Category Archives: body

Oh, yeah, one more skill!

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In my post yesterday about the skill developed for/during meditation, I forgot to mention the skill of returning! This is used when my monkey mind starts thinking, “Hmm, I’ll need to leave work early to get there on time tonight… I wonder if I’ll have time to change clothes… I can wear my new top… Who’s going to be there? I need to go to the grocery store too…” in the middle of meditation. I need to return my attention to the present moment, to my teacher’s directive, whole body awareness.

I have done this so often that I found tremendous value in putting my intent into words when I first sit down to meditate. Then when my mind strays, I bring it back to that anchored intent:

May my mind become steady with whole body awareness.

By the way, that act of gently and lovingly returning one’s wandering mind back to the present moment and to whole body awareness activates a small area between the limbic mid-brain and the frontal cortex called the anterior cingulate cortex, the ACC for short.

The ACC has to do with regulating emotions and behavior, as you might have guessed from its location. It appears that activating the ACC results in lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger, fatigue, and pain sensitivity. In other words, more calm, happiness, acceptance, alertness, and pleasure!

And who doesn’t want that?

You may be wondering how I get my monkey mind to cooperate. I tell it that later it can think and wander all it wants to, but right now during meditation is not the time. Notice I don’t tell monkey mind that it’s bad for interrupting. It’s like a two-year-old sometimes! Redirect, redirect, redirect!!!

Article: Becoming a yoga teacher

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I really liked this article, from Elephantjournal.com, by a yoga teacher about being a yoga teacher.

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2010/09/becoming-a-yoga-teacher/

Developing the skills of meditation

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I was thinking today, three-quarters through my year of daily sitting, about skills that I have developed so far.

It took about three months for me to be able to sit for 30 minutes without spending a good chunk of that time being aware of some pain somewhere in my body. Usually it wasn’t major pain, though, but sometimes the pain seemed to accumulate during a session, and right before the timer would go off, I’d start feeling like I couldn’t stand it any more.

That probably doesn’t count as a real skill. It’s more like acclimating the body to the practice. It felt like grace when the pain (mostly) went away.

Most of the pain was around my sacrum and left sacroiliac joint, where I’ve had injury. Whatever. Do not let this stop you from meditating. You will not experience pain like I did. Yours will be different. And you will learn from it. Unjudged, pain is sensation, pure and simple.

It also takes core strength to be able to keep my spine erect for 30 minutes while unsupported. I had this ability before I started sitting, developed from both yoga and sitting on an exercise ball with my back unsupported at my job.

If you’re thinking of starting a sitting practice, it’s a good idea to work on your core strength.

Another skill for physically sitting is knowing that your knees should be lower than your pelvis. I have used a round zafu, a crescent zafu, folded yoga blankets, and a yoga bolster to create this posture.

The physical skills of a sitting practice are far easier to describe than the awareness skills.

I’ve posted quite a bit about how I’ve been given the instruction “whole body awareness” by my Zen meditation teacher, and my various explorations of how to do that. It’s been a koan — something you try to “figure out” but can’t, and meanwhile you pay of attention to your actual experience.

One of the things I’m recognizing now is that being able to shift between what’s in the foreground of my attention (hearing a siren outside) to what’s in the background (hearing everything I can hear — the siren, traffic sounds, a helicopter, birds, squirrels, conversations, my refrigerator, my breathing, my cat purring, my tinnitus) is a skill developed in meditation.

Hearing everything I hear without labeling it: another skill to practice. Let it all in and be unnamed!

To further develop meditation skill, you can take that ability to move from narrow to wide from one sense (hearing) and include another sense, such as touch.

Expand to include your other senses: what you see (even with your eyes closed, unless you are sitting in pitch darkness, some light comes through your closed eyelids, smell, and taste.

Include your thoughts and your emotional state.

Let your senses blend with each other. Let them merge. Keep moving between the foreground and background, from narrow to broad awareness.

Another skill of meditation has to do with size or location, perspective or point of view. This is the hardest thing for me to write about right now, because I’m exploring a new edge of my sitting experience.

When I first started trying to become aware of my whole body after months of my attention being drawn to body parts that either hurt or felt good, I had to learn how to “back off”.

To become aware of my whole body, I had to somehow enlarge my awareness.

Now, that’s not something you hear often. “Hey, you, enlarge your awareness!”

At first I though this meant taking in less detail to get a bigger “picture”. It’s not that the detail goes away. I can zoom back in, so to speak. And it’s not visual, and not like a camera. Those are metaphors.

Here lately, I have experienced backing off even further, to where I experience whole awareness — aware of my body as an just another artifact of my nervous system, not really “my body”. Meanwhile, my nervous system is taking in everything.

There is not a clear way for me to tell you how to “back off” in meditation. It’s like I stumbled upon it by accident, and at this point, I don’t quite know what I did, but I do know that I experienced an interesting shift.

Maybe by the end of this year, I can be more clear. I appreciate you readers who bear with me in this exploration. I think we are getting some nuggets out of it.

And when you can let all of your awareness of the background become the foreg

Parking tickets and bad yoga

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YogaDork has a fantastic yoga blog. Check it out at http://www.yogadork.com/.

The post that most recently caught my attention is about how Cambridge, MA, police now give out parking tickets with yoga poses printed on the back! This is not a bad idea, in my opinion. However, the execution could have been better.

Amazingly, YogaDork has managed to get a photo of a ticket with the poses! Go here for a look: http://www.yogadork.com/2010/09/21/parking-tickets-now-with-yoga-instructions/.

The image is blurry, but it appears to show a figure doing sukhasana (easy cross-legged pose), a modification of lunge, and a variation of Warrior 1 with an extremely arched back.

Warning: The last pose shows someone with an extremely flexible spine doing a yoga pose. Please do not try this at home unless you’re an experienced yogi! Otherwise you could hurt your back.

The unperversion of time

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If stress is the perversion of time, as the late poet John O’Donohue said, how do we unpervert time? This is how I do it: I love downtime and require it in my life in order to function at my best.

By downtime, I mean free time, unplanned time alone, or in silence if others are around. Sundays are very good for downtime. So are early mornings.

I’ve experienced periods in my life with little or no downtime. I’m particularly recalling several crazy years when I was working full-time, going to graduate school part-time, and raising a child as a single mother.

What was I thinking?

I’ve filled my life up with so much busy-ness (often wonderful busy-ness) that I had no time left for myself. I mean, life does have a lot to offer. There’s so much to learn and do, so many ways to be useful and helpful and engaged.

I don’t mean to put down living a disciplined life. I do live a disciplined life, structured by commitments such as yoga, meditation, my job, my family and friends, my other interests.

Yet I have learned that I function best when I have at least an hour of unstructured alone time every day. I’ve heard that that was also one of the Buddha’s requirements. Love that man! I feel I’m in good company on this.

My daily hour of downtime hasn’t always been workable, but it is workable now, and I’m enjoying the heck out of it.

Most of my days start off with downtime. I set the alarm for early, and then take my sweet time waking up. I’m talking 45 minutes or an hour here. If I need a little more sleep, I hit the snooze alarm and doze back off, repeating as needed.

Often I let my mind wander and see what’s up with that. What is my mind drawn toward? I tell you, often it’s goofy! That early, sometimes I imagine morphing dreamlike combinations of images that are completely unrealistic in “the real world”. The oddest random things — memories, questions, images, words — come to mind. It’s fascinating and amusing.

I check in with my body. I notice where I feel tight, when the energy isn’t flowing well, and I move to open myself up. Sometimes I do some tapping, a simple version of EFT without words just to get my energy flowing well. I roll my eyes and blink. I notice my breathing. I stretch. Oh, do I stretch!

And then at some point without much thought I’m ready to roll out of bed and onto my feet, and move on to what’s next: pee, feed cat, do yoga, sit.

This is so much more enjoyable than the grind of slamming the alarm off and hitting the ground running, which I have done more than enough of.

This feels like an utter luxury, yet it’s something money can’t buy. You have to arrange your life to be able to do this. You go to bed early enough to have an hour to yourself in the morning. You make this a priority and let other things drop.

You know, I wonder if I’m overcompensating for being out of balance for years. Oh well, that’s for someone else to say. This just feels so right. This is part of living my right life.

I hope you can join us, the Buddha and me, and begin to revel in each awakening to a new day.

“Dear God, I’m in trouble” moments

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I’m remembering this scene from the movie Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen/read it yet and want to preserve your innocence, stop reading now.

It came at a point when the main character — Julia Roberts playing Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the book the film was based on — was recognizing that she wasn’t happy in her marriage and in her life. She looked around and felt like she had no reason to be unhappy — she had it made by certain standards. A nice cushy life, a good man for a husband, friends, professional success, a nice home.

The fact remained — she was unhappy. Unlike her friends blissing out about the arrival of their long-desired baby, she didn’t dream of having a family. She kept a folder of travel destinations.

Then Liz/Julia has her “dear God, I’m in trouble” scene. It is the middle of the night. Her husband is asleep in another room. She’s as alone as she has ever been. She may have been crying.

She kneels, tentatively places her hands in prayer position, and whispers that line to a God she has neglected and disregarded. “Dear God, I’m in big trouble.”

At least that’s how I remember the scene. I thought it was well-played. How often do we get to witness these moments in others’ lives?

Dear God, I’m in big trouble. That thought surfaced into my conscious mind during a time of too-much-busyness several years ago. An inkling that I wasn’t happy managed to get through during a brief pause. Something was wrong, or maybe not wrong, just not right.

I had no idea what to do with that piece of information. I also became aware that I was exhausted.

I had what I believed was a good relationship with a good man. I had a good steady job, volunteered with a nonprofit helping women in prison, and was also was editing an anthology of women’s writing. I owned a charming vintage house close to downtown in an up-and-coming creative Austin neighborhood. I had spent a couple of years processing my major childhood trauma and felt most of it was behind me.

In some ways, I thought I had (finally) arrived.

Yet here was news of difference, an inner voice (was it me?) whispering to God: I’m in trouble. This isn’t my right life.

Did I have any idea what my right life was? No! It was just not the life I was living. Did I do anything about it? No. I had no clue what to do.

And shortly after that, the shit hit the fan in my relationship, I resigned from my volunteer work, and I hunkered down, feeling like a mess.

The Universe did for me what I couldn’t do for myself.

I withdrew more and more from the world and started meditating. I discovered that although I was in emotional pain, I was bigger than that. Much bigger.

That was my India.

It became clear that I needed to focus on taking care of my health. I got tested for food sensitivities and learned not only that I had too much candida, but also that I was sensitive to wheat, among a dozen other things.

I cleared the excess candida by rigorously following the prescribed diet. I learned to avoid wheat, and I felt so damn much better getting it out of my diet. (In hindsight, it was probably from glyphosate that had been sprayed on non-organic wheat. I was not sensitive to gluten.)

That was my Rome. Instead of stuffing my face and having to buy bigger jeans, I lost weight, but I felt so much better.

I have spent time on Maui twice since then, so maybe Maui is my Bali. II have plenty of shamans available, thank you very much. I’m still waiting for my Javier Bardem to appear.

All of that started several years ago, in 2007.

In hindsight, I recognize that overworking, overdoing, is one of the ways I have distracted myself from talking to God, higher power, Spirit, Source.

I recognize that that voice that talks to God is full of innocence and beauty and should never be ignored.

I recognize that when I am stuck, the Universe shifts to unstick me…and I don’t always have to wait for the Universe — I can create shifts myself, or at least the shifts I think I need…and find out later if they took me closer to God and “my right life.”

in a way, it’s like sailing, which is constant course-correcting.

I recognize that one of the ways to hear that voice more often, to get more familiar with it, to converse with it, is to make a habit of sitting in silence every day so I can hear it. Even if it’s just 10 minutes, that is time well spent, because it could be all that helps me be more centered in my authentic life.

Update: It’s 2023. I went through another big shift in late 2010, which led to me selling my house and starting career change from technical writer to bodyworker, and although there have been a few bumps in the road since then, I’m doing my right livelihood.

I’m aware that another shift is underway. It’s not exactly clear yet, but daily sitting in silence as well as asking for help from my higher self and feeling gratitude for all that is right in my life are walking me through this part of my journey.

Hey, ma’am, this yoga feels good!

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I taught yoga yesterday morning and yesterday evening. Two classes in a day! I feel lucky to be able to do this.

The morning class was to 5th graders at my granddaughter’s school. At back to school night a couple of weeks, the 5th grade teachers said this year they would focus on fitness. They have arranged for the kids to get outside for 15 minutes a day, and they were seeking volunteers to help with healthy snacks and fitness activities.

When I was in grade school so many years ago, we got about 30 minutes outside every day. If it was rainy or snowy, we went to the gym. Sometimes our physical activity was organized into team sports, track and field, or games (remember Red Rover?), and sometimes it was just plain old free play on the playground — jungle gym, merry-go-round, slide, swings. It was active. It was fun. I loved it.

Last year my granddaughter’s class did not get to go outside except on rare occasions. They have PE (often in the gym) every third day, rotating with art and music.

Spending time outside every day is important, in my opinion. We need the sunshine, fresh air, and trees and sky to look at. Even if we’re not consciously aware of it, exposure to nature suffuses us with more well-being. Fifteen minutes a day is a big deal.

With so many kids being obese these days, with the decline in school lunches and physical activity, I wanted to support their focus on fitness and volunteered to teach Hannah’s class some yoga. I won’t be able to sustain it all year, but I can spare 30 minutes one morning a week for a couple of months to teach them some yoga.

In fact, it just occurred to me that I can teach a few of them to lead the class after I stop teaching!

(And of course, it’s asana practice, not really yoga. We don’t get into philosophy — but yesterday I did include breath awareness and coordinating it with asanas, and I taught them that namaste means “I honor you”.)

About half the kids had done yoga or were at least familiar with it, and half were new to it. I cherish one little boy saying, when I had them do a seated side bend, “Hey, ma’am! This feels good!”

They were full of giggles and chatter, and I didn’t make any corrections. Let it be fun for them. Let them moo and meow in cat-cow.

I completely improvised. We were crowded onto a rug, limited to seated and standing poses that didn’t take up much room, and tabletop/dog. The first thing I taught was belly breathing. I crammed a lot of asanas into 30 minutes.

At the end we sat cross-legged with our backs straight and closed our eyes and paid attention to our breathing for one minute. During that minute, I heard a few whispers and giggles, and then … about 10 seconds of pure silence.

That silence was so powerful to me! I don’t think they get much of that.

I’ll return next week to teach yoga again. I will also teach them an NLP technique, Circle of Excellence, that they and their teacher will find useful this year, and for the rest of their lives.

In the evening, my Beginner’s Yoga, Beginner’s Mind class picked up again. We did four weeks together, had a week off, and are continuing for eight more weeks. These are adults, most of whom are really new to yoga. We meet in a home, moving the furniture aside.

What a joy it is to hear about them having more body awareness, noticing new strength, having more stamina!

I don’t improvise much in this class. Because of various students’ health issues, we take it slowly. We use props. I want them to feel safe and be safe. No yoga injuries! Taking yoga teacher training from a highly experienced Iyengar-certified teacher has given me the confidence I can do this. We are gradually building strength and flexibility.

We did a nice long savasana, and I got to use some NLP trancework, addressing the healing part within, asking it to communicate clearly to the conscious mind any new information about healing it would like to share.

Article: 10 Things I Learned at Yoga Teacher Training

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I’m posting this article by Valerie Reiss, published in the Huffington Post, so I can find it again when I need it!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/valerie-reiss/10-things-i-learned-at-yo_b_716619.html?igoogle=1

Good article on samadhi

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Judith Hanson Lasater wrote this for Yoga Journal, and I think she did a great job of demystifying the last three limbs of Patanjali’s yoga.

I particularly like her contrast of the filter or grid that we ordinarily perceive reality through and the direct experience of reality — which no matter how it happens, through lovemaking or being alone in the woods or sitting on a zafu — always wakes us up to being more alive.

http://www.yogajournal.com/wisdom/461

Sun Salutation: wakening the bliss body

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I’m falling in love with the pure genius of Surya Namaskar, part of my early morning practice. I love how it really awakens me, how it holds an infinite capacity for creative variations, how it opens me up for meditation, how it opens up my day.

For a long time, I did Ashtanga’s Surya Namaskar A, the same three sun salutations every day.

Then at yoga teacher training, we started improvising. I’m hooked!

I start with hands in namaskarasana, with gratitude. Here I am, standing on this mat, facing east, greeting another day. What mysteries will it hold? May I meet them well.

I’m bringing standing poses into my sun salutation. Triangle, parsvo, vir 2, triangle, ardha chandrasana, triangle. HOLD down dog and BREATHE, then glide into plank, chaturanga, salambasana HOLDING BREATHING, back into three-legged dog, OPEN…

Getting a sweet mix of vinyasa fluidity and the strength and solidity of Iyengar. It opens my koshas (sheaths) from the physical level all the way to the bliss body. Rasa!