Chronic Pain

We have a hard time relating to pain, humans. Everything tells us we should be happy and pain free.  We are sold 'cures'.  Medicinals are hawked at our symptoms, which tells us symptoms should be gotten rid of as best as possible.

Yet if we're human - and I'll just suppose for the moment that we are - there will come a time when pain levels us and can't be avoided.

Since we're practicing, we're becoming more sensitive to pain, not less.  We're becoming more attuned not only to floated, inspirational moments where we feel so alive but also to the nagging voices, the days we creak, and the murky underlying issues in our hearts.

Practicing, we're more sensate not only to our own inner pain, but the pain of others.  Compassion and empathy are noble and valuable things.  We want to be kind.  The science shows that these practices draw us open in that direction, along with healing our anxieties and soothing our depressions.  This is great. This is true.  But the advertising of mindfulness doesn't quite touch the bone truth of the matter: tenderness and compassion sing with ache; this stuff literally hurts.  Months ago, around a death of a student's parent, two children unknown to myself, and a rash of American violence in the headlines, I said sitting with our pain opens us to humanity.  Ours.  Other's.

I don't know if I also said 'it hurts like hell'.  Maybe I did.

Practice makes us aware of how we react to the pain of others.  Good intentions aside, we're rarely compassionate.  Generally speaking, other people's pain is usually worse than our own.  You'd think this would elicit gratitude or sympathy. It makes us angry.  The pain of strangers elicits judgement. The pain of loved ones moves us to fix, advise, or in some way 'handle' the situation.

Relating to pain is hard.  The heart is tender.  It bruises so easily.

Relating to the pain of other human beings generally proves we need to change the story we've been telling ourselves. A mawed heart rearranges us.

Pain forces a visceral knowing of vulnerability.  I mean actual viscera.  I mean the fact of dying, on top of the frailty of relationships, money, day to day grind.  All out of the blue, we are totaled.  The car is wrecked.  The delicate balance of finances has to be rearranged and the day to day is out the window.  It's gone, like a flit of paper napkin out a car window, hundreds of miles deep into a highway.  Such things will never be touched by a hand again.

*

I am alone in the house.  It is January.  January with it's big swallowed chestedness about how I will act in the coming year.  This year, I've promised myself I will write about yoga, which has historically been hard for me to do.  Something of a fear of being incredible, lacking authority; something too of exasperation - how does one write things that are beyond language?; and something, too, of the self doubt and perfectionism that spoil most everyone's resolutions.

With gusto, with jazz and trumpeting, with a sense of relief and finality, I dedicated the year to writing a book.

Then I got sick.

The sunlight in my house is spectacular, mid winter.  It is the idea of white, the only warmth winter has.  My living room is a sundial and the light pours in the old windows, floods room after room like water bursting a dam.  I love this light, this clarion solitude.  It's a place of sun washed skin, and paper.   The insides can come all out, haloed.  All, out. Hallowed ink haloed.

Today I lay in it, not writing, sprawled gingerly, hardly breathing.  I am wrapt with disgust. This is not what I meant when I said I love the light.  This is not what I wanted.

*

The Sallatha Sutra has a teaching on pain.  It says a practicer relates to, rather than reacts. The story explains how this still hurts.

The story is called the two darts.

One who hasn't learned these practices feels pain, and then seeks soothing.  Through the mouth, sweets and cigarettes.  Or though the mind, blame and indignation.  This reaction is like a second dart, a second wounding, infecting the first. It tends to feed the first pain, hang around in it's own right, and become the only sensation left.  Sugar balm.  Nicotine stain.  Resentment like a crude oil on the whites of our eyes.

The practioner ("noble, well trained") feels the pain.  Knows the rising, passing.  Knows reality.  "Is not fettered by suffering".

But the story doesn't ever say "be happy and painfree!  You'll never have to feel that way again."  It just doesn't.

*

A girlfriend - not a yogi or a buddhist - asks me sweet heartedly how I am.  I cite aches and pains.  Mounds of kleenex.  The inefficacy of medicine.  The thing under my back rib that feels like a rusted blade.  I explain how I try very hard not to touch this when breathing.  How hard my shoulders and neck and jaw and eyes are with the effort.

She asks, all sweetheartedly, how I am doing emotionally.  I gave more physical details.

I'm sorry, she says.  That sounds anxious and fearful and angry.  A little resignation, sadness, and uncertainty.

Yes, I said, internally wondering how she is not the buddhist and why I, the yoga teacher, slipped into complaint and didn't catch all that she just summed up in 10 odd seconds. I suppose anyone who relates, who is compassionate, is buddhist and yogi.  She fingered at my bruise.  She prodded, true.  She related to my pain while I was shooting daggers at it.

Yes.  How can I be a yoga teacher, I said, how can I possibly run a studio if I am dealing with a dumb and inexplicable and uncontrollable thing called 'chronic pain'?

My disgust is not with plegm, ache, or the muddy thinking; I am disgusted with uncertainty.  I am afraid.  I am disgusted by the uncontrollablity of pain.

* Nyanaponika Thera's translation of the Salltha Sutra says:

"An untaught worldling, O monks, experiences pleasant feelings, he experiences painful feelings and he experiences neutral feelings. A well-taught noble disciple likewise experiences pleasant, painful and neutral feelings. Now what is the distinction, the diversity, the difference that exists herein between a well-taught noble disciple and an untaught worldling?

"When an untaught worldling is touched by a painful (bodily) feeling, he worries and grieves, he laments, beats his breast, weeps and is distraught. He thus experiences two kinds of feelings, a bodily and a mental feeling. It is as if a man were pierced by a dart and, following the first piercing, he is hit by a second dart. So that person will experience feelings caused by two darts. It is similar with an untaught worldling: when touched by a painful (bodily) feeling, he worries and grieves, he laments, beats his breast, weeps and is distraught. So he experiences two kinds of feeling: a bodily and a mental feeling.

"Having been touched by that painful feeling, he resists (and resents) it. Then in him who so resists (and resents) that painful feeling, an underlying tendency of resistance against that painful feeling comes to underlie (his mind). Under the impact of that painful feeling he then proceeds to enjoy sensual happiness. And why does he do so? An untaught worldling, O monks, does not know of any other escape from painful feelings except the enjoyment of sensual happiness. Then in him who enjoys sensual happiness, an underlying tendency to lust for pleasant feelings comes to underlie (his mind). He does not know, according to facts, the arising and ending of these feelings, nor the gratification, the danger and the escape, connected with these feelings. In him who lacks that knowledge, an underlying tendency to ignorance as to neutral feelings comes to underlie (his mind). When he experiences a pleasant feeling, a painful feeling or a neutral feeling, he feels it as one fettered by it. Such a one, O monks, is called an untaught worldling who is fettered by birth, by old age, by death, by sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair. He is fettered by suffering, this I declare.

"But in the case of a well-taught noble disciple, O monks, when he is touched by a painful feeling, he will not worry nor grieve and lament, he will not beat his breast and weep, nor will he be distraught. It is one kind of feeling he experiences, a bodily one, but not a mental feeling. It is as if a man were pierced by a dart, but was not hit by a second dart following the first one. So this person experiences feelings caused by a single dart only. It is similar with a well-taught noble disciple: when touched by a painful feeling, he will no worry nor grieve and lament, he will not beat his breast and weep, nor will he be distraught. He experiences one single feeling, a bodily one.

"Having been touched by that painful feeling, he does not resist (and resent) it. Hence, in him no underlying tendency of resistance against that painful feeling comes to underlie (his mind). Under the impact of that painful feeling he does not proceed to enjoy sensual happiness. And why not? As a well-taught noble disciple he knows of an escape from painful feelings other than by enjoying sensual happiness. Then in him who does not proceed to enjoy sensual happiness, no underlying tendency to lust for pleasant feelings comes to underlie (his mind). He knows, according to facts, the arising and ending of those feelings, and the gratification, the danger and the escape connected with these feelings. In him who knows thus, no underlying tendency to ignorance as to neutral feelings comes to underlie (his mind). When he experiences a pleasant feeling, a painful feeling or a neutral feeling, he feels it as one who is not fettered by it. Such a one, O monks, is called a well-taught noble disciple who is not fettered by birth, by old age, by death, by sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair. He is not fettered to suffering, this I declare.

*

A few days ago, someone brought me tulips.  Their milky, fleshy white is exactly the texture of the light from the south facing windows.  As I have been laid up, I move them with me, room to room.  I place them on the bedside table while I sleep.  In the morning I chew toast and watch them breathing.  In the evening, they are with me when I soak in the tub.

I realize this is silly.

The things I do when no one is looking are out and out absurd.  I do them, anyway, out of a weird and desperate honesty with myself.  These little ceremonies are what I am, mostly.  The best things I know of being alive.

I think of a passage May Sarton wrote in one of her journals.  "When I am alone the flowers are really seen; I can pay attention to them.  They are felt as presences.  Without them I would die.  Why do I say that?  Partly because they change before my eyes.  They live and die in a few days; they keep me closely in touch with process, with growth, and also with dying.  I am floated on their moments."

*

We are hardwired to resist and avoid pain.  This is aversion, or dvesha.  As this translation of 'the two darts' shows, dvesha run deep enough becomes resentment.  Other people's pain pisses us off.  Ours is an unfairness and elicits self-pity.  We alternate between selfishness and self-loathing.

Dvesha, aversion and avoidance, blossoms to avidya, not seeing.  Not seeing.  Not knowing.  Not feeling.  Not able to be with life.  Not able to be emotionally present even to ourselves.

Blind and stunted, we can't know reality - the beginnings and endings of things, their gratification or cessation, their escape.  We don't know pain's healing.

Aversion becomes so deep, so under and habitual, it becomes the only thing we know.  It becomes substratum, the underlying, the 'truth' through which we filter every grit of detail and arising experience.  Every sensation is the heavy lidded one of our own unseeing.

I am a sundial

A photo posted by Karin (@coalfury) on Jan 13, 2015 at 11:50am PST

*

Most of the time, I am well.  I was diagnosed a long time ago.  Pain was constant, if alternating between 'grim' and 'mildly incapacitating'.  But it's changed.  I mean, over years and years.  I became what is loosely called a yogi.  Over time, I became a person who eats vegetables.  I am organic and damned near vegan, most of the time.  Over the course of many years, my relationship to stress, sleep, money, time management, and other human beings has changed subtly and profoundly.  It's now mostly balanced, honest, felt.  Therefore, I am mostly well.

I believe this:  yogic movement and meditation change the way the body works so wholly the very conditions of the body change; I believe what we eat has everything to do with wellness and disease, happiness and lightness or lethargy and malise; I believe the practices of a spiritual life radically rearrange us into graceful modes of being.

I believe yoga has changed my pain.

So it is hard for me to face the fact that in spite of my yoga asana, in spite of my diet, in spite of mindful effort and good intention and new years resolutions, there will be days I will be flattened to the floor and incapable of thinking through a clear sentence.  I simply don't know how to relate to this.

*

Talking with a woman, recently, about chronic medical conditions and yoga, she suggested I focus my teaching there.  'Chronic pain' could be my schtick.  I could advertise it.

But how, I wondered.

If we know anything about chronic conditions, it's the fact that everyone's is different.  Symptoms are different; pain itself and prognoses are different.  No two people experience fibromylgia (or MS, or IBS, or PTSD) the same way.

There is no 'teaching' or 'sequence' or 'pose' I could offer for fibromylagia.  Just as there is no teaching that could answer to every knee, heart condition, or fear.  If I were to 'market' my expertise to chronic pain, what happens to the students who don't have chronic pain?  There are two dozen people around me who have 'knee pain', arthritis pain, grief pain, stress pain.  The pain of loneliness, boredom, stupid meaningless life pain.  Sometimes, normal people are totaled, all out of the blue.

Symptoms shouldn't be mitigated.  The arising and passing should be explored.  The arising and passing, of both pleasure and pain, are life.

It takes humility to be so intimate with your own life.

Intimacy with blooming and wilting flowers makes them sweet and wholly naked.  Intimacy with suffering makes suffering less personal.  Pain isn't personal.  It's chronic.

The petals yawn, fully flushed, going yellow.  They mark my hand with a shadow.  I am close.

*

Relating to pain hurts.  It asks me to not advise, not palliate, not fix or condone or judge, but to open.  Openness is ruthless and will not end.  Openness tends to demand much more of me.

Staying close to process is the only way for me to know where I am in the process; what to do, how deep it goes, what feels.  Tulips keep me, my writing, my teaching, from the foolishness of black and white, hyperbole, all or nothing.

Pema Chodon says there is a longing, a yearning, a need to honor our own wounds while opening our hearts to the wounds of others.  She says this is the way the heart wakes up.

*

I take the flowers with me, room to room.  And a box of kleenex.  And a blanket.

I cancel classes.

The tulips are four days old now.  They are limp.

Most of the time, I am well.  Today I write half a poem.  It begins, "I love the light..."

mysterious bodies

Body is a hard thing to understand.  We can name and label things.  We do.   But the questions of body - why?  Why am I healthy, when my brother is ill?  Why does this food do this?  What is aging?  what am I capable of?  Why does illness hit, or miss? - stay stuck in mystery. Kicked into the bucket of sometimes bad things happen to good people and don't take what you've got for granted. Except that we do.

I, do.

A few days ago a woman showed me two pictures.  The first was a bag of pills - big as a person's chest, pounds heavy - that she no longer takes.  This doesn't include the supplements and the over the counter stuff, she said.  The second picture was of a year old German Shepard, whom she has adopted and goes running with.  She couldn't walk very well when she started yoga, due to various and medically unexplained neuropathies.  Was one of those who said 'I probably won't be able to do most of this, but I'll do what I can". She was shocked when things she took as fact started changing.

Yoga does this.  Makes us take nothing, nothing for granted.

We've all heard similar stories.  Yet I don't want yoga to come across as a miracle cure, nor myself as a healer.

Yoga doesn't miraculously cure.  It only teaches us to approach our own experience as open to change.  It doesn't change disease, all the time.  Or even some of the time.  Or at all predictably.  It does, however, change our experience of being alive.  It changes us.

I have fibromyalgia.  It is flaring.  I keep forgetting what I'm doing. I stop talking midsentence because I've forgotten words, and I trip because my back or knee or ankle gives.  I think my insides are lined with cut glass. Breathing hurts.  This makes me not breathe very much.  Not breathing much has now thrown my neck out and a headache in and a shake into my arms.  For four days now I haven't been able to sleep, think, or stand without hurting.  My clothes hurt.  The bed hurts.  If you've noticed that I'm tongue tied and stupid, and forget things like yoga pants so I teach in jeans, or that I kinda hobble around like I'm seventy nine and arthritic, my apologies.  I promise it'll pass.

But here's the thing: I can still do yoga.

Mincingly, true.  Very, very slowly and cautiously, true.  But I can.  Yesterday, it amounted to one very ginger child's pose and half an hour crawling my way around blankets and bolsters trying to get under certain muscles and float the joints so they don't touch anything.  I spent the rest of the day laying in various positions on the bathroom and kitchen floor, rubbing ointments and oils and herbs in, popping ibuprofen, alternating hot and cold.  I was miserable and teary.  But I had child's pose, and one archingly tender backbend.

It seems, over the years, that yoga has given me enough knowledge and sensitivity  to move without making the pain worse.  Which is something.

I know of nothing else that asks me to move so slowly, so attentively.  Tender, but in the sweet sense of the word.

#fibro flaring. 3 days I can't sleep, can't eat, can't really walk or talk or sit without hurting. But I can yoga. I know how to move so subtle I move around the pain, move without causing pain. Which is something. Bodies are mysterious. Who suffers, how. Why medicine can't answer the questions. I know of nothing, nothing other than yoga that allows us to move so subtly, so attentive, so careful and true into the unanswerable questions. breathe on them without causing more pain. What is this, who am I, how do I live kinda questions that doctors and books and others simply cannot ever ever answer. #yogateacher

A video posted by Karin (@coalfury) on Dec 12, 2014 at 8:42pm PST

I think of all the ailments people have cited to me.  Progressive and chronic diseases.  Grief.  Anxieties.  I don't have answers.  I don't know why one person falls ill, another is hit by a car, a third seems to be 'blessed' but is miserable.  I know others with fibromyalgia who can no longer work, who are so debilitated by pain and pain medications that they have lost, significantly, the joy of being alive.

I don't know why I am mostly well.

Bodies are mysterious.  But then again, so is everything.

Every question burns down to an unknowing: We don't know right from wrong, who deserves what, why we have this body or that problem, what happens when we die or how we ought to be living.  There is no guidebook and there are no rules.  You can find rules, sure; but you can also find ten other rules offering contradictory advice.  Accepting rules and handed down wisdom gives some comfort, surely; a good enough map.  But at some point, medicine is not going to be able to answer the more human questions of our mortality.  And self help is going to fall stupidly short when it becomes a moral imperative for us to act justly, let go of our own prejudices, or help us care for our elderly.

Everything is mysterious.  We are mysterious.

Does god exist? What do I believe and what does that mean?   Am I in love?  How do I live with cancer? with grief?  None of these questions can be answered.

Right answers don't, ultimately, exist.  I don't have anything ameliorative to say about this.  Except that I know this yoga, and this yoga asks us to move slowly, attentively, with acceptance and humility and willingness, toward what is most achingly tender.  To live in the delicate and vulnerable space of questions and uncertainty.  To take up the responsibility the questions ask of us.

Each time we do, a connection is made.  Something is sounded.  I mean, like when you sound out the depth of ocean.  Not 'understood'.  Not 'proven'.  But infinitely more resonate and felt than what was there, before.

This doesn't cure.  It isn't a miracle.  It's simply a way of living that takes nothing for granted.  A tender way of attending.  A way of moving without causing pain.

Which is something.

Falling off the mat

What I was taught of prayer I've had to let go of. When I learned to pray on my own everything became sacred.

A photo posted by Karin (@coalfury) on Nov 11, 2014 at 5:16am PST

Someone asked how, exactly, yoga becomes the path.

Which is exactly and inexpressibly it's own answer.

When we start looking around for a path, we are on it.  Perhaps we recognize we are on a path, always, some kind of a one.  Towards brambles, through thickets, down deep and swashbuckled or walking around and around and around the same boulder in the middle of a field.

Hey, says some thing inside.  I want a path.  I want to go somewhere.

Or, perhaps, this hurts.  This hurts so very much.  I don't want to hurt like this any longer.

I'm okay, someone said to me today, but I'm crawling.

We are on a path, and we look around for landmarks.  Exit signs.  The breadcrumbs we dropped on the way in.  We look and we look.

It is a hard thing to explain.  You feel a bit of strength, a bit of release or joy or exhaustion on the mat.  From there, questions bloom like ink in water.  If you feel your strength, you will begin to wonder about - perhaps even believe in - your own potential.  If you feel release, you will know that you were sore and tired and fed up and wounded.  You will also know as fact that release is possible.  The consequences are endless: now, what?  says the seeker.  If this is true, what is next?

That power is what I have seen come alive in people, over and over again.  But it is also where our yoga can fail, can become a place to hide, can be a bitter disappointment.  I have heard too many students speak of feeling 'blissed out' after a class, but somewhere between leaving the studio and walking back into the kitchen, the feeling is lost.  We mistake the asana for the whole thing.  The mat as the truth bearer.  The asana, the mat, the teacher are techniques of yoga - not yoga.

Grief is more painful than is ignorance.  We long for the bliss, and want to change ourselves.

I believe that this is the yogic teaching, and always has been.  I believe it gives some fairly clear, if not easy, directives.  It remains to be seen whether yoga in America can truly teach this, can give us teachers versed not just in how to sweat and bend but how to heal and struggle and grow, how to be brave.  Bravery is not, unfortunately, something that can be bottled and sold.

I realized I was mashing recovery from addiction talk with yoga talk, as I answered her.  This felt messy, at first, as though I were falling off the mat.  But then it felt okay; both are spiritual quests.  Both say, at their gut, that life becomes better and we become more we when we live according to spiritual laws, however secular and modern our lives might seem.  Even if our problem is work related, or a broken family, or a body broken and soul tied by combat and relationships and the things sex and aging and parenting and stress put our bodies through.  Our problem is time, and money, and sore knees.

Our answer is in practice.

Not of poses, exclusively, but of beauty.  Integrity.  Honesty.  Self growth.  In knowing we ourselves become better and feel better when we do the right things, even when we don't want to.

Our path, if we're ever going to find it, will not come at the end of a course or in a pretty envelope or a gift given by someone else.  It will not happen in five years or at the end of a life.  The path begins today, under your feet.  This can be disappointing, because it means 'spiritual' and 'healing' and 'better' must involve the daily stuff of our lives.  Some days, I feel I'm holding a broken toaster in my hands, and it symbolizes the whole of my life, and everyone else gets a Lamborghini.  What, I want to say, this?  How is this a tool to anywhere?  What am I supposed to do, now?

We feel lost, sometimes, as though we have fallen off the mat, crumpled into the floorboards, lost our bearings and our ground.

But feeling lost is a first sign of being somewhere.

Yoga is simple.  But it is also terribly hard.  And it doesn't, because it's yoga, offer a set of to do lists or progress reports; it will not and does not because it recognizes it can't.  What was right for Iyengar was not right for Jois.  What was right for Gandhi will probably not be very right for you.  What is right for you is yoga, but it is a yoga of your life, your body, your ethics, your diet, your energy, your integrity and sense of beauty.

Now what?  says yoga, and waits for you yourself to answer.

Of course, there are some guides.  I can make suggestions.  I can talk about the ethics and the personal observances, what little Ayurveda I know.  I can help talk out sleeping and eating and choices and physical practices.  And I will, whenever I can.  But even there, as a teacher, the most I can do is say 'now what?' to students, over and over again.

As though I were handing the cosmos back into their hands.  They hand it back to me, and I hand it back to them.  I'll hand it back over and over again.  I ask them what they want to do with it.

Falling, being lost, is a very strong and good and dizzying place to be.  It is where magic happens.  Is this true?  comes from a few moments of reflection, of experienced stretch, of quietly breathing even though you think you might fall apart.  Is this strength true?  This power?  This calm?  Is this promise real?

Yes, I say.  It is.  And hand it back.

"The guts have fallen out of my yoga". What to do.

On this path no effort is wasted, no gain is ever reversed;

even a little of this practice

will shelter you from great sorrow. - Bhavagad Gita

Yesterday, I posted on the facebook page:

"In the course of my yoga, there have been times I've had to dig a little deeper to get myself to practice. Things happen. The fascination wears off. Dissatisfaction or busyness pervades, even when I most want to 'feel' yoga. The body feels cold and life just seems stuck. Sometimes, all efforts toward self-care and growth seem thwarted by a big, grumpy, demanding world. This is a thing; not personal, but a truth. At times, this signals a point of incubation, of the practice or some life path going deeper. Which might involve increased resistance or doubt, a knowing that to continue means we have to let go of something we're really not ready look at, let alone let go of. Sometimes it means the body itself is acclimating; the changes a yoga practice initiates are ocean swells of rearrangement. Sometimes its a recurrence of mind junk, periods of self-doubt and self-loathing, confusion and unclarity about what we're doing".

I post according to the conversations I'm having with students, and the conversations I'm having with student bodies.  I posted this after someone told me the guts have fallen out of her yoga, and she missed it.  Once I posted, there was a kick back. Many are struggling, a lot of us are confused and conflicted.  Others have just noticed that while it used to be easy - they wanted - to come to yoga three and four and more times a week, the spark died and now once a week, if that, is all they really have time or care for.  Many people want to take care of themselves, want to feel like yoga made them feel, once, but for whatever reason they just haven't gone.  In years.

Sometimes the conflict is about yoga, sometimes not.  But when we are seriously confused and conflicted, even our refuges like a yoga class become distasteful.  Dubious. Effortful.

I posted precisely because this is a psychological reality, not a personal loss or failure.  It isn't that the teacher isn't any good any longer or that the poses have gone old.  It isn't- this is my, personal likely thought  - that I was fooling myself all along, I was a sucker, that yoga is really just as meaningless as everything else.  That I've been wasting my time.  I can't do what I want to do.  I do the things I hate to do.  The disappointment is awful, in my mouth.  Like old pennies.  Rancid, old pennies.

Doubt and heaviness are a thing that happens to us, once in a while.  It isn't your fault and it's isn't wrong.  It means something.

We start, I said in class, by grounding.  When we ground and sit still, we become aware of thoughts.  This just happens.  We become aware of the planning, observing, judging, uncomfortable, winding and chattering mind.  This is chitta vrittri: Patanjali's twisting and tormented mind.

Sometimes chitta mutates into some whole other beast of a thing.  It moves.  It penetrates the body.  We go cold, and dark.

As I wrote in the yoga of darkness, this doesn't mean yoga isn't working anymore, but that it is.

Often, it happens when the honey moon ends and real yoga starts.  What was interesting and so exciting hits up against an edge.  We realize how far our hamstrings can stretch and then the opening stops.  We learned how to do a crow pose but no matter how much we engage the right muscles, our feet just never will leave the floor.  We hit a point where the body really needs to be a different thing if it's going to go on, or where we ourselves really need to change our lives if we're going to keep practicing.  And sometimes, we're just not sure we want to do that.  Or maybe we would do, if we had any idea how.

Sometimes it happens because we are depleted elsewhere in our lives.  When this is so - and it might be years in - even our refuge feels exhausting.  Even sweet things taste half assed.  It becomes really hard to care, let alone get up and do.  We don't know what to do.   We don't feel what we want to feel.  The things that we loved - that we want to love - have become as burdensome as everything else.  This hurts us.  We're such bad mothers.  We wasted our years getting into this career and don't know why any more.  We forget what we loved about our lover.  We disgust ourselves.  We trudge on.

Sometimes, we have no idea why it feels the way it does or why we do the things we do.

Chitta seeps into the body itself, and we don't even know.  Stuckness, samskara, blocks and stress are sometimes invisible to us.  We can end up in the ER, thinking something is wrong with our heart, terribly wrong, and be told that we have 'anxiety', but be confused about how this could be true.  Sometimes, sorrow eats our bones and we develop strange pains, neuropathies, fatigue syndromes, and when we're told it's a head thing we get pissed.

(As you should: pain in the body is real.  It is not 'in your head'.)

The thing is this: what we are doing here is trying to feel into the space between body and mind, the place where they interface, to see how they tangle and observe.  You cannot do this, yoga thing, and not eventually hit smack up against your personality and the reality of your life.  You can't try to 'change' your self or any aspect of your days and not hit up on a deeply patterned body that wants ice cream, is depressed, feels vulnerable, old, wild, or dull.  There is no separation and when we touch this - consciously or no, usually no - something very deep in us may recoil.

This is okay.

I want to say 'don't quit'.  But what I need to say is that yoga is not on your yoga mat.

Yoga is a way of being alive.

And what you may need to do, warrior heart, is not pound yourself into submission or child's pose right now but be still, and listen.  Be still, and know.

When yoga is seen as the feel good, flowy things we do in class you'll end up missing something.  When it is seen as the feeling you get, and you get hooked on that feeling, you'll end up missing something.  Yoga is not the postures, the teacher, the breath.  If we try to keep it there, it will end up being a mere show of vanity and accomplishment and self-recrimination or loathing or boasting, just like everything else in life.  If our yoga is not rooted in self-inquiry, non-harming, truthfulness, clarity, it becomes hollow.  We will suffer.

What I need to say is ground: ground and root your practice in the yamas and niyamas.  Use them like crutches, make them devotions you touch on at the end of the day, lenses through which you can actually see your day, touchstones to help you make decisions because you're so spent and confused you don't know what to do any more.

We are yogis; we're lucky; we have instructions and techniques.

What will happen is this: you'll have ways to see that it isn't, really, personal.  It isn't.  The fatigue and frustration.  The sick of it all ness.  The battle.

The battle isn't personal.  You can stop fighting.  Be still, and know the truth.

Real, actual practices you might use:

*use the yamas niyamas.  As stringently as you use a weekly yoga class or used to.  Work with your teacher.  Get a book, a journal, a spiritual guide or a therapist.  Start with ahimsa...do not harm.  For the next week, notice harming thoughts, behavior, speech.  For one week.  Notice.  Notice by writing, making a list, making an intention, meditating, talking with your teacher, or however you do.

If our practice is not rooted into deep psychological inquiry and the ways we're living, as much as it is rooted in body, our body is eventually going to 'betray' us.

What you'll find, in practicing the yamas and niyamas, is a deeper self and poignancy, a rush to live dharmically rather than stuck in yourself (all that 'self loathing', stuff).  This is difficult, especially if where you are is self doubting right now.  But listen to the truth of who you are, beyond tired.  You'll suffer so long as you DONT see yourself as a divine spit of universe with mountains to move.  You'll suffer so long as you can't love yourself as completely and wholly as Jesus loved, as you love your pet and a child, as you love your closest friends.  This isn't easy and I'll write more on it.  But it is true.

*Use all available resources.  The heart of yoga is interconnection and the longing we all have for connection - an ultimate reality that we are not alone.  Yet we need yoga precisely because we usually feel alone.  Hire a babysitter.  See a therapist.  Call an old friend even though you feel shitty because it's been so long.  Go see your doctor.  Go to a meeting.  Go to class.  Hold your lover's hand and explain that all you can really handle is holding hands right now.  Pray.

*The feeling that we are unsupported and need more support (affirmation, a thank you now and then would be nice, goddamn it can't you see how hard I'm working here) is an indication that our ojas is sapped.  We're going to talk about ojas in this weekend's workshop.  Other symptoms include: not getting real sleep and not feeling rested in the morning.  Lack of care about the things we used to care about.  Dull feeling in the body, in the eyes, in the hair.  Bloat and brittle, or greasy and gross.  Confusion, lack of knowing what it is we're supposed to be doing with our lives, inner conflict.

You're going to have to go forth, anyway.  Life is going to go on.  You might as well give yourself permission to feel what you feel and investigate it, invest in the process, go along for the ride.  If you have to cry along the way, so be it.

*When our body is this cold and dry, we may need restorative yoga.  Meditate.  Practice self massage.  Soak in the tub.  Get a massage or a pedicure.  Eat comfort food and lubricate: moisturize with coconut oil, sesame oil, shea butter or other like these, externally.  Often.  Thick, like.  Oleate internally by getting lots of good fats.  Take fish oil or flax oil.  Use a lot of it on your food.

*Stay warm.  Cuddle into socks, blankets, comfort clothes.  Let yourself get a healthy sheen of sweet on once a day (which does not mean sweat buckets, it means healthy sheen).  This can be yoga but doesn't have to be.

*Do try to get to the mat.  This body mind thing is uncanny.  It isn't in your head.  You won't release what is happening in your heart until it's actually processed in your body.  Yoga does this.

*Listen.  Keep going.  But listen close.

A love song for Iyengar

 Body is the bow, asana is the arrow, and soul is the target.  -BKS Iyengar

BKS Iyengar died last night.  Along with Indra Devi, TKV Desikachar, and Patthabi Jois, he brought the lineage of Krishnamacharya west.  I knew he was ill and in hospital a few days ago and have had a lingering shadow in my mind these past days.  Grief is a funny thing.  I can't say that he was my teacher; I never met the man.  And I can't say that I miss him or lament much his passing; he was an elder and he lived and died well.  But grief is a funny thing; it's the feeling of a passing, the feeling of the weight of a life and then the odd, light, empty space of the life being gone.

I feel it as I'm standing at my counter, waiting for the coffee to boil, and alone in a quiet house.  I've already taught the morning class, left the studio, walked the dog.  Yogis stand in the morning, quiet and already accomplished, while the rest of the world buzzes toward consciousness of alarms and newspapers.  Of course, we have alarms and newspapers.  But we find a quiet place to stand in the morning, and look at it.

This morning, Iyengar has died.

I try to call up a rough idea of what his teaching, with that of his peers, has meant to the world.  I can't fathom this very well, because the blessing of their work - yoga as a global phenomena, yoga as a universal, yoga as a thing I was able to come across and now am able to teach - is a daunting thing.  Millions practice.  Words whispered, chanted, clung to.  Bodies touched.  I am grateful.  I am moved.

I am moved by that shadow feeling that has been with me the last few days.  A wondering what we will make of it.  What happens to yoga when the fathers have died?

I mentioned this feeling to one of my teachers the other day.  Abhinivesha, he said.  The fear of death.  This ultimate reality thing that all of us will struggle with, sooner or later.  Yes, I said.

But the fear of death is really a fear of life, of life being a loss.  There is the danger of getting lost, ourselves.  There is the sense that we might fail.  That we might come to the end of our lives and realize we missed something, we did not live rightly or fully.  There is a sense of struggle and suffering and this ultimate question, as Doestoevski had it, of whether we are worthy and have made good on that suffering and those questions, or not.

My fear, my affliction right now, is not that Iyengar died nor even that I will, but a looming question of how we will carry his lineage and the teaching of tradition.  Yes, we've been given the gift.  We can do yoga with our dogs, with strobe lights, in any small town in any corner of the world.  We can do yoga with thudding soundtrack, rubberized mats, and mala beads worn as bracelets.

The question of gifts is what you do with them.

Do they become accesories and baubles, or do they touch and change the heart?

The passing of the teachers changes the role of the students.   It throws us off into a place of less direction and unclear paths.  The mantle of the teaching floats a bit.  If we've studied well, I think the direction, the teaching, the path, will shift.  When the way outside becomes so uncertain, the way inside will have to become compass.  We'll have to go deeper into ourselves to find the way through.

Iyengar and his peers taught yoga as an interior tradition, a mystic and practical pathway toward a good death.  It is introspective work that honors this tradition - not the proliferation of yoga classes, brands, or the mastery of asanas.   The teachers leave, the path disappears.  If there is going to be a path, it has to emerge from the deep introspection and interior work of the new generation of teachers.

"The practice of yogasana for the sake of health, to keep fit, or to maintain flexibility is the external practice of yoga.  While this is a legitimate place to begin, it is not the end...Even in simple asanas, one is experiencing the three levels of quest; the external quest, which brings firmness of the body; the internal quest, which brings steadiness of intelligence, and the innermost quest, which brings benevolence of spirit".

I am quiet in my kitchen.  I never met Iyengar.  But his path laid out a highway and I, dirty haired and hollow eyed with my thumb sticking out, desperate for a ride, was picked up along the way.  Along with a motley bunch of half brained mystics, body obsessed fitness gurus, and lonely middle class seekers.  We rode the bus together.  The bus has stopped.

I believe there are teachers, now, doing the internal work.   Reluctant pilgrims and desperate learners, both.  Of course there is cacophony, there is controversy, there is Lululemon. There are thousands, millions of us, who dutifully approach the mat even when we're not sure what it is we'll find.  Some will be moved, will see that we've been thrown out into the wilderness.  Some will see that what we're doing here is embodying the quest.

I am quiet in my kitchen, and I've never known Iyengar.  My teacher mentioned Abhinivesha.  Fear.  The answer to fear is greater love, bigger courage, more honesty.  The answer to silence is song. Not speech, necessarily; song.  Pithy, gutted love songs.  When we are really quiet, the heart sings.

If we teachers listen, we'll emerge teaching.  Not postures.  Not as career.  Not as a spiritual fad or an exercise regime.  We'll come out teaching as pilgrims teach. Road weary.  Calloused.  On going.  I listen to the quiet noises a kitchen makes.  I feel the weight of a life on my own heart, as a question and answer both.  Grief is a a funny thing.  A feeling of weight.  A feeling of absence. The song drifting up out of silence.

Vinyasa, Injury, and Addiction

I had a student who severed his ulnar nerve, falling through a glass window.  He rapidly began to atrophy in his hand and after two surgeries and a smattering of assessments, physical therapies, and wacky alternative treatments was told he would not regain it, ever.  Movement.  Ever.  Hand. We adapted his practice.  His atrophy stopped.  The muscles filled back out.  He did chatturunga one day and wept.

Thing is, your body has thousands of nerves and neurons.  We freak out about losing them.  But yoga, if carefully done and practiced without expectation (we were not AIMING for chattarunga, we were focusing on 'what is still there'.  But that focus on other parts of the body gave him some of his hand and wrist back), seems to do miracle things in bodies.  Not regeneration, but retraining other nerves.  Revealing undreamt of possibility.

I also had a student who broke her wrist falling while skiing, was told not to bear weight in her practice, and promptly quit.

Miracles, or quitting.  I see both.

When people begin a (vinyasa) yoga practice, they are very likely to complain about their wrists.

I generally try to talk through the alignment of the hand and shoulder in weight bearing poses, explain something about muscles, and try to have a conversation about the difference between 'pain' and 'soreness'.  Generally speaking, we come in having very weak wrists, hands, and forearms, if not pretty awful shoulder habit bodies, .  All of this means that being in strong alignment in downdogs and chattaruangas is likely to be really, really hard at the beginning.

Once the body has adapted by building appropriate strength and carrying weight appropriately, this soreness goes away.

They may not complain so much about sore shoulders, but most of us have very unstable shoulder girdles in our planks and chattarungas, and will eventually end up with rotator cuff issues.

This happens, yet teachers are prone to say 'do what feels good for your body', rather than stopping the student.  We've been coached and encouraged to believe that moving our body 'how we feel' is the benefit of a yoga practice.  And there is some truth to this.

However.  I'm thinking.  I've had a number of conversations recently with 'Astanga refugees' (people who blew out shoulders, low backs, with a too rigid for years on end interpretation of the Astanga system as something that 'can't be adapted'), and 'flow' yogis who have had to take months if not years repairing damage that happened when a teacher insisted they do wild thing, or 'breath through the pain' of a hamstring stretch (that tore).  As 'flow' has rapidly become the dancey, groovey, showy Yoga Of Choice in America....so much so that it is pret near the only type of yoga you can get in many places.... injury has become a question.

Of course, you can injure yourself doing any sport.  Or walking on icy side walks.  Or lifting a child or brushing your teeth, if you're not careful.

But yoga's promise - a non-injurious practice - needs to be both re-assessed and re-claimed.  We teachers need to be more careful and more trained.  And we, as students, need to learn things like the difference between soreness and pain, recognize when we are tired and losing alignment, stop ourselves from going too fast too hard too often.  We need to remember that yoga is not a 'sport'.  It is a rigorous body training and assessment.  But it is not a sport.

I need to catch this, myself.  As teacher.  As student.

When students get hurt, the need to change the practice or take a break from practicing is terribly hard.  Painfully hard.  We've come to love it so much. It hurts and is scary to lose.

Just as it is scary to think of losing our bodies, at all.

I know.  I've dealt with a few relatively minor injuries - a strange carpal boss that appeared on the back of my hand and made hands and knees impossible for awhile, let alone down dog; a concussion that left me forbidden to go upside down or raise my heart rate for six months.  Both these and other, even more minor injuries or illnesses, kept me from my practice or enforced a VERY drastic change to my practice.  It was hard.  I had all sorts of 'what if I can never vinyasa again?  Does this mean I'm just done, no more headstands, handstands, ANYTHING, ever, just done?' thoughts.

It was awful.

Chatturgangas afterward felt blissy.

But I'm faced, now and then, with the difficulty of needing to say, as a teacher, 'don't practice for awhile'.  Or 'don't do that pose'.

And the difficulty in myself when students don't listen.

Thing is, yoga reveals us.  There's a very popular yoga teacher who runs a workshop called 'asana junkies'.  I thought this was cute, when I first heard it.  Just like at my 12 step meetings, there was an immediate recognition of myself in somebody else's story.  I want to raise my hand and say 'busted'.  I know a lot of people who get crabby if their practice is put off because of circumstances.  People who go into depressions when their beloved teacher leaves or moves or takes a pregnancy hiatus.  People who grumble when classes aren't sweaty enough or a substitute teacher shows up.  I know that all of us - see me raising my hand, here, a 'busted!' grin on my face - have a little bit of this.

The meditation, the revelation, is the work.  When I have been injured, I had to somehow deal with the fact that I may not be able to invert and arm balance ever again.  I did this sometimes well, mostly poorly.  Of course, in the end I AM able to do those poses.

There is the fact that someday I will no longer be able to.

The question is what are we doing, in this yoga, thing?  What is it we really want and need out of

a practice?   The complexity, elegance, and potential of bodies is amazing.  We can spend our lives exploring this.  There is a biochemical thing that happens, while we are doing this, that changes our minds and our very lives.  But how is that complexity, elegance, potential, and biochemical thing related to overpushing ourselves or becoming dependent on a certain pose, teacher, style, or routine?

I don't think it is.  Related.  Not at all.  But we get confused.  We're human.  That's what we do.

And I don't know that I should teach as much 'up dog down dog' as I do; or that yoga classes from east coast to west should be so full of 'vinyasa flow' standards.  Not unless we get really particular about teaching the right way to do it.  The right way to do it is non-injurious.  We're failing, that.

Ultimately, the meditation suggests we have to accept.  We have to accept it when we lose legs.   This doesn't mean we stop practicing.  It in no way means the elegance and potential of the body is gone; but it is DIFFERENT.   It is only powerful to the level we can accept and play with body's uniqueness.

We have to learn to accept the smaller losses or ego swipes along the way - the whole do what you can but if your breathing is compromised you've passed the edge, thing.  Or maybe we don't HAVE to.  But if we can, if we can learn to be that sensitive to our inner bodies, to experience, to the breath, our practice will continue in its elegance until we no longer practice.  If we don't, we re-create suffering.  Impose the addictive, denial qualities of the rest of our lives onto our practice.  Harm ourselves.  Miss the point.

Practice accepting illness or injury now will make the transition to a different practice fluid and entirely possible when and if you DO lose a limb.  Or your eyes.  Or die.

Don't practice acceptance and those arrivals will floor you.  The arrivals are coming.  That's what life is.

The short, practical thing I want to say here is this: you can adapt a vinyasa class to a broken arm, toe, or a wheelchair.  Really.  You can.  It may get a little more complex for you (and hopefully your teacher) as you have to take time and figure it out.  You might have to learn more about yoga.  You might have to build up different strengths and flexibilities and this might take time.  It might feel hard, confusing, and frustrating.  But who ever said yoga was going to be simple and easy?

When you are injured, take the time you need to heal.  Don't ignore your doctors,  teachers, or sensations.  It's a sprained wrist, a broken leg, whatever.  Struggle with this, mightily, but accept it.   Then practice in a way that respects the injury, finds new ways to move, break expectations all over again.  Fact: people without arms can do amazing yoga postures.  Follow them and be bloody glad you just have a fracture.

The more subtle, complex thing I need to teach, practice, and encourage is this: adapt or burn. Find your own practice.  There is a practice in you that is stunning, strong, powerful, deep minded.  But it may not look like the class, the 'vinyasa', or what you did yesterday.  Most of us have 'can be changed' and 'cannot be changed' all screwed up.  There IS potential in the body and mind.  And there are things we cannot change, waste energy resisting or free ourselves by surrendering.  Feeling this out is your work.  Work hard. Figure out what moves.

shoulder medicine from Karin Burke on Vimeo.

Prayer of sighs, prayer of the hands.

I was asked, today, if Christians could practice yoga.  The girl who asked blushed, said she knew it was a silly question, but still wondered how her faith and her yoga studio were related, in the sum total of her life.

It is an odd question, but also not.  Both are things that promote spiritual journeys, healing communities, a more centered soul.  98% of Americans say that they believe in God, and the vast majority of these identify with a monotheistic religion. Meanwhile, millions are practicing yoga, in studios and in livingrooms.  Both are attempts to come closer to something.  Both are marginalized from our daily life.  Yet both speak to our live’s center.

I told her I wasn’t sure I would believe in anything, especially prayer, if I hadn’t found it in yoga.

There is something deep in us that yearns for truth and meaning.  This thing has become irritated and sore in a culture of ruthless individualism, mass marketing, and social discontent.  Oddly, even as we believe in the power of the individual, we seem to be a people radically disconnected from our own selves.  Both traditional faith and yoga are attempts to answer that deep something.  Both are valid.

But the problem with belief is that stubborn “Truth” thing.  Faith becomes arrogant when it claims a better right than others.  No system of thought or expression of faith holds a monopoly on insight.  Yet there has to be some gravity, some reality, to a faith.  Pure relativity becomes wishy washy and hollow.

The expression of yoga in our world is unique and, I think, uniquely special.  It is not the same practice it was thousands of years ago.  The magic is not only what it has done and will do to heal our culture and change us, but the way we are changing it.  Yoga is an expression of Spirituality, and I sometimes do it in a Christian church.

I also do it on sidewalks.  But that’s a different point.

Let my prayer arise in Thy sight as incense,

And the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice. -Psalm 141:2.

We tend to think of prayer, spirituality, and our ‘selves’ in intellectual ways.  We are taught that religion is a thing we retreat to, find in special places, are taught by special persons.  We tend to disregard the physical as a handicap, an embarrassment, and a weakness.

We lose out when we do this.  Spirituality is not a thing to be found in churches once a week or in ‘retreats’ and ‘cloisters’: it is here, and it is now, or it's fake.  Nor is it a teaching handed down by others, if we’re honest: religion is the song of the heart.  Our bodies our our very lives, our gift received and our gift to give.  Our bodies will dictate our ultimate truth.  Our relationship with our bodies says an awful 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.

Ever since the Incarnation, when the Word became flesh, no one is permitted to scorn or disregard anything human, natural, or earthy, and this includes the body.  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

How do we come to terms with our own selves?  What role does shame play?  Love?  Hunger?  What does that self of clay and ash have to teach us about salvation, grace, humility, reverence, and joy?  What does it teach us of death?  Why have religions across the world, throughout time, involved physical practices?  And why have mystics of all faiths found union with their god through practices of prayer, breathing, posture, meditation, and selfless service?

There is a strong tendency to deny (starve, abuse, overwork, cover, hide) or disparage the body.  It’s been suggested the body is the source of sin, let alone weaknesses of mind and spirit.  Yet God, if we want to go the Christian route, chose to Incarnate his son.  Maybe this was about suffering.  I don’t know.  I think it must have also been about love.  Jesus was a man, full on sensual, and hungry, and tired, and aging.  Disparaging his humanity also disparages our own.  It opens the door to philosophies of exclusion, hatred, and violence.  It is the first step toward self-loathing, shame, and losing our ‘selves’ to the judgement and possession of others.

Who are we?  What are we supposed to do with this life, this body?  How do we, each and personally, incarnate the idea of devotion, love for neighbor, peace, or gratitude?

We pass through life.  We know youthful play, awe, thrills, and heartbreak.  We taste sex.  We know relationships, parenthood, and work.  We know illness, trial, and loneliness.  Ultimately, I think we are called to dance, and to pray.  These things that are done with our hands.

In the end, I think yoga is less about athleticism than about a prayerful heart.

Embodied. A brief theology of movement.

The yogic literature is rich with metaphor, poetry, and dancing.  Even in our classes, with teachers speaking from the hip, the words they use connote emotions and values, wedding those things to the movements of the body.  There are rhythms in our body, pulse and breath; there are rhythms in the universe, subatomic, tidal, diurnal; rhythm is music, and music is a way of the dance.  Bodies are both passionate and pathetic.

There is a power here, a little truth, that can tell us much about ourselves if we are willing to listen.

We are fairly schizophrenic when it comes to the body.  On the one hand, we idealize it.  We spend billions of dollars perfecting and tweaking it.  Advertising, for soap and for soup, makes use of the human form.  At the same time we are a culture of shame and of judgement.  It is hard for most people to think of the ‘physical’ without immediately thinking of the ‘sexual’.  The body is politic.  Women’s bodies are covered in chadors, undergo cliterodectemy, covered too much or too little.  Men’s bodies are used as machines, and sent to war.  (Of course, both of those things are shifting to universal machines and sex toys).  Body, especially the truth of the body, naked or sick or aging, is a very vulnerable thing.  We wince at the doctors office.  We dress without looking.

I once heard a religious woman speak of the importance of praying while standing naked before a full length mirror.  Christ, she said, trusted and revered human flesh enough to use it as his own.  God does not love my spiritual life only,she said, but my flesh and my bones.  “The body is a gift”, said the Buddha, “it is a path to enlightenment”.

I practiced today, with resistance and irritability.  I noticed, throughout practice, moving from warriors to chatarangas, that my mind kept slipping to work I should be doing.  I’ve learned, in meditation, not only to watch what kind of thoughts I’m having – I should be working, I will this, I must that – but that I can go further: see where the thoughts take place in my body, how the thoughts feel.  It can be a revelation to realize how much time we spend with certain thoughts, “subconsciously”, and even more revelatory to realize how physically entrenched the thoughts become.  Thoughts release hormones, chemicals, cortisol or endorphins.  The body clenches, hangs on, resents or worries.

But I continued to practice.  The strength of my arms constricted and weary, crackling with popped knuckles and wrists.  My skin warming.  Pinking.  Sweat, soft and sheened on my joints, the peak of my forehead, the small of my back.  Then, the teacher’s voice, closing a surya, said something about peace, and center, and gratitude.  How good, she said, to be alive.

To realize the body as a garment of the soul, the miracle that carries these lovely brains around, is only half the mystery.  To realize my thoughts and the way they grid across my nerves and joints, is not really the point.  The point is that the body itself, that dancing, is good.  It is so good, it beats those stress thoughts and fears and petty little brain things into quiet gratitude.  Body is not a stage on which the human drama is placed.  It is that human drama. Not reaction, but the creative action.  Do yoga, find joy.  Walk, sing, play, and be changed.  Give birth, and touch the divine.  Fall ill, and flirt with mortality.

Yoga is the practice of mindful movement.  We feel how powerful it is, but articulating the power or realizing the huge implications isn’t something we normally do.  The mindful practice of particular physical movements combines mind and body into a unified experience.  Take one part away, however – for example, full attention  – and the overall experience changes significantly.  The yoga practitioner becomes increasingly aware of the vital role that both mind and body play in any action.  First, we grow more and more aware.  Eventually, we become capable of changing and influencing the experiences of our lives.

Drama and dance are as old as the human community, and have often been used in liturgy, worship, and sacred moments.  This is no small thing.  To move the body in a particular way, to em-body, elicits both physical and emotional change.

Aristotle called it catharsis.  When I was in high school, I wanted to take part in a play.  My english teacher, who was one of very few adults I trusted at that point, forbade me.  No, she said.  You already know how to pretend too much. To become an actor, she meant, would be changing the facts of who I was.  Perhaps she could have said it differently.  Perhaps, with the right mentorship, I could have used drama to affect positive change.  But I think she was right to say what she did.  She knew how powerful acting could be, and those were powers I could not, at the time, handle.

But I have continued to be drawn to the actor, the play.  It’s not a form I know well, because it seems too real to me.  A human being, embodying an experience, typically elicits the physical and emotional response in me that literally doing the thing would.  When we move our bodies, when we ‘act’, our brains release those hormones, our hearts fire up the bloody rhythm, and we are changed.

Once, I saw a woman who had recently lost a child “playing” with her surviving daughter.  She crawled, she made faces, she pushed little trucks around.  Eventually, her daughter brought her a doll and made motions, insisting, that the woman cradle the doll in her arms.  The woman’s face tensed.  But she obeyed.

She took the plastic, wall-eyed baby doll in both of her arms, and her head tipped down into a gesture of tenderness, looking, for all the world, as if she were looking into a child’s eyes.  Holding the doll in her left arm, she tucked at the blanket with the fingers of her right hand.  I don’t think she knew it, but she began to rhythmically rock.  Slow, and steady, and heavy.  I don’t know what she felt, but I saw her whole composition change. My own face was wet, until her daughter rushed me and brought me over to play with her toy kitchen and stuffed turtle, whose eye hung by a thread.

I have practiced yoga through many different things in my life, and the lives of people around me.  It hasn’t always been easy, or necessarily joyful.  Sometimes, it almost seems dull.  But at some point in the practice, or in feeling the practice in my body throughout the day, the verdict is fairly standard.  This is my body.

It is good to be alive.

Resolution, change, and broken promises

We can't help but measure ourselves, wish things were different, make grand gestures and ultimatum type statements about how we want our lives to be.  This time of year it comes as 'resolutions'.  We reflect on how things have been going or what has passed and set some goals or dreams for the future.  There is good in this.  It is important to grow. There's the fact, too, that resolutions are promises broken, more often than not.  They are one more thing to beat ourselves up over.  We know what it is we need, what we need to change, but are stumped and frustrated and hurt because we don't know how to break out of where we are.  Most of the things we've been taught don't actually work very well: try harder, make a list, go on a diet, set up a schedule.

Why is it we want to change so much, but cannot?  Why is it we become our own worst enemies?  Why is honest change so hard and so rare?

Yoga has very direct answers to these human questions.  We can't or haven't changed because we have karma.  Karma being our habits of mind, feeling, and behavior.

We change our karma in recognizing the kleshas, by seeing with clarity where it is that we are stuck.  Through persistent practice, meditation and mindfulness, through clarification and purification of body, mind, and relationships we start to hack through the dense dark matter of karma.  We begin to see.

There are five kleshas or obstacles, five barriers to the self and to happiness.  They are the path, the threshold, both the obstacle and the obstacle's overcoming. They obstruct our lives and our vision.  For the next five weeks I'm going to teach each of the kleshas, as well as ways to break through them, as a way toward deeper self knowing and self practice.

Abhinivesha is fear.  Fear - or what most of us would recognize as anxiety - determines much of our presence in the world.  Seeing fear, knowing it, knowing where anxiety is in our body and how often it's seeping into our thoughts, is a cornerstone of yogic practices.

Opening ourselves up in spite of fear is both the goal and the way to the goal.

Backbends, tonight, as fear mongers and also release of fear.

In upcoming weeks, we'll look at all of the kleshas: abhinivesha (fear or anxiety), asmita (false identity or confusion about who you really are), raga (attachment), dvesha (aversion), and avidya (blindness or ignorancence; not being able to see reality).  Avidya is the source of all the other kleshas, the granddaddy of human suffering and confusion.  The way to strengthen our resolve, build our character, change our lives and practice yoga is to continually enlighten.  To transform.  To hack through or blow on or tentatively consider the idea of lifting the veil of our own blindness.

Gratitude is fierce surrender

I spoke, it being thanksgiving, of gratitude.  I said it is a particular kind of attention; gratitude is a way of seeing and being in the world.  As such, it has nothing to do with circumstances or things. It has to do with us.  Gratitude is not an attainment or a thing that happens to us; it is an innate capacity we have, a thing we practice or do not.  Like all capacities, it can flourish.  It can atrophy. This is the heart of yoga, I said.  This is the point.  The capacity to stop, shift, and pause at any given moment, in any situation, and touch on the breath.  To shunt our attention away from our habit mind into our wider mind and more vulnerable heart.

I did not say this was easy.

It is hard to let go of conditions, blame, coping skills, excuses, competition, entitlement,  and control.  It is terrifying to let those go and accept, instead and suddenly, that the path has to do with self and reality.  It goes right down the line of our sternum to our soft spots.  Self responsibility, self mastery, self soothing, self determination, self motivation, self control, self expression, self knowing.  Not selfishness - but letting the self break open and seeing what is there.

To linger, attentively, gratefully, in any moment will strip away our arrogance.  Those things for which we may be grateful - children, family, safety, food, the age we are and the health we have - show themselves for what they are: conditions, frailties, current expressions of constant change.  Little breaths of grace for which we have no real authorship and no end control.  They are given us, but might not have been.  They are not ours.  Those things for which we might be grateful but aren't swell and burgeon in their mystery: wheeling snow, the way a highway is empty on a holiday morning and you are on it.  The sunlight, the bare trees, the deafening quiet.  A moment, alone.

Listen.  I had a horrid holiday.  Things which I thought I had gotten over, things I didn't want to think about or feel, positively smacked me into stillness.  And more than stillness; they so washed over the nooks and crannies of my brain and the fibers of my body I was reduced to a seedy, snotty, sniveling depression and then ashamed of that depression.  Sex and babies and age, relationship and money and longing to be loved.  Tender spots for us all, surely.  I have a strong tendency to resist what is tender.

Let me be blunt.  A relationship that was supposed to unfold to a wedding this New Year's Eve fell apart.  In its falling apart, I am suddenly back to financial fear and insecurity, an insecurity I haven't felt for a long time and thought wouldn't come again.  A sister had a child, which rather than making me feel love and hope and generations made me feel old, made me remember children I have aborted or given to adoption.  A surge and roil of shame for the things I've been and done and seen, bitter grief for the fact I can't have those chances back, time has passed, I may never have children or partner or family,hit me blunt wise.  The anniversary of a friend's suicide, exactly on Thanksgiving, returned all sorts of memories and the unalterable fact that his presence is only an absence, now.  The birthday of an old, dear, alienated from me love intensified that thing, that aloneness, that fact that time has passed and left me standing, dumb, where I am.

All, all things I am rationally aware of and fully believed healed, processed, handled.

But when the days came, and the sudden horrible cold and dark of Minnesota winter, when that infant was actually born, my wheedling and mature mind was hijacked.  I crumpled.  Grief and depression are not concepts.  Grief is a taste in the mouth and a collapsing of the lungs.  Depression is your body, gone horribly wrong, you mind rotting and broken and unworking, and no one else knowing.  Emotion is a reality you live in, distinct from the realities of other human hearts.

Emotion is our reality, our wider mind and more vulnerable heart.

I skipped the actual thanksgiving meal because I couldn't bring myself to go.  And felt guilty for doing so.  I minced through what contact I could.  I sat, in a big empty house that is suddenly mine and mine only, and I watched the first snow of the year appear in the sky.  With my forehead on the window pane. Snow has no straight way down.

It is hard to stay with your breathing, then.  It is hard to teach yoga, hard to walk a dog, terrible to eat and to swallow.  The snow is real, you see, and the empty house, and the new born infant.  The fact is grief, but also, oddly, bellowingly, a love for that baby that is tactile and teary.  The question isn't what god in his cruelty makes this or what karma will balance it out again nor what it should be nor what it all means; the question is what happens, now? What is this, who am I, what is here?

My teaching, strange and raw, had a kind of clutch in the throat.  But also a kind of naked.  I moved, myself in practice, as if I were dying. As if I were praying.  I think, I suppose, I was.

I taught Anjayeasana.  The deep version, where it is hard to breath, where your heart pounds hard enough to drown you.  You try to lift that heart, up.  The word, anjayeasana, I forgot to say out loud as I taught, means offering.  Not perfect, not pretty, but a ripped heart, the hard to take breath, offered.

To stay has a kind of humility to it, a kind of purity, and the world breaks open with questions.  What am I to say to the sister (I love you, and it's panging)?  What am I to teach (Feel your feet, listen for breath)?  What do I do with this loneliness, these empty hands (tell someone.  Make a sound in the silence. Take the cup they offer)?  How am I supposed to live in this empty house, all mine, all empty (unpack the boxes, write the falling snow, live here and write this down)?  Why did my friend die (I don't know, and I don't know why I'm alive, am.  Alive, alive, alive.)

It is hard, at times, to be grateful.  To practice self compassion, self determination, self motivation, self knowing means surrendering without knowing where it goes.  To willingly slide into vulnerability and uncertainty.   To take reality, whole, and swallow.

Surrender is fierce.  As anything that will change us must be.  All projects, any love.   All healing.

To give our selves into the unknown is wild.  To show up.  To be changed in ways we cannot imagine, past our control, more than we intended.  This is the practice and like snow, like sky, it has no straight way down.

This kind of surrender has a way of knocking us, windless, to our knees.

Which may be the final meaning of reverence.

What I have found isn't answer.  I want to tell you how beautiful, how quiet, a highway gone empty can be.  The reverence, the ground, holds.  Your heart breaks, snow falls.  The sacred is this way; humane, snotty, captivated by snow and highways and the smell of an infant's thin and many veined skin.  Her breath, I tell you, is sweet.  My breath is sharp with longing.  We are creatures who breathe, until we can't.

Rage, fear, sadness, fatigue. The yoga of darkness.

“Emotion is the chief source of all becoming-conscious. There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.” -Carl Jung I once had a student who started to drift away and began to look sheepishly apologetic when she did come to class.  She avoided my eyes and had an invisible wall around her mat.  She used to ask questions or chat after class; now she was the first out of the room and gone from the studio by the time I'd left my mat.  Eventually, though, we did talk a little.  She told me things were busy.  She talked about her kids.  Then she looked somewhere into the middle distance  and said she didn't know, really; yoga just wasn't working any more.

Sometimes, she said, all I feel in child's pose is anger and disappointment.

Yoga has a corner market on feel good words.  I recently had a massage therapist tell me we were both in the 'feel good industry'.   The promise of 'enlightenment' tends to make us think we will be more spiritual, and this somehow means we'll be a little less freakish about time, our kids, our money.  There is truth to this.  Yoga can show us how good it feels to be alive.

But yoga will also show us exactly how badly we feel.  Usually, when honest emotion starts to come up, students leave.  They skip class or decide yoga wasn't what they wanted.  They say 'it's not working any longer'.  The emotion itself keeps them away; they're 'not in the mood', 'too busy',  or 'too depressed to move'.  They will  - trust me, this is real - feel guilty for feeling so crummy when others are just trying to get their savasana on.

This doesn't indicate that the yoga isn't working, but that it IS.  The end isn't this negativity, this disappointment.  But negativity is part of the path, and it has to be gone through if you want to understand it, to understand yourself, at all.  If you don't, you'll be shutting down half of your experience of life, and probably the best strengths you'll ever find.  If you don't, you'll continue to skip, overcompensate, repeat, and lull.  You'll segue irritation into nicety, stuff it, and it will erupt later as rage toward an intimate or yourself.

Most of us have spent the majority of our lives stuffing and repressing our feelings, rationalizing them, avoiding them, or sublimating them into exercise, food, cigarettes, television, shallow relationships.  Women are taught not to feel anger because it's not nice, not feminine (or too feminine and bitchy, emotional, hormonal and out of control).  Men are supposed to feel competence, all the time.  In our efforts to feel better, many of us start  shutting it off, wholesale, in favor of pop psychology or easy spirituality.  It's called spiritual bypass.  It's an attempt to avoid painful feelings, unresolved issues, or truthful developmental needs with such words as 'everything happens for a reason',  'god's ways are not our ways', or 'choose happiness'.

There will be a yoga class, someday, online or at your local studio, where your teacher will start singing. She'll say 'exhale' as if there's something orgasmic about it.  She might allude to the goodness of your heart, your hamstrings, or the light inside.

If you are like me, this may make you clench your bandhas like a fist.  There may come a day you lower down into child's pose, "sweet, receptive, safe" child's pose and feel nothing but boredom, irritability, and dis-ease.  You keep lifting your head off the mat, looking at the clock.  There may come a day your brain starts swearing at the lovely yoga teacher saying something vapid about love in your newly blossomed chakra.

Here is the thing.  Yoga is not about bliss, but about honesty.  Spirituality is not certainty, but the longing of the heart.  Enlightenment is not 'letting go' of bad feelings, but understanding them, what they're doing to us, and how they are expressed in the body.  Non-harming and forgiveness are not about feeling generous or big enough (bigger than and condescending), but knowing the difficulty of right actions and assuming responsibility for the difficult.  Forgiveness often comes directly out of acknowledging how bloody bitter we are.  Love is not joy, all the time. Sometimes, love hurts. Love is raw.

Yoga is a love story.  Not the fluffy, romanticized love story, but the real one.  The kind that leaves you changed.

Emotions are doorways, ways in.  The goal is not to exist without shadows, to become so spiritual we no longer feel fat, bored, envious, or impatient.  The goal is to swallow hard as we take on willingness to go into the dark.

Because yoga asks you to work with both your body and your mind, the inevitable result is going to be messy.  There will be times the body itself will start in on anger, hot and fast, trembly, without the reasoning mind having a clue what is going on.  There will be days the boredom or loneliness seem so sharp they may actually wound.  There will be five thousand ways your mind will tell you it isn't worth it, it won't work, that love is not real.

Yet, yoga has probably already given you a clue to this.  You've probably already felt how love - whether it be romantic or ethical, compassion, right living, making a solidity of your name - is the only thing that is real.  The highest and best in human beings is subtle, mysterious, and tied directly to the shadows.  Life is both unbearably cruel and devastatingly sweet, often at the same time.

The shadows will show up.  Go there.  Apathy, acedia, what Christian mystics called desolation, existentials call despair, moves when we move toward it.  It isn't the passage of time that heals us, but the passing through experiences.

There are hundreds of things telling us to 'get over it', to 'think positively', or to 'let it go'.  Be wary of these as the roadside distractions that they are.

Yoga is the love story where in things fall apart.  God moves away, often at the same time he takes away the ground.  First goes this, then goes that.  Gone are the thrill of the first months of yoga class, the ease of learning something new every time you walked in the door.  Gone is the schedule that allowed you class three times a week.  Gone is the strength in your shoulders, the ability to keep on a diet.  Gone is the confidence of conversion.

And then a small movement in the heart.  And then two.

Asana: psalm of the flesh

"Enter eagerly into the treasure house that lies within you, and so you will see the treasure house of heaven...The ladder that leads to the Kingdom is hidden within you."  sixth century Christian mystic St. Issac the Syrian

I'm faced with this problem:

I teach, mostly, asana.

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

And I tell them the way is through asana.

You see the problem.  I'm contradicting myself.

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

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

We show up and are prodded into the present moment.

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

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

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

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

I think that is where we need to be.

***

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

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

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

But there is something more than the simple explanations.

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

Dissolving tension, fear, and samskara

We've all come here carrying something. What's your burden? Where are you gripping? What holds you down, or back (fear, external coping skills, stories)? We are all creators: our bodies and brains are under constant regeneration: what we are repeating or have repeated or have witnessed has released certain neurotransmitters in our brain, which lays down a pathway and the pathway will repeat itself. The body repeats its own movements, in tension, in lack of breath, in immunity shut down, in hormonal imbalance and fatigue, in digestive distress, cravings, and brain fog. Looking at my own practice/life and working to dissolve those samskaras. In body, in thought. Going to play with dissolving those tension lines in our asana tonight and tomorrow. Practice softening to take on the things we really want. There are physiological reasons why we crave, shut down, feel anxious or depressed when faced with something new or challenging or the very idea of letting go.  The psoas muscle grips, which is the thing that would allow us to run away or to curl into fetal position, contracts.  It ripples across the diaphragm, conflicting and complicating our breath.  It brushes up against our GI tract and constricts the flow there.  When the pelvic diaphragm and digestive/reproductive/elimination areas are constricted, waste management is obscured.  Which leaves us more toxic and less able to take nourishment even if nourishment comes in our mouths.  The circulation and lymphatic areas there are compromised.  Further, the vast majority of our serotonin levels is produced and circulated from the gut.  Serotonin is the hormone of satiation, satisfaction, sighing with being content.  If we compromise that, we we literally be unable to feel soothed, let alone okay, so we will rush for cigarettes, alcohol, sex, spending, sugar, naps, approval.

If we can physically touch and relieve those areas, our capacity to find our self center and our self soothing will get back on track.

Last night I asked students to remember and recall what they came for - to tap into their longing, their core strength, their center.  Tonight I'm suggesting that we cannot really tap that center (which is literally the core meridian line of the body, our core strength) until we can dissolve the gripping at the edges, the front and back superficial meridian lines.  We cannot take up those things we long for, the things we crave, our truth, until we let go of the things holding us back.

Metaphor and anatomy, both.  Your body is your poem and your destiny.

Prana. The moving.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prana

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

Prana and the energy body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yama

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

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

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

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

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

Pranayama – practicing life’s energies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Single, Blessed Inch. Journeys and souls. (For next weekend's Jivan Mukti workshop).

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

**

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

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

**

**

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grounding ourselves in the consequences helps us arrive.

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

**

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

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

Blessed be the cracked, the weary, the sore. Yoga and pain.

12 years ago I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia.  This was not helpful. The diagnosis was this: you hurt, you have brain difficulty, there are questionable and various causes, it will always be this way.  My response: no shit, thanks much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go ahead.  Say that's melodrama.

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-oral aloe vera.

-vitamins b and d.

-fish oil

-epsom salt baths.  lavender.  clove.  vertiver.

Blessed Be.

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

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

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

We are not perfect beings.  But we are good.

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

Spring's breath: detox, saucha, resurrection.

Sometimes things touch us.  A breath of green air from an opened window after a long, cruel winter.  The combination of innocence and insouciant wisdom out of a kid's mouth.  Suddenly, a robin's song.  The bud of a flower, not opened yet, but full of kinetic energy, potency, brilliance.  The chords of a song, perhaps.  The whispers and shades of flirtation.  Briefly, suddenly, we are snapped out of our day to day lives.  We feel the pangs of longing, we desire.  To live more.  To know more.  To learn.  "Normal" is doubtful.  We hunger and thirst. Of course, other things can touch us: the death of a dear one, recognition of passing time, a diagnosis, an old pain become so pervasive you realize you are a prisoner.

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

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

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

How pathetic.  she said, and shifted the conversation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And yet we can.  There are ways.

Saucha

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

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

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

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

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

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

TRY THIS: Spring Detox: Food, Stuff, Heart

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

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

The cost is minimal, the efficacy is sound.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You'll feel better in the morning.

Heart:

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

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

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

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

It is not easy.

But it is the way through.

To flow, to place mindfully. To go on. (The art and falling of sequencing).

There were questions this morning about sequencing/teaching, about where and how I learn what I teach.  Befuddling question, and I think I gave half a dozen very lame answers.  Other teachers.  My own practice.  Trying to answer student's questions and their 'challenges' or interests in the form of a sequence.  You tube.  Books. A better answer is this: I meditate on it and I work on it really hard.  The impetus or inspiration comes to me from those various sources (my practice and what I've learned.  How I learned that tree pose can be done on your hands.  What pose taught me how to use my hands to deepen forward folds.  What the big toe is for...or the day I felt my heart both breaking and healing itself by it's willingness to break in ustrasana.)  (my students and what they ask: how do I find ease in my low back?  What's wrong with my knee?  Why do I feel so vulnerable in hip openers/rageful and energetic after corework, terrified of inversions, blissy after backbends?)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jivan Mukti recap - my old 'emotional yoga' mission statement to self

Buried in and central to yogic practices are ways of breathing, moving, and being that profoundly change the way we feel.  It doesn't merely change the way we feel in the moment or for the few hours afterwards - it changes the way we feel our feelings, think our thoughts, and experience our moods.  Science and medicine are proving, each day, what yogic science has known for a very long time: yoga changes our brains, our bodies, our hormones, and the way we think, feel, and process our experience, inner and outer.  Stress, chronic pain, anxiety, depression, grief, trauma, insomnia, eating disorders and addictions all respond powerfully.  Those with self esteem issues, childhood abuse issues, combat experience and sexual assault or trauma histories have all found healing on the mat that they may have given up on, elsewhere.  Yoga touches these very human experiences and changes them in ways medicine and traditional talk therapies simply can't.  It is one thing to understand our problems and to understand healing.  It is altogether different to feel change, beginning at the soles of your feet.

The practices of yoga began as a quest for that kind of healing and emotional well being.  What we think of as a physical practice or a form of meditation was actually a deep inquiry into the human condition.  Yogic sages knew human suffering just as we do, and their intention was to understand the human condition in order to  attain freedom, joy, and emotional balance.  The central archetype in yogic lore is the Jivan Mukti - or soul awake in this lifetime.

The Jivan Mukti expresses the idea that healing is possible.  But not healing in the way we usually think.  This isn't about coping skills, getting over it, or learning to let go.  It isn't even about returning to okay again.  The Jivan Mukti runs deeper.  Healing actually becomes a deeper sense of being alive.  Our grief becomes resonate with more compassion and a stronger sense of joy.  Our stress becomes our wisdom and our teacher.  Healing, passion, enthusiasm, attention, compassion, and love become deeply embodied.

Yoga as Therapy

Psychotherapy and medicine feature a rich collaborative relationship between client and therapist, or patient and doctor.  Both are eloquent in addressing mind and emotions, as well as physical health and disease.  Yoga bridges the science of body and mind.

The range of human emotion, mood, and cognitive ability cast a wide net, from panic attacks to joy to perfectionism.  Each and every one has some answer in yoga.  Western medicine and therapy are starting to prove the fact that mind and body interface in both subtle and obvious ways.  Our memories are held in our muscle structure.  Our emotions are stored across the physical field.  The feedback loop works both ways, so that our thoughts can change our body, but our body can also literally change our minds.  When we don't deal with the body, we leave out important parts of healing.

Many of the most basic human conditions are actually conditioned prior to our learning language.  We learn our core standards of trust, security, anger, how to self sooth, how to respond to fear, and self-worth long before the language parts of our brain have matured.  Additionally, traumatic experiences such as an assault, a fire, or even a serious illness are processed not in the language and rational parts of our brain, but in our instinctual, emotional, and spiritual selves.  The concept of neurotransmitters and their role in cognitive functioning and our general mood are common knowledge.  What is less well known but every day more evident is that similar 'neural pathways' and 'neurotransmitters' work in our spinal cord, our hearts, our fascia, and our muscle tissue.

For all of these reasons, it is strange to think that we could 'talk' or 'reason' ourselves into healing.  If our hurt, fear, stress, or memory is stored in the body, it only makes sense to believe healing should involve the whole body.

The Ways We Hurt

There is nothing wrong with feeling stressed, angry, depressed, or anxious.  These are a natural part of the human experience.  In fact, they are appropriate responses to the world we live in.

All of us, at one time or another, experience grief.  Anger is a natural and appropriate response to feeling violated in some way.  And stress, psychology has shown, is actually a motivating, strengthening, learning human response.  The problem is not that we feel these things.  It's that we become overwhelmed by them.  At times, it may seem that we experience so much fear, anger, or sadness that all other emotions lose their place.  At other times, we may be so overcome by the power of an emotion that we feel swept away, powerless, or dominated by whatever it is we are feeling.

We live in a stressful world.  The World Health Organization suggests that by 2015 depression will be the #1 health problem on our planet.  One in five persons struggles with some kind of depression disorder, and another one in five some kind of anxiety disorder.  Add to this chronic stress, multitasking, the pressure to have it all, and a cultural value system that emphasizes achievement and individualism over self-care and community. Emotional imbalance is more common to the human experience than emotional balance.

That imbalance manifests in thousands of different ways.  Low self-esteem, constant worry, insomnia, persistent body image issues, chronic pain, fatigue, compulsions, invasive thoughts, ruthless self criticism, and an underlying sense that there is something wrong are all terribly common.  'Terribly', both in the sense of being overwhelming in it's frequency, and 'terrible' in the way it actually feels and expresses itself in our lives.

Imbalance may come from core family issues, abusive relationships, stressed-out or absent parents, financial or social strain, poverty, spiritual alienation, overwork.  It is important to recognize how imbalanced our culture (and, to be fair, much of the human condition) is: competitive, consumer culture is stressful; difficult economic realities are stressful; world poverty, violence, terrorism and war are difficult; sexism, racism, and agism are realities.  In very real ways, our global existence is under constant, if unacknowledged, threat.  The sum total of human knowledge took thousands of years to double up until the last few centuries; our collective knowledge makes everything we thought we knew obsolete, now, within a few years.  It might happen only once in a while, during particularly stressful points in our career or on the heels of a significant loss.  Grief is, in it's very nature, a form of depression.  But for an increasing number of us, stress, frustration, powerlessness, apathy, sadness, or anxiety are more normal than not.

Yoga as Healing

No matter what 'caused' it, and no matter how long it has been present, we do have the capacity to heal.   To heal more deeply and more powerfully than we may be capable of believing.  Much of our emotional and cognitive wiring is set, locked into a pattern, and difficult to change no matter how much you may want or understand.  But therapeutic yoga can actually go deep enough to re-set our emotional and cognitive wiring.  It literally provides new learning, new insight, and new experiences, while addressing the old 'hardwiring'.  Yoga gives a new collection of tools - experienced, felt tools more than logic tools - that reverberate deep into the mind-body-spirit network.

Yoga can be a first hand, embodied experience of vitality, strength, peace, and calm.  It can also be a first hand, embodied experience of self-worth, at-one-ment and grace, which are so central to our religious and spiritual selves.  Atonement and grace form the bulk of theology and prayer.  Yoga, oddly enough, is a way to feel the power of prayer, and deep connection, in every tissue of your body.

"Emotional Yoga" as a yoga class

We tend to think of yoga as a fairly intense physical practice.  No matter what style or brand of yoga you practice, you will be getting some of the therapeutic benefits of yoga.

But science and tradition also show that one does not need the intense physical workout, nor a daily practice, to experience the profound transformation available through breath, meditation, and posture.  Indeed, some of the most healing work may come in gentle, restorative postures and simple breathing exercises.

You do not need to be in shape, flexible, or entirely mobile to participate in the class.  You do not need any experience with yoga.  Nor do you need to 'buy in' to any spiritual practices or cultural traditions.  All you need to do is show up.

We all have different needs.  There are specific postures and breath work that energize us from the lethargy of depression, and others that help to ground us and stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system - soothing anxiety. The first standard in yoga is ahimsa, or do no harm. That is a guiding principal to all yoga classes.  So while some poses might work especially well with depression, others with anxiety, etc, no pose will be harmful. The principal is balance. I'm committed to understanding individual students, and will be ready to change the class according to need and hopefully give further information and additional practices to those students who have specific concerns.

Sometimes, the head must go below

Sometimes, The head must go

below the heart.