your core. It  stimulates digestion. It helps to improve balance, posture and concentration. When done correctly, Virabhadrasana 1 can be helpful for knee problems and can open stiff or frozen shoulders, returning them to full range of motion.

Technique

Warrior 1 is a variation of a forward lunge. We often move into this posture from Downward Facing Dog so let’s take that as our starting point here.

From Downward Facing dog, inhale and step the right leg forward placing it your foot between your hands, slightly to the right near the right thumb so that your right leg tracks with your right hip.  Align your fingertips with that front right ankle and the ankle directly under the knee.  Press the heel and big toe mound of that foot down into the earth to activate the ‘drawing in’ muscles and the nerves that run from inner foot to inner groin.

Spin the back/left heel in and down, so that it’s arch is aligned with the front heel.  (Alternately, building strength, keep the back foot facing forward, heel back and lifted off the ground to find more room in the hips).

Continue to square and lower your hips earthwards; the whole pelvis descends in a level way.  The tailbone doesn’t tuck, but it does descend.  From that descent, feel your lower back elongate and find space.  Exagerate that stretch so that you can begin to draw up with your front body.  Get lighter on your fingers as you draw the belly up and toward your spine, turning on your core strentgth.  As you are ready, hands come to your front thigh, your hips, or begin to extend forward and up toward the ceiling.

Palms face each other. You may have your palms touching or arms shoulder width apart.

Gaze is forward or slightly up, towards the ceiling.

Intend your hips square towards the front and allow the right knee (front knee) to open towards the right.

Stretch your tailbone towards the floor while at the same time lifting your torso.

As you exhale, sink your hips. As you inhale, lift the chest a little higher.

When you are ready to come out of the pose, press through the right leg and step the left leg forward. Another way to exit the posture (which is often part of a vinyasa style class) is to place your hands on the floor and step back into push-up position getting ready to flow into the next posture.

Modifications

Those with knee or hip injuries may find entering the pose easier by stepping the foot forward from a standing position, rather than down dog.

Use a chair or fitness ball under the hips to take some of the weight off of the front leg. Or hold onto the back of the chair or a wall for support.

Have back foot anchored on the wall and actively push into it; this gives you the combined stability of the wall and the floor and teaches your back leg to actively push.

If your find Warrior 1 is hard on your shoulders you may want to keep the arms stretched out in front of you or have the hands at your hips.  If your shoulders creep up toward your ears when you bring the hands together, keep them parted and shoulder width over your head.  If you have rotator cuff injuries, sweeping the hands forward rather than sideways up over head will avoid aggravating the injury.

Be particularly careful if you have any knee problems. Don’t flex the front knee too deeply. You might also choose to lower the back leg so the knee rests on the floor.

To make room in the hip area, stay on the ball of the back foot in a more traditional lunge position (rather than turning it out at 45° in a flat position.)

Know that extending the arms increases demand on your lungs and heart.  Keeping hands in prayer at your chest or solidly on your hips will allow you to build the lower body strength and find proper alignment while maintaining your breath.

A Few Tips

Don’t allow the front knee to collapse inwards as this is quite stressful on the knee.  With it bent, imagine pointing the kneecap out over your fourth toe.

Think of pressing into the outside edge of your back foot. This helps to square your pelvis forward and engage the entire back leg, strengthing calf and quads, stretching hamstrings, stabilizing joints.  It also gives the stretch to the hips, the psoas, and the lumbar back.

Bring your shoulders down on your back, relaxing them away from the ears.  Transfer the ‘lifting’ out of your shoulders and into your core, pillar strength.

Keep your chest lifted trying to find that sensation of broadening or opening.

Find a point of focus and maintain a soft, steady gaze.

Ultimately, the front knee bends to 90 degrees, so the front thigh is level with the floor.  This is very deep, and requires a lot of strength, and can be hard for those with ‘tweaky’ knees.  Think of descending the front hip, rather than bending the knee.  Your whole body lowers its center of gravity and the hips are much lower to the ground than when you are standing – emphasize the dropping of the hips and the grounding of your legs.  From there, relax your shoulders and lift your spine, heart, and belly button.

People talk the cold, hunched and cringed over, cussing the place they were born and the place they have chosen.  Some of us wonder just what in the hell we’re doing here.  Drifted.  In the prairie.

I taught the last few classes directly at this brittleness, this harshness, this coagulation around the heart.  Knowing what blows us is partially weather, partially light. It is  mainly a severence from the sweetness of the body to its cruelty and dis-ease.  Sometimes this manifests as fever, indigestion.  Irratibility, inability to stay focused or inspired.  Lethargy or anxiousness.  Dry skin.  Judgemental and hardheaded opinions that wear the mask of Truth.

I taught with the intention of reconnecting, rewiring, nerves to their full length and awareness to the body’s all-ways there ability to heal and regulate and comfort us.  I wanted to invite the body and the mind into the same pose until they became the same thing – to draw awareness and acceptance to the hard places so that we can put some space around it and begin to move it as well.  To breath and exhale and let go.  To know what it is we need to do and do it.

There were questions.  These are a few of my answers:

THE LYMPHATIC SYSTEM

Our body carries a lymphatic map as varigated and subtle as our network of veins and arteries.  Lymphatic channels draw toxins and inflammation from our tissues to be processed and digested.  There are, just as there are central terminals for blood vessels and nerves, major lymph nodes under our arms, in our throat, and in our hips.

Unlike the circulatory system, however, which has its movement from the pumping heart, lymph is dependent upon bodily movement and the muscles around the channels to move.  And gravity, and pressure, and massage of the tissues themselves.

Physical movements as laid out in yogic postures or basic daily range of motion keep lymph flowing.  Inversion encourages this flow, sometimes specifically into the heart and lung area (think Uttanasana and Sarvangasana).  This is beneficial as many of the pathogens we encounter are things we’ve inhaled – the lymph directed to lungs and major arteries has an opportunity to absorb toxins and, when we un-invert, to flush lymph back to the nodes for detoxification.

The body’s first line of defense, though, is mainly in the throat, nose, and trachea.  Many yoga poses directly invigorate and stimulate the glands in this area, bring increased circulation to the tissues, and clear congestion.  Pranayama does this, as does throat and shoulder opening asana, as does lifting the tree of the lungs.

THE THYROID

The thyroid and parathyroid, in the throat and upper chest area, are master glands sending messages for metabolization and immunity fighting to the rest of the body mind.  Ujayyi breathing and asana that alternately constrict and stretch the thyroid gland (again, shoulderstand, bridge, the chin tuck of lotus pose) stimulate and rebalance the thyroid gland.  From the thyroid, both the endrocrine (hormone) and nervous (mind and body and stress and relaxation) systems are engaged. When we stimulate the thyroid, we stimulate the tonsils.  The tonsils and adenoid are part of the Waldeyer ring, which is a ring of lymphoid tissue found in the pharynx. The lymphoid tissue in this ring provides defense against pathogens.

THE GI TRACT

The belly, too, is where many pathogens, allergens, and irritants enter our system.  Therefore, the belly is full of living flora and white blood cells.  The massaging, pumping, inverting, and compressing of the belly area encourages the circulatory system to take up some of these pathogen and infection fighting white blood cells into the body wide blood stream. Circulation to the organs, muscles, and glands of the digestive tract  improves digestion and builds stronger tissues, and breaks through fascial adhesions or displasia (irregularly shaped cells).

FASCIA

Fascia is the bonding substance and ground of our body’s structure, a net that our muscles, bones, and organs hang in.  It allows for muscles to glide across one another, nerves to communicate to one another, and chemical reactions to occur.  Fascia’s makeup and structure can be changed, torn, or made thick with too little movement or too much corn syrup.

Sometimes these fibers break or tear.  If they heal incorrectly, we develop adhesions (or scar tissue) which inhibits movement.  Myofascial release — or gentle, sustained pressure on the soft tissues while applying traction to the fascia  – breaks up adhesions, gets blood flowing, and increases nervous sensitivity.  Movement such as yoga crosses fascial lines, invigorating the bodymind’s map of healing, movement, and stagnancy.  Yoga IS myofascial release.

MIND, STRESS, AND SWEETNESS

Any good doctor will tell you that most of our illness is stress based.  Most of us know that stress accelerates aging, wrecks havoc on our immune system, and causes the negative thought patterns to become entrenched.

Anyone with any experience with yoga and meditation also knows, on a kind of pre-cognitive level, that yoga helps return us to ease and wellbeing.  That this shift has less to do with changing the facts of our lives, circumstances, or even our bodies, and much more to do with awakening our sense of resiliency, acceptance, compassion, and sweetness.