our-yoga

It's hard to know where to begin this post, having recently come home from a 3 1/2 week teacher training retreat in beautiful Bali. Since the real purpose of Teacher training is to recognise the teacher within, and in Yoga the discipline of looking at oneself is expressed through the Niyamas, I thought I would start with that. The Niyamas are the second of the eight 'limbs' of Yoga, and are key observances or self-practices that are like beacons, lighting the path back to the true self.

Saucha – purity
To live Saucha starts with oneself – taking care of the body, which is our temple, our vehicle through this life, the mind, and the soul. Yoga gives us helpful cleansing techniques, or Kriyas, which are practiced every day to keep the nadis (energy channels) of the body clean and balanced. In a borrowed metaphor, Yoga is like a process of renovating your house (transforming your life). So once you have knocked down walls, broken through barriers, smashed what you no longer want or need, you must sweep away the old to make room for the new. After all, who decorates a dirty house?

Santosha – Contentment / Satisfaction
Santosha is the principle of accepting what we are given in life as enough. But it is more than material contentment or detachment from the material world. Santosha is to realise that all that we need, we already have, within ourselves. All the tools for our liberation are there, waiting for us to remember how to use them. To live Santosha is also to accept your limitations of the present moment. In our daily practice of the Ashtanga primary series at the retreat, each of us has to accept the limitations of our current practice, as we are allowed no further in the series if we cannot perform a pose. It is frustrating because our natural tendency is to look ahead at poses to come, and measure ourselves against them. But by learning to live with our limitations we also learn to be satisfied with our state of being as we are.

Tapas – Effort / Self-Discipline
Tapas is more than just 'effort', it is 'transformative effort'. Tapas is the ability to see the silver lining in your hard work, even when it feels like it is going nowhere. Literally “fire” in Sanskrit, Tapas is the ability to burn through your negative thoughts and make room for the positive. The Ashtanga Primary Series (literally called “Yoga Therapy” in Sanskrit) is the embodiment of this transformative process. It is a rigorous, challenging series that cleanses and balances the body. It requires discipline, commitment, patience and humility, and when practiced thus, it will indeed rouse the fire that can transform you and move you to another level.

Svadhyaya – Self-study
One could say that this principle is the embodiment of Yoga. Whether we know it or not, to practise Yoga is to embark in a journey of self-discovery. As one of my teachers said: “the mat is like your battlefield. Here you confront yourself. And if you can rise to that challenge, do battle with your ego and still maintain a steady breath, what in life can you not do?” Our Svadhyaya on the retreat was further intensified with the observation of Mauna, or “noble silence”, for the first 7 days when not in class. Imagine 25 people walking in silence, eating in silence. It was intense! The Mauna was like a cleansing process – breaking the habit of “chit-chat”, of speaking without thinking, of being on social autopilot. Bringing us to mindfulness, bringing us into ourselves.

Ishvarapranidhana – devotion
Literally this Niyama means “surrender to God”, but for me personally the idea of devotion is not that blind following that I associate with my limited contacts with modern religious institutions. The devotion here is to a higher purpose, yes, but that purpose need not be sought without, for it resides within every one of us. Call it what you will: the soul, the consciousness, our inner light, our divinity, our inner nobility, our True Self. To be devoted to finding this inner light is a lifelong commitment. It requires us to peel away the obstacles of humanity (ignorance, egoism, attachment, hatred, to name a few) in search for that which is already within us. Ishvarapranidhana is the humility to look truly at oneself, the courage to accept change, the discipline to transform our lives so that we can live every moment of every day as our true selves – so we can be free.

And so, those are a few of the lessons I have been learning of late. It is good to remind ourselves of these fundamental principles, which are after all the foundations of all the rest of the limbs of Yoga, with the Yamas. This is crucial because Patanjali is telling us: to achieve liberation, one must live an ethical life. Without this, in the famous words of Pattabhi Jois: “all is just circus.”

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7 months ago I started working on handstand (adho mukha vrksasana - downward facing tree pose. Go figure.) Now, I have never been gymnastically inclined. I could never do a backflip, or a cartwheel (still can't!), or any elegant combination of those things. So given that, I think it would be fair to say that I brought little experience but lots of baggage with me when I began this pose.

Sometimes the hardest part of learning something new is un-learning all the things you learned before.

In my mind, I can feel this pose. I can sense the muscles in my body as I place my palms on the floor, pressing down through the fingertips, and then lift one leg up to the sky and hop ever-so-smoothly and rise up, my lower back curving, my muscles engaged, my feet lifting towards the sky! In my mind.

Back in the real world and firmly rooted in my body, however, it is a whole different experience. My courtship with handstand has been neither graceful nor smooth. It has been a hard, sweaty, teeth-gritting experience. It has been a grueling and inelegant process of throwing myself towards an unforgiving wall and heavily crashing back to earth. There has been sweat. There have been grunting and angry noises. There has been frustration, and oh yes, there have been tears.

There have been sacrifices, many of them on the part of my partner, who time after time has stood behind me and dodged my wildly flinging legs in an attempt to catch me in the pose. She learned handstand at the advanced age of about 7, and used to walk on her hands in the front yard. She, as rational a being as has ever walked on two hands, cannot understand the fear. It goes something like this:

her: "you can totally do this pose!"
me: "I know. but I can't!"
her: "why not?"
me: "I don't know! I don't trust the wall to catch me."
her: "but the wall has to catch you! it can't go anywhere!"
me: "yes. no! I'm afraid."
her: "but you know you can do it, and you know the wall is here!"
me: "yes. but I'm afraid."

At some point in Yoga, we have to confront our fear. It is part of the flow. It is deeply entwined with the journey we are on. It manifests to us in a thousand different variations, each deeply personal to the wide-eyed traveler. It is one of the most daunting things we can do as an adult. Sure, we cope with fear when it comes upon us in extreme situations. That is one thing. But intentionally seeking out your fear and confronting it - that is a whole different experience. At the end of the day, we are alone in our fear. Fear shatters our ego and the delusions we make about ourselves. It is up to us to try, fail, cope with failing, and try again. Until one day, yes, we lift up through the fear, and in spite of the fear, we rise.

So after 7 months, yes, I finally am able to kick up into handstand against a wall. But each time I do it (or, so often, don't) I still have to move through my fear. Each time is as intimidating as the first time I faced that wall. And each time I don't make it (and there are still so many!), I am still deeply confronted by the feeling of failure, and frustration. Even when we are successful, fear is not finished with us. It is a part of life, and it is here to stay.

So, what is a girl to do? Each time, I have to breathe, and keep on breathing and move on, moving either buoyed by my success or depressed my failure, but moving inexorably nonetheless. Leaving it to try another day. Coming back to my centre and remembering that I am not here to measure myself against what I can or cannot do, but what I tried to achieve. Reminding myself that you never know who you truly are until you know yourself in the face of a challenge. That is a tree facing downwards. That is Yoga.

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I can't remember where I read the term "tiny yogas" (or else I would credit it), but I love the phrase. These refer to the many ways we can apply what we learn in Yoga to our everyday lives.

The physical applications of this are obvious and you can be as creative as you want! Practice tadasana while waiting in line at the bank. Try your triangle pose (utthita trikonasana) when you get home from work and you feel a bit stiff. Use parsvottanasa (standing nose-to-knee stretch) to stretch out your hamstrings before a hike or a walk. My personal favourite (as my housemate will testify) would be Warrior III while brushing my teeth!

But the asanas are only the beginning. So I want to refer back to my last post about balancing energy, and bring the theory off the mat. We don't only benefit from having balanced energy when we practice our physical Yoga, but being aware of your energy and balancing it in your everyday life can have a positive impact on ordinary situations.

As an example, let's imagine Yogi Jane, who is facing a difficult situation at work. Her boss calls her into a meeting and lays on her a huge task, that will require immense time and resources, that has to be done yesterday, that will require her to drop what she is doing and work around the clock to get it done. Even though she privately thinks that what he is asking is unreasonable (it makes her stomach churn!), she acquiesces. As she drives home that day, she thinks about the task ahead and her stress level rises. When she gets home, her housemate Sarah asks her how her day was, and Yogi Jane explodes into a long tirade against her boss and this task he has set her. No matter how Sarah tries to comfort her, Jane's stress levels don't abate. Finally, Sarah's patience is exhausted and she heads to bed. Jane is left feeling unsatisfied and negative, and her stress keeps her from sleeping well.

Sound familiar? Now let's look at the situation from an energy perspective. When Jane acquiesces to her boss despite her reservations, she is using only softening energy - bending or complying to the situation. The 'hard' or muscular energy in the situation isn't dissipated - and it turns into stress, which then overflows into stress, and impacts other situations in her life (her relationship with Sarah). The imbalance between Jane's softening and muscular energy causes her to experience the situation negatively, and she ends up the worse off for it both professionally and personally.

So, what could Yogi Jane have done differently? Imagine that when her boss comes to her with his demands, Jane takes a deep breath and activates her muscular energy - her willpower. She actively resists the instinct to give into her boss' demands. This has an instant physical effect - making her posture stronger and more self-confident. Instead of agreeing immediately, tells her boss that she thinks his proposal is unreasonable. Then, she balances this resistance (her muscular energy) with some soft energy, and proposes some alternative scenarios that could achieve the objective within the time and resources available to her and her team. Together the two of them come to a compromise that meets both of their needs. Coming home to her housemate Sarah, she shares the story of her problem and how she resolved it and then the two relax into a nice quiet evening.

Perhaps this is oversimplified, but the concept remains. Just like in each and every Yoga pose there are areas that need muscular energy and areas that need softening, the same can be applied to situations we confront. Different contexts require different balances - but learning to apply the right mix of 'hard' and 'soft' energy to the situations in our lives can help us bring the mindful, calming influence of Yoga off the mat.

Practicing 'tiny yogas' - applying the principles of Yoga to an action or an activity in your day, is a rewarding way to begin exploring the path of Karma Yoga - Yoga by action, if you will. In the next post, I'll explore this concept more fully and also touch on the fundamental precepts of the 'Yogi code of ethics' - the guidelines (do's and don'ts!) that Yoga lays out for how to live a fulfilling life.

~Namaste~

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The Yoga we are most familiar with - the practicing of physical poses or asanas - is often called Hatha yoga. In Sanskrit, Ha = sun, Tha = moon. Together, Iyengar defines hatha as "force or determined effort". Combined with the meaning of yoga (to 'bind, join, attach', and also 'union' or 'communion') we reach the overarching view that the practice of hatha yoga is a joining or balancing (of the sun and moon energies in the body) by determined effort in order to achieve union or communion. (To what is up to you!)

The concepts of sun and moon elicit in us a reference to masculine and feminine. Hatha yoga, is about disciplining the body (and mind)'s energies. The masculine energy is linked to the God Shiva, and is called the Prana (masculine). The feminine energy is linked to the Goddess Shakti (Shiva's consort) and is called the Aapana. Together they form the Kundalini, which is like a spiral of energy that flows the length of the human spine. This accounts for the focus of Hatha asanas on the spinal column - it's also why it is important to perform poses on both sides of the body (balance).

In theory when we practice Yoga we are trying to join the masculine and feminine energies of our body, thus becoming 'whole' and achieving "a poise of the soul which enables one to look at life in all its aspects evenly." (Mahadev Desai as quoted by Iyengar in 'A Light on Yoga'). These energies flow through our subtle body (our non-physical or psycho-spiritual body... it's complicated - look it up!) by means of channels called nadis. The nadis run all along the body, connecting at 6 special centres of energy called chakras. But now I'm getting sidetracked.

I recently parcitipated in an Anusara Yoga workshop in which the Teacher discussed this balancing principle. He discussed masculine energy as muscular energy. It is that energy which is powerful, energetic, and giving. When you push up from plank pose (kumbhakasana) to downward-facing dog (adho muka svasana), that would be masculine energy. But once you arrive in the pose, you invoke your feminine energy to soften the upper back and the shoulders and sink gracefully into a deeper stretch. The feminine energy is what allows us to be creative, countering the strong but rigid masculine energy with a gentle touch that says "what if...?".

What amazes me is that in my 7 years of practicing Yoga, I have only just discovered this. How did I miss it? It's fascinating (to me!) that in Western Yoga, which is so female-dominated, the feminine principal of Yoga seems to play second fiddle. Is this because the main styles of Yoga we practice today were male-initiated? Or is it because Western society is full of those rigid, energetic masculine principles? Because we are so focused on the individual, or on attaining instead of letting go? One example is our typical Yoga mat - straight and narrow. Why did it take me 7 years of Yoga to hear a Teacher say: "go ahead and go outside your mat". Simple, yet it can change the whole way you practice Yoga. It feels like coming home.

From this we learn a valuable lesson. Yoga is neither masculine nor feminine but both. It is strong yet soft, rigid yet fluid, it is fixed in a moment but flexible and changing always. Somewhere in there is a balance - a moment when time stops, when the ego dissolves, when the Yogini or Yogi just is. And that is Yoga.

~Namaste~

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