Seeing Inside Out

Focus Right Where You Are

2012-01-26T15:19:00.009-05:00

Focus on your breathing. Not changing anything. Where do you feel it most? Don't get lost trying to quantify more and most, or choosing here or there. Try to simplify and feel wherever you are feeling the sensations of your inhale and exhale just now.

Stick with that for a few breaths.

Notice where you are finding the breath to feel more vivid in your body, and if you've already wandered, come back to the inhale and focus on where you sense breath more fully in your body. Just for now, just right there. Allow your mind to quiet down a little bit.

Begin to find the three-dimensional quality in your breath, just as it is, just where you feel it most now.

Notice how it describes your internal spaces from front to back of you. Spend several breaths on this.
Notice how it finds a way to describe the top and bottom lengths of you. Spend several breaths on this too.

Just come back to where you feel it most. Perhaps that has changed. Don't think your way into this, just notice that you are thinking about where you feel the breath, and come right back to feeling the breath.

Continue to allow your attention to notice the way your breath describes you. I know you cannot notice everything, but imagine that you could! Follow your curiosity into your hip joints, along the back of your rib cage, into the subtle tilting of your pelvis with every breath. Is your inhale grainy or smooth, is the exhale noisy or soft? Are there qualities in this breath, now? coolness or heat, jaggedness or elasticity? Don't worry about using words to describe qualities. Notice what you can and come back to noticing without getting lost in cataloging. If you do get lost in words and trying to find language, just come back to focus your attention on the breath. No big deal. One great aspect of this is that there is another breath right after this one, so nothing is lost. Just come back to your focus.

Seek out any dull areas in your body, where you don't seem to feel any connection to your breath. Pay attention to that space for a few breaths, allowing your awareness of the breath sensations elsewhere to soften, like a gaze that is unfocused.

Restart if you got lost, and notice where you feel the breath now. Perhaps you can move around a little, do a few yoga postures (asana), or walk around a bit for a few breaths. See if the focus of your attention can keep coming back to find where you feel your breath and where you don't so much. After a little moving about, return to a position you can hold for a few minutes, sitting comfortably, or perhaps laying your body flat on the floor. Bring your attention back to where you feel the breath in your body, continuing to explore its three-dimensional qualities, seeking out any areas that feel dull or unmoving.

Even a few minutes of this every day helps support you in physical, emotional, and psychological ways! There is no "goal" or "end" to this; just set aside a little time to get interested first in what you notice, and then in how that changes.

This is one way of meditating. It offers a way to begin cultivating awareness, increase your ability to focus attention even with all the distractions in the mind, and to strengthen the connections between your mind and your body. This definitely helps me to be right where I am, wherever that is.

Warrior Walking

2012-01-25T12:42:00.004-05:00

This morning after teaching, I experienced a remarkable synthesis of yoga and the moment in daily life. Walking home there was a saturated feeling of soft support of my bones through my contact with the earth, spaciousness in the joints of my hips and shoulders as I moved, a wide open quality in my view of the urban scene around me. There was joyousness balanced with stillness in my thoughts. I recognized this sensation as that of Virabhadrasana, the warrior, in my yoga practice. I was startled to find myself a walking warrior on the streets of Brooklyn!

What really awakens in the warrior poses? Can the gaze be soft and inclusive? Does the support felt in the foundation of the earth allow a subtle rising energy that is alert and poised? Where does the breath expand, what is releasing? Where does the mind grasp, find clarity? Can there be spaciousness in the joints and a balance of effort and ease that prepares you for whatever is around you? All of this can be going on at the same time in all of the three traditional standing warrior poses, Virabhadrasana I, II, and III.

The subtleties are in the cultivating of your awareness to enable you to take in the muscular work, the alignment of the structural elements, the softening of the edges and the gaze, the placement of the breath as a buoyant support for staying in the present moment. This allow you to stay present, not blanking out or fading away. Often in classes students are led through a vinyasa that takes them through one warrior into and out of another. In that experience there can be a collaboration of stillness and movement if the student can let go of gripping, yet hold steady to alignment and ease throughout the muscular and joint shifts. This is really not a simple endeavor, and often I see students physically muscling their way from here to there and back again. Of course a yoga practice often begins right there, at the junction of the physical and the alert awareness that effort can spark.

Experiment with remaining in the asana, exploring your own experiences in the moment, and see if you can struggle less, effort less, and notice more. Take out an element, perhaps the uplifted arms, and discover what is happening with your bones and breath. Acknowledge the emotions and the patterns that effort and resistance might bring up. See if you can soften more by attending to the quality of your breath. Then, perhaps add the arms back into your pose. Can you express the open gaze and steady heart of the warrior through the soft expansion of your collarbones from the soft center at the base of your throat all the way out to your fingertips?

No Goal + Open Outcome = Experience

2012-01-21T18:02:00.004-05:00

I set myself tasks, getting groceries, showing up for practice or for teaching. It is easy to put objects on the calendar and begin investing in how all that comes to pass, whether it does, and with what efficiency. The checking off of the list becomes another layer of goal. It is strange that I can so easily rely upon all of this to define myself. I can identify with having the capacity or not to do these things. But using this to define myself is as though assigning myself a meditation practice and putting my body on the cushion is the same as meditating. Looking at that straight on, it is so clearly not so. The setting of a goal may well influence the formation of an intention, but is not the act itself of doing and being.

The action of being present is not the same as aligning the spine. Aligning the spine can help with many layers of awareness, to be sure, and that’s where some confusion might enter the picture about yoga and the practice of yoga. A recent article in the NY Times about yoga and injury brought up questions among students and teachers these past few weeks. The article clearly describes the negative physiological effects in specific cases of repetitive overdoing or predisposition to injury in asana practice. It can happen even in meditation if a person insists on sitting motionless for many hours a day, disregarding physical best practices. These are distortions of what the practices demand, in my opinion, since yoga and meditation actually do make demands but more squarely in the areas of commitment, cultivating attention, and willingness to see patterns of behavior and reactivity and bring intelligent awareness to these patterns.

I have no intention of mimicking the life and practice of spiritual renunciates from previous centuries or even current times. Neither is yoga a weight loss program or a new age form of aerobic workout. Teachers who teach this way are grossly misrepresenting the depth and range of the practices in order to serve a client base who want this from them. So everyone takes some risks along with that approach.

Any body can benefit from connecting to their physical body, and from initiating a conscious practice of cultivating awareness, deepen the understanding of the interactions of breath and energy and apply some yogic principles and philosophy to their way of being and doing. Students of yoga can be young or old, able bodied or disabled. There is no requirement to achieve specific asana or lengths of meditative sessions. Asana practice certainly can develop strength, flexibility and stamina, body awareness and cultivation of energy use without participating in a sport. Meditation practice does enable the loosening of constraints of habitual ego patterns developed over years of responding and reacting, and gives insight into seeing conditions that continuously change with more clarity.

Perhaps seeing one’s own drive and emotional baggage when doing yoga is one of the first and greatest benefits of the practice. Learning to step back from the pressure we put on ourselves can help us see that there can be a less encumbered flow of energy for us to use. This is truly a saving grace. Good teachers are on this path, and can help students discover their own feet there too.

Applying the Practice

2011-12-22T10:55:00.007-05:00

I look out the window and see the bare hills, the dark leafless trees, the bright gray cloudy sky. Birds are busy at the feeders, and though I am North now, I know that there are roses still budded and blooming in Brooklyn. Today the winter's day will shift into the longest winter night and from here on the daylight grows by tiny increments. Mild temperatures and moisture could fool me easily into imagining it is early April and Spring is around the corner.

But that is not so. Choosing an image for a season's greetings, my husband and I agreed on a deeply snowy image.

My elderly mother-in-law is no longer traveling and so, my closest clan of four will transport ourselves to spend this next weekend together with her and my sister-and-brother-in-law. This makes me feel happy and grateful even as I pack a bag and try to organize for departure. Convenience and ease are not the reasons I exist on earth. I am acutely aware that there is no knowing what comes next, and there is virtually no point in imagining what the next winter solstice will bring, snow or blooming roses.

Sadness washes through my system with regularity these days. I feel a turning of my gaze towards the faces that are no longer here with me, and the small actions of preparing for the ritualized holiday season bring up the softly dark spaces once occupied by people dear to me. Last year I did not know they would be gone now, and here in this moment, I can allow the feelings to arise, see them for what they are -- love and longing, appreciation and gratitude -- and go on about putting candles around the house. I do not try to push the feelings away, ignore them, or feel sorry for myself. I simply feel the feelings, as energy arising around my heart and filling my mind with memories that add a dimension to everything I am doing.

In meditation teaching I often say that we are not trying to erase or stop ourselves, correct or change ourselves. We are making the space to see ourselves, experience our self and begin to explore possibilities that are otherwise drowned out by the constant shifting and noisiness of mind and reactive nature. On the mat, the yoga asana flows from physical effort to an understanding of energy and attention.

At this time of year, it seems these practices come directly into my every day moments. I am not on the mat, I am in the kitchen preparing for a family meal, remembering turning my hands towards other meals. I am not quietly sitting on a cushion, I am sitting in a zooming crowded car on a busy interstate highway. It is even more amazing to open up my awareness and focus my attention in these contexts. I feel the sadness, nod at it and let it slide past like the blur of exposed tree limbs. I am glad to be on my way, and there are roads I no longer need to travel. It is complicated to understand this delicate balance of love and loss. The first aspect is to go ahead and feel it, notice it, see what it is. So I use my asana practice here too, to be present in body and energy, connected beyond the reactive state of mind and filling with joy.

Asana is not sport, yet leads to the dance of life

2011-12-15T20:33:00.007-05:00

I really don't know what it is like to be an athlete who has a routine of training in order to ever more confidently master the ways and means of the body. I came to the physical practice of yoga at a stage of life when, truth be told, I thought my physical prime was clearly or at least obviously behind me. It was an emotional and foundational search that brought me to the mat in the first place, looking for the well upon which I could draw to assuage my deep thirst to be worthy of well being.

What happened was simple in a way, as I almost immediately came to understand that I was already whole and the sustenance I needed was within my own grasp, if I could pay attention to the patterns I already had, and learn to release my grip on giving meanings and stories to everything. Meanwhile, I tackled the athletic aspect of asana practice without really knowing what this was, or that I was entering an entirely new way of living in the body I had thought I knew.

My first experiences with yoga asana were inexplicable. I felt as though I was trying to follow instructions while someone spoke in languages I could never hope to understand. I was unfamiliar with my body as a mechanical entity, and knew nothing about sanskrit or prana, as such. It didn't take long for the practice to have its way with me, though, and before long I was taking classes with teachers of various "types" if the class fit into my schedule. So I experienced a little Kundalini yoga, and some Hatha, some Kripalu style yoga, Iyengar and vinyasa. There was a little meditation and a little chanting. And pranayama was taught as it fit into the mood or plan of the teacher, with little explanation of effects or properties. And so I grew in my own curiosities and explorations.

Years went by in which I practiced on my own, even gave up practicing, and then returned to classes in various studios. This is so far from the tradition of a student seeker finding a guru who nurtures and guides a practitioner to trust fully and surrender to the practice! And yet, my own research and experience led me to deepen my practice, take trainings and begin teaching. In this aspect my course has definitely been part of the tradition of inquiry at the source of experience, cultivating awareness and leading to study what other practitioners have also discovered.

Now I physically experience my every day, contemplating the meanings of muscles, the powers of the mind and the intricacies of support in the breath. There are definitely asana that physically elude me, and I admit that athleticism is not my goal in practice, yet I am curious about the mechanisms that enable and disable at each point along the way. I am investigating will and fear, ease and dis-ease, judgment and joy. I seek to help my students find a fuller experience of themselves, without needing to pre-judge or pre-qualify themselves. I ponder the drives within the physical practice, seeing in some students the addictive qualities of exertion and attainment, while others rely upon pattern and repetition to reduce their fear of the unknown. Seeing or experiencing what is true in the moment, and just letting that be so, is a transformative practice.

Back to Basics Again

2011-12-14T17:53:00.004-05:00

There is a constant cascade of words, feelings, sensations, ideas, memories and sounds. I could be watching a student breathing, or riding on a subway, or drifting in and out of sleep and this would still be so. Somehow there are ways to narrow the focus of attention and at the same time open up levels of awareness. It turns out that it never works to try to shut all this down, turn it off, ignore it, block it out. The only thing that works is to open awareness even wider so that, in some way, all this billowing, thrashing, distracting material becomes just a very small bit in a much much more vast expanse.

Sounds unbelievable even to me, and yet, if the breath is the raft and my attention is floating on that, everything else is just part of the ocean.

So sometimes the swells are noticeable, or a wave crashes in and totally pulls me away from the breath. The funny thing is that it doesn't matter at all, because I can smile at this (or not even react beyond noticing that it happened) and turn my attention right back to my breath. Not getting sucked into judging the situation, or hanging on to the idea or the feeling that splashed onto my raft and caught my attention, I lose nothing.

Who is measuring how many times I climb back onto my breath-raft? Who is laughing at the object that managed to pull me off? Just me, all me, not me at all. There is a swirl of energy around my breath that contains everything -- that which will distract me and that which grounds me. The ability to focus my attention gradually gets stronger, more able, more adaptable to the movements of words, feelings, sensations, reactions in general and conditions in particular.

So I come back to the most basic practice again and again: simplify, experience, abide. And it is the breath that takes me, follows me, holds me, sends me, returns me and enables me to play this game at all of observing and being my self.

Relaxed Awareness

2011-12-06T10:02:00.010-05:00

Right this moment, I see that the limbs of the trees are dark and bare against a bright gray morning sky, yet I can dwell among the jeweled leaves in this photograph. My heart can open to the beauty and sensation of the curving canopy arching over the street, and revel in a sense of wonder and gratitude. Yet I am actually sitting at a computer, typing, aren't I? Feeling the starkness now of damp tree limbs silhouetted against the clouds, I begin to crave a hot cup of tea. These feelings, reactions and observations are the product of mind, my own mind! Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras, speaks of the constant fluctuations of mind and offers a systematic study of human experience through yogic practices that can see beyond these radiating fluctuating waves into the core substance of being.

I live in this contemporary world, that of alternate side parking and washing machines, store bought packaged products of every kind and instant messaging. Yet my goal in this moment, and in my life it seems, is to seek out this substance of being. Sounds completely impossible but in any given moment my own breath can make this available to me. I have to pay attention. The kind of attention is something that I am actively evolving, honing, enabling. Whether through physical yoga practice, or meditation, or deciding what will be dinner, or noticing my husband's breath in the middle of the night, this kind of attention can open the possibility of relaxed awareness and access to being fully present.

Relaxed awareness falls into place naturally when the grip of judgment is loosened, so I am not attaching to outcome or object, and my mind can observe the widest range of details and all my reactions to the details freely. I see the glorious canopy above me, and the stark limbs; I feel the rising spring sap and the cold chill of snow on the branches. Do I attach to meaning? Do I hold tight to a preference of one over another? Must I put values on the sentimental qualities of longing and loss, of joy and rejuvenation? I can feel anything and all of that, yet still be free. This freedom doesn't inhibit commitment, since even that is conditional and within the context arises naturally too. It seems that commitment relates to where I turn my attention (as in a yoga posture I can focus on my ribcage or my feet and change the whole experience). Does this make me dull and monotone, without intensity or specificity? I think not. The water of the self remains responsive to the wildest sea, the choppy whitecaps, the smallest waves, the subtlest ripples in the pond; and with all of this available my experience of life is enormous!

All that is solid melts into breath

2011-11-18T14:01:00.006-05:00

The breath has a way of discovering space, just as the air itself seems to find the smallest crack or most enormous canyon. It has been seeming to me lately that my practice and my teaching are growing from this discovery. Directly. My ability to notice the breath, or be aware of it, has encouraged an internal investigation among all my own cells... and this branches out into everything I do.

So when I take a yoga class, I follow directions, just like my students do in my classes. Yet what I experience is my breath slipping under my shoulder blades, no matter whether the teacher says "lift your breastbone" or "press into your heels" or "reach for the ceiling." In some cases there are other sensations, the pulling and twisting, the pressures, and collapses of interior spaces or bones, or muscles, or ideas. I walk on the sidewalk feeling signals from all the points of the body, full of reactive chatter, and the breath quietly expands beneath my ribs, swinging my pelvis just a little this way, and releases my throat as my pelvis quietly swings just a little that way on the exhale...

I am beginning to understand something.
It starts with noticing.
Expands into observing and alertness around what I notice.
Then I sort and contemplate the rising ideas and reactions, eventually letting them all slip out on the exhale.

And I begin to notice that I am understanding something.
This expands into examination and inquiry into what I notice.
Eventually I release what I think I understand and experience my breath quietly slipping between the hairs in my nostrils.

When I can no longer enable my breath to investigate and expand my awareness, I believe I'll be ready to leave this body and try something else.

And so, as usual, I bow to that which sustains me. Om Namo Bhagavate Vasudevaya.

Being: A Balancing Pose of Bones & Breath

2011-10-22T10:55:00.006-04:00

Lately I've been balancing in an open space, where ego defines the self and awareness enables no self. It has been hard to rationalize writing in this blog, as though I hold some kernel or seed, acting to share its potential and growth by posting in cyberspace. This tends to lean a little too far towards ego and I lose my balance. Yet I seek experience in my body -- the practice of yoga, the making and eating of meals -- to validate an existence that is totally normal and real and designed around accommodating ego. Then I meditate and sometimes lean a little far into no self, finding a vastness continues to open that is still unfamiliar and surprising.

The temptation to meditate is leading me towards compassionate action as well as withdrawal from the senses. Walking, teaching, studying, interacting, I can operate from vital energies emerging from that vast open space. But I remain an individual ego - opinionated, full of feeling, clutching at experiences and reveling in reactions.

In these days of lengthening darkness, I cherish those boundary moments when deep awareness saturates, and there is no understanding at all of a defined named sort. Dawn and dusk seem to embody this sensation even as the brightness of day and the layered shadows of night thrill me. I continue to revisit the moment in the hospital when my father and I mutually arrived at the boundary between his living and his dying. It was wide, vast, endless and precise. Universal and personal. Everything was present - fear, love, unknown and known, hope, grief, but the deepest sense was vastness and utter connectedness.

So I've neglected the blog. This has also been clarifying since I let go of defining it. I have been keeping a journal of notes that speak in words - telling of experience or observation or feeling or idea. Journal perhaps acting the role of non-judgmental, all-accepting intelligent parent. Journal as wise, kind, compassionate teacher. Journal as interested and disinterested, informed companion. Not much influence on what arises, the blank or scribbled open page.

Shadows in August

2011-08-12T08:51:00.006-04:00

The clouds slid across the hills yesterday in the form of shadows fluid and dark. I could see this dance of darkness and light changing the tree and earth surfaces in my view, yet being under the cloud shadows was a different story. The intense heat of the August sun halted and the coolness in the breeze stepped forward. Colors changed, and for a moment there were thoughts of those possible predicted thunderstorms. Fleeting, soundless and insubstantial, the clouds continued moving; tall grasses rustling in the sun. This is how we live, here in the shadow, here in the sun. We notice and we don't notice and each moment is just this.

So it is with the day lilies that open their blooms for one day. Clusters on a stalk promise blooms tomorrow or next week until the day comes when it is the last lily bud on the stalk. The bees find their way to the open blooms, the deer nibble off buds with no care for the bloom that is forever lost to sight. Lilies come and go, clouds shift, shadows come and go. Summer months that appear and beckon on the horizon from mid-winter are here and gone too.

So I am here in this moment at the computer, seeing the shadows move, watching the sun illuminate that particular clump of trees and blooming goldenrod, picking the blackberry seeds out from my back left molar. Not dead yet, no longer a child nor childbearing, seeking still a way to express the love I feel and comfort myself as a human being by sharing this moment in a blog post. Easier just to appreciate the raucous sound of the jays, and the fluttering dance of maple leaves in the sun.

Here Today, Here Now

2011-08-01T07:29:00.006-04:00

I am puzzling over the odd illusion that I get things done, that there is an endpoint, that I do something until it is finished. There is great resistance in me over giving this idea up, yet I clearly see it as "an idea." Even in the setting of a goal there is really only the doing. I might finish a meal and wash the dishes but I am not done with eating. I may weed the garden but I am not done with gardening. I may hold headstand for a specific number of breaths but I am not done with headstand.

The lessons of the summer continue with every poppy and daylily bloom.

Living fully within the constraints of this very moment, not reaching into the future, nor grasping at the past, seems to require releasing this idea of "being done." It is not the same as leaving things unfinished, nor does it mean not accomplishing anything, but rather truly letting go of results. I think humans quite naturally construct beginnings and ends for emotional and psychological convenience and to feed the illusion of certainty that we find so comforting. It is a huge shift to loosen my grip on this way of understanding. Once I see it clearly, it seems to have pervaded everything.

Moments of being offer me great freedom from this clutching. In those moments when I can fully be in-the-being mode rather than in the doing-to-get-done mode, there is even greater happiness than from the illusory constructs. But my oh my how I do fight against this! That is where practice makes all the difference. Plodding along, moment by moment in meditation or a yoga session or in the garden, or the kitchen, or with a list, or in conversation, or contemplating my calendar, I can actively see my tendencies and practice loosening the grip.

Wild Raspberries

2011-07-20T09:59:00.002-04:00

This deal we make to take human form does not exempt us from the cycle. Just as with the wild raspberries, some dry on the twig, some half eaten by a bird or slug, some flower and never bear fruit, some ripen and fall, some ripen and rot, some get plucked for jam, and as the canes die and the summer storms rage, there are those not yet ripe, those pink and hard, those purple and dropping, those red to perfection.

I do not care which I am, but understand these raspberries: bushes thick, brittle and thorny; berries fragrant from a good distance in the hot sun.

Just as I understand these raspberries, I find myself to be that oriole waiting in a nearby thicket for a safe moment to swoop in and feast.

Separately We Seek & Seek What Exactly?

2011-07-18T12:37:00.006-04:00

We meditate and struggle to find awareness. In fact what is being asked or sought? Aren’t we simply asking to open the mind; making the time, taking the time, to cultivate focus in order to cultivate open mind? Perhaps not knowing anything about what that is, and that, in and of itself, doesn't matter.

I think meditation is this gift of time to watch oneself be. To experience being, to find out something about awareness and see reactive mind in action. To see our own habitual postures, attitudes, judgments. To notice and drop the frantic (and constant) grip on thinking, judging, making oneself into something. So scary, and full of judgment cycles, to drop that grip -- until it happens and the world does not collapse.

Why do it? Approach this question of cultivating awareness in order to do or gain what? For a while we imagine there is a goal or specific benefit. Do we want to target and pin down the self as someone or something? To allow for self acceptance and find peace from the constraints of judgment? And just how does that result from this gift of just sitting and observing the self, of training the mind to focus?

Perhaps the simple act of consciously sitting the self down, or walking or laying the self down, with all it's burdens and stories, is enough. This is already the success being sought. The step is the goal.

So maybe by breathing in and saying "breathing in, I am breathing in" we allow space for a subtle structure in which we discover in ourselves that we can cultivate awareness without gripping.

I am not gone, not mist either

2011-05-15T07:30:00.004-04:00

The enormity of being present through these strange and miraculous weeks, in which both my parents died, has left me unsure of my physical shell. I feel the breath, counting on it as a reminder of what it takes to describe the line between living and not living. Its qualities have changed, and I wait for the waves of gratitude to return.

I cut the first asparagus. I weed the blueberries and untangle the mesh netting from the delicate branches budded for bloom and berry. There is celebration and grief in my every action.

It is too easy to say that I am quietly turning my attention towards the earth. More complex to draw my heart away from tending and caring for the people I love who have drifted out of this realm. My eyes soften just below the horizon, widening the view without focusing.

Memory and experience are collections of my mind, rotated at will to allow for varied levels of engagement and reaction. My heart beating has its own imperative, driving my body and leading to possibilities that calibrate a normal life.

The apple branches dip just in front of the window, buds amid leaves, blooms amid twigs. This was true last year too, and without any storytelling, the birds peck at the damp bark.

Some Words of Rabindranath Tagore

2011-05-10T06:58:00.005-04:00

Sent (on April 29) by Ruth Waddell (my aunt) to Josh Holland (my father) in condolence for the death (on April 27)of Anabel Holland (my mother), read when received by Josh (in hospital) on May 5th by Sarah Meredith (me).

Read at his graveside by me on May 8, 2011

Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet,
Let it not be a death but completeness.
Let love melt into a memory and pain into songs.
Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest.
Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night.
Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence.
I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.

I know that this life, missing its ripeness in love, is not altogether lost.
I know that the flowers that fade in the dawn,
the streams that strayed in the desert, are not altogether lost.
I know that whatever lags behind in this life laden with slowness is not altogether lost.
I know that my dreams that are still unfulfilled, and my melodies still unstruck,
are clinging to some lute strings of thine, and they are not altogether lost.

A Jane Hirshfield poem

2011-05-01T18:41:00.002-04:00

from The Lives of the Heart, 1997, Harper Perennial

Late Prayer

Tenderness does not choose its own uses.
It goes out to everything equally,
circling rabbit and hawk.
Look: in the iron bucket,
a single nail, a single ruby --
all the heavens and hells.
They rattle in the heart and make one sound.

Seeing the Whole

2011-04-25T08:56:00.006-04:00

The body defines us like a fence. We imagine it keeps us intact and we judge ourselves, often incredibly so, based on what we see as the self in the body.

I've been spending much time with my dad in the hospital and separately with my mom in hospice care. It seems clear to me that the person we are exists both as a kind of saturation in the body and at the same time without any physical attachment to that body. Obviously the state of the physical self influences a great deal in the way of our conditional experiences and prompts the reactions we have. Mental attitude or positioning, awareness and the habitual level of gripping have an even more dramatic influence on our reactive nature or our responses or even our comprehension or perception of conditions in the moment or in the mind.

It is remarkable to me that I can be intimately connected to a quality of being whether or not there is active physical presence or interaction. Even hundreds of miles can separate me from these individuals and I remain open and alert to the quality of their being. I understand when I am with them, that the physical body is of paramount importance to them, defining their physical existence in the conditional world of cause and effect, reaction and response. And yet the entirety of who they are actively separates from this physical entity even as I sit with them, even as we talk or hold hands. The touch, the word, the sound, these are fleeting conditions. The quality of being stretches beyond that in a direction-less way, without physical attribute, not subject to time or space, or conditional nature.

With deep gratitude I am catching glimpses of the non-dual nature of being.

Ordinary & Extraordinary

2011-04-04T07:20:00.003-04:00

The string of tensions and joy that make up life are patterned like beads, yet one moment is mindless and routine and the next extraordinary. Whether sitting zazen or flying through movement on a yoga mat, sitting at a desk or waking from sleep on the couch, it is only this moment that we experience.

Mind chemistry has its hold on all the rest of it. What is remembered, what is expected, what is felt, what is responded? This moment, possibly the only action is this breath, this glance, this touch. The practice is so simple: Let go of the patterns that attach this moment to what was or will be and fully experience being.

No, it isn't a state of bump on a log, where everything must fade into nothingness. And it doesn't require a thousand years of training to control every aspect of the physical body. This moment may hold every emotion, not reserved for only one or another. In fact, it is the vastness of this moment that turns the routine into the extraordinary.

In my Tai Chi for Arthritis classes, I say again and again, "Focus, and Relax." Training the mind to be useful with its powerhouse of possibilities, while allowing the physical and emotional self to dwell in spaciousness with communication lines open, well, there you are. Being present. The good and bad of it all becomes a pattern like slides projected on the walls around you, and can be seen for the illusions that they are, as reactions, as conditions, as patterns.

Wake to it, and awareness saturates the dark and the light, opening the moment and illuminating it.

April Come She Will

2011-04-02T10:37:00.006-04:00

I've been traveling strange terrain these past few weeks. From barely melted snows in upstate New York, to full blown cherry blossoms in Washington, DC, to palm trees and azaleas in New Orleans, to uncurling greens on the bushes in Brooklyn, and again the brilliant yellow of daffodil slopes in Maryland. My heart is traveling strange terrain and the world around me seems to reflect the vastness, fragility, beauty, starkness, and unpredictable but inexorable movements of life and death.

For the first time I missed a class at my neighborhood studio where I've taught since Inauguration Day 2009. By missed, I mean simply couldn't show up and had no substitute available to replace me. My father's urgent medical situation required my full presence. There was much sweetness in teaching last week and hearing that a few of my beginning students stayed to practice together.

I've sat with my mother, who is floating on a gentle sea of pain medications and freedom from the constraints of conventions. The tenderness with which she touches her own hands, strokes her own cheek as though forming the shapes in clay; she opens her eyes with clarity and space so enormous that my feet feel lighter as I meet her gaze. She has drifted quite a way in this nearly a month in hospice care. Her room at the group home feels like a soft safe nest. What an act of grace that after a life of such turmoil she is finding her way with such an openness of heart.

I've held my father's hand as he went through procedures, humming the violin part to his humming the viola part of duets we have played, keeping his attention aloft of the changing chest tubes and with the breath itself. His clarity of mind and good humor more endearing than my heart can bear, and his suffering finding a place within my own ribs. He stood by me through all my childhood surgeries, fainting as the anesthesia took me out to sea. I can still feel his two large hands holding my one right hand. So I gaze at the delicate fuzz of spring tree branches against the sky as I walk around the assisted living facility to which I am hoping he can move when, in his words, "the white cells win."

What is a yoga practice? I find my center, my core self, sitting on the Amtrak train speeding from New York to Washington to New York to Washington. I breathe into that three-dimensional space where all three of his chest tubes are draining away the mess that ought not be there. I walk up the stairs to my 4th floor apartment, grateful that my sprained ankle is recovered enough, knowing that each step I take is a practice in letting go of expectations and outcomes; that each breath is truly the gift of presence, in this moment is the fullness and freedom of my life.

There are so many of us on the path. The footprints fit my feet perfectly no matter which way I turn. I feel graced by each and every one of you. I will return your gaze even when I have no eyes with which to see.

The Tenderest Shoot

2011-03-20T09:55:00.004-04:00

Pastel by Ruth Waddell

In Upstate New York the earth is frozen hard until the sun's rays reach into that first few centimeters, softening, and warming even as the air temperature rises just above freezing. On the shady slope under the old maples the snow still holds its piles and drifts, though they've sunken and crystallized from thaw and freeze.

The tiny spikes, translucent yellow-green, flat and luminous, pierce this frozen layer and poke up above the earth into the bright sunlight. The garlic is coming up. The day lilies, too, have begun their journey from the dark to the light, just as the length of day equalizes with the length of night, here in the Northern Hemisphere -- and equally in the Southern Hemisphere. Equinox, "equal night," began with an enormous and unusual "perigee" moon, closer to earth due to its elliptical shape.

How can something so fragile make it through such a forbidding environment? Even once above ground the variations in temperature seem impossible to bear for my skin, and the wind when calm is fine but it kicks up into biting nose-running cold.

Living in this fragile human body I am in awe of the tiny garlic spike. My own strengths are also in my tenderest parts, those that open to awareness, draw my attention, expand my view beyond the frozen and hardened into the wildness of conditional fluctuations. The ability to see my self in all my reactive nature comes directly from this place of openness, where anything might pierce the luminous and let the darkness in, yet just as easily break through the darkness with light.

I cherish my understanding of how the roots dig in and suck in nutrients; the garlic bulbs swell and form cloves in heads just below the surface; the spike lifts and rises into elegant spears of leaves and stems sending up a globe of blooming flowers, the flavors and aromas of garlic in every bent stem, in every bloom.

The Beginning and End of Meaning

2011-03-13T12:50:00.005-04:00

Every moment hangs like a water droplet from the edge of the leaf.
Luminous, tenuous, distorting and beautiful beyond all words.
Why rush through the living and the dying?
Why push the moments into cubicles of attachment?

This is pain.
That pulling, wrenching feeling of wanting something other than what is.
That darkening tenderest of reaching for that which is not so.
That sharp claustrophobic grasping to get beyond the already piled and defined.

Oh it is an odd and disorienting feeling to let this droplet be.
Letting the droplet be detailed -- only as an illusion that it is separate from the air, the water and the elements that define it in the mind as a droplet.

Imagine you are the surface of the sea.
Experience this.
The rain. The air.
The spray. The currents.
The waves, the deepest fault lines.
Non beginning, non end.
Experience being.

What if all we could ever hope to be is exactly what we are in this moment?

This is joy.
Feeling open to the gentle movements of breath.
Sitting in silent vast spaces where mothers birth and mothers die.
The sounds are the echo of inhales and exhales.

Month of March.
This transitional instant,
when I can feel the beginning and end in the mountain mist.
The swelling buds, the frozen mud.
The hot fire and hustling wind.

Taking down the wall between joy and pain,
the droplet becomes the sea.
And I am but the interstice
between air and earth for a moment.

Finding What Supports You

2011-03-10T09:04:00.004-05:00

When I say, "allow your feet to soften into the earth," it might sound like gobble-de-gook or hocus pocus until we begin playing with the way we actually use our feet. This shift in attention brings a level of understanding that can help with balance, with organizing your bones above the earth in ways that help transfer weight without stressing joints, and also lightens the load even in an emotional sense. First we try the communication system between the feet and the brain. Are the signals getting through in both directions? It's good to let yourself laugh when that little toe just doesn't hear you, or when the ball of the foot rises instead of the toes. As with any relationship, humor can help a lot as we gain an appreciation of the other's point of view.

In any posture, whether doing yoga or not, you can explore the grounding of your body. It isn't always your feet either, sometimes it's your sitting bones below you, or the angle of your pelvis that help settle you so that your spine can follow its natural rise. Investigate the way the bones rest on the earth -- exploring while laying down on your back for example, you can just notice the way your breath lifts and releases you and discover exactly which parts of you are touching the surface below you. Cherish this discovery of how your spine works, and allow your attention to follow the breath as it gradually releases tensions and more of your body can relax into the support below.

Standing you can do the same thing while gently leaning your weight into the inner edges of your feet and then the outer edges. What does that mean? Well, can you feel any weight in the inner side of your heel, or do you tend to feel yourself resting on the outer edge? Perhaps more of this than that in one or the other foot? Just find out. Try bending your knees slightly and feel the weight naturally seep into the heels, stretching the front thigh into the hip socket a little can do the same thing -- draw your attention to this and play with it. It may feel like you will fall over, but relax into it with a little shake, a little boogie woogie, and then settle back into it.

Once your communication lines are open, you can really draw energy up the legs from the earth; you can relax into your seat and feel an energetic lift in the deep core muscles; you can ease the shoulders down your back upper rib cage and feel your ribs freely floating over your hips.

If you find the support below you, you can rise lightly and feel freedom in the joints as well as the mind. Give it a try. Focus on it for a moment, whatever posture you're in! The deeper support will become evident once you allow the exploration to begin with the surfaces of things.

It's Magical

2011-03-08T08:47:00.004-05:00

Gently lifting arms with an inhale, wrists flacid, and on the exhale allowing the hands to drift back down to the thighs like seaweed softly undulating in the waves. A genuine effort for most of the 80+ year olds in the room, but their faces glow with peace and relaxation. Letting go of the tension in their fingers, of the clenching in the shoulders, they begin to sit taller, and settle their feet under their knees.

Eyes glowing after class, smiles readily spreading on faces, even with the very serious business of standing up and taking hold of their walkers, these students do not care if they are "practicing yoga" or "doing Tai Chi." We are sharing a morning of breath and presence, letting go of judging ourselves and each other. Sometimes I cannot help but exclaim, "Who would have thought we could be working so hard and feel so relaxed!?"

We do hard things. Sometimes the hard thing is communicating with toes, or attempting to lift one leg. Sometimes the hard thing is trying to inhale just a little more in a three-sip breath, or perhaps hold on the chair seat and lean to one side. Each body has its struggles, each mind has its resistance and predisposition.

Yet what happens is magical. Gratitude that we can inhale an arm upwards and release it on the exhale, that we can sigh an out-breath together to relish our effort and relieve more tension, that we feel lightness in our legs as we align the bones and let the earth carry us. It is this sharing, sweet and complex for every person in the room, that heals and encourages, that carries us through the dark times and hard losses. Again and again I bow to my students with reverence and gratitude.

Winds of March

2011-03-03T20:29:00.003-05:00

Walking on two feet, my sprained ankle gently seeping deep gratitude with each movement. I was able to return to teaching at the Shelter this week, adding in this piece I had cut away to make space for my healing. Now the students bring their joy and sorrow to me, quizzically and laughing out loud, eyes closing, sighing and silently.

I pass through the seasons as I walk from shade and wind into sun and warmth, remembering the tornado that ripped through the neighborhood and took down big old trees. One huge sycamore trunk stands truncated with one large limb reaching out askew - a remnant still enormous. The piles of snow, gone.

I've been substitute teaching for a fellow teacher who went to India for 6 weeks, and her delicate aged student has offered me an open well from which to draw, dipping the bucket, winding and unwinding the rope. These days I feel the energy pulse from my palms when I am near her, and can feel her breath moving towards me.

My mother is dying. She is saturated with happiness to know that the path is now clear and no one is pretending anything about what kind of living she will do. Criticized all her life for not carrying a tune, she now hums to herself. When asked what she is humming she grins, yes, grins, and says "Why, I don't know!" Delightful. No need, no need to know, to hang on, to grip and clench, to explain, to ask, to argue or deny. No need, no need to put up with, or put down, to reach in or pull away.

This is a most remarkable time. I revel in it even as I careen a bit wildly on the road, as though a powerful wind is blowing and I'm giving in, just a little.

Nothing is Wrong, It's just Fear

2011-02-28T22:12:00.005-05:00

It wasn't hard for me to tell my mother that she could let go if that's what was right for her. It slipped out as though it was always there, our eyes smiling at each other. She was fingering the scarf I made for her that only a month ago she said had reminded her of the taste of strawberries. Somehow, I was completely calm and relaxed telling her that I will miss her but that it was okay. Maybe it was because I could feel that the stream was already flowing in that direction. Perhaps it was because she seemed so happy to be floating on the water headed towards the falls. I can hear the falls, I just don't know exactly how far away they are.

Attachment. I suppose it is the big attachment, that we hold on to the idea of being alive, of other people staying alive, that life is what we hold dear and hold on tight. The practice of seeing my own attachment to anything, an opinion, an outcome, a schedule, a relationship, has been so revealing of how I make meaning where there are really just constantly shifting conditions whose visibility depends on the light.

So I sit in one place, open to the deep contentment I saw on her face, feeling the fear of the work I will have to do once she is gone, knowing that her presence is not some thing nor does it belong to anyone, not even to her. Her presence is the surface of the water that is everything in the sea: wave, froth, air bubbles, sand, beach, conch shells, sand crabs, sky, wind, the sound of the falls in the distance.

I don't know the way, but all paths lead there.

This Asana is Contraindicated for ...

2011-02-20T12:04:00.004-05:00

me, and yet I practice. Listening to my own arguments, I hear fear and I hear determination. There is goal setting and there is wishful thinking. There is regret and self-doubt, and there is hopefulness and curiosity.

When I began practicing yoga I took any class that fit in my schedule. I was approaching 50 years old and I knew less than nothing about the lineage, names of luminaries, history, even potential health benefits. I didn't even know what shape I was aiming for in the Asana of the moment. I listened deeply, worried on the surface about mixing up my right from my left, and began breathing into a new space of awareness inside.

This fall my practice will be much the same as it was 10 years ago... I will be discovering that I can change the angle of my lower spine by remembering my big toe, and I will use the wall to prepare for Ustrasana (camel pose) just to see how much energy I can raise from my Tadasana (mountain pose) knees. There are many Asana I can explore in my practice, and of course, my practice does now include teaching which is a magnitude of exploration I could not have imagined in those first few experiences.

Every Asana has benefits that reach into the basic functioning of the body -- circulation, nervous system, muscular strength and flexibility; and the mind -- judgment, intention, challenge, determination, curiosity, resilience and focus; and the organs -- etc. Every asana has contraindicated conditions, for example shoulder or ankle injury, stages of pregnancy, frailty of bone, uncontrolled high blood pressure, etc.

As a teacher I may mention a few of the "if you have this, modify in this way" instructions, but I find it hard to say, "just don't do this." I find it especially hard to say it to myself. At the moment, I have two physical variables that would contraindicate nearly everything I do in my yoga Asana practice -- including what might seem simple like sitting in a cross-legged position.

So here is the secret: Do not hurt yourself. Follow the path of the breath and prepare your physical body for practice with an open mental attitude of exploration rather than goals and end results. Use props and find out what is actually happening in as full a way as you can in that moment. It is not getting into the full pose of Ustrasana that will help you if you have low back issues or rotator cuff problems. Yet many of the steps along the way will be exactly what your body can best use to mobilize, stabilize and strengthen, stretch and explore.

It is the mind that wants to take the full expression of Urdhva Dhanurasana (Wheel). Deepening and exploring a supported heart opener over a bolster or block, or using blocks to support your sacrum and your upper back in Setu Bhandhasana (Bridge pose) will give you more possibilities to experience your life than you could imagine.

So it can really help to find a teacher who can help guide your practice into the deepest places you can explore, and slow things down, rather than attending classes that continually show you what you can do to hurt yourself. It helps when you don't believe that everything rests in the final pose, and keep an open mind about what might open your practice.

Let Go of That To Do List!

2011-02-16T13:43:00.004-05:00

I resist the whirling vortex of the list of what must be done and relax into this moment, fully free. You could say that I am taking refuge in the completeness of acceptance, or just that idea of "being here now." There really is nothing that must be done, (I am breathing in and breathing out), though there are many many ways I could use my energy, (I need to call the hospital and take that package to the post), and I do turn my energy. Every where I turn, my energy turns. Where I turn my drishte (my focus), so my attention turns.

This is a direct learning from my yoga practice. It is the focus of the attention that draws the energy to that point. We are breathing all the time we are alive here in this body, and yet when we sit still and focus on our breathing suddenly we hardly know how to breathe in and breathe out. We watch ourselves struggle to simply hold our own attention in one place. So it is a worthy practice to let go of the judging and the constant review of the items on the list, and practice simply being present.

Just when I start thinking, "oh my life is so complicated, I don't have time to do this, no one would imagine all the things I am juggling," someone else says these same things to me about them! I smile, maybe even laugh, fully accepting this is human nature. Celebrating that we are alive, we have nearly infinite (did I say "nearly?") ways of using the moment-to-moment life we have. Yet so often the focus is far away on something projected or remembered. That way is the path of anxiety, stress, insufficiency, and sorrow, in a word "suffering."

Resisting that whirling vortex of "must do this" and "should have done that" and "how will I ever get all this done!" I can quietly wash the beets, enjoy the red stain on my cutting board, hear the happy clicking of the oven lighting, and feel the firmness of my hand gripping the knife. Later, after I teach a few sessions of yoga, I will share these delicious roasted beets with someone I love. I do not have to put that on the list, nor resist it.

Moving from the heart

2011-02-10T08:42:00.003-05:00

The practice of supporting the heart is a practice of using the heart for support.

Learning the Lyrics by Singing Along

2011-02-07T09:39:00.003-05:00

Repetition and patterns are powerful ways of teaching ourselves, so it is no surprise that when we have the same reaction again and again, we learn to cement that response. Perhaps it is laughing at jokes that are not funny, perhaps it is swatting the fly that buzzes nearby, perhaps it is resenting another day on the job.

Think of how much easier it is to sing along with the song on the radio, or the ipod, then it is to remember the lyrics on your own. We sing along and sing along and with the support of the music we begin to remember those lyrics, hum-humming where we don't quite remember the words.

It may sound like a plan of positive thinking, but allowing yourself to experience the possibilities of reacting differently, and practicing that, can have the same impact as humming along until you get most of the words. You can learn a new song and enjoy even humming along til you know it better. Maybe stuffing envelopes feels demeaning or is boring or obviously doesn't use so many of your other positive attributes and skills. You can try stuffing envelopes with an awareness of this attitude, and open yourself to enjoying even this job more. Perhaps you will come up with ways to improve the work itself, offering to translate the mailing into a series of pre-printed postcards or emails, making those envelopes unnecessary. Perhaps you will come to appreciate the reaching out that each envelope represents.

Give yourself the freedom to choose, separating from a repeated negative pattern.

There are so many more songs that you can sing.

A Sense of Humor

2011-02-05T15:08:00.004-05:00

When in doubt, smile. Did I just miss my stop?

Let the laughter come. What made me think that I could do more than this today? Funny hopeful me. How lovely this day has been, taking me all day instead of 3 hours! This just opens the possibilities for tomorrow.

Taking out those stitches for the third time... grinning ... amazed at how thoroughly I can explore ALL the possible ways to do this incorrectly! And nodding at my bravery to try it one more time, not knowing if I will recognize the correct pattern I seek to knit, having discovered so many others ...

No, its not embarrassing to fall on my ass in a yoga class! It is my human nature expressing itself and making me laugh! It is my heart that reaches up towards the ceiling through my feet. Maybe by the time I'm 60 I'll be able to move away from the wall... or not.

Checking the level of personal investment, in the opinion, in the judgment, in the appearance or the action, by the self or an other. Can there be humor towards the effort, in the process of being present? It's a trap too easy to catch one's self in. Is there something good about feeling bad about one's self? Learning to see truth, we can separate from the judgment and live more fully.

I can think of so many times my children got something done to their own satisfaction, having left out important elements, or mistaken one thing for another. The effort was still good, the effect sweet if incomplete or "incorrect." Let the compassionate heart smile, even if perhaps we watch a heart break apart; we can know that it is love and kindness that will find the way back to wholeness, not judgment or emotional dissection.

Meditation: Find a comfortable seat and center physically, or can be done walking or laying down. Allow the space behind your eyes to soften. Fill that space with warmth and gently smile in just the corners of your eyes (yes, even closed). Feel your cheeks begin to lighten. Allow the warmth of this smile to find the corners of your mouth (loosen your jaw). Breathing, softening, feel this smile seep around your lungs, your heart, your hips, your knees. Smile softly at your toes. (Even just the idea of toes!) Staying here in the warmth of your own compassionate acceptance, friendly, kind and open to whatever you find. When your mind wanders, return to the softness behind your eyes and once again slip into a smile.

Smiling at our own attachments to sorrow or pain, we can see our path and find freedom.

Deconstructing a Flood of Words: Using the Yamas

2011-02-04T08:36:00.012-05:00

Imagine meeting a friend and as you are standing there, the friend begins handing you one thing after another. The first thing you take with one hand and keep making eye contact with your friend. You can hold this thing easily in one hand. The friend immediately hands you something else, a handful of small things. You put the other object in the crook of your elbow and take the handful carefully in one hand. The friend then hands you a large awkward object and places it across your outstretched forearms. Another object follows immediately that is sloshing in a container. You stand still while your friend continues to pack every possible crack and balance point with one after another thing.

How many times have you had a "conversation" that felt like this?

Words are mental objects. They represent ideas, carry the kernel of reactive emotions. Words can literally transform the inner landscape with visual information, and can reconfigure a thought process by eliminating or adding elements.

Speech is a powerful way to communicate, yet words are often used without any idea of their actual impact.

There are moments when each of us suddenly feels the weight of our words. Awareness is intense in those moments when the call for clarity is great, or when the emotional impact of each word is evident. We feel it when each word is painful; we feel it when words reassure. Words can bring fear, excitement, calm, joy, anger, confusion, clarity.

Teaching yoga requires specificity in language when directing other bodies, when inviting the minds of others to focus, when suggesting visual or emotional constructs. It is one sided, directive-suggestive-instructive talk. This is a collectively agreed upon inequality. When this kind of inequality occurs among people in typical conversations, it implies the same tacit agreement, and can be very uncomfortable for the listener, and sometimes leaves an unpleasant feeling afterward for the talker too. For some, this kind of one-sided hand-over-the-stuff talking is a challenge to compete, or sets up a verbal jousting match. The listener might make an effort to break the cycle or show equal fortitude, or feel a need to claim some equal worthiness for attention. The deep need to be "right" or "have the last word" can easily arise.

The person who storms you with object after object probably does not realize that you cannot hold on to all of it. It is likely they cannot see that this transfer doesn't afford you any opportunity to make any use of the objects. It may be that the intent is not to gain your understanding, but simply a desire that you take all this stuff to lighten their load. The odd part is that the objects actually remain in the custody of the person who gave them, even as they weigh you down. It seems those same objects can be handed over again and again. Perhaps they are not the actual load, but simply represent the burden being felt.

Taking stock of the deeper layer of communication can help slow this flood and might actually help shift that burden through awareness. If the friend (or you) are lonely, it may be a desire to feel a shared experience of life that provokes the stream of words in one direction. Perhaps a sense of isolation creates an urgency in having another person confirm the stream of experiences or reactions. Perhaps it is uncertainty that pushes a person (or you) to such an effort to be convincing, taking each point and covering every detail of the subject just to be sure and reinforce this version of them. Sometimes it is a deep need to be appreciated, or acknowledged, that prompts a person to disclose too much of what they know, or how they feel or how they arrived at their conclusion.

Kindness and respect can stem this flood. Allowing the undercurrent to rise to the top can be as simple as saying, "It must be hard to go through all this on your own," or "It is interesting to hear how you think about this, and I can tell you have thought a lot about it;" "There are many who would react the way you reacted." This stops the flow of details and returns to the core of the communication. It is also sometimes useful to simply say,"I am interested in what you are saying, but cannot absorb all these details. Can you tell me the part you really want me to know?" You can even ask, "Do you want me to respond to this, or are you simply telling me so that I will know about this too?"

These kinds of responses come directly from an investigation of the yogic principles of the Yamas (one of the eight limbs of yoga as outlined by Patanjali from centuries ago).

The Yamas are yogic principles of outward and inward behaviors. Each of the outward principles relate to the concepts of how we function, and interact. Taking on any one of these will lead to the others. Ahimsa - non-violence - applies to being kind, refraining from the domination games, being patient with yourself and others, and practicing compassion in speech as well as action. Satya - truth - again relates to the deepest awareness rather than the surface feedback. Being kind in the truth you express will enliven and enrich, rather than dominate and degrade others. Asteya - non-stealing - is a practice of respecting the energy and time of others as well as your own, not simply refraining from taking objects, but also making unnecessary demands of others. Brahmacharya - restraint - the source of celibacy practices and also of relinquishing overindulgence and repression, embracing moderation and respecting the divine in all beings. Aparigraha - non-possessiveness - is the cultivation of non-attachment, honoring of the many strands that weave the fabric of life without dictating or grasping, making space for the self and others to simplify rather than vie for control.

Starting with any one of the Yamas as an investigation is like having a walking stick for uneven terrain. Everywhere you go, whatever you may do or experience, let the Yama you choose help you feel the structure below that supports you on the path.

Seeing the Inside Space

2011-02-03T08:31:00.008-05:00

Today as the sun rose something dawned in me too. I heard an echo of myself saying that I was disappointed in someone and suddenly knew what that really was. It felt as if literally the walls had blown out and the truth was left standing in an open space. This disappointment, standing in that space, was a state of my own mind, an attachment of mine, built out of patterns in me, and had nothing to do with that other person. In fact, as I looked back on times in my own life, I could blow the walls out there too, seeing my individual self doing exactly what I needed to do in that moment, as I experienced it, based on conditions and patterns. Do I really need to hold on so tightly to the judgments and conditions of those moments? Can I truly let go of that and simply see the shifting sands for what they are?

Why do we situate ourselves this way? Putting the emphasis on hardening into the judgment as to what someone else (or our self) should-would-could be or do, rather than allowing the present conditions to be visible, and the choices clear as choices?

We can build inner support for this -- with enough practice! It is not that difficult once there is understanding. I don't mean the kind of intellectual understanding of "oh, yes, I see how this works..." but the deeply embedded understanding that no longer requires building all the walls to hold up the ceiling of attachment, judgment and isolation in the moment.

In it together, without separating self and other from compassionate acceptance, it is much more natural to see how we, as human beings, live and act within the boundaries of our reactive nature. We don't judge a bird for landing on a particular branch rather than another. Can we tolerate the notion that the whole process of our living on earth is a miracle of unforeseen consequences and that we can remain open in each moment to the possibilities without attaching to one particular outcome?

As the people of the Middle East experience the earthquake of their own making, I hope that they can individually and collectively let go of the idea that only one set of conditions is acceptable. With so many competing interests, there are bound to be many possible strands in the weaving of the new rope with which to make the basket they want to carry their hopes. It is by turning this compassionate acceptance towards ourselves that we can learn to let go more deeply. Finding that we do not need to turn off connections, we practice breathing around and through the harder moments and the confusion of reactions, allowing the straightforward view of the structures we build to hold our feelings of disappointment, approval, etc. more clearly.

Then we can look openly into each others' eyes and see. The emergence of a beautiful new human being gives rise to the vastness of possibilities, constrained only by our vision of choices and attachments to reactions. It is no coincidence that the form of that beautiful new human was once the inside shape of another beautiful human being.

Just a note in the moment: Farewell to dear Beati who transitioned onward (age 90), and welcome to new darling Rylen, just getting the hang of the breathing air thing.

When Things Seem So Much Farther Away

2011-01-29T13:02:00.003-05:00

Halfway into the last snowstorm I noticed how all my normal errands seemed so much farther away. My yoga practice has seemed a bit like this too, since I sprained my ankle.

Turns out it is not really my body that puts long distance in my yoga practice, nor the snow piled on all sides that makes the local food co-op any farther away. It is all in my mind.

Making adjustments in yoga practice is a natural part of practice, and comes with the territory if you are going to practice on your own or in a class. Just because the teacher or the person next to you can lean on their wrist does not necessarily mean that you can... or put your heel down when squatting or lift your arm next to your ear. Each body comes with its own patterns and structures and it is more than half the amazement of a yoga practice to discover all this about the body you actually live in.

The same is true when injured or not feeling well, or under special natural conditions. A dear friend of mine is very near to the end of her pregnancy and just this last week ran into three specific movements in her yoga practice that had been fine last week but her body just said, "nope, skip that one this time." This indicator is helping her understand the deep changes taking place as her child prepares to emerge. My ankle tells me many stories even as I work into a seat for meditation! In this way, my teacher is always with me, drawing my attention to sensation, to the shift in the breath, to my own wandering awareness.

And of course my food co-op is right where it has always been, but the journey there and back has been brought sharply into focus as a moment-by-moment experience. I am making constant adjustments for my ankle, for the ice, for other passersby, for the beauty of the nearby fence all decorated in snow. How wonderful to be aware and alive! Of course I will be happy when the pain subsides even further, but do hope I can remember to notice when my attention shifts and many things seem closer while others move farther away.

State of the Union: knitting and purling

2011-01-26T12:03:00.006-05:00

When I began knitting again I couldn't remember how to even get stitches onto the needles. Then I began looking at all these awesome patterns and thought perhaps at this stage in my development I might have cultivated sufficient attention and patience to try making something that requires attention and patience. I was surprised to find that some of the most intricate looking patterns are actually the very same simple stitches that I have known since high school days... the basic knit and basic purl stitches. It is how they are used, dispersed, slipped, knit together and so forth in patterns that might just be two or four rows, but could be as elaborate as 16 row patterns... Well, it just amazed me that so much variety, beauty and usefulness could come from such simple stitches used with intelligence and diligence.

Last night as I listened to the State of the Union speech, I was reminded of this idea of how basic stitches can be used so variously. It depends upon the skill of the hands holding the yarn, the appropriateness of the attention to the level of difficulty in the pattern itself, and the willingness to focus fully -- yes, even tearing out what has been done to get to the mistakes, figure out what happened, and, while still maintaining an even temper, continue on in the pattern.

In my estimation, our current president is keeping just such a steady hand on the yarn. He was handed a terrible tangled snarl and a very complex pattern two years ago. There was much to untangle, much attention required to see and then re-establish the pattern chosen by the election that put the needles in his hands. Now he is seeing the pattern emerging and can go back to clean up a few missed stitches, while beginning to add the shape required for this new stage in the work. He can change the lighting to see better, and he has asked for help in spinning the yarn he needs, but his hands remain steady throughout.

Some will say, ditch the pattern. Some will say, change your yarn. Some will say, oh, just leave that mistake no one will notice it later. Some will say, this piece you are working on will never fit. Some will say we do not need this knitting any more, just stop knitting and let everyone figure out for themselves how to card, spin and begin again.

I say steady hands and focused attention will continue to create a thing of beauty -- resilient, useful, and adaptable to the changing climate. Each will have their chance in turn to take the yarn, but not many can see the pattern in the tangled knots. Lucky we have such a one just now.

Inquiry & Acceptance

2011-01-20T08:39:00.007-05:00

Prodding, poking, pushing at the self, at others, at conditions, into what seems so: this is reactive nature at work. Curiosity sometimes masquerades as the motive for questioning things, for aggressive inquiry. Fear may be hiding at the core in some of the pulling, pushing at and away; flowing under both timidity and boldness. How can we practice yoga, or meditation for that matter, as an essential inquiry and accept the inquiry without all this manipulation?

Deep in this tangle of branches the sun simply shines on the snow. It doesn't matter if the snow is covering old pine needles or is clinging to the branches of the wintry tree. The sun simply filters through anything it finds and interacts without hesitation in its specific seasonal angle, heat, duration -- all of which are conditional upon where on this earth's sphere we are observing that it is shining.

This is the magic of awareness and acceptance. With a focus of attention, and deep openness to whatever the attention finds, like the sun's light our attention can continue to shift and reach anything in its path. So with attention, and the key is acceptance. If we must control, name, categorize, and react to what we find, we are lost in the constant push-pull interaction of the surfaces, forever entangled.

The inquiry can be the beginning of noticing how "I," the person I have built out of experiences and meanings, with materials like conditions and reactions, respond to the inquiry itself. Do I resist? Do I tense up? Do I weep? Do I compete with myself? What is the pattern I have already created for this category of "inquiry?" Once seen, let the reactions rise and fall. Allow the light of your awareness to filter as does the light of the sun, reaching whatever it finds in its rays. The ability to witness the rising of responses, like feelings and thoughts, tensions and spaces, comes as you accept that you can continue observing without getting lost in the tangle.

So we practice. "Practice" implies that it is an ongoing experience, not a once-and-done kind of knowledge. Each moment that I inquire and accept is a living present moment, connecting to something far more universal and open than the reactive nature I observe.

My sprained ankle is healing, gradually giving me insights and experiences of myself functioning in the world. With each step I find I am inquiring as to the balance between the constant friction of judgment and testing and the open space of acceptance.

What Is This?

2011-01-17T10:42:00.004-05:00

Here it is, mid-January, cold, freezing in fact, and yet the sun shines brightly in the rolling landscape of upstate New York. Snow blankets all but the most windswept fields, and icicles are forming from the roof. The sun's warmth has its effects, the wind has its own, the shadows of the old mountains cause their own colder micro climates. At some level I accept all this, just as it is, as long as I am inside a warm place, protected as is appropriate for my thin-skinned, fur-less, warm-blooded body. I can appreciate it, even revel in it, as long as it doesn't directly threaten my sense of personal comfort and safety. Yet I can understand the harshness of it too. I have deep respect for the blue jays who puff up as they sit on the branch, yet dive into the sunflower seeds in the feeder after the sun has warmed things up just a bit. The world is not cruel, it is what it is, too cold for me, tolerable with adjustments for the blue jays.

It is in the realm of human interactions that things are not as easy to accept as they are, and what they are is not so clear. Judgment forms about the way someone does or does not do something, says or does not say something, wants or does not want something, feels or does not feel something. Yes, even the way someone does or does not understand or notice something can be judged, and categorized, filed and stored for reference again and again. This becomes the building block of interactions and relationships. This can also barricade me from seeing my own way.

In situations where I do not like things as they appear to be, I can go on ahead and judge others and myself, creating internal structures filled with longing that things be different than they are. Whatever the motive may look like, it is of no use, as this does not change anything except my own reactions. These, in turn, set traps that hold me, caught in my frozen idea of how things seemed in that moment. Ensnared in longing, with no idea of the real source of that craving, aversion or attachment, and with no way to let it go.

The first step is asking, "what is this?" and letting the answer continue beyond the first layer. Perhaps that first layer is frustration or anger; perhaps it is sorrow or shock; perhaps it is anxiety or the compression of being in a hurry that floats up first. Letting the answer continue means asking again, "and this?" in response to that first answer. Maybe the anger is a feeling of failure or hurt feelings; perhaps that sorrow is loneliness or disappointment. Ask again, "then what is this?" Allowing the body to relax, to find its way to the sources of self-judgment and the fear of external judgment.

Sometimes different words help, instead of "what is this?" I might ask "is this me?" and this can help me see that none of this, none of this emotional reactivity actually defines me. "And is this me?" for the next layer will reveal that it too is not me. These are like transparent layers I can learn to see through, through the sad heart, through the loneliness, through the fearfulness.

Then what do I do with those peelings of my reactive self? Can I let them drift off in the cold wind, or set them down gently in the glittering snow, and feel how my heart continues to beat? Allowing my body to rest for even a short span of a few breaths, the flood of reactive, judgmental behaviors and feelings can be seen and separated from who I am. This is where choice begins as to being where I am in that moment or staying stuck in the structural patterns of judgment and blame, even admiration that turns over the power of possibility to someone else, rather than recognizing this in my self.

This common struggle to be present becomes a foundation upon which I can stand. In some ways it is the core of my practice, allowing myself to learn and unlearn these patterns and find freedom. It is not mine alone, but part of human nature, a vastly shared experience. Ah, and here come the chickadees now that the temperature has risen just a bit. Doing what they do, as they are, in this very moment.

Teaching with Myself as the Unknown

2011-01-16T13:11:00.007-05:00

I am very curious to discover my teaching this week, since my own inner balance has shifted to be ever more obviously unknowable. I twisted my ankle a week ago as I walked on slippery sidewalks. The process of recovery has been revelatory so far. Aside from the literal experience of sensation and changing forms, of course I have had to change my behavior and expectations. I've chucked normal patterns and am observing how I react. It is using a lot more energy than I thought it would, just to watch all this, and be in it.

The coming week I have shaved off a few classes and obligations, canceled a couple appointments and spread a few things out over the week. The plan is designed to give me more time between everything to elevate the foot, to recharge my energy, to take the time I will need to travel slowly from place to place. Even with these changes I am going to negotiate carefully as I go teach this and that class. The getting to and from the teaching will be as much to learn for me as the teaching itself.

There is no way for me to know what will happen, how it will feel or what the progression of events might include. It amuses me that my mind keeps asking how I might find a solution in the form of someone else who might take away the uncertainty or the discomfort. I know that fundamentally it is my own body that will heal itself if I can stay out of its way. Exploring what helps that healing and what subtracts or detracts from that healing is really at the center of my attention.

I'm struck by how this is yoga practice as everything. Tenderly, non-judgmentally I am exploring the range of motion of the rest of my body, and consciously relaxing my mind in its tendencies to grip and attach, to project and to figure. I practice as I knit. Practice as I wait for help with something, practice as I step down each stair, practice as I move in my sleep. It is a fascinating process of integrating and experiencing. The shift in my view is what changes this injury from a deficit to a gift.

Sensations as Sensations

2011-01-12T14:08:00.005-05:00

This morning I slipped on the icy shoveled sidewalk. One foot began moving away and the other ankle folded to catch my balance. Pop, twang, and back on my feet. All in a moment, yet in that moment I had a flood of sensations that triggered a heightened awareness. Gratitude that I was standing on a sidewalk, fear that I was injured, amazement that so little had happened and so much had changed, fear that I could not trust my body to function normally, curiosity about the condition of my ankle, pain, hesitation, gratitude the foot took my weight. This all took just seconds. Each momentary feeling took hold and let go, took hold and let go. Then the investigation began.

I have been using a meditation of noting sensation and allowing sensation to be sensation, freeing the sensation itself from the tag lines of feelings, interpretations, anxieties, memories and projections. For me, this means actually choosing not to name the sensation that arises, simply sense it. Each sensation has the potential to reveal the way I operate, attaching thoughts and feelings, assigning meanings, planning etc. in response to the sensation, which has by that time passed into something else. What remains is the construction I've built around it.

So I tested my range of motion, began tentatively walking, using leg muscles and experimenting with how I put my foot down, when to transfer weight to the heel, how high to lift the leg to relax the ankle before its landing, etc. Very slowly and with attention to each step, I got where I was going. It was an amazing journey.

Sometimes I speak about the space in each breath when we remember to notice. I have often spoken about awareness of how we transfer our weight to the earth. Today every single step is an experiment in awareness, letting the fullness of the sensations be just that, and watching the moment unfold.

A friend posted a quote on FB "Every setback is a detour to my goal." -- NFL Colts Head Coach '09 This is a marvelously subtle way of letting go of the steering wheel and the judgmental mind and allowing experience to be just that. We cannot get anywhere from here, we can only be here. By being here, fully, we are just where we need most to be.

I have canceled or postponed all my teaching for today and tomorrow to tend my new project, to experience my body and allow rest and healing to be part of every step. What a blessing my practice has turned even pain into curiosity, even fear into openness. The saying attributed to The Buddha is "Pain is part of life, the suffering is optional." My twisted ankle is such a good teacher!

Traumatic Events: Hard lines, Soft Soft

2011-01-09T11:50:00.008-05:00

This morning I feel bereft as I contemplate the shootings in Arizona that have killed several people and critically knocked a vital public servant off her feet for the inevitably long term, with unknowable recovery of her abilities to function after very serious brain injury. I look at the history of lost public leadership in my lifetime and understand that this kind of event can be quite provocative. Our nation has already allowed policies of national distrust to draw forth vitriol and hatred among us simply because we might see things differently, look different, think in a different mother tongue, have been born in a slightly different longitude.

I am the granddaughter of immigrants who fled to this country to save their lives and to enable them to achieve some semblance of their personal value rather than spend lives limited by oppressive regimes and prejudices. I can certainly see how it is that I both clamor to defend and glorify the country I live in, yet distrust any authority. Postures of power and control run on the dualities of promise or greed and fear or blame.

Most of my life I have been deeply drawn to participate wholeheartedly while at the same time harboring an equally deep distrust of that which draws me. I fell in love again and again, at least from the age of 4 when I first remember the texture of the cheeks of my new love in my half-day kindergarten class. My resistance to the war in Vietnam was all encompassing, whether feeding Veterans on Washington Mall, smothering myself and a friend to protect against teargas, building bathroom walls for the local county office of the "Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam Now," or reading everything published at that time to support my fierce arguments. It was equally important to me to try to change the way my high school taught important subjects as disassociated from living and doing, working strenuously to institute an experiment in hands-on learning within the wider community. My writing and working life has been mostly in this same all-or-nothing mode of operating. No one could be more impassioned about giving grants for public programs, or fairness in schooling, or even the benefits of a yoga practice.

Somehow my human nature continues to underline the duality of this reactive and attached behavior. In order to be persuasive, productive, needed, I have always carried the gene for tunnel vision right next the gene for distrust of structure and authority. Okay, perhaps even my own intellectual, sexual and personal structures have betrayed me in the past, drawing me deeply towards that which also hurts me, but certainly political activism will do that. I think that any deep drive to change towards a particular goal or need has that in it too. But the distrust is also a warning and leads to sabotage of purpose. The balance will remain elusive with this deeply divided way of understanding and being.

I apologize for all the moments when my actions have emanated from that dualistic posture, knowing it almost always caused harm. I am sorry that I, too, have at times zealously obscured truth or evolved selective deafness to the voices around me. I am grateful to be here, living long enough to just begin to understand this, hard as it is. My practice helps me find the truth, and allow it, breathing and connecting to a much larger awareness.

May we transition into a new way of being, find our way unimpeded by regret, bitterness, hatred, greed and delusion. Rest, heal, go in peace. May the suffering cease.

Back to Basics

2011-01-07T12:55:00.006-05:00

Everything is part of everything else, but when starting a yoga or meditation practice, it does help to narrow it down a little bit. Keeping some basic ideas in mind can invite a more relaxed attitude as we begin a new journey.

For me, yoga has a simple set of principles to begin: breath, alignment, awareness, kindness, curiosity.

Traditionally, the eight principles of yoga, in plain terms, include our relationships to the world around us (yamas) and to the self (niyamas), alignment (asana), breath (pranayama), concentration (cultivating awareness), withdrawal of the senses (developing non-attachment), meditation (interacting beyond dualistic understanding), and the integration of being beyond a separate self (bliss).

Let's be satisfied with whichever part of all this we can hold in our awareness. Start with the basics:
• paying attention to the breath, when you remember; and return to paying attention to the breath when you realize you have forgotten.
• attend to your alignment -- the way your bones stack to transfer weight to the earth and support your movements; and when you realize you have forgotten about your alignment, simply attend to the effects of that and make adjustments.
• cultivate awareness, allowing your breath to lead you in and out of your sensations, reactions, emotions, and postures. Let your mind help you by focusing one one thing at a time, developing the ability to focus by accepting that the lens slips and requires readjustment.
• be kind when you find you have shifted into remembering, replaying events, hollering at yourself, projecting possibilities, wishing things were different, going over things that take your attention away from right now. Just smile a little at your human nature and cultivate awareness of any pattern that might emerge in your internal ways of operating.
• take an interest, be curious, about how your body works, how your mind works, how your interactions and reactions rise and fall away.

Any and all of this will lead to all the rest of this, without you having to make a list or keep a chart or memorize Sanskrit names or learn physiology. Let the names become generalized, in fact, when you notice that you are drifting out of this moment, name the drift -- "drifting" -- or a bit more specifically "worrying" or "dreaming" -- and come on back to NOW. You can do this on a yoga mat. You can do this right at your desk, this minute. Or brushing your teeth.

May all the hoopla over 2011 simply open the path as you make your way.

shadow and light

2011-01-03T17:48:00.002-05:00

Sometimes we just don't know what we are getting into. I seem to learn about beauty or pain, about the changing temperatures or the rising tides from opening my heart.

Cactus do not withstand harsh climates, they grow into unique and remarkable beings. Perhaps there is no need to name names, label everything, pretend that once it has a name it exists in a particular format. Like a shadow that is always there, we only see if there is enough light.

If the light shines just right everything that is solid melts into air.

Seeking the Source & Nodding to it

2011-01-02T11:28:00.005-05:00

Reactions come so fast that it is easy to mistake them for reality. Feelings definitely are real in their effects - coloring everything around them and can even change the idea of who we are while they're at it. Responsiveness is something we all share to varying degrees. Without that our lives would not be of much interest, too monotonous and dull. But feelings can sideswipe us too, taking our breath away and leaving us gasping for air; and at times pump us so full of excitement, anger or other strong emotion that we are practically blind to what is going on around us or even in us.

It can be hard to let go of a mood of melancholy that taints everything with regret; or to hold on to a feeling of happiness that saturated a time shared. Sometimes we feel the whole world turns in one moment, happy and going along until WHAM something changes in the way things are said, or done, or the events take a turn in unexpected directions and then everything feels different.

Some describe emotional twists like changes in the weather, sunny and pleasant, and warm enough until the wind kicks up and as though standing in a shadow or out in a wide field, the chill cuts deep and nothing can be done to protect us. But in fact, this is not quite the way it feels. It is not an outside influence like the wind, but an internal one that changes the way feelings take hold. Then everything changes because of the way we respond to those feelings.

Recently I was traveling and visiting family and friends. The sequence of activities and moving from this place to that was remarkably easy. Though there were twinges of sadness upon parting one, there were thrills of happiness at the next stop. Getting out of the routine was remarkable, and the landscape around me was quite different and entirely provocative. I didn't have much of an agenda beyond the going and doing together with people, trying to make fun out of daily stuff like meals and such, catering to various interests among us, and offering opportunities for visiting. But after going along for a few days, a comment was made to me and it was if something shifted and what had been a happy time turned tumultuous, brooding and rife with hidden hazards.

I had been reading "Radical Acceptance" by Tara Brach, Ph.D., and was able to use her powerful tool of taking a pause, literally, and relaxing my body, to seek within myself where the pain or sorrow or tension was held. Going deeper, beyond the tightness in the stomach or the clenching of the throat, the racing heartbeat, I was able to find a more embedded source for the reactions that I was feeling. The deepest level of feeling was that of being a failure, that of being unlovable or unworthy, the response way down under what seemed like frustration or uncertainty. It can be set off by any type of rejection or criticism, and start a cascade of justifications or defenses. I have seen this pattern before in myself and in others. It is not uncommon to have these deep feelings, and to be ruled by them. But it is not required that we react and react from that same wounded place from long ago.

Obviously no one is perfect, and holding oneself to that kind of standard in all things -- especially emotional and connective aspects of relationships -- is really a waste of energy. But it is important to see where the feeling of "less than" or "unworthy" come from. Perhaps that urge to be loved and accepted went unanswered long ago, or we judged ourselves like objects rather than living beings and put a shameful stamp across our foreheads for all time because of a behavior or reactive moment in the past. When we do this, any little thing can refer straight back to those feelings.

Seeking out that source of the deeper feeling makes it possible to nod at the whole self in which the emotional response rose. Then we might be able to deal with the situation at hand in the moment just as it is, rather than attaching it to everything that has ever felt bad or gone wrong before. (Oh that sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach will take us right back there to that awfulness...whatever it was.) Each of these reactions is just that -- a reaction. Events change continuously offering the possibility that with a fresh and open mind I might be able to feel the current feeling and go on, being authentically myself without all that 1) baggage, 2) self-abnegation and 3) fear of disaster!

What a relief it is to see each response as a response. Not that there is erasure of responsibility for the actions I take, or the effects of those actions. I can recoil and in that instant see myself begin to entrench in a defensive reaction. It is at that moment that I nod at the deep sorrow that underlies the response, and can put down the defense in favor of being present in that moment rather than holding on tight to relive an imagined moment of the past.

treasuring the unknown

2010-12-26T20:09:00.002-05:00

It is unfamiliar for me to walk in a Southwestern desert landscape. The forms and contortions that vegetation make to adapt in the severe and extreme climate astonishes me. I find the utter newness keeps me vibrating with joy and alertness. It is so natural to resist change or the unfamiliar, yet I have chosen to put myself in a context where I do not have the usual clues and continuity. What remains steady is my attention.

I know that one foot steps and the weight shifts. There is red rock dust and gravel beneath my feet, the air smells sweet and there is no wind. Everywhere my eye turns I am seeing the possible and the impossible. My own interpretations cease to carry much meaning. There is such grace even in the harshness. So much life even in these adverse conditions. It is easy to watch my own patterns here, in this wide earthly ocean. I see my attempts to categorize, to combine what I know with what I do not know. I feel the open spaces where the unknown beckons my mind even as it is easier to leave the mind resting, an observer.

Bon Voyage

2010-12-22T12:49:00.004-05:00

The journey varies in length. In all, it is but an instant. There are longer views, ways of looking at it, like counting days or years or hundreds of years. The meanings appear and disappear, changing in shapes and size.

Uncounted people were born and died in the past week, let's call it a week and imagine it as a certain number of days starting at a specific moment. Or let's not. Many hearts were squeezed in sorrow and pain, many exploded in unimaginable joy and love.

This is the journey and there is not a one living being who can successfully avoid it.

The wonder at the lunar eclipse, the deep seated joy at the seconds of light in each day, the profound peace of the night, all come and go, as does the sobbing and the disbelief, the intensity of silence in the absence of the loved one's breath.

Each moment we sit within our constellation of ideas, feelings, sensations, imaginings. Each moment our constellation moves ever so slightly around that core of being that is uniquely our own and yet not ours at all.

Honoring each and every one of you, in this moment, since it is all I have to give, "Bon Voyage."

FInding the Jewel in This Moment

2010-12-17T08:44:00.005-05:00

Open the pomegranate.
Marvel at the deep color
And perfect imperfection
of geometry and succulence.
Now deal with the stain,
holding that appreciation
within yourself
succulent and
perfectly
imperfect
as you are.

This is the best moment of your life.
This is the best moment of your life.
This is the only moment of your life.
This is your moment.
This is your life.

Cold wind in your face,eyes watering,
Shove your hands into your pockets.
Meet the gaze of each passerby
and smile to the corners of your eyes
sharing the exhilaration, the confrontation.
Being alive and awake.
Watch yourself rush, or regret, pity or retreat.
And smile at your self
grateful for the cold
to the corners of your eyes,
cherishing the warmth of your heart
and your runny nose.

This is the best moment of your life.
This is the best moment of your life.
This is the only moment of your life.
This is your moment.
This is your life.

Knitting a Yoga Practice

2010-12-16T11:29:00.007-05:00

Yoga can seem endlessly repetitious, or perhaps infinitely new, simple and complicated all at the same time. On our own, we fall into patterns, push and pull at them and sometimes get tangled so that we have to put the whole thing down for a while. Or daunted, puzzled, blocked or frightened by what we find, or what we cannot find, we seek a teacher or other resources. Sometimes we just walk away from practice for a while.

I have recently found myself to be knitting. It is many years since I made my last sweater. Since then, I have forgotten even how to start the yarn on the needle (called casting on) or how to read the directions of a pattern or to see from the yarn on the needle what stitch it is. In the beginning I had to scrounge for yarn and make up a project out of my head in order to get going. Then I searched for my stash of yarn from years ago, discovered two projects abandoned mid-stream, and both leftovers of yarn and new batches ready for a project.

Surrounded and encouraged by the help of friends (who are also my neighbors --one of the blessings of a cooperative way of life), I am relearning how to knit. It is as a true beginner I approach each aspect of the task, yet as my hands begin to move there is a deep familiarity. As one of my teachers put it, I already have experienced hands. Even so, each stitch requires real attention of a specific kind, while also keeping in mind a pattern within the row, and a pattern beyond the row to include a part of the project or the whole piece. Yet my hands and eyes must attend to this stitch being formed on the needles and must not wander too far into the realm of patterns and projects else I'll drop a stitch, split the yarn with my needle or do the wrong stitch all together. I have had to tear out and start again several times on the simplest of stitches simply because I could not keep my mind focused enough to count the stitches as required. With some humor and acceptance, even this superficially frustrating task was deeply satisfying. Not giving up, holding to a real standard, knowing that in some way my life is held and unfolding in each impermanent and purposeful stitch.

While making something for someone specific, suddenly I want to give it to several people. Ah, I can observe my way of operating... I would like one too, I would like each of these people to have one, I would like to be the person who can make something for everyone... all of that. Out it comes, quietly while I work on this stitch. My hands get tired, my fingers ache. I change my posture to make myself more comfortable. Just til the end of this row, I think, and then turn and start the next row. Well, I'll just do this last side. Watching myself strive to get more done, while at the same time enjoying the feeling of the yarn in my hand, noticing the ache in that finger, taking deep pleasure at the beauty of the methodically twisted yarn in its emerging form as something else. Knowing that even the end of this row is not the end, nor will the end of this scarf be the end. I feel connected to centuries of hands making warm things from spun fibers.

At this moment I truly can no longer see the difference between knitting and yoga. Staying here precisely with this stitch, profoundly understanding that the stitch is nothing and everything, just yarn yet already a scarf, part of a sheep yet wrapped around my aunt's neck, while really still moving in my fingers between the knitting needles. My yearning to be productive remains held stitch by stitch in reality, just as easily pulled back into a thin line of yarn or an elaborate design. This is like the singularity of the breath totally entwined in every cell of me, the movement and wear of the body with all my intentions and inattention, the tangle and deep peace of the mind and that which eludes the mind's grasp.

Finding Compassion In Your Self Towards Your Self

2010-12-14T22:21:00.004-05:00

The yoga mat is an invitation to stand right in the middle of your self, being fully present. So often we feel as though we are on the outside looking in, or somehow on the fringes of the circle where others seem to belong and we do not. Whether it is holidays or routines, we seem to easily separate ourselves from the core of our being, judging and dissecting instead of holding ourselves in compassionate acceptance.

Taking a few minutes on the mat to center yourself, you can sit or lie down. Closing your eyes, allow your breath to soften and deepen into a quiet belly breath for a few cycles. Crossing your arms across your chest, wrap your fingers around your upper ribs right under your arm pits, allowing your thumbs to rest pointing upwards like suspenders near your collar bones. Now breathe gently into your hands for a few minutes. Encourage your shoulder blades to soften into the mat if you are laying down or relax down your ribcage if you are sitting up. Gently release your hands to rest on your thighs or alongside your hips if reclining, palms up if that feels natural to you.

Bring to mind the feeling of gazing into the eyes of a being from whom you felt undemanding love. Perhaps you had a pet as a child, or have one now, or perhaps an infant or grandparent has looked into your eyes with full acceptance and non-judgment, simple wide open acceptance. If you have difficulty drawing up an image or feeling of this from another being, imagine you are the one staring at another being with this acceptance and openness, not measuring or qualifying, just fully willing to accept who they might be. Sometimes picturing a kitten or puppy, or small bird like a chickadee, can help bring up this feeling.

Once you have really focused your attention on this sensation, allow the warmth and fullness, softness and luminosity to flood you. Direct this open, accepting, compassion towards your own being, perhaps as though gently wrapping yourself in a warm blanket and flooding your inner core with lightness. Simply breathe and feel this non-demanding acceptance.

When your mind wanders bring it back to your breath gently expanding and contracting within your body. You can narrow your attention now to the coolness of the breath coming in through your nostrils, and the warmth of the air as it leaves your nostrils. Allow yourself to fully absorb that there is no judgment in the breath, there is nothing lacking in your being.

Gradually begin to move your wrists and ankles. If sitting, gently massage your thighs from hip to knee, and then your calves to your ankles. Pressing into your feet with your thumbs, smooth the energy from your heels to your big toes, from heels to the next toes, and then the next until you have gently massaged energy to flow into all the toes.

Encouraging your view in these wild windy days and crowded holidays, full of expectations and celebrations, from a deep core feeling of warmth and compassion for your self will help you understand that you are far from the outside looking in. Rather you are deeply rooted right in the center, just as you actually are, and breathing in and breathing out can remind you of this any time you remember to focus in on it.

Acceptance: Friend Your Self

2010-12-13T08:49:00.005-05:00

Irritable when your shoelace breaks as you prepare to leave?
Frustrated to discover you are short of lentils for your walnut lentil loaf?
Defeated to find they don't make that specific wallet anymore?
Angry that there are no seats left on that cheaper flight?
Upset that the frame doesn't come in that size unless special ordered?
Anxious that your right hip won't let you Ardha Chandrasana or Vrksasana?
Disappointed when you get home to find the 2nd delivery was attempted in your absence?

These are all normal situations that can escalate a feeling of helplessness and anger, especially when the pressure is on to squeeze things in to a tight schedule, or there are deadlines and holidays coming with their own special requirements.

Acceptance is a very deep and rewarding practice. It provides a base from which to observe the reactive self; and with an openness and kindness a bit like a friendly arm around your shoulder, it can allow the moment to pass without the clutch of despair to cloud your view or your action.

It seemed to me growing up that political activism and "fighting" for what seemed right was a noble interaction in the world. I took it as my personal mission to try to make other people happy in a strained family dynamic and thought it was normal for people to try to "fix" each other. This kind of well meaning but destructive idea assumes that there is a better way to see or do or be than that which comes naturally to each of us. I think the schools perpetuated this attitude of "fix it" rather than one of growing what was there already. I'm sure there was a striving for good purpose and intention in all this, but acceptance was not a foundational part of it. Reactive nature provoked more reactions, emotions could hijack intellectual understanding and pit each person against themselves and each other in a blink of an eye. Many a moment was saturated in defeat, self-rejection, blame of others, and helpless sadness. I see how this created an external and internal idea of who each of us could be. I came to understand that there is a common core to all of us, a strand that binds the heart in love, not judgment. Acceptance is part of the path to this understanding.

Everything that happens is transient - it comes and goes. If we can keep our response in the moment as well, we are liberated to react and to act in very different ways than if we allow every little bump in the road to be felt judgmentally, as part of a cumulative defeat, a negative judgment upon the self, an excuse to blame or distrust, and on and on with external and internal negativity. When we bind the moment to these rising emotions of judging ourselves and others in response to fleeting conditions, we trap ourselves further in the emotional cycles of blame and shame, anger and frustration. Of course, this limits our ability to see or experience the range of possibilities and make choices for non harming, non judgmental behaviors.

Imagine approaching the object of discontent as a friend, something like: Ahh, someone I recognize, know well, and though respectful of some distance between us, feel warmth and curiosity. At first it can take an active intention to feel this, to take this approach. Like training oneself to follow a procedure, it is assuming a particular pattern to shift away from other possible reactive patterns. In time, though, it becomes a natural response, to look with affection or at least kindness upon the person whose action or behavior might have disappointed in the past, or upon the shop clerk who informs you that what you seek is no longer available in that size, and even upon your desire to have that thing.

How we function in the world is much more a choice we make when we take this approach, rather than blowing around in the winds of reactive nature. We do not have to let reactivity define personality and character, and create so much negativity in the heart towards the self and others. This is a first step in the practice of acceptance, seeing through the reaction, cultivating the awareness in the moment of reactivity. Once we begin to see the layers and possibilities, we can choose to water a different seed, so to speak.

The practice deepens beyond the surface behaviors into a level of understanding that liberates the attachment to assigning meaning and value in all directions. And even with the occasional negative reaction, while still under the thumb of attachment to control and judgment, the way of being in the world is transformed.

Constancy: the discipline of being

2010-12-08T07:52:00.004-05:00

Every month I go visit my elderly relatives, parents and aunt, about 150 miles away from where I live. Every day I take a few minutes to meditate and practice even just a bit of yoga aside from my teaching. Every night that I am home, I share a meal with the one(s) I love who are living with me. These are not ritual patterns, they are mindful acts.

Being present is not a casual operation! With time and practice, mindfulness and awareness become more constant as a way of operating, of being. But to get there from here takes intention and action.

So just as with checking mail or washing dishes, there is a determination of value in it even when it has nothing to do with how the world will judge you or what others think of you. This is something that comes from inside, the urge to find your self or to shed layers of the self that no longer suit you, or that chafe or cause pain.

Meditation and yoga practices do not take you from yourself. It seems to reveal a more vivid quality in fact. I can see my wandering mind, I can notice that tight muscle buried deep in the hip socket. I can watch feelings rise and fall in myself. These are part of me, and I can adapt my functioning to accommodate in different ways once I am aware.

Choosing to travel every month, choosing to show up on the mat every day, these are ways of connecting. The energy, relationships, awareness and peace that come with being present are vast, seem larger and more inclusive than anything I've run into before. This state of being can accept sorrow, can include anger and pain, can hold joy and excitement, can be all the facets of emotional and physical self and still be intact. It is this undamaged quality to the energy, the being, that is the revelation. No matter what else has happened, or we think is happening, this inner energy is whole.

Curiosity and constancy are enough to get there, add a dose of intention and suffering to pull you deeper into the inquiry and all there is to do is let go of resistance and be.

Expectations & Plans

2010-12-02T07:38:00.007-05:00

It's a set up, all this internal arranging around projections and assumptions. Could be a simple thing, like expecting my spouse to put the pot lid back where I think it belongs, or a complicated thing like expecting to find bliss in Savasana. In either case, it's a construction and prompts a sequence of conditions and reactions. Judgments, disappointment, anger, one-ups-man-ship, controlling behaviors and even affection can link to expectations. How many acidic comments towards self or others have originated in expectations that have not been met? So many awkward and painful moments taint the opening of gifts. Even deeply loving relationships can be poisoned by holding tightly to projected ideas of who someone is, by expecting specific actions, types of achievements or responses. This kind of expectation creates others as who we want (think) them to be, denying them the chance to fully express who they are. Many grown children feel this prison of expectations in relationships with their parents, until the relationships can shift to different ground. This trap is not one way but operates in all directions!

Plans are a different matter if they can be separated from expectations. One can plan a trip with thoughts of being open to the possibilities of choices, conditions, and requirements without attaching too solidly to the expectation that it will be this or that, go this way or that. Think of planning for weather when you travel and you can understand the conditional nature of a plan. Weather has an influence on activities and by accepting the possibilities, we can make a reasonable guess at the patterns based on time and place, and perhaps pack a sweater, or find an optional inside activity. When we are taken by surprise to find an unusually warm day, or windy day, we can make our accommodations on the spot without attachment to disappointment or other judgment. Enjoying this aspect of our ability to react to changing conditions is part of what makes life interesting and allows for a range of experiences.

We might look at relationships to other parts of our lives much as we do the weather, planning for a normal range and observing the reactions that arise when conditions change. This attitude of openness offers fluidity and possibility rather than the clutching of disappointed expectations. The more familiar we are with our own patterns of reactivity, the easier it is to let those patterns shift or even chose a different reaction before acting.

Planning might be setting an alarm clock so that you can wake up in a timely way, knowing even so that there is the possibility of a snooze alarm or a malfunctioning alarm clock. If you know your pattern of reactivity, you can get a clock without the snooze, or put a second alarm clock further from the bed so that you must get up to turn it off. It is the attitude that shifts when we release expectations. Accepting that missing the alarm changes the day, perhaps helps you to see your priorities more clearly. It can help you identify physical or emotional needs that were being ignored, such as resistance to the expectations of the day, a need for more rest, resentment of obligations, or even that you are fighting off an illness, or need more time to prepare yourself.

Shifting from expectations as a way of operating takes time and practice. We will still expect the sun to rise, and the night to fall! Letting go of expectations even just a little can ease stress during these next few demanding weeks. Maybe New Year's resolutions can be seen more as intentions rather than a straitjacket of expectations. Maybe gifts can be felt as intentions too, and the judgment of objects, expense, choices etc. can be softened. It can be the greatest gift to free the people around you from judgments about them and their actions.

Taking that next breath

2010-12-01T08:09:00.007-05:00

Befriending yourself is like a book of short stories, each step of the way there are characters and subplots. Though all by the same author, they may have very different tempos or flavors or impact. Some are short, some endless. One thing ties them all together and that's the breath itself. Without that, all the stories dissolve. So on the journey to radical self acceptance the breath is a deep well from which we can draw, and the more we cultivate awareness of the breath, the deeper the well will seem.

So often yoga practice takes us in its arms when we are tied in knots or desperate for a solution. Many times it welcomes us even when we arrive with negativity and resistance, or uncertainty. Self judgment is a constant companion for some of the practice, and sometimes this even turns outward towards others in the class or the teacher or the world at large.

The path to unconditional love of that embarrassing, messy, inept, awkward, shameful, angry self can begin with the next inhale. Just the simple act of recognizing how the breath flows in, stretching the diaphragm down into the belly and spreading the ribs just a little, lifting the collar bones at the fullest, can redirect this energy and begin to dissipate all that judgment. When you can allow the exhale to soften the inside of your ribs, slipping your shoulders into restful lightness atop that structure, feeling the deep pull of the low abdomen to empty out that last bit of carbon dioxide at the base of the breath, a little ease will begin to seep into the body. This is a direct signal to the mind that it does not have to fight off the moment. There is nothing in this moment that is threatening or destructive. Nothing in the moment that deserves all that vitriol pouring towards it as though the self was the enemy.

Truthfulness (Satya) will show you that there is a tenderness and compassion, an openness towards that struggling self, the one that made the mistake or said that thing or dropped the ball or acquiesced to something now regretted. The breath can help take you, one inhale and exhale at a time, into that space where there is a steady equanimity with which you can see your fears and embarrassments, anger and shame without having to hold on to those feelings and wallow in negativity that prevents your ability to be in this moment. If you are not present now, you are not living your life fully. Walking in one direction with your face turned to see behind you will not help you see where you are going nor where you have been.

Each time you bring that breath in, you offer an open hand to your inner being, a hand you can always reach, one that never waivers in its steadfastness at your best or worst moments. Whether you are on the yoga mat or off, you can let your own breath remind you. That open hand will be there, offering unconditional friendship to you right where you actually are.

Ego & Nirvana: Getting There By Being Who We Are

2010-11-30T08:23:00.006-05:00

In my opinion, ego is the human structure that distinguishes one's self from the constant barrage of ongoing energies all around us. It is a critical part of the filtering and sorting of what comes in, and to some degree controls and influences what comes out. With our physical senses taking in all kinds of data about touching and texture, color, light, tastes, sounds and fragrances, we physically experience and shape our memory and understanding of experience. The body has myriad mechanisms to code and appreciate this, attach meanings and values, and place most of it in hierarchies of influence and importance. Our own unique ways of doing this make us the wonderfully diverse and peculiar individuals that we all are. The contexts for this and the company we have throughout this experience influence the things we file and where we file them too.

The less physical yogic principles of sensory withdrawal (Pratyahara), deep concentration (Dharana), and meditation (Dhyana) are not goal oriented nor do they aim to obliterate the ego or the senses. It seems to me that these three of the 8 limbs of Patanjali are parts of the process we experience as we separate out the essential-eternal witness consciousness from the individual ego. Or, I could say these principles illuminate the underlying vibration, rather than the ego, that which serves as the recording device for the variety of harmonic possibilities representing our experiences.

On the yoga mat we discover a little bit of this structure when we use the breath to neutralize the recording device (ego) and train our concentration on the more universal aspects of being. We can use the mind, the ego being, to visualize the structures of the body, to place intentions in the form of colors or sensations in a particular chakra or imagine the inner form of an asana without taking the body into it. Another example might be when we cultivate an awareness of energy beyond the body, as in feeling support from the earth and gravity. With the breath we can learn to pinpoint our attention and remain focused so that the flow of constant ego-linked observations and reactions can be seen as the foreground (or self with a small "s"), rather than the entirety of being (or the universal self with a large "S"). This is the path of Dharana, which begins to stretch beyond the physical body, giving a glimpse of where ego resides and opens to more of the authentic state of being.

I suppose this is why meditation is sometimes sought as a way of getting away from the self, or approached with the hope of quieting the mind into silence. Both of these attitudes are just that, attitudes that make the path itself a little more gritty. It seems to me that approaching the practices with a curiosity to know more about thus self, about this powerful and chattering mind, can start with the physical practices, the first of the 8 limbs, Asana practice and Pranayama, and open into glimpses, even for fleeting moments, of the space beyond the physical being. The opinionated recording and organizing device of ego is a bit like the shapes of a face or sound of a voice in its specificity. We all have this, and it seems we all have that which is beyond it as well.

Tada drastuh svarupe vasthanam - 1.3 sutra of Patanjali
Then consciousness abides in its true nature

Song of The Open Field

2010-11-28T10:59:00.007-05:00

photo: jesse r meredith

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn't make any sense. -- Rumi

The analytic mind has its place. The fullness of sensory lushness has its place too. Experience, that instant recording of sense and intellect, combines in giving us a history, a sense of our self, a place to stand from which we can define and evaluate all that constantly shifts around us. Yet even deeper below these aspects there is an ancient urge to inhale and exhale, to shield oneself from harm, to test the truth as perceived. Much in our human experience rests in the responses of this ancient center of the brain and neurology. Call it fight or flight, or anything you want, if not ruled by it, we must consciously recognize it and work beyond its impulses.

I love this poem of Rumi's (Sufi mystic poet) that so simply steps beyond these limitations of mind's self-absorption. Recently I acquired a Tibetan singing bowl, and even with my totally rudimentary skills, the song it sings goes so deep. This vibrational quality resides in music of all times and places, and can be held in the simple tone poem of "OM." In my classes I sometimes say that it is present in all things and we hear it when it rises to the surface, but it works the other way too. Even without vocalizing, just being present, this vibration can reach deep into the being quality without getting stuck on words, meanings, separations of self or other.

Devotional chanting is not something that makes everyone comfortable, kind of like singing in a church choir is not for everyone. There is an uncanny feeling of self awareness when sound emits from your own throat and joins almost indistinguishably from ambient sound. Self begins to separate and merge along with the sound itself. This can happen even without vocalizing. Silent "OM" is often more wide open than even that which we speak.

Meditation can be an invitation to be in that place, that field Rumi refers to, where the dualistic right/wrong, me/you cease to exist. Even being there for one second as you read Rumi's words, even one second in that field can change everything else.

Gratitude without Measure

2010-11-25T10:42:00.003-05:00

No need to pile up the gifts or the blessings, marking the gains.
No need to sort the losses, the wounds, the sorrows, noting the missing.
No need to reach beyond the moment into memory or projections of what might come.
No need to fight despair, or grasp for happiness.

Here I am.
Letting go when the time comes.
Cradling with love when the time comes.
Sinking into the earth, or rising to meet the sun.

Here I am.
Or perhaps no longer here.

Not stacking the logs of what has come my way.
Not picking through the ashes of what is gone.

Perhaps there is no difference between that which makes me happy
and that which makes me sad... except the way I respond, attaching
to the idea, my body circuits reacting and flooding me with the chemicals of the moment.

A carrot from our dirt comes,
a walnut from a tree far away,
an apple from the yard, dropped,
a raisin dried from grapes of another season,
bread baked in someone else's oven,
herbs saved from the side yard,
squash found grown in a friend's compost,
cranberries from a New Jersey bog,
oranges from a hill in California,
potatoes from the nearby Middleburgh Valley,
and faces around the kitchen table
made of hope and willingness.

Do we measure this, on which yardstick?
The category of gift or loss? The levels of love or tolerance?
The measuring cup of last year's meal?

I am here, and the greatest joy for me
is the gratitude of this moment.
That I am in this exploration,
human and conflicted,
humble and proud,
loved and loving,
breathing
and not knowing
the next moment
until now.

Ahimsa & Judgments

2010-11-22T08:50:00.002-05:00

There was a children's book my kids loved when they were little that was set up so that each page offered a “that’s bad” or a “that’s good” set of conditions. Each set of pages illustrated the same situation from a different point of view. Sometimes it was hard for my children to figure out at first why it was good, or why it was bad… and they delighted in turning the page to discover the instant reversal of fortune. There are many jokes and riddles like this as well. The biggest is the one we present to ourselves daily, reacting constantly to the conditions around us.

Seasonal change, holidays, markers like New Year’s or birthdays often seem to bring out the “that’s good – that’s bad” in us as we project and remember. We look ahead and say, “Oh no, this is going to be …” or perhaps “Phew, now we will be able to ….,” as if the mere fact that there is a next moment offers us a “good” or “bad” set of conditions. Of course some of the conditions we project or remember are related to economic hardships and climate, to physical conditions and types of community in which we live. Yet even with these conditions there are those whose basic approach is “now I can change everything from what it was,” while there are those whose attitude is “look how this will limit me.” We do not control conditions of the sun and seasons, the wind or the age of our bones, yet we do live with those conditions and have choices how and whether we react.

Here, where I live in the Northern Hemisphere, East Coast of the not-quite-New England United States, we leave behind the summer warmth, as we watch the vegetation lose its green vitality, drying through the phases of colors and textures until all becomes more starkly browns and russets against evergreens and stone. Days shorten, nights lengthen and the air cools, beginning to require layers of protection on our subtle, fragile flesh. Animals living outside in this changing world grow thicker coats of fur, fluff their feathers for insulation, bed down in nests and burrows, sometimes even turning down their own biological thermostats to better match the outside world. They do not judge the harshness or the coldness, the darkness or the lack of fresh greens. The adaptation to the physical world is as natural as the breath itself, and some do not survive the shifting seasons, either by design or by circumstance. We humans uniquely assign values.

It is deer hunting season in upstate New York, suddenly as of yesterday morning. The sounds of gunshots reverberate in the hills. I associate this sonorous punctuation with death and destruction. By late afternoon, driving to or from anywhere there are carcasses hanging from trees. It is a horrifying time for me from one point of view, yet the deer laying dead by the side of the road is also done with this life due to human behaviors, and the deer bones found in the field after the coyotes have finished with it is done with this life as well. It is my own mind, my own judgment that attaches the sense of horror, assigns attributes to the people who roam the hills with their powerful rifles aimed at another species. It seems different if they aim at our own species yet we, humans, do that too and assign a different value to that based on context and intention. We make rules about shooting deer, which some hunters keep and some do not, just as in the context of armed conflicts among ourselves. Some feel the rules are arbitrary, restrict their freedoms to act as they choose, or pin them down in situations where there is ambiguity of choice.

So as I approach Thanksgiving, I turn my own pages, “this is good” and “this is bad.” I watch my own predisposition to say “This is harm” and “This is natural,” and I find myself exploring the world of human intentions.

Do no harm, Ahimsa, is a basic fundamental part of yoga awareness and practice. It begins towards the self, towards other living beings, and in the way we offer our teachings, making all efforts to leave space for others to find themselves. How to apply Ahimsa to the porcupine chewing on my front porch, to the hunter from next door shooting off into the woods, to the broken hearted driver who realizes they have run over a darting squirrel? How to offer Ahimsa in a room full of older people who suffer from attachment to the memories of what they used to be able to do in bodies that no longer do those things? How to practice Ahimsa towards myself as I see my judgmental nature turning and twisting at the toll booth, the body of a dead deer strapped to the SUV roof next to my car?

The hunter from the hungry family who will hunt and shoot the deer, bringing home meat for the freezer to feed them all winter is not killing any differently than the sporting hunter seeking the 5th set of antlers to adorn the wall in their home. The death of the deer is not different. The intention is different. Why does this matter to me? Who am I to sit in judgment of the one or the other?

We make choices about what we do or we fall into patterns of habitual action. We can make choices about whether we judge something or not, and recognize the values we assign to our judgment. I do not foresee a time when I cease judging others or myself. Yet I come closer and closer to practicing Ahimsa in my judgments, leaving just a little more space for myself to choose right action, right speech. Perhaps this also makes a little more space for others to do that too.

Not an Escape Hatch

2010-11-21T08:37:00.011-05:00

Right in the middle of a hard time, I throw myself on the mat. Oh to clean out this mess in me, oh to just erase the hard stuff and feel peaceful. Why can't I just step outside this snarl by meditating and doing yoga?

Even though the practice is not an escape, my practice brings me closer in to what is going on, if I choose to allow that to happen. Meditation and yoga-on-the-mat practice does heal some of my internal wounds, and perhaps these inflammations and old gashes support the current mess. It can lead to the illusion that the practice helps me escape... because I feel so much more equanimity and space for my own breath in the practice. I can let my body unclench from its reactivity and that brings more energy to every situation, even the hard ones. Giving myself space can also change my entire view of what's going on.

So the impulse to throw myself into practice in order to escape and erase is also reactive nature, and though the result is not escape or erasure, the practice itself can help me step back and observe my own clenched hand, my own part in the story from whence the trapped feeling comes.

There are moments when my mind shuts down with the overload of information, when I cannot figure out what to do. There is a misconception that I must solve the problem. Practice helps me notice the specificity of my own posture. Where am I tightened up, where can I lean into the earth for support, how can I let go and make more space? This is the same approach that works best in the middle of a snarl. In its nature a relationship reaches beyond the individual components into a shared energy, an interaction. If I can find my own breath, feel my own foundation, free my own clenching, then there is a much better chance I can actually see and accept the conditions and reactivity around me with more than just tolerance.

My attachment to the outcome of the situation exacerbates the snarling, and my practice helps me see the source of my attachment. That, in and of itself, can set me free from the entrenched place where I was stuck, defending, attacking or drowning in confusion.

Practice, in its nature, helps me see that there is nothing "wrong" and nothing "right." This way of seeing what is, without judgment, eliminates the idea that "problem solving" is relevant or useful. By addressing my own attachments and judgments, I free myself to be more open to all the aspects of whatever the current brings in.

Practice, not to erase, not to escape, but with the possibility of seeing more and more clearly, being present even more fully. Using meditation and yoga will help, not to slip away and disappear, but step into more space for your awareness, for your compassion, for your intellect as well.

Inhabit the body, Focus the Mind & Find This Moment

2010-11-19T17:00:00.005-05:00

Within a few breaths, the room full of office workers feel their shoulders melt, let their attention rest lightly on the breath drawing into their bodies and begin to let go. We had lifted each leg and felt its weight, then released that weight into the floor, into the structure, into the earth itself. Lightness had already begun to seep into the faces in the room. I cannot imagine they had ever sat together in a room with their eyes closed, breathing gently and feeling so complete.

The purpose of my time with them, all the countable minutes of one hour, was simple: to offer a release from stress. Basically help them relax into a genuine experience beyond analysis and words, goals and priorities, to live in their bodies without criticism and learn a little more about who they really are. Just get them out of the dualities of thinking. Just offer them a view of their own personal roller coaster. Just let them be free. That's all. Oh, and do it sitting in standard issue office armchairs, under fluorescent lights, surrounded by tables and chairs.

That evening, I gently tucked a blanket under the head of a 60-something year old woman in Savasana who was experiencing her first yoga practice. She had her knees propped on blocks, and her shoulders open beneath her ribcage. Her palms were softly open, her mind focused on the glow of her energy pooling there. Her breath was so light, her body weightless. If I had the right kind of camera, I bet I could have captured an image of her energy body along with the other 15 glowing beings on the floor around her at the medical center. Practice began with them spreading mats and distributing blankets to each other, commenting and taking care of each other while waiting for everyone to arrive. Just settling on the mats took time, tending to the truth in their bodies, accepting those findings, and encouraging the breath to discover them too.

This morning, as the sun rose, I watched seven beautiful young faces, eyes closed, breathing in and breathing out, each envisioning a pool of luminous energy in their pelvis as they sat on the mat. With every breath I could feel the energy radiating from them, deeply concentrating as they lifted a blind face towards the ceiling on the inhale, then releasing the chin towards their heart with the exhale. It took a few minutes to get them here, inhabiting the body using the mechanism of the breath, cultivating a focus of attention in the mind on this inhale, this exhale. For just a few minutes, they could let go of the outside shapes of the asana and gave up on competing with themselves, not needing to be more than this, accepting right now.

It only lasts a moment. But that is all we ever have, isn't it? This is why I practice and teach yoga. So far beyond the rush of exercise, so deeply moving in the cells, so full of open space and endless possibilities, regardless of time, place, props, age, body weight or condition. I mean what I say: the only pre-requisite is if you are breathing.

Let's Not Talk About It

2010-11-14T11:22:00.004-05:00

A vital part of teaching yoga is allowing students to hear their inner voices, to rest in the awareness of being, to find their reactive natures and witness themselves in action. Verbal cues can make a huge difference in directing attention and cultivating awareness, and they can also blur into a sound wall that blocks all those inner levels of investigation.

In conversation the same thing can happen, and I know that I, specifically, can be totally the perpetrator of a wall of talk. I grew up in a family where there was competitive talking -- and had to learn as the youngest in the gang, how to enter this, or even whether to enter in. Then, out of that context, I had to learn how to hear myself stomping all over the possibility of an exchange. Part of it is probably defense. Okay, I am a passionate type to begin with, but believing in what you say is not an excuse for not listening.

Believing in what you say is not an excuse for not listening.

Listening. Believing.

Believing in what you say can also mean not listening to what is inside your self. Taking a position, holding a position, knowing something so firmly, so elaborately, that it can, all of its own massiveness, block out the possibilities inside your own head, body, awareness as well as anything coming from any where else.

Silence is not a negative quality. Not talking offers a possibility, rather than a negation of speech. The mind is always full of chat, and if we let the chat fill in all the spaces, well, where's the space for awareness?

So, yes, meditation is a way of observing all of this, but yoga practice is that too, and attending yoga classes, and teaching yoga classes, and having breakfast with your lover, and walking your dog or without your dog. Even engaging in casual conversation with someone on the subway is an opportunity to observe, to listen, to find the spaces that surround the piles of words and ideas, yours and theirs.

Sometimes it is infinitely richer to listen more fully than to talk more about it. Not saying that keeping things to yourself is the deal; there are plenty of times when it is essential to share and words are one mechanism.

Words are one mechanism.

Exploring the others is a marvelous journey. So for just a minute, let's not talk about it! As Jacques Pepin says at the end of every TV kitchen episode, "Happy Cooking!" Do the doing, be the being, listen to the fullness and emptiness of whatever you come across, inside or out.

The Most Important Thing

2010-11-13T10:39:00.005-05:00

It struck me recently that as soon as I assign a most important thing, my opportunity for freedom from attachment begins to seep away.

Sometimes while teaching I will say, "just notice what you notice, then let it go." So I am trying to encourage awareness without elevating any particular sensory data or any of the meanings we like to attach to that information to "most important thing" status.

When taking classes I am curious about the ways in which teachers draw attention to a wide variety of possibilities for the mind, directing and encouraging, hoping to bring focus and awareness where there was blur and oblivion. Some speak of alignment points, I know I sometimes do (knees over ankles). Sometimes its energy flow patterns, as in "allow your spine to rise with the inhale," or maybe "radiate from your heart through your fingertips." Then there are the emotional/psychological instructions "open your throat chakra and allow your true voice to sound," or spiritual encouragements like "feel the universal self in your back body."

But what's the most important thing? Attentiveness? Non-judgment? Focus? Alignment? Dedication? Perseverance? Faith? Putting in the time? I really think that as soon as I allow a "most important thing" to take hold, I close off possibilities and become attached to outcome. It's that simple.

In almost any context, if I ask myself "what is the most important thing?" what I really mean is, "Can I focus in on this a little better?" or it might mean "Can I get this situation under control?" The first is cultivating awareness and drawing my attention more to whatever it is, the second is grasping and attaching and hanging on more tightly to what I think. The first definitely makes it easier to maintain my equilibrium, the second tends to lead to willfulness and letting reactivity run the show. Either way, my practice at this point goes back to "noticing what I notice, and letting it go."

Being is such an interesting way to live a life! I am deeply grateful to spend less and less time in that state where I am a puppet and my reactive nature holds the controls.

Sugar Candy: A Beautiful Practice

2010-11-12T20:18:00.007-05:00

When someone compliments me, I know they are making judgments, but it is deeply sweet. Just like sugar candy, we so easily learn to crave that sweetness. Beauty is in the mind, a way of appreciating or noticing some thing or attribute, and that has this sweetness too. Like watching a dancer move through a choreography suited to their nature or the musical score, or when the light at 4pm strikes the tree tops just so, or when the breath carries me through Surya Namasakar (sun salutation) from the inside. It is grace made visible.

When I go to different studios, sometimes teachers come up and actually say to me, "You have a beautiful practice."

The first time it happened it was like the candy, a little shock at the sweetness, and that warm melting feeling that comes with pride and ego growing. Then, like steam dissipating, the little sweet droplets began separating on my tongue and I wondered what does this mean?

It happened again today. Not saying it happens all the time, but I am beginning to find that it is not unusual. And I am finding that I can see the candy as the confection it is, without having to eat it.

My practice is simply me, connecting to the energy that the breath brings me, and trying to hear what the teacher is offering me. I can feel clumsy, funny, and smooth. I can find all kinds of things interesting along the path that another teacher is offering me. Sometimes I rebel against a tone or a sequence or an attitude, but when that happens it becomes my practice too. The practice of watching myself judge myself as somehow mismatched to the moment. That is, of course, impossible, since there is nothing else but that moment and obviously I'm right in it! So it is me chafing at being... which more often than not makes me laugh when I see that it is happening.

Actually, now, today, when it happened again, I saw that it was simply the grace of the breath made visible.

So I looked around and wondered if the teacher also saw beauty in the man standing there fighting with himself about balancing, rather than taking an accommodation for his hamstring situation and letting his body rest in balance. Maybe seeing it in that woman folded in child's pose instead of taking a twisted Ardha Chandrasana balance (standing half moon, with opposite hand down). Or could it be seen in the practice of that dancer in the corner with the incredible lines from fingertips to toes, or that young man who was finding new space in his spine while he tried to relax his forehead. Every one of them was beautiful to me, as they searched their souls for freedom in that moment to let the body twist, rise, extend, stretch, deepen, breathe, and be in a most specific way! Willingly, and with concentration, each one of them was expressing grace as it was in that moment, for them, in that body, on that day.

So next time I see a piece of dark chocolate and crave that sweetness melting in my mouth, I will think of grace, and simply take a piece. There is no need to reject the compliment, nor to make any more of it than its intention of appreciation. I'm learning to leave ego out of it, and just be grateful for the flow of grace.

Not So Special, Just Being Authentic

2010-11-11T14:47:00.008-05:00

There is such a temptation to build ego! Even as the yoga practice works to dissolve the dualities, drawing attention to the energy rather than the definitions within which the energy moves... Meditation is walking in the wind, watching the world move in response, feeling it, and even while feeling it, letting the feeling slip out of the sensory realm.

Okay, so meditation can take a person beyond that ego, but the ego still wants in on it. You can feel it, hovering, wanting to get its sticky fingers back into the deliciousness. There's nothing wrong with ego. We need it, definitely, to function properly in the world. But it is not the same as being, it is the separate "self" rather than the universally connected "Self."

Taking a yoga class is a wonderful exercise for me. It is like the way your core feels when you first try to invert into headstand... all wobbly and strangely new. There's a sense of identity, yet an observing identity, and yet still another body of energy that is simple and clear. I have to laugh at the teacher person on the mat who is laughing at the student person on the mat who is laughing at the blissful energy person on the mat who is hovering over the aching knees and softened heart person. All of them are me and yet this does not make me into any thing, or any one in any hierarchy. Each body in the room has this fullness of knowing, not knowing, feeling, perceiving, and witnessing. How wonderful is that?

The fact is that nothing I do on the mat, or off the mat turns me into a pot of gold. I remain a breathing entity wobbling through the moments I get, sometimes lifted off the earth in a blissful state by a gust of wind in the leaves, sometimes slogging in the mud with a shovel made of the heaviest steel. And so it is for everyone, I suspect. We have our separate faces so we can tell better stories, otherwise we might be like bees and all there would be would be a sound of communal buzzing. Actually, some of the most marvelous moments are those when we listen for that very sound among us.

The big part of practice in this regard is to let go of my attachments to putting values on "me." It is not that I am worthless, but that there is no measurable entity when it comes to "being me." It doesn't matter if I can do a particular asana or not, or if it looks just so or not. This way of being without judgment means that I don't feel "special" in any way that elevates me beyond the other human beings (or frogs for that matter) around me in the mud of yoga practice. This helps me really be compassionate towards myself and others. We are all just riding this particular wave, even if we cannot distinguish this wave from any other. The riders who fall into it sooner are no less riders than those who are riding it still.

Judging the Falling Leaf

2010-11-10T07:35:00.004-05:00

Walking in the detritus of Autumn. Traversing a landscape with piles of leaves, leaves blowing across the streets, swirled in corners against buildings, damp, dry, brilliant and crushed to brown soggy pulp. What a beautiful reminder of this constant cycle in which we all exist, that of our budding beginnings, coming into full leaf, pulsing with chlorophyll and the means of production to sustain life. Then at a certain moment, draining of that functional ability, turning into something of a different color, a flare marking our existence before detaching, letting loose from the juices of breath and voice, and drying, crackling, falling, drifting, rejoining the substance from which we came in the first place.

So what is beauty? What has value here? What is the meaning? Where is the kernel of justification for everything? Do these definitions and categories change anything about the bud, the green leaf, the tinged yellow, falling brown or decomposed leaf? It is natural for the mind to see the details and acknowledge attraction or repulsion -- does a rotting tomato appeal to you the way a red ripe one does? I don't think so, usually. But if you look without the judging as to whether you want to eat it or not, or touch it or not, perhaps you will see it within the confines of its own beauty.

Some practices put forth the contemplation of the dead as a way of understanding ourselves. To watch the decay of the body is a reminder that we are all one with the dust, one with the microbes and bacteria, one with the water flowing, the leaves falling, the next breath taken by someone else. It is a tough lesson to learn that way, and yet there is much beauty in it. The decay process is not ugly or beautiful, just as the brown leaf or the red leaf is not ugly or beautiful. It is the mind that makes it so. This judging mind is so often turned up to a high setting, aimed at ourselves or others, at each corner of the world in which we spend our days.

The yoga mat, or the site of any meditation, offers a place where for even a few moments you can contemplate letting go of the judgmental mind. Pick up a few leaves -- green, fall colors, brown -- and use them as a focal point for your practice. Let them suggest to you that judging them is a mindless inquiry. Seeing them is an awareness practice, can lead to single-pointed focus, and help you let go of pre-conceived ideas even of your body, your possibilities, your self. Allow yourself to feel the leaves as part of your own cycle, to feel your own beating heart as part of theirs.

I often feel the leaf in me as I drift to the earth for Savasana, not judging where I fall, noticing the support wherever I touch the earth, and feeling the lightness of my curling parts in the air, never minding the next gust of wind that takes me flying.

Making Peace With The Body

2010-11-09T08:20:00.002-05:00

Just completed a training session based on research into the measurable effects of yoga on the quality of life for people living with arthritis. A totally wonderful period of focus on softening, acceptance, open heartedness and the strength that mind-body-and spirit can bring towards healing.

It seems so clear that the beginning and the ending of healing is learning that one can turn the compassionate heart towards oneself, accepting that the body is ours as a gift, in spite of the issues that arise and perhaps in particular because of the issues that arise. These joints and aches are reminders that awareness and acceptance will open the way, towards peace, towards joy, towards the true self. We could go blithely along never noticing our self, simply running on reactivity and conditions, setting goals and reaching, grasping for that next brass ring. The ache in the knee, and the understanding that this moment is truly all that you have, go together in a most amazing way to bring a person into the present, vividly.

Not saying pain is good or bad, not saying deformity in the joints is a goal or to be avoided... just being. More on this when I have more time.

There are so many people walking on earth now who have come to understand the gift that each moment brings.

Defending An Open Heart

2010-11-03T17:38:00.004-04:00

So much of my practice and teaching, daily life for that matter, is related to right action and an open heart. This way of being has long been a part of my basic character, or nature, but I have had a bumpy ride with it. There has been a lot of suffering, let's just say, and misplaced trust, disappointed hopes, and tremendous energy expended in ways that seemed to dissipate into nothingness.

I also grew up feeling that other people's happiness was somehow my responsibility, though I have long since come to understand that it is only through a person's own awareness and being that the freedom of joy can emerge. That joy can be shared, which is something I definitely do. Somewhere along the way I have learned that I can live with my compassionate heart available to share joy and sorrow, yet feel safer, and can even at times offer a safe space for others to experience themselves more fully too. It is my yoga practice that seems to have shifted me here.

It boils down in some ways to releasing attachment to outcome, making the offering without the goal of making the offering, rather by simply being available to be offering. In this framework we cannot give away anything, nor lose nor gain. Oh that doesn't sound easy, does it?

It is not impossible to practice strengthening this sense of safety in openness. Just as we might practice sending compassion in a meditation towards someone for whom we have not always felt positive feelings, or we might now see others' behavior in terms of conditions of pain and suffering rather than letting it jerk our reactive nature around; we can learn to see and label dangers, and get more familiar with recognizing and using the strengths within us.

It all begins with the breath and cultivating awareness. That really is a simple exploration that can last your whole life! The physical yoga practice helps enormously with this, in my opinion. Breathing is a mechanism of balance, and balance offers the equanimity of a much wider range of motion whether it is the heart or the feet in motion. Through a sequence of Asana, tensions can be released that allow access to muscular strength and flexibility. The movement of the muscles and deeper support they can offer the bones, the greater a sense of foundation to every posture, every action. The process of gaining awareness, of stretching and strengthening, of focusing on moving within the movements of the inhale and exhale, produces a most amazing increase in the body's ability to feel ease with what is actually so. This enables movement in the emotional world as well as the physical one. Access to strength while remaining relaxed is a beautiful way to describe how the heart can be open, yet not be subject to changing conditions or harmed from operating without foundational support.

There are spiritual and other energetic practices that strengthen the heart and its ability to let go of the attachments that cause so much pain. Something as simple as a Mudra (hand posture in this case) of balance and grace as with Anjali Mudra (fingers gently resting upon each other, base of palms touching loosely resembling "Prayer" hands), of protection, as with Vaikhara, the shield (thumbs tucked into fists, forearms crossed in front of chest with hands held against the body), can help marshal the energy body's resources. I also find Garuda Mudra, (Eagle) of hooked thumbs, crossed wrists held with palms facing the heart to be particularly healing for feelings of being trapped in conditional nature. This is just one more tool to help balance energies, balance out the mind-body authority struggles, and give heart energy a little more support!

Locking up the movements of the heart will not hold them, just like holding one's breath will not stop the moment. As awareness grows, attention becomes more focused, breath becomes more available to the energetic needs of the body, and the body can develop in its ways of supporting alignment and finding balance. In this way the heart can also begin to feel more freedom. It is not something a person makes happen, it will happen on its own as the practice supports that opening.

Begin Practice with Awareness

2010-10-31T09:25:00.005-04:00

Pratapana - Sanskrit for warm up practices - are part of yoga practice for me. There is nothing formulaic about it, yet there is a logical physiological sequence to follow. Yoga practice for some begins with sun salutations and this movement and sequence is designed to move the joints, stretch the spine, stir up circulation and allows lots of possibilities for adding variations. There are many days when Surya Namaskar (sun salutations) are too vigorous to begin my own practice, or my classes.

People with athletic or dance backgrounds know a good deal about how warming up the body leads into a safer and more productive practice. The body is only one part of yoga practice, and it does benefit hugely from sensitivity to the joints, circulation of energy and natural tightness of specific muscle groups. I recommend moving from the subtle and to more progressively dramatic movements of the spine, the rib cage, the hips, toes, neck, shoulders, well, the whole variety of body parts. The special aspect of this for me is that it is not with a focus on the hip that I would move the hip, but with a focus on the breath.

Breathing in expands the body, naturally moving and stretching more muscles and joints than I can name. Breathing out reduces the inner pressures, relaxing all those muscles and joints into a natural contraction. Yet the breath does much more than that. On a physiological level, the breath brings oxygenated blood into every cell and eliminates carbon dioxide and other "waste" products of the bodies functioning. On a psychological level, the breath draws energy and awakens a sense of fullness, openness, energy, sufficiency, expansion, and possibility with one conscious inhale; and releases, nurtures, calms, relaxes, opens and cleanses on the exhale. With a focus on the breath, all the Pratapana of spinal movements, opening and lubricating the shoulder joints, stretching of hamstrings and discovering mobility in the toe joints become a challenging and deeply moving practice of awareness.

With this level of engagement, your practice begins from the moment you put your attention in "yoga mode." Bringing attention to the breath will change your seat and your sun salutations. These are not exercises solely for the body, but experiences that offer the possibility of being fully present from the very moment that you breathe in and breathe out. The practice then can move in and out of Asana, and on and off the mat.

Deep or Shallow, It's All Good

2010-10-30T18:55:00.009-04:00

Some days we go through the motions until that last moment, in Savasana (Corpse Pose, relaxation), when something specific and unnamed loosens. We curl onto one side in the quiet breathing of that precise moment, and nothing else matters. Sitting up, drunk on the softness of our own breath, we realize slowly that this is all we are, and it is everything, the paradox of emptiness. An open space has opened up inside us and is reflected for that moment holds everything we see, hear, feel, think, and wonder.

Some days from the very first moment the day begins there is something open, inviting a looser grip, a willingness to see from all sides and be content with what actually is so.

Must we make this into something else, call it by some Sanskrit name or attribute it to a god or goddess? Do we feel the beginning glimmer of understanding that the deepest part of ourselves is, in fact, as sacred, divine, spirited and open ended as any belief we might adopt?

What makes yoga so potent is how it quietly opens up the mysteries in moment after moment of inquiry. There is no right answer and no pre-requisite. Each of the principles leads to all the other principles. Each of the practices leads into all the other practices. Take meditation, for example. One person can practice for years or for 10 minutes a day and either way find a kaleidoscope of effects, insights, open moments. Is one deep and another shallow, or can we simply accept that there are endless possibilities if we are open to them?

Expectations will change your time on the mat, giving you something to resist, something to judge, an aim that will cloud your experience. It is a marvelous gift to allow the practice to take you to the depth that suits the moment without expectation or judgement -- perhaps floating on the surface, or sinking deeper than you have words to express into a non-dualistic world where the name of this and that no longer hold the key to being.

"People say that what we're seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."-Joseph Campbell

Illusion is not the Self

2010-10-28T07:38:00.006-04:00

Rem Koolhaas building at IIT, Chicago, IL

It seems to take a very long time to let go of the basic framework that every little thing I think or feel is real and important. Yet I can sense that this shift is happening. It comes forward when I can laugh at the way I feel aggravated in my interactions with the guy from the garage when he disrespects my schedule and commitments. It appears as I kneel in happy confusion in the midst of a challenging yoga class when the teacher has called for an asana that is totally incomprehensible to my tired brain-body connection. It slips up to the surface listening to my sister on the phone creating analogies for herself to explain my experiences. No hard feelings, no reruns, no regrets or disappointment, no shame attaches to the moment.

Why is it so hard to let this aspect of self-importance go? Perhaps my "Western" cultural orientation is part of the gripping on this, that deeply embedded concept that the defining structures of intelligence and self respect require assigning importance to the fleeting and impermanent. Several people have expressed to me that they do not want to live into an old age when they can no longer "be themselves." I see this as gripping at the control mechanisms that are probably operating in them all the time to "be themselves" as a construction defined by these same ideas, judging themselves as to their worthiness. Letting go of that grip will not change who they are, if they can accept who they are in the first place. The question of worthiness of self is a puzzle of endless pieces that will never be complete as long as we keep any piece clutched in our tight grip.

The yogic path has no guarantees, no warranty, no hierarchies of grace or benefit. Each moment offers the entirety of being present, and demands the entirety of being, a self that is not separated into bits. This is not some super-high-concentrated-focus-entirely-on-something state of being. In some quite absurd way, really anyone can accomplish this way of being if they can let go of the self-importance and criticisms, allow themselves to be open to the truth, and accept the impermanence of all the mental constructs. This sounds huge and maybe even scary. The fear is a part of the construct material that we can really just leave on the bench and simply walk a distance away. It isn't gone, it just doesn't have to be the puppeteer holding our strings. It can become another one of these lovely objects we can observe and appreciate. Fear helps us identify our attachments, among other things. It serves as a warning that there is something on the path to observe as we take our next steps.

No one has the blueprint that shows who I am supposed to be, or how this particular life of mine is meant to go. There is nothing I can do that is untrue to my self. I may feel preferences, even have strong opinions, and act with passion and conviction, but all of that can be turned in any direction and none of it is good or bad. Without the judgments, criticism, gripping of attachment, there is ease, some open spaces of freedom, even as I do something silly and give that mechanic more fodder for his attitudes. Perhaps my humor on the mat as I fail to pretzel into a "yoga pose" is supportive to someone else in the room, and I've long since learned not to tell my sister how to interpret her own thoughts! So I am "being myself" all the time, learning how this works, and living with a kind of spaciousness in everything.

Staring Down Fear & Its Partners

2010-10-22T21:21:00.007-04:00

Claude Monet, Haystacks, Art Institute of Chicago
Every twinge in my shoulder starts a little fear reaction that I can see coming. I feel the twinge and I see the fear right there. Then I stretch out the shoulder and know that even if some day I can no longer stretch away the pain, I do not need to succumb to the fear. The changes we go through can teach us a lot about our attitudes of attachment, judgement and fear.

Loss is a very distressing aspect of caring about other people, or about objects, or about systematic ways of doing things. Loss enters into a deep partnership with fear. It can be as simple as mourning that glove, now abandoned in the gutter having fallen out of the pocket, once treasured as a souvenir of a wonderful trip to a beautiful place. It might be the sorrow and denial while sitting at the bedside of a dying loved one, knowing that even these moments of tortured breathing are marks of a presence that will be taken and gone. Perhaps it is just that lapse in memory of how to make that origami figure so familiar and easy from childhood, but now beyond memory's reach.

So here we all are, surrounded by our desires for things, our craving to have the next moment go the way we want it to go, to control the level of pain for our loved ones, and to avoid pain ourselves. We live in a web of our attachments to people, patterns, behaviors, and preferences. Every part of our existence has potential to threaten us with something we fear to lose, or make us feel we must defend against loss. Sometimes it boils down to fearing change in those persons, things, systems. The relationship is not what it used to be. This hip is not how it once was. Vision and memory, endurance and strength, digestion, clothing size, the very voice with which we sing, all these aspects can and do change. It is our attachment to them as though they were or ought to be permanently a certain way that causes so much suffering and fear of loss. We measure and judge, hold tight and lose.

We can practice being okay just as we are. We can practice accepting that we are okay just this moment. Maybe we are not the same as we "used to be" and perhaps we can not hang on to that which we once treasured, but in this very moment, yoga can help to return our focus again and again to the conditions in this moment. We can let go of comparisons to past and stop threatening ourselves with diminished conditions of the future. We can release the attachments that corner our loved ones or erase the genuine moment for the sake of the role being played in a context set just so. There is enormous freedom from the ordinary pain of fear, when we can take things as they are, and let curiosity open the possibilities available now. Perhaps they are not the same possibilities of a few years or months, days, or moments ago. Who is the judge of what is loss and what is gain? In visiting my family recently I was struck by how very much everyone still has in the way of possibilities, regardless of what might seem like limitations. The biggest impediment to those possibilities seems to me to be the fear of loss and its partners, attachment, judgment and grasping. When those lose their grip, there is so much more time for happiness and joy.

The Constancy of a Shape Shifter: Taking In the Truth

2010-10-19T08:20:00.009-04:00

Yoga is not really a religion, but there are definite principles that underlie all the various families of practice we call "yoga." There are some deep connections between Yoga and Buddhism, Yoga and the Hindu practices, and actually with most of the major spiritual belief systems. This is clearly because all of these structures have to do with how we conduct ourselves, how we treat each other, and how we approach the hardest parts about being human in the world and understanding what can only be seen as the mysteries around us.

photo by j.r.meredith

Truth is one of those underlying principles that seems relevant in every belief structure. This idea of truth sometimes seems like a shape shifter. In any given moment we can know something to be true that is simply no longer true in the next moment. This is not falsifying the truth, but requires that we live in the present moment. Memories are notoriously slippery in terms of what they hold and what they shift around. If we color the moment with interpretations, then the memory we hold of it will also slide around as our view changes with time and distance. If we can actually take in the truth of that moment, it is complete in and of itself and does not require us to add or change elements. We can take it in just as it is. Eventually we can learn to see that everything is subject to conditions, and that conditions by their nature are impermanent.

This is a very hard thing to do. It is like telling someone to let go of something without moving... but in fact we can do that too.

In a yoga practice it is probable that you will run into yourself at every turn. Much as the practice may promise you a release from the definitions and constraints that bring you discomfort and suffering, it will open all the possibilities, not just the ones that feel like letting go and floating in a sea of beautiful colors. There are very specific physical things that happen through a physical yoga practice. Of course, muscles strengthen, lengthen, loosen, tighten; breath changes, opens, shortens, lengthens, and quiets. The mind, meanwhile, attaches, detaches, interprets, tells stories. The mind is busy noticing, taking notes, questioning, smothering feelings and highlighting feelings, and so forth. The yoga mat is a great place for noticing how you, very specifically you, deal with all kinds of circumstances and expressions of yourself. It helps to start with what is actually happening, and notice the intricate weaving that the mind does all around that. Just notice it, and let it go.

So what is actually happening? Is that the truth? It is a good start. In any Asana or posture there is potential to notice changes and shifts, whether you are sustaining the pose for several breaths, or moving in and out of the pose again and again. It is not like a law of averages or finding a median where the way it feels more often or most of the time is the truth... the truth is in each moment of the Asana. It can take time in a practice to accept that which is in any moment as true. The fear, hostility or desperation that arises as you twist for the sixth or tenth time in Utkatasana (Chair Pose), and the relief, determination or urgency that arises as you release back from that twist into plain Utkatasana, the flood of gratitude, blame, or shaky surrender as you fold into Uttanasana (forward fold) or rise into Tadasana (mountain pose) are all true. We don't have to keep a catalog of all of these truths. The hip will hold on to some of it, the heart to some, the mind to some. Next time you take on the twisting either that day or in another day's practice, you will hear the echos and feel the stories rise. This is you in action and is the seat of your explorations about yourself and truth. Yet the twists will have their own shapes that next time, and learning to accept that which is now, that which is this moment, is truly the path of truth, the conditional nature of our experiences and the deepest understanding of impermanence.

What my left hip felt yesterday made me laugh at myself. How hard I was willing to work to close off from that truth, and to tell a different story. The hip kept prompting me to see the moment and I could watch my mind work to wind and unwind its attachments and interpretations. Today, this moment, is simply today, this moment. The more space I can give the truth, the clearer my practice is too. And when that attitude comes off the mat, well, try it and you will see why it is an underlying principle in all deep spiritual practices! By the way, there really is no getting around it, either. It is there whether we take it in or not. The amazing revelation in all this is that taking in the truth brings authenticity into everything. Imagine that! No wonder so many seekers give their lives to the search.

We are not all monks

2010-10-18T08:26:00.004-04:00

Yoga class feels so wonderful, and adds new dimensions to life. The body and mind begin to awaken to possibilities that seemed unavailable before. Someone suggests a book and through reading and taking classes a new way of understanding begins to develop. Breathing comes more consciously, maybe even time is starting to organize around getting to yoga class. But we are not all monks.

Can a person who has children, a job or two, health issues, an erratic schedule, or any other kind of routine actually develop a regular practice or even begin to include a truly deep inquiry into their life without feeling always there is not enough time and they never know enough? How does yoga fit into a regular life?

The basic principles underlying yoga are the Eight Limbs spelled out in Patanjali's Sutras, but even if you have never seen that, or heard of that before, they will help you integrate yoga into your life. They are simple, like doing no harm, or releasing judgmental mind and attachment through not grasping at that which is not yours. Perhaps when you see things as they truly are you will understand that your practice accepts you just as you are too.

Here's what I mean. You can only get to yoga class once a week. Is that a yoga practice? Yes. You carve out fifteen minutes a day to do some stretching you remember from class, and before you go to bed you spend five minutes in quiet sitting, to still yourself and refresh yourself for the night. Is that a yoga practice? Yes. Maybe you try to get to class two or three times a week and then don't go for a month and half. Is that a yoga practice? Well, you tell me. Do you bring your awareness to your breath while you wait for the subway in the morning? Do you center your weight over your feet and release your spine to rise, relaxing your shoulders, your jaw, your eyeballs while you wait for the elevator? Do you look at your neighbor and their children with open minded compassion as they try to resolve conflicts, without thinking judgmentally about them? Then yes, that is a yoga practice.

Yoga is not a mat-based activity. The yoga mat and the asana practices are one part, one way in. The practice offers insights and ways of being present that have no boundaries about bodies and mats, about inversions or even pranayama (breathing practices). All of that helps cultivate your awareness so that you can have a yoga practice throughout your days and hours, with or without a yoga mat handy. Does that mean that you can quit setting aside time for classes and asana, for meditation and a direct focus on the inquiry? No, I don't think so. But it helps deepen your understanding of the practice if you can let it slip off the mat and still recognize it.

Repetition & Layers

2010-10-10T10:11:00.005-04:00

In my own practice and teaching I allow myself freedom to explore the moment itself. This might mean that I do not follow a set routine, or series of movements or set up with preparatory thoughts, chants, or breathing patterns. Maybe this seems to be a lack of discipline, and perhaps it is. Maybe this is learning to listen and hear the deep teachings that are embodied in my physical self, and perhaps that is so too. There were periods of time when my practice was similar, day to day. Same pattern of warming up the joints, same pattern of following the Surya Namaskar (sun salutation) series of Asana, and adding in a this and a that of twist, or hip opener, of working towards inversions, then a similar series of forward bends and cooling down towards Savasana.

Recently in preparation for a training program through the Arthritis Foundation, I began following a DVD of the most basic Tai Chi foundational movements. Each little movement is preceded by the very same warm ups and followed by the very same cool down exercises. Once again I am in that phase of doing the same movements in sequence, adding in a little this or that of the previously learned lesson plus the new form, and then doing the same closing sequences.

As in all my yoga experiences, there are many levels in the moment. In the breath itself, there are textural changes. There is deep cultivation of awareness as balance shifts from side to side; the arm motion balances the leg shift, and the one hand posture stabilizes the movement in the other hand. It is so beautiful to find once again my attention drawn to feeling the energy in the core of my body in response or as the starting point of the movements.

The role of a good teacher definitely includes bringing the student back from the edge of their effort to the deeper principles. Dr. Paul Lam, who originated this series of Tai Chi for Arthritis, encourages the student to focus on one principle at a time for a period of their practice --for example a few days or a week with focus on balance, gentleness, fluid motion, soft inner energy, or breath in the core -- and then return again to focus on one principle at a time. Repeating the same warm ups, practicing the new forms, closing with the same cool down movements as I focus my attention on my shifting balance, or the spaciousness in my joints becomes a new experience each time I revisit the deep principle.

Try sitting in Sukhasana - a comfortable cross legged position. Imagine you have never done this before and just notice how it feels to be sitting just like that. Breathe into it for a few breaths. Now let your body make the adjustments that offer the support to free your spine, add the props, and bring in the subtle shifts that soften your foundation. Allow your breath to relax your jaw, your heart, your eyeballs. Now simply sit, with your attention on letting your body release and be open to the possibilities. How many times have you brought your body to the mat and sat it down without noticing that it was you, there, on the mat, being yourself? You can now bring all your awareness to any aspect of being, perhaps an intention is forming in your heart, perhaps the breath is now reaching into the back body, perhaps you can feel the flow of energy along your spine.

Doing "the same thing" is a brilliant light to shine into every aspect of your being. Repetition is never "the same thing." Is every inhale the same? Opening like the unfolding petals of a flower, your ability to be present in the moment will bloom with your focus and awareness.

At the Beginning, Give It a Minute

2010-10-09T21:17:00.007-04:00

Vinyasa is great fun and good to get energy circulating. You can work through the breath, move in the flow of energy, stretch and build muscles, surprise yourself and find yourself moved by the sequence of events. Vinyasa in sanskrit, means "to place in a special way." It combines movement, energy flow, and placement. Lots of yoga studios offer Vinyasa flow as a way to release from the constraints of the judging mind and the stagnation of personal patterns, as well as to unblock the lines of energy so that the final cool down and relaxation are that much deeper.

Vinyasa is hard on a body with physical constraints (think Carpal Tunnel issues, tight hamstrings, back trouble or knee replacements), and especially for people who are new to a yoga practice. It can be a struggle to keep up, to find your way, even to get the breath going in and out as instructed. Not knowing what is coming next or how to align oneself can make it impossible to use the prop that protects or enables. That initial scramble can sort out quickly for some, and be a source of serious injury for others. It can feel 'hard" in a way that is not inherently part of yoga. "Hard" in a learning curve kind of way. "Hard" in the "I am not good at doing this" kind of way. The newness of the postures and the constant movement can make modifications tough to figure out, adjustments hard to fit in between the instructions, and understanding of the basic principles a little vague. Of course a good teacher helps with all of this to some degree. For more experienced practitioners, Vinyasa can ratchet up into more and more physical challenges integrated into the flow, pressure to keep up, try the "harder" variations and, occasionally, emphasizes personal expression in the flow that can be more involved with ego than with cultivating nonjudgmental awareness and the foundational breath. Again, good teaching can help draw a student's attention back to the practice and out of the performance of Asana.

Figuring out a posture from the inside takes time. It is very different than learning a series of dance steps. One doesn't always need to be negotiating all the details, yet there are depths of understanding that only come with time, time in the pose. Take a simple pose, like Balasana (Child's Pose). This is very often offered as a "resting" pose, yet is difficult for many people and as with so many Asana, offers a very deep practice. The hip creases are drawing back, pelvis lifting, spine curving; knees are deeply bent, tops of feet press into the floor, while the shoulders are spreading open, the heart widens as it sinks, the ribs center pulling back towards the spine, and the third eye rests on the earth. Breath is into oneself. What's so simple about this? For some, the bend is beyond their capacity in the knee or spine. For others it is the internal quality of breath in the ribs against the thighs, the leaning of the heart inward that brings the emotions forward. Perhaps it is the openness in the back ribs, the breath ballooning over the kidneys that shifts the attention, or it could be simply feeling the earth below you, supporting your shins that lets the tension release from the back of your neck. Where does the mind go? Perhaps it begins with making all the little tweaky adjustments of ankles or shoulders, but if you stay there a minute other experiences begin, and perhaps your attention will shift.

Passing through Balansana for a moment to catch your breath is a wonderful thing too, like that moment when you take your shoes off after being in them all day. But in every Asana there are hidden treasures, secrets about yourself, illuminations about existence itself that come with time, time in the pose. So if you feel you are struggling and thrashing about in Vinyasa classes, give yourself a minute in your own practice or find a class that can slow it down for you. Spend a few breaths -- perhaps starting with 3 -- in each aspect of exploring Asana and your strength, flexibility, awareness and inner sense of alignment will catch up to you. Take that sense of balance back to Vinyasa class and see what a different experience it can be.

As a student once said to me, "There is just so much to think about all at once, including wondering what I am thinking about!" Letting this go, allowing the experience to get beyond thinking into experiencing the moment itself, is possible in one Asana or flowing through a Vinyasa. Try different approaches until you find the one that gives you the time you need to integrate and align yourself safely.

Props & Then Some

2010-10-07T09:42:00.007-04:00

Give yourself what you need. Put the block under your hand. Give support to the elevated leg. Use the strap.

Yoga is not an exercise in "How do I get into this posture?" The practice is one of "How do I find myself here?"
Using and supporting principles of alignment, so that you gain the most benefit from your foundation in any pose, you can build the strength, encourage the flexibility, open the heart, release the joint, let the mind free of the constraints of judging yourself.

Sounds simple, right? "Find the support you need and use it." Perhaps it is spending ten minutes reading poetry before a stressful meeting to give you that sense of spaciousness in which to see with clarity and listen clearly. Why not take that plum with you as you walk to the train so you can focus on what you are doing and let go of the worries of whether you will find something you can eat later when you need a boost? Perhaps it is spending more of your practice time reconnecting with your feet instead of pushing through the complicated program you had set out for yourself.

It is wonderful in Trkonasana (triangle pose) to use a block under the hand on the floor. It doesn't matter if you "can do it" without the block. Give yourself the space to stretch the spine naturally, to let the neck be easy, to breathe into the sweet rotation of the ribcage. Perhaps you will find out that you have been reaching for the floor... perhaps when you take that block away you will find that the energy from that hand on the floor can now reach up through your opening heart.

Sit on the block in Virasana (Hero's Pose). Give your knees this new openness and see what happens. Perhaps your feet will relax in a way you have not imagined, or your breath might just reach further down to your root chakra because of the new relaxed length in your spine. Perhaps when you take the block away, you will feel that same deepening, lifting, ease, now that you know it is in you.

Wrap a strap gently around your lower ribs, crossing it in front of you and letting the straps rest gently in upturned hands. Then just breathe. Feel the way your whole body is supported by the soft wrapping strap, the way your hands gently move with the movement of the strap responding to your own breath. Close your eyes. Let the strap support your focus, enliven your sensitivity to being, find yourself existing in more than three dimensions... just breathe. Any time in your practice perhaps you can now bring that same level of awareness to your lower ribcage, noticing how the breath relates in that moment.

Navasana - Boat Pose- is so delicious with hands helping the thighs lift, or taking just one leg at a time, letting the other leg or foot hold steady. Let the lower back feel its length, allow the inner groin flexors to ease a bit. Try letting go and keep your focus on that feeling of steadiness rather than on the tension in the muscles. What do you need to help relieve the stress you feel? Find the source first, and then give it support.

Can you open up to the question of whether you need support? Can you allow yourself the openness to find the truth of this question in yourself? Exploring this on the mat, in the practice, off the mat, in your life, is not so hard to do as it might seem. Start with using the props, softness under your head in Savasana (Corpse Pose), or a simple block under your knees in Sukhasana (Easy Pose - cross legged seat) might just make room for your awareness to wake up, your attention to focus on something other than the muscular, and your breath to move you.

Once we learn how to find the support we need in the moment, our strength can develop. Each time you find yourself saying, "How can I support myself here?" you are also asking, "Where is this binding coming from, where is this blockage of my energy?" This is the deeper question ... and helps to explain why the support we find and give ourself is so enabling. If you seek out where the struggle is taking place in you, and make the shift to ease that, the freedom that comes is unpredictable and authentic.

Oh, by the way, you can always use the breath if you have nothing else handy.

Inquiry or Grasping?

2010-10-02T09:24:00.006-04:00

Reaching for your toes, pulling on your hip, twisting your neck more to move that shoulder, bouncing on your feet to throw your legs towards the wall in an inversion.... Are these actions explorations of how the body works, about how the energy moves, about where the foundation really rests, or are they striving for that goal -- that shape -- that affirmation of self. How do we shift from the mind set of grasping into one where the goal is no longer the driver of experience? How do we allow the practice to move more freely from the dictates of the judging mind?

For me the grasping seems to come from a set of sources: Either I am challenging ideas of whether I am able or unable, which can also be seen in terms of judging whether I am good or bad; or I am responding to inhibitions based on fear. Every time I practice yoga I am faced with discomfort somewhere along the way. It might be in my hip joint on that first deep internal rotation. It might be in my mind in the form of disappointment as I release my attachment to Padmasana (Lotus) in Sirsasana (headstand). When discomfort arises, I watch my desire rise and take note where it is pushing me: to escape or to push through, to applaud my attempts or exaggerate my failures.

The pattern set by grasping is either holding on tight to something I don't want to release or of reaching beyond what actually is in an attempt to get somewhere else. What the practice teaches me every day is that I can see that pattern and not fall into it, nor do I have to react to it. I can nod at it and proceed to breathe up through my core into my upside-down self or make space around my racing excited heart. I might apply Ujjayi breath (ocean-sounding breath) to support me and search my body for clues as to where the resistance has really taken hold. Where there is desperation, I see it and acknowledge it. Where there is sadness, I see it and acknowledge it. Where there is determination, I see it and acknowledge it. These are aspects of myself and I do not reject them, but I begin to ask a new set of questions about them. How can I use that energy to open more fully, to see where the energy leads, without striving towards an end point?

The inquiry is a source of continuous growth no matter what the condition of the body. This is part of the magic of the yoga practice. My heart goes out to those students in yoga classes, desperately throwing themselves again and again in an effort to find an inverted posture. The support in the body is not available when jerked around by grasping. It is the release of the goal, the deepening breath, the softness in the foundation, the lift in the core, the open space between the collarbones, the clarity in the mind's focus of attention. It is the letting go into the twist, the inversion, the cross-legged position, the arm balance, the stressful meeting, the standing-on-the-platform-when-you-miss-the-train.

What I am doing there on the mat is the same thing I am doing off the mat. I am exploring. I am seeking a balance between discovery and failure, between being set in my ways and limitlessness. The practice of yoga offers the opportunity to explore what there is beyond the grasping, the striving and the judgments. It keeps me aware of my goal-setting tendencies, and helps me see the context in which I am driven to set those goals. It helps me see the goal as a marker of my own measuring, judging self, and that there is much more than that for me to experience, share, and enjoy. Nothing prevents the discomfort, but it is not so uncomfortable if I can see it for what it is.

This reminds me of breaking in new shoes. The practice goes little by little to stretch and shape around the truth of the foot, supporting and changing the foot a bit as it goes, until the exploration is free and natural. And when the shoe fits well, there is no end to where the foot can go.

Beginning Yoga: Isn't So Simple

2010-09-29T13:20:00.009-04:00

Yoga is supposed to simplify everything -- isn't it? We practice and feel profound peace, self acceptance and joy. Suddenly our confusions and pain are absorbed into the greater wholeness of the universe and we are just fine being who we are -- isn't that it? Or perhaps it is more like working out at a gym and we just come to do the same things enough times that it gets easier? And once it's easier, we find profound peace, self acceptance and joy and our confusions and pain are absorbed into the greater wholeness of the universe...no?

For so many that first yoga class is a huge up hill struggle with the boulder. Right from the start it's sitting on the mat: what the heck is a "comfortable cross-legged position" with tight hamstrings, low back pain, screaming knees, tight groin muscles and crushed ankle bones ...? Then there's standing in Tadasana (Mountain Pose) otherwise known as standing up straight, right?, only every muscle is quaking or aching and nothing feels normal at all, while the mind is zooming all over the place checking on this and that only to discover that there is no communication at all with the toes or the inner thighs (inner thighs?). Have we really been functional human beings all this time, yet we can hardly sit or stand once we're in a yoga class??

My heart is so full when I teach beginners. It must seem that I take the simplest most natural thing and it turns into a puzzle that cannot be solved. There is never enough brain power to focus on the breathing while melting the center of the heel (center of the heel?) down and lifting the inner arches, while relaxing the shoulders and finding space in the .... well, it could go on and on.

In fact it does go on and on. That is the practice itself: Learning how to train the mind to be attentive, yet let the brain go; learning how to open those pathways of energy in the feet and through the legs so that one really can relax the spine around the muscular effort being made; learning to accept that which is so in this very moment and leave the judgments and know-it-all/know-nothing dualism of the self behind. All this is in fact happening right from the start in a beginning yoga class, just by focusing attention on what is actually being experienced.

The overlay on all of this is that there is no right way or wrong way in it. That's often a revelation. And discovering what makes things happen, what becomes possible, what the mind asks for, what the body says about that, all of this happens constantly on the mat, just as it does off the mat. So it doesn't matter how much yoga a person has already done in their lives (I was recently in a class where the teacher said, "so forget about all the 1,239 times you've 'done' down dog...") it is this particular moment you are using for your investigation of what being you, being human, and just being really is. Notice I did not say, "could be."

So far, it seems to me that nothing in yoga is hypothetical. The ability to be aware simply expands as we let go of the boundaries we have set, consciously or unconsciously. If we clutch at getting there, instead of marvel at being here, we will miss some of the salient features of being here that make all the difference in understanding being. The unfolding nature of asana leads the body into openness by following the breath and accepting and exploring what the bones and muscles can do, that's where the details stop being separate. In the beginning, though, it sure does feel as though the devil is in the details!

I offer my beginning class (or any class) as a safe place for bringing all of this into the moment. We can watch our own mind telling the story of the moment, feel our own feelings opening and closing in response to what we are actually doing or what we think we are doing. There is a sacredness in honoring our own breath and it naturally includes and absorbs everyone else's breath too. The air itself holds out a strangely pervasive and deeply compassionate acceptance of who we are and who everybody else is. The first person to fall out of Vrksasana (tree pose) has the hearts of everyone in the room. Then the laughter comes as we sink to the mat, or the sighs reduce every body to its fullest exhale. Perhaps it is that moment we feel the universal aspect of the "union" that is yoga, and let go of our own details.

No Posturing - Just Experiences

2010-09-27T08:06:00.006-04:00

Anything we try to do every day can turn into a routine. I remember going to an aerobics class for a few weeks many years ago and how the experience went from unfamiliar and clumsy to feeling on top of the game. My sense of familiarity helped me feel the fluidity of the movements, and I anticipated and enjoyed the shift from one rhythmic sequence to the next. I loved the rest at the end even then. But it was not something that brought my awareness into focus, nor was it something that I could do for myself. The whole thing rested on someone telling me what to do and with getting myself into the stream of motion in that room full of other people. The injuries, though commonplace for aerobics classes, have haunted my feet and knees ever since.

Yoga can be much the same if it is approached as a series of physical postures. In fact people can find some of the same unifying principles from any athletic training program, physical work or dance where there is commitment and regularity, and a sense of giving over to the natural rhythm of the breath. Unlike these other pursuits, it is interesting to me that with mindfulness, one can actually include everything in life as part of the practice. Like Thich Nhat Hahn's comment "do the dishes to do the dishes," there is a way of being in which everything becomes the yoga practice. This has little to do with whether you can hold Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog) with an inner rotation in your thighs or if you are breathing with the sound of the ocean from gently constricting your throat in Ujjayi breath. It is a collaboration of mind and body, held non-judgmentally in the compassionate heart that allows for the freedom to just do the dishes to do the dishes.

What yoga postures do, when explored over time and in a variety of sequences, is open the inner and relational communication channels, refresh or even build a network of "power lines" through which the currents flow through a person. These are physical and measurable, such as circulatory or neurological or glandular for example, and they are non physical in the sense that vitality and energy have emotional and spiritual aspects. You can be in great health and feel terrible. You can have serious physical "deficiencies" and feel alive and engaged. A yoga practice combines the integration of the entire physical self, as "flawed" or inexperienced as one might feel from living in such a judgmental and critical world, with the sense of possibilities and deeper realities of the human capacity to fully be present. Each moment can become a bead of freedom and gratitude in a chain of events that do not have an end goal or purpose beyond the moment.

In classes focused on alignment and the details of how this or that muscle or bone operates within the pose, it is the subtle cultivation of awareness and the focusing of attention that have the deepest impact. The qualities of mind experienced throughout this process may fluctuate between curious, judgmental, attached to outcome and detached from outcome, aware of others with critical mind and aware of others with a compassionate heart. The first step is to welcome curiosity and allow nonjudgmental acceptance of all the discoveries in the moment. This has nothing really to do with taking a specific asana shape, or whether you can now or ever will do this or that asana. It is not the posturing that builds the practice, the asana postures simply provide a systematic array of switches and conduits that open up the energy and awareness already within each one of us. This is why, unlike so many other physical practices, in yoga there are infinite varieties of asana postures and modifications that can be made to enhance the personal experience whether the shape can be "achieved" or not in that moment. Truly experiencing the moment is more to the point than posturing through the practice.

Looking for Answers

2010-09-25T18:13:00.004-04:00

finding what is in me,
gratitude for the discoveries,
space for the questions,
breath for the inquiry.

answers no longer exist -
the process is revealed.
it all comes down to more space
for the questions, the discoveries,
and the breath.

Ease Up

2010-09-21T21:57:00.006-04:00

In spite of all we do to try to be comfortable, life is full of discomfort. We run into the gamut of experiences as we go along, sometimes blissful, sometimes inconvenient, maybe fun, maybe unhappy. So what gets us through all of this? Can we find a sense of balance even when things are not so comfortable?

The yoga practice gives us ways of trying out strategies to find ease no matter what is going on. Perhaps it is a demanding situation at work or in a relationship, or with a physical injury or hard times with circumstances beyond your control. On the mat, maybe it's a twisting balance, a scary back bend or even just sustaining through something muscular and simple like Kapotasana (pigeon) or Utkatasana (Fierce Pose). Where can we loosen up, where can we let go of the gripping, what is the source of the support? Perhaps we can identify the impingement that we brought into the situation and by noticing that, we can better relax around it, or work into releasing it.

Taking things in steps and stages can help identify where the real issues might be -- perhaps in the body it is something out of alignment, perhaps in the workplace or relationship this could be true as well. Getting things lined up so that there is support for the moving parts... allowing the toes to spread fully on the floor, the inner core of the heel softening and leaning into the earth will allow a standing posture to unfold with more ease, even if it involves a twist in the ribs, and active squaring of the hips. Maybe attention and focus on the breath will help identify how one hip is moving ahead of the other, causing the twist in the shoulder that is tightening the neck. Just forcing the ribs around into an idea of a shape and letting the feet stay off balance is not comfortable and the shape is of no consequence without cultivating the awareness. In human relationships or with pressures at work, it can also be a matter of finding the balance between the all-out effort, and letting go of the goal -- that shape -- and exploring that which is actually happening in the moment.

You can keep breathing and just force yourself to hang on tight for another breath in that unpleasant place, but what you learn from this experience is "how hard it is," or perhaps make more room for judgments about yourself, others and everyone's inadequacies. Maybe all that gritting of teeth makes for an opportunity to pat yourself on the back for pushing yourself, just another way of inflating ego. Is that the path to happiness? I don't think so. It's a little like arguing forcefully until you win the argument but at the cost of the trust and respect in the relationship. Is "winning" the argument what makes happiness? Again, stroking ego instead of opening up to the possibilities of what could be loosened, of what caused the tension in you in the first place.

Thinking about ease rather than comfort can be a help on and off the mat. Not talking here about "hard" and "easy" but ease - as in what would ease the pain, or ease the tension, or ease the sense of confusion, or ease the pressure? Can the source of the discomfort be identified? Next time you are impatiently waiting, or feel you haven't got the time, or are about to snap at someone, or can't make up your mind, or feel that heat rising in the muscles, or the tension in your neck, or can't fall asleep or have to get up too early... what can you do to help find ease in the moment? Can you find your breath? Is there a way to use the inhale to draw strength, energy, a shifting of attention or an opening of spaciousness, and let go of something on the exhale (shoulders, jaw, tension in the fingers)? Allow yoga to help you learn to ease up. Whether you are comfortable or uncomfortable may stop being so important if you can find ease right where you are.

Mass is just a form of energy

2010-09-20T20:25:00.004-04:00

I am delighted to accept that we are nothing but interactions of patterns woven in a web. Maybe it isn't important whether this left hip opens so much, or if I fall out of a standing balance when I close my eyes. Perhaps this constantly moving, shimmering breathing body is truly just as Eastern mystics and advanced physics posit: a form of energy for me to use to explore this impermanent moment. I do not have to cling to making anything happen. I am not invested in looking a part or wearing a mantle of wisdom and grace. The fact that I exist in this moment is remarkable enough for me to celebrate my little coagulation of energy.

I cannot predict what my life will be in three days or in two years nor describe what my dreams will be tonight. What I know is that where I draw my attention, my awareness goes. On the yoga mat I am learning to experience truth, and to use my breath to keep me right there, in the experience without the judgment and attachment that deadens me to the moment itself. As moving energy, there is no duality, only the story of duality added by the beautiful human mind. And I can appreciate that without attaching to it.

It seems to me that on the yoga mat I am everything and nothing. My breath has no hierarchy. My heart beat has no ulterior motive. My amusement knows no rules, my heart opens to the floor and the sky, the cold nose of my blind cat, the waft of cool morning air from the window. I am simply energy in the form of mass.

Defining all beings, and all "things" in these terms, we are constantly exchanging, moving patterns of tiny particles; weaving the web that gives the world its appearance, and all the sensibilities that notice and experience that world.

Honoring the grace and magnificence of this cosmic dance in all beings and 'nonbeings.' Namaste.

Ego & Body: Less Ego, More Breath

2010-09-18T14:50:00.008-04:00

Yoga class. Look around. Put your body on the mat, and see if you can get your mind to stay with you there. Every breath, awareness streaks through your body, is it really always saying "me, me, me?" Can we separate out ego in the practice so that the mind can simply be alert and not defining self constantly?

I am experiencing the oddest combinations of this as I attend classes in various Yoga Studios, Capital "Y," Capital "S." I feel very different in my little neighborhood storefront shelter-from-the-storm studio, and definitely in the classes I teach at the medical center and the shelter. This level of visibility is new for me, this witness to the ego during practice. It is a level beyond ego that observes the "me" watching the "me" on the mat. Perhaps it is because I am putting my self in a new and demanding context in which the judgment/assessment of others is more likely to be felt. My breath saves me every time, as each breath flows into my body, taking shape in the asana, somehow the "me" goes out with the exhale. I can literally become a body in space for which some "I" feels such compassion. Sometimes I can shake with love for the form taken, accepting this, and this, and this. It is "me" and "not me." Some part of me is laughing at the part of me that observes me, too. Watching "me" watch "me." Now that is funny!

Where am I when all this is going on? I am drawing my bones more squarely to my foundation, or pressing gently into the earth to find my core rising up, or simply softening whatever body parts I can notice that are clenching and opening the energy to flow more freely.

When I look around, I see ego in the bodies around me, sometimes ego seeps out and the bodies rest quietly in their shapes. Sometimes ego causes suffering, or even celebration. It raises questions for me about why people practice yoga especially in classes. I do think sometimes classes can build reactiveness, strengthen judgment, bolster existing tendencies, and increase attachment to form or goal. For some it will take a particular teacher to shake this up, or it might take a certain amount of practice before something begins to loosen the grip of ego. And it sometimes happens like a stroke of lightening, striking and obliterating what was always there; as though a solid object has simply burnt up and vanished leaving space, open space in its place.

There is no way that I can sit on the yoga mat and not be me. The wild thing is that I can truly be me on the mat and not be attached to any significance or meaning related to that. Lately I'm just flooded with gratitude for the opportunity to be doing and teaching yoga, to be breathing and sharing these moments. It is not a matter of ego if I can do this or that asana. It is not a matter of ego if I can let go or am still grasping. It is not a matter for judgment and self definition whether I do yoga or haul wood. The less I cling to ego on the mat, the more I find peace and joy in the practice.

May I just say that bodies are amazing. We humans have a remarkable vehicle in which to experience life on earth. Phew.

Taking Each Chord and Playing The Possibilities

2010-09-16T17:23:00.006-04:00

I just heard a wonderful interview with jazz musician Herbie Hancock in which he eloquently explained a basic principle of my yoga practice. He was answering questions about his new project, and talked about his interest in all sorts of music making. He spoke of jazz and described that vulnerable place where he could respond fully to what was possible in the music, listening to what the other musicians were doing, and really being present. The interviewer referred back to Hancock's early training and the formative experiences he had working with mentor Miles Davis.

It was at that moment Hancock said, and I'm paraphrasing, that he was performing in Europe with Davis and everything was going so well, when in the middle of a performance, Hancock played a chord (he was on piano) that was glaringly awful and wrong. As his heart was sinking, Miles Davis took a breath, and then played notes that fit into the chord pattern, making that chord work in the piece. Asked about the importance of that moment, Hancock said that it was at that moment when he realized Miles Davis did not think the chord was wrong. He did not judge the chord. He simply took that as something new, an opening of possibilities. He went on to say that if, in playing jazz and in life, you can leave the judgment out of it, you make room for that vulnerable honesty that gives you access to the music (and the truth). He said in that space, you learn to trust the other musicians, and to trust your self, in essence being authentic. Being present. It helps him connect with people all over the world, and play all kinds of music.

In truth there is freedom, in letting go of judgment, the limitations are loosened. Imagine yourself on the yoga mat, with all your usual thoughts about what you can and cannot do. In the middle of a lunge, the teacher asks you to lean over your thigh. Stretching your spine, you lean over your thigh and then you're asked to hook your elbow and twist over your thigh bringing your hands to your heart in Anjoli Mudra. You've never done this before and yet you find yourself twisted, hands moving towards your heart, feet grounded in a lunge, gazing over your shoulder to the back of the room. If you had been thinking about this shape, or how hard it is to stay in lunge or how you twist better to this side than that, you would not be where you now find yourself. Is that all there is to it? No, just step forward keeping your knees bent and you will be twisting in Utkatasana. Is that hard or easy? Is that the right way to "come into" Utkatasana? Let it go. Perhaps being open, not judging, authentically in the inquiry, you will find out more about who you really are, and how to play with the chords you find in you.

Bring Body & Mind to Class & Find Your Practice

2010-09-15T08:04:00.009-04:00

detail Seurat painting, Chicago Art Institute

When a student comes to a class, they sit on the mat, arrange their body, prepare to take directions from the teacher and assume in all good faith that this will be a satisfying yoga practice. There is a sense of relief that someone else will be in charge. There is sometimes a little anxiety, could it even be performance anxiety, about what will be asked and how it will go. Usually there is craving too, desire to feel or be or experience something beyond the day-to-day of work, household, relationships etc. Sometimes it is just yearning for healing that brings the body to the mat.

But what brings the mind to the practice? Why separate out the mind, as though it was the evil twin? We do not need to silence the mind, nor perfect the body in order to deeply explore yoga. It seems to me that we learn though yoga to unify that which is the experience of this life in this body/mind with a greater sense of listening to a larger way of being, tapping into something universal about living.

What if attending class was all about exploring who you are in such a way that it enabled you to continue exploring who you are when you are not in class and feel okay about what you find? That means accepting the anxiety or relief, acknowledging the cravings and desires, allowing the sorrow and the joy to percolate and not judging them as "good" or "bad" nor giving up on what might seem "hard" or taking too much for granted in what comes "easy."

So many students now take yoga for exercise, for a "sense of wellbeing," some for healing, and some for community. Ideally the class is a springboard to making yoga your own practice. Bring your self into the communal setting to share breath, to learn about the exploration in a safe way, and what you take away will be an ongoing support for your own practice.

One thing is for sure: the mind can help the body understand and sustain challenges and openings by focusing attention in specific ways and the body can help the mind let go of judgments and be open to possibilities through alignment and the breath. Yoga is an adventure along a path that combines the body's movements, breathing, alignments, challenges, and attitudes, with the mind's posturing, undulations, shifts, information and inspiration. So where is the heart in all of this? That steadfast organ, pumping away, circulating fresh energy and removing obstacles and toxins? Well, that's not what we think of really, is it? We think of that open warmth and spaciousness, that deep longing and giving, the rising joys and sorrows, the tenderness and fierceness, in essence the compassion of acceptance and gratitude that is shared with other living beings. So applying heart energy becomes part of the yoga practice too, the turning of compassion towards oneself may be the revelation of a class, and turning compassion towards others may transform your life.

I've been taking classes lately that focus on many different variables of the yoga spectrum. It has been mighty interesting from my teacher-viewpoint and my own body/mind assembly. The strongest feeling so far for me has been that all of this experience I am gaining through my own body and mind feeds my yoga practice and my teaching practice. Not a picking and choosing of this and that, or judging this better than or less than, but assimilating the on-the-mat-waiting-for-class experience opens my heart wide to my students, and introduces new elements into my personal practice.

Take your classes out of the studio and into your heart and see what happens!

Less Ego = Less Effort

2010-09-09T16:33:00.005-04:00

The class I took today was introduced with the idea that the authentic self might not require so much ego at the center of everything. That this idea of "I" could actually get in the way of the yoga practice! Perhaps it is the way that thoughts have of turning towards judgment, comparison or criticism when they focus on the self. Maybe its that slight fictional quality of the way the mind looks at the self that tampers with the experience in the moment. It was interesting to pay attention to information that arose about the ego throughout the asana sequences, throughout the remembering and forgetting of the breath, in the middle of extending from the toe mound of the little toe or from the base of the spine, while finding one side responding differently than the other.

One remarkable effect of this little bit of attention to when and how the ego stepped in, or commented, was to notice how little it did for the practice. That judgmental quality, even the "wow this is better than I thought" idea, does not bring more energy or less stress to the physical self. What does it do for the emotional self? Is it useful in some other way? A question to investigate for yourself. I found that letting go of the ego, the mind, the "how do I look now" of the asana, the "what will this hip do" part too, relaxed me even within the strenuous qualities of sustaining or moving my body. My mind seemed relieved of that duty, and begin to notice new things about the breathing in the room, about the textures of the sounds, and even about my own alignment.

It is hard to let go of the competition with oneself, fears of what judgments from other's might be, and of the measuring of one's self against everyone and everything that seems outside the self. It is just as hard to let go of the grasping towards the story the mind wants to tell. If we can allow ourselves to understand that this is story and not the experience in this moment, it takes a lot less effort to swim through the hard stuff. There is resistance to letting go of the separations and definitions, even the concepts of "good" and "bad" or "flexible" and "inflexible." Without the judging, comparing, critical mind, what is simply is what it is. This might be more breaths in headstand than you ever thought you could do. It might mean falling over in an attempt to revolve your Ardha Chandrasana. Yet without the ego, it is effortless to move in and out of these situations. There is no pain or shame or inflated expectation involved. It is this freedom of taking things just as they are ... in a state of constant flux and possibility -- where effortless effort comes to life.

Walking Is Walking

2010-09-07T09:27:00.006-04:00

Here it is - When I walk to the store, I am walking. When I walk to teach, I am walking. When I walk to the creek, I am walking.
Here it is - When I practice 15 minutes, I am practicing. When I practice an hour, I am practicing. When I practice 2 hours, I am practicing.

So don't tell me that you don't have time to breathe, or that you can't take ten minutes for yoga in 24 hours each day. Everyone gets the same number of minutes in a day... and we make so many choices about how we are going to spend them. In fact we spend way too much time on the planning, thinking, rationalizing, explaining, etc. side of things. It's the way our minds work, so that's fine, just accept it. But put the practice in the day. I am suspending all the rules for you about time of day and routines.

Today it hit me as I ate my morning melon: Listen. Loosen. Open. Relax. That's the practice. You can add challenges, you can work on specifics of anything within that framework. Try chanting. Use Ujjayi breath or Bandha locks. Balance. Twist. Invert. Let the mind go beyond and look back at itself. Send yourself or someone else compassionate acceptance.

LISTEN: Let the breath take over the whole system. Allow your interest to connect to being present. Find what your own wisdom has to offer you. Take the risks, find the sources. If this is all you do, it is your practice.

LOOSEN: Warm the joints, be merciful and compassionate towards your soft side, your weak limb, your striving nature. Allow your body to come to the breath for support and nurturing. Find where the catches are and let them go. If this is all you do, it is your practice.

OPEN: Explore where you actually are. Allow temptation to flow through you and open your question marks into movements and shapes, forms and breath. Find what leads to what and let the energy find you right there. If this is all you do, it is your practice.

RELAX: Take it in and let it go. Close your eyes in recognition that you have all you need within you, the earth below you, the breath -- the very air itself -- moving you as it will. If this is all you do, it is your practice.

So you have a lot to do today, or you did a lot today. Ten minutes. Twenty minutes. Listen. Loosen. Open. Relax.

Intentions and Actions

2010-09-06T21:05:00.004-04:00

Every time I show up on the yoga mat, I have every intention of exploring myself and my understandings through yoga. Much of what I know has been learned over time either from teachers, or through direct observation and inquiry. I learn from my students as well, which makes teaching that much more rewarding. Lately I've rarely been able to attend classes taught by other teachers. Some of this is due to my schedule, some is the expense of taking classes, some is due to diverging approaches to practice.

My own practice evolved with every teacher I encountered in those first few years of practice. I was lucky to meet many earnest young teachers from many different yogic schools. Most were very generous with their knowledge and their interests. After my certification to teach at Kripalu, I was deeply curious about many aspects of yoga as they became more and more accessible or visible to me. Now, just as I did then, I am drawn to the teachings of others who have come by various paths and am tremendously curious about their approaches, the different pathways and encouragements to understanding what is all one... the breath, the present moment, the body, the mind, and the vastness beyond the mind, in other words, yoga!

So, I have decided to commit myself to two class cards and use them up within approximately six weeks at two different Manhattan yoga studios. Each has a signature style, well known originators, an eclectic merging of traditional spiritual practices with more contemporary physical tendencies towards motion and music. Both have integrated Buddhist and Hindu devotional undercurrents. Both will challenge me to open my heart and take in a new depth to my own practice. I've chosen these two to begin, but there are definitely others that are also calling to me! We'll see how this goes with my own teaching schedule, elder care travels, weekends upstate, family and other work responsibilities.

It can't help but infuse my personal practice with a variety of currents, energy, curiosity and confusion. This is all good. It is the experience and exploration that intrigues me. And I just know it will seep into my teaching, as I cultivate my own awareness. Around mid-October I'll evaluate the effect of these external influences. I may continue to develop relationships with these two studios, but I may take up a couple other studios that integrate these same aspects with a different style.

Thanks to my treasured blog friends who have so courageously been describing their practices and their struggles, their defining moments and their mechanisms of finding their way. What an inspiration they are. I am beginning to feel excited, as well as a little bit anxious, about taking my intentions into action. Even the "little bit anxious" part feels to me as growth.

Bones

2010-09-01T12:52:00.005-04:00

Walking, feeling the swing in the joints, realizing that the skeleton is the frame, bound together by its fittings and tendons, by its uses and spaces.

Thinking about moving in the world. Sensing that being in the world relies upon this spaciousness and the tensions of tissues that hold me together, keep me flexible enough to move.

Distributing my weight throughout my body, my bones hold this human form. For now.

Some of the most beautiful moments of breath come when I see the dry arch of my ribcage like an ancestral skeleton on the earth bleached by the sun. I call this the cathedral of my ribs, and fill it with light and breath.

Walking, passing a front stoop piled with flowers in honor of someone who died, and later, passing the small neighhborhood church where a hearse stood out front. Feeling joy and wonder. The bones, resting without the tensions in the flesh or muscles, without the breath. Is there sorrow in the bones? I don't feel it.

Heat washing the outside of me, heat washing the inside of me. Letting go of the pressure to hold on to my body, I can allow my bones to move with the movement of the breath. Still breathing. For now.

Walking, part of me is contained in this container of bone and breath. Some of me is an electrical impulse or a chemical reaction. When my bones rest, where do I go then? Savasana. Corpse pose. The idea of letting go, allowing the bones to hold my form, my spirit free, my breath easy. For now.

You Are Just Where You Are

2010-08-31T21:11:00.007-04:00

What is it that makes us want to be out of our own life; are we really thinking that it is better somewhere else? Lately I've been seeing people inhabiting their bodies around town as if for a period of time. It feels as though we really do simply find ourselves inside this particular shape or shell, and move around reacting to everything, sometimes blocking out the incoming information to escape the present moment. I was riding on the subway today with a bunch of people who were actively doing something other than riding on the train. The cacophony of multiple headphones going full blast vied for airspace. So many people disconnected from the people around them, not listening to the sounds of the train moving or making contact with each other. For me, the train car was a delicious floating space full of interesting people, aspects of each other, all of us between one place and another, spending time together in that one moving place. We were truly fellow travelers in a place and time. Watching the flashing illusions of a passing train, feeling the movement of the train on its tracks. swaying, stopping and starting, sweating, and drying.

Yoga can help so much with being where you are. Living in the body you have, accepting that the journey is one of getting to know that body, becoming familiar and continuing to explore the world through the means available in the body and the mind. What else is there for us to use? Of course our senses can be developed in different ways, our skills and abilities take us in different directions, but fundamentally we live in the body and make the choice to be present or work to absent ourselves.

Again tonight in class I was struck that just being present is the whole point of practice. It's not about losing oneself, but actually finding and being oneself. It is useful to draw attention to the continuous expanding and contracting that is the breath in every movement. It reflects our energy and release. It helps to focus the mind when we draw our gaze back to the undulations of breath in motion, to laugh at the forgetting and remember again. It was like standing on the train, open and loose, flowing with the train on the tracks, breathing with the car full of people, even wearing earphones and reading e-books, playing electronic games and ignoring their own presence. The difference that was enormous though was that the students were glowing blooms in the fading light of dusk, each breathing, taking the time to be, finding the way to open to that sweetness in the moment. Even when the going got demanding, or they were stumbling into the unknown, they were finding themselves. What a beautiful way to discover that even though we take the chattering mind wherever we go, we can stop and set that down, let that go, and breathe right where we are - wherever that is.

Container for the Breath

2010-08-27T13:17:00.004-04:00

It is difficult at times to really understand mortality, the temporary nature of the life in which I am so totally immersed. At the very moment that I am coming to fathom interdependence and the conditional nature of everything, I am challenged to understand myself as eternal. Okay, I do get that conceptually, and even the laws of physics encourage me to think about matter forever transforming in its particular shapes or definitions but not disappearing in its most essential aspects.

My strongest help in all of this is the breath itself. I can so completely understand myself as a container for the breath. The air, the particles and the movements of the air, are part of me. What I breathe in, I become. What I breathe out, I release. Today I was sanding ancient paint off a century old door that will open one of these days into my small upstate yoga studio. I wore a significant mask, not just the flimsy filter type. The idea was that I was not going to breath in the little particles sent flying by my sandpaper. I took this action because we now know that what we breathe in, we absorb into our cells, with varying effects and I wanted to avoid the effects of breathing lead paint chips.

So now I watch the wind blow through the leaves; I feel it cooling me as I work in the yard. I know in a profound way that it will blow through me too. My substance in this format is here now. My lungs drawing and expelling the air define me as a living creature. When that stops, I will not be this living creature any more. Yet the air will continue to bellow in and out of all the other living beings in any given moment in time. Sometimes I find small fossils in the rocks around me here in Gilboa, NY. They were also breathing in their day. Their essential qualities still exist in some format, not just the imprint they left here when all was under the sea so many years ago. And so I understand that my own aspects will remain, not just the ash I may become, or the particles of earth and dust, not just in the effects I may have had on others who live beyond my own years here.

Breathing helps me be present in this moment fully. That is fundamentally why I begin every yoga practice and every class I teach by drawing attention to the breath itself. In every moment the breath informs me of my mortality and my immortality; allowing me to understand the conditional world, and the eternal as well.

Stones Teaching Me Today

2010-08-26T16:24:00.007-04:00

The stones arrange themselves, not because their shapes are right, or their weight, or their color, or their texture or even their chemical composition is "right." There is no value at all in any of them, yet each is all that it can be at this moment. And they belong where they are, wherever they are. Small, smaller, smallest. Hard, harder, hardest. And so it is with us. Can we simply accept that we are as we are and allow ourselves to fit into the world, into each other's hearts, arranging ourselves?

We arrange the stones too. Feeling their heft, absorbing their subtle surfaces, seeking their fragmented shapes. We layer them and organize them, rely upon them, and leave them long after our own breath is gone and done. We turn natural parts of the earth towards our own purposes. This is part of our exploration of our own existence.

Stones are a path that we cannot see, just as the practice is such a path. Until you step upon it, you may think the path is a garden of sedum and strawberries. Your feet will find the pebbles supporting them even when your mind is unaware. This points to the entryway that the body provides us for experiencing our own lives. Thank goodness for that!

Even that which seems dead and inert is simply a form in which energy is stored, or used. Maybe we see the lushness of the sedum and think "oh that's living and beautiful," and enjoy the juxtaposition with the inert stone. Yet the lichen grows on the warmth of the stone, not in the dirt. This reminds me that the sensory world is totally subject to my mind's construction of the moment. I can observe without having to assign "living" and "inert" and yet understand the concept of "living" and "inert." And I can practice accepting that this doesn't limit my awareness, or devalue my sensory input. Accepting that I am standing still on the earth and that it is turning on its axis, and that it is revolving around the sun, while at the same time I am breathing and every cell is open space.

Acceptance

2010-08-25T14:21:00.005-04:00

"Acceptance does not mean that you have to like everything or that you have to take a passive attitude toward everything and abandon your principles and values. It does not mean that you are satisfied with things as they are or that you are resigned to tolerating things as they "have to be." It does not mean that you should stop trying to break free of your own self-destructive habits or to give up on your desire to change and grow or that you should tolerate injustice, for instance, or avoid getting involved in changing the world around you because it is the way it is and therefore hopeless. Acceptance as we are speaking of it simply means that you have come around to a willingness to see things as they are. This attitude sets the stage for acting appropriately in your life no matter what is happening. You are much more likely to know what to do and have the inner conviction to act when you have a clear picture of what is actually happening than when your vision is clouded by your mind's self-serving judgments and desires or its fears and prejudice." Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

Cultivating an open mind doesn't have to mean having no opinions, but it does mean being ready to set that opinion aside long enough to hear something else, or notice the effects holding that opinion might have. Today I watched my students make such a variety of efforts related to our yoga practice. One student continuously took each movement beyond her comfort zone, another simply closed her eyes and moved from within. Each one was living within the constraints of what she knew to be so, as well as within the parameters set by her opinions about what she thought she knew. When Jon Kabat-Zinn describes acceptance, he lists many of the aspects of ourselves that we fear we will have to give up or lose if we "accept" what we know to be true. He goes on to explain that acceptance "means that you have come around to a willingness to see things as they are." From this vantage point the one student can see the source of pain in her shoulder, and also the source of pain in her pushing herself into that posture AND the possibility that she gains more from staying within her pain-free range. The other student can accept that her inner voice will take her where she needs to be, and she can see that this inner direction may be steering her towards or away from fully experiencing the movement. Acceptance is an important step towards the truth and towards awareness of the range of possibilities. The part that limits us the most is that clouding of the mind by its "self-serving judgments and desires or its fears and prejudice."

I like to think about acceptance as I watch the season change. Accepting all the stages and phases of these transformative times is such a deep experience. There is more joy in it for me than clinging to the idea that summer is the time when I can relax or when the world is more beautiful. It insures disappointment to imagine that only the height of the season represents that season. Taking in the subtle beginnings, watching the process of the changes, cherishing each part of this warming and cooling, blooming and storing, procreating and dying gives me a much wider sense of my own options too. Acceptance helps me to see myself interacting, reacting, and in stillness without needing to attach judgment to each of these. I can tolerate stressful situations by adapting to the conditional nature of the moment, and accept that there is a deeper level where other possibilities exist too. This can bring a sense of hope, a sense of potential for solutions that might otherwise be invisible or inaccessible. In practice this might mean discovering movements and energy that would otherwise be blocked by attachment to associations, prejudices, judgments and patterns from the past. For me acceptance, hope and possibility are each held within one another.

The Big and The Little Things

2010-08-24T15:34:00.005-04:00

There is such a succulent quality in the opening up of a pose in yoga. It is the same deeply aware and blossoming feeling when you take a bite of something totally delicious, or feel your child's heart beating next to your own. Getting there is a series of steps and stages, no matter what condition your body or your mind might be in at the moment. Of course there are those incredible suddenly-you-are-totally-there moments in life, but mostly life is spent in the steps and stages. These are precious to me, and each one is like a strong light beam on the moment, on the truth, and is embedded in trust that this is, in and of itself, the practice.

For each and every person there are poses that seem totally out of reach at first. It might be that forward bending is always a struggle, or that back bends are frightening and painful, or that even lifting an arm a certain height seems to be the boundary layer of what you will ever be able to do. To each and every person I say, let it be what it is, and keep exploring what it is. If we can let go of the definitions that make this "the limit" or "the unattainable" or the "problem with me" then the possibilities will open. Perhaps that forward bend just needs something to stand on that elevates your heels... and liberates your lower back or your hamstrings. Perhaps seated hip and shoulder opening sequences will help release the tension that has historically prevented back bends from reaching out of your core and put all the stress on your back. Perhaps relaxing your neck and opening your heart will allow grace to rotate your shoulders at a lower level and the gradual strengthening that will find your arm moving with your breath. In each case, you need not aim for the most advanced posture first, which is what many people seem to do.

When I begin going to yoga classes, I used to present myself with the idea that Ustrasana (Camel pose) was what I had to do to be "doing a backbend." In the beginning of my practice I couldn't do them at all and who knows but that I may end up not "doing" them as time goes by. Thank you to all my teachers who helped me understand all the little things about opening the spaces, and lifting from the root, and relaxing the unnecessary effort, and taking the small stages that make the "big thing" appear like just another small step in a process of exploration. Ustrasana has led me into other places that I didn't think I would ever go. And even in the course of my exploring, I've had injuries from other things that brought me new layers and stages of awareness. These also open into the "big things" about the body and its strengths and weaknesses, about the mind and its judgments and expectations.

Each part of the path is the path. Understanding this is one of the most marvelous ways of learning how to let go of the hierarchies I impose on seemingly everything. It is obvious to me now that this level of awareness continues to open not only in spite of all the particulars of my specific body and mind, but because of those particulars -- and that is true for each person and all their "big" and "little" things.

Aging is the Path Deepening

2010-08-22T11:05:00.006-04:00

So many people around me seem to use their age as a measure of themselves, useful to their critic and judge. Age also seems to play a big role in the way we all pity ourselves or worry about "the future." Our view of the past is totally washed by the waters of age bracketing.

My parents are old. Their children are old too. My children are young yet, but they are old compared to how I can remember them.

My body does not function exactly the same way as it did yesterday, or three years ago, or 40 years ago for that matter.

In my practice I teach people of all ages, with bodies that have lived through many different experiences and registered them in various ways. Their minds took all that in as well. My own practice began as an exploration of who I might actually be, an effort to discover whatever I could about living this life in this body as this person, and searching for a way to at least limit the pain involved in that process. I've learned about all these matters, and opened doors and windows that I did not know were there before my practice of yoga, and some that I could see vaguely in the distance have become more familiar to me.

Age is for me now a natural reminder to deepen the practice. Continuously letting go, finding new layers and ways of understanding acceptance, gratitude, and joy. Each creaky joint, each little bit of energy opening up, the requirement that I check in with reality and not make up anything about what is, these are just a few gifts of my aging.

I observe my parents, one in a wheelchair with dementia, one fully in charge of a dependent household, and contemplate the number 90. Imagine living ninety years? Imagine memories of being my own age of 56 as so very much younger than the present moment. Nearly half a life ago. What difference does it make that I was more or less flexible a decade ago? How is that knee right now? What can I do to relax that shoulder a little more and draw my energy through my core instead? Can I listen to this conversation in this moment without laying judgment upon every one and every word? Have I seen this before, been here before, heard this before, felt this before? Really? I take a step back to see, think, feel, breathe, observe myself in my patterns and shepherd my feelings like a little flock, safely into the gated pasture where they can be free, and I can be free of them enough to be here now.

The gift of openness, of letting go, gives freedom and truth the chance to take hold in this moment. Just being is the only being there can be, at whatever age. And adding years in and of itself means little. For me, the moment now is the only opportunity offered.