Cutting yourself free

I was up late - okay, I didn't sleep - because I got on a roll scribbling notes for the upcoming workshop, revisiting old writing, reflecting. It is vitally important that we start asking why we are not as happy, as strong, as laughful, or as healthy as we might be.  It is important that we start to wonder about what our lives mean.  Important that we start to see yoga as yoga - not as a set of exercises or pretty choreography.

I was reading a raw foodie's insights yesterday and she spoke quite bluntly about ridding her body of toxins, pain, and cancerous cells.  Then, in the same breath and with the same context, she started speaking not of antioxidants and greens but of gratitude, generosity, reflection, and letting go.

Yoga is not the practice of postures, but the practice of living an ordinary life extraordinarily well.  To do this, you have to cut yourself free.  From envy, from old habits, from legacies of manipulation, control, or dishonesty.  You may need years of therapy to do this.  You might need a big gulp of courage.  You might need to procrastinate it for awhile.  But eventually, to do yoga, this is what you have to do.

Start with forgiveness and acts of generosity.  Forgiveness is not allowing another person's wrongs, but cutting yourself free from its track marks.  And generosity does not - never has- meant giving away from your own wealth or security.  It means sharing your most essential gifts with the world.  And thereby making them stronger.

Clarity, hard and elegant clarity, starts with these.

Whispered Wisdom

for the upcoming Praying with our Hands, Dancing with God workshop.

Whispered Wisdom, Bhakti diary

Down through time, seekers and gurus have trespassed across the ordinary and cultivated paths to wisdom.  Across traditions, deep in our ancestry, wisdom teachings have been passed like folk cures from teacher to debutante.  Every single holy book there is is a collection and transcription of an oral tradition going back thousands of years before the things were written down.  Yoga stands there, in half lit hallways of time, where individual soldiers of life have sometimes found a thing that worked for them, throwing open the doors of perception.

We know this.  Yet, strangely, a bit wonderfully, yoga is popular. You can take classes in libraries, college gyms, retirement centers and vacation line cruises.  You can download teacher wisdom.  Yoga is a practice of books, DVDs, and the world wide web.  NBA and NFL players do it.  Sexy popstars do it.  Suddenly, practices handed down across centuries are available at WalMart.

We are, ahead of anything else, practical people.  Understanding that makes the increasing popularity of yoga an obvious thing: yoga is  a very practical endeavor. It cultivates cardiovascular health.  It builds musculoskeletal strength and flexibility without the grind and shock of high impact aerobics or sport.  It peaks every organ system  – the respiratory, digestive, reproductive, endocrine, lymphatic, and nervous.  It cultivates the capacity to relax and dramatically cuts away at the negatives of stress.  Yoga instantly makes us feel better, breathe better, sleep better.  We digest better.  Many claim easing or healing of long entrenched illness.  You do not need long years of apprenticeship or training.  The effects of yoga are immediate and profound.

Still, the physical and practical benefits of yoga may mask, or at least be a superficial version of, something more.  Hang around any yoga studio for a bit and you’ll hear stories of remarkable self transformation.  People report a profound rediscovery of self and purpose.  Some claim their capacities of concentration, creativity, and  intuition blossom strangely.  People start talking like believers or religious. “Chronic” illnesses wither.  People find focus, purpose, and meaning in their lives. Some trespass across the common world of the ordinary and find the doors of perception flung wide.

It can be hard to know what to make of this.  Is that stuff ‘yoga’? And which yoga? A basic google search turns up such a wealth of philosophies and interpretations the neophyte can be overwhelmed.  There are rumors of enlightenment, hints of change.  But the incomprehensible stew of every conceivable philosophy, psychology, and metaphysic is bewildering. The ancient and the modern, the esoteric and the practical, the magical and the scientific fuse.

Or, they don’t. The deeper, promised secrets of yoga are not easily had.

As I came to yoga, I had intimations of the something else, something deeper, something profound, but very little idea if those things applied to me.  My practice involved the ‘gross physical body’: I was a hardbitten atheist, strongly attached to reason, struggling to make sense of a hurricane life.  I found that there was something in the practice that I deeply, physically, needed.  In the beginning, it was simply about hanging on and feeling better.

When I began to look into the deeper aspects of yoga, I had difficulty knowing what to make of it all.  There are a plethora of how-to books to teach the asana and breathing techniques.  And there are treasure troves of lore: mythic adventures of gods speaking to nearly godly men; fascinating accounts of levitation, knowledge of former births, bilocation, states of nirvanic bliss.  The wash and swell of Hindu texts elucidate ecstasy.  Union with the One.  Knowledge of the Absolute.  Cosmic consciousness.  Pulling back the veils of deception and the phenomena of the material world.  But it is hard to know what those things mean to me.  Are those descriptions of what’s happening during a lunch hour vinyasa class?  Where is the transformation story of a neurotic Western agnostic like me?  Is this supposed to be my story?  If so, why can't I glow?  Why are things like alarm clocks and financial fear still part of my existence?

The questions I have – and hear from others – sometimes seem quaint or simplistic.  We come to yoga hoping it will help.  It usually does.  It usually does in unexpected and stunning ways.  But it remains hard to know what that means, or to answer the questions.  ‘Can a Christian practice yoga’ sounds like a ridiculous rant out of a t.v. evangelist’s mouth, and it is, but it is also a valid question.  Where do I begin?  How much do I have to do?  What is kundalini, chakra, ayurveda?  What is supposed to happen in meditation?  If you stick with this, do you end up vegetarian, wearing mala beads, annoying your friends?  Do I have to give up french fries?

Historically, yoga is a wisdom tradition.  It is a story of journey and transformation.  Ultimately, the ‘secret’ has less to do with what is whispered than the fact of whispering: if it were just getting the answers, we could read a textbook and have done.  There would not be thousands of texts, nor millions of practitioners.  Truthfully, journeys are made with teachers and maps and guides.  We suffer from a lack of mentorship, a not quite knowing what we’re supposed to do, no clear route of initiation.  We’re not terribly sure that we even want initiation, but the wisdom is tempting.

I am coming to believe that the ‘whispered wisdom’ is a slant truth, a cunning little word play.  The texts, teachers, and mentors are helpers.  Historically they have been the lights.  In the end, though, I believe we start to hear a whispering, haunting voice inside.  The texts, the practice, and the philosophies are not the end product, not the prize: they are maps to the prize.  Maps themselves are not the terrain covered.  They are representations.  Translations.  Metaphors.

Happiness, they say, is not a thing you find one day or a constitution you are born with, even if some of us are more predisposed than others.  Happiness comes not from any specific thing, but from the building of a life in which happiness has room to come in.  Create, cultivate, the conditions, and the thing appears.  Remove obstacles.  Clear spaces.  Recognize barriers and work through them.  Give time to the things that contribute to happiness: friendships, family, intellectual expansion, spiritual growth, play. Give priority to reflection, regeneration, commitments and slow and steady growth.

Yoga is a creeping, haunting thing.  With any exposure to it, and half-assed effort, a kind of inner whispering begins.  We find there is simply more of us than we thought.  A great deal more.  More consciousness, more energy, more equanimity, more life in the body, more connection in the emotions, more fire in the depth of our emotions, good and bad.

I have always had voices in my head.  Most of my life, they have been conflicting.  There have been a number of them that echo the judgement, critique, or down right abuse I’ve taken in from elsewhere.  I began to notice a year or two ago that those voices, all that conflict and resultant paralysis, began to fade.  This in itself seemed a wonderful thing, and I was unsure exactly what had happened.

But in the last year, a different thing has begun to happen.  There is still more there – an astonishing amount of more.  More consciousness, still.  More and deeper empathy.  More energy.  More equanamity, more depth.  I continue to spy into the practices and philosophies and metaphysics.  I soak it in.  I have begun to take that happiness approach: make room, establish the conditions, let go.  The conditions mean I look for gurus and mentors.  I practice listening.  I give time and priority where it seems most appropriate.  I try to apply the ethics, restraints, observances.  I get frustrated and then I let go, go deeper.

There is suddenly a voice.  Suddenly is not the right word: I am aware that this voice was one of those earlier voices.  Some of the themes are familiar.  The songs.  There is a clarity and a surety that was never, ever there before.  An authenticity.  But it is more than just ‘my true self’, more than ‘clarity’: it’s also a tremendous and haunting reserve of beauty and wisdom.  So much wisdom, I am baffled.  Things that seemed difficult aren’t difficult any more.  I am not afraid any longer.  Situations that seemed hopeless, or hopelessly complicated, suddenly are not.  I hear voices: I am walking the dog at midnight, thinking of any random string of things, and I suddenly hear a voice ten leagues deeper than that conscious stream of thought tell me exactly what I need to do about some other thing, that I wasn’t even thinking of.  I am driving midmorning, anxious and listening to the world news on NPR, running between bank and grocery and vet, and suddenly two words sink in and everything sinks magically into perfect places.  As if magnetized.  As if tethered by strings and drawn in.  I move to a sudden understanding of world and myself.  Am changed by the understanding.

A haunting, resonant voice.  A steady knowledge that this yoga is not just practical, not purely popular.  There are strange questions and stranger answers out there.  America is suffering a crush on yoga, and like any love affair, there are ups and downs.  Any mature relationship to yoga has to acknowledge those dark places and low points.  The pushing the physical too far.  The commercialization.  The idealization of gurus.  The trade in of spiritual path for monthly membership fees.  The weird attempts to transcend realities of work, intimacy, identity.

Ultimately, the yogic path is about work, intimacy, and identity.  It goes as deep and as pithy as psychoanalysis.  It can ask questions and leave us hanging for lack of good answers.   Not transcendence, but depth.  Not overcoming, but going deeper in.

But there is that voice.  It surfaces.  It becomes more clear.  It keeps us company on the journey, through wild goose chase and moments of inner calm.  It knows why we are there.  It, too, is determined to save the only life we really can save.  When the sages say the wisdom is whispered, they mean it’s a thing you have to listen to hear.  That the listening changes who you are.

vajra - the strength of diamonds

It is cold.  Frigid.  Alienating, isolating, brilliant and sharp.  Sharp, as in the kind of cold that burns and cuts you. It is hard to move through cold.  Hard to move oneself out of bed, somedays.  It is hard to step up and do the things you need to do.

What we need, I decided, is a practice to embody this.  A practice that can acknowledge the sharp hardness but somehow make it useful.  Cultivate fire, melt with compassion, glow the hard edges of 'reality' down to a level of usefulness and wisdom.

There is a way of seeing things as they are, of 'accepting reality' that results in bitterness, cynicism, judgement and sarcasm.  This is one version of truth.

But there is also truth made into wisdom: truth that presses hardness into diamonds and moves beyond sarcasm into kindness.  It is a soul's journey from 'knowledge' into 'wisdom', a psychiatric path from neurosis into sanity.

There is a sanskrit word, Vajra, which I think means what I mean right now.  Literally, diamond.  It is a way of seeing and being that sees things as they are, rather than seeing things through the ego.  It is the ego, the selfishness, the fearbound, that makes 'reality' and our ideas of it opinionated, judgmental, sarcastic, cynics burned down to spit and hissing.  The challenge, the path, is to pierce through the fear of intimacy and embody tenderness through being vulnerable and open.  The movement from the intellectual, cold, reasoning doubt in the head to the clear sighted, vulnerable warrior of the heart.  The challenge is, as always, to stop living life from the head, and to live from the heart.

Vajra, like a diamond, can be used to cut.  But nothing can cut it or break it.  It is vajra that will give us the ability to see through and cut away from old paradigms that don't work any longer, to step away from old behaviors and old relationships that have limited or caused us harm.  It is the ability to cut oneself free from resentments, old bitterness, antiquated modes of thinking that end up in prejudice, anger, resentment, smallness, fear.  Vajra is the diamond strength that can cut through the legacies of pain and open us to the strength of vulnerability and heartfulness.   It cuts new paths.  For ourselves, for our children.  For our new day, today.

Coldness, bitterness, anger, fear: all these darknesses that seem, at first blush, to be endings.  That seem so caustic and deadended.

They prove, if we enter them honestly, to be catalysts and shining shimmery things.  They prove to be the opportunities we have been praying, or wishing, or waiting for.  Don't disparage opportunity because it doesn't look like a pony with a ribbon around its neck, or a lover the way you imagined him all rescue and romance.  Sometimes, opportunity is a really fucking cold weekend you have to spend in doors.

Opportunity is what you do with it.

of spirit

"There isn't anything except your own life that can be used as ground for your spiritual practice. Spiritual practice is your life, twenty-four hours a day." - Pema Chodron

"And when you turn to the right or when you turn to the left, your ears shall hear a word behind you, saying, "This is the way; walk in it." -Isaiah 30:21

"Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; rather, seek what they sought."  Guatama Buddha

"The whole way to heaven is heaven itself."  Teresa of Avila

This sunday, if you haven't signed up yet, do.

If, anyway, you wonder what yoga has to say about spirituality and heartwork.

What all this body stuff might have to do with healing the soul.

Or what ancient practices have to teach you about your own life.

It isn't for everyone.

But it is for you if you are tired of arguing about religion and politics, tired of reading about spirituality, tired of talk-talk-talking about change or better or goals or happiness.  Tired of talking about things that matter without doing a single thing that matters yourself.

My hope is that a few of those who are looking for things that matter, trying to figure out what really matters to them, or are sick of living with what doesn't will find yoga to be an exercise of spirit and a path of heart.  Come.  Sunday January 27, 9-noon.

Please register here and click the workshops tab.

The power of fire and water inside.

I had pratice this weekend in the art of letting go.

Let me not be trite: this isn't homework nor philosophical navel gazing.  This was having my heart broken and sniveling my way through the weekend.  It wasn't the end of the world.  It was just old old family stuff, and the way you continue to look for family approval and support even when you know better. Ought to know better after 35 years.  Still, though, you go looking.  Love is a dog's heart and it begs.

And it will always hurt when it gets betrayed.  And you will continue to feel afraid and alone, so long as you are doing important things.

I know all of that, theoretically.

But I sniveled and slunk down the kitchen cabinets until I was sitting on the kitchen floor and wondered at how my eyes could faucet.  How they pour and pour.

This is the thing, the practice: It occured to me that there is an energy created by hurt.  I let go, surrendered.  Surrender gives us velocity.

The body is a threshold.  The body is a door.

More often than not, pain is the catalyst that moves us.  More often than not, we 'change' and 'grow' with varying amounts of grace and muttering.  We sputter and wince.  It hurts, this.

The art of being alive and waking up forces a certain amount of loss and grief and fear into not only our consciousness, but the fabric of our bones and the tissues of our viscera.  Letting go - into heartbreak or anxiety or joyful anticipation - revs up a kind of expansion and fruition.  It makes of us a forcefield of kinetic fire, flickering under the skin.

Movement - I mean yoga and breath and hands - are a doorway.  A threshold.  A thing to hold onto with both hands when the room is dark or the world spins.  But a creative way into your own forces.  Body, breath, hand is an alchemy of anxiety, pain, uncertainty potently changed into the very thing that helps us find our feet and know who we are.

On the whole, you'd think 'spirituality' and successs in life are built on a theory of bliss and abundance.  On propserity and getting over adversity.  Positive thinking wants to build structures so big and powerful it would take an army tank of disappointment to break through.  Or, to avoid that disappointment, we'll simplify ourself to ghosts, zen ourselves so abstract there is nothing left to lose.  Or we get so busy we don't have time to feel the losses.  We'll medicate with drugs, alcohol, food.  Sex.  Tuning out in front of the television or retreating to ordinary mediocrity.  Perhaps sales of anti depressants and anti anxiety meds are so high, and self help gurus send messages to avoid responsibiity abnd pain - because all of that is easier than looking at heartbreak and learning how to deal with it.

We know how to push through our fears and feelings in frenzied attempts to achieve goals.  But we know precious little about how to suffer gracefully and productively when we are up against forces we can't control.

I think this is an excercise - a movement - of spirit.  I think it is movement that gives us spirit.

Happiness, I think, is not an absence of pain, but an understanding of pain.  That joy is in it, somewhere.

This isn't intended to be an essay on the bleakness or the necessity of human hurt.  It is simply a noticing how powerful our fires inside are, and wonder what might happen when we open ourselves up - appropriately, for our own dancing - to vulnerability.  To seeing power where power is: in shaking hands and locked up throat.

Yoga for Athletes

Two things. First, every Thursday, every class, is themed and taught for athletes.  This does not mean you have to be an athlete to attend - it just means my teaching language and  methodology will specifically address those issues most commonly brought up by athletes.  There are two strong classes and one restorative class: something for everyone, whether looking to build strength and endurance or detox and recover post workout.

Secondly, announcing a 'Yoga for Athletes' workshop on Sunday, Feburary 17, from 9 am to noon.  This workshop will teach a strong flow targeting strength, focus, endurance, body system balance.  But it will also teach a set of restorative, detoxifying poses.  There will also be a smattering of information on why yoga can be so beneficial to modern day sport - and how to include yogic practices into your training.

Sunday February 17, 9 a.m. – Noon

$40

Return Yoga

822 ½ W St. Germain

St Cloud MN

Wear: comfortable clothing you can move freely in, as well as a warmer shirt to cover up with/socks as we will NOT be engaged in a strong practice or move the whole time.  Have something comfortable for the discussion part.

Bring: a notebook and pen, your mat if you’ve got one, possibly a towel or small blanket to sit on and shift around on as we discuss.  Something to sip.

Yoga is for all bodies, in any condition.  But athletes in particular have found something in the practice that makes their time off the mat more powerful.

Yoga is unique in its ability to counter-act overtraining, cross fascial lines (where many sports unbalance the areas of the body), facilitate myofascial release, and radically improve the body's ability to sleep, eat, digest, detoxify, intuit, respond, and heal on a tissue and cellular level.  All without the injurious jarring actions or expensive equipment of other exercise programs.

Learn to incorporate yoga into your game. Every class, every Thursday is a ‘yoga for athletes’ class, and this workshop is a fantastic place to begin. Karin works hard to stay on top of science's contribution to sports medicine and yogic studies, and teaches these skills in each and every class.  Recovery time is improved, the body becomes more resilient and responsive, less prone to injury; muscle memory and structural integrity are part of the process.  While this is a great class for runners, cyclists, golfers, skiers, soccer players, and any other athlete, there are also students whose primary form of 'exercise' is yoga.  Whoever you are and whatever your level, the class is intended to challenge while teaching the skills of growth and acceptance, commitment and exploration.  There is deep physical and psychological value to finding one's edge, and changing the edge.

Healing happens in the pause between breaths

This morning - New Year's Day - broke cold and crystalline.  I walked to the studio before the sun was anywhere near up and watched my breath in the air, listened to the sound of my boots on sub-zero clots of snow and sheets of ice over the pavement, wondered at the great silence of the world that is the space before dawn.  The space before anything. It is said, sometimes, that that hour is the best hour in which to do a practice.  That the veils between the worlds are thinnest.  Or perhaps only that the interruption and blare of everyday life does not have such a purchase on us.

For whatever reason, predawn is given over to those who are suffering, those who are inspired, and those who are watching the spaces between one day and the next.

This morning, I suppose, the space between one year and the next.

I lit a candle and I waited to see: who would show up for this first practice in the new year.  What moods and movements they'd bring in the door with them.  Weather I should be silly or serious, push for hand stands or take long, deeply introspective holds with our hearts and our bodies near the floor.

I listen to student's breathing, as I start a class.  And as I did so this morning I realized I didn't want to say anything much at all.  Nor did I get the sense they needed any directive at all.  Life its own self - this dawn of a new year, their dedication and ceremony shown in showing up at six in the morning before anything else can happen in their year...all that says more than enough.  What I wanted, instead, was to listen to that breathing and to invite them into the wordless spaces as well.

Over the holidays, I was given a singing bowl.  I have held it, asked it to sing at the end of a few classes.  But today I used the singing bell for the whole entire class.  I lead, silently.  I demonstrated a pose - nothing new or complex or workshopy, just going back to the beginning and practicing what we already know - the class followed.  I let them hold the pose for a deeply long, 20 breath or minute hold, 30 seconds for deep strength or balance poses.  Then I'd ring the singing bowl, signaling an end to the pose.  I'd demonstrate the next pose, they would follow, and we'd just breathe together until the bowl told us the pose was done.

As I write, now, reflecting, I notice not only the starting of thoughts that end up in typed sentences, but the spaces between the thoughts, the spaces between the words.  The spaces give meaning to the confusion and irresolution of everthought and nonsenseword.  Thoughts and words mean nothing, go nowhere, without a pause of meaning and understanding.

And I recall the spaces between our poses this morning, and hearing a teacher whisper at one point: healing happens in the pause between the breath.  Find the pause between the breath.

Years ago, when I was starting a practice, teachers told me so much about breathing I grew sick of hearing about it.  They reminded me to breathe, ad nauseum.  Yet I started to realize what they were doing was directing my attention back and back again onto my own self: they were teaching me to find the moment of pause.

The moment before reaction, before automatic thought.  The moment before I repeat old habits for the thousandth bloody time or surrender to the self sabotage or negative thought patterns.  It was in their directives, in the occasional glimpses I caught of this 'space between' that began to teach me to SEE the patterns I was caught in, as well as to witness how fleeting thoughts and emotions were.  It was in that suspension that I started to notice edges - and to notice how teaching others about that edge, that half second of crazy time when all hell is breaking loose, the half second when anger is inhaling an explosion, when fists are raised, when chaos threatens to break apart whatever stability has been patched together during the infrequent moments of calm. The suspension interrupts moments of violence, sadness, boredom, or life as automatic.  To break the cycle of despair that gets passed from generation to generation when anger wins and calm is absent.  Or the cycles adults put them through, day after day and year after year, when we know longer remember what growth and vibrancy and passions are, when we no longer learn, when we can't really say we're still living or what we're living for.

The yogic path is to slow everything down, learn how to breathe attentively, to create space between the breaths.

There was a time, years ago, when I didn't really understand this was possible.  Not really.  Pay attention to the breath, whatever.  Remember to breathe, sure.

I didn't realize there were paths away from eruptive fears and the powerful slipping of time, gone and gone and gone again.  One breath at a time,  I was taught how to breathe with attentiveness and space.

As we progress through the breadth of what we experience in this moment  - the sensations, feelings, thoughts, memories- we are able to help each other sort out the chaos, and see within the maelstroms places to hold fast. From those new vantage points, we  see paths away from the anger and towards peace; paths away from judgment and towards acceptance; paths away from fear and towards Love.

We breath and find the healing between one breath and the next, the ceremony between one day and the next.  The edge of time between night and dawn.  The moments when actual change and reflection are possible.

If you can find the pause between the breath, you can heal.  You can learn to enlarge time, find choice, repair old wounds, start whole.  You make more space to live in.  You enlarge, find meaning, understand.

Without contempalation, without pausing to look, listen, and feel out the meaning of things, without purpose, we get lost.  The passing of time is just the passing of time.  All we can do is watch.

Contemplation is the lending of purpose, the finding of meaning.  The participation in being alive.

It is the space between words that makes things into phases, sentences, understanding.  It is the pause of reflection and intention that draws lines and makes sense of things.  It is the space beneath the surface of things from which we live.

Under the superficial is the more of life.  More love.  More energy.  More hope.  More health.  More breath.

If the moving of one year into another means anything to me today, it means that paused breath, the suspiration, the sacred rite of exhale.

Resolutions, revolving.

I've talked already about the new year, about resolutions and change. There is a difference.

Resolution has something to do with appearances and surfaces.

Change is different.  Change runs deep.  Change is more about revolution than resolution and appearances and superficiality.  While many of us are comfortable spouting off resolutions, far fewer of us are actually willing or able to accomplish change.  The difference, I think, lies in resolving and wishing the world (ahem, other people) to be different or see us differently or changing our own damned selves.  Revolution, from inside.  Change is realization that nothing much has changed, ever.  That world is the same world, the relationships the same, the chemical compositions of our comfort foods are the same.  Change acknowledges, sometimes grudgingly, how little we can actually change: not other people, certainly.  Not physics.  Not the way things are.  But feel what an hour, a few simple movements can do, at the end of your next yoga class.  Notice how nothing has changed, but self; and in this change, everything is different.

Things do not change, said Thoreau.  We do.

One of the great metaphors reflected inasana practice is that of spiritual evolution. Webster’s dictionary defines evolution as “a process of continuous change from a lower or simpler to a higher, more complex, or better state”.  Simply put, evolution means growth.

And growth is rarely a linear process.

Thus, pavritta.  To twist. To evolve.  Websters suggests evolution is “a process of continuous change from a lower or simpler to a higher, more complex, or better state”.

You've heard this in class: pavritta trikonasana, pavritta parsvotonoasana.  Maybe, if the teacher is bold, pavritta paschimotanasana.

They are a classification of poses: they are twists.  They are complex.  They are subtle.  They are among the most heat producing and detoxifying of asana.  They are among the more discomfiting and challenging.

As growth is.

In order to create this movement in the body, we need to stabilize the foundation, extend or elongate the axis, and finally to actively revolve or move around this axis.

In most standing twisting poses, the foundation consists of the pelvis and the legs.

These poses require that we root powerfully through the legs and feet, and harness the core’s support.

Then we channel this energy into the spine and allow the spiral energy to be expressed through the torso.  The arms, the eyes, the hands.  The very breath, spun in widening circles.

They demand flexibility, strength, and the ability to balance while engaging complementary opposing forces.

Learn this, and new years resolutions become pale and flimsy things.  Revolution is much more impressive.

This is what we will do this week: evolve.  In downdog, in triangle.  In standing forward fold and seated forward fold.  To sundial, to bird of paradise.  Pasasana. To find our own spine and make it longer.

Root powerfully, and harness the core's strength.  Spill it.

Ahimsa. First, Ethics.

(more for the body, mind, feeling, world workshop coming up Sunday December 30th.  Come!) Ahimsa.  First, Ethic.

Karin L Burke

My practice began with asana.  It began in the body.  Words and understanding, all this ethics and philosophy, came later. I felt a strange, deep stirring when I practiced.  I didn’t know a thing about yoga philosophy; it would be a stretch to say I ‘understood’ it.  Yet I intend to say exactly that:  I think that strange and deep physical stirring was ethical, what the body said and the mind heard was the beginning of understanding.  This is who you are, body said; why can’t you remember?

First, the body.  Later, the words. Like life its own self.

What I thought, at that point in life, was that philosophies and religions fail when you try to use them as actual tools to open jars with, relieve headache, or cope with a difficult human being.  They are pretty.  Pretty like a dress you wear on banner days when you yourself feel gorgeous and all the world is right.  But most of our lives – my life, anyway – didn’t happen in the way of lace and poetry and kid gloves.  It happened with bitten nails and chapped lips, screaming alarm clocks, and much weariness.  Makeup, and make believe, church and ethics, all amounted to the same thing.  Fairy tales and palliatives.

Yoga’s ethics are different.  They are not an excuse or escape from the body, but an expression of the body.  They are part of the human, as skeleton is.

Harm none, honesty, purity, ahimsa are words written on and of bodies.  They are as much a part of us as is skin.  As is bicep, bone matter.  The smoke and heat of blood.

*

When I was a girl, I wrote poems.  Sometimes, lacking a notebook or simply trying to catch the moment of clarity, I wrote on the inside of my forearm.  But I don’t think convenience was the whole reason I wrote there; I think it was a part of what the words were, a piece of their meaning.  It was important to have the ink there, on my flesh like that; a constant flicker of ink in corner of eye reminder.

Like a branding.

Words for the sake of argument are sterile.  Words in a book may or may not be read.  Words around ideas are just words.  As marking, though, as witness, words take on gravity and dimension.  They are a manifesto taken to bodily extremes; a manifesto of the body and for it.

One of these poems little girl me wrote described a storm and a lost man.  It got cold.  The sky poured.  The man was alone, had nothing, and there was darkness.  Over and again the poem said naked, damp, and hungry.  Every human being of us knows what that means.  All the saints and native gods of all the corners of the world have known it.  We know.

As in, This is my flesh.  Our veins are veins of compassion, not of blood.

When I was a young woman, I still had poems inside me, but my lifestyle ricocheted from safety and fairy tales to darker, harder places.  New Orleans Parish Prison, for one.

I thought, while sitting there one day, that I was now qualified to write folk songs.

I have a tattoo, now, woman grown, on the pale and thin flesh on the inside of that left forearm.

Yes: the place I used to scribble and ink on day after day.  It is my handwriting, this tattoo; the needle traced over what I myself had written and made it stay.  Naked, it says.  Damp.  And hungry.

When people ask, I say it’s just a prison tattoo.  This makes them laugh and the conversation stray.  But it is exactly true: I laid my forearm across another woman’s lap and she patiently, slowly, branded me.

When people ask about the words, all that nakedness, they usually think it’s some innuendo.  All is sex.  I don’t correct them.  But the words are not about lusty, satisfied desire so much as they are a description of need.  These are the words we know.

Is it strange, I wonder, or delightful, that the most rigorous intellectual exercises and sublime metaphysical contortions of yogic science echo what I’ve felt and tried to express my whole life:

We know what the words are.  We ought to know our veins as compassion.  We ought – because we do, in a sense – have first words branded into our arms and the palms of our hands.

To have the words bless and sanctify everything we touch, mark everything we do, witness our hours; we ought to be reminded of ethics as soon as we are reminded of body.

First, ethic; first.

All two year olds know what generosity is.  And every two year old knows selfishness.  We stay infants all our lives.  Unless we decide to grow up.

*

You stand, you breath: the whole body trembles.  The nerves flash.  The breath roils.  It all says yes: yes, this has been true, all along.  This is who you are.  You were born to love, and yet you are alone.

Figure this out.  Go slowly.

*

Nonviolence is not a discrepancy or diversion of the body.  It is the logical outcome of having one.  Do this, and remember.

*

Still, I am a wordy, philosophical kinda gal.  It tickled me no end when I found the philosophy.  I found the philosophy to be a pure distillation of what I felt on the mat, knew with my hands and my eyes.  The point of practice is not physical contortion and heavy breathing; it is a question of aliveness, is sensitivity.  Yoga is ethics, first.  If it begins as a flash of physical knowing, it holds true all the way to the most rigorous of intellectual understandings.  Compassion is a truth we know across all the different fields of knowledge.

The logic of yamas and niyamas appeals to our highest level of intelligence.  At first glance smarts isolate us, put the smart one on a different level and lead to accolades, cloisters, academia. Intelligence separates us from the fold. But this isn’t the whole thing; intelligence taken to its conclusion resolves to withness and leveling. Full expression of genius lies in relation, not isolation.  I don’t say easy, I just say genius.

The fully developed human being knows his own self, and where he stands.  He knows everything amounts to this: either he sees the body of every other as equal in importance to his own, or he does not.

Compassion, ahimsa, is inborn and instinctual.  But it is also – and this makes it rare – a truth the mind can find no shortness with.  Any shortness found is with the self, and not compassion.

Like god, I suppose: bigger than mind, it contradicts the mind.  This doesn’t prove the smallness of god. It proves the smallness of self.

*

Ahimsa is historical. Hippocrates, father of medicine and citizen of ancient Greece, is credited with the healer’s code to ‘first, do no harm’.  He understood medicine holistically and humanely; illness is not the concern of wellbeing, wellbeing is.  When healers act out of their own diagnostics of what is ‘wrong’, they may injure the person while treating the limb.  To ‘fix’ a disease or wound at the cost of harming the person in some way is worthless, even if the disease is ‘cured’.  To not harm, then, takes precedence over the healer’s own accomplishment and the treatment of disease.

A doctor is concerned with physical pulp and tissue.  Oxygen, the grey matter of the brain, depression and anxiety and the muscle fisted heart.  From there, directly, a doctor is concerned with the soul and the being.  With communities.  With the bodies of history and the eyes of the not yet born.  Compassion, ahimsa, is the only way such disparate bodies of knowledge form a whole.

**

The body is knowledge, see?  To feel is to sense one’s humanity, however jaded and limping.  To sense is to know.  To know one’s own senses is to realize the mirror and shadow and echo of oneself in everyone else’s body.  It feeds directly into using one’s wisdom as a means of connection.  One’s history and secrets and accomplishments as communication.  One’s fear as the impetus to love.

The body is wild, and messy, and discordant.  There are reasons we prefer to live in our heads.  And yet to feel what one feels, moment by moment, is ultimately the kindness of telling the truth.  It demands bravery; it is frightful to see not with our expectations and ideals and shoulds and oughts and musts but with what is.

The word courage translates, in latin and old french, ‘with heart’.  Compassion, as translated as the greek of the new testament, means to feel ‘from the bowels and gut’.  It is not easy, no.  To face reality.  To stop living in the boundaries of our heads and enter the field of the body, where things are not so orderly and are, quite frankly, terrifying and hard to understand.

It is large and expansive, that land of what we do not understand.  To ground ourselves there we ourselves must grow huge.  We must, sooner or later, realize that courage, bravery, ethics, true self, are not things without fear.  But a place where the fear doesn’t matter any longer, where fear can be felt without leaving us paralyzed.

**

Our eyes grow gentle to see this way.

This is what eyes were capable of, all along.

You were born to love, and yet you feel alone.  Figure this out.  Go slowly.

**

If you pay attention to the breath, eventually you realize it is not you, breathing.  It is your body responding to the universe.  It is atmospheric pressure, breathing you.  The breath is, with out you.  When you end, there will still be others breathing.

This is a primordial, gut wrought, deep stirring experience.  It starts in the privacy of the body.  From there, it softens the eyes and reveals a universe, an atmosphere, a word.  It speaks. We develop like children: first in body, later in language and its brainy knowings.  If you allow yourself to feel what you feel, see what you actually do see, you resolve to fierce compassion.

Ethics are visceral.

Every human being is marked, branded.  We all have these tattoos across our foreheads, written into the lines of our hands, but the things are mostly invisible and private.  I am born to love, built of it, it says; and yet I feel alone.

We know the words by heart.

Breathe out, look in, let go.

Forget about enlightenment.Sit down wherever you are and listen to the wind that is singing in your veins. Feel the love, the longing, and the fear in your bones. Open your heart to who you are, right now, not who you would like to be. Not the saint you’re striving to become. But the being right here before you, inside you, around you. All of you is holy. You’re already more and less than whatever you can know. Breathe out, look in, let go.

—John Welwood

Go on.

Your body is capable of things you think - right now - are impossible and ridiculous. It isn't a question of body. It is a question of commitment, time, willingness, life. Your life, I tell you, is much bigger than your thoughts are.

Go on.

And if this is true of your body...what might be true of all those other things left buried inside you?

Witness. Mindfulness.

Written for the upcoming Body, Mind, Feeling, and World workshop.  If you're interested, sign up. “The empty sky is my witness.” – Jack Kerouac

We want peace.  We want relief.  We want a sense of calm and a broader opening to joy.  These are universals, although they come to us in very particular and personal ways.  And they are things that are promised us, in yoga, in meditation, in spiritual paths of any shape or origin.

The way in is paradoxical, and has more to do with not doing and not reacting than with a ‘practice’.  It comes in stepping back and witnessing who you are.

The irony is of course that we think we know.  We think we know better than anyone else does, certainly.  There is a sense in which this is true: no one else knows our secrets, or is as preoccupied with our thoughts and feelings and beliefs as we are.

But there is also a larger sense in which this isn’t true at all.  We don’t know who we are.  We don’t have the foggiest.  We have a tendency to become attached to our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs and confuse them for ourselves.  And we have a tendency to stay so close we can no longer see the big picture.

Once upon a time, someone told me “your thoughts aren’t true, you know.  You don’t have to believe them.”  This was a revelation.  It continues to be a revelation.  This was the beginning of many deep changes in me, starting with a yoga practice, an exploration of mindfulness and meditation, and not a little soul searching.  In any journey of healing or self work, honest appraisal of our thoughts and beliefs has to come in to play.  This causes a minor eruption.  A revolution, complete with burned citadels and blazing flags, from the heart outward.  It results in clarity, centeredness, and purpose.  It creates a sound refuge.

And it’s tremendously hard to explain, as it’s a thing of experience.  Of show, don’t tell.

Sakshin, the Witness, is the you of you that is larger than your conscious thoughts or fleeting emotions.

The human animal is a thinking and reflective animal.  Not only do we think, but we have the capacity to watch ourselves think.  We have the gift of self awareness.  The easiest way to envision this is to call up in your mind a picture of yourself, where ever you are right now.  Watch as this character of your mind stands and leaves the room.  You can do this whether you actually leave the room or simply use your imagination.  This quality is what allows us to remember, to learn from what we remember, to ruminate and change our minds, and to create or plan.

But the camera can pan back even further, to where we see the thoughts, can start to question where the thoughts are coming from, ask who the thinker is.

Sakshin, the seeing witness

Sakshin, the Witness, becomes our closest ally in our daily practice.  We are ambitious, judgemental, competitive, and want to change.  But we cannot create any substantive change until we know and accept what is.

Sakshin is the quiet water beneath the constant chatter and fluctuations of our everyday consciousness (citta).  It is those fluctuations Patanjali wanted to quell with the practice of yoga.  The fluctuations are caused by perception, thought, emotion, memory.  Because of avidya – our inability to see, our mistaken ideas about dualities, our ignorance – we imagine that these fluctuations define and limit who we are. Our ignorance hurts. We suffer.

All our life, and much of our strength, is spent is assigning values to people and things. We analyze, we criticized, we compare.  We feel envy.  We feel lack. Or we feel pride, ambition, dedication. But we are rarely taught to accept and simply mirror what is.  Sakshin engages both the outer and inner worlds on their own terms and lets them speak in their own words. It is  present-centered, with no memories of the past or concerns for the future. Sakshin is self-reliant, independent of approval or disapproval, self-accepting, and big enough to hold both success and failure.

Mindfulness, buddhist Practice

In meditation we learn to be non-reactive.  There’s a thought, we let it pass without judgment or any need to follow; there’s an itch, we let it be without moving; there’s a sound, you notice and refocus on your breath; there is a surge of emotion, you feel it fully without turning it into a command or a story.

The practice is simple.  Not doing.  Not attaching.  But it has never been ‘easy’.  It teaches the  vast difference between what’s actually happening and what the mind is making up.   Oddly, this practice allowed me to be more engaged with ‘what’s really happening’ and with the processes of my mind.  It has allowed me greater spontaneity, a relief of grief or doubt or regret, and a full appreciation of my strengths and limitations.

The paradox is that being attached to a thing – emotion, say – I neither get myself or the benefit of the emotion.  Anger is a prime example: if I follow the anger, believe it as ‘truth’, I set off a chain reaction of further emotions, hormones, chemicals, and neurotransmitters. I engage my whole fight or flight response.  Typically, I also recall other incidents of anger, or reflect on neutral events in the past, and suddenly ‘understand’ them in terms of this anger.   Fuel to fire.

Mindfulness, however, fully engages with the emotion, feels it full on, and lets it be what it is.  It gives a sort of dignity to the thing.  Approaching anger with that tender, nonjudging Witness, I can often see what is making me angry (usually not what I first thought).  I can see what it is that I think I need, or what I think it is I’ve been threatened with. Fears and pains are teachers.  We should listen to them.  Benevolent curiosity toward anger is the first teacher of compassion; I learn compassion (not pity) for myself, but also a kind regard for the other party, whose needs and motivations are often remarkably similar to my own.

Being mindful toward my anger also graces me with a kind of flexibility, generosity, and bigger than myself ness.  Anger rankles and burns. It consumes.  But it is also only a piece of who I am, not the whole.  And it often consumes more precious and tender aspects.  Mindfulness allows me the room to give anger its place without letting it hold sway.

The big, sweeping space of mindfulness is the active practice of keeping the mind focused on what you are experiencing in the present moment, moment by moment, without commentary, analysis, or judgement. Without reference to the past.  Without expectations or fear.  Again, oddly, the practice makes us big: by dissolving the ties we take for granted (why does he always do this?  Why can’t I ever…? I hate…I wish…every man is the same…my body does this every time I get a headache) we have the room to try other approaches.  We see people for who they are, rather than what we’ve come to expect from them.  And we see that who we are need not be attached to who we’ve always been and the way we’ve always done it.

Typically, we use the breath as a  vehicle or focusing point for our meditation.  But we can apply mindfulness to anything: different sensations in the body, sounds, emotions, even thoughts.

Finding the clarity born of mindfulness, letting go of distractions, needs, and expectations that carry us away from the present, only happens with time, commitment, and a surrender to the process.

The process can be scary.  We learn how little control we have over our own minds. The light we start swinging around can illuminate parts of ourselves we’d rather not know, or force us to reckon with things we’ve spent tremendous energy avoiding.  When people begin a ‘meditation’ practice, they often say “I’m no good at this.  You tell me to follow my breath but I can’t shut off my thoughts long enough to do that.” Depending on who we are, ease of sitting with the uncomfortable may be terrifying. Impatience, self-criticism, perfectionism, and the desire to quit or run away run deep in us.

In the end, mindfulness is not about escaping thoughts or emotions, or turning the thoughts off. Thought happens.  No one can stop thought.  If that were possible, there would be no reason for meditation, ‘liberation’ of yoga, or any of the self-soothing strategies humanfolk have devised over time.  We don’t escape thought and feeling and what is, but radically change our relationship to them.  “You don’t have to believe your thoughts.” said unnamed teacher: mindfulness and witness open the heart to possibility.  It allows choice, rather than reaction.  It opens a space for Right Intention to steer our lives, or true belief, or the really right thing to do.

Thoughts and emotions can overwhelm: most of the ‘problems’ in our lives have to do with our reaction to thoughts or feelings we didn’t know how to think or feel.  Mindfulness won’t magically stop this, but it will bring it to light.  At those times, we can begin to fall back on compassion  – again, not pity – for ourselves, the great reality of where we’ve been and the greatness of the task we’ve begun.  Facing demons rather than running from them. Mindful witness is a place to begin the forgiveness of self, and of our failures.

Yogic Sakshin, the Eternal Witness as ally

Begin at the beginning.  Begin where it’s practicable.  Begin with the body.

Sit back or lie down on the floor and close your eyes.  Step back from your body, as you might step back from a puzzle or slightly crooked picture frame.  Scan your awareness over your body’s surface.  Easy.  Do this from the soles of your feet to the crown of your head.  Feel, for example, where your skin comes into contact with the world, the border between what’s inside and what’s out.  Feel where fabric of your clothes touches your skin.  Feel the heat or coolness of the floor.  Feel where the air in the room moves over your body.  Feel where your skin is soft, where it’s calloused.  Where it’s warm or cool or cold.  If you can’t stay methodical, let your awareness play.  Just keep refocusing on being aware.

Begin to start scanning those places of your body where we don’t often go – with awareness, with breath, with vision.  The back body is key.  Notice if there are areas beyond the vision of your Witness (internal organs can be hard.  Or areas of injury may simply feel ‘injured’, not detailed).  Somewhere along the way, we lose large tracts of ourselves to a kind of physical avidya (ignorance or not knowing).  Eventually, someday, the Witness will be the guide that brings you to those places.

Follow your Witness inside, away from the surface, toward the contents of your citta (everyday consciousness…that fluctuating mind).  What do you see in there?  Our brains consume more energy and more sugar and more blood than any other part of our body, but we’re largely unaware of what it’s doing.  Forget the whole we only use 10% part.  Generally speaking, I’m wholly unaware of that 10% I am supposedly using.  Ordinarily, we identify with the fluctuations and so submerge or lose ourselves in them.  We lose not only them, but ourselves.  The Witness will tell us the kinds of thoughts we have.  I was surprised to learn how much time I spent planning and worrying and projecting – I thought I was a lazy and sanguine kinda gal.  Most of us are consumed by planning, rehashing, competing, preparing.  Any and all of these have a value and a place – but if we’re not aware, we’re not even getting the benefits of worrying, planning, or preparing.  Or of reflection.

Use Sakshin to step back from the contents of your mind and regard what you see without favoring any one of them, or trying to dismiss the unsavory. Appreciate that you can remember yourself and know yourself apart from these rippling thoughts, cataclysmic or therapeutic or preoccupied as they may be.  Allow each its full expression without getting mired in them.  They are a part of you.  Wings, or limbs, or potentials.  But they are not who you are.

Sakshin is the means by which we inquire into and enlighten ourselves.  It asks, sometimes irreverently, sometimes compassionately, who we are.  The more open we are to the Witness, the more we begin to see our ignorance/avidya; we begin to realize we don’t even know who we are.  This is a gift.  We have worlds of potential in us, big areas of healing that have historically looked like lost causes, huge reservoirs of flexibility, endurance, compassion, attention, and creativity that remain lost in the morass until we approach and learn, Witness as guide.

The elementary act of witnessing, and not doing anything, is enough to initiate the process of transformation.  Physical transformation, emotional transformation.  Revolution of spirit.  When the Witness shines the light of awareness on the unnecessary or unhealthy doing-somethings we engage in, the doing-somethings immediately lose some of their potency.  The grip of avidya – and hence, suffering – is weakened.  Stubborn, trenchant tensions or habits or beliefs spontaneously dissolve and transformation becomes effortless.  We subtly change.  The authentic slips in.  Breathing, and all the other things we do ‘just happens’.

Your inner being is nothing but the inner sky. Clouds come and go, planets are born and disappear, stars arise and die, and the inner sky remains the same, untouched, untarnished, unscarred. We call that inner sky sakshin, the witness, and that is, the whole goal of meditation. -Osho

“I am the goal, the supporter, the Lord, the witness, the abode, the refuge, the friend, the origin, the dissolution, the foundation, the substratum, and the imperishable seed.” -Bhagavad Gita

This, Gargi, is just that which is not changed.  It is not seen, but is the see-er.  It is not heard, but is the hearer.  It is not thought, but is the thinker.  It is not known, but is the knower.  Apart from it, there is no see-er.  Apart from it, there is no hearer.  Apart from it, there is no thinker.  Apart from it, there is no knower. Gargi, in this alone which is not changed, all space and time are woven, warp and woof.- Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3.8.11

“Some look upon this Self as marvelous; others speak about It as wonderful; others again hearof It as a wonder. And still others, though hearing, do not understand It at all.”  ?

Winter blue. On why I need a kapha practice.

(Scroll to the bottom for quick info on kapha balancing poses, diet, schedule, etc). An odd winter, really.  Last week friends in Chicago told me that temperatures had reached 70 degrees, and I walked the dog in a tee shirt wondering what December meant any more.  Perhaps it means volatility, rushing change, sudden dark.  I have no doubt that freakish weather is part of our environmental legacy and 'super storms' will continue ravishing whole cities - but I don't know what to expect of ordinary every day weather.  Yesterday, suddenly, snow.

Not snow.  SNOW.  As though we'd been brought back to that allegorical childhood we all had, where it pillowed and drifted and blew round the corners of houses until houses disappeared, laced and dusted trees until tree became wonderful.  I listened to the radio Saturday - in itself, not a thing I do any longer but remember from childhood - and watched as the traffic slowed, announcements were made of closings, predictions of school cancellations rolled in.  My sister and I drove many miles across country to the extended family Christmas.  There was fog and heavy air, there was miles and miles of white, disappeared fences, undulating fields.  The car slid in the parking lot as we arrived and feet made that squeaking on new snow noise.  It was warm, though: on the sidewalk a black water puddle and I paused, as the door opened and the riot sound of family and warmth and dozens of children I don't know rolled out the opened doorway; I paused and watched the lazy snowflake hit the puddle like some kind of haiku.

When I woke, Sunday morning, the world had vanished.  It continued to vanish, all day long.  There was no traffic, although I live on what I think is one of the busiest intersections in town.  The neighbor boy, drippy nosed and snowsuit clad, knocked on the door and offered to shovel.  I let him.  It snowed on and on, and he kept shoveling.  Every few hours I'd open the door and let my dog go out to join him - two black figures cavorting in on an immense canvas.  A world blanched of all sound.  A freezing of time and reality.  He'd knock again, I'd say he really didn't have to shovel til it ended, he'd sniff and go back to his self-imposed responsibility, the shovel and snowsuit outsizing him.  The winter outsizing both of us.

I sat at the table in the very quiet house and drank tea.  Ate oranges.  Put on more socks.

I watched a mood walk closer to me like a wall of fog approaching over a body of water.

Depression comes that way, some times.

Winter used to be my metaphor for it, depression.  A wall of blank.  A kind of dying.  A place where everything is isolated, nothing makes a sound, and you might lose limbs if you aren't careful.  The heart might freeze inside you.

This is the thing, though: I don't slide down to those depths the way that I used to.  I don't much want to die any more.

But I do notice: the moods in me like weather, like season.  How real they are and how they change the timbre of my voice, the appetite on my tongue, my ability or inability to remember.  I watch, too: how the smallest, dumbest things are the things that help me.  Cinnamon.  Light.  Taking off shoes and socks and getting bare feet, bare hands, on to the mat and moving until I sweat.

Look: the ancients understood seasons - night to day, fall to winter - and they understood characters - gregarious and earth motherish, or bookworms, clowns, family centered or rogue.  They understood that happiness and enlightenment come from a full on acceptance of who and where we are and living appropriately.

The practice of yoga is learning who you are and where you are (winter, family, mid west plains) and understanding.  Understand that this affects your basic experience of life and learning to dance, move, adapt, thrive within it.

The boy kept knocking on the door.  I gave him an orange and hot chocolate.  The dog first loved the snow, then shivered.  We hunkered down, and then I wrote this:

Hands and eyes and mind grow dry and numb, the fire all draws in.

Which is my poet brain striking on the truth of ayurveda of this season.

Winter begins dominated by vata and moves toward kapha.  To survive, we need to balance kapha energies with food, with self care and body movements, with kapha balancing yoga practices.

Winter's short days affect us, whether we are fully Seasonally Affective Disordered or simply hungry for more light and longer days - a greater sense of awakeness and time to live.  Further: holiday season will bring with it a sense of being frenzied, broke, over wrought, under appreciated, lonely and misunderstood no matter how fantastic your social and familial relationships are or whether or not you observe a holiday.  Even the fact of NOT observing a holiday can stir up deep rooted emotional connections.  The end of one year and the anxieties about a coming one contribute foreboding, a sense of shortness, or overwhelm.

Know this, and accept.  Accept, and then find wild joy, anyway.

Yoga teaches us survival, and then more than survival into joy.  There are things, yoga teaches, you can do.  Do them.  Perhaps there is a reason we humans have a hodge podge of celebrations - and all celebrations of light - in the darkest days of winter.

Celebrate ridiculously, for this is how human beings get through.  Celebration, commemorate, make holy, pray, observe, and practice.  Same things.

My niece has learned Christmas songs in the last few weeks.  From her carseat in the back during that long drive, she kept refraining, every now and again.  Let it snow let it snow.  Let it.  Snow.

Let it.  Accept, and find deep joy in the deep snow, deep joy in the deep body.

KAPHA BALANCING PRACTICES - FOOD, SCHEDULE, SKIN, PEOPLE, ASANA

Mid to late winter tends to be dominated by kapha energies; the sky is low, often cloudy, gray and days are cold, damp and heavy.  Life - even in the busiest places, moves more slowly.  When in balance, kapha energy provides lubrication and structure.  This has to do with joints, mucus, the texture of our skin and our hair.  Kapha type people are often the strongest and have the most stamina.  Kapha has to do with strength, vigor, endurance, stability of both body and mind.  It is responsible for lubrication of joints, flowing of thought and emotion and ideas, moisturizing skin and fascia, maintaining immunity and lymphatic balance.  Out of balance, it leads to sluggishness, fatigue, ache, mucus related illness, excess weight, negative emotions such as attachment, envy, greed (and the loud relational negatives of loneliness, comparison, jealousy which can tip into over dependence or far too much isolation).  Too much kapha energy is earthiness, solidness, taken too far: a sense of being stuck in the mud, buried, dark, cold.

In general, we should follow a kapha - pacifying regimen in the winter. But dry, cold, windy weather can at times provoke vata, too, and can lead to arthritis, indigestion, etc.

FOOD - Appetite tends to become 'heaftier' during winter months - which can lead to weight gain if we answer with highly processed foods and corresponding lower excericse.  However, kapha in itself is the withdrawing of energy from the extremities to the organs, and many people may lose weight in winter if they don't add proteins and grains significantly.  We should not eat the same foods we ate in the summer seasons, and need bulk and warmth and spice.

Incorporate whole grains, buttermilks or cottage cheeses if you do dairy, steamed vegetables, warm soup, and spicy food into your meals. Because your appetite is heartier in the winter, eat more protein- beans, tofu, eggs- and if you’re not a strict vegetarian, chicken, turkey, and fish. Add warming spices such as cinnamon, cloves, and black pepper to promote digestion. Drinking sweet or dry wine with your meals will stoke your agni (digestive fire), improve your appetite, and increase circulation. Avoid cold drinks and opt for hot water, hot tea, hot cocoa or chai.

SCHEDULE - much like the cold wet autumnal season, a schudule can help get through the dark time of winter.  Think of softening the schedule, but keeping it moving.  If possible, allow yourself to wake up a little later.  Avoid naps (but know they can be healing, too; just don't fall into a rut as kapha tends to over sleep and the sleep makes us more tired).  Try to be active early in the day and include excercise; give yourself pleasurable activities for the late afternoon and evening - think joy and interest.  Schedule something to look forward to (big: a vacation or long awaited purchase or accomplishment, small: a movie you really want to see or book to read, a lunch date with a good friend, a self indulgant purchase that won't break you in anyway but feels good).  Try new things to keep your interest involved and yourself challenged.

SKIN

Think circulation.  Massage, get a loofah, scrub and exfoliate.  Find an oil appropriate for your skin and stimulating (bergamot, rosemary, juniper, vertiver, melissa) and indulge in it.

ASANA PRACTICE

Hard enough to sweat (ayurveda says on brow, armpits, joints and a feeling of dryness in the mouth is the point you need to get to) and challenging enough to break you out of 'stuckness' and stagnation.  Aim to counter Kapha's natural tendency to feel cold and sluggish.  Move through flow and sun saluations with as much a sense of speed and warmth as you can without losing connection and integrity.  This will lighten and warm you.

Most standing asana are invigorating, especially if you hold them for a longer time.  Try holding for 20 breath (that is much longer than you may have ever, ever done so).  Backbends are also heating, and getting extesion of arms and legs (up, over head) promotes the heart to push and the circulation to flow.  Open your chest and the front lines of the body as much as you can.

Kapha is said to be dominant 6- 10 am, so do some sort of asana or excercise then if at all possible.  Just a few minutes.  One salutation.  One stretch. Just do something.  Incorporate firey pranyama into the practice, especially at the beginning and close.  It cleanses that heaviness, mucus, and chest gunk, as well as energizing the digestive system and balancing energy levels throughout the day.

PEOPLE:

Kapha doshas are trustworthy, stabilizing, grounded people.  But they can tend to be too sentimental and nostalgic for how things were and unable to move forward.  As winter and it's Kaphic tendencies set in, make sure to watch your own proclivities toward others.  Keep yourself challenged and excited and avoid getting stuck in the past.  Realize not all relationships need to be ideal to be rewarding. Allow yourself to be given gifts and appreciated. Practice open hearted gestures of compassion, play, service.  Don't try to be oversimplistic about your feelings (guilt, depression, fear), but see them for what they are without letting them become everything.  It is possible to know you feel guilty but also know you ARE not a fundamentally guilty person.  Go for lightness and laughter.  Watch comedies.

No feeling is final

“Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

Praying with our hands. Dancing with God.

prayingwithourhands-FLYER <---

A workshop

  Sunday, January 27

9 a.m. - Noon, $40

register here

"Let my prayer arise in Thy sight as incense, And the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice." Psalm 141:2

"The Incarnation establishes without a doubt, once and for all, the given-ness of union with God.  We do not have to attain divine union.  We do not have to climb out of our messy flesh into the pure Spirit of God.  God has become man.  Our flesh is his flesh.  Our body is his body." -Carmelite monk William McNamara

"Our whole notion of reality has actually been topsy-turvy.  Instead of God being a vast imaginary projection, he turns out to be the only thing that is real, and the whole universe, despite its immensity and solidity, is a projection of God's nature." -Deepak Chopra

There is confusion: some people say yoga is a religion.  Some people say it is exercise.  It is neither, but sometimes there is confusion.  So: what is yoga?  And why is it spiritual?  Or is it not?

We tend to think of prayer, spirituality, and ourselves in intellectual ways.  We are taught that 'spirituality' is a thing we find in special places, handed on by qualified others.  We disregard the physical as a handicap, an embarrassment, or a weakness.

We lose out when we do this.  Spirituality is not a thing to be found in churches once a week or at turning points in a life story.  It is not to be found in retreats or cloisters.  It is here, and it is now, or it is nowhere.  Nor is it a thing taught by others, if we are honest: religion is the song of the heart.  Our relationship to our body says a lot about what we think of God's creation.  The most profound connection to the divine is always experienced inwardly, as something between ourselves and God.

There is a strong tendency to deny or disparage the human body, to suggest its the source of sin and weakness.  Yet in the Christian tradition itself, God chose to incarnate his son.  Maybe this wasn't only about suffering, but also about love.

Who are we and what are we supposed to do with this life?  This body?  How do we, personally, incarnate the idea of gratitude, anger, joy, salvation, devotion, or love?  What is peace, and what is praise?

We go through life's stages.  We know youthful play, thrills, and heartbreak.  We know relationships, parenthood, and work.  We know illness, trial, and loneliness.  Ultimately, I think we are called to dance, and to pray.  These are things that are done with bodies.

A workshop dedicated to exploring 'religion' and 'spirituality' in terms of yoga.  To finding 'self', and mapping the relationship between this 'self' and God.

Wear: comfortable clothing you can move freely in, as well as a warmer shirt to cover up with/socks as we will NOT be engaged in a strong practice or move the whole time.  Have something comfortable for the discussion part.

Bring: a notebook and pen, your mat if you've got one, possibly a towel or small blanket to sit on and shift around on as we discuss.  (pillows, props, all welcome.)  Something to sip.

Any questions?  Let me know.  I'm excited!

Give the gift of yoga

Why not give yoga?  To your mom, to your boss, to your best friend? Easy.  It's elegant, it's personal, it's meaningful.  (Yes, yes, I still remember the one who first got me in a studio.)

Buy a (new student) $30 for 30 days package, a workshop (every last Sunday of the month, $40).

Or, hey, ask your loved ones to buy you a month.  You want that more than socks, don't you?

I have a stack of holiday cards I can fill out with the gift information for you to give to your loved one.

If you are not a student, but would like to purchase a gift, you can click on the paypal 'donate' button to make your purchase.  I will add your gift to the student's account or create an account for a new student.

The point (practice)

The point, I think, is not to live some other life but to fully live the life that we have. It is not easy for me to swallow this.  More often than not, I want things to be different.  I am not entirely satisfied with the face that I have, nor that I am a middling age woman, nor with my bank account.  I live smack dab in the middle of conservative suburbs in the Middling West, which is the antithesis of what I expected and worked for.

I overheard a woman in a restaraunt the other day, with a crestfallen look and her hands limp on either side of her plate: this isn't what I wanted, she said.

Which is what most of us get.

I used to teach a woman who was driven and focused as a tiger.  She was beautiful and, I think, relatively 'successful' by anybody's standards.  We practiced headstands one day and I saw frustration cloud her face to a cool marble tone.  I'm not strong enough, she said; I'll never be able to do the variations.

I answered that it would come.  But I think I answered, wrong.  I think I should have said it doesn't matter.  It doesn't matter whether or not she will ever find lotus and hanumanasana and pincha while standing on her hands.  It is a truth that she maybe never will.  We can't predict things and she may never practice again, let alone for the years more the pose might take.  She might lose her limbs or her health.  She may lose interest.  She may never get the poses she wants.

But the practice still has a radical and precious worth.  I watched her move away from the wall and knew she was more comfortable doing those poses in which she looked like a rockstar.  It's enough, she said, speaking of the sweat and the work out and the core work.

But there is something, something to practicing those poses we are not very good at.  Something to inhabiting the land of This Is Hard For Me.

When I was a little girl, I believed, I knew, that I was going to be a monk.  I wrote silly poems that were half prayer, half song, and half magic spell and this seemed to me the most important thing I could do with my life.  I felt the truth of human love and suffering and likened that somehow to god.  And, it seemed to me, that if god or love exists, the only rational way to spend my life was in dedication to it.  As I grew up, though, I lost my sense of god.  Churches seemed ridiculous places for me to be.  I lost all feeling of 'faith' without losing that first tug and pull to be what I wanted to be: a monk, serving love, writing poems, standing for healing in a broken world.

These suburbs rankle me, and newspapers bother me, and my schedule sometimes leaves me feeling very little of 'purpose' and much more of 'fatigue'.  I spent the afternoon, yesterday, writing poems and daydreaming under a tree next to a monstrous bed of peonies.  The poems were intoxicating and wild and breezy, the heat was dizzying, the afternoon passed slow.  But I hit a wall of doubt: the notebook is so messy.  The poems are not finished, not edited, not publishable let alone memorable.  I looked from the black ink on the limpid paper and then to the ants, colonizing the blooming peonies.  What's the point...I found myself thinking.  I can't describe these flowers.  No one will ever read my poems.  I will never be a monk.

I stood and brushed the humid dirt from my knees and my seat, gathered my papers and headed back into the house.  But as I did so I remembered some of my students, the conversations we have had, the way their movements sometimes strike me dumb and make me teary.  I recalled to myself the days I am most tired, most frustrated, think myself most stupid and a bad teacher and stuck in middling america; the moment I show up, my mood no longer matters.  Something happens.  I let my 'self' be pushed aside and let the yoga talk, instead, I try to be present not to my wheeling thoughts but to the bodies and lives that show up in the room with me.

I wanted to be a poet monk, to stand for love, to touch beauty and heart and soul every day.  It occurred to me, standing in the hot sun with my arms full of half written poems, that that is exactly what I am.

The point is not to change our lives, but to change our selves so that we can live our lives, fully.  To find the precious worth of what we can do, are doing.  To appreciate that we are getting the myriad benefits - postural, hormonal, strength and tissue and joint wise, now and today.  That this is more real, and more beneficial, and a bigger point than the imaginary pose we might or might not someday hit.  This is real, while we spend most of our lives blind and desirous of the imaginary.

To be present while moss covers our face, or the drone of suburban lawn mowers drills into the fantasy, to watch ants and peonies and be okay with whatever poems we can write.

Yoga is courage

Yoga is courage.  It is the bravery to look at reality full in the face, and be touched by how deeply you love.  Yoga invokes the courage to remove our absurdities and crutches and blank stares. The startling revelation of love. All the saints of history have known this. All of our great artists. This is the message of all the angels and messengers.  And a few, stellar people-of-our-own-lives whom we are blessed to rub elbows with now and again. Grief, hard knocks, and fear reveal our attachments, true.  But they also show the glorious aspect of that attachment: we are woven into the fabric of the world, we are linked to everything that is.

Pain is a badge, or maybe a threadbare, greasy flag, that indicates our humanity.  It waves it's gritty fibers in a soiled, but archly noble, patriotism for our homeland.  This is our humanity.

And humanity is a beautiful, gorgeous, precious thing.

The Strong Body, Quiet Mind Project

The Strong Body, Quiet Mind Project provides high quality yoga classes to veterans, first responders, at risk youth, and survivors of trauma.  All veterans and first responders are invited to participate - service and health providers are invited to collaborate with Return Yoga.  Participants are asked to pay $30 per month for unlimited yoga classes.  A veteran's i.d. card or first responder i.d. is all you need to sign up. Sign up must happen in-studio for Strong Body, Quiet Mind.  Every class on Return's schedule is open to project participants.

Participants are invited to all yoga classes rather than 'special' classes: there is no need for labels, anonymity is respected here, and all to often 'help' comes with stigma.  The truth is, we all need healing. Further, 'special' programs or classes are all to limited in time and scope, leaving participants after a few weeks rather than encouraging an on-going, life process of growth.

The Need:

Our society is rife with anxiety, stress, and trauma.

Studies have shown that PTSD and 'shock' in this generation of military will overshadow anything known to previous generations, costing billions. Veterans returning from service are finding a depressed economy, a dirth of future and career opportunities, and a shortage of services that answer their physical and psychological needs.

Research is showing that domestic violence and sexual assault survivors are just as likely to suffer trauma symptoms, with an even fewer sources of support and intervention.

Similarly, first responders are on the front lines of crisis situations day in and day out.  On going exposure to traumatic situations takes its toll on responders, who are under appreciated, under respected, and under protected.  Trauma, stress, and shock are status quo.  The private costs are often invisible, but no less deep.

These populations suffer in their own lives, and the effects of trauma are passed onto the next generation. These demographics are over-represented in the unemployed, the homeless, the incarcerated, those seeking emergency services, addiction services, and medical assistance. Their children struggle in education, health, and social connections. These kids are more likely to be involved in crime, high risk behaviors, and have inadequate medical and educational support.

HOPE

Trauma has proven to be one of the most difficult issues to 'treat'. However, current research has shown that the skills of mindfulness, meditation, and yoga promote autonomy, well being, and genuine healing in away medicine and traditional 'talk therapy' can't. 8 weeks of a yoga practice has proven to calm the sympathetic nervous system and increase activity in the areas of the brain associated with the parasympathetic nervous system, sense of safety and autonomy, and cognitive functioning. Further, yoga can be taught at very little cost, with no negative side effects, and is accessible to any level of ability/mobility.

The effects of trauma (or stress, for those who have been labeled too much already) are pernicious, at times devastating, at other times manifesting as a numbing sense of being 'damaged' or 'broken'. Many who have lived through trauma (from a car accident to the death of a loved one, a sexual assault to active duty)often describe it as a chronic state of hopelessness.

Yoga is a rediscovery of hope, and the lived experience of grace.

It was so for me.

There is a profound difference between trying to 'get over it', and feeling oneself okay from the soles of the feet to the deepest parts of the brain.

Yoga allows us to experience ourselves not as 'wounded' or getting over it, but as powerfully alive and worthy human beings.

How the Program Works:

Return subsidizes costs directly, in such a way that every class dollar spent by students goes to funding the Strong Body, Quiet Mind Project.  Return is incorporated as a non-profit.

Additional funding may come from community or private donations or grants.

If your program is interested in accessing yoga classes for your demographic, please contact Karin Burke at karinlburke@gmail.com.  All support, whether by participating in class or donating directly, is greatly appreciated and provides a demonstrable good.

Fertility yoga

Now and again people ask if I teach or would teach a prenatal yoga class. The short answer is no.  The long answer is yes; always, of course.

I do not host a specifically prenatal class; such classes are hard to maintain fiscally, hard to hold class numbers high enough, and it is impossible to randomly pick one time during the week when all the interested pregnant women could make class.  It doesn’t help much if I do offer a class Wednesday mornings, if four out of five people can’t make that time slot.  In my experience, holding a prenatal class is too small for too big a need.

I do, however, teach pre, post, and fertility yoga.  I also know that fertility and health often times include loss of a child, aging, and sexuality issues that a ‘prenatal class’ doesn’t touch.  While pregnancy certainly does have specific practices in the yoga tradition, I also believe that fertility touches men’s health as well as women’s, that bio, psycho, and social aspects of gender, identity, self esteem, health and wellness span relationships and life cycles, and yoga has specific tools and suggestions for ALL of these things.  The question is not what prenatal yoga is, but what your process is and where you are.

My recommendation is this: take a private session to discuss your own needs, goals, and circumstances.  You will learn in a private or two the poses that will help and the way to avoid or modify poses that are contraindicated for pregnancy.  Once you have done this, you can attend ANY yoga class, anywhere, safely and effectively.  Of course, you can continue taking a private sessions as you need and want the individual feedback and support.  I believe that individual feedback and support is crucial; pregnancy, sexuality, and fertility issues are profound embodied and psychological experiences, felt individually and existentially.  You deserve such support.

Once you have that foundation, I strongly recommend attending the healing classes.  Unlike a once a week, hard to get to prenatal class, healing classes are held five nights a week.  Classes are small and tailored specifically to who shows up for class.  Each class explores specific healing postures and meditative traditions for our own unique needs.

Those who have a long yoga practice behind them can absolutely attend strong classes the full term of pregnancy, provided they are willing to make appropriate modifications.