Dedicating Your Yoga

Photo by E.S. Curtis 1908

Sometimes at the beginning of a yoga class, I will suggest to my students that, during quiet sitting as class begins, they create a dedication for their practice, offering their practice to a quality they would like to develop, to a particular person, or to themselves.

"Everyone thinks yoga is so physical, but it's really very mental," Judith Lasater once said in a workshop.  Whenever we practice yoga, whenever we take our seat, whenever we close our eyes, the mind is there.  That is why dedication and intention are so important; it is mind yoga.

Dedicating your practice clears away the cobwebs of confusion that can reign in our minds for much of the day.  I sometimes literally see an empty room or an open plain or the clear blue sky in my mind when I first sit down to practice.  It is so easy to be swept away in the detritus of the mind; the voices of the culture, the echoes of our parents, something someone said to us at work that day.  When you take your seat at the beginning of a practice, your first and most important step is to remember your own goodness, and to remember that you are enough.  What a huge difference in the yoga practice when we start from this foundation, instead of the small mind screaming its opinions.  "We must lose weight!  We must get more muscular, flexible, toned!  We must become more holy so we will be loved!"

Entering a yoga practice from the small mind is already contracted.  No matter how persistently you stretch your hamstrings with this attitude, it will make no difference in the level of love and happiness in your life.  As far as I know, the Dalai Lama cannot perform Eka Pada Rajakapotanasana, yet he is an example of love and expansiveness for all of us.

I know that hatha yoga purifies this body, and in turn allows me to be less confused, more sane, and less distracted by the dullness I feel when my body is toxic and sluggish.  Giving hatha yoga to my body is like rubbing the dirt off a beautiful gem, so that it can shine more brilliantly.  I can literally see this in the eyes of students after a good practice, and I can see it in students as they change over time, becoming softer in their faces, more confident in their bodies, and more balanced in their relationship with themselves.

Setting intention, offering dedication is a sacred act, and I encourage you to courageously bring this into your practice.  The very fact that we exist in these bodies is miraculous.  When we clear the space, create an intention, and dedicate the fruits of our practice, there is such a lightening of the heart.  This is your own hugely generous and limitless, inexhaustible true self answering your call.

Planet Stress

Right before I left three weeks ago, for my supposed trip to Egypt, I was ponderously going on to my yoga students about how travel forces you to let go of your agenda, to let things occur as they will, to accept and not judge other ways of life, yada yada.  Little did I know how much I would need to take my own advice.

I met my partner Greg in enormous, insane, polluted Cairo, and we made plans to head over to Dahab, a resort town on the Red Sea.  We made airline reservations, and booked a place to stay.  Two hours later, Greg opened his email and said, "Uh-oh, bad news."  He had received an email from the U.S. State Department warning of the possibility of increased terrorist activity, due to the upcoming Muslim holiday of Eid, in the exact place we were headed.  Okay, we're flexible: change plans.  We'll go down south to another spot on the Red Sea.  We checked our Lonely Planet guidebook.  Guidebook says it's a great place to go; just be aware there is the remote chance you could step on a landmine on the beach.  Just be sure to step only where others have stepped.

By this time we'd spent three days in Cairo, and I was NOT letting go of my agenda to get out of Cairo as soon as humanly possible.  All attempts to travel in Egypt were blocked.  So, I started researching other countries; we were right there near Europe...so many places to go!  But some were too far, some were wet and rainy, some were not that interesting.  (I know, bourgeois suffering, but still...)  Finally, I found some info on Malta, a small group of islands in the Mediterranean Sea, 90 miles south of Sicily.  
 
We landed on Gozo, one of the Maltese Islands, where Europeans flock from their stressful lives in search of sun and ease, swimming and great food.  I carried a BIG agenda with me to Gozo: I needed to rest and relax, I'd been working hard, I needed to renew on this trip.  Our first night in Gozo we stayed in a village called Marsalforn, which was exactly as noisy as Fremont on a Friday night in the summer.  Buses right outside our window, people partying all night long.  Even though they were yelling in German, or French, or Italian, I did not find it charming.  I needed to sleep.  Waaaah!


Okay, we moved across the island to a lovely smaller village called Xlendi and finally found a place to stay where we could hear the ocean at night (especially the night it stormed so hard the chairs around the pool ended up on the roof), and there was only the somewhat charming noise of the French family's children running up and down the halls at all hours.  "Maman!  Papa!  Pourquoi?"

And as I began to work on my agenda to relax and release some of my stress here on this beautiful island, here is what I found: the people who live here, even here, are rife with stress, with the sense that there is not enough time for everything, with the pressure to make money, and get everything done.  Anna, the older woman who owned the guesthouse we stayed in, told me she was going to the doctor that day to get some tests done.  "I have very much stress," she said.  We asked a taxi driver whether he'd ever been over to Camino, a beautiful island which is a 20 minute boat ride away.  "No, I'm working too hard," he said.  "No time."

I felt a great yearning to share some of the things I've learned that have helped me deal with the feelings of squeeze and anxiety over time, tasks, and money.  There is no yoga or meditation on Gozo.  There is very little yoga in Cairo, if any.
  
The entire planet, it seems, is whipping itself into a greater and greater frenzy of work.  Even those whose careers are built around providing escape valves from this ever tightening vise of stress, like those who run guest houses on remote islands, or those who run yoga studios, are themselves overburdened.  

I did get to renew on Gozo; we took all day walks along the ocean cliffs in sight of some of the most mind-boggling views I've ever seen.  We swam in the warm Mediterranean Sea.  We ate gourmet meals every night, as Gozo's cuisine is informed by the French and Italians who have moved there.  And yet, the "relaxing" I did on Gozo was not the same as the deep soul rest that happens to me when I go on a meditation retreat.

On this trip, I really got the difference between travel and retreat.  Travel is full of external experiences, of changing sights and sounds, of lots of moving around, of seeking.  Retreat is a sacred environment dedicated to open space, to freeing the mind from its automatic nature, so that it can roam in an expanded realm, not be a data and information downloading and sorting machine.

Retreats themselves are not always (hardly ever) easy, especially at the beginning, because they involve de-toxing from the things with which I habitually distract and occupy myself; the emergencies that aren't really emergencies, the ever accelerating pressure of time, the self-imposed deadlines. 

On retreat, what has been suppressed from consciousness by the frenetic activity of doing rises to the surface.  The de-tox can go all the way from slight discomfort to sheer terror, as the process begins its good work of re-making your innate humanity, healing your immune system, slowing down your heart rate, sharpening your inner attention so that you can actually hear and know what is true for you, so that you begin to inhabit the more subtle aspects of your aliveness.  Just as nature knows how to create a flower from a seed, she also knows how to renew your systems, if you give her a chance.

So with great compassion for this overburdened world and all its struggling inhabitants, I share a vision that, all over the world, there will someday be as many meditation centers as there are coffee houses, scattered throughout cities and towns as quiet, serene places where people of any faith and practice can stop in for a half hour, close their eyes, go deep within, or at least shake off the most external veneer of intensity, and then go on about their day, refreshed.  Just like your so-called smart phone; if you don't charge it every day, it is useless, not so very smart after all.  Meditation, silence and yoga are the charging practices that bring us back to a nourished state, ready to work efficiently, but aware at the same time of a vast and important life beyond work, one from which all human creativity and meaning arises.

Please Practice

"Do your practice and all is coming."
Pattabhi Jois

 Please Practice
Because your body is a light filled
Soul house that regularly
Needs its muscles lovingly expanded
And toned into more possibility.

Please Practice
Radically unplug
From distraction, anxiety, overdoing,
From senses flying outward to
Senses sensing inward, where the insights are.

Please Practice
Because the world depends on you,
On your sanity and focus,
Your creativity and commitment,
Your unique sparkling aliveness.

Please Practice
Because your breath wants to be freed;
It has been serving you humbly every moment,
Nourishing your vitality, rhythmically,
Without pause, singing you into life.

Please Practice
With liveliness, with a curious mind,
Without preconceptions,
Follow inklings, unusual movements.
Freely investigate the
Phenomenon of embodiment as you.

Please Practice
Because repetition brings mastery,
And even if you tried to exactly
Repeat, you never could.
Every time you repeat, you create
And are created.

Please Practice
In community, alone, with virtual instruction,
However you can make it work,
Carve out the space, make the time,
Push other things aside.
Be fierce for yourself.

Please Practice
Because silence is calling you,
She has missed you, she is waiting to
Heal you and uplift you,
She has peace and expansion
In her touch.

Please Practice.

Six Things I Know About Yoga at Age 60

GRATITUDE FIRST.  Being 60 is like careening down a giant highway, seeing loved ones veer suddenly off the exits, never to be seen again.  You have become intimate with the random, mysterious nature of life. You know for certain that change is constant, always reforming, tearing down, building up, dissolving, and creating.  Every time, every single day that you have the opportunity to practice, you bow with great appreciation for that.

YOGA REQUIRES ENDURANCE, a falling in love kind of endurance that gets you up in the morning and on the mat.  Or guides your feet to class after a long day of work.  It's intuiting somewhere in the distance the form of yourself that you came into this world with, your unique body mind heart print.  Yoga mysteriously takes you closer to that, as it fine-tunes the way your heart beats, the way the chemicals flow in your bloodstream, the way you inhabit space, the field of your awareness. Love is how you overcome obstacles.

PHYSICAL FLEXIBILITY IS OVER-RATED, and mental flexibility is too little cultivated.  What use is the ability to put your foot behind your head, if you’re snappish and impatient, judgmental and unloving, with every little thing, including yourself?  I’ve known yogis with bodies like taffy and minds like blocks of stone, and newbies to yoga with their sweet stiff bodies, untalented in the kinesthetic realm, yet glowing with sweetness and open minded.  Let’s use all our practices to cultivate a mind that fluidly meets the daily round of life with creativity and wisdom.

ASANA IS IMPORTANT.  We do asanas to call forth inside ourselves the archetypal energies and images that each form or sequence brings to bear on our psycho-spiritual selves.  This process mysteriously awakens our blocked creativity, our insight, and our healing powers.  Asana clears us, it opens the sky inside us.  With just a few dedicated yoga practices a week, our wise and grateful bodies and spirits respond overwhelmingly with increased strength, vigor, and clarity.

ASANA ISN'T EVERYTHING.  We love our asana, and it loves us, but it's only the tip of the yoga iceberg.  The great texts of yoga are a vast resource of the highest investigations of the human soul and mind on this planet, a profound gift to the human species, from the Vedas to the Upanishads, from the Bhagavad Gita to the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and on to later iterations of these traditions in the Tantric stream, like the Siva Sutras and the Vijnanabhairava Tantra.  Glittering gifts and endless pathways of insight await any who delve with devotion into these living texts.

YOGA MEANS MEDITATION.  If you step your toes into the texts mentioned above, you will observe the primacy of place that is given to the practice of meditation.  Meditation is the great, courageous, and intimate process of being with oneself, an outrageously radical thing to do in this culture of stimulus, constant distraction and external focus.  Meditation is developing a relationship with the eternal presently abiding.  It is making friends with all the ways that life expresses itself in the form of you.  Meditation is the great heart path of the yogi, the way to walk in the sky, the way to your birthright of freedom.

May all of your practices be blessed always with the fruit of inner recognition.

Yoga Scar Tribe

Yesterday my long time yoga teacher John Friend turned his back on a group of his own teachers who have been working tirelessly to come to an agreement with him about the future of a teacher run Anusara yoga.  The vision that came into the world through him was remarkable but, as a colleague said, " the vessel has become corrupted."  I have been waiting to see if John possessed a true warrior's heart, courageous enough to dive into his own darkness.  But no.  But for us, yes!

Yes!  As we walk away from the Anusara "system," we walk into space, possibility, creativity, deeper heart, the opening to generate new life and ideas.  We continually transcend the systems that birth us.  And when we transcend them, those systems can either embrace our growth and nourish it, or be threatened by it and try to close us down and maintain the status quo.  The negative father archetype arises, a form of punitive exclusivity. Becoming your own inner authority is a life's work, and you are forced to take the next step in claiming your own genius.

My strongest prayer for John and my prescription is that he unplug himself, confront himself truly, go dark, put some vegetable seeds in the ground, nurture them into growth, harvest them, cook them, eat them.  That he stay off airplanes, computers, and telephones.  That he wrestle his demons in a lonely cabin by the sea, with no women, no fans, no audience, no way out, no communication - for a long time.  May this be so.

It is important right now for everyone to continue their art forms, whether writing, dancing, yoga-ing, painting, musing.  And maybe not put it on public media right away, but sit on that golden egg a good long while so it does not hatch prematurely and malformed.  Know that there will be some time of feeling unmoored, uncreative, cut off from source.  Keep your dear self company in the formation of your own next blossoming.  Bring the words out when ready, birth them out with the vitally important healing they contain, the elevator down and in to our/my/the deepest and most true realizations.  We will all need what we will each bring forth and we will recognize and know its value when we see it.

These insights will heal us, unite us, challenge us, break us, mend us.  They will look unfamiliar but strangely attractive.  They will make us fall back in love with our yoga.  Maybe not tomorrow, because loss, scar forming, and personal truth seeing take their mysterious untold time.  Some will heal sooner, as they are familiar with this experience of scarring - oh, yes, this again.  Others will take longer, as their heart skin is achingly baby soft and unfamiliar with scars.

Betrayal torches the soft trusting heart and yet each heart is more resilient than it knows.  It will never find this resilience if it is not tested.  During the testing, one will say and do things that are less than perfect, less than skillful.  The wound is open - it hurts stunningly even to breathe on it.  But in time, scar tissue, stronger than skin, a badge of survival, forms. 

Instead of the "Merry Band" we are now the Yoga Scar Tribe, hurt, opened to our own brilliance, forced now to claim it, speak our own words (let us never say "Shine Out" again, but find our own precious way to express this.)  We will always recognize one another because of these scars.  Show me your scar and I'll show you mine.  Maybe you will tattoo yours or drape it in lovely fabric or audaciously show it off.  Maybe you will be bold with it, maybe you will be shy and private with it.  Regardless, everyone, everyone, has gifts that will be reaped from this wounding.  I can't wait to see them.

I love you all.

Photo by David Jay from "The Scar Project," portraits of young breast cancer victims.

Don't Know Mind

In Buddhism, there is the concept of Don't Know Mind.  When I used to practice Zen meditation, one of my practices was to meet each thought that would arise with the inner comment "Don't know, don't know, don't know."  What do I ever actually, really, truly KNOW in life?  It's profoundly difficult to even get to know my own mind, let alone to presume that I understand the inner workings of someone else's mind.  

And yet I shorthand other people constantly, reducing them to one dimensional cartoons: that person is a jerk, a demon, a loser, a saint, that person will never change, never heal, never come around.

I would venture to say that fixated mind is one of the biggest impediments to compassion.  When my mind is fixated, I can't be creative, I can't be kind, I can't imagine a greater outcome for the situation, I can't flow and surf the ever changing waves of life.  Due to some challenging and painful events in my community in recent weeks, I have gotten to know my own fixated mind even more intimately, as I have reduced the complex conditions and circumstances of other people's actions and words to simplistic caricatures, so that I can file the fear and grief I have been feeling into a convenient lock box deep inside.

But, hey, that doesn't work.  The truth comes out in dreams, in aching joints, in fatigue, in a general overall not feeling right about myself.  I know I'm not acting or thinking from spacious mind; I'm acting and thinking from narrow fearful mind, which never offers many options.  For me, I use the judgment/curiosity question.  Am I immediately judging someone or a situation?  If so, I know I'm in my fear brain, my primitive brain, the part of my brain that is simply reactive, and doesn't think at a very high level.  I'm just trying to protect this organism, I sense threat, I react and try to protect.  The irony is that the reactive mode just creates more pain and suffering for me, as I wall myself off behind my opinions like a barricaded castle.

In contrast, and this is the working edge of my life right now, am I in curiosity mind?  Hm, I wonder why that person acts that way.  In Buddhism, the concept of causes and conditions is also taught; there is no such thing as an isolated, independent action, event or even emotion.  Everything and everyone is a complex bundle of causes and conditions that led to a certain moment or a certain action.    If I can be curious, open-hearted, and compassionate about the causes and conditions inherent in everyone's life, I can live and perceive like the sky, watching the clouds flowing through her great endless space of heart.

I am committed to expanding my capacity for love and compassion in this lifetime, and believe me, it is a warrior's practice.  That's why in many traditions the image of the warrior is used to portray the difficulty of bringing more air and light into the fixated human mind.  One teaching says, "Changing a habit of mind is like trying to turn a ship in the middle of the Ganges River in monsoon season."

And yet, through the examples of great souls, great friends, and great teachings, I am hopeful that collective human mind can rise to the capacities it was created to embody: unlimited love, boundless compassion, endless space, profound courage. 

Yoga House on Fire

A fierce wave of clarity and alignment correction has torn through the yoga world in the last two weeks, and particularly through my world.  Two weeks ago, disturbing allegations about John Friend, the founder of Anusara yoga came to light.  I have zero interest in cataloging that information here, and I certainly have no interest in proclaiming John Friend innocent or guilty.  It's not for me to say what he should or shouldn't do with his life.  I will say that his actions tore my world apart in the most intense way, and that I have been in deep grief for the last few weeks.  For me, there has been a death.

I always encourage my yoga students to stay open to every sensation, not to shut out the intense sensations, to breathe right into the heart of darkness, as it were.  Courage in the midst of fire, even if it's just the fire of your quads in a standing pose.  Basically, I am instructing and encouraging openness.  First instruction for meeting fear (i.e, grief, judgment, anger, and all the other fear siblings): open to it.  Walk around and look at it.  Shake fear's hand.  Ask fear in for tea.  Second instruction: stay, and keep coming back again and again to staying, not escalating, staying.  If you feel compelled to speak, ask yourself: are these words coming from wisdom mind or wounded mind?  If you're not sure, stay.  Wait.  Pause.  Meditate.  Breathe.  Third instruction for meeting fear: allow yourself to be vulnerable.  Instead of lashing out, opinionating, pressing send, or inflaming, turn around and hold the tender bird of your vulnerability in your heart hand.  That tender bird lives in every human being on this planet, even those you want to demonize. 

These are all daring, paradigm shattering yogic practices.  We should be good at these by now, we should be outstanding at these by now.  (I'm not scolding you; I'm talking to myself here now as well as y'all.)  When the proverbial shit hit the fan last week, it was such a big practice opportunity.  Did we practice?  Or just react? As Pema Chodron (my go-to girl for crisis) says, " When you speak what you’re afraid of from a natural intelligence free of hope and fear, you will know what to do; how to apply openness, trust, see something as the end of something and the seed of the next thing."

Our yoga practices are meant to lead us to such a sense of trust in ourselves, that we don't need our external circumstances to be any particular way, that we know how to catch ourselves with our practices, that when we're provoked, triggered, disappointed, we have a way to pull out of that.

We're kinda immature as a species, and my great hope is that yoga be one major crucible that can squeeze us through the chrysalis into more intelligence and compassion. We HAVE to do this, the planet depends on it.  Otherwise, won't this precious incarnation into human form have been wasted on this go-round?  Yogis, this is my call out to you to rise to your highest and to show the world that yoga is not some large corporation, some passing fancy, some opportunity to wear cute clothes, some marketing deal, some way to have a cute butt, some platform for self aggrandizement, but a fundamentally paradigm shifting heart mind guts sky traveler practice that changes a person radically from the heart up.  May this be so.

For our students at Seattle Yoga Arts, I want to reassure you that we're not going anywhere, that we remain devoted to the Anusara method because it is a beautiful and efficacious system of hatha yoga.  We will continue to offer you the same grounded, alignment based, heart uplifting yoga we always have.  The Anusara method came through John Friend but has now transcended him, informed and embellished as it is by so many talented teachers and amazing souls.  Many of you have reached out to us in the last weeks with statements of heart rending support and sympathy, and for your generosity of heart, I bow to you.  May we all travel this great path of yoga with the biggest hearts imaginable, radically loving.