our-yoga

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

Dearest readers, 2012 is drawing to a close. The world didn't end and the solstice has passed, so in solar terms, a new year has already begun. Many have been saying that 2012 marks the end of an era of humanity, and the dawn of a new one. For me, 2013 is certainly going to bring about some major changes.

On December 31st, I am leaving East Timor, my adoptive home for most of the past 8 1/2 years. It's hard for me to begin to write about the significance of this to me. I came to this half island nation when I was just 23 and I am leaving now, 31 years old. How to sum up the changes that take place during a quarter life? In this place I found friendships that transcend all boundaries and will last a lifetime, loved and lost a soulmate, and through this loss learned the meaning of fleeting pure happiness. I have climbed mountains in the sunrise, heard the Old Magic humming, swum with whales and dolphins, dived with a dugong, four-wheel-driven up a rocky escarpment with a flat tire, camped on beaches under the stars, slipped into a career and become a yoga teacher.

I have held babies just born and witnessed the death of a child; I have sat on the floor listening to gunfire while a teenager sobbed with terror, spilling stories of past horrors that he witnessed as a boy. I have been displaced from my home and returned to find it looted, but while others ended up in a tented camp, I still had a roof over my head. I have learned time and time again what it is to be privileged: a well-fed, well-educated testament to the top tier of the geographic and social birth lottery into which probably everyone reading this blog is also born, free to choose my own destiny, to make my own choices, to have any job I choose, to marry and have children if I choose, and only if I choose. I have been constantly humbled by the everyday hardships of the other 80% of the world's population, by the barefooted men who walk miles over the mountains, by the women who bear their babies year in and year out, by the children whose lives are more work than play and who go to bed hungry every night of their lives.  I have seen the most beautiful sunrises and sunsets of my life, felt peace in the midst of chaos, found love amidst the woodsmoke and the flowers.

In essence, I grew up, here in the hot, humid air. Like a migratory bird, I landed in this place to shed the awkward feathers of a fledgling and grow a pair of wings. And now it is time to fly - away from this land I have lived in but that could never be my home, leaving behind great chunks of myself that have bled into the earth, the sea, the sand and the sky. A part of me forever to remain here; a part of here forever to remain with me.

There are no words for these sea-changes, these great transformations. Most of us mark them with life's big events; my tribe, the global nomads, we mark them with entry visas and exit stamps.

So where to next, dear readers? Well, for a little while, I will be returning to Canada, the country of my birth. Living a mere 600 kilometres (400 miles) from my birthplace - the closest I have lived since I was 8 years old! For the next few months you will find me nestled in the mountains in Whistler, British Colombia, soaking up the cold, the snow, and the crisp clean air. From the tropics to a Canadian winter, from the sea to the mountains, from one of the poorest countries to one of the richest, it is harder to imagine a bigger contrast, and I am reminded that in my nature I gravitate towards extremes.

Everything changes and yet nothing changes, dear readers, and I will still be blogging here, about yoga (a lot) and life (a little bit), and probably about skiing, and snow, and the dislocation that only a returning expat knows. About a homecoming to a place that is no longer home, about an affluent society unseeing of its own good fortune. I am trying to go without expectations, but of course that is impossible, so I hope to study and teach yoga, to reignite my practice in the chilly air of winter, to reconnect with old friends and the land of my birth, and to keep blogging about all of this, the yoga of life.

As always, if you're reading this, I am both humbled and honoured that you have taken the time to do so. Happy new year, readers - what changes, big or small, will 2013 bring for you?

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I just read Kino's latest article on Elephant Journal. Lots of good stuff in it. Among other things, she writes about how yoga practice is like Navy Seal training (yes, Navy Seal training!), and how we can apply four important mental tools from Navy Seal training to help us when we face difficult postures in the practice.

I'm not going to talk about those four tools here (you can go read the article yourself ;-)). What I'm going to do here is share a few passages from her article that really speak to me, and say a few things here and there, like I always do. At the beginning of her article, Kino tells us a story about one of her students in her weeklong Mysore course: 

"...in the class that I was leading there was one student who made a small whimper every time a posture or movement was difficult. When I asked her if she was in pain she would invariably say no, just that she felt it was really hard. This sound came out of her in a subliminal manner without her even realizing it. This little whimper also came directly before she would quit and give up on the challenging movement.

...I had this sense that if she could gain control of this part of her nervous system then she would gain strength and clarity in her practice and perhaps also in her life. When we talked about the relationship between her “suffering animal” sound and quitting when postures were difficult she said that the sound must be subconscious because she wasn’t even aware of it.

When we returned to the practice and worked on one of the hardest movements for her, a deep backbend from the Ashtanga Yoga Intermediate Series, she was steady and calm, quiet and focused and actually able to go through the whole movement with strength. By concentrating the mind with the power of yoga she was able to rein in the involuntary urge to give up, give in, whimper and quit when things were difficult."

Hmm... why does something keep telling me this "deep backbend from the Ashtanga Yoga Intermediate Series" is Kapotasana? ;-) Well... because what other deep backbend from Intermediate Series is so notorious for inspiring so much fear and anxiety and, in this case, "suffering animal" sounds? (For a first-hand account of the emotional dramas that often accompany the performance of Kapotasana, see this post.) And if it is indeed Kapotasana we are talking about, then the yogini's emission of the "suffering animal sound" is totally understandable: If you do kapotasana in your practice, you know what a formidable posture it is.

But back to what Kino is saying. She continues:
  
"We all have our sounds of suffering: a grunt, a whimper, an exhale through the mouth or just a slouchy posture.

When these arise as a knee-jerk reaction to what you are experiencing and you allow that reaction to guide your actions, this pattern has a dangerous hold over you. To a larger degree the lesson of yoga is about gaining control over the nervous system when you stand in the face of panic, pain, stress and challenge. In this way yoga is actually meant as a training of the mind to prepare it to face adversity with a balanced emotional state.

If you have the energy to make a noise and grunt, you have energy to give to the posture or movement. Instead of just releasing the potency of the moment in a sound, try to direct your energy inward to the inner body and utilize the urgency of the moment to delve deeper within.

What you do when faced with these feelings will largely determine how you are able to adapt and move forward in your life.

If you collapse, quit, give up and give in to the suffering animal inside of yourself rather than train the mind to be steady and calm in the face of pain or danger than you are setting yourself up for failure. In order to work through painful and difficult circumstances the mind must learn how to be strong and balanced, clear and compassionate."

This passage really speaks to me. I feel that these words express very eloquently why we bring ourselves to the mat every morning and put ourselves through so many physical challenges. Actually, I would also like to add to Kino's list of things people do when they get to their "least favorite postures": One of my teachers told me that when she got to her least favorite posture, she would always consciously or unconsciously find herself getting up from the mat and taking a bathroom break!

But seriously, I really think that there is a lot of truth in Kino's observation that "If you have the energy to make a noise and grunt, you have energy to give to the posture or movement": Whether we are aware of it or not, every little action that we take or word that we utter releases energy. Actually, this is true of all our actions in the world at large, but our practice on the mat amplifies this fact and brings it to our attention in a way that is hard to ignore; unlike in off-the-mat life, where we often have the option of tuning out difficult feelings or sensations by distracting ourselves with all kinds of things in our surroundings, we cannot simply ignore or "tune out" the very uncomfortable sensation of not being able to breathe comfortably when we are in a challenging posture like Kapotasana. The practice forces us to face difficult situations, and make a conscious choice as to how we are to use the energy that we have. We can choose to release that energy in the form of a sound or gesture that expresses our fear, anxiety or frustration; or we can choose to move that energy "inward to the inner body", and use it to help us navigate the challenging posture. In this way, yoga can be likened to a Jedi training, both on and off the mat.

Actually, if we think about it a little, all this also sounds very much like pratyahara. We usually define pratyahara as withdrawal of the senses, but insofar as what we direct our sense-organs to often determines where our psychic energy goes, pratyahara can also be understood as a withdrawal or turning inward of psychic energy. So, in this way, working with difficult postures with equanimity and presence of mind through maintaining steadiness of breath is also an exercise in pratyahara. Pretty interesting, don't you think?

All this also makes me think about the recent conversation in certain quarters of the Ashtanga blogosphere about the question of whether it is possible to love the practice and still do the practice "right". It seems to me that if everything I (and Kino) said above is right, then the answer has to be: Most absolutely! If the practice is such a wonderful training ground for our minds and spirits, what's not to love about it? Sure, the practice is not all roses and whatnot (what's the correct expression here?), but then again, life isn't all roses and whatnot either. Should we cease to love life just because it is not all roses and whatnot? Should we cease to love people we love just because life with them is not all fun and games and fireworks? (I'm hoping your answer to all these questions is no :-)) The practice (and life) can be very difficult at times; indeed, if we take our lives (and practices) seriously, the difficult times may very well outnumber the joyful ones (or maybe it's just that the difficult times always feel longer...). But why make it harder by not allowing yourself to love it?

Grimmly recently commented that I may be overloading my readers with too many videos in my recent posts. But videos are fun! And Kino does make some pretty good videos. So, at the risk of overloading your senses with even more visual content (Ha! Talk about pratyahara...), I'll end this post with one of my favorite Kino videos. Enjoy!

       

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I just watched the video above, in which Kino talks about who can practice yoga in her usual no-nonsense yet unpretentious manner; indeed, I often have this feeling that she gets all the s@&t she gets online (and offline as well) precisely because she is not pretentious enough, because she doesn't assume this holier-than-thou persona and manner of speaking that some people who call themselves yoga masters do...

But enough of this. I'm sure you don't read this blog just to listen to my (non)-analyses about why some yogis talk shit about other yogis... So back to the video. One reason I really like the video is because Kino alludes to one of my favorite Guruji quotes: The one where he proclaims, "Old man, stiff man, weak man, sick man, all can take practice. Only lazy man cannot practice."


So all can take practice (except lazy people). But what is it that keeps all coming back to our mats every morning, except Saturdays (or whatever day your rest day happens to be) and moon days? The practice, as we know, is not easy; it challenges us on so many levels (physical, psychological, mental and emotional). Why do something like this six days a week, if nobody is forcing us to do so? 

I think the answer--at least my personal answer--lies in one word: Faith. Faith that the practice will bring us to a better place and make us better people than we believe ourselves capable of being; faith that the practice will reach us wherever we are, and heal us on the various levels that need healing.

And I also believe that along with faith comes a certain love of the practice. Not the kind of love that makes you jump for joy every single moment, but the kind of love that grows from a certain confidence and faith in the object of one's love, the kind of love that transforms both the lover and the beloved.

By the way, if you are a regular traveler in the Ashtanga blogosphere (I sometimes wish we get frequent flier miles for the number of blogs we visit :-)), you will know that a lively conversation is happening in some quarters about whether it is possible to love the practice and still do the practice "right". Questions that have been posed in this conversation include, '"What are they doing that allows them to “love” this?', 'Are they doing it “wrong?”' (See, for instance, this post)

As an aside: Personally, I think a lot of this conversation involves a lot of clever-sounding word/ego games, trading on small distinctions between "devotion", "trust", and "love", and similar words. Distinctions which don't seem to me to make a difference, in the bigger scheme of things... Then again, I'm no yoga scholar, so maybe they do make a difference, in the end... What do I know? In any case, I'll just like to offer a little word of unsolicited advice here to any who would care to listen: Before you make a distinction, it might be a good idea to ask yourself, "Am I doing this out of genuine curiosity and love of the practice and my fellow beings? Or am I doing this just to show that I am 'clever' and capable of making such distinctions?"

I probably do such things myself, so I am in no position to judge. But since I have probably been there and done that, I thought that is all the more reason for me to say something here.

But anyway, to come back to the 'is it possible to love the practice and still do the practice "right"' question, my personal answer is: Absolutely! If you have no love for the practice, but make yourself do it everyday anyway, doesn't that make you a sado-masochist? Of course, again, I'm no yoga scholar; for all I know, there may be some obscure passage in the Yoga Sutras or the Hatha Yoga Pradipika (or wherever) that says that yoga is the practice of sado-masochism. In which case I would be doing the practice wrong. Well, then, so be it. But as far as I'm concerned, love has everything to do with it.     

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

Happy Valentine's Day! I don't know if you celebrate Valentine's, but since many of you who read this blog practice Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga, let me see if I can give an Ashtangic spin to this arguably most over-hyped and commercialized of holidays: May the flame of your love for the practice grow with each passing practice, and never burn out, whether or not you get to sixth series in this lifetime ;-)

Indeed, it may be that in the bigger scheme of things, it is really love of the practice that will decide whether we will continue our practice in spite of the many obstacles and pains, physical and otherwise, that we often encounter in the course of our practice journey. At a workshop a few years ago, David Williams told us that when he tells people that he has been practicing non-stop for more than 30 years, they usually respond, "Wow! You must have great self-discipline to be able to do this practice non-stop for so long!" But David thinks that the word "discpline" has a rather negative ring to it: To him, it implies that he is being disciplined for having done or not done something. He prefers to think that it is really love of the practice that brings him to the mat every day, rather than self-discipline.

But there are often times when it is difficult to see how love could really be what is motivating us to roll out the mat, especially during those days when we are tired or feeling low on motivation. Or during those times when we have to work with injury or some kind of physical limitation, when doing even the most basic of movements could bring pain. For instance, I once threw out my SI joint so badly that I couldn't move from updog to downdog without lower back pain. I eventually managed to heal myself by working on my uddiyana bandha and on the alignment of the toes, but in the process, it took a lot of trial and error to find a way for my body to move in a pain-free way through this most basic of transitions, and during that process, every error was a painful one.

Hmm... I guess I could have picked a more Yoga-Journal-friendly example to illustrate my point: This seems like the kind of example that some people out there might point to as a reason not to practice Ashtanga ("See, you practice this Ashtanga yoga, you get back pain... for what?! Shouldn't yoga be pain-free?"). Sounds also like good grist for the yoga-can-wreck-your-body mill.

Anyway, the point I am trying to make is: How can we love this Ashtanga practice, if it brings us so much discomfort, and dare I say, pain? Is love enough to see us through this journey of practice, or is something more needed? If something more is needed, what is it? Grit? Courage? Fearlessness? Discipline? All of the above?

Any thoughts?

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

we recommend you to buy some goods below for comfort, safety and ease of your yoga activities

Being sick recently with dengue fever has meant that for the last month my asana practice has been completely modified. Stepping to my mat on Day 10 after getting the fever (2 days after leaving bed for the first time!) I couldn't believe how weakened my body was from the illness. So it has been short, gentle practices for me, focusing on stretching out the muscles that were cramped up by the fever. In addition, mornings have been tough now that I'm back at work, so I have been putting in play my 10-minute sequences!
 

1. Flirtation: You first meet, and you feel a spark. For a while, you keep your distance – doing a bit of reconnaissance, and research. You attend a few classes, the spark nurtures a flame and your attraction grows...
2. Dating and Romance: Before you know it, you are dating. In fact, you are more than dating – you can't get enough! Your friends notice a change in you... You are giddy and all you can talk about is yoga this, and yoga that, and how great yoga is and how much you looooove yoga...
3. Obsession/compulsion: And sure enough, it's not long until you barely even see said friends anymore, because all you ever do is yoga! You eat, breathe and sleep yoga, you check all the yoga books out of the library, you spend hours locked in your room trying impossible yoga poses. Your wobbly knee in Warrior II can reduce you to tears, and the last time you had to take child's pose you held it against yourself for a week. At the same time, you can feel deep shifts happening within, in places you'd rather not go, in realms that are dark and scary...
4. The breakup: And so, you decide you need to take a break. After all, haven't you always wanted to take up long-distance running? Why not start now! At first you enjoy the free time. You reconnect with your friends and have a few drinks and laugh about how you are so over that yoga thing. But after a while, you start to miss it. You see someone on the street with a yoga mat, and your heart leaps while your tummy lurches.
5. The make-up: And so eventually you steel yourself, you swallow your pride, and you humbly go back and offer yourself up to the practice. It feels so right, it feels so good! And here, you may take one of two roads... Maybe you will head straight back to Step 3 and repeat Steps 3, 4 and 5 over and over again... But just maybe you will pass go and progress to...
6. Going steady: Yep, you and yoga are here to stay, and you have all the characteristics of a good relationship. Yoga complements you without dominating your life. You recognize that you will have good days and bad days, and you don't judge the relationship based on that. You acknowledge that you need to have other hobbies and social time for the other relationships in your life. Instead of brining out the worst in you, yoga brings out your best side, and opens up a place for you to grow and confront your fears. You don't feel judged, criticized or insecure – you feel just fine where you are, thanks, and you are enjoying the journey.

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