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Showing posts with label mindfulness. Show all posts

Practicing Yoga Mindfully (Rerun)

09:02 | Labels: healthy eating, home practice, Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness, Nina Zolotow

by Nina

Raindrops and Reflections by Nina Zolotow

Although it’s a rather new concept, approaching yoga poses as a mindfulness practice is a very powerful tool for improving your physical and mental health. Whether you are trying to change your eating habits, reduce your stress, or heal from disease, learning to listen to your body is crucial. In his wonderful book Full Catastrophe Living, Jon Kabat-Zinn points out what happens if we simply operate in automatic-pilot mode:

"One very important domain of our lives and experience that we tend to miss, ignore, abuse or lose control of as a result of being the automatic-pilot mode is our own body. We may be barely in touch with our body, unaware of how it is feeling most of the time. As a consequence we can be insensitive to how our body is being affected by the environment, by our actions, and even by our own thoughts and emotions. If we are unaware of these connections, we might easily feel that our body is out of control and we will have no idea why."

Kabat-Zinn goes on to say that physical symptoms are the messages your body is giving you that allow you to know how it is doing and what its needs are.

"When we are more in touch with our body as a result of paying attention to it systematically, we will be far more attuned to what it is telling us and better equipped to respond appropriately. Learning to listen to your own body is vital is improving your health and the quality of your life."

And one of the best ways to pay attention to your body systematically is to bring mindfulness into your asana practice. I, myself, have learned to recognize certain physical symptoms that tell me when I’m overstressed (for example, a burning feeling in my chest). When I experience those sensations, I know it’s time for me to scale back temporarily and practice the yoga poses that calm me down. In my interview with Elizabeth (see Meditation and Healthy Eating) about mindfulness and eating, she talked about learning, from both meditation and asana practice, to recognize when she was actually hungry versus thirsty or had low potassium and that has helped her lose and keep off 50 pounds.

So how you make your asana practice a mindfulness practice? Kabat-Zinn writes:

"We practice the yoga with the same attitude that we bring to sitting meditation or body scan. We do it without striving and without forcing. We practice accepting our body as we find it, in the present, from one moment to the next. While stretching or lifting or balancing, we learn to work at our limits, maintaining moment-to-moment awareness. We are patient with ourselves. As we carefully move up to our limits in a stretch, for instance, we practice breathing at that limit, dwelling in the creative space between not challenging the body at all and pushing it to far."

If that’s not enough—or if you have fallen into a rut with your practice that’s putting you in automatic-pilot mode, I have some specific suggestions:

Practice yoga at home. Practicing on your own, without the distraction of the teacher telling you what to do you or other people in the room, forces you to pay more attention to your own experience of being in the poses.
Pick a single physical sensation to follow throughout your entire practice, whether it is the quality of your breath in every single pose, the even distribution of weight on your feet—the balls as well as the heels—in every pose, or even something more arcane.
Change your routine. If you do practice at home and are in stuck in rut, try doing something different. Practice on the left side first instead of the right. How does that feel? Or, do all your twisting poses, even all the standing the poses, without turning your head. Twist from your spine only and leave your head looking down at the floor. Notice how hard that is, and how different your neck feels.
Try using props if you never have. See what difference it makes. Or, if you use props regularly, try a different height (lower or higher) or try practicing without props for once and see what a difference that makes.
Try holding poses for longer periods of time than you usually do. Notice the resistance that comes up in your body (as well as your mind).

Anyone who has additional suggestions, please chime in!

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Spiritual Sanity

11:47 | Labels: Jill Satterfield, mindfulness, spiritual sanity

by Jill Satterfield

Floating by Melina Meza

Sometimes I think I know something; but more often than not these days, I think I don’t. In fact, I’m finding great ease in not knowing, which is the total opposite of what I used to think. I remember as a child thinking that when I was an adult I would have opinions, but at that point I didn’t have them yet because I was still a kid. I remember working on developing opinions, and it paid off. I felt like I had grown up when I could say something wasn’t good to do, or that this type of clothing was better. I even went so far as to mimic my family’s values about where the best places to live were and what the most honorable vocations were. But now I have way too many opinions and I’m happily letting more and more of them go!

By watching my mind for so many years now, I’ve befriended impermanence and change. Stability in anything except awareness has gone off the wish list, which has made my life more full of ease. This is the sanity and ease of not knowing: being comfortable—not always liking, but being comfortable—with change.

Meeting moments with some sort of fresh and open view is like living on a boogie board—our mental and emotional muscles get more accustomed to being still within movement and know to expect change. We settle less into complacency and dullness, and stay more wakeful and bright. Freedom comes with the ability to not get hooked and pulled in a million directions at the (associatively patterned) whims of our minds. Freedom comes with the ability to be in the present and with not knowing or assuming or deciding what will come next, but riding the proverbial waves of natural moment-to-moment change.

Kindness towards the mind that loves stability and constancy comes from a heart that is already inherently resilient. And our hearts can be coaxed back to being open to change as the way things are. This is where mind, heart, and body are a fantastic team—each supporting each other as different instruments in the same orchestra. A little louder here, softer over there, not so fast here to develop increased harmony and communication. These components of our whole being can support each other at various times and in many ways. We start with just noticing the “I know” mind that might set off the nervous body pattern, which can scare the heart into hiding.

Spiritual sanity is knowing that we don’t always know and then taking a seat in the wisdom of not knowing—even if that looks lame in some people’s eyes. Not claiming to be an expert or guru might not be the best marketing tool or way to brand oneself but it is what can keep us healthy and honest. I’m all for being sane, open, and more childlike in my non-opinions when I can be. My brand may suffer (if I had one) but I sure won’t.

As an experiment in mindfulness try noticing your opinions about yourself as they arise. For instance when you think about yourself, how do you categorize yourself? Gender? Financial status? Race? Vegetarian? Liberal or conservative? Once you notice your definitions of yourself, watch how you respond when you deliberately bring up the opposite. For example, how you relate to someone who eats meat if you are a strict vegetarian or how do you feel about the Tea Party if you are a liberal? Does a fire in your belly flame up? These are rather simplistic examples, but are some that we might just be on autopilot about. The point, really, is to notice what we have previously unnoticed so that we can begin to make choices about what opinions and views we keep and why, and what we let go of because they block a potentially open and unencumbered view.

Opinions, perspectives, and view points are all really useful in our relative existence if we can have them and hold them so lightly that they might be gone at any moment. Entering into every moment with an open mind might not be totally possible for those of us not yet enlightened, but we can do our best to be lightened in our suffering load. Spiritual maturity then becomes holding less and less, and being open to much, much more.

When you demand nothing of the world, nor of God, when you want nothing, seek nothing, expect nothing, then the supreme state will come to you uninvited and unexpected. —Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Jill Satterfield is the founder of Vajra Yoga + Meditation, a synthesis of yoga and Buddhism that combines meditation, yoga and contemplative practices. Named “one of the 4 leading yoga and Buddhist teachers in the country” by Shambhala Sun Magazine, Jill has instigated mindful and creative educational programs for over 28 years.

She is also the founder and Director of the School for Compassionate Action: Meditation, Yoga and Educational Support for Communities in Need, a not-for-profit that trains teachers, psychologists and health care providers to integrate mind and body practices into their professions. SCA also provides classes to people in chronic pain, with illness, those suffering from PTSD, and at-risk youth. Jill teaches workshops internationally, is a faculty member of Spirit Rock Meditation Center’s Mindfulness for Yoga Training and the Somatic Training in Marin, California, and is a guest teacher for many other training programs. To find out more about Jill, visit her website vajrayoga.com.

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Forbes Magazine Gives Yoga a Thumb$ Up

12:57 | Labels: B.K. Bose, Baxter Bell, children, mindfulness, Niroga Institute, trauma

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!

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Redefining The Present Moment

20:14 | Labels: Insight, Meditation, mindfulness, practice, Presence, Video, Wisdom, Youtube

I've posted several videos of Michael Stone, and I came across this one as well. I was a bit surprised to see him without hair and a beard. At any rate, I wanted to pass along more information for those who maybe interested in his books, etc. Simply visit: www.centreofgravity.org.

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Practicing Yoga Mindfully (Rerun)

Spiritual Sanity

Forbes Magazine Gives Yoga a Thumb$ Up

Redefining The Present Moment