Nice, lengthy NY Times Magazine article about John Friend, founder of Anusara Yoga, written by Mimi Swartz, long-time Texas Monthly writer. It provides a good overview of contemporary American yoga – practiced by 16 million people, often creating community in the way that churches once did, and having a $5.7 billion per year economy.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25Yoga-t.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&src=ig
I like this post on Elephant Journal from a fellow meditation blogger about setting up your home meditation practice when you have a family, not much of a sangha, and other obstacles. Early in the morning is my best time too.
http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/07/meditation-for-the-working-class-family-folks/John Pappas’ blog, where the post originally appeared, is located here, and it’s worth a look-see. He’s located in South Dakota and has a photo of Mount Rushmore that includes the Buddha among the dead presidents! Check it out here:
http://zendirtzendust.com/Confession: I am a brain geek. I’ve been lucky enough in this lifetime to have worked for 3 years with Nina Davis, craniosacral therapist extraordinaire, and I can’t thank her enough for sharing her work with me.
CST is usually subtle. The one time it wasn’t subtle was when she worked on my locus ceruleus, a “blue spot” in the brain stem that is affected by trauma. When it opened up or unfroze or however it changed, I experienced profound, deep relaxation with no internal images or dialog. Just deep black restful awareness. It was like bliss.
I recommend CST for all trauma survivors. Trauma rewires the brain in a dysfunctional way, and your full recovery depends on you (with whatever help you can get) rewiring it back to a healthy state.
(Besides this, Nina has shown me how acutely a person can develop her sensory acuity, to the point where she’s aware of tiny structures and processes inside her own brain and body and in mine as well, using her fingertips and awareness. She’s just brilliant, like a Bene Gesserit from Dune. I have some perception of my energy body and can feel shifts, but she’s got the detailed inner anatomy down.)
I’ve read articles about scientific studies of long-time meditators that concluded that meditation affects your brain waves in a positive way. I believe it, based on 6 months of daily meditation. I experience my energy field differently, although my physical body is feeling pretty good too these days. It’s as if my brain waves are oscillating in more synchrony than before, which is pleasant and self-reinforcing.
I am very curious about brain waves. They are bioelectricity, and there are machines that give you visual feedback of your brain activity. Here’s what I know (from reading A Symphony in the Brain and Wikipedia):
I would love to have a portable EEG machine and electrodes like Ken Wilber uses in the YouTube video where he shuts down his brain waves. It would be fun to play with and learn from. One researcher claims that each hertz is associated with specific mental activity. That would be fun to experiment with!
I wonder what we would see if both Nina and I were hooked up to EEG machines when we were doing craniosacral therapy. What happens when I’m doing yoga, meditating, drawing, petting my cat — what states occur?
I’ve also learned that you can get a “brain tune-up”. A company called Brain States Technology (with three affiliates in Austin at present) uses a new strategy for working with EEG readouts and improving brain functioning. Rather than using a medical model (specifically retraining the brain not to have epileptic seizures or ADHD), they simply show you how to optimize your brain waves, right to left and front to back. So, for instance, you might have less delta and theta when awake, and more beta in the left hemisphere and more alpha in the right.
I’m gathering information and considering doing it.
I’m interested in increasing my gamma waves, which may signify a mental state called “unity of consciousness.” The jury is still out on this (and scientific juries take a notoriously long time to agree on things).
In the meantime, the man who brought us the Delta Sleep System CD has now created one to optimize gamma waves, Gamma Meditation System. I’m ordering it.
Very grateful to have this recommendation from a new student last night:
Mary Ann is a generous, patient, and experienced yoga instructor. She is flexible in her approach and can accommodate the needs of complete newbies and advanced students, adjusting poses for different experience levels, body types, degrees of flexibility, and health issues. She modifies poses using props, and she substitutes alternate poses that stretch the same muscle groups in a different way for more or less advanced individual students. For example, she suggested using folded blankets to achieve the desired straightness of back for a number of the floor poses, and she helped me experiment with the “supine pigeon” pose to find an approach that would stretch the right muscle groups in my hips without stressing my neck.
Mary Ann encourages her students to challenge themselves, always reminding them to listen to their bodies and learn when they can safely push their limits, and when they should pull back. Her feedback is helping me to be able to feel when I am performing a pose correctly and to understand what movements instructors are trying to elicit when they say things like “draw down your shoulder blades” or “tuck in your brainstem.” Mary Ann believes that yoga can make us all healthier, more energetic, and more flexible in our minds and bodies, and she shares her passion with an infectious enthusiasm and an empowering pragmatism.
Why do you want to teach yoga?
Yoga has made a big difference in the quality of my life, and I’d like to be able to pass that on to others who are interested.
How long have you practiced yoga?
I’ve lost track. At least 16 years of active practice (and when I didn’t practice regularly, yoga influenced my breathing, posture, and awareness). I started learning yoga from a book in 1982, watching Lilias Folan on PBS to de-stress and create energy. I began seriously practicing with teachers in 1998 to heal after a car accident. I’ve worked with mostly Iyengar, Integral, and Vinyasa Flow teachers in Dallas and Austin and have a home practice. At present I assist Eleanor Harris, substitute for her, and teach private classes while I complete my yoga teacher training. http://www.eleanorharris.com/
What is your favorite benefit from your yoga practice?
The level of overall well-being I feel from practicing yoga regularly.
What do you have to offer as a yoga instructor?
Knowledge, from studying, reading, and working with various teachers and styles of yoga. Encouragement, because I know that yoga is wonderful for the human body. Respect, because it is awesome to see students open up with yoga.
How would you describe the way you want to teach?
I teach beginning and mixed-level classes. I base my teaching on the students’ needs. I use diagnostic poses to see where to focus as well as asking students what they’d like to work on. I break difficult poses down into small chunks to make them easier to learn. With permission, I adjust students to help them feel a pose when words are not sufficient.
Do you require props for teaching or not?
Props are always welcome, and if they are not available, I can teach without them.
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You can navigate to my yoga page from any post on this blog by clicking the blog title.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted “My spiritual awakening story.” In hindsight, it would have better been named “A spiritual awakening story.” That one just happened to be dramatic and unusual. Actually now, I think they happen all the time on a micro level.
I’ve gotten some perspective on that. It seemed at the time (and until just now) to have happened out of the blue.
Of course it did not.
In the course of writing my yoga teacher bio a couple of days ago, I realized I had been doing yoga for several years when that event occurred. Yoga totally opens up the energy channels. I was ripe for it to happen.
Too bad I didn’t have a network of fellow yogis to share with and learn from. And still, I paid attention to my chakras after that, and I knew that opening was good.
Today during my sitting, I experienced something much less dramatic that I’m still curious about.
I meditated for over an hour today, and I opened my eyes for quite a bit of that time. When open, my eyes were in a soft, unfocused gaze similar to the peripheral vision gaze.
What I noticed was a barely noticeable phosphorescence between things – in the spaces between trees and rocks, trees and trees, rocks and water, earth and trees, water and trees, and so on.
It had a faint shimmery quality.
I’ve seen something similar around plants when nightwalking, but never in the daytime.
I thought to myself, either I’m seeing energy, or I’m seeing humidity!
If you have any knowledge or experience with this, I’d love to share – in the comments or offline.
Each season Appamada does an outdoor meditation on a trail west of town, nearly to 620. Today was the summer sit, the first one I’ve attended.
I enjoyed getting to sleep in a little bit today, since we didn’t start until 9. It was fun to meet up with sangha members and chat as we waited for others and got ready for the hike. Usually there’s no chatter on Sunday mornings until after service.
Wow. What a spectacular spot I found, atop a huge flat-topped limestone boulder in the middle of a creek. Luckily I had worn my VFF “toe” shoes and could wade out to it with no problem.
The cicadas totally dominated the sound scene, followed closely by the sound of small waterfalls. Really, those cicadas sounded very much like my tinnitus, only much louder and external. I chose to interpret their noise as life: the joyful fecund life of summer. Will work on that with the tinnitus.
Just as I had gathered my stuff, feeling done, here comes the rest of the group. we were in sync.
My sangha is full of such happy, interesting people. Grateful!
I’ve been trying to think of words to describe how I’m experiencing myself these days. It’s different than before I began “the year of sitting daily.”
Expanded. I am going through a period of expansion, and interestingly, there is more inward expansion than outward expansion, although both are happenin’.
My awareness of myself has increased and includes awareness of my being, not just awareness of my doing.
Friend Alan Steinborn posted this on Facebook: “waiting is purely psychological…”
I got juiced by experimenting with what it is like to not wait, to let go of waiting.
I responded, “wow, it is! what happens when you’re not waiting (and awake)?”
Alan responded, “basically, you know you are not waiting when ‘when’ carries no meaning….then what? just this…”
Yes.
I invite you to do this little experiment. Experience yourself waiting (which I realize I do quite a lot without thinking about it).
Now experience yourself not waiting.
There’s a shift, yeah??? Which one do you like better?
I’m reading the book Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom by Rick Hanson PhD and Richard Mendius MD and can’t resist sharing something I just read. It’s about how meditation affects the body/mind. It cites studies (which I won’t do here) showing that meditation does the following:
The key is to develop a regular daily practice, no matter how brief. Even one minute before sleep makes a difference, if done consistently.
These are the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths:
Restated as practice principles by American Zen eminence Charlotte Joko Beck:
Caught in the self-centered dream, only suffering;
holding to self-centered thoughts, exactly the dream;
each moment, life as it is, the only teacher;
being just this moment, compassion’s way.
Each Sunday at the end of zazen and service, we repeat these four practice principles three times. It took me awhile to memorize these lines, and now I think of them often, especially the last two lines, which ground me, open me, and deepen me.
The Well: bodymindheartspirit 