our-yoga

I just read Angela Jamison's latest post on the Ashtanga Yoga Ann Arbor blog, where she discusses in engaging detail that million-dollar Ashtanga question: How do you know when you are ready (or not ready) to teach Ashtanga? I encourage you to read her very intensely thoughtful and utterly honest post in its entirety, but here's an excerpt that really speaks to me:

"For ashtanga teachers, transitioning from sadhana to seva (from self-focused practice, to service) can be weird. It can stunt one’s growth dramatically if done without sufficient (1) preparation as a student, and (2) support from teachers and community. When this transition is made because the student puts herself in the teaching role, and not because her own teachers identify her as sufficiently skilled and prepared to teach, the challenges just mentioned are multiplied.

(Subtext: do not get in to ashtanga teaching unless you full-on cannot avoid it. Resist!! Don’t give yourself over to it unless you basically have to do it in order for your own practice to grow, and unless you have tons of support.)

Given these challenges, most teachers need active, invested mentors to whom they are accountable. (I do.) They need a (1) clear method and (2) a sense of history to keep from getting confused. They need to have strong equanimity and mental clarity, so they can (1) stand outside today’s “yoga” market and culture hype and (2) influence that culture positively.

Teachers need to be able to identify, and resist, the ego’s urge to use teaching to feed root chakra needs: money, sex, power, and attention.

(Subtext: yoga BS, and yoga scandals, happen when teachers don’t have all the support they need. Or when they fail to realize that they actually do have sufficient money, sex, power and attention – and thus they constantly grasp after more and more of the same. This happens when we don’t have anyone to call us on our, well, crap.)"

Reading Angela's words above and reflecting on my life of mostly self-practice over the last few years, I can appreciate that what has happened to me over the last few years is really no accident. If you read this blog regularly, you will know that over the last few years, I have, on several occasions, entertained the notion of teaching or "sharing" the practice with others, and although I have made a few limited ventures in this area, none of these ventures have led to anything big or long-lasting.

Reflecting on Angela's words above, I can see that the "failures" of my forays into teaching Ashtanga thus far are actually not bad things at all, from a big picture point of view. While there is probably nothing inherently wrong with sharing my limited knowledge of the practice with others, it is still nevertheless true that I was never in a position where I "full-on cannot avoid" teaching; I was never in a position where I had to teach in order for my practice to grow. As they say, everything happens (or does not happen) for a reason: I am quite convinced that in not teaching Ashtanga over the last few years, I was in fact protected from the vicissitudes of today's yoga scene; a scene which, as many of you know, is more often than not driven by the forces of the free market than by people who genuinely know what they are doing. Angela speaks quite bluntly about this pitfall of the contemporary American yoga scene when she writes:

"The majority of yoga teachers are exploited. Exploiting them is easy because they’re inexperienced as practitioners and poorly trained as teachers. But exploitation, inexperience and poor training don’t help anyone – not really.

...here’s the thing. Trying to pretend you know what yoga is when your practice is not fully developed is a formula for arrested development. Thrusting a person into this job for matters of convenience is not cool. It’s the reason western yoga is full of elementary-level instruction trying to pass itself off as something more by adding special effects. 

(Subtext: when you meet someone who wants you to teach regardless of whether you’re ready, and for matters of their own convenience, is that your teacher? Do you deserve better?)"

These are definitely sobering words for this "fake-it-till-you-make-it" capitalistic culture that we live in, in which it seems that virtually everybody wants to be seen as an expert of one kind or another, whether or not they actually really know what they are doing or saying.

On a slightly different but related note, at her LA workshop last weekend, Kino also briefly addressed this question of when one is ready to teach Ashtanga. During one of the sessions at her workshop last weekend, she related this humorous story of a very physically-talented student she met during her workshop in Taiwan. Apparently, this student, who had a background in martial arts, was doing Ashtanga for the very first time in his life (apparently, he had accompanied a friend to the workshop and was taking the workshop along with the friend to keep the friend company). Seeing that he seemed to be quite physically able, Kino asked him if he could try jumping through with straight legs. After hearing her description, this student effortlessly accomplished a straight-legged jump-through on his very first attempt ever; an accomplishment which took Kino herself many years to achieve.

Anyway, the point of Kino's story is this: You know you are ready to teach Ashtanga yoga when you can look at people who are more advanced in the practice than you are (or who can effortlessly do things that took you a long time and a lot of effort to accomplish), and genuinely rejoice and be happy at their abilities, without being envious of them or even being resentful of their achievements.

Well, all I can say is this: Using Kino's yardstick, I know for sure that I am definitely not ready to teach Ashtanga. If it's okay with you, I'm not going to go into the details here. But I think you get where I'm coming from...           

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After a long overland journey from Southern California, I arrived back here in Pocatello, Idaho a couple of days ago. School starts back up tomorrow, and I am still trying to re-orient myself to the gravitational pull of my "normal" life (i.e. the life that does not involve driving all over the place attending yoga workshops and interviewing celebrity teachers).

But I guess I'll spare you the boring details of this re-orientation. Here's something else that might interest you. On the way back to Pocatello, I took a little detour off the interstate, and stopped briefly in Preston, Idaho. Preston, as some of you may know, is the home of Napoleon Dynamite. I don't know how many of you are fans of the movie, but while in Preston, I went to a few of the places where the movie was shot, and took some pictures. In what follows, I shall set out these pictures I took alongside screenshots from the actual movie. I hope you find them interesting. If this doesn't interest you, and you'll rather read about something more yoga-related, well, then, wait for the next post :-)

But in the meantime, for all of you Napoleon fans out there, here goes. The first thing I saw when I got into Preston was Pop'n Pins Lanes. This is the bowling alley that Kip and Uncle Rico went bowling at in the movie:

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Unity Farm has over 12 acres of forest, which I manage using my Stihl 290 Farm Boss chainsaw and my Scandinavian Forest Axes

I've written previously about managing firewood and logs for mushroom farming

Recently, as we've worked with Tree Specialists on a land management plan that includes an expanded orchard, bees, wildflowers, meadow, and wetland, I've  learned more about tree identification.

As a mushroom expert doing toxicology consultation on the 2500 species of mushrooms in North America, I've become quite comfortable with identification keys.  Recently Barbara Keene of Tree Specialists walked the forests of Unity Farm and taught me how to distinguish white/red oak, red/norway maple, black/sweet birch, cedar, poplar, hickory, ash, dogwood, and elm.

What's the technique?

First, look at the branching pattern of limbs and twigs.  

Maples, Ash, Dogwoods, and Horse Chestnut have opposite branching.    Oaks, birches, poplars, hickory, and elm have alternating branch patterns.

Next, look at the bark

Ash has a diamond-like raised bark pattern. Birches have paper-like peeling bark.  Poplar has a distinctive fissured and ridged bark.  Hickory bark forms ridges in a vertical pattern.   Dogwood is "square plated".     Elm bark is rough and coarse, with intersecting ridges.   Cedar is "string-like".

Finally, look at the buds and nuts.

Maples have distinctive large buds in the spring .   Hickories have a distinctive nut (a favorite of Euell Gibbons)

Thus,  once I've found an opposite branching pattern the presence of a raised diamond or square bark pattern is sufficient to distinguish maples, ash, and dogwoods.

For alternating branch patterns, the presence of paper-like, fissured, vertical ridges, or rough intersecting ridges is enough to distinguish oaks, birches, poplars, hickory, and elm.

The texture and silhouette of cedars (and aroma) are unmistakable.

Buds and nuts help confirm the identification.

Armed with this knowledge, I can harvest fallen branches or dying trees for firewood, mushroom cultivation, or projects that require wood on the farm.   Over time, with help, I'll become a competent forest manager.

The March HIT Standards Committee focused on streamlining test scripts for certification, an overview of FDA Universal Device Identifier rule making, clinical summary formats for Long Term Care, and the latest updates from ONC.

We began the meeting by reflecting on the recent HIMSS conference, noting that the culture and momentum for EHR and HIE adoption in the US have changed to the point that there is no longer of question achieving our meaningful use attestation goals.

Liz Johnson and Cris Ross provided an overview of the implementation workgroup review of testing scenarios.     Their goal has been to increase the clinical relevance and decrease the burden of testing for certification.   A scenario-based sequence approach enables the reuse of data across multiple tests are part of continuum of functional evaluation.    Part of the work of this group is to ensure the tools provided for testing (9 different tools for Meaningful Use Stage 2) work well and that pre-testing entry of data is allowed, reducing the time of testing procedures substantially.

Next, Terrie Reed presented the FDA's Unique Device Identifiers work.   She discussed the two standards that would be used - GMDN for categories of devices and the use of globally unique identifier for each product (GUDID).   Her analogy to medication vocabulary standards is that GMDN is like RxNorm (a chemical name) and GUDID is like NDC (a specific package size).   She also noted that the regulation will include all medical devices.   The standards committee advised her that the regulation should cover consumer devices used for healthcare as well, so that EHRs and PHRs can be more easily interfaced to consumer devices.

Bill Russell and Larry Garber presented an excellent overview of Long-term Care Coordination standards work, noting that CCDA would benefit from additional templates.

Finally, Judy Murphy and Doug Fridsma presented ONC Updates.

Over the next month, the Standards Committee members will continue their workgroup efforts to select foundational standards for Meaningful Use Stage 3.    I look forward to our next meeting.

It's midnight here in Irvine, California, where I am staying at the home of a couple of friends who are hosting me (I came down here from LA immediately after Kino's workshop last weekend). It's way past my bedtime; fortunately, tomorrow is a moon day, so I don't have to worry about getting up very early :-)

But I want to write about the little yoga pilgrimage that I undertook here in SoCal today before I go to bed. It started with my going to mysore this morning at Tim Miller's studio, the Ashtanga Yoga Center in Carlsbad. I had a little trouble finding the place; apparently, part of the road on which the shopping center in which Tim's studio is located has a different name, and my directions did not reflect that.Which threw me off for a little while, until I remembered from Tim's website that the studio is located directly above H&M (a trendy fashion store). So I asked a few locals where the H&M was (I didn't think many locals would know where the Ashtanga Yoga Center is, but H&M is a different story...), and was able to use the directions they gave me to the H&M to find Tim's studio. Isn't it interesting how you can use something that was intended for one purpose for another purpose? I can't help feeling that it was the energy of Hanuman that helped me to manifest the wisdom to find the place in this creative way.

Practice at Tim's was great. Before class started, Tim walked around chatting with people. When he got to me, he said, "We've met before. You look familiar." I then proceeded to explain to him that I had attended his workshop back in 2008 at Miami Life Center (Kino's studio). In response, Tim simply smiled serenely, and said, "Good to meet you again." It's things like this that sometimes make me wonder if I end up giving too much information to people--information that are, in some sense, not terribly essential to the encounter--when I introduce myself.

Anyway, after the introduction, I proceeded to do my practice. It was great, as I said. I did full primary and second up to Kapotasana. Through it all, I got just one adjustment from Tim (in Virabhadrasana B), but I was happy with my practice. As with many other mysore rooms that I have been in, there was something about this practice room that made me practice at a faster pace than I usually do at home (group energy?), so that by the time I got out of Kapo, I was totally winded. It was all I could do to do three backbends, and stand up from the third one. I just didn't have it in me to do dropbacks and standups. Neither Tim nor his assistant insisted either, so I just went straight to the finishing postures.

After class, I asked Tim if he would pose for a picture with me, and he agreed:

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I do.

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Emeli Sandé - River
If you're looking for the big adventureand gold is all that's on your mindIf all you want's someone to take your picturethen I won't waste your time.See, maybe I'm too quiet for youyou probably never noticed mebut if you're too big to follow rivershow you ever gonna find the sea?

Chorus:so follow me i'll be your river, riverI'll do the running for youfollow me i'll be your river, riveri'll move the mountains for youfollow me, i'll be your river, riveri'm here to keep you floatingfollow mei'll be your river river. River, river, yeah
If all you want are answers to your questionsAnd you can't seem to find no love for freeIf you're looking for the right directionThen darling, look for me
See, I can make the load much lighterI just need you to confide in mebut if you're too proud to follow rivershow you ever gonna find the sea?

Chorus:so follow me, i'll be your river, riverI'll do the running for youfollow me, i'll be your river, riveri'll move the mountains for youfollow me. i'll be your river, riverI'm here to keep you floatingfollow me i'll be your river, river. River, river, yeah

Wherever you're standing, I will be by your sidethrough the good, through the bad, i'll never be hard to findso wherever you're standing I will be by your sidethrough the good, through the bad, i'll never be hard to find

Chorus:so follow me, i'll be your river, riverI'll do the running for youfollow me, i'll be your river, riveri'll move the mountains for youfollow me. I'll be your river, riverI'm here to keep you floatingfollow me, I'll be your river, river. River, river, yeah
Wherever you're standing, I will be by your side

Through the good, through the bad, I'll never be hard to find

* * *

I've been loving the vocal stylings of Emeli Sandé. Refreshing. Different. I find great pleasure in finding musical artist that fly a little below the radar. She's a gem and the above song is one of my favorites, specifically because of the lyrics, and it is a treat to hear it through such a exquisite voice. Everyday I am challenged in letting go. A constant theme. Many times I have resisted in letting go; however, when I finally do it seems a greater possibility opens. 

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On a previous Yoga Tip, a reader left the following comment: "I'd love some tips on how to keep a straight leg without locking the knees in balance poses."

This is an excellent question! Many of us have probably heard yoga teachers talk about the importance of not locking the knees in standing and balance poses.  Without going into too much anatomical detail, this is important for the following reasons:

• If your knee is locked in a balance pose, it means that the joint is holding the weight of the body, instead of the muscles. In the long run, this can wear down the protective cushioning around the knee (called the meniscus) and cause wear and tear on the joint, which can lead to pain, injury and possibly conditions like arthritis.
• If your knee is locked in a weight-bearing standing pose, for example triangle pose, the joint is again at risk, but in addition, because you are now stretching as well as bearing weight, the ligaments and tendons surrounding the knee joint are also at risk of taking the strain of the stretch, instead of the muscles. Since ligaments and tendons are meant to stabilise, not to stretch, this can quickly lead to injury - and a torn or injured ligament takes far, far longer to heal than a similarly injured muscle.

1. Begin in a standing pose with a neutral pelvis.
2. Establish an even weight distribution between the outer edge, inner edge, and heels of your feet, lifting your toes up to do so if it helps. Press strongly through the big toe mound in order to lift your arches.
3. Keep that engagement and then without moving your feet, try to engage your muscles as if you wanted your toes to lengthen forwards and your heels to draw back.
4. Next, imagine your shins drawing forward.
5. Now, engage your muscles as if to squeeze an imaginary yoga block or tennis ball in between your thighs, lifting your kneecaps upwards and drawing the thigh muscles up and back.
6. Finally, engage your muscles as if you wanted to lift your pelvis away from the tops of your femurs. This one is tricky - just visualise it, even if you can't feel anything happening.

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Recently I was asked if SaaS/Cloud computing is appropriate for small practice EHR hosting.

I responded

"SaaS in general is good.

However, most SaaS is neither private nor secure.

Current regulatory and compliance mandates require that you find a cloud hosting firm which will indemnify you against privacy breeches caused by security issues in the SaaS hosting facility.

Also, SaaS is only as good as the internet connections of the client sites.   We've had a great deal of experience with 'last mile' issues"

To add further detail, Bill Gillis, the CIO of the Beth Israel Deaconess Care Organization (BIDCO) responded

"We built, manage & maintain our own private cloud in a Co-location facility.  Our EHR cloud is served to the practice via public internet over SSL. One challenge we struggle with is ISP availability and service level/stability.  In Metro Boston one would expect a robust internet infrastructure.  We've found heterogeneous public internet capabilities and quality of service.  We've found that getting a good ping response is not truly an indicator of meeting application performance requirements.  Many cloud hosted applications are sensitive to latency, packet loss, fragmentation & jitter.

In the first year of our project deployment we struggled because the ISP connectivity did not appear to be the culprit.  A practice would have 10+ megabit connections with ping returns under 25ms.  Yet the practice would experience application freezing, crashes or very poor/slow response time.  From the public ISP's perspective 'the lights were green' and they would take no further action.  After engaging third party network sniffing firm, we discovered the real culprit impacting performance - network latency.  We were able to take the data from that engagement back to the ISP to illustrate the problems with the packets in transit.

Implementing network sniffing engagement was time consuming and costly.  Doing this for the 100+ practice locations we were supporting is not sustainable.  Luckily we found a company in Boston called Apparent Networks (now called Appneta).  Appneta makes a small, low cost black box application that provides deep and detailed network data back to a secure cloud.  We place a device in a practice that communicates back to a device we keep in our hosted/central site.  The devices continually communicate with each other and log all of the various degrees of network performance up to the cloud.  The best part is we preconfigure the devices and mail them to the practices reporting issues.

 All the practice staff need to do is provide power and plug it into an open Ethernet port.  This saves us from deploying a technician on-site.  Since we first deployed these devices we've been able to get to the root cause of performance issues and resolve them rapidly.  We've been able to identify everything from an ISP charging for a certain level of bandwidth while only providing 1/2 that speed to staff streaming media during high volume hours saturating the local router.  The performance data is stored in the cloud indefinitely.  This give us a longitudinal view of the network/internet connectivity for a specific practice.  Recently we were able to avoid a potential issue by noticing that a practice's connection stability was slowly degrading over the past year.  We were able to work with the ISP to discover they had an issue with a local Central Office/substation.  The reality is most ISP's are not that willing to work with us until we show them the data.  Once we have the smoking gun, they tend to dig deeper and work with us to resolve the problems.  For all the high-tech equipment we've leveraged for our private cloud, this device was the real swiss army knife of the project."

I've described Cloud Computing as "your mess run by someone else".   It can be done successfully, but SaaS is only as good as the privacy protections you purchase or build yourself.   Performance is only as good as your network connection.

I hope this is helpful.

Moment of inner freedom when the mind is opened and the infinite universe revealed and the soul is left to wander dazed and confus’d searching here and there for teachers and friends.   
- Jim Morrison 

I've lived in Sweden for over 3 years now. Time has flown by, as I always say. It's kinda frightening just how fast. During the cold, dark winters, I still ask myself, how in the hell did I end up here? Oh yeah, I remember now, hahaha. It's not all that bad. I just like to exaggerate on the weather just like any native Swede would. Hence, constantly complaining, talking about, comparing it to, hemming and hawing, blah, blah, blah. I guess it would get old after while. Now, the newness of the winters are steadily beginning to wear off, and wear off fast. And somehow, once entering March the temps have dropped even further, but hopefully not my resolve. 

However, this isn't why I write today, because quite honestly there is something I need to get off my chest, and usually when it comes to this point it has been eating at me for sometime already. I like to ride things out and see where the chips may fall and with limited platforms or people to express this too here I have no other option but to blog about it. Those who have been following me for a while know that I don't have a problem talking about dark periods in my life, and believe me, there will be more to disclose. I don't believe for one minute that being in the world of yoga means hiding behind a manufactured face of bliss. When we get down and dirty, meeting our edge it isn't always pretty, but by God, it will be liberating! And quite frankly, as of late, I tire of the coldness of Sweden. Oh no, not the temperature, this is not what I speak of today, it is the famous Swedish jealousy and passive aggressive nature that is so prevalent in this country. In spite of my experience with this, I'm not here to rattle on and downgrade a place that I have grown to love and appreciate. Sweden in many ways is an amazing country and one I feel blessed to experience. But what I have learned through my travels is every place has a light and a shadow side and Sweden is no different. 

Often it has been confusing. I have been with those who I thought were my friends to then get the sense they were anything but, hoping for my dimise. In many ways, it has made me sad, for a minute, and to really look at it forces me to reach higher and rise above. What I have found is the more push back I get, or passive aggressive treatment I receive, I use it as fuel to further look inside and find a better way within myself to be and to live. Having an acquaintance be unable to handle it if I am at the center of conversation within a circle of people, to then speak in Swedish loudly next to me, starting another conversation to make themself feel more powerful and in control, is something I have experienced on a number of occasions. It's shocking but funny at the same time. I guess it takes more energy to be that way. 

I've been in working situations where it took someone literally 6 months to acknowledge my presence even in the mist of looking them in the eye and saying hello. Again, it must be hard to be that way. So closed off and unwilling to give someone on the outside a chance. The thing is, being on the outside is nothing new for me and to live with this has in many ways been a blessing in disguise. When I receive the brunt end of this type of treatment it only makes me stronger, as I lean on those who I know in my heart have my back. Once you know who is really willing to go to bat for you, it's relationship to cherish. 

This has also been a practice in not allowing myself to shut down and close off. Though it hurts at times, and my heart has ached, at the very least I know, I can feel and be vulnerable to it. Though often I have been angry. However, I have no problem with letting the anger ride out. At least there is blood pulsing through my veins and being true to the emotion that arises means I don't have to be attached to it for long. Though there have been lies spoken and undercutting remarks and unkind behavior done on my behalf, I choose not engage in it even though humanly speaking it does cross my mind. I'm not here to bitch about it. I'm here to transform it. This is what I have realized. 

My boyfriend has spoken openly about this to me, which he calls, "Swedish jealously." Friends of his have been frank about it as well. Of course this is not limited to just Sweden. I'm not that blind. One can find this type of treatment anywhere. Often when willing to step out, make a difference, or to simply live your passion in truth, there will be those who will have issue with it instead of using it as inspiration. 

So to those who would not like to see me succeed, or have made my stay here more challenging and isolating, I thank you. I thank you will all my heart. You have strengthened my resolve to continue on my path, exploring my potential, and expanding into the new projects I have set in motion. I'm even more inspired to find the love and to be who I am. If it wasn't for you, I might not have quickened so readily inside myself. And, with that being said, I am even more revitalized and motivated to establish a community in Stockholm through the love and passion of yoga that will sing the praises of what this journey is all about. Yeah. I'm not going anywhere.

Once again,

THANK YOU.

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