5 minutes of pranayama a day

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Learning to teach yoga — there’s a lot to it. Learning the asanas, pranayama (breathwork), communications, the verbal/visual feedback loop, linking asanas, sequencing asanas, anatomy and physiology of the physical, energy, and pranic bodies…

Chanting, Sanskrit, philosophy, scriptures, teaching different levels of ability, teaching for conditions like pregnancy or disability, teaching different styles of yoga…

Whew. We’re probably going to go way over 200 hours, and that’s okay.

And probably in August or September, I will be teaching a four-class series. If you’re interested, please let me know.

I’m grateful that one of our first assignments is to practice pranayama for 5 minutes a day.

On Saturday Eleanor taught viloma breathing, inhaling into the bottom one-third of lungs, holding, inhaling into the middle one-third, holding, inhaling into the upper one-third, holding, and then one long smooth exhalation.

I observed myself trying too hard, overdoing it, filling my lungs up so full I had to expand to be able to exhale, holding by locking down. Just as I like to go to my edge in asana practice, so I was going to my edge in pranayama.

Eleanor said “different edge.” Aha!

At home I practiced taking deep full breaths, but natural deep full breaths, and holding with a minimum of effort. Actually, rather than holding, I just paused from inhaling.

Very gentle, very different experience.

I will be good at this when I finish my training.

Yoga teacher training

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Last Thursday I started my yoga teacher training.

I am working with a private teacher, not going through a studio. There are two other students. My teacher, Eleanor Harris, has trained yoga teachers for studios before. This is the first time she’s offered it at her home.

This will be my life outside work  for the next few months. We meet Tuesday and Thursday evenings, some Friday evenings, and Saturdays. She will be offering classes at her home studio, so we will have real students to work with as we learn to teach poses and whole classes.

When complete, I will be certified to teach yoga by Yoga Alliance (RYT-200). I will be able to teach beginner, mixed level, restorative, and vinyasa flow classes.

After 12 years of yoga, in two classes I have already learned concepts new to me — linking poses and the 5 pranas.

I will be taking 6 or 7 yoga classes over 3 or 4 days a week. I’m sure it will strengthen my sitting practice.

Yoga has ideas about meditation — in fact, the Buddha was a yogi before he became enlightened (only rather ascetic about it), and yoga had a deep influence on him and thus on Buddhism.

I’ll be exploring both yoga and Zen meditation and writing about my understanding and experience of them here.

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Bindu Wiles is a yogi and blogger. She is undertaking a challenge — taking yoga classes 5 days a week, writing 800 words per day, for 21 days, as an online community project. I am not going to join her, but I want to support her. I may do something similar at some point!

Here’s the link to her blog, if you’d like to catch her: http://binduwiles.com/buddhism/my-new-project-21-5-800/

Every time I sit, it’s a brand new experience

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Looking at meditation like this is very motivating.

Like learning almost anything worth learning, there’s some skill to it. There are obstacles to overcome. Physical discomfort, wandering attention, dullness, boredom.

This is the antidote. Beginner’s mind. Even though I have done this hundreds of times, now I am doing it for the first time this day, with this particular set of experiences, degree of openness, degree of relaxation, experience of compassion, feeling in my body, level of mental activity, expectations.

I have found this way of practicing meditation to be compelling. I wonder what I will experience the next time I sit. I look forward to it.

I notice I notice more. I notice I notice longer without my mind wandering. I notice more in my body. I notice my resistance has lessened. I notice I enjoy sitting more.

~~

Not tonight, but sometime, I plan to write about this quote from Flint Sparks:

Paradox is what reality looks like to the dualistic mind.

Another great Joseph Campbell quote

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I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

Joseph Campbell directly addresses the seeking part in us and implies that the meaning of life is transcended by the experience of being alive.

The experience of being alive.

If you’re reading this, guess what? You’re alive!

“The meaning of life” puts an intellectual spin on what seekers seek. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

Think about “being alive” and “the experience of being alive.” What’s the difference?

You can be alive and not have the experience of being alive. You can be asleep, or in a coma — alive but not aware. More common is experiencing some minute fraction of being alive — seeing the pine needles on one branch of one tree, and not seeing the whole forest. Do you do that? I raise my hand.

“The experience of being alive” includes so much more than the intellect — emotion, sensation, and self-awareness, awareness of one’s own life.

I was talking to Peg today during practice inquiry about my practice focus — whole body awareness — and I said that it seems to take a shift in the point of view of my identity to even be able to imagine my whole body as I sit. She called that “the big step back” or something like that. This change in perspective is a  known marker on the Zen/zazen path.

She said that recently psychologists have learned that toddlers follow their mothers around at the distance from which they can see the whole bodies of their mothers.

Today in zazen, after I spoke with Peg, I practiced awareness of being in my body, breathing, sensing, as I simultaneously imagined being able to see my whole body sitting in zazen from the outside. This is a little tricky and fun to practice.

I’m going to do that some more.

The non-breakthrough

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A breakthrough is different from slow, incremental change. The word “break” indicates a suddenness.

In my experience, breakthroughs are fairly rare and rarely happen all of a piece. Even breakthroughs occur incrementally.

Breakthroughs are glamorous, the celebrities of change. Non-breakthrough change (I wish there was another word for that) is sometimes so slow and incremental, you don’t even notice it, like a child doesn’t notice his or her growth, until clothes don’t fit or new furniture is needed.

But others, especially those who don’t see the child that often, do notice growth.

I feel like I am in a period of non-breakthrough change. It happens every day when I sit. There are no amazing revelations. Just a slow sea-change in how I experience myself, and since we see the world as we are, how I experience the world.

I sit and experience more of being centered in my body than I ever have. I notice more of my experience. I am more present to my actual experience.

I’m doing it! This was one of my conscious goals when beginning this year of sitting daily, to be more present to my actual experience.

And for those aunts and uncles who don’t see me that often, the feedback I often get from the world is that I am calm.

I appreciate that.

Feedback sought on new blog look

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If you like this theme better than the previous theme, will you let me know via a comment? You can comment here on the blog, comment on Facebook, reply on Twitter, or let me know in person — lately I’ve run into a couple of readers who haven’t commented in writing but who let me know they check out my blog. It’s very nice to know it’s worth reading to someone.

On a whim, I decided to look at WordPress’s blog themes. The previous theme just seemed very cliche for meditation. This one feels much fresher to me — but is it too dark?

Practice noticing

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These days, when I meditate early in the day, my sitting experience is very body centered, as I have mentioned before.

Of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s four attentions of meditation–technique, relaxing, making friends with oneself, and being open–I realized I’m doing it!

The technique Peg gave me is whole body awareness. Seeking whole body awareness includes relaxing, making friends with myself, and being open. Wow, brilliant direction, Peg!

In seeking whole body awareness, my attention is drawn to a part, to some specific country, mountain range, or river on my whole body map.

Breathe into it and soften it, if pain or tension is there. That’s relaxing. So is allowing my breath to slow and become effortless.

Making friends with myself means noticing my actual experience and accepting it, unjudging. I notice sensations, thoughts, emotions, my subtle body, the flow of changing experience, moments of stillness, bliss, clarity, moments of catching my attention caught by a thought, moments of coming back to center. I notice noticing.

Being open is part of noticing to. I notice pleasant sensations arise with pleasure and then fade, and another experience arises. Same with pain. It all changes.

Get some sleep so you can wake up!

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The quote below caught my attention yesterday as I was reading a post from elephantjournal.com on Facebook. The author is Ricardo das Neves, who is described as a writer on spirituality and humor and a yoga teacher in Seattle, writing about how to fall asleep (both falling asleep and awakening are prerequisites to awakening):

As someone who dips his toes in the meditation pool, I also notice that if I’m lying awake thinking, it’s invariably rehashing the past or planning the future. In the present, there’s only awareness, silence. So to enhance my awareness of thoughts, I locate where in my brain I’m thinking. I notice that it’s mostly top-and-left-of-center, though occasionally it’s back-and-in-and-left. Now I “move” the thoughts over to my right brain. That is, I pretend to feel them coming from the right side of my brain. There’s no question I’m aware of thoughts at this point if I have to push them over to that location. Next, while exhaling slowly, I place short words in my right brain. “Sleep” is a favorite one. It’s not a command; it’s just an exploration of what happens when I say “sleep” every now in my right brain and then perceive all kinds of images that come up out of the blue. That’s the right brain’s language. I notice those random, fleeting images. I keep placing simple words in my right brain. I get images. Words in the right brain. Images. Wordszzzzzzz….

To read the entire article, go here.

I played with this technique this morning at Sunday service at Appamada. We sit for several 30 minute sessions with 10 minute walking sessions in between. Plenty of time to play with your meditation!

Like this: Imagine the word “word” (or pick another word–it doesn’t matter). Imagine it in your mind’s eye as being projected in front of you from your left brain. You get to pick your favorite font. It could be bold, outlined, italic, red, cursive, blocky, whatever you choose. You see a word in front of you coming from your left brain.

Now slide that word over so that in your mind’s eye it is projected from your right brain, and notice what happens.

Do this now before reading on.

For me, the word becomes pure image without meaning, and the letters begin morphing, become covered with fur, or snow. They may change color, dance, unravel and become new shapes. It’s slightly (or majorly) hallucinogenic, and harmless. It’s fun!

This morning during zazen, I also spent time noticing what I saw with my eyes closed. I was facing a window in the zendo (hey, rhyme!), which had morning light flooding through. I let the light in and noticed how my visual centers were stimulated to create vague changing shapes, like phosphorescence. This was fascinating to watch.

Even though I didn’t visualize the word “sleep”, by the time of the reading, I was so deeply relaxed, I caught myself falling into sleep a couple of times. I pulled myself out.

Sit and be still for 30 minutes sometime, if you don’t already. You  may notice that rather than being boring, the opportunities that arise to have fun and be creative are endless!

Trauma releasing exercises

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Update: In Feb. 2011, I started my Chronic Stress and Trauma Recovery Challenge. Click the link to read about it. If you’ve done them even once, I’d love for you to comment on your experience(s).

~~~

I wrote about them in my earlier post entitled “Another Book Influences Meditation,” about the book The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process by David Berceli.

I’ve been doing David Berceli’s trauma releasing exercises a couple of times a week for over a month now. This morning I did them and changed it up a bit: during the seventh exercise, when I was lying on my back, knees bent, soles on floor, my legs were cycling through bouts of shaking and stillness. During the still periods, I could feel an electric current running through my legs, and then the shaking would begin again.

This time on impulse, I raised my forearms straight up and just gave my hands a little shake. Immediately, involuntary shaking began in my forearms, which lasted some time. Even when my legs cycled into stillness, my forearms kept shaking.

(Note: When I spontaneously released the blockages from an old trauma while reading Waking the Tiger, my forearms as well as my legs shook, and there was a pins-and-needles sensation from the elbows down and the waist down. Haven’t encountered that sensation again.)

Then I raised my entire arms from the shoulders, and man, they just took off with the shaking. Eventually my right shoulder, but not my left, was also shaking.

This without deliberately stressing my arm muscles the  way I do my leg muscles to incite shaking.

I shook for 20 minutes, and then I meditated.

Soon I realized that the parts of my body that had been shaking (legs, arms, and right shoulder) felt distinctively different from the parts that didn’t shake. The shaken parts felt lighter and cleaner, as if something heavy and a little murky had cleared out of my body.

Further incentive to keep doing these — I would like to experience all the parts of  my body shaking, releasing stress and trauma, and feeling light and clean again.

The Q’ero believe only humans accumulate hucha. They remove it using breathing techniques. The Q’ero probably have never encountered anything like the stressful lives we modern Americans live. (I mentioned hucha and breathing techniques in an earlier post called “Body Scanning Practices.”)

Trauma releasing exercises release vast amounts of hucha.

They also have an effect similar to Carlos Casteneda’s description of recapitulation — you release “other” unclean energy and reclaim “your” clean energy, but without having to dredge up memories one by one and fan your head back and forth with your breathing.

No images, no sounds, no words are required with Berceli’s exercises. They are a purely kinesthetic way of releasing hucha/trauma.

That makes them elegant and accessible.

The entire sky turns into enlightenment

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Okay, so I’ve been rolling out of bed, doing three sun salutations to stretch and warm up, and then I sit.

It’s so early, my brain feels sluggish, which is actually a pleasant experience for li’l ole vata me. I’ve been enjoying these early morning sessions a lot.

The problem, it seems there’s not a lot to write about.

When I say “my brain feels sluggish,” I mean I’m not experiencing much internal dialogue, which is my usual vata experience. And from the words of internal dialogue, whether witnessing or chattering words, come material for this blog.

What I notice gets named and later blogged about.

So I just sit. I notice, but it’s not particularly interesting to verbalize. My attention stays fairly centered on my body. Sensations of parts, sensations of myself as bio-electricity, just kind of a meandering body-centered attention, with moments of brilliant presence.

Maybe this is what it feels like to be a kapha.

I’m remembering a phrase from Dogen’s Jijuyu Zammai: “the entire sky turns into enlightenment.”

Wow. That is going to happen sometime when I’m sitting. I don’t want to miss that, don’t see how I could possibly miss that! It’s motivating!

I just may have to manufacture something to write about.

Happy Buddha’s birthday-enlightenment day-parinirvana, whenever you recognize it.