our-yoga

I just finished watching all four seasons of Battlestar Galactica: About half an hour ago, I consumed completed the last episode of season 4. So they found Earth... well, sort of. I won't spoil it for you by telling you more.

All in all, I think it was a beautiful ending to a very well-told story, although I can't help feeling that more explanation of what exactly happened to Starbuck would have been nice. But then again, I suppose there's something to be said for not over-explaining things.

The feeling I have now is like the feeling one gets when one finishes a good book: You don't want it to end. But as the oft-repeated cliche goes, all good things have to come to an end... Well, I guess the upside is that we can all now look forward to some serious Ashtanga blogging (do we even know what that means anymore?) without all this neither-here-nor-there rambling about Cylons that has been all-too-characteristic of my blogging in the last couple of months. Yay. Long live Cylon-free Ashtanga blogging!  

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by Nina

Rose Light by Melina Meza

When I was going through perimenopause, the worst symptom I had was fatigue attacks. Although fatigue or exhaustion is a classic symptom of perimenopause, I'm pretty sure I made up the term "fatigue attack" because I needed a special term for how it felt to me. I'm a pretty energetic person who gets a lot of things done in a given day, and my yoga practice during that time was quite athletic. But during that period, once in a while, I'd suddenly feel so drained of all energy that all I wanted to do was collapse into a puddle on the floor. There was something essentially different about these hormonally based episodes of fatigue than normal tiredness, and I remembered that same feeling of utter exhaustion from my pregnancies (although those were combined with nausea). So I knew it wasn't something I could fight with energizing poses, such as backbends or sun salutations. Fortunately, I got some guidance from two different senior teachers, Rodney Yee and Patricia Walden, who both helped me figure out a good way to practice when I was feeling that way.

When I first talked with Rodney about a fatigue practice, he came up with a sequence of supported inverted poses (see Just In Time for the Holidays: Inverted Poses). However, the first pose in the sequence was Downward-Facing Dog with head support (traditionally the beginning pose in a supported inverted pose practice), and I complained to him (whined?) that when I was feeling exhausted, that pose felt like to much. So he changed the sequence to start with a long Legs Up pose (Viparita Karani) so I could have a nice rest to start and then move on to more active inversions. That was a revelation to me who had only done that pose at the end of a practice. Learning I could rest at the beginning of my practice instead of the end—that I could break a rule that wasn't even a really rule— was a revelation. I started to realize I had a lot more freedom to adapt my practice to my particular needs that I had known. And practicing was a good way to get through a fatigue attack and did leave me feeling refreshed.

Later I took a workshop from Patricia Walden on Yoga for Menopause. She, too, recommended a combination of restorative poses and supported inversions. Eventually, when the book she wrote with Linda Sparrow, The Woman's Book of Yoga and Health, was published, I started to practice her menopause fatigue practice on a regular basis. This sequence is quite long and some of the poses may not appropriate for many of you, but I'll list all the poses here just in case.

1. Supported Reclined Cobbler's pose (Supta Baddha Konasana)
2. Supported Seated Forward Bend (Paschimottanasana)
3. Supported One-Legged Forward Bend (Janu Sirsasana)
4. Simple Seated Twist (Bharadvajasana)
5. Downward-Facing Dog with head support (Adho Mukha Svanasana)
6. Standing Forward Bend with head support (Uttanasana)
7. Headstand (Sirsasana)
8. Inverted Staff pose (backbend in a chair) (Viparita Dandasana)
9. Chair Shoulderstand (Sarvangasana)
10. Half Plow pose (Plow pose with chair) (Arda Halasana)
11. Supported Straight Leg Bridge pose (Setu Bandha Sarvagasana)
12. Legs Up the Wall pose (with variations) (Viparita Karani)
13. Relaxation pose (Savasana)

Regardless of whether you try this sequence or not, it's worthwhile to look at the strategy behind it. It begins with Supported Reclined Cobber's pose (Supta Baddha Konasana), which is a very restful and relaxing pose. Next are a couple of supported seated forward bends, which are also quieting and restful but a bit more active than the first pose. The simple seated twist is even more active, and definitely stimulating. So now, after having a rest and being a bit energized, you're ready for the more strenuous poses: Downward-Facing Dog with head support, Standing Forward Bend with head support, Headstand, and Inverted Staff pose (backbend in a chair). From there, with the Chair Shoulderstand, Half Plow pose, Supported Straight Leg Bridge pose, and Legs Up the Wall pose, you are moving into the quieting, soothing supported inversions, ending with the most restful of the group. You are also getting a balanced asana practice, with a combination of forward bends, backbends, twists, and inverted poses. (I should say this my analysis of the sequence, not Patricia's.)

As with any sequence, you could shorten this sequence by leaving out certain poses (especially if there are ones you don't normally practice) but still keep the remaining poses in the same order. Or, you could come up with a sequence of your own that combines restorative and supported inverted poses in a way that allows you to rest in the beginning, move toward more active poses, and then rest again at the end. The important thing is to acknowledge your fatigue, and adapt your practice to your current condition, thinking outside the box as needed. And, remember, doing even just one pose (such as Reclined Cobbler's pose or Legs Up the Wall pose) will very likely make you feel better than doing nothing.

Naturally, if you aren't going through periomenopause or menopause (or aren't a woman!), you can still do a practice like this whenever you feel exhausted.

This morning, I woke up to a very peaceful feeling in me. There was this quietly calm, joyful sensation that the universe is taking care of me, that there is absolutely nothing to worry about. Which, I can assure you, is not something I feel often; most days when I wake up, I'm either assaulted by a whole bunch of thoughts and worries ("What the hell am I going to do about X? Or Y? Or Z?..."), or I am fighting the urge to just go back to bed (this has been made worse these past couple of months by my online chess-playing and Battlestar Galactica watching, which have jointly conspired to deprive me of much-needed sleep). In either case, the practice does wonders in focusing and calming my mind, and energizing my body: I suppose you can say that the practice does to me what the Energizer battery does to the Energizer bunny.

But as I was saying, when I woke up this morning, I felt neither exhaustion nor mind-assaulting worry. All there was was this beautiful sense of being in sync with the universe. I'm not sure why this is. I certainly didn't do anything out of the ordinary last night: I watched my usual couple of episodes of BSG, and played a couple of games of online chess (badly, I might add), and then went to bed like I've been doing for the past couple of months. Hmm... could it be that I am actually one of the Final Five, and this feeling of calm is actually a precursor of things to come? Well, this would be nice, but I need to stop deluding myself... 

In any case, when I stepped on the mat this morning, I felt this feeling of calmness surround my entire being like a halo. Sounds dramatic, I know, but I'm not usually this dramatic, so I think you can allow me a little dramatic license every now and then :-) In any case, this feeling of calmness was so all-pervading that when I finished five Surya Bs, I suddenly had this sense that I had done enough on the mat for today. I was very tempted to just end my practice right there and then, but I continued anyway; I'm still not sure if it was ego or sheer force of habit that caused me to continue the practice past that point (probably a little of both). I ended up doing my usual practice (full primary and second up to Supta Vajrasana).

Now I can't help but wonder: What if I get this sense of calmness and enoughness frequently from now on, or even everyday? Does this mean that I might one day stop practicing asana altogether? Well, we all will one day stop practicing asana (if nothing else, death will stop us), but that's not what I mean. I mean, what if this feeling of enoughness persists to such an extent and frequency that I no longer feel the need to do any more asana? Well, if that happens, what will I blog about? Science fiction and philosophy, probably (actually, come to think of it, I am already blogging about these). And then I will have to rename this blog Science Fiction and Philosophy in the Dragon's Den. Hmm. Doesn't sound half as catchy as Yoga in the Dragon's Den. Oh well.   

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On November 13, 2002, the network core at Beth Israel Deaconess failed due to a complex series of events and the hospital lost access to all applications.   Clinicians had no email, no lab results, no PACS images, and no order entry.    All centrally stored files were unavailable.   The revenue cycle could not flow.   For 2 days, the hospital of 2002 became the hospital of 1972.  Much has been written about this incident including a CIO Magazine article and a Harvard Business School case.

On July 25, 2013, a storage virtualization appliance at BIDMC failed in a manner which gave us Hobson's choice  - do nothing and risk potential data loss; or intervene and create slowness/downtime.   Since data loss was not an option, we chose slowness.  Here's the email I sent to all staff on the morning of July 25.

2002 and 2013 were very different experiences.   Here's a brief analysis:

1.  Although 2002 was an enterprise downtime of all applications, there was an expectation and understanding that failure happens.   The early 2000's were still early in the history of the web.   There was no cloud, no app-enabled smartphones, and no universal adoption of social networking. Technology was not massively redundant.  Planned downtime still occurred on nights and weekends.

In 2013, there is a sense that IT is like heat, power, and light - always there and assumed to be high performing.   Any downtime is unacceptable as emphasized by the typical emails I received from clinicians:

"My patients are still coming on time and expect the high quality care they normally receive. They also want it in a timely manner.  Telling them the computer system is down is not an acceptable answer to them.   Having an electronic health care record is vital but when we as physicians rely on it and when it is not available, it leads to gaps in care."

"Any idea how long we will be down? I am at the point where I may cancel my office for the rest of the day as I cannot provide adequate care without access to electronic records."

In 2013, we've become dependent on technology and any downtime procedures seem insufficient.

2. The burden of regulation is much different in 2013.  Meaningful Use, the Affordable Care Act, ICD10, the HIPAA Omnibus rule, and the Physician's Quality Reporting System did not exist in 2002.   There is a sense now that clinicians cannot get through each day unless every tool  and process, especially IT related, is working perfectly.

Add downtime/slowness and the camel's back is broken.

3.   Society, in general, has more anxiety and less optimism.    Competition for scarce resources  translates into less flexibility, impatience, and lack of a long-term perspective.

4.  The failure modes of technology in 2013 are more subtle and are harder to anticipate.

In 2002, networking was simple.  Servers were physical.  Storage was physical.  Today, networks are multi-layered.  Servers are virtual.  Storage is virtual. More moving parts and more complexity lead to more capabilities but when failure occurs, it takes a multi-disciplinary team to diagnose and treat it.

5.  Users are more savvy.   Here's another email:

"Although I was profoundly impacted by today's events as a PCP trying to see 21 patients, I understand how difficult it is to balance all that goes into making a decision with a vendor on hardware/software maintenance. However, I was responsible for this for a large private group on very sophisticated IT, and I would urge you to consider doing future maintenance and upgrade projects starting on Friday nights, so as to have as little impact as possible on ambulatory patient care."

My experience with last week's event will shape the way I think about future communications for any IT related issues.    Expectations are higher, tolerance is lower, and clinician stress is overwhelming.    No data was lost, no patient harm occurred, and the entire event lasted a few hours, not a few days.     However, it will take months of perfection to regain the trust of my stakeholders.

It's been 10 years since we had to use downtime procedures.   We'll continue to reduce single points of failure and remove complexity, reducing the potential for downtime.   As a clinician I know that reliability, security, and usability are critical.   As a CIO I know how hard this is to deliver every day.

In a previous post, I set forth this theory that Kino and quite possibly all long-time Ashtanga practitioners are Cylons. More precisely, they (we?) are Cylon sleeper agents; they/we think they/we are human, but are in fact Cylons who have been placed here on Earth to fulfill a role in God's grand plan. A little background story here for those who are not initiated into Battlestar Galactica lore: Cylons believe in God, although there is some dispute among Battlestar Galactica fans as to whether the Cylon God is also the God of the human Judeo-Christian tradition.

But let us leave this academic dispute for another time. The reason why I have brought this Cylon-Ashtangi  theory up again is because some recent developments in the Ashtanga blogosphere seem to have provided further support for this theory. The ramifications of this theory are considerable. For one thing, if this theory is true, it would prove the critics of Ashtanga right: Ashtanga is really not for everybody. It's only for Cylons. Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it: Critics often charge that you would have to either be a teenage boy or inhumanly strong or flexible (or inhumanly able to take a ridiculous amount of mental and physical punishment, six days a week) in order to do Ashtanga regularly. Well, if all regular Ashtangis are in fact Cylons (even if they don't know it), this would prove the critics right, because Ashtangis would then be quite literally not human.  And come to think of it, don't the behavior of teenage boys often make us wonder whether they come from another planet? Well, wonder no more...

But where's the evidence for this theory, you may ask? I'm getting there. Let's start from the beginning: In Battlestar Galactica, there are a total of twelve Cylon models. For most of the series (up to the end of season 3), only seven out of these twelve were revealed. Here are three of the models:

The remaining five models (a.k.a. the Final Five) were only revealed at the end of season 3. A key reason for this revelation was that the Final Five had an important role in God's plan: They are supposed to show humans and Cylons the way to the promised land, i.e. Earth.

Okay, so what has any of this to do with Ashtanga? Well, earlier today, Erica over at Ecstatic Adventures of the Exuberant Bodhisattva alerted us to a very important fact: There are presently seven types of Ashtangis. As a result of recent events in the Ashtanga blogosphere, Erica's Mula Bandha exploded (I hope you're okay, Erica), and God revealed the seven Cylon models Ashtangi types to her in a dazzling vision. According to Erica/God, these seven types are:

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I'm excited to be collaborating with Barefoot Yoga to offer Yoga Gypsy readers a giveaway! Barefoot Yoga is an India-inspired, Seattle-based company offering environmentally friendly yoga products.

Originally, I was going to do a review of one of their products for the giveaway, but given the cost (both financial and environmental!) of shipping things all the way to my current location in Australia, we came up with an even more brilliant idea, which is that the giveaway winner will write their own review, which will be posted on the blog.

So here's how it's going to work!

1)  To enter the giveaway, simply leave a comment on this blog and/or on my Facebook page before Friday, August 9th. Sadly, they can only ship to the US or Canada so if you enter, you will need an address there.

2) In your comment, ask a question or make a suggestion for a future post you'd like to see at Yoga Gypsy. Be as specific as you like!

3) Be sure to include your name in a way that will be unique and easy to recognise, because the winner is are going to be chosen by a random generator, and we don't want any confusion over who the winner is!

4) By entering, you agree that if you win, you will write a review of the product for the blog within 2 weeks of receiving it at home.

5) The winner will be announced on Saturday, August 10th.

And now, here is what you could win:

A Barefoot Yoga Silk Eye Pillow! And here is the gorgeous product itself:

Here's what Barefoot has to say about it:

Escape from it all with our 100% silk aromatherapy eye pillows. Made in India from ceremonial sari designs. Filled with flax seeds and dried lavender, these soft and cooling eye pillows work as a mood tonic, antidepressant, headache remedy and detoxifier.

The shape of the pillow contours to your face adding gentle pressure and blocking out light, relieving tension and calming active muscles around the eyes. Used for deepening relaxation during Savasana, meditation and afternoon naps. The pillows are hand-washable, refillable, and adjustable (zippered opening).

All of our silk eye pillows come with a storage pouch with zipper closure, and the eye pillows are not microwavable.

So, what are you waiting for?

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by Baxter

View From Above by Melina Meza

I love it when capitalist magazines find something good to say about yoga, even if it is how it is making someone lots of money. But in this case, Forbes says yoga might save the US trillions of dollars in lost productivity for our economy. How so, you ask? Why, for a start, by reducing the dropout rate from high schools in this country, rates that shockingly range from 30% in most places to over 50% in our urban “war zones.” (I call them war zones because of the continual violent backdrop that these children are subjected to day in and day out; where just walking to and from school, let alone being in school, is a constant cause for anxiety and worry about getting hurt or killed.)

What was a delight to see is one of the featured yoga experts quoted frequently in the article, BK Bose, in whose Niroga Institute in Berkeley, CA, I have had the great pleasure of teaching for the past several years. Bose, who started his career as a software engineer in the high tech industry in Silicon Valley, has more recently focused his work on bringing yoga to under-served communities, and training teachers to work with these special populations. These include classes at the Alameda County Juvenile Hall, low-income public schools and low-income senior centers, to name just a few. His work, as with most small operations around the country, is done as a non-profit venture. Even on its smaller scale, the results of the yoga classes are significant.

And after all, if we can influence the health of our youngest at an early age, that should lead to a longer, healthier life as they age (and, of course, many of our readers have school-aged children). The key underlying factor that Bose identifies as the culprit in so many of the challenges our young face is chronic stress. We have written on many occasions about the ways in which yoga can help us deal with stress. But what about in our kids, and in the growing number of kids that have to deal with gangs, substance abuse, and crime in their neighborhoods? This adds a whole new twist on doing straight up mindfulness techniques. These techniques can work quite well for children who don’t have the kinds of violent communities that Bose’s programs work with, as you will see below.

For me, as I read the article, I found one concept that comes from mind-body research defined in a new way that I could relate to from my own yoga teaching.  I often refer to the mind’s background chatter as “monkey mind” or “restless mind,” and the tendency is for this kind of thinking to have a background feeling of anxiety or stress associated with it. The following paragraph from the Forbes article talks about what mindfulness practices do to the brain, including the new phraseology “default mode network (DMN)” which I find confirming of my own observations:  

“In 2011, a Harvard study showed that mindfulness is linked to increased gray matter density in certain cortical areas, including the prefrontal cortex and regions involved in self-referential thoughts and emotion regulation. There seems to be a strong connection between mindfulness and the brain machinery involved in self-regulation. Other work has shown mindfulness to be linked to relative de-activation of the default mode network (DMN), the brain system that’s active during mind-wandering and self-referential “worry” thoughts, which are generally stressful in nature.”

Mindfulness practices, then, help us change the way we are thinking, or at least the way we are focusing our minds, which changes our stress response. For a young person, this might equate to changed behavior, in which he or she has more control over emotional reactions that might lead to trouble. Bose, however, notes that in his students who live in violent communities and are more often directly or indirectly victims of trauma, mindfulness is not going to work.  As the article points out:

“This is all well and good, Bose adds, but there’s an obvious caveat. When they’re in the midst of stress and trauma, few kids have the ability to sit still enough to take part in a sitting practice. “If you’re not ready to sit in classroom,” says Bose, “you’re not ready to do sitting meditation. If you have drugs and gangs and violence all around you, you simply can’t sit still. Teachers tell us that they often yell at kids 100 times a day to sit and pay attention. It doesn’t work. And to ask them to do this in the context of meditation can have a worse-than-neutral effect – it could be disastrous.”

He says that you have to go beyond mind-body research to trauma research, which tells us that physical activity can help the brain deal with stress and trauma.

“Trauma research tell us that we hold trauma in our bodies… Neuroscience says mindfulness; trauma research says movement. All of the sudden you’ve got moving meditation or mindfulness in motion. Mindfulness alone isn’t going to cut it for these kids.”

Even for adults who carry a lot of anxious energy stored up in their bodies, we here at Yoga for Healthy Aging have advocated for the necessity of movement practices, sometimes more vigorous yoga styles, as an initial stage in leading to deeper relaxation and stress reduction in your daily practice. Turns out to be true for kids with trauma, too.

The take-away from this Forbes exposure of yoga to a larger audience in the US and for us yogis here as well is that it may prove invaluable to teach young and old alike to do yoga, combining active asana and quieter mindfulness practices for maximum benefit. And that it would be a good idea to change policy on a national level to fund such ventures, so everyone at least has access to trying yoga, to see if it works for them. What an interesting, and possibly wonderful, world that could be! 

It's been almost a month since the conclusion of the Encinitas yoga trial. As most of you know, the judge in that trial ruled that there is nothing unconstitutional about teaching yoga in schools; yoga, Judge John Meyer said, "is similar to other exercise programs like dodgeball." Therefore, yoga has nothing to do with religion or spirituality. Therefore, the teaching of yoga in schools does not violate separation of church and state. Therefore, children can go ahead and enjoy yoga in schools without fear of spiritual or religious indoctrination. Yay.

But things are a bit more complicated than that, as most of you know. Many thoughtful observers of this trial have concluded that this verdict represents a Pyrrhic victory; Carol Horton, for instance, has written a very thoughtful post on the implications of such a victory. The victory is Pyrrhic, because while the court has ruled that yoga may be taught in schools (which is great), it has also, by characterizing yoga as being no different from something like dodgeball (along with all the unhappy memories of grade school P.E. classes that this word brings up for those of us who were not-so-socially-well-adjusted non-jocks), thrown out the yogic baby with the bathwater (which is not so great). Yoga, as most of us who have had any exposure to it will attest, is anything but non-spiritual: I suspect that even casual yoga "users" who only attend one yoga class a week at their local gym or health club will readily attest that yoga is more than just stretching (or dodgeball). To simply say that yoga is just stretching (or dodgeball), then, is to seriously misrepresent what yoga is about.

But with the legal-political culture of this country being what it is today, the only way to make yoga kosher within the legal structure is to characterize it as a spirituality-free and all-religion-friendly exercise/stress-reduction modality (this blog, incidentally, has also been lauded as a Transcendental Site for Stress Reduction. I'm still not sure what the "transcendent" means here... but anyway.). The only other alternative, it seems, would be to admit that yoga is spiritual. And therefore religious, according to Candy Gunther Brown. And therefore in violation of separation of church and state.

Something has gone very wrong somewhere. But what exactly? Well, for starters, we get the sense that this kind of (falsely) dichotomistic thinking ("Yoga is either only exercise, or it is spiritual and therefore a religion") fails to do any justice to the richness and complexity of lived yoga experience. I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that the average person who decides to start yoga at her local gym or yoga studio does not walk into her first yoga class thinking, "This yoga is ONLY exercise and stretching. If I should start feeling anything during or after class that cannot be reduced to or explained in terms of the effects of exercise, I'm going to stop doing yoga. Because I only signed up for exercise and stretching; I didn't sign up for any spiritual-religious indoctrination."

Hmm. Or maybe what all this means is that yoga studios need to start getting all new students to sign a spirituality waiver form before they start classes ("I, the undersigned, acknowledge that in doing yoga, I am willingly exposing myself to possible transformation that goes beyond and cannot be explained in purely physical terms. If said transformation occurs, I will accept full personal responsibility for it, and will not hold X Yoga Studio liable for said transformation or any effects thereof.").

But here's something else to think about: What is so bad about spirituality or spiritual transformation in the first place? Well, one might say that spirituality is "bad" because spirituality is religion, and the teaching of religion violates the separation of church and state; or, perhaps, violates the freedom of religious belief of the individual, in the case of the unsuspecting student who walks into a yoga studio or gym expecting to get only exercise, and gets more than what she signed up for.

Hmm... fair enough. But what if one cannot truly be a human being without first being a spiritual being of some sort? To be truly human (as opposed to being only biologically human) is, among other things, to recognize that all these other blobs of flesh and bone that I am surrounded by are persons of moral standing. And it seems to me that no amount of scientific analysis can explain why I should treat these blobs of flesh and bone in a way that accords with their moral standing as human beings: Why, for instance, I should not steal from this particular blob even if I am pretty sure I can get away with it, or why I shouldn't torture that particular blob even if doing so will give me great pleasure.         

So if we assume that the purpose of education isn't just to cram scientific and technical knowledge into students' brains, but to foster individuals who can function productively and constructively as human beings in human community and civilization, and if one cannot function in such a way without being a moral being who recognizes the moral standing of oneself and one's fellow human beings, and such recognition is ultimately a fundamental conviction that cannot be reduced to scientific terms, wouldn't this mean that cultivating a sense of spirituality, far from undermining the goal of education, is actually an important--arguably, the most important--ingredient to any process of education that is worth the name? And wouldn't this mean that cultivating a sense of spirituality that enables the student to recognize and respect the human-ness of everybody around her is (or should be) a key component of educational systems?

What does all this mean for the doctrine of separation of church and state, that doctrine which we Americans--no wait, you Americans (I've lived in this country for so long, I often forget I'm not a citizen)-- hold so dear? Well, it probably means that spirituality can and should be taught in schools, even if it violates the separation of church and state. After all, what is more important: Fostering true humans beings, or adhering to some abstract doctrine? But this is probably not going to fly. After all, what self-respecting parent would willingly risk exposing her kid to the dangers of Hindu indoctrination in the guise of spirituality cultivation?

But maybe there is another alternative, one that would, admittedly, require us to get outside the only-exercise/only-religion dichotomy box that the legal system has put us into. Maybe, just maybe, there is such a thing as non-denominational, religion-free spirituality? But to have this kind of spiritual, we--or any rate, the legal system--would have to accept that there is such a thing as spirituality that is not religious; we would have to accept that something can be spiritual without being religious. Are we ready for this?    

P.S. It just occurred to me that there is actually yet another alternative. Maybe exercise in itself is spiritual. Which means that dodgeball is spiritual. Come to think of it, there are probably important spiritual lessons to be learned from being terrorized by your more socially-well-adjusted grade-school peers during P.E.. Dodgeball as spirituality? Zen and the art of dodgeball maintenance? Somebody should write a book...   

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by Shari

Mushroom in Winter by Melina Meza

Nina and I were talking a while back and we realized that we hadn't yet written any posts on menopause. Well, considering that this physiological episode is a major event in every woman's life, we thought it was about time to take this on, and decided that I should start the ball rolling so to speak. Although each woman’s experience of menopause is very personal and individual, there are certain similarities that we all experience, including the end of the ability to give birth! Now this is not to imply that all woman make the decision to become pregnant and raise a child, but the physiological ability to become pregnant is age-related.

To begin our exploration of menopause, I read the book Yoga and the Wisdom of Menopause. A Guide to Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Health at Midlife and Beyond by Suza Francina. This book was published in 2003 but the information it contains is still pertinent. It provides good background information about what menopause is, and how yoga can be applied in all the stages that lead up to menopause as well as during menopause to help alleviate some of the more common issues that woman have to deal with. The usage of yoga was the unifying theme throughout the book.

Moving to specifics, I'll start by defining what menopause is and how you know you are in it. "Meno" means "month" in Greek and "pause" comes from the Greek "pausis" for stop. So menopause is the cessation of menstrual periods, an end to the monthly cycle. There are three stages:

1. The first stage is perimenopause (“pre-menopause"), when the change in hormonal functions leading up to menopause occur. Typically perimenopuase begins around age 40 (but remember this is a rough estimate) but can begin in one’s 30’s. This stage typically lasts around 5 years, but sometimes lasts for 15 years. In perimenopause women may notice changes in their menses where they are lighter and longer to heavier and more frequent. There are many hormone fluctuations and sometimes this time is called “puberty in reverse”
2. The second stage is menopause itself because the menses stop. Menopause is considered official 12 months after the last period. The average age of women whose menstrual periods have stopped is 52. Though a woman’s period has stopped, it doesn’t mean that the hormonal levels are stabilized and this period is categorized by emotional shifts, hot flashes, hot surges or flushes.
3. The final stage, which lasts the remainder of a woman’s life, is post-menopause when the woman’s body has adjusted to its hormone levels.

Most often when we think and talk about menopause, we focus on the physical discomforts, emotional roller coaster ride and weight redistribution in our bodies. But it is a time where we all are learning to adjust to our physical changes, energy changes, and mental challenges. Now Nina has written extensively in the past about emotional health and moods as well as management of depression through the usage of yoga. All of her recommendations can be applied very directly to the challenges some women experience during the stages of menopause.

My particular interest in reading this book was usage of yoga and its effect on the endocrine system and easing menopausal symptoms, especially the management of stress. The book provides illustrations of restorative poses to counter the stresses of a body adjusting to widely fluctuating hormonal levels. Supported Relaxation pose (Savasana), Supported Child's pose (Balasana), Supported Backbends with a bolster, Legs Up the Wall pose (Viparita Karani), and Supported Reclined Cobbler's pose (Supta Baddha Konasana) are highlighted repeatedly in personal vignettes as a prescription for health. (not necessarily in this order). Supported standing poses, inversions, and twists are also recommended, with the woman using a wall or a chair to prevent overly exhausting herself during asana practice. A guiding principle that is cycled back over and over again is that our practice of yoga changes as our body changes. This is not just due to physical aches and pains or the limitations in mobility, energy or strength but in how our intuitive self begins to guide us more in our asana practice.

What I liked most about this book was its celebration of the cycles of a woman’s life. Throughout the book there is joy about entering into an initiation that all women are a part of. The usage of asana is as a guiding tool to help us navigate this unknown territory. The author presents her book as a way to nourish one’s soul through the practice of asana.

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 If there is any sanskrit word that has become completely mainstream in western culture (other than yoga, of course!) it's probably karma. We use it in everyday conversation and we think that we know what it means. We interpret karma as an invisible force that ensures that "what goes around comes around:" Like, if you throw your gum on the street and then the next week you step on gum - karma, right? We tend to see Karma as some type of avenging angel who will mete out justice to those who have done us wrong, or we believe that karma somehow explains why bad things happen to people: "you get served what you deserve."

Once you start on the yoga path, however, it's useful to back away from our Hollywood appropriation of Karma as a stiletto-wearing-bad-girl-avenger type, and dig a little deeper to understand how yoga and karma are linked together. To help with this, I've created some little drawings, which if nothing else clarify that I do NOT have the karma of an artist. :)


What is karma?

Karma in sanskrit means action.  At the most basic level then, our karma is simply the sum of our actions, thoughts and words. And like any moment in time, our thoughts/actions/words don't exist in isolation, but they build upon what we have already done/thought/said, and play a role in creating our future thoughts/actions/words. In modern behavioural science, we call this habit formation, and it's an essential part of being a human being - on a basic level we use our talent for habit formation to learn language (associating words with objects or feelings), remember people's names, pick up essential motor skills like walking, or learn how to do new things, like swimming or standing on one leg.

In yoga philosophy, every action leaves an imprint, like an echo or a small seed planted as a result of this thought/word/action. These imprints are called samskaras, and they accumulate in our subconscious. The more we repeat a particular type of thought/word/action, the more seeds are sown, and similar seeds group together to become clusters. These are called vasanas, and as you might imagine, the bigger the cluster, the more ingrained the habit.

These patterns begin forming from the time we are just infants. As children we are not born into a neutral environment: we are born into a family, a place, a culture, and the karma of the world around us begins to imprint on us from a very early age. As we grow up, we emulate the actions/thoughts/behaviours that we see around us, thus planting the first seeds and starting the accumulation of samskaras.  In traditional philosophy, we are also born with vasanas that we have inherited from our previous incarnations, and we take them with us into the next incarnation.



You are creating your karma every day


The key thing to understand is that karma is not some scales-and-balances system, with all the vasanas waiting passively around to be weighed out on a final judgement day. The cycle of karma is an active, ongoing, day-to-day process. Our samskaras and vasanas manifest in our daily lives as subconscious desires, and around these desires we form habits that, over time, become deeply engrained patterns. As we act out these patterns over and over, the vasanas grow and become like powerful magnets: we become subconsciously attracted to people or actions of the same nature, and go around the wheel again. The bigger the cluster, the more powerful the attraction. As the saying goes, "like attracts like." The vasanas are so powerful that they become compulsions: we think we are making choices, but in fact our lives are being directed by our subconscious impulses.

It's important not to immediately attribute judgement to this picture. Some of our vasanas are our highest qualities, and these increase our joyfulness. But we also have vasanas that manifest in ways that make us unhappy, too. Have you ever found yourself emotionally over-reacting to something small, and taking it out on others? Do you make poor choices and then wonder "why did I choose that?" Have you ever mused to yourself "why do I always do this to myself or to others around me?" Do you freeze when you wish you had acted, or act impulsively and then wish you had not? Do you constantly revisit a choice you made and hold on to regret or bitterness about that situation? These are some of the symptoms of vasanas that are NOT serving you. When these vasanas hijack our choices and our relationships, it causes us suffering. This is samsara - being stuck in the endless wheel of karma, hostage to our own subconscious.

Anyone who has dealt with addiction (theirs or someone else's) can probably relate to this. Or, just watch any soap opera ever made!




Yoga helps us become aware of our karma


There are two things that are important here. One is to understand that our "karmic" addictions here are not just physical, but they are mental, behavioural and emotional patterns as well. The second is that karma is not an external force striking blows for or against us: we actively create our karma every day, through our thoughts, our actions and our words. This is fantastic news, because it means that by changing our words/actions/thoughts, we can sow new seeds, and grow new clusters, and create new magnetic forces that attract happiness instead of suffering. But of course, first we have to become AWARE of our subconscious habits, which is trickier than it sounds.

This is where yoga comes in. The practice of yoga is the practice of self-awareness. What we are learning through yoga is to observe ourselves so that we can become aware of our vasanas, our deeply rooted patterns. What we encounter on the yoga mat is ourselves: our thoughts, our emotions and our reactions to our practice are a mirror for our everyday lives. We seek to become aware of ourselves so that we may  transform our thoughts, actions and words, and create new habits, new patterns, that don't cause us pain.

The eight limbs of yoga are a roadmap for this transformation, with the ultimate aim being liberation, moksha, to free ourselves from the wheel of karma and from the compulsions of the subconscious. To be self-realised is to be mindful of our every action, thought and word, allowing us to create our own destiny.

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