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OPEN MIND OPEN BODY Ideas for Your Yoga Practice |
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Can
Yoga Really Change My Life? Register
for the Online Class Now
When
I first started practicing yoga, I had the idea that it would be good for
me. I had no idea why it was
good for me, but I’d heard that yoga could improve everything from
health to happiness. So I was willing to try it. But I remember being in a
class, with the teacher asking me to do something in triangle pose that
literally made no sense to me whatsoever – I had no idea what she was
asking me to do with my body, let alone how to do it. And I thought to
myself, “This is going to change
my life?” I
thought maybe yoga worked a little bit like medicine – I might not need
to understand how it works, I just needed to take the right dose and let
it work its magic. And I did that for a while, practicing yoga with no
real sense of how it might change my life – just the hope that it would.
This is what we might call the “slow path” to enlightenment.
Fortunately for me, I was soon introduced to yogic philosophy, and I
started to understand that how I practiced yoga was a lot more important
than the simple fact that I practiced. I began to see that I could apply
yoga philosophy to my practice first, and then to the rest of my life. To
some degree, I think that practicing yoga blindly can still work. Because
the practice of yoga is so powerful. Sometimes you get lucky, and stumble
upon the heart of yoga just by showing up on a regular basis. Some of you
may have experienced that already. I see it all the time – students who
insist that yoga is, for them, simply a workout. Nothing more. They
practice regularly, and then one, two years later, they announce that
they’re becoming a vegetarian, or that they’ve mysteriously lost the
urge to smoke or drink, or they’ve miraculously stopped fighting so much
with their partner, or they’ve finally decided to leave the job they
hate and pursue their dreams – and no, they don’t want to talk about
whether their yoga practice had anything to with it.
So, yoga can “work” even when we don’t ask for it or expect
it. Sometimes,
though, you get stuck, and end up using yoga to reinforce all the habits
and qualities that are causing you to suffer. Yoga practice can become a
forum for self-criticism, for ego-driven ambition, for impatience, for
emotional escape - so yoga can become just another way to stay stuck in
whatever patterns and conditioning are holding you back in life. We can
use our yoga practice counterproductively, if we lack a little guidance
and some insight into the larger ideas of yoga. That’s why it’s
helpful to have a framework for your yoga practice that gives you a sense
of how yoga can help you. The
goal of this email class is introduce you to some ideas and practices that
can help you create a life-changing yoga practice. We’re aiming high
here – yes, yoga can change your triceps, but…..why settle for
anything less than a truly transformational yoga practice? Yoga
will help you change some of the external circumstances of your life. But
for most people, the greatest change they can imagine is a change in their
internal experience. Imagine a major change in how you think, feel,
experience, and respond to the world. That’s what we’re aiming for
here. YOGA
& CHANGE Try
a little experiment now. Come
into tadasana – yoga’s basic standing pose. Close your eyes. Now try
to be completely still. Completely, totally, motionless. No movement. No
change. Resist any change. Is
it possible? Did you find yourself holding your breath? There is no way to
stay perfectly still, in tadasana or in life. Every moment is always
unfolding, and all you can do is follow it and perhaps try to guide it. Come
into tadasana again, and close your eyes. Notice how the breath moves you
in tadasana. Can you feel yourself getting taller on the inhale, more
grounded on the exhale? Or perhaps you feel yourself expanding on the
inhale, and drawing in to your core on the exhale.
Whatever you feel, whatever you notice, do it intentionally. Ride
the natural change and do it on purpose. Yoga
teaches us that everything changes – everything is always in the process
of renewing, unfolding, and evolving. This is good news. It means that we
don’t need to provide the energy for change in our own lives. Change is
not an uphill battle – it doesn’t need to be a struggle. Everything is
already always changing. We simply need to learn how to direct change and
allow change to happen. Instead, most of us are struggling to prevent
change – we cling to our habits and our ways of viewing the world.
We may not even be doing this consciously. But if we sincerely
invite change, there’s nothing that can stop it. ACCEPTANCE
AND THE PRESENT MOMENT What
kind of change can you expect from yoga? Essentially, yoga has two gifts:
the first is developing our ability to be at peace independent
of our current circumstances. We
find out that we have a choice about our mental state and emotional state,
and that we can choose contentment over boredom, anger, fear, or hate. By
helping you accept the present moment, yoga gives you the possibility of
experiencing contentment and compassion whenever you want
-- not just when events turn out the way you hoped, or just when
your with your few favorite people in the world. This is the gift of acceptance.
You could also describe this as surrender, or openness, to all experience.
So yoga helps us let go of the need for everything to be exactly “our
way”. You
may have already experienced this in your yoga practice. Poses that were
once incredibly uncomfortable – perhaps even painful or seemingly
impossible - may have become
quite comfortable for you now. Yoga is a practice of getting comfortable
in some very awkward positions. Yoga increases our comfort zone. So,
this ability to find peace, contentment, even curiosity - in any
experience is the first key to how yoga can change your life. And,
ironically, once you relax into the present moment, you free up energy for
change. Try
another experiment now. Enter a pose that directly confronts, and slowly
unravels, tension in your body. Choose a pose that challenges your
flexibility, and that you can comfortably hold. A good example is
uttanasana, the standing forward bend. It starts out a little bit
uncomfortable – definitely not neutral. But as you relax into it, your
experience changes. If you accept where you are, and allow your body to
release gradually into the pose, it become more comfortable. But if you
resist where you are, either by forcing the stretch too soon, or by
grimacing and holding the breath and hoping the whole thing will be over
soon, the pose becomes more and more uncomfortable. Relax in the pose and
wait. Breathe deeply. Accept where you are and find the comfort of it. If
that were all yoga did for us – teach us how to accept the present
moment – that would be pretty nice. But it does more than that. Because
we don’t just sit and meditate in life; we act in the world. Our actions
have consequences, and yoga teaches us how to act skillfully. SKILLFUL
ACTION The
second gift of yoga is developing our ability to “live” our values and
our highest aims. Yoga teaches us how to become free of our unconscious
and destructive habits, so that we can act on purpose. By helping you see
more clearly, and act more intentionally, yoga will give you the ability
to live on purpose. Hatha
Yoga, broadly speaking, is any form of yoga that focuses on uniting mind
and body. Another way to think about that, is that Hatha Yoga is focused
on integrating thought and action. Ancient yoga scholars called Hatha Yoga
skill in action. Some scholars
have called it “practical wisdom”. This
practical wisdom – the ability to
act skillfully - is the second key to understanding how yoga can
change your life. Skillful
action has a few key qualities, all of which Hatha Yoga develops: 1)
Intention. Understanding the ethics, values, and aims that drive your
action. 2)
Awareness. Understanding the current situation, so that you can respond to
the situation with insight. 3)
Action. Acting in a way that is in line with your intention, and
is in response to the present moment. Acting with focus, commitment, and
patience. Let
me explain this basic premise of skillful action in practical terms, so
that this process doesn’t seem any more mysterious than it is. Let’s
say that you’re interested in baking a really delicious chocolate cake.
That’s your intention, and you recognize it clearly. But intention only
gets you so far. It takes awareness
to know what steps are necessary to bake a great cake. Awareness is not
some mystical kind of omniscience. Awareness simply means that you’ve
been paying attention in life, and you understand the factors that will
influence the outcome of your effort. In this case, you’re not expected
to intuitively know how to bake a cake. You simply need a recipe. You need
to know where to buy the finest ingredients at the best price. You need to
know how everything in your kitchen works, especially the oven. And you
may need to know a few other tricks about combining ingredients, timing,
and that sort of thing. There
are many ways to increase your awareness about cake-baking. You can ask
someone who bakes great cakes. You can read a book. You can practice a
lot, and see what works best. The bottom line is, you need to pay
attention to how things we work,
so that when you go to make that really delicious chocolate cake, you
understand cake-making as best as you possibly can. And as you go about
making the cake, you build your awareness even more. Ah! What a nice way to melt chocolate!, you notice. You learn more
by paying attention as you go. That’s
awareness. And you’d be
surprised at how many of us go about our lives trying to make really great
cakes without ever paying attention to how cake-making works. If we
don’t understand cause and effect – in all areas of our lives – our
cakes will always fall flat. Now,
let’s consider the quality of action that we add to intention and
awareness. Imagine you have lots of cake-making awareness, and you’re
ready to make the cake. As you begin, you get distracted by the television
you left on in the living room. You forget how much sugar you’ve already
added to the batter, so you guess and add a little more to be safe. Then
you start daydreaming about how great the cake is going to taste, and you
forget to preheat the oven. You need the cake to be ready soon, so you put
the cake into the cold oven and hope for the best. Then the phone rings,
and you take the call. A little while later, you smell smoke. You rush to
the oven to find a burned cake. Instead of staring over, you toss the cake
into the trash and give up. To
make use of awareness, you need focus and commitment – the ability to
direct your energy towards fulfilling your intention. You also need
patience to continue on, even when things are not proceeding according to
your imagined timeline. You might be surprised by how many of us invest a
great deal of energy increasing our initial awareness of a problem, but
then lose focus, commitment, or patience. Without these qualities, we
can’t follow through with our intention, and we can’t effectively
respond to a situation that changes. So,
to bake a really great cake, you need awareness – the basic
understanding of cause and effect – and the ability to direct your
effort and respond to the situation as it unfolds. Then, your cake-baking
will be an example of skillful action: you will have produced the best
cake that was possible in this moment. And that is always
enough. Consider
a second example, from yoga: learning how to do a headstand. At first, it
might seem scary, intimidating, even dangerous. But you have the intention
to try, because you recognize that trying headstand will be a good way to
challenge your fear and practice learning something new. First you need to
develop some awareness about headstand – what are the benefits of
practicing headstand? How does one approach headstand? You ask, “Does it
matter where I put my hands? How I place my head on the floor?” You
become curious about things like alignment, because it helps you
understand the pose. You are willing to listen to our teacher, rather than
to rush into things. You also need some awareness about your own body,
asking yourself, “Do I have the strength to enter headstand today? Do I
have any chronic tension in the neck that will influence my headstand? Do
I know how to stand upright in tadasana – which is a pre-requisite for
finding a comfortable headstand?” And also some awareness about your
reasons for practicing headstand – “Am I only trying this because I
think I should? Am I trying to impress my teacher? Am I nervous about
falling and hurting myself? Can I approach headstand with curiosity,
mindfulness, and courage?” Once
you have some insight into the pose and your current condition, you can
approach headstand skillfully – using what you’ve learned, observing
how your alignment and your attitude influence your experience in the
pose. Whether or not you balance perfectly, you have a good experience in
headstand and have taken a skillful step in the direction of practicing
headstand. If you have commitment and focus, you try again, always
applying what you have learned. You have patience with yourself and
don’t become frustrated or give up. This
is how yoga trains skillful action. Yoga turns the integration of body,
breath, and mind into one big practice ground for life. It’s not just
about whether or not you can do a headstand. It’s about how you approach
headstand and how you experience headstand. Yoga turns the integration of
body, breath, and mind into one big practice ground for life. Each pose is
an action to approach skillfully. But every pose presents a different
challenge. How you approach the pose, and practice the pose over time,
determines the outcome of the practice. The
body makes an excellent practice ground for the rest of life because it
confronts us immediately. It forces us to acknowledge that what we do and
how we do it have real consequences, that we can see and feel. Yoga shows
us how well our way of relating to challenges works. When you lose your
focus in a balancing pose, and fall, the effects of your action are
immediate and obvious. When you push too hard in a pose and pull a muscle,
the effects of your action are immediate and obvious. If you pay attention
in your yoga practice, and practice with the intention of learning about
yourself, you can’t help but develop more skillful action. A
PRACTICE FOR LIFE Think
about what it would mean in your life to have skill in every action. Skill
in what you say and what you do. Skill in what you eat, what you buy, and
what you give to others. So that every action you take is in line with
your highest goals. So that every action you take is in response to things
as they actually are, in the current moment. When we practice yoga, we are
practicing how to act skillfully – mindfully – ethically – and
intentionally. Hatha Yoga is a practice of realizing how
asleep-at-the-wheel we are in everyday life, and the process of learning
how to become awake. So that we end up directing our lives intentionally,
instead of ending up in a ditch somewhere, wondering what happened and
where we went wrong. When
you put these two things together – acceptance and skillful
action – you find that yoga will help you change what can be
changed, and come to peace with things that are not under your control.
That’s what you can expect from a consistent yoga practice. It is both
more than, and different than, what most people expect from a yoga
practice. A strong body, improved health, relaxation – yes, those will
come, too. But they are the side benefits; they may make it easier to live
a purposeful life, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. The
practices of Hatha Yoga help us wake up, help us choose peace, and joy,
and compassion, and train us for acting skillfully in life. These
practices fall into four main categories: breathing practices, meditation,
asana, and relaxation. This email class will focus on all four. By the end of this class, your will understand that your yoga practice is just that – practice. Practice for life. Yoga doesn’t take us away from our lives – it isn’t an escape, or a retreat. It’s a way of showing up for our lives. All you have to do is commit to the process. Register
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