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.