Category Archives: heart

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.

So, what do you blame your good fortune on?

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My friend Katie has been playing with the concept, “What’s your excuse?” using her big mind. She asks:

What’s your “excuse” for making real the compassionate/wildly loving/identity changing/unrealistically abundant goals and dreams you have?

It seems we can all easily access lots of excuses for why we are the way we are (poor me), why others are the way they are (poor them), why we failed at something, why we’re not living at our full potential and capacity. Bad parents, childhood trauma, family history, DNA, born that way, hard-wired, didn’t know any better, lacking something.

Not that those experiences have no consequence, but how far is that bad parents excuse going to take you? How long will it last? What will it take for you to stop making it?

What if those bad parents provided exactly the life experience you needed to discern parenting skill levels in others and perhaps even become an awesome parent yourself?

What if your childhood trauma provided you with the exact amount of suffering you needed to develop a highly compassionate heart?

What if that trauma prompted you later to try to find out who you would have been had that trauma not occurred?

What if you realized the trauma had moved you in a direction you would not otherwise have taken, and the full glory of your existence included trauma and recovery?

What are your excuses for your misfortunes and for your good fortunes?

Katie responded to her own question thusly:

 Here are some of my excuses for greatness/expansion: Having the three best parents imaginable, seeing the green flash on the ocean as a teenager, my best friends, standing on top of Haleakala at sunrise and sunset 3 days in a row, the existence of the book The Structure of Delight, Spider Joe’s celestial spider pictures, the fact that I could go on and on 🙂

We have a mutual friend who “blames” her wonderfulness on the fact that she was energetically zapped by 12 Peruvian shamans! I like that one a lot.

I enjoy believing that all of you wonderful friends (and friends I haven’t met yet) have created a wonderful world just for me to live in and appreciate.

In fact, there’s so much to appreciate, I currently narrow it down to just the miraculous blue sky of this planet, and all the wonders it holds — stars, constellations, meteor showers, the Milky Way, cloudscapes, thunderstorms, lightning, sunrises and sunsets, moonrises and moonsets, rainbows, green flashes, oh yeah. And space, spaciousness, the spaces between things.

Thank you, my friends, for showing this to me, for creating it, for letting me play.

Here’s an experiment. Every time you notice yourself blaming something or someone and feel the contractiveness associated with that activity, pause. Take a moment. Breathe. Tell yourself:

This is a story I made up.

Then find a more creative story, a funnier story, a fresher story.

No one owns “the truth,” but you own your truth. Life is more delicious with really good stories.

Wonders of silence

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We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us to see their own images and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even a fiercer life because of our silence. ~ William Butler Yeats

I love this quote. Ran across it in a Yoga Journal post entitled Surrendering to Silence (http://www.yogajournal.com/practice/907?utm_source=Wisdom&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=Wisdom), by Catherine Ingram.

Reminds me of a passage in one of Martin Prechtel’s tales of living in a Mayan village where he says that the human mind makes a grinding sound that animals can hear, so that when we’re out walking in nature, they hear us coming and move away from us.

Stilling the mind can be learned with practice. Then, nature approaches. Butterflies, birds, and other creatures no longer flee.

Some would say we have become a vehicle that allows the universe to know and appreciate itself.

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.

Celebrating 2000 hits!

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I just checked my view count. Since I started this blog way back in late December 2009, it has been viewed by 2,000 people besides me.  When I started, I had no idea if it would get even 1,000 views over the year, so this is a real milestone.

Thank you so much for visiting. It means a lot to me.

I love comments and feedback and suggestions, so please don’t hesitate to comment and share your response to a post.

Now. I wonder if I can get 3,000 views by the end of 2010…

Absorbing a loss

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Last Monday I went into work, and my boss came around, closed the door, and told me she had some sad news: my colleague Val had passed away on Sunday.

Val dead? I could not imagine those two words used in the same sentence. It was truly a shock.

This past week has been a tough week, absorbing the loss of someone I saw often over the past 6 years, someone I liked and admired. During this week, I witnessed my denial and acceptance dancing together, sometimes one leading, sometimes the other.

Val was one of my favorite people in the office where I work. All we had been told was that Val was out on “temporary but indefinite” leave. Somehow I had the impression that he was taking care of a seriously ill loved one.

I couldn’t imagine Val sick. When I was walking on the Town Lake trail regularly on weekends, I’d nearly always see Val running. He and his girlfriend took wonderful vacations — hiking on the Olympia peninsula, scuba diving in the Great Barrier Reef, a camel ride to the Great Pyramids.

My boss told me Val learned he had lung cancer in May and took leave, that he’d been on chemo, that he’d come through the first round with encouraging signs of improvement, that he’d been in a lot of pain on Friday, had a good day on Saturday, and died Sunday due to a problem with his stent (where they put the chemo drugs in). He was 50.

I found some old emails from Val with links to his vacation photos. I found one of him in Olympic National Park, wearing a floppy hat, smiling hugely. I printed that photo and taped it to the now-closed door of his office. It  just felt right. I wanted to remember him happy.

A director later sent an email about Val’s passing and used the phrase “absorbing this loss.” I like that. Absorbing a loss is a gradual process, like a sponge soaking up water.

We bring our losses into our memories, and they become part of who we are.

I went to bed that night vividly remembering Val — the way he teased me after seeing me out on a date — how I was so wrapped up in the conversation, I didn’t notice him (Val) trying to get my attention. Seeing him running on the trail on Saturday mornings. How he laughed when I demonstrated lion pose in yoga class last spring. That was the last time I remember seeing him laugh.

I remembered many smaller moments, of passing him in the hallway, a conversation in the kitchen or across his desk, being in a meeting with him. These memories were more about remembering his physical presence.

Tuesday morning when I arrived at work, I immediately noticed a new sound, a cricket. It was in the kitchen, not visible but very audible.

For a split second, I felt annoyed, and then that feeling dropped completely, replaced by happiness that this cricket had decided to visit and hang out in our kitchen and serenade us.

On Wednesday, someone told me that more photos had been added to Val’s door. By Thursday there were maybe a dozen photos of Val. His door had become a shrine.

On Friday my acupuncturist noticed my grief. It manifests on the lung meridian. She helped me with talk and bodywork, but some part just did not want to give it up yet. It was about more than just Val’s death. It was about change: accepting change and making changes.

I took a solitary walk Friday night, reconciling, integrating, absorbing. I needed that.

I remembered seeing Val before he went on leave and noticing that he seemed stressed, tense. I thought it was about a project he was working on.

With hindsight, I know that he was feeling physical discomfort. Pain from lung cancer.

Friday night I had a dream in which a helicopter crashed in front of me. Usually that means dropping denial.

Val must have gotten so fragile in those 10 weeks of battling cancer.

Saturday I attended a celebration of Val’s life at the Umlauf Sculpture Garden. His large family and many people from work came.

Words were said, smiles and hugs shared, tears shed, photos and mementoes displayed, poems read, songs sung, and hands held, under the trees and the big Texas sky.

I am grateful for having lived through this difficult, emotional, contractive and expansive week. I am grateful to Val for sharing my path a little way.

It seems that with every death, we process every previous death and every future death, including our inevitable own. We are more fragile than we like to believe, held together by an arrangement of chemicals and electrical currents, and when our life force moves outside that narrow range, we dissolve and disperse.

I’m so sorry about you losing your health, Val. You are free of pain and suffering now, and for that I am happy for you. I am grateful that you lived a good life, of work and love and adventure, and that I knew you. Thank you for sharing your many gifts.

I am getting out on the river today, doing some paddle-boarding, and doing it for me, doing it because of the model Val provided.

You never know what the future holds.

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?

Cat love

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Woke this morning as I often do, to my pushy but loving cat Mango snuggling up close to me, then gently touching me with his paw (claws out), to which I recoil and push him away because it hurts. Repeat several times. He loves to snuggle. His claws are too long. I don’t think he knows that it hurts.

How much patience he has with me, getting pushed away morning after morning. He usually just keeps coming back. Occasionally he leaves the room, and then I feel bad. I’ve driven him away when all he was doing was trying to love me and be close. (And get me out of bed to feed him his favorite cat treats — he’s always got plenty of dry food in the bowl, so he’s not starving.)

I make sure that I don’t pet him in my bedroom very much. I’d like for him to get a clear idea that petting, scratching, and massage are for when we’re on the sofa, and the bedroom is just for sleeping. But it’s not working very well.  He loves my hands. They are the source of love, and he seeks them out. I hide my hands from him under the covers or pillows until I’m ready to get up. It’s a little game we play.

He loves me for my hands.

Yeah, I’m okay with that. He gives good eye contact , shows his appreciation, and loves a good cuddle. Sometimes he even drapes himself across my chest with his head over my shoulder, just to get more body contact. He hugs! (I think maybe he has abandonment issues — he was a stray that I adopted, and he seems to show me his gratitude every day, which I love.)

But I don’t love his paws because of his sharp, long claws.

I could lock him out of my bedroom and sleep a little later. Or I could trim his claws. Not my favorite thing to do because I don’t do it well and have hurt previous cats, accidentally cutting into the quick. Since he spends a lot of time outdoors, I assumed he didn’t need his claws trimmed. But hmmm. Mango is not a tree climber, not an athletic cat. My daughter makes fun of his fat-boy walk. I tell her he’s not fat any more, just big. (He overate when I first adopted him from the streets, but he’s slimmed down a bit.) She still loves to watch him walk.

If I trim his claws, he’s the perfect cat. Affectionate, snuggly, sweet.

I think I’ll do it. Learn how to do it without hurting him. I can do that. I can do that.

Making friends with myself

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The third wheel of attention in meditation, according to Chogyam Trungpa, is making friends with yourself.

After six months of daily sitting using the technique of whole body awareness,  I have gotten views of my whole life that have deepened my compassion for myself and for other human beings.

When I was a child, under the surface of civility and compliance, all sorts of disturbing awarenesses arose. Confusion, doubt, helplessness, inarticulateness.

For instance, at times I concluded that something was wrong with me, that I wasn’t good enough, that I was being judged and didn’t meet the standard, that no one understood me, that it was not enough just to be myself, that what I felt didn’t count.

These are painful thoughts to think and feel about oneself. Yet show me the person who has never experienced this.

These thoughts occasionally arise even now, on and off the cushion, and I now am quite aware of the emotional pain that accompanies them.

Maybe the most worthy response to awareness of suffering is compassion. I don’t believe there is really a purpose for suffering. It just happens as part of the human experience.  And, it is often a catalyst for growth.

So for all children, and for all those who have survived childhood, I feel compassion. It is hard to grow up. If you’re reading this, congratulations on making it.

I notice fluctuation in how I feel about myself. Some days, full of confidence and vigor, other days, full of doubt and sorrow. Many days, both. Whatever it is now will change.

Part of making friends with myself is beginning to see how I create my own suffering. How I have punished myself, how I have viewed myself as being much smaller than I really am.

I have sold myself out by not dreaming big enough and believing in my dreams.

I can now stop doing that each time I become aware of it. It feels great each time I stretch into my Large Self!

I love this quote from Mark Twain:

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

The task now is to know which ones never happened, and to respect the ones that did happen and note their lessons, and all let these past troubles go.

Technique and relaxing

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More assessing, in terms of Chogyam Trungpa’s four wheels of meditation, which I’ve written about several times as being handy guidelines for placing your attention during meditation. I’ll cover technique and relaxation today.

Technique. My technique, given to me by my teacher, Peg Syverson, is whole body awareness. I didn’t know how to do this at first, so I’ve experimented. My most recent experiments have been (after I’ve scanned my body and relaxed) to see myself sitting there as if I’m outside looking in.

I start viewing myself from the back. My point of view has to be at a certain distance to be able to see my whole body from the back. Then I shift to viewing myself in 3/4 profile from the front left, then directly in front, then in 3/4 profile from the front right.

Seeing my whole body in my imagination at the same time that I’m feeling myself sitting is a stretch. In NLP, when you’re experiencing being in your body, we call that first position. Third position is viewing yourself from outside your body, like a movie camera.

So in essence I’m practicing being in first and third positions simultaneously and moving fluidly between them.

Whole body, whole life. Since I started doing this a few weeks ago, my internal maps about my whole life seem to be changing. New finding: I am much less static and much more dynamic than I’ve previously believed.

I am in awe of transformation. From the meeting of a sperm and an ovum, changing moment by moment, with physical growth, developmental stages, experiences,  memories, imagination, awareness,  to being this 57-year-old broad who blogs and is a grandmother, wow, what a trip!

And not just for me. For you too. Your life is bigger than you think. Honor your whole life, even the parts that sucked. It’s your unique gift to all-that-is.

Relaxing. I have become much more aware of tension in my body, of places where I’m holding, where I feel stiffness, or even just a lack of flow. When I sit down to meditate, that is often the first thing that comes into my awareness. I slow my breath. I scan my body. I breath into the holding places.

One of the most awesome skills I’ve learned in the last few years is that there is no end to refining one’s sensory acuity or one’s awareness.

Thus, perhaps the greatest benefit of meditation is that it’s a skill that when practiced daily just brings deeper and deeper levels of self-awareness.

One thing that’s amazing is how difficult it is to stay relaxed. I get up off the mat, and I have people to connect with, places to go, chores to do, money to earn, fun to have, et cetera. And before I know it, I’m holding somewhere – or several somewheres – and I’ve completely lost the experience of being relaxed.

Some stress is good stress. Learning that, and how not to hold, is a skill I intend to refine.

I’ll post about making friends with myself and being open soon.