Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra – Page 2

December 28, 2023March 18, 2024

Digesting Trauma: The powerful medicine of Hatha Yoga

“PTSD is the inability to forget” Dr. Ellen Kirschman ¹

Yoga is the cessation of the fluctuations of the mind. Patanjali Yoga Sutra 1.1

Yoga is the ability to digest and transform our thoughts, feelings, memories, experiences so that our clear and sacred selves will shine through.

Yoga is the experience of peace that emerges when our afflictions have been overcome.

Yoga is the freedom that arises when our past has been processed and we are fully present.

Some experiences are very difficult to forget. If, at the moment of trauma, we are unable to fully process and digest what is happening, that experience can be held in the physical body (also identified as the “Food Body” or Anamayakosha in the yogic anatomy map known as the koshas) Sometimes food and experiences are indigestible – uncomfortable, painful, difficult to absorb and process. The blockage caused by the undigested matter can obstruct our access to the other dimensions of our being – our knowledge, wisdom and joy. Through understanding this we can use our yoga practices to digest and heal traumatic memories stored in the physical body.

There is an inherent wisdom in the process of yoga practice. We can buzz along in our lives just fine, and then, one day the blockage becomes apparent and it’s time to heal it. We’re not defective if we have issues. It’s pretty normal to have a degree of trauma in the body. Yoga is a fairly sophisticated method of dealing with the residue of trauma due to this potential for digestion and transformation. We could just manage our symptoms. But we are invited – in the deeper levels of yogic experience – to transform what was not processed into insight and wisdom. It takes deep willingness, an open mind and considerable bravery. But the rewards are ample.

There are multiple approaches to processing trauma through our yoga practices. We may be experiencing the impacts of the trauma on the psychological level, and our yoga practice restores equilibrium. But going further - by breathing and feeling and observing arising memories on the mat – if we are spacious enough – the memories are released from the physical body and new understandings of experiences awaken. The experiences are digested. We can use those same techniques in the presence of physical symptoms which can range from tightness to chronic misalignment to pain or acute injury. Wise presence in yoga asanas can resolve physical trauma through wise practice. This can be approached well by experimenting gently with specific postures that intuitively, or as a result of research and study, we believe will be related to the anatomical structures involved.

As we use the tools of yoga to train ourselves to be calm, objective and present to reawakened memories of traumatic feelings and experiences, we mitigate the cycles of recurrence. We move from the experience of being bombarded by the repetitions of memory and subconscious patterning to creating new relationships with the stories we have lived. The charged quality of the memory becomes neutralized and laid to rest. We may never “forget it” – but we can transform it into a tool for awakening, empowerment, deepening and opening to ourselves.

Just as digested food nourishes the cellular structure of the body, digested experiences nourish the stability and robustness of our neural landscape. They transform the very mechanisms through which we understand the world. We become less fragmented, less dissociated and more integrated. We become whole. In this way well-practiced yoga can be a powerful tool in the management and healing of PTSD. Some tips for practice are:

Work with the quality of your breathing. Begin with gentle but focused breath and explore how the different qualities of breath impact the physical experience of a posture. Look for the quality of breath that is in effect when you feel a muscle release.
Work with the quality of your attention. Begin with gentle but focused presence. You can train specifically in this – take a posture and maintain your gentle receptive attention on the bones, the flesh, the skin. The moment when a memory arises and you stay present rather than becoming lost in it is a power point for healing.
As you train in this way, it’s important to notice your reactions to the awakening of trauma in the body. The most common reaction is to attempt to control it by pressing it down – psychologically, physically – a kind of powering through. This will interfere with the release of stress pattern in the body. Allowing is key to healing. Assuming you are practicing with moderate intensity – you can practice staying present to discomfort. Of course – don’t force.

.Through a carefully cultivated yoga practice we reintegrate the parts of ourselves that have been locked away through trauma. No longer fractured in this way, we become whole, and the experience of PTSD can be transformed into a process of healing. While the knowledge of the experience still remains, we are now no longer bound by it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IT40YKvLBTg ↩︎

Each blog post is associated with a related newsletter with related commentary, suggested reading and maybe a song or two. You can find past newsletters (and the current one )on my Facebook page NatalieteachesYoga. Sign up below to receive newsletters in your inbox. No marketing, I promise! Just content that I hope will open your mind to deeper levels of yoga practice.

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July 23, 2023September 5, 2023

About the Body: Headstand

Let’s not take a headstand out of the yoga practice! Find a good Iyengar instructor and learn it from them!

Around 2012 there were rumors that yoga teaching insurance would no longer cover classes where headstand was taught. It was a rumor. A threatening one to us old school teachers who were under the gun at the time. But headstand is a posture which is open to debate. In the classical schools it is the king of all postures. In more modern accommodating classes, you may not ever encounter it.

I am in the first group. I studied and taught Jivamukti Yoga which has roots in the Krishnamacharya lineage. Krishnamacharya was the root guru of three notable traditions originating in his students – Ashtanga (associated with K. Pattabhi Jois), Iyengar (associated with B.K.S. Iyengar) and yoga as taught by T.K.V. Desikachar which he called “yoga”.

At Jivamukti we practiced headstand for five minutes a day, and it was taught in almost every class. I feared it deeply. When K. Pattabhi Jois came to New York to teach I walked through my fear and took some of the classes the classes. The first day he singled me out and did not let me run to wall during headstand. He held me off balance in the posture for 12 very, very long breaths. I was sweating bullets and seeing my life pass before my eyes. The next day, he walked over, put in me in the headstand in a balanced way, and then walked away. From that moment forward it was a favorite.

This was how it was taught in those days. For me, this was very effective.

I’d had a long-standing issue in which my cervical spine would lock up and cause much pain to me. Going to the chiropractor helped but nothing really changed.

I walked out of the Puck building that day and stopped on the sidewalk to stretch my post headstand neck. As I stretched my neck the spaces between the cervical vertebrae expanded and my neck elongated in a way I’d never felt before. I was already sold on yoga, but with that opening I was sold in a new way. My curiosity about Patanjali, ancient sage of yoga and so called “jungle doctor” had been unleashed in my practice in a whole new way. There was healing to be found in yoga. The world looked a little different.

As a body worker and Shiatsu therapist I suspect in a casual unproven way that the pressure on my cranial sutures released some stress patterns in deep levels of my fascia. (but don’t try this at home on your own, find a good teacher!).

Remember headstand is just Tadasana, mountain posture turned around. The posture is famed for the capacity to uproot all those places where we are stodgy and stuck in our ways. It’s a fabulous transformer

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December 20, 2022July 30, 2023

About the Body: The Body as a Communication Device

In the classic medieval text the “Hatha Yoga Pradipika” or The Guiding Light of the Yoking of the Sun and Moon – we learn that in classical yoga, the practice of Hatha Yoga culminates in the body’s resonance with the sound of “Om”. We are tuned by the practice to a vibration where opposites are united and revealed as facets of one source. That state of unity creates a particular feeling tone. In my experience when that happens, we are feeling the love of the universe within our own form. To do this, the biochemical aspect of the body requires cleansing (diet and various cleansing practices – the shat karma kriyas – the process of sweating during practice), the musculoskeletal system needs to be toned and balanced, and the energy body, emotions and the mind require discipline and clearing through meditation and sound practices (Om) and adjustments in personal care and ways of relating. I know it sounds like a lot, but for most of us we do a little at a time, transforming at a pace that is appropriate for us. The result of this is a clear “sound”. We can hear it in the sound of our voice. We can also hear it inside us as our intuition and wisdom become illuminated. A common test is to listen to your Om at the beginning and end of the class. Or any old time you feel out of tune. This clarity of resonance or lack there of is key to our capacity to communicate. If you’ve ever tried to sort things out with a friend when you felt foggy day you know it’s more difficult than when you are awake and clear. The body is a communication device – not just with our tongues and mouths, but with our posture, the brightness of our eyes, and our health. Imbalance in our system is reflected in the body. And through working with techniques of Hatha Yoga we can bring the system back into balance.

A good place to start is always the musculoskeletal system. The density of the bones and the memory capacity for the fascial tissue and muscles impacts the balance of the whole body mind spirit system. So how do we start?

All yoga starts with Tadasana – or Mountain -or Simple Standing Posture. It is so simple and straightforward that every tension is apparent. We just stand upright with the balance of the weight distributed evenly across the soles of the feet, arms alongside the body. Personally, I never try to force change in Tadasana. I use it as a measure. How is my Tadasana at the beginning of practice? What is it like at the end. Like the Om, it’s often very different, reflecting as greater state of balance and resonance. Sometimes I’ll just stand in it for a long time and feel the tension patterns surface.

Those tension patterns can tell us a lot about how we could create positive change in our lives. There is no formula. For me it’s always my hamstrings get short and tight and my head juts forward. Over the years – through spacious self-reflection and input from yoga colleagues – I’ve come to know that when that pattern emerges – some piece of me is not in the present moment. I’m hanging on to a belief, or perception or way of being that doesn’t serve me anymore. Often by the time my body communicates something – I’ve been ignoring it for a while. Sometimes insights about what needs to change will emerge during asana practice, sometimes meditation or the other forms of practice can help to illuminate the issues. The key is to seek to understand in a receptive way rather than just to fix or overcome and that understanding lays the groundwork for transformation of the body and everything else through my practice.

My newsletter lays a philosophical ground drawn from Patanjali Yoga Sutra 1.40 to work with in conjunction with this blog post. Take a look here: To Know – Results of the Experience of Yoga – https://mailchi.mp/4f8d72e44e70/to-know-yoga-and-the-experience-of-knowing

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December 9, 2022January 24, 2025

About the Body: Navasana: The Boat that Crosses Samsara

The imagery of yoga is embedded in the understanding of yoga. On one level the imagery is just about communicating an idea – how to convey an abstract principle in a way that all kinds of students can understand. On another level it is about communicating technique – something is called what it is called for a reason. On another level it ignites our spiritual know which supports the execution of the posture.

One of my favorite examples of the spiritual image of a posture conveying the experience of the posture is Navasana – boat posture. In the classical yogic way of looking at life – there is suffering. The practices of yoga, meditation, mindfulness, and the associated behavioral prescriptions are considered a vehicle which can carry us to the other side of suffering – peace, joy and liberation. The suffering is global and cosmic. It’s also deeply personal, intimate and immediate. The capacity of the global suffering to land as the personal experience of suffering in our lives is mitigated by our practice of yoga. The uncomfortable experience may be present, but we don’t experience it the same way when we are well practiced. Navasana, or boat posture, is an asana where we embody the boat which can safely convey us across the vast presence of suffering in the cosmos to the safe shore of the state of yoga.

At its worst, Navasana is a clench your teeth, grin and bear it hold your breath posture. At its best we lightly balance on our sitz bones, heart lifted, reaching our toes to the sky. We can aspire to endure the posture or to understand the posture enough to find the lift that will take us across the sea of discomfort that life can be. It’s a posture that invites us to take ourselves lightly.

In my experience working with students the key to the posture is the connection of the sitz bones to the earth. Too far forward, the posture will be more challenging than it needs to be – but notice where the challenge emerges in the body. It points to an area that may need some awakening try a combination of strengthening and stretching the area with good breath and attention. Too far back on the sitz bone the heart closes. To discover the sweet spot for balance prop yourself a bit. Sit with knees bent. Place your hands on the floor slightly behind you. Lift one foot at a time until you feel comfortable with the action. Lift both feet, then press your hands into the earth and rock forward on your sitz bones, experimenting to find the spot where it’s easiest to hold your feet in the air. Lift your hands.

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October 2, 2022November 13, 2022

About the Body: A Unique Constellation of Tension and Ease

Each of our bodies is a unique constellation of tension and ease born of the musculoskeletal landscape we were born with, the impact of habits of movement, the impact of emotional, psychological and physical trauma, and bodily awareness, In Hatha Yoga, we are invited to iron out these differences – bringing the ecosystem of our individuality into a harmony embodied in the sound vibration of Om.

The seasons are turning cooler, our attentions turn inward yet again, and we are invited to shift gears in our yoga practices. This subtle adjusting of focus and style to harmonize with the seasons is a classical organic element of yoga practice which invites us to consider balance in our lives, our practices and our creative work. In yoga the balance emerges as the fine tuning of our awareness and integration in the pairs of opposites – activation and ease. The foundation for this teaching is found in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra.

The postures develop our capacity to discern. We can consider the following in crafting our personal practices – the perfect posture is born of cultivating a personal understanding of places in the body you need to activate, and the places in the body that you to would benefit from bringing ease to. For this – we can work with large areas of the body (the back of the legs) or more specific areas of the body(the juncture of my sacrum and vertebrae L1) depending on the degree of awareness we have of the nature of the sensation.

A tool I use to discern tension and holding versus slack and unconsciousness (or lack of any feeling of awareness at all)l is to work with repetitions.

Choose a basic posture, one that is reflective of some physical discomfort you have in life.
Practice this base posture – breathing and scanning the body nonjudgmentally for various sensations.
Practice some postures you believe might be helpful – scanning the body and breathing throughout.
Repeat the base posture – scanning the body again. What feels different?
Repeat the repetition.

I’ll sometimes go through a repetition sequence several times with several small sequences within a day of practice if I have time. Sometimes I just run through it once.

Note that many discomforts in the spine are born of tension in the neck and hips, so you may want to include postures that dress the neck and hips in repetition sequences.

Did you like the post? In my newsletter I dig a little deeper into the philosophical aspects of working with the postures. You will never get more than newsletter a week, and the newsletter is meant for edification and entertainment – not sales.

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August 21, 2022September 16, 2022

The Fruits of Yoga: Awakening into the Experience of Infinity

About the body

II.47 Patanjali Yoga Sutra Steadiness and ease of posture is to be achieved through persistent slight effort and through the concentration of the mind upon the infinit

II.48 Patanjali Yoga Sutra When this is attained the pairs of opposites no longer limit.

(translation of Sutras by Alice Bailey)

One of the techniques from the classical practices which is really powerful in uniting the two opposites is something called moola bandha. Moolah is “root” and Banda is lock, and the experience of moola bandha or root lock can be activated by several different approaches.

On the physical level a very simple way to begin to activate this root lock is to engage in lift the space between the anus and the genitals. Bring your attention to the area and attempt to draw it up and in toward your navel. Now hold that for your entire practice while breathing at the same time. For me, to be honest, I have the best luck with this if I work with it in seated forward bends and standing postures. Some yogi’s can perform this to an extent they levitate the body. In my opinion working with it on both levels is useful, and working with it simply is safer.

On and energetic level what moolah bandha does is move the energy in an energy center called the mooladhara chakra(the root chakra) which energizes the entire pelvic girdle. To directly experience our energy requires patience and the cultivation of a subtler level of attention. But for some, this is easier. Just know that if you keep practicing consistently and well you will have tangible experiences of this kind of energy and be able to learn to manage it. As a matter of fact we all feel our energy all the time. Some examples are the experiences of sexual desire or butterflies in the stomach. When we’re focused on identification with our sexual identity, our financial identity our tribal identity and our identity as a body (as opposed to as a spiritual being) the energy of this center moves out into the material world. We may notice this as an experience of deep fatigue. The energy also moves outward if we seek our answers outside of ourselves, rather than listening within.

When we work with Moola Bandha this way of looking at ourselves and looking for answers shifts. We begin to wake up to a different way of understanding our lives – what are we creating, how we participate in the larger community of the universe, what is our personal path of love and what is our authentic expression. When we start asking these kinds of questions, looking in these directions for the answers to the questions that arise in our lives Moola Bandha is activated on an energetic level. When it’s activated on an energetic level it often spontaneously arises on a physical level as well. The trick is to keep the state of mind as you re-engage the external world.

A powerful way to support the physical practice of moola bandha is to shift our attention towards these universal considerations while we practice. Our attention will work harmoniously with the physical contraction of the space between the anus and the genitals. By working these two aspects together we activate a powerfully gentle form of transformation. How do we shift our attention while we are in our practice? Shouldn’t our attention during our practice be on our practice? I encourage you to ask those questions when you are on your mat in your personal practice. There are as many approaches to this integration as there are people practicing yoga. Some people meditate before practice. Some people chant before practice. Some pray. Some extend the benefit of their practice to others or take a moment to envision that somehow as the practice transforms them – that the world around them will transform into a peaceful world where beings are happy and free. The possibilities are endless hence Patanjali’s statement about the limits. The important thing is to consider incorporating these kinds of techniques into your practice on a physical level. In actual practice an effective moola bandha will show up in a lightness – a freedom of movement, a steadiness of the mind, and a stability in the grounding of the posture. It may also show up as a different understanding of yourself in the practice and this I will leave you to discover on your own!

February 17, 2022July 24, 2022

Yoga, Freedom and Moving into Sovereignty

The focus this moon month in the newsletter is freedom or in Sanskrit, Mukti. Mukti translates as “liberation”, freedom, and it’s important to understand that freedom in the sense of yoga is different than freedom in of our day-to-day life – although they are related. We may think that having tons of money would be freedom or rebelling against social conventions would be freedom. Freedom is not inherent in those experiences. Ask anyone who has very large amounts of money or who has lived in the counterculture for a long time and in their story you will hear of the oppressions that still remain. In yoga freedom is something that we develop inside ourselves as we cease identifying with the fluctuations (vritti’s) of our mind. That’s the second sutra of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. The fluctuations of our mind frequently take the form of how we think of ourselves, how we think of others and how we think of the world we live in. These mental constructs can become rigid and block our ability to be open and spacious and, well, liberated. The freedom of the yogi comes in the form of an inner sovereignty which allows us to become the masters of our own minds and to use that freedom to choose the path of love over and over again.

Yoga is a discipline that leads to freedom The practices of yoga involve experiencing certain kinds of restraint and under those conditions finding the freedom there. When the restraint is lifted you have a different understanding of who you are. Restraint comes in the form of tying yourself in a knot in an awkward posture and remaining peaceful. Restraint can mean being willing to suspend our immediate desires in order to allow a higher state of wisdom consciousness to guide our actions.

When we tie ourselves in a knot in a posture we stir up the deep resistances we have to living. The knots are knots within our consciousness and so the goal is that to breathe, to be present to what’s happening and not fight with it. Consider this first level of freedom one that you could find contentment even when circumstances around you are not to your liking. That’s a tremendous amount of freedom. Sometimes for whatever reason it’s not the best idea to change a circumstance. Even though it’s uncomfortable, it’s better to be strong. This capacity is honed in the practice of asana. Accept the limitation, breathe be still and allow your inner guidance to direct you step by step to moving beyond the limitation into a deeper expression of the posture.

This kind of yoga training reveals discernment – the capacity to understand if our impulses are coming from our authentic heart desires or our desire to control. It’s a powerful means of developing aligned autonomous inspired choice making. Sovereignty. It is a gift of the yoga practice born of moment by moment alignment with self and that is the freedom. Rather than having others dictate who we are or who we become or what actions we take in our lives we are free to take action in alignment with our highest best interest. Yoga will take us to a healthy and beautiful body of all different kinds of shapes and sizes but this is the heart of the yoga – this sovereignty and the freedom that emerges through practice.

December 13, 2021July 24, 2022

The Elements of Sadhana: Santosha- Contentment

In the newsletters we’ve been talking about creating a sadhana – a conscious spiritual practice of yoga, a discipline of yoga as conscious spiritual practice. This past week I introduced the mahavratam or great vows outlined in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. These vows aren’t something that Patanjali devised – he compiled them from studying with the esteemed yoga masters of the day (which was some time a few thousand years ago no precise date is known). There are ten of them. They are often considered to be moral imperatives. In practice I’ve found it more useful and more authentic – I get better results – if I let that idea of morality go and open up to practicing them whenever and however I can, trusting that they are actually learning devices for me. Through practicing them I open to understanding who I am and who everyone else is. As I open to understanding I make better choices. The ten mahavratam are: nonviolence, non stealing, adherence to truth, continence, non- hoarding, cleanliness, contentment, austerity, self- reflection and devotion. In the newsletter I briefly talked about the practice of saucha or cleanliness. Today I’d like to speak a little bit about contentment, or santosha.

One thing to consider when practicing these – they’re also called yamas and niyamas, restraints and observances – is that we are always creating. We are creative beings – extensions of the divine, which is the creative energy of the universe, the supreme creative energy of the universe. This is an underlying paradigm of the yoga practice. The yoga practice will reveal that we a specks of divine creative consciousness – and we can live from that truth. This is co-creating, which is yoga – to be yoked to the divine. The restraints and observances clear the palette of our consciousness, enabling creativity which is unbridled by our past.

With yoga the idea is that creating in alignment with the infinite divine opens the doorway to limitless possibilities- and that wisdom, that intelligence – will create richer more satisfying possibilities than our personalities with their cravings and conditioned attunement to lack. If we choose it, these practices deepen our understanding of the elements of a good life. This is partly why I encourage you to set aside the idea that they are imposed morality. Practiced lovingly, they open the way to a delicious abundant live. Less is more.

With the practice of santosha or contentment this connection between our behaviors our beliefs our thoughts in the world that we experience is made very clear.

Perhaps in your life you have met those or perhaps you’ve been in this space yourself ( I know I have been) where you feel a need to complain about everything. I’ve seen a real uptick in this during the COVID situation.

I think we can all agree there is much to be addressed in the world., but right now we have to accept what’s happened and what is happening and learn to work with it. Shaking our fists at a perceived enemy is unlikely to change the world…changing ourselves is likely to change the world, not only because we engage those conversations differently.

But let’s think back to the before time – before COVID – and remember those days in offices or classrooms or social gatherings where we or our friends or neighbors or our family would lapse into days where we complained and complained and complained. Surely we’ve all known in ourselves or others that momentum that complaining develops – once you start complaining there just seems to be more to complain about. The yogis understood this very deeply through their meditations , analysis and self reflection. The practice of contentment is to practice contentment under all circumstances that’s a key of these mahavratam – under all circumstances. So in any moment (the grandeur of universality demands we operate one moment at a time) when faced with complaining, we choose contentment. It’s like putting down a heavy object. “I just don’t want to carry the weight of my complaints, so I’m a gonna put this down, right here.” It’ll be okay. Once we’ve entered a quieter state of mind, wise action can emerge more clearly.

What does that mean – in the yoga practice – to work a difficult situation? Perhaps it is to rest in the understanding that you’ve participated in the creation of it and take responsibility for the fact that you’re there. You skip the blame (of yourself and others) you skip the victim story and nurture and invite the ability to see the situation differently. Liberation arises when we realize there is no one to blame. The practice of contentment opens our minds so that we are able to see that. To be honest, in content I perceive that there is nothing to complain about. It’s all perfect. But to deeply know that feeling we have to practice.

One of the ways that we can train ourselves in the vast practice of contentment is to practice on our yoga mats. One of the most obvious powerful and potent ways to do this is to be content with a posture even as you are working to transform it. Where I am is fine but I’d like to deepen it. I’d like to expand it; I’d like to move to the next expression of it. So the first part of that is to enjoy every posture just where you are with it. This is one of the reasons why the postures that we can’t do are so important. As I say this I realize that this is one of the biggest difficulties of a home practice is that we never bump into those postures that we don’t like. At the same time if the classes available around us are not suitable – to force ourselves to go into a class that is just full of difficulties makes no sense either. So what can be a good idea in your practice is to add a small step towards a posture that you would like to attain someday. For me right now this is wheel urdva dhanurasana.

I had an accident last fall where my wrist was smashed. I’ve consciously decided to recover slowly. In my full practice days I would do three full or wheel postures every day. Wow right? To me that seems like wow. I was never a born gymnast. That posture has intense ramifications on the wrist and feels remote to me but at a certain point I had an intuition a revelation that in fact I would be able to do it again in this lifetime So what I’m going to practice this moon month is to sit at the wall and take a camel posture and place my hands on the wall. A highly modified introduction to the movement that would lead to wheel. And I am content.. This is the beauty of modifications in yoga. What they do is – if you practice them fully,happily embracing what the modification has to offer you – it’s actually like working the full posture you develop the shape energetically on a deep level and it opens from the inside out. One day your’re ready and the full posture emerges – like a chuck busting out of an egg.

So how do we learn about modifications if we’d like to incorporate them in our sadhana? I highly recommend them even if you don’t have an injury. Spend some time in modified postures. By working with the modifications you’ll learn some of the paradigms of postural yoga. We’re very fortunate to live in an opulent world where there’s all kinds of information about yoga on the Internet so I’m sure you can find some information about modifications there. As far as books books go and even Internet the best school of yoga from which to learn about modifications is the Iyengar school so I encourage you to look into that when choosing postures to work in your sadana.

Once you’ve practiced santosha on your mat for some time don’t be surprised if you catch yourself practicing it in your life. You don’t have to make a big trip out of doing all of these mahavratam. Just know that they can extend to all circumstances, and they’re not limited. Your contentment is not limited to certain circumstances. You can start practicing them in certain circumstances until you feel confident to apply them in more challenging circumstances.

OK that’s our blog post for today. As always it’s my sincere wish that this information be useful to you and that your practice will lead you to a blessed and wonderful life.

October 18, 2021July 24, 2022

Experiencing Yoga: Overcoming Obstacles within – without

This month in class – as we practice asana, we are holding space for the understanding of yoga as presented in the first pada or book of the timeless text Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra. In this pada Patanjali lays out the arc of yoga – he spells out the origin and result of the practice as well as some fundamentals of practice itself. He also spells out the inner and outer obstacles. This is important. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people in the world find well-being in yoga. We all want that well-being, but, well, maybe we just don’t feel like we can do yoga. My teacher once taught me that the hardest part of yoga was just getting to class. Do you have obstacles? What are they? As a yogi, I confront those obstacles daily. As a yoga teacher, my life is filled with persons telling me why they can’t practice — at job interviews, at the bank, at the dinner table and in the grocery store. Hey, maybe you just don’t want to! Nothing wrong with that! But if you do want to, acknowledging the obstacles and being willing to engage them can be a powerful move forward towards actually becoming stable in your practice. It’s really important to note that Patanjali spells out both inner obstacles (our thoughtforms) and outer obstacles (i.e.not feeling well). Adopting a two pronged approach to address these two apparently separate dimensions of our being can be a powerful catapult into a strong practice.

For many of us, the outer obstacles seem to be the easiest to focus on in the beginning. It seems that if there was just a little less traffic we could get there. But, from the perspective of yoga, the outer obstacles always have an inner corollary. The outer obstacles Patanjali identifies are: illness, laziness, negligence, the attraction of pleasures, confusion about the practice, attachment to the way things are and a tendency to fall back on old habits. The inner barriers to the experience of yoga are the various thoughtforms that we have been conditioned to believe are true and unchangeable (“I’m not athletic – never have been since I was a kid”). The solution to the equation is yoga. In the samadhi pada Patanjali describes the experience of yoga arising as we shift away from identification with our conditioned thoughtforms and engage with and identify with the ground of consciousness which is fresh and clear and unfettered.

Arm balances – historically – have always been a big struggle for me. It took seven years for me to do a handstand. When I finally stood on my hands, it was a surprise. My physical effort had been minimal; linking to some measure of illumined consciousness had been maximal. It’s a story I lived many times in my years of practice. Today, faith in myself and a willingness to let go and link up with a more illumined perspective is still essential to my practice. If that linkage wobbles, so does my posture. But what I saw in that moment of my first handstand was that I had held myself down with the belief that I could not support myself with my own two hands. To be honest, that epitomizes much of my life journey and my journey through yoga. It’s been a journey from dependence to independence.

The first step is a little bit of willingness to see what our inner thought forms are. We don’t have to worry about changing them. A willingness to consider that they are there can go a long way towards dissolving them. Patanjali identifies them as:

What we’ve learned intellectually from valid sources
What we’ve learned intellectually from invalid sources
Hearsay – what we’ve heard about, but have never experienced.
The arising of states of non-wakefulness (sleepiness)
Recall – drawing forth of past experiences (memory)

Because the obstacles can be so deeply embedded in our programming it does take a bit of faith to get on the mat at all. But if we desire the sovereignty to deeply transform ourselves and our world that desire can propel us along in our practice until faith in the practice emerges. It’s all in what you focus on.

September 19, 2021October 18, 2021

About the Body – Alignment

Understanding Alignment — in the body.

“Just tell me what to do.”

I hear that a lot as a yoga teacher. Life can be overwhelming, and when we get to yoga, we just want to let. That has its place in our practice. But like eating chocolate cake It’s best used in a particular time and place – but not all the time. It’s easy to get lost and miss what we come to the mat do to, whether it be physical or spiritual results we are aiming for. The personal experience of life and yoga blossoms with individual alignment and connection to the effulgent source of being. This requires a bit of trailblazing to find our way through the wilderness of situations and challenges we encounter on and off the mat. This call to authenticity and engagement led me to study the source texts in the original (rather than relying solely on expert commentary) and to apply them in the moment – opening into the essential experience of living yoga. This includes physical body postural alignment. Alignment always is an individual matter. While masters of yoga can pin point an alignment issue, I’ve found it isn’t complete if my own insight and understanding doesn’t emerge from it.

There are very, very few alignment instructions in the texts (another reason why Iyengar’s “Light on Yoga” was such a breakthrough yoga classic). The texts discuss the shapes of a few postures in a general way (the Hatha Yoga Pradipika) and Patanjali advises that our posture should be stable and joyful, or steady and easeful (although the translations for that vary widely). So we are given a general principle ( think of it as equivalent to gravity) and then it’s up to us to find it in the world and decide what it means. The journey of self-discovery that yoga offers can elude us if we rely just on the teacher who offers their experience. To find our own understanding requires that we embrace the forms, as we as we have encountered them in class on YouTube, etc., and then let’s explore this mystical formula oin our own f steadiness and ease in our own bodies.

It requires attention, honesty with ourselves and a willingness to feel. You see, in the end, what a yoga practice always reveals (and this is supported in the texts) is that the level of change is in mind. This is a universal principle. If the mind is heavy or inert the body will be, or perhaps wobbliness arises during change in the life, etc. and you may find difficulty balancing. So I invite you to open to discover your alignment through exploring balancing steadiness and ease and take note of what interferes with the experience of steadiness and ease when you are on your mat. Most of the people I’ve worked with find that it’s surprising what the underlying issues are, and the sense of freedom that emerges as a result of that work is well worth the effort.

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