Yoga makes me put my mind in my body. I appreciate the freedom from monkey-chatter-mind. I like how the movements make me feel alive like when I was a kid playing, all physical. It reminds me of child’s open-heart.
Beginning from a cross-legged posture, I ascend from the base of the spine. 
I brings the palms together at the chest, hands at the heart center, thumbs touching, pressing into the sternum. I descend the energy from the mind to that same place, and think of something most precious. I peel back the layers of the onion, and I come to the star-child I am, innocent, open, vulnerable, and so full of love.
As I relax my facial muscles and the soften the contents of my head, I allow, and light radiates from within my heart, streaming outward. I am permeated.
Yoga | 28.06.2006 4:30 | No Comments
“But the most important question, in order to see into and behind, to weigh the value of all that lives, ‘Where is the soul? Where is the soul?’ ”
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Where is my soul in the matter? I ask myself.
Is it evaporating, getting compromised, set aside, shuffled under?
Or is it not?
In stillness, I bear it witness.
In order to find out how to reveal our innermost Being, the sages explored the various sheaths of existence, starting from body and progressing through mind and intelligence, and ultimately to the soul. The yogic journey guides us from our periphery, the body, to the center of the being, the soul. The aim is to integrate the various layers so that the inner divinity shines out as though through clear glasses. Oneness, what I often call integration is the foundation for wholeness, inner peace, and ultimate freedom.
-B.K.S. Iyengar
The Human Condition, Yoga | 16.04.2006 22:14 | No Comments
One of the things about yoga and meditation that I love is that things emotional and mental find a physical counterpart. Finding access to work with these things physically has been a very valuable tool. As I’ve found myself stuck with a mental obsession that leads to emotional upheaval, I’ve been bringing myself to the folded blankets on the floor to sit and clear my mind.
I want to have a good day, I want to be free to enjoy this beautiful day for what it is. It, and all it contains, is a gift. I work to shift my perspective.
I begin with my eyes closed to minimize distractions from the physical world. I sit straight and tall, and imagine the world in all 360 degrees, from front to back and side to side. I imagine the city in front of me- the industry to the east and the suburbs and the mountains to the west. Beyond them behind me, the desert, the coast, the ocean. Mexican and southern lands stretch to the south- which include my oasis Ojo Caliente mineral springs in the sparsely populated arid lands of New Mexico. Colder regions and forests lie to the north in the vast landscapes there. Most of the continental United States, the plains, the Appalacians, New England, and more ocean lie ahead. My consciousness expanding I see the world a great big, living, energetic ball with all its creatures in deep, broad, and expansive space.
I place my hands together palms touching, thumbs at the sternum, and I sing the Om. I chant it three times. I am aligned with the energetic world. I bow my head, stretching my neck, relaxing my jaw and my eyes, looking deep into my chest- humbled before the magnificence of Creation. I bring my hands to my knees, palms up, allowing this great energy to flow through me. I turn my palms over.
This ritual puts me in a head space which brings me to the threshold of the evolution of my existence. I can’t go on with any less.
Part of the work is with the negotiations within the body in order to sit comfortably. Today, my lower back complained, a dull throbbing radiating from my sacroiliac joint. As my groins relaxed and knees dropped, which they should, my hips want to tilt backwards. The pelvis should be perpendicular to the floor as one sits directly on top of the sitting bones. With each out-breath, it slides back, back, back. I work with the strength in the core which is where one ought to hold themselves up from to keep this from happening, and to keep the muscles of the back and the kidney-band relaxed. I added more height with blankets, and this helped.
Usually though, when discomfort arises, the guideline is to just wait for something to shift. In this part of the struggle one thing that comforts me greatly- something that applies also to the challenges of simply being alive- is the observation of the fact that everything in this world inevitably changes. When I am uncomfortable, I assure myself that if I just wait patiently, something, inevitably, will change- whether it is the pain in my hip, knee or whatever. This makes my heart swell with joy and hope.
Next, is work with the mind. I find that place in my brain that tenses when I’m thinking, and I let that go. What seems to happen naturally when I do this is, from behind my eyes I peer into my heart, and light patterns emerge, energies swooping and swishing in my third eye. I experience moments of this wonderful and blissful state of being until my mind asserts itself again, and some dialogue or commentary arises in my mental space. This exercise, this practice, the observations of the body, the fluctuations of the mind continue. The minutes click by in this way.
This experience is liberating. Those brief moments of freedom reached interspersed in the usual are blissfully soothing to my soul. I get a tangible sense that I am part of the magic that is the energies that exist permeating everything. I breathe in this Oneness that I have brought into my consciousness, this collective of All; I breathe out the individual spirit in me that has bought into the delusion of separateness. I am comforted. I want to bring this in to the way I go about my days. Although it is fleeting, this is the window through which it arrives, in these blessed moments.
I sit until I feel I have been able to take a nice rest and repose in this place where I am free to not think and be trapped in the mental gymnastics of my ego that wear me down. I have been wanting to break free from some negative patterns that are very old and ingrained in me, and this is my key.
I naturally want to stretch into some yoga poses after this. This is where my pent-up emotions flare sometimes, and make me want to scrap it all.
Today, I placed my hands, with fingers spread out like star-fishes in front of me on the yoga mat, and I stretched back, lifting my hips away from my head, into dog-pose. My shoulders complained. My legs protested as I attempted to bring my heels to the floor. Aggression flared, and feeling raw inside, I bent my knees and came down, bringing my forehead to the floor. Tears in my eyes, I just took this wave of emotion washing over me and allowed it. It became simply a physical sensation as the prickles percolated over my heart.
I knew just what to do next. I got two chairs from the kitchen as I moved into Mr. Iyengar’s series for emotional stability. I placed blankets over the backs of the chairs and place them one on each side of my yoga mat, back to back, with room to place my head in between them as I bent with straight legs, feet about shoulder-width apart, hinging at the hips to bring my shoulders to rest one on each chair-back, my head hanging relaxed luxuriously in between the chairs. This gentle forward bend feels so supportive, and I spent the next five minutes there, beginning a very nurturing two hours of yoga- with most of the time spent inverted, with my head below my heart.
Now, feeling a great calm I write, laundry swishing away as the washing machine dutifully hums along, and the sun enters brightly though my windows, washing warmly over my work-space.
Thank you so much, body of knowledge that has been transmitted to me so that I can help myself live a joyful life. For someone who had a hard time saying it, I’ll go ahead and do so- I deserve it. We all do. It’s available regardless of what is or is not in our lives, it’s all in our minds. And awake to this joy, I can give back so much more. This is what it’s all about.
May I be happy, may all beings be happy. May we all abide in peace and grace. Namaste.
Yoga | 5.03.2006 17:40 | 3 Comments
I have begun reading Light on Life.
Iyengar, B.K.S. Light on Life. Holtzbrinck Publishers, 2005.
He is a living example of a human being whose life is permeated with the art of yoga (72 years) which is a way of life, physically and philosophically- with great affects in the mental and emotional constitution of a person. I too have experienced great benefits of what has begun as mere simple stretches in my life. I have begun to tap into productive habits and a well-spring of holistic health. Yet the struggle is overwhelming sometimes.
I wanted to read the words of a master as I feel I am in the thick of some heavy transformative work, as drastic themes predominate my life. I just wanted to hear what Mr. Iyengar has to say.
This passage in the introduction strikes a chord with me.
The life of a householder is difficult, and it has always been. Most of us encounter hardship and suffering, and many are plagued with physical and emotional pain, stress, sadness, loneliness, and anxiety. While we often think of these as the problems caused by the demands of modern life, human life has always had the same hardships and the same challenges making a living, raising family, and finding meaning and purpose.
These have always and will always be the challenges that we humans face. As animals, we walk the earth. As bearers of divine essence, we are among the stars. As human beings, we are caught in the middle, seeking to reconcile the paradox of how to make our way upon the earth while striving for something more permanent and more profound. So many seek this greater Truth in the heavens, but it lies much closer than the clouds. It is within us and can be found by anyone on the Inward journey.
Yoga, I often say, is like music. The rhythm of the body, the melody of the mind, and the harmony of the soul create the symphony of life. The Inward Journey will allow you to explore and to integrate each of these aspects of your being. From your physical body, you will journey inward to discover your subtle bodies: your energy body, where breath and emotions reside; your mental body, where thoughts and obsessions can be mastered; in your intellectual body, where intelligence and wisdom can be found; and your divine body, where the Universal Soul can be glimpsed.
I am in good spirits.
However, I had some strange dreams. I was at the house I grew up and my parents disappeared and made me take over the dinner party. There was not enough food. It was quite stressful. Without any kind of closure to the glitched dinner party I transitioned to a scene at night deep in the banks of the Cherry Creek. There were lots of trees, tangled branches, the running creek, a moon. Some kind of group of dangerous people who were going to descend and do some vague bad things to the group I was with, so I fled. I’m not sure in which order all these scenes came through my dreaming mind, but I was on a crowded European train at one point, and had flown in a rickety plane across the Atlantic. I was with Brigid at the airport, whom I’d like to see in San Francisco. We were told by someone that if we waited at the airport, we’d see Charlotte the Baroness, who was flying in from somewhere also. She’s a DJ I know in San Francisco, whom I spent a bit of time with after meeting her in Denver at a Tribe party in 1996.
My unconscious never fails to make me wonder. Wild, these images that come from almost nowhere to surprise me.
As Linda, my teacher always says, “it’s a long, strange road.” I couldn’t agree more.
Dreams, Yoga | 29.01.2006 13:18 | No Comments
I love these words and am touched by the ideas in the following from the forward of one of Mr. Iyengar’s books, Light on Yoga:
The Practice of Yoga induces a sense of measure and proportion.
Reduced to our own body, our first instrument, we learn to play it, drawing from it maximum resonance and harmony. With unflagging patience, we refine and animate every cell as we return daily to the attack, unlocking and liberating capacities otherwise condemned to frustration and death.
Each unfulfilled area of tissue and nerve, of brain or lung, is a challenge to our will and integrity, or otherwise a source of frustration and death. Whoever has had the privilege of receiving Mr. Iyengar’s attention, or of witnessing his precision, refinement and beauty of his art, is introduced to that vision of perfection and innocence which is man as first created- unarmed, unashamed, son of God, lord of creation- in the Garden of Eden. The tree of knowledge has indeed yielded much fruit of great variety, sweet, poisonous, bitter, wholesome, according to the use of it. But is it not more imperative than ever that we cultivate that tree, that we nourish its roots? And furthermore how dangerous is that knowledge to those who, ill at ease with themselves, would rather apply it to the manipulation of other people and things that to the improvement of their own persons.
The practice of yoga over the past fifteen years has convinced me that most of our fundamental attitudes to life have their physical counterparts in the body. Thus comparison and criticism must begin with the alignment of our own left and right sides to a degree at which even finer refinements are feasible: or strength of will causes to start by stretching the body from the toes to the top of the head in defiance of gravity. Impetus and ambition might begin with the sense of weight and speed that comes with free-swinging limbs, instead of of with the control of prolonged balance on foot, feet, or hands, which gives poise. Tenacity is gained by stretching in various Yoga positions for minutes at a time, while calmness comes with quiet, consistent breathing and the expansion of the lungs. Continuity and a sense of the universal come with the knowledge of the inevitable alteration of tension and relaxation in eternal rhythms of which inhalation and exhalation constitutes one cycle, wave or vibration among countless myriads which are the universe.
What is the alternative? Thwarted, warped people condemning the order of things, cripples criticising the upright, autocrats slumped in expectant coronary attitudes, the tragic spectacle of people working out their own imbalance and frustration on others.
Yoga, as practiced by Mr. Iyengar, is the dedicated votive offering of a man who brings himself to the altar, alone and clean in body and mind, focused in attention and will, offering in simplicity and innocence not a burnt sacrifice, but simply raised himself to his own highest potential.
It is a technique ideally suited to prevent physical and mental illness and to protect the body generally, developing an inevitable sense of self-reliance and assurance. By its very nature it is inextricably associated with universal laws: respect for life, truth, and patience are all indespensable factors in the drawing of a quiet breath, in calmness of mind and firmness of will.
Yoga | 20.08.2005 7:30 | No Comments
N. Lois Turtledove is a graduate student at the University of Colorado at Denver obtaining a Master's Degree in Humanities. She teaches yoga inside and outside the home, and is an apprentice in the ancient therapeutic art of shamanic practice. She understands that the only real enemy is the self, and the Self is the deepest source of nurture. She wishes freedom from suffering for herself and for all sentient beings.