Autumn Lotus Yoga

A week out from the move & I can finally feel change in my bones.  And it has me asking some good questions, ones I stopped asking for a little while & am glad to return to.

What do I want for myself?

Who do I most want to be?

How do I feel & how do I want to feel?

These past six months I’ve focused on healing my back, my relationship with yoga, & continued work on my relationship with food.  I found an unexpected home studio, one that I didn’t plan for, but fell in love with in the end.  The next stage is upon me though, & it’s time to change.

Goals don’t work as well for me as questions.  We can fail to achieve goals, but questions are just avenues to explore.

Why do we resist when we try to do something nice for ourselves?  When we try to change, or heal, or take a class or a walk or do our practice or eat a salad, when we know it’s the best possible thing? 

Heidi articulated a fascinating line of reasoning on that conundrum this weekend, and I’ve condensed it below. 

Fact: We say to ourselves horrid things we’d never say to others. 

Fact: If/when someone does in fact say something horrid to us, we internally put up a block, a hardening, resistance born from anger and pain. 

Logic: We say horrid things to ourselves. We harden against those who say horrid things to us.  Therefore we block, and resist ourselves. 

Even when we’re trying to change & do something wonderful, there’s a feeling of — “Why should I trust the neighborhood bully???”

It takes time to change that.  To stop, first off, being horrid to yourself.  And then to ease off the years of built-up self distrust & slowly release the resistance.

Woah, I’m traveling ALOT these days.  Just coming back from a long weekend celebrating Founder’s Day at my alma mater (Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY) & only a few days here before back to New Haven!

For the few days on the road, practice was of the much abbreviated variety done in cramped hotel rooms.  But I got a chance to work on what Heidi has described to me as the essence & purpose of Forrest yoga & indeed all yoga.  I’ve read a lot of words on the subject, but hers were particularly concise so I wanted to share ‘em.

The purpose of Forrest Yoga is to get us in the room, in our bodies, breathing. 

Yeah, sounds simplistic.  It is.  Thank heavens.  Simple is hard enough to do.  If we can get into our skins & breathe, we are present.  If we are present, we are practicing our yoga.  Everything flows from there.

If you want to put in window dressing of union of body/mind/spirit, Ok.  If you want to add Sanskrit words or definitions of Self, good for you.

I don’t have much interest in that right now.  I like just getting into my body, breathing.

That said, here are some pretty pictures of Vassar College! 

Main dorm — built in 1861 to house the crazy notion of educating women to the standard of men!

Looking from Main Dorm towards the Library (corrected once I took another look at the phot . 

The Chapel.

And the Vassar library up close.  Yep, it’s not a very pretty campus..

Oh, and me — proving that you CAN go home again, so long as you allow it & you to have changed.

The pose continuum is much like the spacetime continuum. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacetime_continuum

I am such a geek.

Actually, it’s a concept born in my head in response to some yoga cliches I keep hearing & can no longer agree with or support.  Yes, the ever popular “There is no such thing as a perfect pose” and “There is no wrong pose” crap.

Okay, let’s look at the “no wrong pose” concept first.   Because there are some Very Wrong Poses. 

Wrong Poses: Ones that hurt, exacerbate an injury, or are inappropriate for where the student is at physically/emotionally — or, ones that are so effed up in alignment that it looks like Picasso doing yoga.   (Which would be totally AWESOME.  I want a series of Cubist yoga paintings.) 

A yoga class would then look like this!  If we were all, like, nekkid & stuff.

(Though I swear one of the Demoiselles of Avignon is doing Gomukhasana/Cowface pose arms!!  Seriously!!  Look at the second from the left!!)

Ok.  Back from art/yoga fusion geekiness.  On with the rant.

So then there is the “no perfect pose” silliness!  Yes, I understand the intention of the phrase.  But.  In a particular moment, there can be a particular expression of a pose that  fits juuuuuuuuuust right.  That feels & breaths & heals & is like a drink of water on a dry day.  It is something that changes every single breath, perhaps, but there sometimes is a really great place to be in a pose.  Right foot just in X spot, Left foot somewhere tasty, core alive, everything moving in freedom & beauty.  Yummmmmmmmm.

Hence, the invention of the Pose Continuum.   The perfect pose is frequently evasive.  The wrong pose sometimes annoyingly persistent.   The gradation between them is wide, though, & a really good playground. 

It’s the range of expressions of a pose where it’s not distorted & owchy & is unencumbered by BS projections of This Is How Triangle MUST Look.   It’s the places where a pose is workable & you’re on the journey towards Just Right For You Right At That Moment. 

(I am currently writing like Pooh Bear talks.  Hunh.   

The Pose Continuum means we have many opportunities to find goodness & sweetness in the pose.   Like Rumi wrote  (one must quote Rumi in yoga, yes?

“Out beyond ideas
of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field.

I’ll meet you there.”

Pose Continuum.  Talk it up.  Tell it to your friends.  Before I trademark all the cool.

This one is for the amazing Kai, proprietress of the addictive blog http://reluctantashtangi.blogspot.com/  (Especially love the kangaroo & critter pix!!)

In Forrest yoga the theme of a class frequently is focusing on bringing healing/breath/freedom/energy to some chosen spot in the body.  It may be an injury or just an area that needs attention.  A pretty good-sized area, too.  Like your lower back, or neck or shoulder or front of the chest or whatever.

But this also begs the question: “Well, umm, HOW, exactly, am I supposed to do that?”

And that is a fair question.  Another Forrest thing is that if you tell someone to do something, you better be able to tell them both how & why.

Here’s my thoughts  first on the How of dedicating a class to a particular spot. 

Nutshell: In every pose, feel your spot.   Even if it’s not an obviously spot-related pose, feel your spot in the pose anyway.  Then, work the pose in a way that feels good for your spot. 

That means, for me, what my spot feels directly determines how I shape the pose on the outside with the big alignment stuff of legs & arms, but also how I shape the pose on the inside. 

If my spot is my lower back, for example, its happiness determines the exact angle of the tilt in my pelvis, or whether I squeeze the sitbones or front hipbones in & how much.  If the spot is my shoulder, it means I focus in each pose on wrapping the shoulder or connecting with my shoulderblade or whatever makes my shoulder feel good in the pose. 

Once you’ve connected to the sensation of what’s going on in your spot, the next level is working to get your breath in there.  One way is to provide some sort of pressure onto the spot & breath into that pressure.  Outside pressure might come from placing your hand there, or anytime the area is in contact with the floor or another part of your body.  From what I’ve encountered, getting breath into an area might feel at first like a small movement of expansion & contraction, or like the area is waking up & you are getting more sensory information from the spot.

As for the Why… One of the great things about working this way is that it takes a lot of  the BS out of the poses.  There is a purpose to the practice beyond whether or not I can do the pose in X way.  I work the pose in a way that feels good for my injured or closed off spot, not in the most flashy way possible.   Also I’m not doing the pose in the smallest, least energetic way possible because that’s not terribly useful alot of the time.  It’s like, out of all the possible variations for doing a pose, you get to pick the one that feels the best.  Not the one you think you have to do.  You have nothing to prove or fear on the outside because the practice is dedicated to you in a specific, detailed, healing way.

Contining on the Why train, another great thing is that it means my practice will be good for my spot.   Class will be helpful rather than hurtful for an injury.  Or help open a shut down area rather than further close it.  All the effort I’m putting into my practice will be gifted to a place that needs it & I learn moment-to-moment what helps.

And it gives an inner drishti or focal point, if you will.  My attention is going inward very specifically, rather than wandering off to my To Do list or daydreams.

Also, and this is key: By focusing on  being nice to one manageable area, I will learn how to work with my whole self in a humane & healing way.  Now that’s a useful thing to work on…

This thought started in class this morning.  Picked up again after teaching my volunteer class.  Culminated during a short second practice this evening.

Things in my life which have changed in the past few years:

my profession

my address

my mood

my marital status

my name

my employer

my favorite books

my favorite websites

my favorite music

my hair

my dress size

my voice

my brain chemistry

 But I am still here.

Hmmmm.   Those things must not be me, deep down.