Your mental health

Jim Campbell - OmLight Yoga Photography

Earlier today I had a conversation about mental illness.  It made me think of yoga, and I posted on the facebook page.  But then that same friend and I talked again, and he reminded me of the difficulty: on the one hand, it is too easy to call negative emotions or problems in life 'illness' when it is part of being human; on the other hand, 'mental illness', along with a hit list of things from fibromyalgia to IBS to PTSD, are too often minimized and dismissed as being 'in your head'. Clarity: it is not just in your head.  I hope that anyone who knows my teaching knows I believe these things to be very real, very physical, a cornerstone to reality.  I do not advocate over simplistic views of 'healing' that encourage you to meditate your way past DNA or cancer or depression or alcoholism or schizophrenia.

But I do think - I know - that yoga helps.

Western medicine (humanity, maybe) has floundered on these kinds of illness, and yoga offers a kind of healing that is unheard of, elsewhere.  I do not say it makes it all better.  I do not promise symptoms will all go away.  I cannot make the blind see or the dead rise and I will never, ever tell someone NOT to listen to their doctor.

The best shot you've got involves both your doctor and your yoga.

Here is what I said on facebook:

talked with a friend this morning about 'mental illness'. How, of all the medical conditions in the world, most of which have seen an improvement in life expectancy in recent years, the opposite is true for the chronically depressed, anxious, and struggling.

Yoga helps, I kept thinking. Yoga heals. I know this is true.

But I also know that 'illness' is itself limiting. There is nothing wrong with feeling anxious, sad, or angry. Life is anxiety provoking. We should feel sad and angry.

The problem is not that we feel these things, but that we feel overwhelmed and damaged by what we feel.Yoga, though, teaches us different. Teaches us to find more more meaning and more power from what we feel. To use these very things to feel more alive, not less so.Yoga helps. I know this is true.

The fact is, anyone who tells you they have a cure or it is all in your head is minimizing your experience.  Anyone who tells you they can change the way you feel or that you SHOULD change the way you feel is being harmful and dishonest and misleading in very important ways.

I do not want to offer you something to make you feel better or to change you.  I want to say it's okay to feel what you feel.  To say yes, I see it, it is there.

To say, still: yoga helps.  I know this.

Oddly, though, I want to throw in an immediate caveat: yoga isn't for everybody.  The gurus who try to tell you their yoga is for everyone are false gurus.  This yoga has worked for me, and I believe there is a yoga that will work for everyone.  It may not be called 'yoga'.  It may have nothing to do with physical postures or breathing or philosophy.  But if it is an ongoing personal transformation, it qualifies in my book.

I throw caveats, everywhere.  Like breadcrumbs.  As if I'm going very deep into the unknown woods.  Perhaps I am.

Mental health.  Yoga for everyone.  I think I will continue to write on these things, to teach and to practice and to sweat them out.  I am not preaching answers.  I'm asking questions.

The problem with mental health is hopelessness, pathology, and society.  Within the individual, healing and a full, humane, joyful life are entirely possible.  Yoga is the process of finding it.

I know, this: I am watching someone I love be destroyed by active alcoholism and am maddened by her inability to see it, crushed by my inability to understand why I was able to get better and she has not.

I sat with a woman for a long time last week talking of chronic, debilitating depression and crushed my fingernails into my palms as she said she didn't believe she could ever have kids for fear she'd pass 'this' on, yet she was grief stricken by her loss; she didn't believe she'd be able to live to old age if it kept on this way, that suicide is inevitable; I knew exactly what she meant.  I know, because I have that depression, too.  I tried to explain that I have it - I have it STILL - but that it is different, now.  That it is truly my strong point, my revolution, my actual reason for being alive and finding joy and being strong.  I cannot much explain it, but it happened on a yoga mat.

I have seen autism, trauma, manic states, and schizophrenia change because of a yoga practice, people become alive again and not crushed, not broken, but sweet and powerful and glad to be alive.

These are the questions.

If this is possible, why not try?

Commit

 

Until one is committed, there is always hesitancy The chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation There is one elementary truth, The ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans; The moment one definitely commits oneself then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help that would never otherwise have occurred.A whole stream of events issues from the decision, Raising to one’s favour all manner of unforseen accidents and meetings and material assistance Which no man could have dreamed would come his way. Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

Goethe

Yoga in St Cloud, beginning Tuesday, September 4

Less than two weeks from now Return will open in downtown St. Cloud. Here is what I have: 822 1/2 West St. Germain Street.  30$ for 30 days new student special.  Classes are always $10 after that.

Return Yoga is a non-profit: each $10 you spend goes to help teach vets, domestic violence survivors, and at-risk kids.

Questions?  Hit the interested button.

Schedule?  Here you go:

stcloudcalandar

Stability. Balance. Grace.

A recent study of Parkinson's disease showed a gentle yoga practice, once a week, returned people's ability to balance.  To stand, on their own.  To walk.  To hold the hand steady. Parkinson's is a withering disease, a slow erosion of the neural pathways.  The body slowly loses its capacity and the mind, I imagine, begins to close in upon itself, moving in smaller and smaller cages.  The mind forgets how to relate to the body.

Painful.  Frightening.

Yet I don't think it's terribly far from what most of us are living, most of the time.   I think we have forgotten (mistrusted, misused, tried to hide or control or shrink) the body to the point we can no longer feel it.  We have become trapped, disembodied.  We have, in very real ways, forgotten how to feel and what it means to be embodied.  To be alive.

It's a common experience in yoga classes to feel we're going to fall on our faces, that we're on the verge of toppling.  We feel the anti-thesis of grace and beauty.  When I teach, I watch this happening; feel your feet on the ground, I'll say, or notice your breath in your belly, and half the people in the room look up to the ceiling as if the answers and the sensation were up there somewhere.  They crane their necks around to see what the teacher or the experienced students are doing.  If I say feel your hand, from the inside, I get looks of skepticism.  There's yoga teacher talking crazy again, the look says.

I am not speaking of advanced poses of gyration and balancing on one foot.

I am talking about tadasana, mountain pose.  Or sitting up tall.

This is very, very hard for most of us to do.

**

We cower, instead.  We hunch.  We try to make ourselves small, or have a chronically puffed up chest.  Old injuries, our childhoods, our belief and self esteem all cow the body into misalignment and unbalance.  This isn't metaphorical, either: if you think of how a depressed or grief stricken person stands, how they breath, you can imagine the postural changes.  Four or five minutes of this posture has a ripple effect on our mood and our chemistry.  Ten or twenty years, and the mood and the chemistry have re-formed the body and made it hard.

Feeling violated or insecure causes some bodies to protect themselves with added weight.  Anxiety and constricts the muscles around the heart, freezes the shoulders and the back into a hard shell.  People who have been told to be quiet, to not draw attention to themselves, who have learned to focus all their attention outside (on alcoholic parents, an abusive partner, an unstable environment) hold a very small stance and seem to shrink in space.  Even assertive, confidant, or aggressive persons have an overdeveloped strength in the neck, chest, and arms but stand on cocked legs, bowed legs, hurt their knees and their ankles over and over again.

Some of this is malicious feeling, as though we have to 'deal' with all our unresolved issues in the past.  It needn't be.  Similar structural changes happen simply because we over use our dominant hand, fell off a horse when we were twelve, or were rear ended five years ago.

These are only questions we can start asking ourselves, directions in which to move.

What happens inside when someone cues you to stand tall?  How does it feel to occupy as much space as you can, to stretch your arms wide, to kick hard?

Do you hands shake?  Why?

*

The Parkinson's study suggests yogic movement retrains the brain and neural pathways, establishes new pathways, reconnects brain and intention and nerves.

Even if parts of our brain have died and eroded, we can learn how to stand again.

*

I feel I'm going to fall over, a student said in virabadrasana 2. If the slightest wind blew, I would fall.

How, then, do we learn to feel balanced, to feel strong and stable?  What does a yoga pose have to do with our mind, our self?  Where do you start?

I asked him to pay attention to his feet.  In an effort to stay stable, he was unconsciously taking small steps, keeping the movements and the poses conservative.

Yoga poses begin with foundations, with the way our body comes in contact with the floor.  A strong, balanced pose means the joints are stabilized, which means the muscles and connective tissue are engaged (which means tightening joints up, not flexibility).

Personal trainers and physical therapists often teach movements with a ball or a wobble board.  The point is teaching the body to stabilize itself.  The body does this by contracting muscles in co-ordination, creating foundation.

Yoga uses the body itself to teach stability and poise.  If it is true that fear, anxiety, depression, or a car wreck fifteen years ago changes our body, than it is also true that consciously training our body to stand confidently will change our minds and our moods.  It offers a way to confidence, stability, and grace that is altogether different than psychotherapy or positive affirmations.  It asks us not to worry about the thoughts and feelings that happen over, and over, and over again but to pause for a moment and consider the skin of our toes and the structure of the ankles.

But to get there, we have to feel our feet on the ground.  We have to know our relationship to the floor.

We have to start getting out of our heads, and into the body.

*

There is an illustration floating around the internet, that say's "When you fall, I'll be there for you" and is signed, affectionately, The Floor.

Some yogis have altered the illustration and crossed out 'floor' to read 'mat'.

This is the point I love, in yoga.  The point where the idea, the philosophy, the meaning, is ripped right out of the abstract and into the real.  yoga is the practice of reality.

On the one hand, this idea of the floor catching you is humiliating.  It culls up images of awkwardness, embarrassment, all that learning how to walk and ride a bicycle. Let alone dancing, which most of us can not, in any impressive way, do.

On the other hand, there is a honest comfort here.  Reality is the only solid ground there is.  Our plans, our expectations, our heads have proven us to be silly, more often than not.  They are houses of mirrors and will lead directly to suffering and disappointment, if not just a chronic sense of being numb and stuck.

Reality, though, touching our hands or our feet to the floor and learning how to build stability, has an element of power to it.  I have friends who swear by the grounding effect of gardening, others who will mutter something about needing to use their hands when they start to feel overwhelmed or have to work something through.  Most of us, I think, can remember a time when an emotion swelled so powerfully we had to go for a walk, had to wash the dishes or clean a closet or sweep the floor.  Most of us can acknowledge the fact that a difficult to solve problem often needs us to stop ruminating and spend time doing: tinkering on a car, walking the dog, playing with a child, cooking a meal.

It isn't that there is anything wrong with thinking.  Only that thinking, to be inspired and fully formed, to be genius, needs to have its feet on the ground.  It needs time, ground, experience.

We will never, I mean, think our way into feeling better or more alive.  We can never burn by thought alone to an answer to life's questions.  We can never work through the issues of our past or our unfulfilled dreams or our nagging anxieties unless and until we experience our selves as strong, fast, stable, and breathy.

*

This is a gift.  This is a promise.  This is why yoga is so powerful for those of us who might feel anxious, vulnerable, or afraid.

At moments of heartbreak, overwhelm, or panic, it is possible to find our feet.

Yogic movement retrains the mind, reconnects attention and nerves, gives us the floor.

This is why yogic practice is hard, and the hardness has very little to do with physical limitations.  The hardness is in our minds, in finding a willingness to let go of our thinking habits and just show up, instead.  Most of us resist.  Our mind insists we aren't any good at this stuff, that other people are strong and flexible and athletic but not us.  The mind wants to stay afraid, says things like I'm always alone, this situation is unfair, why me, why can't I.  It is packed with 'always', 'never', and doubt.  It is ruthless in it's perfectionism, procrastination, blame, and fear.  It becomes rapt with it's own preconceptions, prejudices, and self-preservation to the point it loses connection with reality.

Yet emotional balance, emotional intelligence, and healing are reality bound.

Remember, for a moment, those times when you were so emotionally charged you needed to move.  Or how physical reality (song, walking, washing the dishes, touching something alive) has helped you work through a problem.

Now know, for a moment, that the quickest and surest route to getting out of your own fear and suffering is to consider someone else's.  Wisdom practices throughout time have taught that the surest way to solve your own problems is to help someone else through theirs.  The point is not altruism, per say.  The point is reality.  If we can, for even a moment, crawl out of the mind and into the world we come back in contact with reality and perspective.

We remember time.  We know relativity.  We realize we can, actually, stand up.  However big our fear or panic, we'll know that there is more to life than it.

There is more to us than it.

The mind closes in on itself, moving into smaller and smaller cages.  It forgets how to relate to the body.

Eventually, we learn how to feel panic or fear or uncertainty full on, but still stand.  We'll know they are not constant, not solid, and that we do not actually become overwhelmed.  We'll learn emotional balance, intellectual gravity, skill in life.

We experience ourselves standing tall.

Who you are

I don't believe we any of us know who we really are, what we are capable of.  Yet our 'identity' - the things we believe to be true about ourselves and tell ourselves - is the strongest motivating force and understanding of life that we have.  So we hurt.  We hurt because there is a primal discrepancy between this identity and the truth. One of the fundamental human traits is an ability to change and to grow.

Yet the nearly universal experience is a feeling of being unable to change.

The practice of yoga has the power to so drastically re-arrange our bodies and our psyches and our souls we might be startled.  This isn't metaphor.  It isn't self help craziness.  It is the practical outcome of a very specific set of practices and observances.

I have seen persons with chronic pain become agile, joyful, active and more alive than the majority of american adults.  I have seen persons work through severe trauma, anxiety, depression.  I have seen people who were told they would never walk again run, dance, and jump.  Others lose hundreds of pounds.  I have seen a 'paralyzed' man become a gifted and compassionate yoga teacher and himself move into poses that are 'impossible'. A 'blind' man so increase his proprioceptive functioning he can see.

But here, here is the secret: it is not a thing you can think about, believe, or wish your way into.  It will not be what you expect.  The truth is you cannot 'will' your way out of an addiction, a depression, a panic attack, grief, hormones, or pain.  You cannot 'control' your thoughts or your consciousness.

It is a thing you let go of, instead.  It is an experience, not an idea.  You may have to be willing to 'let go' of your old ideas and stories of identity.  Some say so.  I don't necessarily agree; I think it just happens.  I think that we show up to meditation or a yoga studio because we want to fix a sore back, or our girlfriend made us do it, or we are intrigued enough to try.  The practice itself is a biochemical change to consciousness.  It is a re-ordering of our endocrine system.  It is a suspension of our stories and an experience of how many other things could, actually, be possible.

When I say stories and identities, I mean the voices in our heads.  The rock hard belief that 'I am not a flexible person' or 'I am bi-polar, this is just who I am' or 'I need chocolate now' or 'I can never tell this to anyone, ever'.  We all have a little city inside, a whole population of 'selves'.  We fill various roles (daughter, employee, born in such a such a city, American, woman, mother, shopper at Walgreens, watcher of romantic comedies).  If we watch our thoughts, we'll start to know them.  We'll start to see that 'mother' isn't even the end of it, we have "I'm a good mother when I..." and "I'm an awful parent when I..." inside there.  We've got a holographic imprint of every experience, every conversation, every relationship covering our insides like decoupage to the bones, a library in the brain, mostly unconscious but active in us still.  As instinct.  As impulse.  As pattern and personality.  And behind all of these selves there is usually a more prominent, more 'rational' self.  A kind of manager or director.  It's the one who keeps all those other crazy characters in line.  The one who hands out assignments and judges outcomes.  It's the one we usually think of as 'me'.

But even that self is a story and an identity.  Even that self can be seen as 'pattern', 'habit', 'conditioning'.  It is not true.  There is more to our potential and our body.  Yoga is a remarkable way to begin playing in terms of that potential, that more.  A way to experience biochemistry, expanded awareness, the life of life and the body of body, which alternately feels more authentic and more impersonal than any one of the 'voices' we've ever heard before.

Yoga is a delicate and probing exploration of our self.  Our selves.  We trace 'I am just an angry person' and 'I don't know why I did that' and 'I want to be a better person, but' to it's root source.

Yoga is revelation.

Yet you can't just read this and get it.  You can't just hope for it and watch it happen.  I'm a yoga teacher, for crying out loud; I know this and I've seen it happen in students over and over again and yet it's hard for me to do the truth.

Do: do.  The truth is done, an action.

Yoga will not change you unless you do yoga.  Meditation will not change your brain chemistry unless you meditate.

If you show up on the mat, you will change.  But you must show up on the mat.

I do not say easy, and I don't say magical.  I say real.

Give me strength...

There is strength to open pickle jars.  Strength that can hold a twisted, inverted asana where all of one's body weight is supported across the five fingers of one hand.  And then there is the strength that burns down cities in war, of storms that rips trees from the earth, the true strength of death that makes smoldering matchsticks of us all. It was a hot, smoldering summer.  Without thunder or mercy, just the drone of dry heat.  It was easy to fall into lassitude, into believing everything would go on being the way it was.  To think of strength as the muscles, and a personal thing.  I practiced handstands.  There were many black flies.  I flicked at them, absently.

Then one day it thundered.  It roared.  Someone said 'it's fall now, so...' and I thought but no, no it isn't.  By the end of her sentence, though, it was.  September is irrevocable.  And I was snapped out of my dailyness when told I'd have to move, things are changing, I'll have to make decisions and things won't be the same anymore.

The westernest leaves of the sugar maples turned a burned red.

**

When you meet persons who have practiced yoga or meditation for a long time, you are struck by their levelness.  They have a kind of grace.  A quality of being touched, joyful.  It seems, sometimes, that they are a lucky brand of bastard whom suffering and the chaos of life hasn't touched.  Their lives must be different, less stressful than ours.

This isn't true.

When you ask, you learn that they suffer and worry just as we do.  Their lives are no less stressful than our own.  I've known yogis who battle massive depression.  Folks who weep when their parents die.  Ones who have lost money, a limb, a child.

It is not that they don't suffer or that they are immune to life's changes.  It is only that they have learned what true strength means.  It isn't that they don't age, don't hurt, don't have headaches or have to work and find time and defecate like the rest of us neurotic humans.  They suffer and struggle.

But they are not overwhelmed.  They are strong.

**

Before I practiced yoga, my life was a kind of war.  It seemed very hard.  I seemed to have to work, constantly, to hang on with both hands, to keep the whole thing going by my own efforts.  I wavered between a kind of self-pity (why can't I have a life like hers?  Why is that person so lucky?  Things would be different if I had the money, time, if I lived there, if I met the right person, didn't have to deal with this person...) where everything appeared very random and an overweening sense of importance: I would make my own life happen, I would learn the right skills, I would or would not make relationships work, have a happy life, be healthy.

Most of us spend most of our lives with this kind of erratic, frantic movement.  Where we have to juggle and keep dancing.  Where we are constantly busy or too busy, but never really seem to get anything done.

I thought of my depression (devastating, disgusting, brutalizing and wanting me dead) was a thing I had to manage and control.  I thought of my time as I thing I had to control.  I thought happiness and success were things you got if you were good enough at it, and I tried but doubted the outcome.  I thought, most of the time, that I understood The Way Things Are, whereas others seemed only to have opinions and not know The Whole Story. Relationships, just like projects, were things I had to navigate.

I rarely noticed the color of leaves or the passing of seasons.  Unless, of course, it came as a kind of insult and affront to my efforts; the passing of time making a mockery of my best intentions. The whole of 'life' being out of control and myself as powerless.

**

We forget who and what we really are, says yoga.  We are blind.

The practice is to discover strength.  Not of muscles, not of pickle jars, but the strength to be fully alive with the burning leaves and the thundering storm.  To know we are not supposed to and never can 'control' life - we can't even control our own thoughts and feelings, for chrissake -

we are supposed to live it.  To participate in power and strength, rather than fight against it.  To realize there is power and passion and awesome, more baffling strength in being than we'd ever glimpsed.  Strength is there, is real, but we've been looking for it in the wrong places.

**

Yogic strength is in attention, in showing up and watching without turning away.  We watch our thoughts...churning, not so pretty, unstoppable, sometimes just plain stupid, every once in a while deeply provocative and profound.

When we learn to watch them, we are not crippled and driven by them.  We can access the profundity.  And we learn to not be cowed by all that pettiness and drone. Attending can let it be, thoughts being thoughts, mind being mind.

When we learn to attend, we may be slapped with the shock of strength.  Craving, for example.  We slowly start to practice just watching and will notice that 'craving' is an understatement: it is an avalanche of physical sensations, sweaty palms, salivating mouth, a spreading subtle tension across the entire body of muscles, a tightening in the belly, a compression around the eyes, perhaps even a closing of the hearing; it's a ruckus of thoughts, terribly uncomfortable and pressing and insistent, and you cannot stop it.  Attempts to stop it make it worse.

Muscle, for another example.  When we learn, slowly, as we can, to literally pay attention to what stretching feels like, it might hit us like an orgasm or an drug altered state: reality is more intense, more vivid, more than it was before.  We notice not only that the muscle is tensed, but whether it is clenched or trembling or steady, hot or cold, rough in texture or smooth like water, we notice how one muscle touches another muscle, where sensation begins and ends, that sensation in one tiny part of the body spreads like ripples in water.  A clenched hand spills up the arm and into the neck, it alters our breath, it clenches the jaw, it tightens the chest, it shifts our toes, and it literally changes the way we think, shouts a change in our hormonal levels, heats or cools the skin, raises hairs, focuses or unfocuses the eyes.

Every emotion, every movement, has this powerful swell of energy behind it.  Even boredom, apathy, hunger.  Attending shows us how powerful these things are.

When we get stronger, we might be able to tolerate attending to a thing like anger, rage, depression, anxiety.

I am afraid, we will think.  And we'll have the strength to go on, anyway.

We'll realize, more and more and over and over, how much is involved in this being alive.  It's as profound, I tell you, as the ocean is deep or the cosmos is baffling.  We cannot control our minds, we cannot control our lives and our deaths.  But we can know them.

**

Do this, and the strength in you suddenly seems something out of a fairy tale or a comic book, something almost divine.  There is a reason yoga talks in metaphysics.

Oh, my god, you'll think: I LOVE this person, and your love will swell.  I am HUNGRY, you'll realize, and start to eat differently, all the colors and textures and tastes being louder than they were before.  I want to be happy, you'll know, and you'll start moving, moment by moment, into the person for whom happiness is possible.

A person of strength and grace.

It doesn't matter if I can do the pose, or not, you'll think in your yoga class.  And you'll be dumbstruck to realize you're standing on your head.

**

Life, friends, is hard.

We cannot control life.

But it is possible to be alive in it.

Walking, I notice the passing of time.  The cicadas are dying and lay on the sidewalk in alien corpses.  The air is sharper, pungent.  There was a time in my life this would be hard: to be suddenly without a place to live, to be asked all of the sudden what my plans were.  I am different, now.  I can feel the panic, like a little fist in my heart, pulling the whole body into it.  I can feel afraid, but I can also wonder and feel: I wonder at all the options, I wonder what is possible, I realize what a difference I can make, here or there.  I decide to open a yoga studio in a little town I used to know.  I do not know whether this will succeed or not.  But I can try.

The fact is, I try more now.  In relationships, in my heath, with my very body thrown upside down with a seeming disregard for things like safety and bruises.  Truth is I am more afraid, more often, than I have ever been in my life.

But the fear doesn't matter any more.

I am strong.

Return goes home. To Saint Cloud. In Minnesota.

Some already know. I've been keeping it under wraps until details like a lease and a date are finalized, but at this point I can announce: Return is opening a studio in St. Cloud in September 2012. 822 1/2 West St. Germain. Classes four times a day.  Strong classes, the sweaty ones where we learn to go upside down and challenge the very nature of our guts and endurance; but also the gentle, reverent, exploring classes that so heal and so change us and are accessible to anyone who can breathe, anyone who has a body. That's the long and the short of it... Mixed emotions, knowing that this is written half for the students I am leaving, and half for students I haven't yet met.

St. Cloud is personal; it's where I grew up, the jumping off point, the place I left in order to wander the wide world.  There is something poetic, I suppose, in going home; so many of our stories circle back that way, so many attempts to find ourselves just prove how much we need to know our own place in the world.  Still, I never thought I'd go back.

The process, the idea, is acceptance and responding to what life we do have rather than handicapping ourselves with what the ego clamors for.  If the world were to my making, I'd be opening a studio in Rio.  On a mountaintop somewhere.  Something with oceans and travel.  If the world were as I liked it, I'd never even have to open a buisness.  I'd just write poems, eat bon bons, and practice asana all day.  In between taking naps.

If yoga were how we 'expect' it to be, it'd only be romantic, esoteric, the stuff of retreats and exotic places of natural wonder.

But an honest practice isn't like that, at all.  An honest practice takes place at home, in the midst of our lives, with the stuff of our days.  Commericial, american, midwestern days. I do not do asana on beaches, and yoga is not a thing I retreat to do.  I practice where I am.  I practice in parking lots, sometimes.  Sometimes in kitchens.  On carpet, on cement.

I am not a hippy, starry eyed kinda person who believes in fates and auras and angels and strings that are pulled by forces.  But from moment I considered St. Cloud, everyone and everything has rushed to make it so.

With some of the largest social service programs in the state, and a city full of society that doesn't fall under the rubric of 'social service agencies', yoga as service couldn't be anything but a blessing, there.  With the demographic boom, the colleges, the smush of St. Cloud Sartell Waite Park Sauk Rapids St Joe all becoming one metropolis that is the metropolis of central Minnesota, it's baffling there is no studio. It's funny that I know the town so well.  There was a pretty studio space, all ready and waiting with the right time and the right price.  An apartment lease was signed, the dog is allowed.  What I thought might possibly happen someday, eventually, somehow, is happening. Happening NOW.

The moment you say yes to your life, life unfolds.

It is not what I expected.  But it makes me very happy.  It is a good.  Unexpected, out of left field, mildly confusing, and good.

I am more grateful than I know how to say.

But I am also sad to be leaving the students, classes, and teachers here behind.  Yoga has lessons for me, here, too:

The good of yoga is not something I do, I teach; I can step out of the way and students will still have the power and transformational tools that yoga gives.  There are many gifted teachers.  Students here do not need me.  I was blessed in introducing some to yoga, helping others find a way back in.  I was blessed in living and working with long time yogis and teachers who are deeply involved in their own process.  I have learned.  I have been touched.

And I will miss you.

by request..

Anyone telling you yoga is easy is lying

Or perhaps they haven't tried, they don't know. They don't know what it is to be living as you.

That is what yoga is, anyway.

Living your life.

Which is the hardest goddamned thing you will ever, ever be asked to do.

Your biceps, what are they actually capable of?

Your spine?  Not yoga girl's.  Yours.

What actually happens in your mind?

What, exactly, are you capable of doing with your life?

And are you willing to show up enough times to really know the answer to that?

Are you?

Yoga is not easy.  Hardest freaking thing I've ever done.  Ever seen.

Once you're there, though, you start flying.

Listen to the Gut - Yoga of Digestion and Indigestion

I want to answer questions that repeatedly come to me from students, provide a few poses and ideas about digestive health.  But I also insist, insist insist at the beginning, that yoga is individual, just as your gut is. I will keep the poses as general as I can, asking you to remember that what works for you may be different than what works for the next guy.  We all have different bodies, different constitutions, different contexts.  Understand that yogic knowledge should ultimately be self-knowledge; talk with your yoga teacher and your doctor both about your specific needs and concerns.

**

Death and disease, yogically speaking, begin in the stomach.  Aging begins in your belly.

Digestive health informs every aspect of our emotional and physical well being.  Many of the breathing and postural practices are directly aimed at the digestive tract.

Of course, in yogic thinking, digestion is both literal and more than literal: we 'metabolize' not only food, but water and air, experience, emotion, relationships, stress, joy and sadness.  This tends to make things more abstract than our uber convenient, pre-packaged sensibilities would like; there isn't necessarily one single answer to why your stomach hurts, but a multiplicity of moving parts.  Frustrating, if you want a quick fix or one simple pose to do magic.  But it is liberating if you begin to understand that mind and body are synergistic; you can heal and harm in both directions.  By understanding and respecting the fact that your management of time, experience, relationships, and stress is directly affecting your digestion, you have a few tools.  By learning to honor and listen to your body through asana you have a handful more.  Understanding and watching what you eat and consume through your skin and mind, you have another few.  Ultimately, this is a more powerful and autonomous way to live than is looking for a cure all.

How To Begin

If you suffer regular but not serious indigestion, picking up a regular yoga practice will be highly beneficial.  If you are interested in losing or gaining weight, be aware that a more physical practice is necessary to 'burn calories', but a basic, restorative practice will improve your body's rhythms, ability to digest and detoxify, improve mood, motivation, and energy levels.  Much of our health, weight, and appetite is wedded to our levels of contentment, anxiety, and depression, which yoga immediately addresses. Frequently, digestive issues are symptoms of some other issue in the body or mind, various biochemical balances; yoga will help sort this out.  Keep in mind, though, that digestive issues are real and often painful and distressing. They are not just in your mind. Start where you are, rather than trying to change your whole body in the next 30 days.  Talk with a qualified teacher whom you trust about finding the right balance of 'athleticism' and 'restorative' practices and you'll find the place for you.

It is not necessary to wait until stomach ache or irregular bowel patterns have dissipated to begin your practice; start as soon as you can.

If, however, you are new to yoga and suffer Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, or other serious digestive problems, check with your doctor before starting a practice and let your yoga teacher know where you are.  Yoga is highly beneficial for people who suffer from these chronic ailments, but if you are recovering from an obstruction or surgery, you should make sure your body is ready to practice.  If you suffer from Irritable bowel syndrome you will find yoga, no matter what stage of digestive flare up, to be very beneficial.

To notice any benefits, you should practice at least 2-3 times a week. Yoga can be practiced every day. If getting to a studio or practice that often is difficult, ask the teacher you are most comfortable with for help with a sequence you can practice on your own.

Let me repeat: a gentle, restorative practice has innumerable benefits to our body's natural tendency to heal, balancing internal rhythms, and finding a sense of control and well being.  Such a practice is easily modified and entirely safe for even the injured or ill.

Just begin.

What Yoga Teaches, and how it differs from Western medicine

When I was in teacher training, we spent a lot of time memorizing the anatomical systems of the body and their components from a western medical and anatomical perspective.  We memorized skeletal components. We traced the roadmap of the nervous system. We prodded the digestive and immuno and cardiovascular bits and pieces.  We crammed, we quizzed. We had a fuax skeleton.  After our initial ignorance and discomfort passed, we named him Greogory and put him into various postures.  We blamed him when the coffee spilled.  I sat up late at night, reviewing latinate words and looking at my own hand, foot, or knee for understanding before waking up early for class the next day. But after all the flashcards and the diagrams, we learned this:

Western anatomy understands things by cutting them apart.  It describes location.  It understands 'health' mostly by describing illness, after the fact, without understanding causes or prognosis over well. But the body's very existence, and each flitting sensation, is a symphony of moving parts and interaction, not isolation. There is really no such thing as 'the immune system' or the 'digestive tract', because it all works in concert.  Digestion is affected by the secretion of proteins, enzymes and hormones, which are part of the endocrine system and have central plexuses in the brain, organs, and spinal column.  It is intimately related to our blood, which is tangled up with our lymph. The endocrine system is influenced by the nervous system of brain and nerves and reflexes.  And the brain is influenced by the cardiovascular system, our breath and blood, while our blood and gasp is directly related to our muscle tissues and skeletal system, which is more or less healthy because of the nutrients and toxins we metabolize or don't.

Some of us may have too much acid in our stomach.  This is affecting our mood, which affects our secretion of hormones, which affects the build up of new cells in the muscles and skin, which may mean we hold ourselves or move differently, which affects our muscles and our bone structure, which in turn affects our body's internal understanding of what needs to be produced and expelled, which results in more acid or far too little.  Which ends in sleep patterns and energy levels, optimism and pessimism, craving and apathy.  The cycles are endless as the cosmos.  This also means you can begin, anywhere.

In terms of asana and posture, the quickest overview to digestion and yoga is this: yoga postures and breath work massage the internal organs and the nerves associated with hunger and satiation; yoga strengthens the muscles of the pelvic floor and deep core; it alternately constricts and invigorates the flow of blood to specific areas of the body, which works to tone the fabric of the various body tissues as it maximizes the absorption of nutrients and facilitates elimination of toxins.

More basic, still: the best yoga pose for digestive health, the best possible detox diet you can go on, is any pose, any yoga class.  Just begin.  Here's how it works.

Yoga pays attention to the breath.

The breath is a doorway between thought and the body.

As you become more and more aware of the subtleties of the breath, you will become more and more sensitive and knowledgeable about the workings of your insides, heart to bone to itch.  As you develop the skill of listening, inside, you will begin to hear and understand the cues and impulses.

When you learn to tap into the cues of your body, you will begin to hear what it really needs. You'll begin to immediately feel the effects of what you put into your body, how your thoughts affect your physical self, and how your physical condition is manifested into what you previously understood as 'truth' , independent mind, or the way things are.  Yoga directly influences our ability to navigate the four core drives to hunger, fatigue, sex, and danger, which changes the very core of who we are.

By learning to pay attention to the breath you step beyond the mind, down into the body.  Your body's natural tendency is to clean and heal and grow stronger.  When you can hear and accept these messages, your behaviors begin to change. You'll have skills for self healing, and digestive disorders will become more manageable and less disruptive.

You do not need to understand it,  describe it, or will it to happen.  You simply need to start a yoga practice and stay with it.

***

Do any yoga pose.  Any.

Consider how frequently we hear poses described as being 'for the upper arms' or 'for balance'.  Yet there is no single pose that is only for hip opening, improving balance, or toning your 'core'.  Tree pose is called a balance pose, for example.  But it directly affects certain nerves in our feet, hips, and the hypothalamus and pineal glands.  It strengthens bone health, prevents osteoporosis, skeleton wide and develops stability and optimal flexibility in the foot, ankle, knee, and hip - which directly changes the biochemical tone of the fascia across the rest of the body.  It opens the hips, which nurtures most of our digestive tract and nervous system.  It releases the secondary muscles of respiration and frees up the area around the lungs for optimal breathing, while simultaneously steadying blood pressure and exercising the heart.  It is known to improve concentration, focus, and light up 'gray areas' of the brain that are somehow associated with subconscious, sleep patterns, and personality.  It is rumored to improve eyesight and relieve depression.

With all of that (and more, and more...), it is impossible for me to say that tree pose is just about 'balance'.

And it is impossible to say there are three top poses for your digestion.

Every single pose will help.  Begin, anywhere.

**

Tree pose, and yoga, are about balance.  Yoga is balance, flexibility, and strength, surely.  But not in any narrow way.  Yogic balance is a highly personalized alchemy of motivation and serenity, mind and body, self and world.  Flexibility is in the mind and heart and ability, not just in the hips.  And strength is different for everyone, and for each individual in different moments.

I have watched students rebuild and recover their strength after amputations and chemotherapy.  I've watched morbidly obese persons begin to recover.  I have seen persons with debilitating anxieties and depressions find an emotional balance that is stunning.

But I've also seen terribly thin teenage girls demand a 'power yoga' class and skip lunch, seen strong young men couple their yoga class with other exercise that must have been burning their bodies alive, inside out.

I once had a girl rush into the yoga studio and ask in hot, whispery tones if yoga would get her into a size six in three months.

I don't know, I said.  I can't promise that. 

I can promise it will give you the body you were born to have, in all its power and beauty.  I don't know if that is a size six, or not.

There is a danger to using asana or detox or dieting to harm ourselves, just as there is a danger to believing your body should be on the same diet as your neighbors, or that your body should magically resemble the plasticized and bleached and photoshopped versions we see in advertisements and media.

The only answer yoga will ever give you is your own life.  It can make it better.  It can.  It will, if you are willing to accept your life, your body, and not someone else's.  Your body is a path of transformation.  It is, says yoga, the only path there is and the best shot you've got.

**

How yoga benefits digestive health

Yoga has demonstrable effects in alleviating and preventing digestive distress.  Yoga is perhaps most helpful for its ability to reduce the stress, anxiety, and the pain of chronic illness. Regular practice will indisputably improve your physical and mental fitness, promote relaxation, and give you a sense of control over your health and well-being. As with other stress management techniques, the more you practice, the more powerful the change.  Yoga gives relief from symptoms such as constipation, diarrhea, bloating, gas, and pain. Yoga is also tremendously beneficial for preventing or minimizing menstrual cramps, which often exacerbate digestive distress.

Yoga stabilizes digestion by working with the nerves (such as the large Vagus nerve) associated with hunger, satiation, and metabolic processes. It balances the hormonal levels of those proteins and enzymes associated with digestion, absorption, and the breakdown and expelling of toxins, as well as strengthening the muscles associated with the digestive process and the organs along the digestive tract. It stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the 'rest and digest' system, while soothing and regulating the sympathetic (fight or flight) system.

Asanas systematically compress certain areas of the body, restricting blood flow to the area.  When released, a flush of highly oxygenated blood enters the area.  This rich blood source is responsible for the delivery of nutrients and oxygen to each individual cell and organ in the body. It also draws impurities, build up, and toxins from the body's tissues, redistributing to the lymphatic system and eliminative system as waste or breaking substances down for use.

Breath work, or pranayama, assists in directing our breath to very specific parts of our body. Breath alone has healing properties and we forget all too often to breath with regularity and mindfulness. Simply forcing ourselves to breath into our bellies during certain yoga poses sends breath and healing to the digestive area. Regular focused breathing can also open up blocked areas of energy in the body - blocked, resisted, or pent energy (prana or chi) in the stomach/intestines is often the cause of digestive problems.

Inflammation, swelling, dehydration, and retention are all important concepts in yoga, both in terms of diet, immunity, and physical activity.  Most imbalances - whether emotional, energetic, or physical - manifest on some level as inflammation.  Typically, inflammation (with swelling, pain, distress, bloating, dysplasic cell structure, weakened tissue tone) in one area of the body throws other areas of the body out of balance as well.  For example, we may retain, swell up, or bloat in our digestive tract but end up dehydrated in our muscle fibers.  Yoga's balance addresses these issues both in terms of relief and prevention.

Constipation versus Diarrhea with Yoga Poses

It is important to note that there are different poses that are good for constipation/diarrhea.

All poses listed here are beneficial for constipation as they will help to get the stagnation of energy moving down in what is known as 'apana vayu'. Master yogis suggest that if you suffer from constipation and do a daily forward folding practice for a week, you will see an immediate and marked increase in bowel activity.

They are each beneficial for diarrhea as well, as they promote consistancy, ease, and regularity.  But if you are in an active state of diarrhea, it is best not to practice intense forward folds (such as seated forward folds.) These poses will increase the downward flow of energy which might increase the flow of bowel activity.

Extreme twisting poses should also be practiced with some caution in those who suffer acute IBD or a history of bowel obstruction.

Twisting or compressing to the left first and then to right will slow the movement of bowels out the intestine whereas twisting to the right first and then the left will increase the movement of the bowels. This can be charted by the squeezing motion of the colon and correlating it with the movement of materials through the bowel.

Overall though, note that the benefits of ANY yoga practice for someone who suffers from digestive concerns would far outweigh the risks.  A practice will calm an over-active sympathetic nervous system and activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which can have resounding beneficial affects on auto-immune and inflammatory diseases.

Diet

Diet is part of a yogic lifestyle, and the science of ayurveda is the medicinal/dietic branch of yogic practice.  Whole books have been written on the subject.  For most of us, too much info or expectations of radical change to our eating will do more harm then good.  Further, yoga emphasizes individuality: there is no miracle herb or superfruit that will work for everyone and address every issue.

There are, though, very simple practices you can work on adding to your life.  Think of it as a process, rather than a deprivation.  Try to enjoy your food.  You'll begin to learn, with yoga, what cravings and habits actually are and how to work with them in ways that nuture you rather than limit you or keep you stuck.

Four suggestions that require no expensive purchases, official diet, or major changes:

*alkalinity and pro-biotics, vs. processed foods (1 and 2).  Our bodies are alive.  Most processed food is not.  Trying to 'digest' much of our supermarket, convient foods is like planting a plastic bag in a forest and expecting it to biodegrade and bloom.  Try to avoid processed (in a box or a can, refined flours and sugars) foods and add living foods.  Drink a cup of hot water with the juice of half a lemon every day (or cucumber slices, lime, or a tablespoon of organic apple cider vinegar) stimulates digestion and keeps the living biology of our GI track in tact.  You can take this much, much further along the lines of supplements, raw foods, yogurts with probiotics and kombucha type teas, but you do not have to.  Just drink a cup of hot water with lemon, every morning.

* Green, leafy vegetables (#3).  Eat them.  The greener, the better.  Again, you do not need to go vegan or learn how to cook all over again.  Just increase your veggies.  Significantly.

* Oral aloe vera.  The medicinal properties of aloe are old hat in our superficial culture by now.  But independent studies have shown ingesting aloe brings tremendous relief to digestive disorders and works to heal damaged tissues, just as it does sunburn.  You can buy aloe vera juice - in many different flavors, qualities, and price ranges - at various Whole Foods type groceries, online, and through health stores.  A 'dose' is generally less than a shot glass and virtually tasteless.  Add it to tea, a smoothie, or just sip it down after you brush your teeth.

*Supplements.  There are many herbs, spices, and teas that are traditionally used to ease digestive distress and prevent digestive problems.  Pick one.  Read a bit on line or visit a health food store; your symptoms and concerns are unique, and you can find a supplement that addresses your concerns.

* extra credit:cut down on the dairy.  It is tremendously hard on our digestive systems.  I'm not saying cut it out entirely, just practice cutting back.

Poses - generally speaking, first.  (I'll post a few sequences in upcoming weeks, as well as breakdowns and modifications of each of these poses.)

Standing poses:

all standing poses are recommended for digestive health.  You can't go very wrong, here.  In particular:

• Trikonasana and Parvritta Trikonasana (Triangle and Revolve Triangle)
• Parsvakonasana (Extended Side Angle)
• Warrior 1, 2 + 3
• Half Moon Pose- Balancing Half Moon (Ardha Chandrasan, both the standing and the balance)as well as Crescent Moon (Anjanyasana)
• Camel (Ustrasana)
• Most other standing and balancing leg postures are beneficial and not harmful for digestive ailments.

Inverted Poses:

Yoga becomes more complicated when getting into inversions, arm balances and back-bends. However, these postures are essential for inner well being, overall health and healthy digestion. While it may seem counter intuitive to stand on your head when suffering from a stomach ache or gas, these poses in yoga are very helpful.

Inversions are a helpful way to ease up the stress of digestion by reversing the impact of gravity on the intestines. Inversions are also very helpful for constipation. Inversions are defined as any pose where the legs are above the heart. It is best if inversions are held for a length of time- at least for a few minutes and up to 15 minutes. Inversions that are recommended for indigestion, but you should learn the poses under the guidance of a qualified teacher.  A good teacher can also help you learn the modifications of each pose, so you can begin where you are and work your way into the full expression as you are ready.

• Sirsasana- Head stand
• Sarvangasana + all its variations- Shoulder stand

Forward Folds All forward folds offer relief of flare ups and discomfort in addition to strengthening the digestive process.  (Be aware, however, that they may stimulate elimination and might be skipped if you have diarrea,  and should be approached gently post surgery).

• Uttanasana(Standing forward fold)
• Paschimottansana (Seated forward fold)
• Marichyasana 1 (Seated forward fold with bent leg)
• Janu Sirsasana (Seated forward fold with leg in tree)

Twists

Twists stimulate, massage, and ease the digestive tract and stimulate detoxification on a cellular as well as an organic level.  Twists can get quite complex and advanced, but the benefits can be had in the very first stages of the pose.  Remember that alignment is where the benefits of yoga are, not 'advanced' poses.  For those who want to focus on digestive health, holding twists for longer periods of time is recommended.

• Marichyasana 2- 4 (seated twist)
• Supta matsyandrasana (reclined twist)
• supta Jathara Parivartanasana (reclined revolved abdominal twist)
• baradvajasana
• garudasana (eagle)

Poses for the pelvic floor/lower back/lower abdomen

• Malasana (squat or garland pose)
• Utkatasana (chair, awkward, or powerful pose)
• Pavanmukatasana or Apanasana (wind removing pose/knees into chest)
• Baddhakonasana (bound angle)
• Virasana (hero's pose)
• Upavistakonasana (wide legged straddle)
• ananda balasana (happy baby pose)
• learn the bandas with your yoga instructor, and practice engaging them during poses

SPECIFIC SYMPTOM RELIEF

Constipation:

• danurasana (bow)
• shalabasana (locust)
• matsyanadrasana (fish)
• apanasana/pavanmukatasna (wind removing pose)
• paschimottonasana (back side stretching pose /seated forward fold)
• uttanasana (forward fold)
• cat cow
• halasana (plow)
• malasana (garland or squat)
• mandukasana (frog)
• bujangasana (cobra)

Diarrhea:

• supta baddhakonasana (reclined bound angle pose)
• viparita dandasana (legs up the wall pose)
• supta padangusthasana (reclining hand to big toe pose)

Gas:

• prasarita padahastasana (wide legged forward fold)
• apanasana (wind removing pose)
• sasangasana (rabbit pose)
• balasana (child's pose)
• adho muka savanasana (downward facing dog)
• gentle inversion poses (including down dog and standing forward fold)

Bloating:

• gentle inversion poses (including down dog and standing forward fold)
• virasana (hero pose)
• dhanurasana
• upavistha konasana (wide legged seated fold)

Incontinence:

• learn the bandas with the help of a qualified yoga teacher
• standing poses focusing on pelvic floor

backache:

• salamba savasana (supported corpse pose)
• supported twists, child, bound angle poses
• reclining twists
• supported bridge

Soul on Fire

"Open yourself to transformation.  You will be transformed."  The Buddha I am teaching, all week, on the burning of the dross.  The fire in the belly.  On setting our souls on fire.  What in yoga is called tapas.

Tapas is the third personal observance or niyama; following Saucha (purity) and Santosha (contentment/acceptance/serenity), we come to self-discipline.  It is translated as heat, dedication, zeal, ardor, passion, enthusiasm, burning and transformation.  It is the transformation, but it is also a willingness to be transformed.  It is the willingness to die a little bit to who we are, right now, in order to let the new be born.

It is not always pleasant.  There is a moment of panic when you walk into any new situation; a yoga studio, if you haven't done anything with your body other than feed it and clean it for ten years, if not outright abuse it and overwork it, can start all sorts of anxiety scenarios off in our heads.  There is the real possibility of flying not up into an arm balance but face down into the floorboards, removing not fear but layers of skin.  There will be moments a plenty in your practice where your legs are screaming holy hell at you and your arms tremble not with the pleasant qualities of satisfaction and strength and vibrancy but just goddanged fatigue.  Your hamstrings may feel drawn and quartered.  Your gut, in the fifth round of core work, may prompt you to wimper.  If your yoga teacher tells you to smile into it and feel gratitude for the body that you have, you may start a chorus of explitives in your head, not beatitudes.  There will be moments when you feel you will die if you do not drink water in the next three seconds.  A good yoga teacher will point that out, and remind you you will not; that it is your mind screaming at you, not your body, that water won't actually affect you for 20 minutes after you drink it and will actually just serve as a way to break your concentration.  And you will pant and scream holy fucks in your brain, you will hate the yoga teacher, you will wonder how a minute could possibly last so very long.  And you will not die.  Surprisingly.

We bring ourselves to the practice like an offering.  We express or tap into an inherent desire to be changed and become in some way more alive.  Tapas is a cultivation of the yearning in us to a fever pitch.

We learn, differently: rather than accepting teachings or wisdom we put ourselves to the test and see what comes out of it.  Knowledge becomes wisdom when it is lived personal experience.  Wisdom becomes part of our essence and structure rather than an abstraction of the mind.  Integrity, strength, perseverance, courage, patience, virtues become character traits rather than ideals.  They become who we are.

Life isn't changed, this way; we are.

Tapas is, to me, a form of dedication and prayer.  You dedicate, donate, give all to the reason you practice, to the yearning.  Perhaps it is easiest to say you dedicate yourself and each practice to god.  By giving yourself over to that greater thing, you become the greater thing. A little.  A little more like it than the person you were yesterday, anyway. Your essence is less self and more fire, more god.  When you look for god, says the poet, god is in the look of your eyes.  You yourself become enlarged.

Another poet saint says it differently: do not look for the answers, he says, you could not understand them now.  Your being is not ready to hold them.  Do not seek the answers, but the questions, live in them.  Live the questions.

**

Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.  Tapas is the question, the why, the what's the point, the burning energy.  It is the way we spin straw into gold, hammer lead into precious, burnished, honey colored fire informed molten and wizened power.

Tapas is dedication or zeal for the very process, the questions.  It is impossible to say, some days, what the point of it all is.  Why we should bother doing anything.  We can't very well know the outcome, or whether there is an ultimate bend of goodness to the world, or a heaven or a god or even a point to going to work each day, growing older, being born and borning children of our own.

But we can choose to live as if the questions mattered.

As if our choices, our hours, our bodies themselves were forming cauldrons and catalysts and catharsis toward something more.

Because this is true: change.  It is inevitable and constant.  Thus we either deny it, struggle against it, fear aging and dying and the day after day horarium of toil.  Or we surrender to it entirely, form ourselves with it, iron our discipline and desire to a form that can enliven the change and be the change and contribute to the roiling on of life.  We reform our bodies into things that can hold and withstand the answers.

**

Anais Nin wrote, in one of her diaries, that she felt she was preparing for a great love.  She threw open windows and aired the house, she threw open closet doors and pulled out the richest fabrics, tableclothes, silver.  She was drawn to fresh flowers, poignant scents, richly made and delicately served foods.  Cool drinks of water.  She had her best wines ready by the time Henry Miller came around.

She intuitively knew that to welcome a great, passionate love, she had to open, everywhere.

She may or may not have known that what she was really preparing was her heart.  What she was opening was not windows but her eyes.

**

I have felt it: there is a layer of pentness, congealed and stagnant energy, bloat and dis-ease and lethargy.  You burn through that layer, often around the hips, other times bound up around the heart, sometimes a layer of gray and brown and haze around the eyes or the brain like migraine, or pessimism.  Some people's joints swell.  Some people's blood sugar turns acrid.  The veins clot and your very thoughts have to plow through layers of wet concrete just to break the surface of your mind.

You sweat and burn.

And you lay on the mat, afterwards, burnt and spent.

Something in your center made more pure.  Shining loud.  Trembling under the fire and left naked.

Everything unnecessary has fallen away. That silence is deafening.

**

The sadhus in India burn themselves alive.  In winter, they sit in the snowy mountains for hours at a time, naked but for a loincloth and the ashes on their bodies.  A bucket of water is positioned to drip a steady stream on them.  For hours.  In the summer months, they surround themselves with five fires, another in a metal container on their head.  They sit in the fire and bake.  Everyday.  For three hours.  For 45 days in a row.

There is no need for our own practices and austerities to be so daunting.  But they raise an interesting question.  Why would anyone do such a thing?  What is the point of such self control and sensory overload?

Is there anything to be learned from this tradition, at all?  What ridiculous things we do, over here across the ocean, mad as bees to feel better or cleaned or alive...what is the point of running 20 miles or 50?  Why do we eat and over eat?  What's the purpose of spending 30 or 40 years at a job or preening ourselves from adolescence on for some romance?  What is the point of marriage, or sex, or intoxication, or watching television?  We not only watch television, but watch it for large chunks of our lives.  We spend money to get the best television.  We work 30 or 40 years to pay for the best television so that we can watch an imaginary person preened to a peak for a romance that is unreal and leaves us feeling shoddy about ourselves.  What is the point of prayer?  Why would we bother buying a yoga mat and showing up in a small room that smells of incense once a week?

Just what in the hell are we putting ourselves through this for?

I think it is an effort to be a little more alive, a little less dead to our own living.  I think it is a practice of paying attention to what is possible.

I think it is practicing, so that our acts become essential, not dross.  So that our food becomes nuturance and celebration, our sex takes on meaning, our relationships become sacred and informing.  Running marathons proves nothing so much as the fact that we can start in one place and end up in another.

Tapas is a practice of remembering what aliveness and passion are.  Discipline is remembering what we really want, or at least dreaming toward something.  Tapas is the choice to find a better way and making ourselves respond.

**

Beautiful Limitation

Yoga is honest.  You cannot, past a certain superficial level, fake it.  It is literal, experience, fact: I know of few other contexts in the world in which what you say or think or desire is so patently irrelevant compared to what you do.  Of course, yoga then becomes a kind of exaggeration of what is always true, a place where the difficult to see and accept becomes obvious.  It is difficult, usually, to believe aphorisms and truisms and philosophies; we give them a passing nod as having a point, but not being practical or real.   Yoga is literal, if not brutal and simple.  You are alone there on the mat.  There will never be a graduation or a test after class, a stamp you get or a certificate that says you can move on to the next level.

This is precisely what makes a yoga practice hard.  You cannot fake it.  You cannot do yoga unless you show up.  You cannot intend to do it, say you'll do it, or desire to do it to any effect; you can only do or not do.  You cannot will yourself into a backbend, or walk into a class one day and decide to flip up into a handstand.  You can't fake flexibility or pretend strength.  You are faced, immediately, with the limitations of what you've got.

I think this is gorgeous.  Of course, it is possible to be frustrated, ashamed, beat ourselves up and compare ourselves to our younger selves or the svelte olympian on the cover of yoga journal magazine.  It is entirely possible to see the core teachings of yoga (nothing is permanent, all is illusion, limits are human) as pessimism.

I don't.  Not today.

Because I've learned that limits clearly define me and give me reality.  We don't get much reality in daily life.  Not with advertisements and those empty spiritual teachings, change your life and self help books around.  Not with this brain that ticks ticks ticks its way to expectations of grandeur or complete defeat.

Reality, when I finally found it on the mat, is comforting.

Because one actual dollar - hell, one actual dime - is infinitely more precious than are billions of hoped for ones.

The body and breath I do have are infinitely more powerful than the wispy, elusive, daydreamed body that is not.

The limits I sound out, challenge, and expand are beautiful.

A slice of the beloved....the yoga of relationships

"We are strangers.  Perhaps by chance we have met and we are together.  But our aloneness is there.  Do not forget it, because you have to work upon it." - Osho Every once in a while, I hear a yoga teacher, a counselor, a self help wonk or a how to make your life better guru promise palaver and platitudes along the lines of 'you are not alone'.

My reaction is usually along the lines of yes, actually, I am.  And every time you tell me I am not, I feel not just alone, but alien.  I feel denied.

I have had students say things like 'you don't know me', 'you can't understand'.  Once, I touched a woman's shoulders and felt her cringe.  Later, she said that she knew my good intentions.  She knew that yoga is a healing, deeply personal process of love and connection.  She appreciated the fact that I was trying to fight the good fight and be a good person in a bad world. 'But', she said, 'when you touched me, I couldn't help but recoil from the fact that the only people who care for me are people, like you, who are paid to do so.'

Teaching often breaks my heart.

*

I know loneliness.  I imagine it is loneliness that makes things like a personal god so attractive.  A true love.  A perfect family or at least one in which everything will be okay.  Someone to rescue us, or someone we can rescue.

On the one hand, it is ridiculous for something like a yoga practice to discuss relationships; this is work we do ourselves.  If anything, yoga affirms our solitude.  This is a blessed relief, to me, after so many empty spiritual teachings and false advertisements about how I should feel and that I'm not alone.  Empty spiritual teachings make it worse, not better.

On the other, yoga is relationships, and reality, to the full.  You are alone, teaches yoga.  But you are with others.  Now, what will you do?

*

It is a practice of being human, and being ourselves.  The key experience of being a self is self, which involves longing and solitude and a deep, hardwired, inner fused desire for connection, authenticity, reflection and recognition.  We ache to belong.  Specifically, we ache to belong to someone.

The experience of the self is also a root problem in most of our modern psychology and perhaps our current global experience.  We promote self-sufficiency, personal accountability, self-mastery, and do it yourself ness.  We applaud the individual and have funny concepts and philosophies about the rights of humanity and the individual, property, boundaries.  Yet we suffer, collectively, a kind of weariness of the self.  A weakness in our communication.  A fear of actually being seen and a feeling of being put upon when asked to care about (let alone, for) others.  Yes, there is poverty and war and violence and food shelves and addiction and depression and lassitude everywhere.  But what am I supposed to do about it, we say...I can't do anything about that.  That isn't, we say, my problem.

The shortest answer I have is that most of our pain comes from a failure to love, a mess and lack and violation of relationships.  Yoga is a practice of having a better life and being a better self.  If you want to practice yoga, try getting married, raising kids, starting conversations and keeping promises.  The yamas and niyamas do.  It doesn't matter how beautiful your poses are, or how long you can flow without having to take a break, how sexy you look in your capris or how many days a week you practice in a hot room.  It doesn't matter if you are vegan or meditate for an hour every day if you still can't look people in the eye and go to bed feeling something is wrong with you.

It doesn't.

Yes, yoga says, you are alone.  You must work with that aloneness.

*

The core teaching of yoga is this: nothing is permanent, everything changes, all that you are capable of loving and being attached to or longing for will, one day, be nothing.  You, yourself, will be nothing.

From this, two rather esoteric and often contradictory theories of yoga have become popular.  The first insists on a kind of global oneness, that everything is linked in essence, on a sub atomic and microcosmic level.  We are each other and every blade of grass that has ever been.  Love, universal.  The love and the beloved are everywhere, always.

Secondly, we should practice non-attachment.  We should recognize everything and everyone is an illusion, a passing moment, and learn to be non-reactive.  Cool to the touch and unmoved as a stone.

I believe, in an intellectual kind of way, both of those precepts.  But neither is an answer to our aloneness.  Neither one tells us in any real way how to live.  They are abstractions, and what we've got here is flesh and bone.

All is one, the moment is perfect, you are already divine and Jesus loves you all leave me feeling a little hollow.  I do not want a generalized love or an imaginary friend.  I want a real one.  And the second practice, of non-attachment, denies the very embodiedness that we are.  Sure, it's an illusion and temporary and imperfect.  But it also happens to be the only shot we've got.

I think honest yoga teaches ruthless honesty: to be happy, be as alive as you can, knowing full well that love is flawed.  Love anyway.

That is what you were born to do.

*

Not to be disaffected, detached, cool as a stone and unmoved as death.  But to be ripped open by our love and survive.  We survive our love by loving, more.

*

There is integrity in knowing and accepting our aloneness.  Yes, it will hurt at times.  But it will also prove to be the most potent source of power and creativity you've got.

*

Slowly, painfully at times, wrapt wondrously at others, baffling me dumbstruck with obvious truths I'd been ignoring for far too long, yoga reveals us to ourselves, and gives us life without illusions.

For some of us, it will be a dawning realization that we are lonely and have been cutting ourselves off.  For others, it will be the brutal recognition that we have completely given away our selves to others: to images, to shoulds, to family, to career, to abusive histories, to the pursuit of instant gratification, to faking it, to roles that simply don't work any longer and roll along like a tricycle with a rusted wheel when what you need is to travel hundreds of miles like an adult. We seem strange and hollow to ourselves and wonder what ever happened to us, the US in us, the person we used to be.  We'll realize we're old, and we never got around to being the person we wanted to be when we grew up. For most of us, it'll be a bit of each at different times.  Most of us are too selfish in some of our world, completely selfless and disappeared in other roles.

Just as no one is all assertive, creative, extroverted or introverted.  No one in the world is entirely right brained or right handed.  None of us are ever happy all the time or awake all the time.

If we practice, we'll start to see ourselves.  Not as we should be, or have been, or want to be.  But as we are.  Human.  This is the truth.

There are other truths: you are not just your thoughts or emotions any more than you are entirely right brained.  You are not 'always' depressed or joyful.  You are not 'always' alone.

There are moments of connection.  However small and flimsy and half assed and misunderstood and frustrating.  They are real, and human, just as you are.

Yes, you are alone.  From there, you can seek out truths in five million different ways, day after day after day.  You will have opportunities for realness with a co-worker, even if you generally hate the guy's guts.  You will have opportunities to make amends to your father, even if most of the time you still don't want to.  You can play a part in your community, or not.  You may go poking around a church, because you feel alone and miss god.  It might disappoint you, for the most part.  But you may also have two minutes of feeling relief, or a brief conversation with someone at the door.  If you can see parenting through the lens of reality, you can accept that you don't actually have control, that your children are not really your own, and that you are never either a 'good' or a 'bad' parent, but a boiling and confusing blather of both.  From there, you may spend the next few hours trying to weight the scale a little more on the generous side, or at least brush the kid's hair out of his eyes, spend half an hour listening to him speak.

No one will ever, ever know you completely or love you perfectly.

That does not mean you can't be known and loved.

By allowing your aloneness, and truth, I think we can be loved, true.  Criticisms will not whither us any longer, when we no longer depend on that other to give us our whole worth.  We can do as best we can at our job, take credit where credit is due, and apologize when we screw up, without devastation.  Some people will love our cooking or our singing or what we do at that job, others might love our humor or just the fact, if he is your dog, that you are bringer of food and taker on-er of walks.  We look for approval in appropriate places and stop looking for it in dead ended and bruise forming places.  The trick, of course, the difficulty, is that we have to chip away at dependency and control.  We have to know, since we are human, that others are too.  No one can rescue you.  And you have no business trying to rescue any other.  No one will love you perfectly, because they will get tired and disappointed in some other part of their own life.  They will have indigestion, fear about a looming bill, concern about their own necks.  They will not love you perfectly, or at all as you expected, but they will love you fiercely.

We know that the opportunities are there.  Someone in the world thinks your body is beautiful.  Someone knows how sarcastically smart you are.  Someone will appreciate your art, and hundreds of others would spend the night more comfortably if you gave the gift of your listening, a meal, or a few bucks.  Even if they are strangers.  There are friends you can chat about books with and spiritual leaders who will listen to your own soul thrashings.  Someone wants to play music with you.  There is, somewhere, a yoga class you can take.

This is true.

The difficulty is not that you are alone, but that you think you are, and you are afraid.

*

I keep coming back to the word.  Yoga.  It means union.  Connection.  This is what I know:

I have read books by persons dead 2000 years and felt my soul stand up in answer.  I have spent days feeling sorry for myself and years looking for solace in bottles or in relationships I knew, on some level, were harmful.  Afterwards I found myself wandering a gravel road with no one but a crow to love me and felt suddenly both sad and alright.  I have loved hard, have lost, but still feel that love rippling through me when certain angles of light hit a certain kind of tree, mostly in January.  I remember words my grandfather taught me, grieved the loss of that grandfather, and suddenly felt a tremendous desire to teach those words to my two year old niece.  I have laughed until my belly ached, though it was years ago and I haven't seen those friends in years.  I have cussed god out, and questioned him, and hated churches because they make me feel so alone, and envied people who seem to find some solace there; but when I have been invited to go again, I have said no.  I know the smell of the black hills, though I haven't been there in years.

I have visited paintings and cathedrals in foreign cities and felt them homecomings and diagrams to my insides. I have seen dawn over mountains and lakes.  I have laid my cheek down in the snow because it seemed the most honest and intimate thing I could possibly do.

I know people who find prayer in the dirt, planting and sweating.  I know others who find it in song.  I know people who feel closer to books or ideas or the way wood feels under their hands than they do in a room full of people.

I know this: connection is real.

Who are we to say it isn't love, because it doesn't last? To say it isn't real, because it doesn't involve face to face communication?  Who are we to say that god doesn't exist when wars have been fought over him and people dedicate their lives and their bodies to feeling him out?

None of these are perfect, or absolute, or in any way enough.  But they are, none the less, real.  Have them, practice them, in addition to the practice of family and work and friendship, and even though you may still feel lonely, from time to time, you'll have ample proof of the fact that your feelings are just as fickle as time is.

*

Every tuesday, I teach in the city.  Recently, I had a bad class.  To a yoga teacher, a bad class is one where no one seems to care how hard you've thought about what you're going to do, you're treated with all the respect a wealthy republican gives to a hotel maid who doesn't speak english, or you step into a service type class with a bunch of teenagers who have to be there and therefore don't want to be and are more than willing enough to tell you you're an arrogant cunt or a white bitch.  These happen.  I walk to the metra station to take the commuter train home and a man with no teeth waves a dirty plastic cup at me, telling me he's hungry.  He smells of baked piss and rank sweat the way sweat smells when you have to stuff newspaper and cardboard inside your clothes to keep warm.  I shook my head and hunched my shoulders and he, too, cussed me.  And then I began to cry.

I cried all the way home on the train, took the long walk home to the house, and then had to circle the block four times before I felt I could walk in without people asking what in the hell was wrong.

I didn't know, and I didn't want to talk about it.  If pressed, I think I'd weeze and sniffle 'I tried so hard...I tried.  So hard."

It didn't occur to me until the next week, after the same class, when I passed the same homeless man with what looked like the same goddamned cup.  He used the same lines, to the word.  I realized, with a wave of sadness, that he'd been saying the same line to me week after week, for months on end, every Tuesday.  I felt no matter how much I taught, how hard I tried, what kind of non-profit yoga world I try to live in, I could never change the brute facts of this world.  The man was still there, and I couldn't do anything.

This made me feel very alone, and very tired.  And I'm not even the guy who's hungry.

*

The word is connection, union.  Typically, people breezily say it means connection of mind, body and spirit.  Or moving and breathing.

I think that's bullshit.

I think connection means the way a painting affects me, and my need to write poems.  I think it is what happens when my friend gets her hands and knees dirty for hours at a time in her garden.  What other men find in music.  I think some people call it god.  I think it is the truth of the fact we have laughed, have touched sexuality, have held children, looked into a friend's eyes even if we couldn't hold it very long.

I think connection means knowing the truth of who we are, how imperfect and flailing our motions usually are, how no matter how good we get or how hard we try all of our relationships will end, someday.  The truth of the five minutes we have, five minutes at a time.

I think it means knowing I cannot make that man not hungry, but teaching anyway.  Knowing love is fleeting.  Insisting on loving, still.

Moving, into Still

I've spent weeks getting technical, workshopy, precise in my own practice and, I suppose, in my teaching.  I've taken one tiny aspect of a pose and approached it from standing, against a wall, lying down, and upside down.  I've done it over and over again.  I've practiced going in, coming out.  I've studied the anatomy and memorized terms, repercussions, hormonal shifts.  This is science, and craft, both. This morning I found myself practicing without technicalities. I woke early for it being a Saturday, the house still full of sleeping others, and without knowing why I'd woken or thinking much at all I cleared a space on my hardwood floor and I practiced. I practiced twice; after that first, whispery practice I went through my day: errands and people and breakfast and lunch and more errands, more cleaning.  Halfway though washing the windows I wanted to practice, again.  Both times I stepped into the first pose without much foresight, without a sequence jotted down or memorized.  There was no music, no plan, no reasoning.

I remembered, later, being a kid and the irrational, heady urge to simply run.  To run far and fast until my legs burned.  To swing and swing and swing until the hinges of the swing's chains seemed welded to my internal gravity and inner ear and rocking brain.  Back.  And forth.  I did this as a teenager, driving.  Just driving on and on.  I've watched others do it.  I've read about it.  Sufi mystics, those whirling dervishes, spin around and around and around until their thoughts surrender and their hearts take over and they find themselves dancing and tangled up and god. Runners talk like this.  And jazz musicians.

When you practice chanting, you repeat a word or a phrase over and over again until you chant yourself into silence.  When you practice movement, vinyasa, or flow, you move yourself into stillness.

I tend to believe all music, and all efforts at speech and communication, ultimately bend back to silence.  And all movement is wrapped up in stillness.  It is only noise, distraction, chattering mind and confusion that tell us otherwise.  We can stay caught up in the layers of noise forever, I think.  Like an argument that goes on and on, a tangled ball of yarn that can't be undone.  We can, and there is not anything particularly wrong or bad about this.  There is much to be said, and we should speak.  We should think, and reason, and plan, and create.

But we should also revere silence, and listen to it.  We can find rest in movement.  We should recognize the oxymoron of the awe-some world in which stillness is never really still, infinity is immediate, and words don't say anything at all.

I can and do often talk about what happens, on an anatomical and philosophical level, of what happens in a pose or a generalized practice.  Inversions do this, say.  Backbends open the heart and ease the spine; lateral bends tone the obliques and the intercostal and release the secondary muscles of respiration; twists press against our pancreas and thus regulate blood sucrose levels.

But it is an altogether different thing to simply say what it is I feel, when I practice.  It isn't a simple thing at all.  It can't be said, but felt.

The density of muscle and bone, a strange increase in their loudness and articulation, distinction, twitches and burns and deep releasing in places I hadn't felt at all, before.  A gravity, a heaviness, a weight and stillness and thud.  But under that heaviness a kind of rippling burn, an electrical wave of flying and thrilling and being energized.  A calm that is poised, more poised than feeling tired or spent or asleep.  But an awake that feels more firey than cocaine or coffee or fear, simple adrenalin, or any combination of them all.  There are lights inside my body, under the skin, and my stomach burns with something I don't quite know a name for.  Joy, perhaps.  It lurches and pinches.  Excitement.  Passion, surely.  It is a fire under the ass.

To practice in this way is to be lulled, to let the breath and the moving become a lullaby and the brain become mesmerized and swooned.  There is sinking, falling in, surrender.

And at the bottom of the breath there is a rising up again, more so.

When I practice this way, I hit a depth that is not always there, that seems elusive.  After a practice this way, the edges of things seem different for hours if not days afterwards.  Colors are brighter, as though my eyes had been covered with a scrim of sepia and brown, or are milky as a newborns, and suddenly I am given sight again.  The edges of pine needles, the fibers of blankets and carpets and denim, the roundness of grapes and the shout of sunshine riot as if springtime and noise had both been reinvented and updated and newly strut in their best shoes.

As if the depth sounded inside were reflected out there, too; all things have a terrible depth and profundity and it is luxurious just to dip your fingers in sudsy water or watch the droplets of water shimmering out of a garden hose.

Things have meaning, after all.

**

- expect lots of dynamic movement, moving meditation, focus on breath this week.

- practice, at least once, letting go of as much technicality and 'progress' as you possibly can, surrendering over and over and over again to moving with your breath.  Breathe more deeply.  Make your movements more full.  Give over to that place that is rhythmic and graceful and oddly, still.

- tratakam is candle watching, fire watching meditation.  Odd that such an ephemeral, never still thing should inspire such stillness and reflective states in us...and have done so throughout different eras and cultures.  Spend a few minutes staring into a flame and afterwards wonder about stillness and movement; notice how still and calm and steady and heavy the experience truly is, while not being 'still' at all.

-vinyasa your way to a dance, or while washing dishes, while walking, while rocking a child to sleep.

- pick a word, any word, and repeat it to yourself fifty times.  Or five hundred.  Until the word SOUNDS different, becomes nonsense, starts to mean something other than what you thought at first, or simply becomes silence.  Maybe because I'm a poet and words have always been magical to me, I remember doing this as a very young child.  I'd like to think all kids do it.  Maybe they don't.  If you did, remember that.

- Notice how dynamic savasana is.

- Try to keep ujjayi breath steady throughout a practice.  Notice, how at the end of practice, the breath itself has built up a momentum; it doesn't stop the moment you lie down in savasana.  It might take a few minutes to actually let that breath pattern go.  No particular lesson.  Just power.  Just awareness.  Just a new found respect for how freaking real pranayama is, outside of consciousness and what we say it is.

Manifesto

Lovely friend/mentor teacher scribbled this up, and I share:

Dandayamana Janushirasana - The Ego Stands Naked

Standing head to knee pose is hard.  It isn’t hard because it’s gymnastically difficult or requires the flexibility of a rubber band.  It’s hard because your ego gets up and stands naked in front of you, and you have to gently teach yourself to live without it.

It is possible to do the pose fairly quickly; you hold your foot and kick with it.  We all have that ego.  The one that knows it will look good if it pushes to the full expression of the posture.  The one that says oh yeah, I’ve got this.  The one that says I don’t want to look like a ‘beginner’.

But here is the truth: you cannot change where you are unless you fully accept where you are.  You do not get the benefits of the posture if you skip the beginnings.  You sacrifice happiness – all the health benefits, all the personal endurance and emotional clout, all the stuff that changes your life – by going for the fleeting pleasure of looking good for a millisecond.

Here is the rest of the truth: you get every ounce of the happiness benefits in the first baby step of the pose, if you enter it patiently.  Standing with all of the weight on one leg, locking the knee, lifting the opposite knee to parallel.

Listen to that ego, though, and the blessings of the pose drain away.

It’s what looks most simple, sometimes, that is hardest.  It’s what looks like standing still, like nothing at all, where the whole body and mind are firing with a subtle change that will leave echos and light trails behind it.  Standing head to knee pose is a catalyst of concentration, strength, trying over.  But first, it’s a posture of patience.

Once upon a time in my way back beginning of yoga world, I was strong and fairly flexible and I could do most of the postures, I thought, pretty danged well.  But I was not patient.  Nor was I listening.  And I spent months steamrolling my way from pose to pose.  One day I realized, though, that I wasn’t doing the pose at all.  In the true pose, your back rounds, your belly curls in, your whole spine extends.  Your weight is spread like a square across the four corners of your standing foot.  Your extended leg rotates in, the toes point back at your face, and your hips fall into another square of alignment.

My back was strait.  I used arm muscle strength to pull myself down, rather than core strength to hold myself up and curl over my center.  I hyper extended my standing knee, teetering in a few seconds of balance and hanging onto my foot, my foot pushing into my toes in some kind of monkey grasp to better hang on, and my breathing basically stopped.  I clung, and then I felt proud of myself.

It’s not that you fail at a yoga posture.  With a decent teacher, which most are, you can’t really do the thing too poorly without them calling you back to a better space.  I felt, realizing how off I was, that I had wasted a lot of time.  This isn’t really true: I was at the earlier, pre-early steps.  I had to do it wrong for a while to know I was wrong.  I had to be in a regular practice, feel out some safety and regularity in the room, the teachers, the atmosphere, before it got safe enough for me to let go of that ego, and start from nowhere.

I started, again.

Shift all of your weight to your standing foot.  Find that square of balance, all four corners of your feet, the ball and heel equally supporting you, your weight rising like a true plane, smooth lumber, solid grace,  from that steady floor.  Find the same square in your hips – the standing one may want to pop out.  Most of us have funny hip habits, leaning too far in, out, the pelvic girdle shifted forward or back.  You won’t even notice this, you won’t even know, until you start from nowhere.

The sacrum spreads, the hips open and ground at the same time, your frame squares off.

Then, you lock that standing knee.

(Hear my dialogue, Mr. Bikram?  Lock the knee.  Lock the knee.  Lock.  The. Knee.)

The challenge of standing head to knee creates a space for you to build concentration, endurance, and the ability to keep trying.  Learning the subtleties of the pose cues you to greater attention, awareness, appreciation for the complexity of your own body.  The skill leaves the mat with you, making you a person who notices more, can take in subtleties, notice minor distinctions, find relations.  A person who knows the value of patience.

Yoga works to balance the two hemispheres of the brain, crossing the thick barrier between them.  This feels an awake calm, stimulation and soothing all at once, quicker, clearer thoughts and improved focus.  The balance gives us ability to let go of thoughts that aren’t currently relevant or necessary.  The quality of our attention, of our conscious presence, changes.  Standing head to knee pushes that quality to the forefront of the standing series.

Oddly, the challenge, the set backs, the humility learned here turn into a kind of lightheartedness.  A return to play.  A retreat from dour seriousness.

The quality of concentration we learn in the pose harmonizes our physical and intellectual (and emotional) behaviors.  There is an element of control, of push, of fight, but there is also a subtle river letting go and release, the patience of standing back: we learn to balance between the two, to call on each according to need, to use the two forces in concert, rather than in self-defeating ways.   In practicing on one foot, then the other, we learn the differences.  All this is a learning of  when strength is a virtue, and when restraint.

Here is the truth: with years of practice, more than enough strength and flexibility, and a pretty good knowledge of the steps of the pose, it is still best for me to practice patience.  To realize, as soon as this pose begins, that my ego has stripped down, stood up, and stands hollering naked in the middle of the room.

I can feel, now, muscles and tendons and joints (sometimes I swear I feel the moving of my veins, the oxygen, the fluids, the hormonal swing), that I didn’t know existed when I began.  I know how the muscles feel in the full pose, how the knee locks, where there is length and where there is curl.

But if I practice patience, I can create those same feelings, in the first baby step of the pose.  Before my knee is lifted, while I’m still fully upright. The final expression is present from the first step.  The ego part would flaunt all that emotional gain, all those physical details, for the bare gain of looking like a hot shot.  Standing head to knee is the practice of ignoring the ego, tapping into all the other things that are there.

Surprising.  Most of us never were aware there was anything, aside from that ego.

Dandayamana Janushirasana is a map to the ocean of things outside that quibbling ego.

I feel my lower back widen and lengthen.  I feel the hips groove to a place that isn’t normal for me, but is actual alignment.  I can feel the muscles of my core take over the whole weight and responsibility of supporting me, and I can feel them pull in, massaging the organs and stuff inside, flushing me clean.  From the very, very beginning step.

The Physical Benefits of Standing Head to Knee

Anatomy

• Improves flexibility and extension of the sciatic nerve
• Contraction of quadriceps, trapezium, biceps, latissimus dorsi, and abdominal muscles
• Compression of pancreas, gall bladder, spleen, uterus and ovaries, thyroid
• extension of kidneys
• bringing the heart toward the floor mimics inversion, puts pressure on the muscle, exercising the organ by increasing the heart rate

Physical Benefits

• builds strength throughout the body
• improves flexibility and eases symptoms of issues related to the sciatic nerve (sciatica, disc herniation, degenerative disc disease, lumbar spinal stenosis)
• strengthens the tendons
• prevents wear and tear of the knee joint and cartilage by strengthening the soft tissue around the knee
• helps clear and prevent problems of digestion
• improves balance
• by compressing the pancreas, helps to regulate sugar levels
• improves tone of core, back, arms, and legs
• massages, flushes, and floods the reproductive organs with fresh oxygen and nutrients, which some say improves your sex life (hmm)
• decreases and prevents varicose veins by extending, flushing, and exercising the long vein running from heart to leg (great saphenous vein)

Listen.

Some perceive it directly in all its awesomeness; others

speak of it with wonder; others

hear of it and never know.

-Bhagavad Gita

Tonight, class.  Talking of the yamas, still, the ethics.  Tonight is the fourth.  Bramacharya.

Usually translated abstinence, chastity, purity.

But I think I've discovered the word's meaning.  Brahma - the absolute, the true, the true self, god, one.  Charya, to walk with, be with, exist in.

Thus, Brahmacharya means to walk with god.

To know, experientially, that ones body is sacred, one's heart is precious, one's life is a holy book.

No matter how much you doubt it or chide it or hate it at times.

To know, breath and skin wise, that your holy book flickers and opens, pages afire, around all these other holy books.  All sacred.  Wisdom that goes on endlessly.  Gods with thousands of faces, millions of hearts, the tissues of the world writing a great poem.

And to try, ethically, to live and walk in that holiness.  To look into the faces of others and see our gods there.  To look into the mirror, someday, without flinching, and know god is there, too.

To listen to the psalm of our breathing and dance with the drum of the heart.

To go walking with god.

Sadhana, our daily practice

Sadhana: “a means to accomplish something”.  In practice it refers to, well, practice.  The allusion is to spiritual path, but the application is firmly grounded in time, in food, in daily habits and schedules.  Sadhana is discipline, and has various formulations in Hindu, Sikh, and Buddhist traditions.  In yoga, the word refers to one’s yoga practice.  Generally and loosely, yogis talk about it as one's morning practice.  It refers to getting up early, hitting the neti pot, getting through the asana and some prayerful gyrations before the sun is up.  Sadhana is what people do on yoga retreats, in teacher trainings, and every day, if they are ‘enthusiasts’ with the time and the money. But the implication of Sadhana drives deeper, out of the studio and off of the mat:  Sadhana refers to all of the efforts and attentions of our daily grind, the passing moments of the daily, the ‘hear, now’ of our actual lives.  If we think of it as an ideal practice, or something we don’t have time for, now, we lose its currency.

Unfortunately, we typically think of ‘spiritual path’ or anything remotely related to heartwork as a thing we need to retreat to do.  Spirituality occurs in churches, we’re taught.  Wisdom is a rarefied, highly esoteric, quiet thing people find on retreats and in solitude.

Yoga looks esoteric and incomprehensible to anyone outside.  Contortionist postures make normal people think the true benefits will only come to them once they can balance on two fingers and lose thirty pounds.  Getting to the mat everyday becomes the priority.  We value our practice in terms of what it does for us, how strong we become, how long we can handle a difficult posture.

I’ve been meditating on and thinking about Sadhana for the last few weeks.  Whenever the word or idea comes up in yoga magazines or conversations with yogis, I hear ‘I’m not doing enough’.  I hear people talk about how they wish they had more time for yoga; they know it helps, they need to get back to a regular practice; they enjoy their hour or two a week, but ‘know’ what they really need is more dedication and commitment.  From the hundreds of people who are interested in yoga but don’t know it at all, this comes across most clearly: they don’t know how to start.  We tend to think we get the benefits once we get ‘good’ at yoga.   But this isn’t true at all.  We get the benefits immediately.

When guides, books, or websites talk about a daily practice they usually suggest that you start small, but go on to include a list of postures, suggest that pre-dawn is the best time to practice, and generally indicate that a daily yoga practice is the way to achieve wellness, peace of mind, and personal growth.

They don’t mention that approaching yoga this way quickly turns practice into a chore, just one more thing we have to do everyday.  Nor do they take into consideration the fact that yoga begins where we are, not where we ought to be.  For those saints or gurus or single people who can afford the time and money and liesure of a daily hour of yoga, I see the point.  I fail to see the point for the rest of us.

That idea falls into the distortion of expectations and blame, and forgets where we really are.  If we buy into it, we think of ourselves in terms of accomplishments or progress.  We resent the days we simply don’t have time to get to class.  We blame ‘life’ or our lack of discipline for the un-evolution of our presence and poise.  Life happens, ala the bumper sticker.

Slowly, my sadhana has become a practice of living everyday life, not escaping from it.

As the breath is the breath is the breath: it isn’t a thing I do, but a thing that does me; it doesn’t happen in an hour long vinyasa class, but every bleeding moment of my life; there are real days when a yoga practice is all but impossible.  A toddler who’s sick, a broken down vehicle, deadlines and obligations and a headache.  The art is not to transcend life, but to really know where I am in it, to immerse myself, and to live more fully.  It took a long time, said a girlfriend, for me to realize that my kids were not an interruption of my sadhana; they are my sadhana.

Sadhana runs like a fire under the skin of everything, if I am willing to see it there.  It’s a charged thing, interested in living an ordinary life extraordinarily well.  Transforming life, not transcending it, is what matters.  Sadhana is meant for hard-working, busy people whose family lives and bills and civic duties consume them as much as it is for buddhist monks, people who can afford vipassana retreats, and teachers who practice every morning at five a.m.  Sadhana is a practice of awareness and acceptance, of being present.  Some days, what I have to be present with isn’t anywhere near a yoga studio.

Historian N. Bhattacharyya writes “religious s?dhan? prevents an excess of worldliness and moulds the mind and disposition (bh?va) into a form which develops the knowledge of dispassion and non-attachment. S?dhan? is a means whereby bondage becomes liberation”.

Sadhana has taught me.  I know the way yoga feels in my body, and I go to the mat as regularly as I can to re-create that feeling.  I know what ritual, practice, and compassion can do to heal my life.  I have learned, through pranayama, how the breath moves me, and how  I can move it.  I know that a regular yoga practice can transform a life.

But I’ve also learned that bondage doesn’t become libration by  disappearing.  Trying to be different than I am, or expecting the course of some new action in my life – whether that be yoga or a new years resolution or a promise – to magically change me. misses the point  The point of sadhana is not to change life, but to change myself in my life.  Some days, that has to do with bills and waiting in lines and not getting enough sleep.  Other days, it has to do with what happens on the mat.  We don’t escape ‘bondage’, we change it.  We don’t get new lives; we get our own, differently.  We transform fear into love.  Our weak spots, our wounds, will become our strengths.

The tools of yoga are tools.  They are effective as bricks.  We build with them.  Each posture has teachings in it.  Each time you get to a class, you change a little.  Prayer, meditation, mudras and mantras, sadhana (practice) and seva (selfless service) have been used for millenia because they work.  But the point is to find how they will work for you.

There comes a point at which you begin to change.  You’ve done the poses for a while.  You’ve felt different after a practice.  You intuit that there is something very important for you in the whole thing, though it may be hard to articulate.

We learn, at that point, to listen.  It’s when you begin to practice on your own, or maybe to make the practice your own, that you enter transformation.  Listening is the practice of yoga.  We begin to go into our own body and let it teach us.  We listen to its rythem and begin to trust it.  This is where genuine knowledge is born.  Going to class, having a community, opening yourself up to such things as pranayama or a neti pot or a change in diet all have benefits.  We need teachers and guides.  But real insight comes from simple, private listening.

PRACTICE:

• Practice listening to where you are day by day, and try to find a yoga practice that will honor it.  Some days, that may mean not practicing.  Other days, we may practice harder.  If ‘yoga is life’, than it isn’t locked in studios.  Bring your awareness to your breath while you work or before you fall asleep at night.  Use five minutes in the shower.
• Honor and respect what you hear when you start listening.  I have a tendency to push too hard, be too perfectionist, demand too much.  I showed up at my first studio one day, battle weary and over stressed and verging on a cold.  My teacher challenged me, suggesting that maybe my daily yoga was supposed to be in a long nap and a real day of rest.  She wanted me to spend as much time as I could, that class, in savasana, even while the rest of the class moved.  Just being in the room is healing, she said.  It is hard for me to let go, and I still did most of the postures.  Since then, I’ve learned to respect myself a bit more.
• Jon Kabat-Zinn says the point of mediation is to fall awake, not fall asleep.  I say the point of yoga is to wake up, and realize you are in love with your life.
• There is truth and centuries of reason behind the daily morning practice thing.  And there just as much truth and reason in the fact that its monumentally difficult for most of us to do.  The fact is, it is tremendously difficult for us to commit to even five or ten minutes of meditation everyday, let alone to a longer asana practice.  Do one thing at a time, and do it slowly.  Buy a kitchen timer, set it for five minutes, and try to work five minutes of savasana or meditation into your daily life.  Morning is good, but if it’s lunch hour, it’s lunch hour.  When I started this, it usually ended up being the last thing I did everyday.  I was committed enough to do it, but only committed enough to do it after everything else had already happened.  Start wherever you are.  But do start.
• If you do want to work your way into a daily home practice, start small.  Easiest if you have a space you can set aside and leave ready.  A little corner of a room works.  If you can’t practice one day, try to make yourself enter that space and just sit there a minute.  It’ll change you.
• Find a few postures that you can do in bed, and do them before you get up in the morning.  It feels silly and like cheating.  But it subverts all our resistances to getting into yoga gear, getting to the mat, getting away from the kids or the phone or the clock.  Do bridge pose.  Do a full body stretch.  Pull your knees to your chest, do a twist.  We most of us know that once we start, going on is easy.  Once we begin, we enjoy it.  It’s the starting that’s hard.
• One downward dog or tree pose will change your entire day.  It will take you two minutes.  Instead of going for a cup of coffee, or when you realize you’re just shuffling paper and checking emails at work, take those two minutes and do one pose.  Just one.  One is enough.

• The most common mistake in yoga is to think we’re supposed to look a certain way in a pose, that it’s about strength and flexibility.  Fact is, yoga is about listening to your body and getting it to it’s most balanced place, not getting to a picture perfect contortion.  For many people, this means backing off: a lot of people are too flexible and too strong, and do more harm than good by trying to go ‘deep’.  Start learning yourself: where are you most flexible, and should you be pushing or easing off?  Are you using strength to force yourself, rather than letting it happen?  Postures shouldn’t cause pain, and we know that, but we’re so driven we typically go for the pain anyway.  Stop this.  Stop it slowly.
• Don’t make any resolutions to practice every morning at 4:30.  Someday that might be realistic for you.  Right now it probably just causes anxiety.  But do consider waking up to watch the sunrise once in a while.  Few things resonate so powerfully.  When I do manage to practice first thing, I feel a sense of ease and control and poise throughout the rest of my day that are impossible to find in any other way.  I don’t have that practice daily.  But I do know that the sun does it, day after day after day, and will be ready for me whenever I’m able to show up.

using what you've got

Little did I know I got a writeup on a blog.  She especially likes the part where I used hymnals as props.  I do, too; there are so many mythic/poetic/physical innuendos at play.  But mostly I called it using what you've got.

Werld. Whirrled. World.