Pink Powder

City skyline caressed in a pink powdery haze reminds me to be gentle with myself.


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But, talks!

In yoga there is a lot of languaging about the butt. In seated forward folds the buttock flesh can be kind of stuck towards the midline, so often students are instructed to use their hands to move the flesh wide and/or back to clear the way for the position to move without obstruction and go deep. (In the picture above, wall ropes are showing my top thighs what to do in dog pose.)

Here is some of the language I've encountered:

Place a hand on the inner thigh, and a hand on the outer thigh. Lift up that sitting bone and push the inner thigh down and lift the outer thigh up to roll the flesh around the bone, widening the back thigh. Put the sitting bone down to hold the flesh out, and repeat on the other side.

Move the butt flaps back.

Create the action of the "blooming" or "blossoming" buttocks.

Make the gaping maw.

And just this past weekend I heard the following instruction:
Grab your assets to open up backstage.

So remember to widen the butt to fold forward.

---
What the Buttocks Think

Don't tell me that nothing can be done.
The tongue says, "I know I can change things."
The toe says, "I have my ways."
The heart is weeping and remembering Eden.

Legs think that a good run will do it.
Tongue has free tickets; he'll fly to heaven.
But the buttocks see everything upside down:
They want you to put your head down there,

Remind the heart it was upside down
In the womb, so that when your mother,
Knowing exactly where she was going,
Walked upstairs, you weren't going anywhere.

-by Robert Bly, Morning Poems



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Personal Revelation in Yoga

I experienced a personal revelation during the Saturday morning session of the Rusty Wells workshop at Moksha Yoga last weekend. Rusty suggested that we dedicate our yoga practice to an individual person that we love. I chose my Dad.

My soul story came out of my parent's, just like my body was built based on their DNA. By the words "soul story" I just mean all the things that make me me. Things like my personality, my emotions, and the stories that create the background for what I am able to express today. I realized on Saturday that I honor their souls or spirits with my life path, even though I can't please their egos or minds. They both have seemed to want things from me that are fantasies.

Just looking at their life-stories and their challenges in the broadest sense gave me some insight. My dad is physically disabled with cerebral palsy and my mom has schizophrenia and depression. Seeing this in the way I did helped me make sense of things for the first time in my life somewhere around savasana at the end of the yoga session on Saturday morning. I seemed to see things from a vantage point that was a bit further than my own suffering. I was seeing my life from a distance that allowed me to see how different forces guided me gently to be who I am today. With my life I have devoted myself to understanding the processes of my mind, honoring my mother's path. And my dedication to the physical aspects of yoga honors my father by pursuing my physical potential. So I am truly related and connected to them even though we are far apart in many ways. I am grateful for this sense of connectedness. It's what I have been wanting. I can live my life dedicated to what they sacrificed for me in a way that is healing for me, and helps me to have something to offer other people who suffer with their minds and bodies.

And just seeing that really seemed to take a burden off of me. I deduce that some of my "not good enough" feelings have been based in a desire to be embraced by my family, and for some complicated reasons that I don't think I fully understand this just hasn't been possible on this earth so far. But now I have the sense that spiritually I am doing the right thing, and fulfilling my mission as the daughter of these people by doing what I am doing with my life.


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Pliable Edges

This week I seek to push against my own edges.

I heard from Rusty Wells that it's worth it: "Most people don't even know where their edge is." This was part of the answer to a question I asked:

What is the relationship between Ahimsa (non-harming) and pushing beyond the limitations of mind in poses?

This question was born out of my experience in his workshop at Moksha Yoga this past weekend: Rusty really encourages people to do more than they think they can, and sometimes it hurts to go beyond what you think you can do. But you don’t know until you try it. And when you do go beyond what you thought you could there is an incredible sense of accomplishment. So the experience was empowering for me, and I was just a bit sore afterwards.

And in life I do tend to enter into experiences that I am familiar with, which is fine. However, I do feel the call to go beyond that, but how?

Rusty also said that he practices before he teaches, and that he pushes himself hard. Otherwise he wouldn’t be okay with telling other people to do this hard work.

Pushing beyond what I know to be limits IS painful and scary. It proves that I don’t really know what I thought I did. But this is the kind of pain and fear that is good. This kind of pain might not be himsa (harmful). In fact it might help me grow beyond my complacency.

How can you even approach going beyond what you think you already know? The easiest way is when someone else takes you there. Like, a yoga teacher might help you to see that you can do a pose that you didn’t think you could.

But in a personal yoga practice, I guess I do it when I listen to the sensations in my body. I tend to get more sore in my personal practice than I do in most classes, and I think it’s because I’m better at being at my real edge in the poses when I’m practicing on my own. I’m also a lot more flexible in my own space and timing.

In meditation, I also seem to get opportunities to see a new angle on things, or when I wake up from a dream I might also have a revelation.

In my daily life I’d like to be better at recognizing the opportunities to see new things in people and places I already know. And I’d like to allow these fresh insights guide me out of my cloying comfort zone. Or more appropriately, I’d like to expand my zone of comfort to include trying more new things. And maybe I can get started by looking for the pliable edges. At the edge I can experience what I know and shift to experience something new, and adapt to that using the language I already am familiar with to start to describe and embrace something new.

Jai! This is how the classes with Rusty Wells ended. It means victory, or right on! Something like that…

Initial Judgments Aside

On the first night of a yoga workshop with Rusty Wells, he reminded me a little bit of Robert Duvall in The Apostle. He was stamping and singing with a fervor that startled me. That night reminded me of some kind of Christian revival in Sanskrit. The experience challenged my sensibilities, to put it mildly...

When we were in dog pose we were instructed to lift one leg and place it right above the butt of the person next to us (I thought). Then his colleague came over and adjusted my foot so it touched my neighbor’s butt. I thought that was rather strange, and felt I should have the choice of not touching this other person’s butt if I didn’t want to… Anyway, maybe I was missing something here or I simply didn’t get it.

The next morning I considered whether I should go back, and spent some time complaining about it internally. I found myself wondering if it was “real yoga.” Then I asked myself the question: What is real yoga? What came to me was the following: Real yoga is opening your heart to another viewpoint. So I went back and I’m very glad and grateful I did.

The Saturday sessions may have been the most physically intense yoga experiences I have ever had. That in itself is kind of cool. His vinyasa yoga instruction has an accuracy and speed that made the class at times seem like vinyasa on steroids. The music had a relentless beat that helped energize the poses when energy was waning. It’s also weird to me that when I looked around people would be in yoga poses moving to the beat of the music, and I sometimes caught myself doing the same thing.

In the end I did find myself just kind of enjoying the wild ride.

same pose, (different side) different day

This is a Guest Muse by Kay Burnett:

In my yoga practice, the balance poses are a particular challenge, the left and right sides being very different. Some days a simple tree pose is effortless, other days the same pose is impossible! What is going on? That is a big question for me and one I try to experience when I am practicing but now and here I'm willing to put words around, thus analyze it.

The focus of the balance for me, besides the basic challenge of standing on one foot, is to allow my tailbone to drop, to allow my hips to level, to allow my shoulders to drop and to extend up and out of the core pelvis, waist and hips. I find that on my "good" side, I can often get to the point where I am feeling the bits lining up. On my "bad" side, the balance alone is a huge challenge and often in a class, the pose is over before I've gotten to my goal of feeling aligned. In my classes with Brooks, I am encouraged to take the time I need to complete the pose and when I feel that I am close, I will take her encouragement to heart.

My problem (as I perceive it) is a knee that does not always respond as my brain asks. It is lacking cartilage and is often stiff and painful. And then the opposing hip comes into the situation. And so the story goes!


I can most often balance equally on both sides if I choose to modify the pose to a foot to the opposite calf. It feels more stable on the "good" side and I can hold it for some time on both sides. Since I can often balance in a fuller pose, with foot to thigh, on the "good" side, I feel the challenge to even the sides. This is where the wobblies get extreme. I have learned not to be agitated or angry with myself for not getting it but I continue to try to complete the fuller pose on both sides.

We want to balance the balance -- same on both sides. I always hear, do the same thing on this side that you did on the other. And when that is accomplished, it does feel like success!

Does it make a difference if we start on our easy side or our hard side? I have a tendency to start on my hard side, go to the easy side and sometimes come back to the hard side one more time.

And what I would like to do at some point, is carry the balance story into life events in addition to yoga. How do we balance in our lives, on both sides, our own desires and realities of what is good for us with the demands and expectations of those others in our lives?

Uncommon Reach

Okay, so I guess the word "atonement" is burdened with a notion of "paying back" for having done something really bad. And in this process you are going to suffer terribly according to Hollywood drama, and other fear-rending storytelling.

However "atonement" in a more wholistic sense is definitely something I want to infuse my life with. And words like "discipline", "effort", and "investment" pale in comparison for me. They miss what I am aiming for in the previous post. They are all very good words for describing the acts around harnessing one's will consistantly towards a goal.

What I am reaching for in my exploration of the uncommon, possibly dusty, and slightly off-putting word (for many of us) is a comprehension of spiritual integration in the physical aspects of my life.

In a spiritual sense there is often a recognition of the idea that someone can "wake up" to a larger truth in life. Like, hey (!) maybe life is about more than making money, buying the right products, and looking young forever. A person can get an awareness of connectedness and overwhelming love when contemplating the universe, doing the dishes, looking at a flower, taking out the trash, practicing yoga, etc. A flame of spiritual awareness can get lit inside someone, maybe inside everyone.

So I have found myself waking up to the idea (over time) that, "Life doesn't suck." This is the opposite of what I told myself and my friends from my teens (possibly younger) through some of my twenties which was, "Life sucks." ...not very clever or original, but true nonetheless. I really believed it when I said it and thought it, and for me the cliche caried the weight of great sadness and disappointment. But it wasn't true. It's just how I chose to view my experience at that time. And it was through the practice of yoga that I started to see my life through the filter of a different viewpoint. (I also think that I can send some credit to a dear relationship that started in my mid-twenties that made hanging out at the bar not-so-appealing anymore.) Things started getting better.

Actions that were taken or not taken from someone with the viewpoint that contains "Life Sucks" can cause serious problems. And it has taken me years of dedicated yoga practice and looking at myself through different techniques including meditation and my women's group to get to a point where I feel like an inferno of enthusiasm, and want to make a difference in my life. So from my more recent viewpoint, some actions not taken in the past are viewed as mistakes even though I did the best I could with what I understood at the time. Today, if I were to continue to ignore undone things I would be living in the past, and ignoring a real situation based in past mistakes. So in a spiritual sense I am atoning when I am putting work into correcting past errors. And from an earthly perspective it really would be accurate to say that I am honing my discipline, or making an investment in myself and my future by contributing to my life situation.

But, I also see imprinted in these mistakes spiritual lessons I must have needed to learn, because that's what happened. So it becomes atonement when I reach for a spiritual healing through actively correcting a real life daily situation that is not right.


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