Inner Wisdom: Trust Me It's In There!

When I began taking yoga classes, I was craning my neck to see what the teacher was doing and tried to put myself in that shape. It felt like it took all my attention just to follow directions for breathing and half the time I was exhaling when she was saying to inhale. I didn't know what I was supposed to be doing, and I was using muscles to push and pull myself into and out of each posture. Every time the teacher would say to relax a body part, it seemed that part of me was tense as could be. How did she know? I felt as though the teacher must have had some incredibly deep knowledge about everything going on, that she had some mystical understanding to guide us into a land of the unknown and that somehow she could even see right through my body to sense all the places between my ribs and each part of my leg muscles! The vast majority of my schooling had been what I now see as top down teaching, in other words the teachers knows and the students just absorb what the teacher says and then they will know too. There was nothing in there about what I might have already discovered, or that there was an innate and essential interest in inquiry embedded in me.

Inner wisdom, what inner wisdom? In the beginning, nearly every aspect of the practice feels externalized. The directions translate into the physical efforts of moving arms and legs, turning one's head this way or that, trying to locate oneself while listening for the next direction to step here or release that part. Yet very quickly the body begins adapting to parts of this. Perhaps it is lifting the heart, or releasing the shoulders that still require a reminder, but the ball of the foot starts to seek the fullness of the floor, and the hip begins to relish that opening and closing and opening feeling as one moves through Virabhadrasana I (warrior I) into Virabhadrasana II (warrior II). Oh sure, the hamstrings stay tight for a while, and the legs shake, and the body gulps for air or holds its breath in Utkatasana (chair pose), but even that relationship gradually shifts to an internal communication that can be self absorbed and eventually self directed, or should I say self-encouraged?

It is through this process that we learn to listen to that inner understanding. Yes, there it is, that inner wisdom. We can come to discern the difference between fear of the unknown or of injury, and tightness in the muscles. When I am exploring asana that challenge the structure in its present condition, I fully understand that I am about to ask my body to do things it probably hasn't done before. I rely on what I do know and the breath is the first support. Breathing I do all the time, though often unconsciously, my yoga practice has me more accustomed to bringing using breath to help me focus. A small change in breath can facilitate so much.

Today I experimented with my Sirsasana (headstand). You can take any pose and find out more about it through simple shifts of awareness, changes in breathing, or taking alternate variations. Maybe you have loose hamstrings and forward bends are easy for you, so you can use a twist to help you extend your spine and your awareness. There are many possibilities that will build on what is natural in you. Then there are the places that fear and unfamiliarity will block off from you, unless you take the time to listen deeply to what is in you. Working towards openness in the tight places, allowing time to breathe into the extension or the twist or the silence, and following what the body begins to ask. What happens if I ...? Could I actually try to ...? Once the body is open, or stretched, or strengthened, it may say "Follow me, follow this energy, follow this breath..." and take you somewhere else.

So, as a teacher, I explore these possibilities to better understand what my students are up against. Oh, yes, I feel fear too about falling on my head or overdoing what my shoulder can take painfree. I doubt and question, I fear and hesitate. If I didn't, I wouldn't be myself. What may be quite different is that I watch that response, that feeling, and breathe into it. What do I mean? That fear and clenching that can grab at me in Urdva Dhanurasana (Wheel - Upward Facing Bow) is best dealt with by breathing up my back body, releasing my heart and shoulders with the breath, and relaxing my spine on the exhales. Sometimes I can even relax my feet and get a playful feeling as I breathe this way. Or even walk my hands around as my shoulders let go of the clench.

When I learned to invert into Sirsasana (headstand), I started against the wall. I do not teach this to beginners. I think the wall is better later on in the experience, otherwise all there is to it is to throw one's body up against the wall and wobble on the shoulders-neck-wrists-head. There was no way I was learning to rise in the middle of the room when I was next to the wall. I was too scared, and thought I was too weak. "Thought" was the real block. I remember a teacher telling me that I had more than enough core strength for something, and I was terrified to try it. Fear was stopping me from discovering something that was already mine. So now I try rising into Sirsana with my knees quite bent, letting my heels dangle behind me, and I try rising into Sirsana with my legs straight. What I am discovering is that core and breath are, not surprisingly, the source of the lift -- not the legs, nor the arms. I gaze at a photograph of Dharma Mitra standing on his head without his arms at all, and I begin to understand, from inside me, how that could happen.

It seems that all I do is continue to take away the blockages to that which is already there, I've just been learning to listen with a little more attention! Wonderful how my body took me into such a place of inversion and balance on this day of the summer solstice, when light outweighs the dark.

How Do I Change?

Working through the amazing experiences of shoulder stand with my legs in lotus. How did this happen? Not as though I set the goal, but somehow after many things led up to Ardha Baddha Padma Paschimatanasana (half lotus legs forward fold, bound to folded toe), which is a place I have not gone before, I sat in lotus feeling the stability of the world above and below me. So I rocked back and hung there, breathing, gently holding my legs just as though I was sitting on the sky, and then stretching my core and and opening the groin muscles just enough to begin straightening my lotus knees to the sky too. I rolled back down to sit. Crossed my lotus the other way and went back up. Breathing up and down my spine. Gentle flexing of thighs and hips, no where I had to go, just breathing. Hard to say... right side up, up side down...sitting or what exactly? It just didn't matter.

I've been humming spontaneously all morning since then. Came in off my mat and wrote this, thinking about 21.5.800 and all the people blogging and writing and doing yoga in search of some transformation.


Change is simply
taking on the challenges of being
openly,
without the barriers of attachment
to the story I have told myself.
Gradually I become more aware,
and in that awareness there is
more of me.
Have I changed,
or found myself
as I have always been,
full of possibilities,
continuous, without end?

In this way
loss becomes a part
of gain,
sorrow becomes a part
of joy,
and the dualities
begin to dissolve
that make this now
and that then.
Or to put it another way,
there is nothing else
but this.

Resistance only works for a while,
and if I am patient,
I can breathe into that
to the place that lets go
into everything.

Practice, Practice, Practice

At what point can I release attachment and simply accept without judgment? I try to begin with myself. Maybe that's the hardest place to start, maybe it's the only place to start. The rising sun doesn't have meaning in its relationships to everything it reaches. It tinges this building or illuminates that quadrant of the sky without adding significance. It is the mind that bestows the myriad stories of soul and heart, of life giving force or cruel burning heat to that rising sun. Infinite beauties and poetic forms inhabit the mind, right alongside the darkest most destructive forms. Attachment to conditions gives meaning, and can turn quickly into a death trap, literally or figuratively. I think conflict is as easily about being wrong as about being right. Either way, the attachment cuts me off from being alive.

Letting go is frightening, so I practice it. I need time to get used to it. I take it a little at a time. Maybe it begins with just letting my belly soften as I breathe. Let that gripping go. From there, I can remember, again, to release my shoulder blades down my back, allow my sitting bones to settle into the earth's gravity, and something softens just a little at the edge of my brain as I do this. There are lots of ways to practice yoga, and the asana sequences and conditions under which the practice takes place. Even there, I shy away from attachment to a particular way or act or sequence.

Of course structure is helpful when I let go. It helps assuage the fear of letting go to have a container that feels that it will hold me... the body perhaps, or the floor, or a larger concept of being that is outside these physical boundaries. Yoga practice offers this container. Meditation is all in my head, yet what happens is that I work my way into a space that is beyond my thinking. In the abstract that sounds cool, but sometimes the way there is really scary. That moment when you realize you have let go and there is nothing holding you, just like a physical letting go and free falling, has its exhilaration and terror all mixed together. It is at that moment that I remember I am breathing, breathing.

Many years ago, when I was not quite five years old, I died on an operating table and chose to turn back. As I mentioned in my last post, my dad's voice called me back. He used to come into the operating room with me, to be there as they put me under. And almost without fail, he would start to pass out as I went down. Now I can feel how he was being my container as I let go, though I think he didn't know it then, nor now that we will celebrate his 89th birthday together next week. So I practice letting go still, and discover again and again that love is that container beyond all physical boundaries, whether I am breathing or eventually choose to return to light.

Courage Is This

One more breath, before releasing my feet back to earth from Tripod Headstand.
Clicking "Publish Post."
Writing commitments in my calendar.
Looking my mother in the eye and holding my gaze steady.
Softening my tongue against the roof of my mouth instead of speaking.
These are small and enormous acts of courage in my daily life. Each require that I release my grip on outcome, on judgment, on attachment generally, and begin to let go of fear.

There is a wonderful experience like this taking place through the internet, quietly since June 8th (which by coincidence happened to be my birthday). Started by a writer who currently lives in Brooklyn, the project 21.5.800 began with this brave invitation: for 21 days, do yoga 5 days a week and write 800 words a day (see http://binduwiles.com/). There are flexibilities in the assignment. Participants can choose different writing goals, and can even choose to do savasana (corpse pose/relaxation) rather than a full yoga class. People began signing on to join in, their blogs or web pages showing up on a list that now, on day 4, has 460 participants. I am not among them, officially, though I have written and done yoga every day. Each day I have visited one or two of the blogs in the list, as well as checked in with Bindu's posts.

It is true that we are not alone, but rarely is there so much evidence. Every blog or website I have visited represents a wonderful, rare, lovely, earnest, open, yearning heart seeking trustworthy company and the deep encouragement that comes from knowing they are in such company. All of this emanates from the woman who started the project. In a wild burst of courage, Bindu Wiles has opened a conduit of energy to any and all who happen upon it. And all through the internet, an invisible, ethereal connection opening communication and understanding in a community beyond physical boundaries.

How did I find out about it? A fellow yoga teacher in Switzerland posted her excitement about it on Facebook. Imagine that.