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.

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.