The Depths

I think there is something in us that yearns for immersion - into water, into life, into love, into drugs.  The question is: how do we find depth in a world that bounces mostly on the surface of things, that stays in the shallows of life, so to speak?

I look for depth like a starving person looks for food.  I check out endless spiritual books from the library, reading Thomas Merton's journals and trying to understand how he thought, and how he arrived at his insights, how his mind learned to go so deep.  I read the instructions of the desert Benedictines and their deep analysis on how to deal with thought.  My meditation teacher, Paul Muller-Ortega, says that meditation is where you learn to go deep, and then you can apply that capacity to everything.  You go deep into everything, you break free of the shallow dimension of life.  I read the texts of yoga and I really get the insight they had; they were WAY less distracted than me and way less distractable.  They had this ability called focus, where they could hold to one idea, thought, contemplation, or vision for a long, long time, until the magnitude of it revealed itself.  When you can do this, you see into the miraculous nature of everything and, the texts tell us, you live in a state of wonder.

There is a separate society of people who are interested mostly in optimizing their experience of depth in life: not through outer outrageousness, like bungee jumping or skydiving, but through exploring the true capacities of the human heart and mind.  For me, this is the most fascinating investigation imaginable, and a worthy use of a life.   

I aspire to this, even more than ever getting my foot behind my head.  Knowing that what I pay attention to, I become, I have lately started a practice of holding a contemplation in my mind during the day.  Every morning I choose a short phrase or sentence, the kind of material that opens a door when you read it, and I hold it in my heart/mind as often as I can think of it during the day.  Sometimes I write it on a small piece of paper and carry it around, like keeping a wisdom teacher close by me during the day.

This practice is helping to train my mind to go deep, to not be pulled around by the nose by my emotional predilections.  If the phrase is a good one, it seems to apply to nearly everything I encounter in my day, and helps me keep a wide inner lens, which includes forgiveness, compassion, and kindness.  There's a lot of that in the depths, and I long to immerse myself there more and more.

Practice Every Day

When you practice yoga, meditation, or pretty much anything on a daily basis, you develop a relationship to yourself.  Themes and issues arise, to be met and moved through in a stream of continuity and creativity.  My meditation teacher Paul Muller-Ortega has a saying, "Random practice, random results."  

I clearly experienced this on my recent meditation retreat, where I was able to do a little yoga a few times a day before sitting for meditation.  One day I moved fluidly like the bobcats we saw near the meditation hall, and the next day I held wall push for one minute, forearm dog for one minute, and headless headstand for one minute.  A pulsation naturally developed between fluidity and firmness, between following something, and building something.

The structure has to be there in order for the fluidity to have something to dance within, including the structure of dailiness.  When I practiced just a little bit every day, even for 10 minutes, I was still familiar with the me from the day before; I hadn't lost myself yet in the accumulation of experience that happens so quickly in just a few days.  I remembered myself, and my body picked up where I had left off, like a good story that was yearning to tell the next chapter of itself.

If I wait too long between practices, it can feel like I am in a stranger's body, and I forget where and who I am.  I am starting all over, and there is an unfamiliarity with the instrument.  When I practice every day, I start to play this body medium more skillfully and with greater sensitivity.  And even with greater interest, since I haven't lost the thread of the music, the rhythm, and the joy.  I remember the particular twist of a muscle from the day before and the sensing I had about unwinding it, and I follow that spiral of body sensation to the next level of perception, and the next sense of inner instruction.  

In this way, practice becomes a magnetic daily attending to an ongoing storyline instead of any kind of harsh or imposed discipline.  It becomes something that weaves itself through your days like a haunting and compelling melody, filled with meaning.

Shooting Star Over Asgaard Pass

Midnight stumble out of warm tent,

light leaks through

     pinpricks in the quilt of sky.

Sudden star streaks directly over the jagged

high crotch of Asgaard Pass.

      "Come up," she says.

Dawn breaks, we toil and climb

vertical through boulders, scree, snow, gravel,

     sage, rare and brief mountain flowers.

We meet others, climbing slowly,

fellow devotees of the Church of High and Up.

The way demands our slow and mindful pace,

our liturgy of worshipping feet.

We imagine we may know her, we may have her,

and the unyielding secrets she possesses.

She brings us to hands and knees, she withdraws oxygen,

she demands everything.

In the end, her impenetrable rock face will never say:

     Here is where I came from,

     Here is what you are made of.

Radiance Lessons

For the last few months I used short readings from "The Radiance Sutras" by Lorin Roche (buy the book here) as inspiration for my yoga classes.  "The Radiance Sutras" are interpretations of verses from an ancient text more formally called the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra, an articulation of 112 methods of meditative experience.  Many of my students were very touched by these verses, so I'm recording them here, along with a rather free-form sketch of my teaching focuses for each verse.

"In any quiet moment when you are breathing, the breath may flow out and pause of itself, or flow in and pause of itself."

Class Focus - Attending to the pulsation of the breath as a guide.  Refining the breath, trusting it, and learning from it.  Waiting.  Listening to where the breath comes from.  Movement informed by breath.  Ease of breathing the most important thing.  Every breath in is a rebirth, every breath out is a connection to the source.

"Worship means offering your heart to the vast mystery of the universe.  It means being so devoted that you are willing to dissolve and be recreated in every moment."

Class Focus - Asana as an ephemeral, temporary art form, always coming into being, and then dissolving forever.  Seeing the preciousness of our imperfection and heartfelt efforts; offering that to the highest evolution.  What are you so devoted to that you would allow yourself to dissolve into it? 

"Experience the substance of the body and the World as made up of vibratory particles, and these particles made up of even finer energies.  Noticing this, breathe easily with infinity dancing everywhere."

Class Focus - Pulsation.  Attend to the inner pulse continuously.  Sensing into the subtleties of the micro-circuitry of the body.  Nothing is ever locked, solid, or hopeless.  Everything is shifting, changing, and rearranging itself.  No pose is ever repeated exactly the same; creativity is boundless.

"Attend to the skin as a subtle boundary, containing vastness.  Enter that shimmering, pulsing vastness."

Class Focus - Inner Body Bright.  Letting the skin breathe and expand out, like a knitted garment that opens flexibly.  The skin barely contains the sparkling, light-filled, creativity-infused power of aliveness that is wanting to express itself.  The outer body is in love with the inner body.

"The spine has secret passageways to the subtle dimensions of life.  Attend to the spine, gushing with radiant spaciousness."

Class Focus - Allowing the spine to be the central awareness in every pose.  Feeling the thickness of the spine in the body, its substantial support, and also sensing into the spine as a conduit of light, a tall pillar of golden light up the center of the body.  The midline as a sense of space filled with sparkles.

"The soul reveals itself to itself through gesture of hand, foot, spine, face and body.  The invisible loves the visible."

Class Focus - The body itself as a vessel of divinity, every movement infused with artful grace and potent vision.  The body as a way the Divine gets to dance, sing, and move in the world.  Asana as an expression of ultimate freedom.  The bound nature of being human as an opportunity to experience liberation.

"The mind stops its building of thoughts and rests on its own foundation, which is immensity.  The light that you see by is the light that comes from inside."

Class Focus - Foundation of any pose is what touches the earth.  Foundation as a meditative object, so mind settles even in the midst of a challenging asana.  First Principle of Anusara Yoga - Set the Foundation/Open to Grace or perhaps Set the Foundation in order to Open to Grace?  Anchoring the mind to the foundation creates the conditions for an expanded experience of the pose/life/being.

The Daily Round

I have a fascination with how people calibrate the 24 hours of each day so that they optimize the use of their energy.  Apparently, I am not the only one, because inevitably the students in our Immersions and Teacher Trainings are rabidly curious about how we teachers move through our days in order to make time for yoga, meditation, relationships, grocery shopping, sleep, and just being.

 I think we're fascinated with this because it's all about how we use our energy, and energy is life force.  It is limited, and the hours of the day are limited.  How do we choose to weave the tapestry of our days, so that we aren't exhausted, and so that our activities refresh us, inspire us, and make a contribution to the world we live in?

Tony Schwartz, founder of "The Energy Project" has a list of what he calls the Big Four.  They are: Skillfully Manage our Energy; Control the Placement of our Attention; Cultivate the Emotions that Serve us Best; and Define and Live our Highest Purpose."  And, look what's in first place: life energy.

My meditation teacher has a phrase he uses: the Daily Round.  And he says everything depends on the choices you make each day in how you spend your precious life force. 

Here is my ideal Daily Round, when I am not derailed by a dog throwing up, a gigantic traffic jam, illness, or travel.  On days that I teach, I leave the house at 4:30 pm or early in the morning.  I aspire to stick to this as best I can:

7:30 am - get up, shower, feed dogs, eat breakfast; 9 - meditate and study; 10 - practice yoga; 11:30 - work at desk; 1 pm - lunch; 2 - walk; 3 - work at desk, read; garden, errands, 6 - meditate; 7 - dinner with BF, read, art or music making; 11:30 - go to bed.

And here are some Daily Rounds of famous people:

Emily Dickinson

6 am - Get up; 7 - breakfast; 8 - study hour; 9 - meet for devotions; 10:15 - ancient history lesson; 11 - English lesson; 12 pm - Calisthenics; 12:15 - read; 12:30 - lunch; 2:45 - practice piano; 3:45 - to to homeroom; 4:30 - lecture in Seminary Hall; 6 - Dinner, then silent study; 8:45 - bedtime

Charles Darwin

7 am - Get up, take a walk; 7:45 - breakfast; 8 - work in study; 9:30 - go to drawing room, read family letters aloud; 10:30 - return to study; 12 pm - another short walk; 12:45 - lunch with family; 3 - lounge on sofa; 4 - another short walk; 4:30 - return to study; 6 - rest in bedroom while wife reads aloud; 7:30 - tea with family, backgammon; 10:30 - to to bed.

Vladimir Nabokov

6 am - Get up, begin writing; 8:30 - breakfast with wife, read mail; 9 - continue working; 11 - hot soak in bath, sponge on head; 11:30 - stroll with wife, eat lunch; 12 pm - nap; 2 - continue working; 7 - dinner, play Scrabble; 11 - struggle with insomnia for an hour.

Winston Churchill

7:30 am - Wake up, breakfast, read and dictate while in bed; 11 - take walk, drink whiskey and soda; 1 pm - three-course lunch; 3:30 - retire to study; 5 - another whiskey and soda, nap; 6:30 - get up, bathe, dress for dinner; 8 - dinner, drinks, and cigars; 12 am - retire to study again; 1 - go to bed.

What is your Daily Round?  Is it working for you?  How would you change it?  Do you feel hemmed in by time or do you have a sense of spaciousness in your days?  I'm really curious to know!

The Advanced Yogi

To me, saying someone is advanced in yoga is like saying that they are pretty much a certified saint.  That's because I don't evaluate students using the foot behind the head criteria, i.e., how radically bendy they can be with their bodies.  Even though modern yoga is so much about the body, my definition of an advanced yoga practitioner includes much more than the body.

When I reflect on all the amazing students who have graced the yoga room in the years I've been teaching, I remember many that I would call advanced.  Here are some of them (all true stories!):

*  The woman who had rheumatoid arthritis and was in intense pain most of the time; she came to her first yoga class with me, smiled during the entire class, then had the generosity to thank me profusely after the class.

*  The young woman with one leg; she was sitting when I introduced myself and asked if she had any limitations that might affect her yoga practice: she said no!  It was only when class started and I saw her practicing that I realized her situation.  She had lost a leg to bone cancer when she was a teen, and was a gorgeous yoga practitioner, who didn't expect or ask for one iota of special attention.  (Of course we were all awed by her anyway!)

*  Our dear friend and long-time student who lost her two children.  Yoga was her lifeline for many years; she kept stringing one pose in front of the other, and in that way survived what was unsurvivable.  She told me once that she couldn't describe what yoga did for her, but that it did something nothing else did.

*  Our many students who have struggled with debilitating depression and yet have found the strength of will and heart spirit to get themselves through the door and take their yoga class.  For them, I know, getting to class can be like climbing Mt. Everest.

*  An amazing student who navigated her way through ovarian cancer that was ultimately fatal.  Yet she had such profound nobility of spirit and was a yogini to the very end; she chanted during chemotherapy and did pranayama when she couldn't do physical practice.

And many more.  They have taught me so much about what it means to truly "advance" in yoga practice.  When it's definitely not about perfecting poses anymore, when life is beyond all that, they have shone like beacons of the best of humanity, revealing what is possible through devoted, mature practice.  Forehead to the earth, I bow to them all.

Aloha Spirit

I just returned from teaching my annual Hawaii yoga and meditation retreat on the small island of Molokai. 

Retreating is important.  When I come back from retreat, I bring with me the spacious ease that I found in the rhythm of rising early and meditating, doing asana every day, being cooked for and fed with love and spirit (heaven!), taking a sabbatical from whatever I'm usually plugged into, and sleeping deeply.  On Molokai, we rise with the birds; actually, you HAVE to because they are LOUD, raucous, and abundant.  Like everything in Hawaii, they are extraordinarily full of life force.  Hawaiians say you pop a seed in the ground here and the next day it is 3 feet tall.

When you retreat, you see your own life from a distance.  You have more perspective.  You step out of what has been narrowly occupying your energy and time, and view things from afar.  We tend to narrow down to a mono-focus in the day to day perceived predictability of life.  Retreating, being in a new place, reminds us that life actually never is predictable or ordinary.  When you are at a distance from the day to day of your life, you can think more creatively about the shape you want your life to take, and can imagine its fullness and the steps it will take to get there.  You are in a liminal space, a space on both sides of a threshold.  You are not in your day to day life, yet you are still moving, living, breathing.  Every moment is filled with the unexpected, like wasps in the composting toilet, baby goats, puppies, flowers of irrepressible beauty and size around every corner, new people to get to know, yoga poses to investigate, chocolate mousse made out of avocados!

Sunrise, and the raucous, uncontainable good morning of tropical birds; then the walk through the dark morning to the lovely yoga yurt.  We gather in a circle, sleepy, to meditate.  The island takes us deep as there is only depth beneath us, a cavern equivalent to the Grand Canyon between Molokai and Oahu.  Like an eagle hovering over this small land mass, seeing the whole island entire, we view our lives from an enlarged perspective, and what we observe is: life is basically good, evolution is possible and positive, and time away is not a luxury, but is needed for the health of our hearts and souls.

Tweet Me

This morning, when I accompanied our new pup Rocky on his morning constitutional in the backyard, I noticed a newly intensified chorus of bird song from every direction.  They are advertising their genetic wares, claiming their territory, and preening for mating season.   I stood on the wet morning grass and allowed myself to be immersed in the cacophany of life trilling itself out from everywhere.

The thing I realized, though, was that my attention could not stay with bird song for very long, even though there was stunning beauty happening so forcefully and musically.  It was a sunny morning after weeks of dark rain, the birds were prolific in their cheeps, peeps, squeaks, and caws, yet there was a mysterious thickness between me and just listening, an impatience to get moving into something that must be important, although I couldn't really think of what it was.

Lately I've been experimenting with catching the subtleties of mental contraction as they begin to occur, and today I was gifted with the enchantment (and I literally mean enchantment -- what can be more other-worldly than how life funnels itself so enthusiastically through the tiny throats of birds, giving us constant ear blessings, if we will only listen) of that avian opera in my own yard, and I was having trouble softening myself and my agenda for the day, and my routinized misgivings, self-concerns, and underground rumblings of fears, to the simple beauty of that song, even for five minutes.

But here's the good news: I noticed I was standing in the blazing sunlight of aliveness, with the outrageousness of life flinging itself into the atmosphere around me, and I was a fretting little knot of mental tightness, rehearsing its varieties of concerns and possibilities.  This may not sound like much, that I noticed this, but it is!  Life was fluid and generous, little me was tight and contained.

It's like when I'm doing yoga, and I'm actually happy when I find a place in my body that is weak or tight, because I think: now this is something I can investigate, and transform.  So, I found, or re-found, for the umpteenth time in my life, my tight little mental corner of the Universe, and I thought: now this is something I can investigate and transform.

So tomorrow morning I'll be out there again, this time with more intention.  I'm not gonna try to do the Olympics of listening to bird song, I'll just see if I can close my eyes and take a good listen or two, with full heart and fluid mind.  That will be my first yoga practice of the day.

Happy Happy Joy Joy?

SYA Teacher Meg

Anusara yoga has a reputation for being "Happy Yoga" because of its foundation in a Tantric philosophy of intrinsic goodness.  Maybe this idea will go down more easily if we think of it as beingness rather than goodness; intrinsic beingness that is neither good nor bad, it just is.  But we have to call it something in order to talk about it, and goodness is a good ole word that you wouldn't think would offend anyone.  And it is the closest everyday word to describing what the Tantrics were trying to express.  You could also use more technical Sanskrit words like ananda (bliss), anuttara (beyond which there is nothing), amrita (mystical bliss), jyoti (light) and so forth. 

SYA Teacher Rebecca

Most of us don't go around in states of perpetual bliss, and I always assume that at least half of the students in any class I teach are dealing with something in their lives that is really challenging.  Sometimes I am one of those people who is in a place of struggle.  So I know I can't hit them over the head with goodness and bliss, or they will tune me completely out.   Students have such strong radar for when you are not authentic as a teacher!  Yet I don't want to leave them behind; I want to welcome them into the yoga fold and offer them some small space in the difficulty, a little lifting of the veil, a remembrance of what is possible.  

SYA Teacher Beth

Here's how people often describe an Anusara class: welcoming, warm, inspiring, joyful.  They also say we Anusara teachers talk wa-a-a-y too much, and yeah, we can get going.  Like: "Draw the powerful energy of the earth up through your legs, so that your belly becomes radiantly alive, your tailbone roots back down into the great mother, causing your heart to lift to the endless sky of consciousness, and the cathedral of the roof of your mouth opens like the vast blue sky, lifting your spirits into the great Goddess source and creating a feeling of supreme bliss."  That IS a bit much, I admit.  But we're attempting to midwife the expansion of the human soul, not just be a hamstring lengthening technician or an ab building coach, although, since we're in human form, that's in the mix too.

SYA Teacher Grace

You can't imagine how much dedication, training, and skill it takes to teach Anusara yoga (read Anusara teacher Emma Magenta's blog on teaching with a theme to get an idea of this).  In our Teacher Trainings we tell our students that Anusara yoga is the hardest yoga to teach - you're not just giving placement instructions, you're inviting the student's heart into radical expansion, while articulating very refined and elegant physical instructions, offering personal manual and verbal adjustments, uplifting the vibe of the whole class, and trying not to talk TOO much!  That's a lot of balls to be juggling all at once.

I'd rather take the risk of being a bit too sappy than live in a safe little bubble of cynicism.  At least we're TRYING to articulate something that is uplifting, as opposed to the great tide of negativity, violence and despair that suffuses the world media.  We Anusarians are kinda innocent and hopeful that way.  That's one reason why I adore this community SO much. 

I Have a Yoga Dream

(With a deep bow to Martin Luther King)

I have a yoga dream that is deeply rooted in the yoga tradition,

That all yogis will become ambassadors of sanity and clarity.

That they will actually live the profound words they say so freely,

That they will do the inner work that it takes to become vehicles of light and inspiration.

I have a yoga dream that all yogis will wholeheartedly commit to the practice of meditation,

And teach it to their children, and, like a great wave, the wisdom of deep insight,

Will wash this planet free of war, suffering, greed, and ignorance, and forevermore,

We will see only the light in each other.

I have a yoga dream that the yoga communities of all traditions combine to show the world

A way to live that honors all varieties of practice, how each uplifts the human spirit, and

That we, as yoga practitioners, become models of a radical shift in kindness, cooperation, and inspiration.

I have a yoga dream that one day everyone on the planet will have a practice,

That will connect them on a daily basis with the One Heart we all share,

That this practice will convince every human alive that their bodies are sacred,

Beautiful, and extraordinary, that their minds are the result of eons of evolutionary effort,
Which has resulted in the opportunity for unlimited intelligence, creativity, and delight.

I have a yoga dream that, through our collective investigation of this miracle of existence,

We find freedom from smallness, bitterness, weakness, cruelty, thinking so little of ourselves,

And that from this inner stance of the great unbounded freedom of each individual soul,

We all abide at last and eternally in everyday ecstasy and wild delight.