Category Archives: body

Sitting and yoga, oh yeah, and breakthroughs

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Today I want to report on my sitting practice. I haven’t written much about it lately. If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll recall that I finally got serious about following my teacher’s instructions, to practice “whole body awareness”.

Today I crossed a threshold. Rather than being aware of my whole body, body awareness dropped more into the background, and whole awareness moved more into the foreground. And somehow they merged.

Maybe a better description for my experience is that for a few moments, “my body” was not me. There wasn’t really a me, an I, except for experiencing awareness. Sounds, body sensations, thoughts — all aspects of awareness, all one.

Okay, I know some of you may stumble upon this post and think this is crazy talk, that it doesn’t make any sense — unless you yourself have explored these realms of being.

You know what? It doesn’t make sense to me either! Making sense is where the trouble started! I am curious, so I will keep exploring.

I’m doing the best I can to describe in words something that is essentially a nonverbal experience.

Before sitting, I did yoga. We worked on Sun Salutations in yoga teacher training last night, each of us leading and innovating. It was very fun and a real workout! They’re like jazz — infinite variations are possible. Amazingly, I can lead a long improvised series of poses for the right side of the body– and remember the same sequence on the left! It just comes back to me.

So before yoga this morning, I did one l-o-n-g sun salutation, making each movement between the individual poses into a little vinyasa to repeat over and over, then HOLDING down dog, chaturanga, bhujangasana to build strength. I made a lovely stew of Iyengar and vinyasa today.

I’m working on a longer post about something the film Eat, Pray, Love triggered. When I work it through a bit more, I’ll post. It feels big!

Back sliding

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Last Wednesday I had a chiropractic adjustment that felt like “the one I’ve been waiting for.” I reported to Dr. Collins on how the exercises from last month went. He had asked me to place shoes — like wedges — under specific parts of my lower back and pelvis so my body could experience what it feels like to be untwisted, doing this 15 minutes 2x a week.

After the second time, my body went through a “crisis day” where it felt like all the adhesions in my left leg were screaming, and then the pain faded. I got a sense memory of two different ways of my muscul0-skeletal-nervous system being organized — the habitual dysfunctional way and the aligned new way. 

Last week, he did some muscle testing, then he positioned me and made an adjustment. I felt a quick pain in my left sacro-iliac (SI) joint.

And then nothing. Like being suspended in mid-air.

And then my body autonomically took a really deep, relaxing breath that told me this adjustment released a long-held pattern of tension.Sweet, blessed relief! This felt like the sweet spot I’ve been working so hard toward since February.

I noticed a need for silence and stillness and stayed home from work on Thursday. So far so good.

Friday night as part of yoga teacher training, we went to the Our Body exhibit — a display of human anatomy using real bodies that have been preserved, positioned, or cut open to reveal the structures inside.

And ironically, after being on my feet for over an hour filling up on anatomy, I began to feel the familiar old discomfort in my left SI joint.

By Saturday morning, my sacral ligament was inflamed. I attended yoga teacher training all day and took sublingual arnica, which helped some. Blood flow is good, but ligaments aren’t very vascular. When I got home, I reached for prescription anti-inflammatories.

Sunday was another crisis day. I took anti-inflammatories, sublingual arnica, arnica gel, and laid low, reading and resting and being still most of the day.

Today, less inflammation and pain, still have some stiffness.

I guess I wasn’t quite ready for the adjustment. I feel disappointed.

I noticed when my SI joints were aligned that the area between L5 and my sacrum felt tight. Also, after an adjustment, some walking is good, but standing is not. Valuable information.

Am I resisting change? Is there a part of me that doesn’t want to heal? I ask myself those questions and don’t get any clear answer. I imagine what it would feel like to be healed, and I realize I’ve held an expectation that once I get my lower back/sacrum/pelvis aligned, I will not only be pain free, but I will have rushes and beaucoups of energy.

Getting aligned (given my history of birth injury, PTSD, scoliosis, and car accident) is a two steps forward, one step back process.

At least I had a taste of it! That is so motivating. I can get aligned. I can learn how to hold the adjustment, just like I held the atlas adjustment that unwound scoliosis.

More wonders of silence

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Just wanted to share a response from reader Loping Buzzard to my recent post, Wonders of Silence.

Great post! I really relate to the “grinding of the mind.” Following recent surgery, I began seriously meditating again after years of neglect. It took a couple of weeks to get back to the place I remember. And when I did, it was obvious. Suddenly, it was like everything stopped and I could HEAR so clearly. Where did that silence come from? Then I realized that the loud sound that was drowning out all others was coming from ME – that constant buzzing, grinding, roar. I was STILL for the first time in ages – not on the outside, on the inside. I was excited but worried that I couldn’t do it again, but with more practice, I can now do it within seconds. That familiar, still calm. And it has made a world of difference in my recovery.

What’s your story about the wonders of silence?

Fire dancing over the heart center

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My Free Day of Yoga restorative class was a success — more successful than I had anticipated. I had limited attendance to 6, but the Austin Chronicle’s listing of classes apparently omitted that detail. Nine people (most of whom I had not met before) found this small studio converted from a double garage — and I found a way to make it work. Yoga creates physical and metaphorical flexibility. We had 9 pairs of legs up the wall!

The sweetest sight was sitting silently, viewing everyone as they did savasana, knowing they were opened up energetically in a way not often experienced. We usually put our armor on when we leave the house in the morning and leave it on until we come home.

It was as if I could see a flame dancing above each person’s heart center. Okay, omit the “as if”. Sometimes seeing is not literally seeing.

For that, I am grateful.

Getting to know myself from the inside out

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I haven’t posted about my sitting practice much lately because it doesn’t seem like there’s been much to say.

I do my three Surya Namaskar A vinyasas. I sit. I set the timer for 30 minutes. I get settled comfortably in siddhasana (knees wide, heels in close, centered one in front of the other, soles facing up), lengthen up my spine and center my torso over my pelvis, center my head over my torso, tilt my forehead slightly down. Close my eyes.

The beginning chime goes off, and I take a full deep breath and exhale, and that’s my most powerful anchor for meditation, that first breath. My energy body opens and comes to the forefront of my attention. I focus on my head — sensations of my energy body, my crown chakra, my third eye chakra, amygdala energy pressing forward, my entire forehead tingling, and face, ears, scalp.

And then I sense my entire head as one. All sensation part of a single system.

Then I move to my neck and upper torso, feeling my open throat and heart chakras (or feeling them open if they aren’t already), and all sensation in my chest, upper back, neck, shoulders, arms, and hands.

And then my upper torso and energy centers as one system.

Same below the diaphragm. I feel the energy of my third, second, and first chakras, my belly moving with my breath, my weight on my sit bones, my lower back, sacrum, perineum, and down my legs through my feet.

And then my lower body and energy centers become parts of a whole. I am three wholes now.

Then I merge the parts into one living, breathing, constantly changing energy system.

This is whole body awareness.

I notice how my attention moves as I also hold my attention on the whole.

I realize that I have visualized a map of my body based on looking in the mirror. My skin is an edge, a boundary between me and not me, in the mirror.

In sitting with my eyes closed, with awareness of my whole body, I let go of that map and feel. Just where does my nervous system go? Are there areas where there is no sensation? Areas that feel strong? Is there subtlety? Yes.

My nervous system (aka awareness) extends as far as I can hear, to traffic in the distance, jets and helicopters making noise from the sky. (Maybe one day I will sit with my eyes open.)

I am getting to know myself from the inside out.

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know that it’s been a struggle to be able to do this. I’ve been finding my way.

And here I am. I’m doing it! It feels full. I sit with wonder in constantly changing fullness.

It rocks.

Pain and pleasure, pleasure and pain — side effects of living

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Last month I woke one day with an aching leg and posted on whether pain is necessary for growth. A fellow yogi and blogger, Ben Ralston, commented that sometimes these issues can be due to birth trauma and/or inherited (“the family pattern”).

I was born prematurely, 7 weeks early and weighing 4.1 pounds, and my father walked with a limp due to having been born with a club foot that was straightened, but the treatment shortened his leg. Perhaps I picked up that energy pattern.

I want to explore these possibilities for healing.

Patrice, my acupuncturist, explained that my leg pain that day, not long after chiropractic work, signified a “crisis day” of my body’s moving toward being more aligned. Crisis day is when you think something is wrong, but you’re actually moving through a dysfunctional pattern to a new place that is more right than before.

She later did myofascial release work on my leg, and it feels great now.

Patrice has promised me a rebirthing session next time we work together. I will report on my rebirthing experience here.

Pain is a catalyst. Sometimes we let things go until the pain becomes great enough to change (laziness). And sometimes we let things go because we don’t know how to change course (ignorance). It seems that we may encounter pain (awareness), and only in hindsight understand that we were on a path that led to it (insight).

We may have to step in that hole several times (pattern) before understanding where we first went off course (great mindfulness), thus being able to avoid it the next time (learning) and from then on (mastery).

Life often does include “getting hit in the head with a 2×4,” as an old mentor used to say. When that unexpected, unwanted event happens, you can’t help but change direction. It changes your direction for you. Sometimes life is like that (more often when you’re young, have you noticed?).

The sweet trick is changing direction before the 2×4 looms large. And that’s being motivated to move toward pleasure.

Usually when we first experience a new pleasure, we are open to our experience, feel the pleasure, and then want more of that. We mark and savor pleasurable experiences in our memories. We hope and maybe plan to encounter it again (expectation).

Just remember. Smelling roses, newly mown grass in the spring, the approach of a storm, the scent of someone you love.

Tasting water when thirsty, the satisfaction of sweetness, a surprising new combination of tastes like watermelon and lime.

Feeling a caress, releasing muscle tension, the intensity of orgasm, air currents against your skin.

Hearing a particular tune, a whisper, a dog barking in the distance, crickets.

Seeing a sunrise, a double rainbow, catching someone’s eye, a funny sign.

Add your pleasurable memories here.

There are other pleasurable experiences in unnamed senses as well.

Experiences like these are catalysts for appreciation of this life, for gratitude. Each experience of pleasure may signify truly being here now, being in the right place at the right time, living your right life.

And they happen in the moment.

It’s when pleasure becomes the point, when we crave it, when we build our lives around it, that things get complicated. 

It’s hard to live without expecting to live another day. Expectation isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When is it “appropriate”? When is it useful?

It may be that letting go of expectation only really happens when we are present in the moment, experiencing life as it is.

That’s what meditation is. A practice to train yourself to experience life as it is.

What a fine line, to enjoy pleasure, and not hang onto it, and not crave it, but just let it arise when it arises, savor it deeply, and let it go. Rasa, in Sanskrit

One more thing. Pleasure and pain aren’t opposites, they are on a continuum of sensation and meaning. They are side effects of having a nervous system.

And a tip: If you don’t label pain, but just experience an uncomfortable sensation and breathe through it, you have opened to your experience.

Awakening intelligence in the body

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I just read this article in Yoga Journal and wanted to share it here, because the writer shows the kind of body awareness that one can develop from making yoga and meditation regular practices. He sensed an area in his body where his energy felt blocked and noticed other areas affected by that blockage. He followed his intuition that he needed to find a good bodyworker to open his energy up.

He notices what actually happens in a session, and this is true for me too: As much as I adore chitchatting with my bodyworkers, they actually work better (that is, my body heals and aligns more) when I am silent, deeply relaxed, open, and energetically supporting their work.

As with yoga itself, the real proof of bodywork is in the direct experience. And the more yoga you do—especially if you complement it with various forms of bodywork—the deeper your ability to sense your inner experience becomes. Yoga practitioners frequently discover that they develop finer and finer perception in areas of the body where they previously felt little. B.K.S. Iyengar calls this phenomenon awakening intelligence in the body.

http://www.yogajournal.com/health/1005?utm_source=DailyInsight&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=DailyInsight

Direct knowledge

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Today’s post is taken directly from my subscription to Ocean of Dharma quotes from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. How timely! His writings are so clear and elegant.

In the study of Buddhist philosophy, from the start one tries to transcend concepts, and one tries, perhaps in a very critical way, to find out what is. One has to develop a critical mind that will stimulate intelligence. If one cultivates intelligent, intuitive insight, then gradually real intuitive feeling develops, and any imaginary or hallucinatory element is clarified and eventually dies out. Finally, the vague feeling of discovery becomes very clear, so that almost no doubt remains. Even at this stage, it is possible that one may be unable to explain one’s discovery verbally or write it down exactly on paper. In fact, if one tried to do so, it would be limiting one’s scope and would be rather dangerous. Nevertheless, one finally attains direct knowledge, rather than achieving something which is separate from oneself. This can only be achieved through the practice of meditation, which is not a question of going into some inward depth, but of widening and expanding outward.

In other words, you can know about something and you can experience something, and they are not the same. Critical mind and intuitive insight are code for left and right hemispheres of the brain, in my opinion. Much of the growth from meditation is actually experiencing more right-brain awareness, which is, hmm, not encouraged in most of our modern educational systems and workplaces and culture.

The yoking of left brain intelligence and right brain intelligence is perhaps a “side effect” of yoga and meditation. Or perhaps the real purpose. Who can say?

If you want more brain balance, you can start with a pranayama practice, nadi shodhana, alternate nostril breathing. 

To subscribe to Ocean of Dharma quotes, go here:  http://oceanofdharma.com.

To learn how to do nadi shodhana, there are small distinctions, but this video teaches the gist of it in two minutes: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1849263/breathing_practice_for_stress_nadi_shodhan_pranayama/

I’m doing it, I’m teaching yoga!

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This week I taught three yoga classes. I substituted for my teacher at my regular Tuesday yoga class. No newbies showed up, so I was teaching mid-beginners, advanced beginners, and maybe even intermediate level yogis.

I brought something to use as a script but ended up winging it.

My pacing was a little off. I started the wind-down a little too early and led them through a lot of twists and an extra-long savasana in order to fill out the hour.

I don’t think they minded.

I’m learning to go with the flow. I notice what people are doing when it’s time to start. Are they lying down, sitting, or standing? I’ll start with what most of them are doing.

I also ask if there’s anything people would like to work on.

The Wednesday night class was the second of my four-class series, Yoga for Novices. It is harder to teach true beginners, especially if they haven’t had dance, Pilates, martial arts, and other similar experiences with their bodies. There are some fundamentals that underly yoga. You teach body awareness, and you break asana down into small chunks.

My teacher helped me teach that class. Her 11-year-old son attended too, and he made it more fun. He is a creative kid. Can’t wait to see what he’ll be like in 6 or 7 years!

The class today was small, and again, I went with the flow. These people have been doing yoga for months or years and are fit. One woman wanted to focus on opening up her shoulders. The others wanted a variety of asanas and some inversions. Everyone got what they wanted.

I had no problem thinking up poses or pacing. I observed the students, and it just came to me what to do next.

I feel happy about this. I’m halfway through my yoga teacher training, and I can teach yoga without a script.

I’ve moved into conscious competence.

Is pain necessary for growth?

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The reason I bring this question up is that today, my left leg hurts, and I have a story about it.

The story starts small. My left leg hurts. Specifically it hurts above my knee and on my inner shin and on my outer calf. It’s a dull achiness that comes and goes.

The story gets bigger. I attribute this pain to adhesions in the fascia between muscles in my leg, and I attribute these adhesions to misalignments in my body’s structure. I’ve already straightened my spine with NUCCA. Working with my AK chiropractor to align my body is going well, but my leg is where the twist is showing up now that my pelvis is getting more aligned. My leg needs to unwind. And it’s Saturday.

(By the way, it feels true to me that the musculo-skeletal system is arranged in spirals. I dreamt a couple of months ago of seeing my left leg skinless, bloodless, with all the muscles showing individually and the bones visible. Then I went to the Our Body exhibit and saw a body with a leg just like in my dream.)

Here the story grows. My pelvis and spine have been twisted due to several factors. A car wreck in 1996 created much soft tissue injury around my sacrum and sacroiliac joints. Long before that, I experienced a severe shock to my system in my childhood, a sudden violent death of a family member. Trauma has deep and sometimes unpredictable affects on the human energy field.

And now the story gets even bigger. I was born prematurely, and it seems that I had an injury to a nerve going from my sacrum down my left leg from the time I was born, or before I was born, or shortly after I was born. I don’t remember, and my parents are gone. I do not know what happened or why I entered my lifetime with this nerve shut down.

I’m aware that some people claim to know all about past lives and karma and would probably be more than happy to tell me in a way that would alienate me from them. (You know what I mean: “I was just being honest, trying to be helpful.” I’ve done that kind of thing myself, and it’s usually deeply out of rapport with the recipient. You may be right, but you’re an asshole.)

The good news is, the nerve can come back alive. It’s not dead, it’s just been dormant. How much of our potential is like that?

Pain is a teacher, a signal that something is out of congruence, out of alignment, misfunctioning. And it is instinctive to want to avoid it. That’s why it’s such a good teacher. Pain is a kind of feedback that’s hard to ignore.

Pain is not bad. It’s just pain. It’s the nervous system doing its job. Pain feels yucky, but it has some positive points to it.

Pain motivates change. Pain motivates me to do something different, to learn something new. My specific SI joint-spine-leg pain has motivated me to do yoga, to get rolfed, to go to chiropractors, to work with Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais practitioners, to experience an array of alternative healing methods.

It’s motivated me to hang upside down and surrender to gravity pulling my body from the other direction. It’s motivated me to learn the trauma releasing exercises, and it’s drawn me to work with Patrice, my acupuncturist, who first told me to hang like a bat and to hold pigeon pose twice as long on the left side and who does myofascial release on me. (And who I can’t get hold of now either.)

I think I’ll go hang, do pigeon, and do the trauma releasing exercises.  Pain provides contrast. How would you know how good you felt if you didn’t have anything to compare it to?