Sankalpa: Relate to Your Intentions Differently This Year for Profound, Organic Transformation12/31/2014 "You are what your deep, driving desire is. As your desire is, so is your will. As your will is, so is your deed. As your deed is, so is your destiny." - Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. A brand new, fresh year. Someone told me yesterday that they love January because everything seems so possible for him. Here in the deep, dark of winter we make time for one last hurrah on New Year's Eve (even if that's just watching a ball drop or clinking glasses with sparkling water before going to bed at 10pm) and then wipe the proverbial slate clean as we awaken the next morning. But what slate? What's changed? People make resolutions every year and a dismal number are still connected to them just 6 weeks later at Valentines. Often we imagine that by saying something, maybe buying a new pair of shoes or equipment, we can squeeze our eyes shut real tight, ball up our fists and click our heels three times to arrive where we said we wanted to go. But what if we had more important places to go? What if the thing we chose was really just the tip of the ice berg - or even a distraction from the root of what we intended to change? More importantly, What if you're already whole and complete? If you're already whole (spoiler alert: you are.) then the best thing you can do is connect to your deepest driving desire, your heartfelt desire, and plant that seed in the nurturing soil of your embodied consciousness, visit it often and allow for organic transformation over time. A year is a good span to live with. You have a two step plan to get started, but don't worry, you'll enjoy these steps. You can rinse and repeat often over time, and here's the kicker: you'll want to. Step One: Practice Yoga Nidra 61 points relaxation with enough time after to rest and listen to your heart, body, wisdom, journal if that's your thing. The deepest driving desire, your heartfelt truth may arise as a feeling, words, images. Just listen. Whatever you come up with - and if it seems like nothing, that's okay - you can't do this wrong - state it positively. Whatever is true "I am whole." "I am relaxed and open to new experience." "I am listening." These are simply examples, the possibilities are endless. Step Two: Come back another time, remembering your expression of your heartfelt truth. Repeat Yoga Nidra 61 points and silently repeat your heartfelt truth in the stillness you've created through the practice. A Sankalpa is more than a wish, a resolution or a petition. Rather than imposing a goal on your life, you allow a deep longing, heartfelt truth, to arise and then you actually pay attention to it. In listening, you commit to taking actions that this longing calls you to. The heart center - the place where people rest their hand organically when making a decision, where joy can sometimes be felt as a leap and loss can feel like an actual cavern - is called "Anahata" in Sanskrit: unstruck. Like a bell. Like your original nature before the ups and downs of this life gave you habits and grooves, armor and vices. Like you. Connecting to this sense of original self, a self without agendas or pretensions, is a matter of peeling back layers, in yoga and Sanskrit called "Koshas." Think of these as layers of how we learn to relate to ourselves. In Sanskrit, from the first to connect to to the final, here's what they're called and what it means:
You can turn them into questions to guide your practice and, in Yoga Nidra, you can bring them into awareness and learn how to deeply listen for your deepest driving desire, your heartfelt truth, that thing that lies under all the other things. In January we'll be working with the questions in classes, they're very simple and you can use them at home and in other activities:
Yoga Nidra can be practiced alone or after practice and we'll be approaching it in Savasana often this month through the 61 points practice. Technically, Yoga Nidra is the state of mind and the practice is a method for creating it, though people often use the term "Yoga Nidra" to refer to the practices that can lead to it. There are many recordings you can use to guide you in the 61 points practice and sustaining awareness in the stillness it creates. You'll receive a free Yoga Nidra Guided Imagery Meditation when you sign up for the newsletter at the top right and you can use this to get started. We'll use this during New Year's Day YinYasative Celebration as well as the Restorative Workshop on Saturday, when we'll have plenty of time to take this journey twice in a restful, supported, even pampered environment. We'll practice a version at the end of most January classes.
Leave a comment and share how your experience with 61 Points Practice or Yoga Nidra and inspire others!
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Come in and sit a while. Better yet, roll out your mat and stand. If you worry you won't "know what to do" or that you'll go long and blow your morning routine, or forget to counterpose (what's counterpose?) or not leave enough time for savasana... This is for you. (click here, go to "Personal Practice Template.") A 15 minute audio template composed of questions, cueing you to focus on the exhale, progress your poses, take an inversion if you'd like, a final twist and a minute and a half of savasana - just enough time - at the end. All with a musical bed from Bill Bruedigam, a talented experimental and meditative musician. Have more time, take a longer final relaxation. But if you're trying to include yoga in a contained and still intuitive way, this recording is for you. Let me know how you use this and what you'd like in the next evolution - leave a comment below. Never miss a recording or a post - sign up for Inspire, Badlands Yoga's weekly newsletter - to never miss out. The sign up is over on the right of this page. You'll be glad you did. Why we practice feeling grateful at the end of every yoga class.
In honor of our national festival of gratitude. Or food. Or being grateful for having food. Or eating our feelings. Don't eat your feelings. Feel them. Right after your luxurious Savasana, after you've reconnected with every sense, moved every joint and begun to breathe... well, less like a corpse, I invite you to feel gratitude for three things in your life. This isn't just a nice way to end class, a touchy feely, oh-see-how-grateful-we-all-are, pie in the sky, there ain't no danger in the world, special secret mumbo jumbo. This is based on real data that neuroscientists at the highest levels are using to transform their own lives while they study the brain some more. So I figure that school administrators, financial analysts, procurement specialists, social workers, paramedics and nurses, fathers and mothers, ministers, veterans, high school teachers and you should benefit from it, too. If you come to yoga classes with me, you know we've been curling up in renewasana between corpse and closing class to feel feelings of gratitude for a long time. I recently listened to an interview of Dr. Rick Hanson by Tami Simon of SoundsTrue - listened over and over, it's that good - that made the science and procedures behind gratitude practice really come to life. Now if you've listened to Simon interview before, you're already a fan and may have heard this yourself. If not, head on over for a listen instead of longing for another installment of America's Next Top Model (Corey so should have won). You'll need to sign up for a free "Direct Access" Membership but then search on "Rick Hanson" and you'll be in. It's worth it. The interview is about "positive neuroplasticity" and leverages what we know about neurophysiology to overcome our natural bias toward looking out for threats, so activating our fight or flight response, and grow our tendency toward a more relaxed nervous system. This procedure "comes from tough minded clarity about the ways life is challenging" and is "based in brain science." The trick is to feel your feelings. But Hanson has a much catchier way of putting this. Hanson notes that having a positive - or useful - mental state is the prerequisite to this method, but also notes how infrequently these transient states actually change us in any fundamental way. He gives 5 modifiers that lead to "positive neuroplasticity:"
(You really should listen to him talk, his interview is crazy packed). His recommendation is that "half a dozen times a day, half a minute at a time" you "help the good stuff stick to you" by stopping to notice the sensations and feelings associated with the positive experience and "install" these experiences by increasing each of the 5 modifiers. Make it last a little longer by noticing it. Up the intensity by savoring it. Notice every sense it hits, even moving your body to capture more sensation. Allow it to be on its own - new, not lumped in with other experiences. Acknowledge the experience's importance to you. The experience doesn't have to be a rock-your-world kind of moment. It can be a "one or two on a ten scale," petting your dog and a stranger smiling at you are a couple of examples they discuss. So now you know why, while you're curled up in a ball, preparing to take your practice out into the world, I ask you to feel the feelings that surround 3 things for which you are grateful. Yoga practice, we all know, is not so much practice for handstands and down dogs: it's practice for traffic and lines and challenges and grace. Practice for grace, practice for love and install a little extra light into that noggin. ...Subscribe to Inspire, the weekly round-up of everything new here in the Badlands. You'll receive a link to an exclusive subscriber only page with a special meditation just for you, plus you'll be the very first to know when new yoga goodness happens... like maybe the book and recorded classes that create transformation coming out after the first of the year. Or see through yoga pants. Whichever happens... oh. Well since that other thing has already happened, it'll probably be the book. |
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