Our bodies are fields of vibration. It’s obvious right? Even though it feels woo. My teeth are denser than my muscles…that means that they are at a lower vibration. They are more solid.
An exercise we can use to experience this directly is to focus internally from the densest to the subtle-est. Bones and muscles, tendons and ligaments, internal organs and the fascial tissue that weaves it all together, and then the boundary of the skin, then feeling the air on the skin. You can experiment with this yourself. Don’t hesitate to use your imagination to connect with the various parts of the body.
This simple exercise is priceless in terms of becoming aware of our bodies in time and space. Often we aren’t in our bodies! We are thinking about past and future…using the imaginal mind to unfurl stories and memories which exist only in our minds. – when we open our eyes they aren’t here any more, or they don’t exist yet.
If you’ve ever attended a Vipassana meditation retreat you may have done a simpler more diffuse body scan to begin your meditation practice.
Bringing our attention, focus and awareness back into our bodies is an essential part of the transformation power of yoga. As we learn to be present to the body in this spacious non-judgmental way, the emotional wounds the body carries can be healed. The power of this cannot be overestimated. Carrying a body full of memory interferes with our capacity to fill our present moments with newness- the fullness of our love our creativity.
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Our bodies are fields of vibration. It’s obvious right? Even though it feels woo. My teeth are denser than my muscles…that means that they are at a lower vibration. They are more solid. An exercise we can use to experience this directly is to focus internally from the densest to the subtle-est. Bones and muscles, tendons and ligaments, internal organs and the fascial tissue that weaves it all together, and then the boundary of the skin, then feeling the air on the skin.
You can experiment with this yourself. Don’t hesitate to use your imagination to connect with the various parts of the body. This simple exercise is priceless in terms of becoming aware of our bodies in time and space. Often we aren’t in our bodies! We are thinking about past and future…using the imaginal mind to unfurl stories and memories which exist only in our minds. – when we open our eyes they aren’t here any more, or they don’t exist yet.
If you’ve ever attended a Vipassana meditation retreat you may have done a simpler more diffuse body scan to begin your meditation practice. Bringing our attention, focus and awareness back into our bodies is an essential part of the transformation power of yoga.
As we learn to be present to the body in this spacious non-judgmental way, the emotional wounds the body carries can be healed. The power of this cannot be overestimated. Carrying a body full of memory interferes with our capacity to fill our present moments with newness- the fullness of our love & creativity.
Was this useful for you? I hope so. If it was, I encourage your to sign up for my newsletter. Once a week or so …its yoga information and inspiration based. No sales, but I do share songs I love that might be fun additions to your practice.
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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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It’s very popular these days to skip over the restraint practices in yoga (ethical vows, structured asana practice, breathing and concentration practices, lifestyle observations). Mastering them is the key to transforming yourself and your life through the practices of yoga and is an important facet of practice. Liberation as intended in classical yoga is a very specific experience. It’s not about crashing through to a new shape with the body even if it hurts. It’s not about “doing our own thing” without structure or discipline. It’s about being awakened into the experience of our spiritual wholeness. The restraint practices should not, and do not have to be dramatic or drastic. It might mean staying in a particular posture even if you are a little uncomfortable – maybe sometimes when you are a lot uncomfortable – in order to move beyond your sense of limitation. To practice yoga in this way does require a high degree of discernment – of learning to feel and experience the body and develop skillful means of working with our sensations. To some extent no teacher can really tell us that.
We used to work with the guideline that if the sensation is sharp you need to back off and approach the posture in a different way. For a dull softer discomfort we would generally stay in the posture and breathe ease into the form. The sensations we have are never black and white, so a guideline like this can’t be followed blindly.
We could consider this…if we bump into a tugging resisting sensation, then we are trying to expand in a place where there is currently contraction, and our work then is to find a way to allow the expansion. Breath is a good starting place, but it requires some attention to how one is breathing. How well you are able to receive an inhale? What conditions support that? Can you allow the lungs to expand? That quality of expansion will travel throughout the body as we allow it, and will gently open our places of deep holding and restrictions. To push against or fight against it will yield a different result. If we soften the mind and the heart and work with wisdom the experience of restraint transforms into its opposite – the experience of liberation. Tension melts and we are no longer restricted by tightness. This transformation of opposites into a unified experience is yoga – to yoke together.
The restraints imposed by the global experience of pandemic have resulted in massive shifts in the way we live and work and love. Training ourselves to be spacious and allowing in of those changes fosters our capacity for resilience and blossoming.
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!
A yoga friend mentioned to me the other day that an experience that interferes with her yoga practice is competitiveness. If a moment arises in class when she glances around and sees that others are doing a “deeper” version of the posture than she is doing, she feels competitive. I have a feeling that this is very common, even if we sublimate it in some way to keep it manageable for ourselves. I know in my own practice it took a very long time for me be able to celebrate the beauty in another’s posture, even if I might admire it, I didn’t necessarily celebrate it. If my yoga friends celebrated a postural accomplishment that I achieved, I denied it’s value in my practice. What my yoga friend is pointing to is not some egoic moral issue. It’s that one of the most precious fruits of yoga practice is the experience of connection we can experience when we practice together – even on Zoom, and that the very human tendency to compare ourselves to others interferes with that.
Some of you may have read that my wrist was smashed a few years ago. It’s fully functional, but I’m taking my time reclaiming the fullness of some of the postures I did. I do remember what they felt like…Urdhva Dhanurasana, for example, full wheel. As I draw up the kinesthetic memory, I recognize now what a celebration of life it was that I was able to experience that full opening spaciousness of the front and back of the body. I had a dream after the wrist smash that I would do that posture again. That inspires me. But I go one step at a time. The gift of that experience though, is that I can’t compete. I can’t even compare. The truth is, based on the degree of the smash, doing plank is a miracle. Side plank also a miracle. That I can participate in a live class of the nature that I always practiced is a miracle. With my previous accomplishments removed what remains in class is the sense of connection…unadulterated by the thoughts I had about the quality of my practice, good or bad.
A week ago I had my first experience of actually being deeply moved by a colleague’s accomplishment of physical grace. Instead of “I should be able to do that” – well, that thought was not relevant – I had a spontaneous “that is so cool”. And then, an interesting thing happened in my ability to see without comparison I could perceive my colleagues articulation of the posture differently, and as a result I began to understand that there was a small micro movement in my body which, at this moment in time, I wasn’t accessing. Sometimes, becoming aware of something you aren’t doing becomes the doorway into doing.
I was told once that the Buddha said that the final frontier to overcome in the mind is comparison. Think about it. He has this…she has that…I have this…she is this, she is that, I am this. It all points somehow to lack. That one or the other of us is missing something or one of us has something that we should be grasping for. This mode of thinking – it’s not bad or wrong – it just interferes with what is possible I ourselves and in our relationships. Yoga promises that we will come to know ourselves as whole through practice. If we know ourselves as whole, we know each other as whole and we experience the wholeness that is love itself. This is an experience worth practicing for.
Paradigm: From Merriam Webster: : a philosophical and theoretical framework of a scientific school or discipline within which theories, laws, and generalizations and the experiments performed in support of them are formulated the Freudian paradigm of psychoanalysis broadly : a philosophical or theoretical framework of any kind
In the course of my early yoga career I learned at least three different combinations of feet positions in Trikonasana. It seemed everyone was teaching something different. Couldn’t we all just settle on one right way? I pressed my mentors for an explanation and they allowed my frustrated questions to just fly past them. I determined which of those was “correct” and advocated it heartily. But as my journey continued I learned that various foot positions have their own logic within certain schools where they are taught. They are reflections of each yoga schools paradigm of the body. But the logic won’t necessarily hold in a school with a different paradigm.
There is the western science view of the body, the Indian view of the body (based on energy, tradition, or a particular lineage), there is the American pop culture point of view of the body (based on? who knows) or my mother’s point of view about the body. There is the Chinese medicine view of the body, the macrobiotic view of the body, the Barbara Brennan school view of the body. The surgical view of the body, the chiropractic view of the body. The variety is endless.
I had one client who made a clear decision with his wife that they were going to stick to the straight Western science understanding of the body in all circumstances and that would govern their decisions. It was a conscious choice. I had a bodywork teacher who used western scientific language to describe the nature of traditional energy medicine to his students – the resulting vision of the body and it’s place in the universe is deeply wise and well considered. When I began practicing, my body was this unruly thing that I wished was more elegant, more beautiful, more manageable, more comfortable and less of a bother – it was a paradigm of dislike. As I continued my practice that point of view transformed into understanding the body as a reflection of my emotional well being, and later still as a field of interwoven energies which could be used to heal. I now understand it as a manifestation within the vast field of consciousness and an opportunity to evolve.
It doesn’t really matter which point of view we take about the body when we practice, but it is important to explore what our point of view is when we are making choices about our practice. How are we relating to our bodies? From what point of view and why?
Yoga can work with all these differing paradigms, and it can be beneficial to explore how our experience changes with differing views. I encourage you to consider in your practice this week…how is it that I understand my body? Scientifically? Intuitively? Mechanically? Kinesthetically? Emotionally? Some combination? How do I experience it right now? How do I want to experience it moving forward? Notice when you are taking class what point of view the class is constructed from, and notice the nature of the result you get and how you feel.
Balancing on your own two arms – it’s a heart thing💖
In the newsletter this month we’ve been focusing on the relationship between teacher and student. By understanding the ideal dynamic of that relationship in classical practice we can enhance our capacity to learn yoga well on our own or with outer teachers.
When looking to external sources for guidance, information, understanding – there is a transfer of authority involved in the learning. We learn by imbuing a source with authority. To learn we must be willing to consider that the external source has valid and relevant understanding of what we want to learn, and we must be willing to try on, sincerely, what they have to offer- to be open to it. At this time scientists and doctors are held up as the pinnacle of valid authority-in other cultures in other times shamans and mystics are revered authorities. For some, journalists are valid authority. Judges are authorities in our culture.
From the yoga perspective authority is not inherent in any of those people. Others confer that authority on them. True authority exists on a whole other level – in the realm of inner wisdom that we all have access to. Scientific findings are replaced, legal decisions are over turned, medical advice is found to be wrong. From the yoga perspective relative authorities like these can be useful but the truest of authorities is the limitless consciousness that we can access by looking within ourselves – beyond intellect, beyond knowledge in the deep silence.
Regardless of your reasons for practicing yoga it’s likely your mind has quieted down through the practice – revealing glimpses of peace and stillness. This inner fount of silence and peace is also the source of ultimate authority. It’s not your personality, it’s not your intellect-it’s the place inside you where your true potential resides waiting to be revealed. The more we choose to connect with it the more that silent wisdom self pervades our point of view.
So how do we access this fount consistently? Asana (postural) practice is a big part of this – by staying peaceful in an uncomfortable position we train ourselves to access this peaceful place at will. There are layers to this….first we just stay an extra breath and then another and then another. Next we practice staying focused on the breath rather than discomfort. Once we have mastered that we can bring ease into the posture by softening gripping resistance. Then in that space of wisdom and peace we can mindfully press more deeply into our alignment or our depth in the posture with wisdom. Press forward with wisdom.
As you practice nurturing this peace within while on your mat, it might be worthwhile to practice accessing that quiet space within when challenged to make a choice. Test the wisdom. This process of testing the wisdom born of silence can be helpful in making a relationship with our inner authority. We begin to recognize the difference between acting from our fear or our wisdom, and our faith in this subtle deeper wisdom grows. We begin to reclaim the authority that we may have given away to the world around us.
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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.
I’m thrilled to be writing this from home as the large international company I worked for celebrates Martin Luther King Day. I suppose if I hadn’t left the corporate world for 20 years of yoga the change would not appear so dramatic to me. In 2002 at Pfizer Inc we had “a black person” in the department. Then maybe two. Now the firm I work for is populated with all kinds and colors of people in all levels of management and administration. It’s more than a little wonderful. Martin Luther King Day is celebrated by the whole firm rather than being an optional day to take off. In my lifetime I’ve seen the first president female presidential candidate {hardworking and persistent), a female vice president of color (intelligence strength and courage). I’ve witnessed the birth of the personal computer, the explosion of the Internet, the cell phone, the electrical car, the surge of plant based foods worldwide, and then the spread of yoga all over the planet. These evolutionary transformations are the result of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people committing their time and their energy, their mone, their resources into what they believe in. The bottom line – how we spend our time – matters. This is a new paradigm. One component of a well-done yoga practice is that we experience the power of a moment of choice – this is vinyasa (Vi- to know, nyasa – to place on purpose). It’s to place our attention on purpose. It’s to place our foot on purpose. It’s to place our mind on purpose. It’s too to choose what we’re doing moment by moment on purpose. On purpose – in alignment with our purpose. As the yoga business wobbles to regain its footing after COVID as practitioners we are invited to consider what we place where and when – on our mats and in our lives. Moments of crisis are always moments of great creativity. Big changes are composed of moments of choices.
I can remember in the early days with my teacher – she would teach one side of the sequence and then invite us to do the other on our own. Sometimes we would practice both sides and then she would ask us to repeat the sequence on our own backwards. I was snagged more than a few times with not remembering what we’ d done. I quickly learned to pay more attention.
Last week I talked about esoteric mathematical ideas of time and yoga. There is no need to understand that deeply except to open to the underlying understanding that your yoga practice opens you to know yourself differently in the context of these vast dimensions of time and space.
Patanjali teaches in The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali that what we focus on grows (throughout the entire book. On the mat or off we are well served by awakening to where we rest our attention – celebrities, calm joyful thoughts, things that are wrong, things that are beautiful, breath, pain, love, etc. and consciously choosing, without judgment, where we want to place that oh so powerful vehicle of our attention
Today as I said is a holiday
my mind turns back to the struggle of job and work and what I want to do and what I want to accomplish there, but this is not a time for that. It’s a holiday of reverence. I attend to what I consciously must and then I tend to what I choose to attend to.
This is easier if you practice establishing intention at the beginning of your day to be aligned and focused in a particular way appropriate for the time. On the mat a clear intention will focus your whole practice. In all the ways you can practice intention I invite you to play creatively with these intentions. Crafting them and your practice lovingly and with full awareness or as full as it is available in the moment.
It is useful to work with intentions divine, personal, worldwide, communal, spiritual, physical, emotional and more for broadening of our perspective. The creative way that we craft them- the intentions – the language we use, matters. As these intentions are part of sadhana or conscious spiritual practice, it’s generally a good idea to commit to working with a particular intention for a period of time. I’m finding that due to the intense transformation of the landscape of experience unfolding for all of us through the pandemic that my intentions work best when I update them about weekly.
It is my deepest wish that you find this information useful, that it serves your practice, your heart and your healing.
Natalie Ullmann 