Intentions and Actions

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

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

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

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

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

"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

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.