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The idea is to start slowly. Start. Slowly.
I asked if anyone would help test a theory a few weeks back and there have been some reports I'd like to share. The theory was that, based on the observations published by Coach.me that 90% of meditators kept a daily practice after just 11 days plus repetition of the simplest component of the habit being the best way to get started, if you simply roll out your yoga mat - and do nothing else - for 11 consecutive days, you'll be rolling on your yoga practice. The results are, of course anecdotal. Patricia noted in her comment, "The 11-day straight thing worked for me- I took it as a challenge, and that helped me do it. I had a little piece of chocolate after each yoga session, and told myself I could take day #12 off! (don't remember if i did or not). I used the string we got in the HYP class to mark off my yoga space on the living room floor- it's there all the time, out of the way, but I can still see it. I do home practice 5-6 days/week. " Another of my class yogis who was very skeptical about starting a home yoga practice was happy to report that he'd practiced 25 days in a row while I was out of town - all starting by just rolling out the mat and rolling it up again. He sometimes practices 30 minutes at a time now with confidence. And just today I received this in an email from a Yoga at Work Yogi: "I'm on day 18 out of 19 days for rolling out my mat in the morning. Most often I am on my mat for less then 10 minutes. A few mornings have literally been the act of rolling out my mat, 1 deep breathe and rolling my mat back up. But it works!" I'd say that's pretty clear! "It works!" at least for these yogis. Have you tried it? How did or is it going for you? Get some support and inspire others: leave a comment below! February's YinYasaTive classes could be called "Heart Opening," for Valentine's Day, Heart Month and Candelmas (half way through winter!), but I wanted to focus specifically on the theme of "connection." Connection is the theme of this year's retreats because it is vital to integrity.
When we move from connection - as opposed to isolation - we move with both sensation and awareness of the body as a whole. Often we're moving with such focus on a body part or an idea that other body parts nearly go limp. We're using the isometric pull back of the arms often used in Sphinx pose to activate many of the less sensed and often missing muscles of the torso this month. You can try it now in a modified Warrior I, or even Mountain. Remember to always end with your restoration pose when you're practicing on your own! One of the most integrative experiences you can have. Leave a comment here if you use these ideas in your practice this month - you'll encourage others and create even more connection! 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!
All physical practice of yoga is some flavor of Hatha yoga. Yin Yoga targets connective tissue and is done "cold" - without warming up, which engages muscles preferentially to connective tissue - so it comes first. In this class, after breath observation and alternate nostril breathing to sense into your body and switch gears from work, traffic and chores, we take two gentle twists slow, long with a cooling breath. The central portion of practice is formed of linked postures, with or without Sun Salutations depending on the aim and level of the class. Linked postures are often referred to as "Vinyasa," which also means "to place in an intentional way." We focus on transitions between poses, not just being "in" a pose. We conclude each class with Restorative postures and practices including Savasana, or final resting pose, and seated meditation depending on the aim and level of the class. We're closing a 6 month cycle during which we've focused on the core catch, deep core, shoulder lines, front and back hips, back bends, forward bends and inversions. Focusing on postures that engage and open the side body - the sides of the rib cage, the arm pits and the soft space between the rib cage and pelvis called the "flank," as well as the often chronically tight IT (illio-tibial) band - requires sensing into, engaging and softening not only in the targeted area, but intense core engagement, heart opening (back bending + shoulder articulation) and hip engagement and awareness. We're putting it all together with this side body focussed class for the end of the year: fire up your inner bonfire and bring all the parts together for one last hurrah before we start the cycle again! What many people don't realize about yoga is that more than poses, breathing techniques, inspiration or pants, yoga is about habits: how to release them, how to establish them and what they are for.
In the Sutras, Patanjali (the guy who gets credit for writing down the note-like sentences in that book) talks about samskara, or grooves. In scientific lingo, these are the probabilities that certain neurons firing will lead to certain others firing. We experience them every day as our routines, our cravings and in many ways the framework for our experiences. We can let go of, cling to or transform the framework of our experiences. All that is required is awareness, compassion and patience. Just three things, but each a deep and inexhaustible process. This morning I experienced a break through of sorts in my habits, one I've experienced before and will, no doubt, experience again. Having recently changed my work identity, place, process and focus, I've been feeling a bit of anxiety for the last month. I resigned as a Paramedic last month and though I'll still hold my license for another year or so, that will fall away, too. I made this choice because the time necessary to maintain that license and the proficiency that it ought to represent was taking away from the time I had to grow as a yoga guide and business owner. I had a wonderful party with my yoga peeps to celebrate and lunch with my paramedic peeps and it was as graceful and joyous a transition as I could imagine. But even these come with anxieties born of doubt, fear and other delusions like identity and security. And when I feel anxious or destabilized - even for really awesome reasons - I have a set of habits, like tics, that I find deeply comforting and reassuring. I go to the gym, which is my happy place from way, way back. I check email too often and very early. I check the bank accounts and update the budget with annoying accuracy. And I do these things upon waking, before practicing yoga, hiking or engaging in any of the other deeply nourishing practices I've established as an adult. Luckily I've pruned out the truly unhealthy habits of younger days and each of these activities has value in the grand scheme. They paradoxically give me great comfort while undermining my equanimity. They involve a certain grasping over-focus that encourages the shadow side of my personality to emerge: the Control Freak Worrier. But it's only when that Control Freak Worrier emerges that I can invite her to tea. And I learned a long time ago that fighting these tendencies does not lead to their lessening. Just as Patanjali says, what we resist, persists (he, of course, says it in fancy Sanskrit). So when I begin to recognize my need to control freak check things, be in proximity to metal plates and loud music and do tedious math... I just do it. I've learned through years of observing my own patterns that this is temporary and fighting it just draws out the pattern. So I wake to NPR on the East Coast, make the Black Lightening coffee, fire up the computer and counter to everything we know about productivity and peace, I check email, website stats, bank accounts, budgets and then do yoga, hike and head to the gym. I give in. My little Control Freak needs to be heard, seen, brought into awareness, listened to and this is her language. It's been three weeks this time. A few days ago I started longing for my more peaceful morning routine - still with the Black Lightening coffee, but in quiet, reading Dogen, with a shorter trajectory to my mat and my hike and longer one to email. It took me about three days of being aware of the urge to return to my Dogen routine before it felt okay to have it, so for a couple of days I sat with the tension between not-reading-Dogen and checking-on-things before giving in to my Control Freak. She had a few more cries to get out, a few more things to say. This morning, making coffee and petting John Denver (our Husky puppy) in the dark before dawn, I awakened to the lack of that tension. Little Control Freak had gone back for her nap, down under the fertile layers of consciousness for more integration, digestion and warmth. I know she'll be part of me for as long as there's a me, but I've grown fond of her and her quirky needs for reassurance. I've learned that the less I fight, the more I bring to awareness, the easier it is to have the "healthy" habits that Little Control Freak would like to impose but can never seem to establish. Oddly, by letting her have her freakish moments, we both get what we need. It's the process of awareness, of compassion and of sometimes putting our grand plans to the side for a bit so that what is freakish, quirky and seemingly all-we-do-not-want can shine and burn brightly: this clears out the pipes so we can have our clear, peaceful mornings that seem so ideal. This is why you won't find "challenges" here, or 30 day plans to re-vamp your self. While they have their place in learning skills, tools and techniques, they aren't the path to organic transformation. Go to the other websites for boot camps and 21 days to your yoga booty. Come here to find support for unravelling all that on your mat and looking at and holding dear everything it stirs up and covers up. They're both useful activities, the learning skills and the unravelling; there just aren't very many places to support the unravelling and raveling, though. It's not as category-friendly as skill learning boot camps. But it IS the missing ingredient. Add a little into your recipe. Let me know what it looks like for you - leave a comment about your stirring and covering and letting go. That's what this is here for: let it go. or how do "How you do it" meditations work.Last month I posted the first half of a list of “How you do it” meditations, explored more deeply in the “Meditation for Busy People” Workshop. Since that workshop is being repeated in October, I thought I’d dive a little deeper. How do “How you do it” mini-meditations work? A “How you do it” meditation is simply turning your daily activities into meditations. After all, meditation is to prepare us for life, so taking our meditative mind off the mat extends the sphere of our cushion. These kinds of meditation have at least three advantages: first, you can plan triggers that remind you in the middle of your crazy day to shift perspective (for instance, breath meditation at stop lights); second, you can build that bridge from cushion to car (where you practice habits has an effect on how deeply they change you); and finally you can score some meditation even on days that start too early to even stop for breakfast and end so late you can only topple into bed (regularity is part of the power of practice). But what makes these mini-meditations work? You may have noticed that if all you do for a week or so are mini-meditations, they’re power isn’t so great and you may begin to feel like they’re not “doing” anything. Some folks have even called these mini-meditations a cop out, adjusting for the sound bite culture or commodification. And they may have a point. While I’m in favor of even the smallest, seemingly meaningless introductions to yoga and meditation I understand why some may be dubious about their gravity and power. Alone, they lack substance. However in my experience, the most powerful things begin and are sustained through hard times by the smallest, seemingly insignificant actions. If all someone does is to practice three mindful breaths at a stop light, I agree their life is unlikely to change immediately (though the first time may feel earth shaking!). But to scoff at three mindful breaths, or the commitment to have them, is to seriously over estimate the amount of time most people are successfully present on the cushion or underestimate the power of desire, intent and awareness. My experience in my own practice and in supporting students’ shows that transformation begins with action just like these. These mini-meditations gain power, depth and meaning once you are practicing some form of sitting meditation nearly every day. Even these specially marked and carved out times for just sitting can begin very minimally - as few as two, three or five minutes, practiced regularly, over time, wear a groove in the psyche (memory traces as well as neural pathways) that makes expansion, connection and depth greater and easier over time. The only “trick” is to start. Once started, these practices - when we don’t use them to flog or judge ourselves, one more yard stick not measured up to - are synergistic. The “trick” is to start where you are, when you are, with all the hustle and bustle of the life you currently have. If you’re going from zero to something, try mini-meditations. Or try two minute scheduled sitting meditations. But just one, for 11 days. Just one. Your practice will grow. It is a practice because it is regular, because it is a clear break from your day, dedicated to presence, awareness and observation. Will it qualify you to apply for that open monastic abbot position? Um, no. But your life is already full to overflowing, right? That’s why you’re starting here. Your practice, while not the most difficult, rigorous or intense is sustainable. And what is sustained sets down roots, yields fruit and grows. What makes mini-meditations “work” is intention, regularity and awareness. The daily-ness or the every-ness: every dish washed, every stop light, every night before bed, every morning after tooth brushing - whatever your “every” is. That’s where the power abides: in your awareness, lavished on your experience, every. Without judgment, without pushing and with regularity. When you go to yoga class, you practice yoga, right? Definitely. You follow instructions to arrange your body and coordinate your breath in various poses and pose combinations. The result is relaxation, strength, flexibility, calm and bliss.
Is that the same as having a yoga practice? No. Because to practice is different from having a practice. The practice you do in class is your teacher’s practice, shared with you as a vehicle for learning, relaxing, strengthening, calming, blissing and creating flexibility. What do you gain by having your own practice? And is one better than the other? You gain a meditative mindset, and one is not better than the other. In fact, each relies upon and enhances the other. The difference between a yoga class and a yoga practice is more than freedom, or getting to hold poses for the length of time you like, or following your intuition from pose to pose - all of which have value when balanced with their opposites. The difference between class and practice is the container. In class, your teacher is the container, which can be part of what is so delectable about classes. I often hear, when I ask if there are requests, “Just tell me what to do for the next hour!” I love this, too, when I’m in the hands of a good teacher. The ability to turn over the reins, trust, follow and be led somewhere beautiful is the practice of surrender and has tremendous value. Sometimes it’s just plain luxurious. The complement to surrender is effort. “What?!” you say, “I exert plenty of effort in yoga class, let me tell you!” And, of course, you are right. There is effort in yoga class: there is physical effort as well as your teacher guiding you to attend to all sorts of things, guiding your mental energy and effort. The luscious quality of turning over the reins and being guided, however comes from surrender of a capacity that also must be exercised once you’ve reached a level of ability: the ability to be the container for your own practice. The difference between class and practice is that in practice you are the container for your own experience. Whether you move through a pre-planned sequence given to you or allow a practice to flow from your body through the filter of knowledge, when you practice you are both in the movement and the awareness of the movement. You are both in the moment and the bridge from the last to this to the next moment. You needn’t be taken out of presence to simultaneously be in the moment and holding awareness of the sequence of moments: this is meditation. In Sanskrit, the traditional language of yoga philosophy, the poles of experience are referred to as vairagya and abhyasa: surrender and effort. There is a passive and an active component to experience, to wisdom, to learning - to existence. Abhyasa and vairagya are to be found in every pose, every breath and every moment, and so you’ll find an expression of them while taking a yoga class, following instructions, breathing and dissolving into the moment. But you can take that experience of abhyasa and vairagya in yoga poses, of effort and surrender, and place it in a context wherein the practice itself (with its components of effort and surrender) becomes the surrender to a constant awareness that over arches and contains the poses, the transitions and the breaths and unites them and itself into a true practice. The difference between a class and a practice is not how proficient you are, how much you know about poses, effects or sequencing or how “good” you are. The difference lies in how you relate to that experience: are you the container or do you turn that over to another awareness? Each is good in its element - very good. Each without the other is imbalanced. A home yoga practice is the surest way to cultivate this awareness and to become the container for your own practice - to truly own your practice, so that whether you are at home or in class you are practicing your own practice and not mimicking the teacher’s. While mimicking the teacher’s practice is certainly where we all start, and a place it’s often comforting to return, the next level isn’t defined by a pose or a sequence or any outwardly demonstrable action. You can be able to “do” any pose, even the most “advanced” and “difficult” pose imaginable and not own your practice. Only when you cultivate the ability to meet yourself, mano a mano, on your mat and feel your way from pose to pose, breath to breath, breath to pose and pose to breath - whether from a template or following an inner knowing - only then do you own your practice. Then you can own your practice breathing in Mountain pose and nothing more or your favorite “goal” pose - then you’ll be practicing even when you’re class. Then, you won’t find yourself looking from right to left or sneaking a peak in down dog to see if you’re “doing it right” even when you haven’t seen the pose. You’ll trust your inner sensation - and your teacher to correct you if you need it - and see yourself differently because your vision has shifted from external to internal, your senses have turned inward and your practice is truly your own. Having a yoga practice requires repetition and regularity, but not necessarily a whole lot of time. You can have a home yoga practice of 5-15 minutes a day most days and gain so much of the benefit of a practice that your experience of classes will transform. Showing up for yourself in a practice and being there for yourself - lavishing your most valuable asset, your attention, on yourself - yields dividends on and off the mat. |
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