Monday Morning Thoughts

Photo by Sol Dust Love

As a teacher I attempt to say things more clearly and precisely without killing the effectiveness of what I am trying to articulate. I like the wisdom of Rene Daumal's take on this.

"It is still not enough for language to have clarity and content... it must also have a goal and an imperative. Otherwise from language we descend to chatter, from chatter to babble, and from babble to confusion."

Yoga Mala

Yoga Mala is a practice that Yogis enjoy during each turn of the seasons. Cleansing, challenging, and gratifying, the 108 sun salutations of Yoga Mala allow us to begin the new season with a meditative and awakened state of body and mind. There are many reasons that we practice 108. There are 108 Upanishads, the anciets Vedic texts. There are 108 beads on the Mala prayer bracelets. There were originally 54 sounds in the Sanskrit alphabet, which doubled is 108.

I started practicing Yoga Mala about ten years a go and have been in love with its powerful message ever since. Four times a year I come to my mat and move through Surya Namascar A, the first group of sun salutations in the Ashtanga primary series. I always find the first fifty four to be the most challenging as my mind frantically tells me to stop and do anything but another fifty four sun salutes. As my mind becomes quiet and the flow of my breathing takes over, this practice becomes enchanting, better yet, meditative. For today's summer solstice I will step onto my mat with a student and good friend of mine and we will welcome in summer 108 times!

Flat Feet

In my afternoon class yesterday was a seemingly aware young woman who informed me that although she heard my suggestion to lift the inner arches of her feet she just couldn't. Really? She had such a lovely body full of potential but her energy died at her feet. She had accepted the base of her body as dead, useless, ugly. Just two pancakes that hang out at the end of her ankles. Her embarrassment towards her malformed feet lived in the rest of her structure. She struggled to find grounding through her legs and stability in her spine. When we cannot connect with our roots it becomes very difficult to adjust and grow. Sadly this is a common response from students when given an adjustment during an advanced Yoga class. The thinking seems to go: why should I feel like I can change such a body structure? I'm well into my thirties, an advanced Yogi, and have already had one surgery.


Again and again I walked over to her and lovingly touch her inner arches to find her flinch every time I got close. She hated her feet. She hated me noticing them. So I decided to love them. Quietly I listened to her tell me why she would not lift them, why it was useless to even try. I decided to agree and instead ask her to lift her inner ankle bones. She gave me an awkward look and then lifted her inner ankles seemingly effortlessly. Attached to her inner ankles were the inner arches of her feet. Her flat collapsed feet followed suit and lifted with her ankles. Amazing. Her feet looked nice! We both smiled and I reminded her throughout class to lift her inner ankles/inner arches and I saw life begin to sprout in her feet and legs and spine.

As Theresa Bertherat writes in ' The Body Has Its Reasons' "... it's never too late to offer your body the time to pause and re-evaluate itself. It requires a little bit of humility, but you're amply rewarded by the joy of moving with grace and precision, of making full, round gestures, of rediscovering all the sensations in a body free at last to live its real life."

Perspective

Perspective. Through my twenties it was a thing I rarely applied. I was interested in fighting reality and forcing my way through life's ups and downs, allowing each event, each confrontation or hardship, to be swallowed up and stored in my digestive track. Ouch! The lesson each life event would produce, whether negative or positive, would get lost in my attachment to control the outcome.

There are few things in life which are under our control but I strongly believe our perspective is. Epictetus wrote " Our hopes and fears sway us, not events themselves... Authentic happiness is always independent of external conditions..."

Whether sitting with heartbreak, a transition in your career, or moving to a new city, hold close your perspective and the potential lessons that lay brightly beneath the events surface. Expansion is always around the corner!

A little Sunday Bukowski Poem

I like it... Bukowski has a knack for making his point in such a way that I have to read it twice.... he always makes me think outside of my yoga bubble. Thanks Charles! Enjoy..

Side of the Sun

the bulls are grand as the side of the sun
and although they kill them for the stale crowds,
it is the bull that burns the fire,
and although there are cowardly men,
generally the bull stands pure
and dies pure
untouched by symbols or cliques or false loves,
and when they drag him out
nothing has died
something has passed
and the eventual stench
is the world.

- Charles Bukowski as written in 'Burning in Water Drowning in Flame'

Joints-Keeping Them Natural

As an athlete and ex dancer I have asked and continue to ask a lot of my joints. For me it started in the knees in my late teens with knee surgery, followed by some shoulder injuries from hitting the sand bar at low tide on fun playful days of surf. A good friend and student of mine, Ben Rubin, is a top notch othropedic surgeon in Newport Beach. If your knee or shoulder gets blown out, Ben is the man you want to fix it. Each time we get together for yoga I think of how he just came from the operating room, probably installing artificial joints. He once asked me why he sees so many yogis with messed up knees and shoulders. He is one of the most committed students I have, practicing yoga five days a week to create space and mobility in his joints. It may be counter intuitive but Ben does not want you to get a knee or shoulder replacement.

Sadly I have watched a generation of Taliban yogis come forward that are either not interested, are bored by, or just don't know that the practice of yoga is to find balance between strong effort and EASE. A type of personality who seeks the push, the sweat and the workout, smashing their bodies into the deepest poses possible to get a sensation and a pair of Madonna arms. Now I admit, I love a good sweat and really can get into an intense practice, and yes, the result of consistently showing up on your mat can create some pretty beautiful arms... however, can we do this without the striving, without the push?

We all have different personalities and therefore different approaches to our bodies and yoga practices. A more fiery personality might need to approach their practice with a touch more grace and ease, while a more complacent personality will need to approach their practice with more energy and effort. One of the most exciting and encouraging gifts our yoga practice gives us is the ability to heal. We can either step onto our mats with aggression, sensation hunting, or, we can have faith that this ancient practice will simply unfold for us. And yes, you can sweat, you can develop some hot arms, and the best part of all, you can heal. I constantly hear myself asking my students to respect their joints, find ease in this part of their structure and they will keep them natural. Preservation... We only get one set of real ones in this lifetime.

Rest

Often times the most important asana (pose or posture) of the day is savasana (resting pose). For the first 24 years of my life I thought resting was nothing more than a punishment. Only when sick does one choose to lie down in the middle of their day and rest!

As an interested student of yoga I decided to try and open up around this idea of mandatory resting at the end of each yoga class. In my world it was basically five to ten minutes of totally forced space out time. I felt strange lying so still and quiet. The buzz of New York pulsed through me as I tried to ignore the classic jack hammers outside and honking horns aplenty. I would have pretend conversations and food fantasies for each one of those minutes allocated towards 'resting'....Not even the most soothing music could help me escape from the noise outside on the streets of NYC and the noise inside my head... I would count my breaths, I would tap my fingers, I would really try!! And nothing worked.... until I stopped trying. It was only a matter of time before I was able to find deep satisfaction in savasana. Feeling my body become heavy, my breath quiet. The energy of the outside world became white noise and cradled me into deeper rest. With this small amount of rest I was able to find space in my mind, almost a re-boot of my brain and body. Savasana was genius.

So here I am, Thursday evening, eighteen yoga classes taught so far since Monday and I am planning for tomorrow a full day around savasana. I will take a rest between each class. The phone will be off, my computer un-plugged. No, I will not answer the door if you knock, and yes, I will be lying on my floor doing absolutely nothing.