The Beauty of Ferocity

She is burningly fierce and infinitely gentle. Her ferocity knows no limits, but she knows where to direct it and when to apply it. Her beauty is unparalleled, her face reddened from the heat of her own passion and rage. You are either with her or against her. She is so powerful that there are twelve forms of her, each form displaying a specific aspect of her personality and power. She has a closet full of outfits but favors dressing in vivid red from head to toe. In her four hands she holds prayer beads, a book, and makes the gestures of fearlessness and of graceful offering. Draped around her neck and shoulders is a garland of severed heads, her chest and face smeared with their blood. From the midst of the gore, her three luminous eyes shaped like lotus blossoms shine like the rising sun…

The Goddess Bhairavi represents that intelligent ferocity that resides within us. When we stand up for something we care about, when we leap to defend someone we love, when we plunge wholeheartedly into our own passions and beliefs, or eliminate something detrimental to our lives, we are Bhairavi. Undeterred. Without doubt. Taking no prisoners. Fiery. Infinite. Bhairavi is always within us – she is a part of who we are. What is interesting is when she appears – what it is inside and outside of us that calls her to the surface.

To receive beauty and grace in your life, you sometimes need to be ferocious. First you need to cultivate a clear analytical intelligence that enables you to discern what benefits you and what is self-destructive. Once you have determined this, unleash Bhairavi. Sever what isn’t serving you. Do so with precision, clarity and deep self-awareness. Own your choices. Don’t be subject to her. Be her. Be terrible in your raging beauty, standing up for what you believe in, whom you love, and who you are in the world. Be passionately ferocious and fiercely graceful. Like Bhairavi, you become as luminous as 1000 suns.

The Beauty of Celebrating Yourself

In order to give to others you also need to give to yourself. In order to be a good friend, family member, or partner you have to be good to yourself first. You have to love yourself. In the yoga I practice we begin with the premise of self-embrace. This is not any sort of narcissism. Rather it is a reverence for nature, of which we are a part. It is an appreciation offered to the people who created, advised, guided, and supported us: family members, teachers, and friends.

A close friend who spoke English as a second language once said to me, “I am so conceited!” When I explained to him that conceited was probably not the word that he was searching for, he explained, “What I mean is that I love myself…I mean, I’m the only me there is. If I don’t love me, who will?” And then he said, “Don’t you love yourself?” I never had anyone ask me this before, so I briefly outlined a few of my faults and then a few strengths. He laughed at me and said, “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, don’t you love you?” It took me a minute, but I finally said, “ …I guess so. I mean…yes!”

The exchange took place just a few years ago, and in retrospect, it is one of the best gifts anyone has given me. He helped to give me the gift of myself. The more I embrace myself, the more I am able to offer love to the people around me. I am better equipped to be a friend, a teacher, and a family member. So this December, in the midst of my gift buying and finishing up of 2010 commitments and goals, I also plan to take fabulous care of myself. Because I love me.

The Beauty of Asymmetry

Asymmetry (Via NotZolddLab.)

Beauty resides in the asymmetrical, the not-quite-matching-up-ness of things, the unexpected, the quirk. Think of the crack in the vase that accentuates the beauty around it. Symmetry can be beautiful in its evenness, but too much of it becomes stasis. Sameness. Predictability. Beauty lies in surprising contrasts.

Instead of viewing asymmetry as a flaw, entertain it as possibility, as an opening. When things don’t match up perfectly there is a friction – the extra screw after you have assembled the Ikea shelving. It drives you crazy, but then again, it gets your attention. It makes you look more closely because there is a role for you – something you need to do – a way to involve yourself. A grain of sand inside an oyster can create a pearl. The displaced thing, the flaw, produces beauty. In our best moments, we can recognize that our flaws and asymmetries can sometimes be our assets. Without asymmetry there is nothing to negotiate, no space of possibility – nothing to work on or to address.

Someone asked me once why I chose to create drawings on ordinary white paper instead of beautiful handmade rice paper. The reason was that the rice paper was already finished as far as I was concerned. It was so perfect and symmetrical that the only interaction with the paper that seemed appropriate to me was admiration. There was nothing further that I wanted to do with it. What do you do with perfect symmetry?

What is that part of you that you view as a flaw?
How can you begin to see it as an opportunity to create beauty in a way that is uniquely yours?

Your Body is a Stage

Inner Landscape 4

At last week’s Anusara® yoga Teacher Training in Paris, my intelligently poetic friend Sianna Sherman described the body as, “either a cage to trap you or a stage to set you free.” Think about it. Our bodies are the vehicles through which we experience the world. What we touch-smell-taste-hear-see is filtered through our own particular physical parameters – through the amalgamation of sensations that is us. Through our bodies we suffer pain and illness, but also pleasure and even ecstasy.

When I find myself complaining about sore hamstrings or wishing that my backbends looked more teardrop-shaped than bridge-like, I remember that I am privileged to even have such concerns. We can use our limitations as excuses to give up or as reasons to feel resentful, but neither of those reactions serve us. We are either accepting the cage or trapping ourselves further through our own negativity. When we begin to appreciate our abilities more than we resent our limitations, our body becomes our stage – a place filled with sensation, drama, beauty, emotion, and artistry.

We need to recognize our limitations so that we can more profoundly celebrate our gifts, but we also need to regularly test those limits, to push at what we believe to be our boundaries and constraints – to get a taste of our potential and savor our fullness. The question we need to ask ourselves is:

Who do we want to be and how do we want to be within our bodies?

The Beauty of Yoga in the City of Light

Le Sainte Chapelle (Via Dimitry B..)

I want to be luminous. I want to glow. I want to be lit up like the Sainte-Chapelle, the extraordinary cathedral of stained glass in Paris, where I've been this week assisting my friend Sianna Sherman with an intense five-day Teacher Training. In Anusara yoga we have an expression, "Inner Body Bright." The expression is intended to evoke the energetic brilliance that resides at our core, to draw it to the surface, and to shine it out around us like a full-body halo. How do we access that inner light so that we can extend our talents and gifts out into the world? We do the yoga.

The yoga for me is asana practice, philosophy study, art making, and writing. For someone else, the yoga might be singing, cycling, or martial arts. Yoga means yoking, connecting. Doing the yoga is about creating internal and external unity. The details don’t really matter. What matters is choosing to do what lights you up.

This week in Paris we've discussed what inspires us, what resides so authentically at our center that even mentioning it creates an inspirational glow for those around us. When our teacher John Friend was here, he spoke of being bathed in the light of the Sainte-Chapelle. The luminosity of the building was more powerful than the stone architecture. The cathedral became a body, while the light was the energy enveloping the structure. Lumineux dans le corps interieur. Illuminated from within. Inner Body Bright

What illuminates you from the inside out? How do you do your yoga?

The Beauty of Diversity

Walt Whitman by photographer George C. Cox, New York, 1887

You are uniquely yourself, yet you are many selves. You are both singular and diverse, a continually unfolding being. As my teacher Dr Douglas Brooks frequently points out, the self who you are with your parent is not the same as the self you are with your lover, your child, or your best friend. This does not make you inauthentic in any way. It simply means that you are multi-faceted. At the core of your identity is this play between your singularity and your diversity.

Embracing diversity in the world around you makes you richer, deeper. When you dive into a new job, enjoy new friends, explore a new interest, or travel, you expand the universe of you. You are different and will be perceived differently. You may view yourself in this alternate context and be confronted with a new image of yourself. External diversity precipitates self-awareness and encourages self-knowledge.

The more aware you are of your own particularities, strengths and challenges, the better equipped you are to understand and appreciate other people. But interestingly, the more you see within yourself, the more endless the process of seeing becomes. You become internally diverse. You begin to recognize that for every drop of self-knowledge you have, there is a river of unknowns. So now you have a choice: you can stop looking, stagnating into set habits and patterns, or you can leap into the cascading limitless waterfall that is you. Appreciating the nuances of difference within yourself offers you a glimpse of your limitlessness.

Walt Whitman said it best: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.

The Beauty of Your Story

Krishna & Gopis (milkmaids)

Once upon a time there was a beautiful young man who played the flute exquisitely. He lived in a small village of cow-herders. In this village all of the women were madly in love with him because of his good looks and his music. One day as he wandered, playing his flute, the women stopped milking their cows and followed his music deeply into the forest, where, seduced by the sound, they dreamed and longed for him.

They began to argue and fight, each claiming that she was the charismatic man’s true love. Suddenly they realized that he had vanished, and they panicked, churning through every lover’s emotion, from jealousy to hope, joy to anguish. Exhausted, they finally became peaceful, and it was then that the beautiful man reappeared. The man, whose name was Krishna, multiplied himself so that everywhere each milkmaid looked, behind the trees and in the streams, in the clouds and behind her eyelids, all that she could see was him. Dazed and sated with love, the milkmaids wandered out of the woods, and back to their homes, carrying the magic of the forest, the beauty of the music, and their passion for Krishna with them. They had internalized the story, and everything they needed was within.

Imagine this story happening inside of you. You are all of the characters and every element of the landscape. Within yourself, you contain Krishna’s artistry and the milkmaids’ yearning for beauty and love. You possess the dark mystery of the forest, in which nothing is clear and anything can happen. You embody the earthiness of the village and the brilliance of a deity. You seduce and are seduced. You are passionate and disdainful. You are singularly yourself, yet you contain multitudes. There is nothing in the story that you are not.

Every story tells you about yourself. Within your daily life, within your daily practice, you tell your story. As a yogi, when you step onto your mat, your practice churns through a cycle of emotions. You watch as your energy and attitude shift and change within each pose. The events of your day wash through your body and mind, shaping your attitude and giving form to your thoughts. So the next time you begin your practice, ask yourself:

What kind of story do I want to tell?

How do I accept the challenging parts of my story and still embrace the beauty?

The Beauty of Listening

Listen (via ky_olsen)

I spent this past weekend in a meditation workshop with a small group of fellow yoga teachers with whom I’ve been studying asana and philosophy for many years. We engaged in multiple meditations with breaks to write notes and share information. The act of setting aside a weekend to do this created a space within which our minds were able to become quiet. Within the quiet, we learned more about ourselves than most of us had imagined. The repetition of meditate-write-discuss created a familiar rhythm that made it increasingly easy to hear what was being said to us within our meditations. We emerged from the weekend inspired, exhausted, invigorated, and amazed.

If we want to know ourselves better, we need to become quiet and listen. When we are quiet, we are better able to hear what our bodies imply, our minds indicate, and our hearts gravitate toward. Cultivating this type of self-knowledge offers us a richer experience of the world around us. The outer world becomes a mirror that reflects back to us our beauty, our complexity, and our infinite capacity for transformation.

Some people develop their ability to listen through ongoing kinetic movement such as running or swimming. Others find it through physical stillness, such as sitting in meditation, and many through practices that play with the pulsation between movement and stillness – yoga, basketball, music, drawing, dance. All of these activities create a framework within which people can focus on themselves in a clearer, deeper way. Through the repetition of one of these particular practices, we become better acquainted with our motivational peaks and valleys. We learn about our abilities to grow and change, where we get stuck, and how to become creative within a given structure. In yoga we constantly talk about how to take what we learn off of the mat and into the street. What we learn about ourselves in our practice is applicable to every aspect of our lives.

What practice offers you clarity and quiet so that you can best listen to your body, heart, and mind?

How can you embrace this practice as a daily or weekly commitment so that you are inspired and amazed by your very self?

The Beauty of Transitions

I noticed the transition this past week – my hands felt smooth and papery when I woke up in the morning, the bathroom floor tiles felt cold instead of cool under my feet. I started craving warm foods in the morning and evening, and I felt quiet, more inward. I observed my body and mind responding to the shifting weather and moving into their autumnal state. It wasn’t an external marker that made me aware of the seasonal shift, such as the beginning of the academic year or baseball season waning. The transition could be felt in my very body chemistry - sort of like a plant responding to the barometric pressure.

Everything in nature pulsates energetically. In yoga we use the Sanskrit word spanda to refer to the pulsation of the universe, of nature, of our bodies. Just as a flower or leaf may close at night and open up again in the daylight, our bodies open and close, drawing energy inward and then radiating it back out.

If we look at the statue of Nataraja, we can see that his upper right hand holds a damaru, or drum, which represents creation, and his upper left hand holds fire, which represents destruction. We know that a tree’s leaves have to shrivel and fall in order for the tree to create new buds and blossoms. This is the natural pulsation of things. In any aspect of our lives we must recognize that there is a time when we need to shed an old habit or pattern so that we can create a new one that serves us better. We need to let the old leaves die to make way for the new. If we resist change, we deny nature.

In this transitional time of year – light giving over to increasing darkness, green growing things slowly turning brown, we have the reminder of what we need to do for ourselves. How can we gracefully transition from the external expressiveness of summer into a more inward autumnal state? How can we hold closely what is essential and shed what is no longer needed?

The Beauty of the Unknown

This morning I woke up at 6:30 am when the alarm on my iPhone went off. It was still dark out, cool, rainy, and almost completely silent, but I could hear my friends moving about the room. Sharon Kenny and I were upstate assisting our friend Zhenja LaRosa with an Anusara® Teacher Training retreat and the three of us had personal meditation practices that we planned to do before joining the group. As each of us moved into our individual meditations, I found my mind wandering off, distracted by my fatigue and my curiosity about the dent in my mattress, detoured by a recollection about a party I had been to Saturday evening and by the color choices I had made in a drawing that I had just started. I began wonder about what I would eat for breakfast.

Meditation is like a mysterious structure that you enter into that contains within it every rasa, or flavor of experience. As I wandered through the hallways of my meditation, I ducked under one thought, pushed another one behind a door, and in frustration, was about to exit, when…there it was…my own personal space of meditation. Just when it seemed like an impossibility, I softened, stopped being so hard on myself, let my daily thoughts and distractions rest to the side, and stepped into the unknown.

Sometimes it is difficult work to get to the space of meditation, and it is frequently interrupted by a meta-cognitive train of thought such as: Am I there yet? Oh yes, I think I’m entering into that place now. But wait. Is it happening?” Meditation is entering the mystery that resides at your very core. You don’t know exactly how you will get there, or if you will get there, or what you will find once you arrive. You are traveling without a plan. But to grow as a person, you need to enter into unknown parts of your self, and to do that, you must begin by opening to all the possible experiences that may emerge.

Not knowing what will happen is opportunity. Not knowing is possibility. Embracing the unknown is an ecstatic affirmation of your own hunger for experience and self-knowledge. The practices of yoga and meditation are, as my teacher Dr. Douglas Brooks says, “the creative pursuit of uncertainty.” They are a glimpse into the vast structure of our own consciousness.

The Beauty of the Universe

Universe (via jurvetson)

Imagine your body as a universe - a vast cosmic landscape in which every planet and every star is a point of energy signifying one of your particular qualities, talents, or aspects of your identity. Imagine each of these coalesced points of energy as a marker of some aspect of your life. Now imagine recognizing that that vastness, that sense of limitless possibility, that ever-expanding tapestry of seen and unseen, darkness punctuated with flashes of illumination…is your very essence.

Just as a star pulses, expanding and contracting energetically, so do we. When you feel depleted mentally, physically, or spiritually, when you have a hesitation of the heart - anxiety, self-doubt, or feelings of unworthiness, hug in to your inner universe - to the constellation of your own complexities. By moving inward, we become expansive. This is not a contradiction. It is an essential fact of the natural world. A dense and compact seed contains the promise of a tree. At the core of our bodies, we find infinite potential. In Anusara yoga we call this pulsation muscular and organic energy. We hug in toward the center of our bodies to tap into the expansiveness that resides there. This enables us to unfold and open, to extend and become spacious.

While it is still warm at night, go outside. If you need to, find an open space – a park or a rooftop. And just look. Receive the lessons of the inky and infinite sky. Welcome the night air into your body. Soften until there is less separation between you and the sky. Commit to recognizing your own vastness - to not getting stuck in one small corner of your personal universe. Commit to seeking out options. Step into your own enormity. And recognize that the endless night sky is a reflection of you.

The Beauty of Alignment

John Friend as SuperOM

“The future is about responding in alignment” - John Friend 9-11-10

Daily life is an ever-shifting process of aligning and realigning. You wake up and realize it’s raining or that you forgot to buy food for breakfast. Maybe you check your email and see a message that adds a layer of complication to your day or one that makes you excited about how your day will unfold. Perhaps you make the most perfect breakfast and the coffee has never tasted so delicious, or instead you forgot to pick up milk and feel vaguely disappointed. You imagined this, but now you have to readjust to that. Every moment of your day instigates a series of tiny shifts and adjustments. Each adjustment is a point of departure from which your actions and choices ripple outward, affecting your life and the lives of the people around you. So the essential question becomes: how do you align with those incremental shifts and changes - with what was, with what is and with what might be?

As my teacher John Friend reminded us this past weekend in Boston, everything is microcosm-macrocosm. The shifts of our bodies and minds mirror the processes of the world around us. If we deny those processes, we become misaligned. If our knee suddenly feels tweaked and we decide to run 5 miles or sit in lotus position for an hour, that’s a misaligned decision that will result in injury. If we decide to address that unexpected shift with rest or a theraputic physical practice, we have responded intelligently, realigning with what is, and setting a positive path for what might be.

The more aligned we are as individuals, the more skillfully we align with those around us. We become proficient at navigating the vicissitudes of life, which enables us to more positively affect our world. We are less likely to lash out in anger when provoked, less likely to be devastated by sadness. If we can align with the small shifts, we can better address the life-changing ones.

So try this:

First, notice some small unexpected shift in your plans or expectations.

Then observe: How is this change affecting my thinking & mood?

Then ask yourself: How, at this moment, can I best align with what I’ve been given so that I can move forward in a positive way?

The Beauty of Beginnings

Yellow Leaf (via My aim is true)

It’s officially September. No ocean weekends, roof deck urban sunbathing, or persistent flip-flop wearing can deny it. For many of us, this signifies the bittersweet trailing off of summertime heat – a regretful goodbye to the radiant openness of our bodies that offers us a similarly open state of mind. For others, the transition into September is filled with the excitement of the new – the cooler weather activating our motivation, our work ethic – a shift into focusing and goal setting. So I remind myself at the onset of Fall that this season can be about possibility and freshness, an opportunity to create a new way of thinking, to set new habits, to shift emphasis from something that didn’t serve us to something that holds potential. An opportunity to make our someday into our now.

I begin my Fall by committing to some particular practice for 5 minutes each day. Seriously - 5 minutes. A few years ago, I committed to a 5 minute a day Pranayama practice. I knew that committing to 5 minutes would make it impossible for me to fail. Even when I had a head cold and was in a state of exhaustion I did it. In the process, I fell so in love with my practice that I often continued for a half hour or an hour. But achieving 5 minutes was so reasonable that I was easily able to honor my commitment to myself. It provided a calm and expansive backdrop to my days.

My teacher Dr. Douglas Brooks says, “If you make a mistake, don’t do it again. And then, if you do it again, then don’t do it again.” This is such a generous way of looking at human nature, offering the reminder that every time we begin something again, we are actually beginning it anew. Every recommencement is a new beginning, regardless of associations or familiarity.

So what will you commit yourself to this September? 5 minutes of running, writing, asana, meditation, drawing, stretching, dancing, apartment cleaning, singing? Remember to be kind to yourself. Offer yourself the present of a practice. And don’t beat yourself up for occasionally forgetting about it entirely. But if you do forget, then don’t forget again. And then if you do forget about it again…then don’t do it again…and so on.

The Beauty of Knowledge and Wisdom

Pablo Picasso-Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (detail) 1907

Knowledge is different from wisdom. Knowledge is acquired information, facts, or technique, like how to speak another language or do a handstand or bake a cake. There is external proof of your knowledge in the form of visible accomplishment. Knowledge enables you to make an educated decision, to get things done, and is the foundation for wisdom. Wisdom, however, is what you do with knowledge, how you apply acquired information to the rest of your life. Wisdom is far more subtle and elusive than knowledge, and is not measurable. It is a refinement or an expansion of knowledge. Wisdom is how poetically you speak that language, the radiance of your handstand, the transcendent, “oh!” of the cake.

In Sanskrit the word jnana means knowledge and the word vidya means wisdom. Vidya is the intelligence, creativity, and artistry of how you apply what you know to what you do. One is not more important than the other – both are necessary to live a rich fulfilling life. You can live less brightly without vidya. But you can’t even make your breakfast without jnana. Jnana is the foundation that allows for vidya to flourish, as long as you cultivate it. But vidya is what offers insight, makes beauty and art, and makes life worth living.

Before Picasso turned toward increasing degrees of abstraction in his work, he painted in a highly realistic manner. His contemporaries could also render in a visually accurate technical style. They all had the jnana. But they did not all have the vidya. How Picasso applied his knowledge was his wisdom – his genius – his vidya. He pushed the boundaries of jnana so much that he changed the rules.

So how does this relate to you?

In what areas of your life do you need to acquire more knowledge, more jnana?

In what areas of your life do you need to cultivate wisdom, vidya?

How can you build your knowledge as a point of departure for the wild creative leap of your wisdom?

The Beauty of the Fire

Ian Britton/Freephoto.com

We must destroy to create. My intention in saying this is not an endorsement of aggression or violence, but an observation of a fundamental fact of nature. When we truly desire change in our lives, when we crave the transformation of our bodies and minds, we need to burn down our old patterns and habits to make room for the new. We must dramatically and emphatically rid ourselves of that which no longer serves us. Sometimes things need to fall apart before they can come back together in a more positive and substantial way. When you burn something, you transform it – it is a form of alchemy.

Now, what you need to throw into the fire could be a bad habit, an addictive behavior, a toxic friendship, or a negative thought pattern - anything that holds you back from being your greatest self. I remember Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps saying that whenever someone insulted or harassed him, he used it as fuel to feed his practice. Whatever came at him he was able to alchemize. These transformed experiences nourished the soil of his practice.

There are fire rituals in virtually every spiritual tradition. Fire symbolizes memory, alchemy, disintegration, and transformation. In Anusara Yoga we begin every class with the mantra Om Namah Shivaya, which can sometimes be interpreted as: I honor Shiva, the great Destroyer. The Shiva we refer to is our own inner light, our own inner fire. This light is luminous and powerful, beautiful and frightening. When, through our practice, we tend to the inner flame, burning away that negative habit – that destructive tendency - that nagging doubt, we clear our inner landscape, creating a fertile ground for personal growth.

So what is holding you back from being your greatest self?

What in your life isn’t serving you?

Envision throwing that thing into the fire. Visualize it burning until there is nothing left but ash. Feed the flame. Transform your self.

The Beauty of Practice III

Imagine yourself as an ocean. Now imagine yourself as a rock tumbling through the waves of that ocean, grating upon sand, other rocks, shells, and seaweed, and being smoothed by the incessant movement of the waves. This is you and your practice.

Stepping into your practice is like diving into the ocean of you – all of your complexities churn and shift as you are buffeted by excitement, curiosity, doubt, frustration, exhaustion, and bliss. These are the thoughts and sensations that arise within the context of your practice. Some of these sensations might be residual from your day or your week, others might be hidden on the ocean floor of your psyche, just waiting for the churning of your body and mind to jiggle them loose. But it is all you – you are the rock, cleansed by the practice, debris shaken loose, rough edges smoothed. And you are the ocean, your own world, deep and enveloping, in which anything can happen. In your practice you plunge into the depths. You move. You see what arises.

Your practice, like the ocean, is always right there waiting for you to step into it. But in a sense you are never not practicing. Everything you do feeds your practice in some way. So the relevant question becomes:

How deeply are you willing to dive into the ocean of your practice?

Or, to paraphrase:

How deeply are you willing to dive into the ocean of you?

The Beauty of Practice II

Sianna Sherman at Dig Yoga

“Practice, practice, practice and all will come…” -Shri K. Pattabhi Jois

I woke up Saturday to the birdlike sound of a flute playing a raga, listening as the sound wandered, swooping down, climbing up, and meandering through the morning quiet. Sleeping downstairs from me for the weekend was master bamboo flautist Steve Gorn. who was engaged in his morning practice. In the bedroom next to mine, Sianna Sherman was on her asana mat and across the hall, our host, Sue Elkind, was deep in meditation. As I moved through my own morning rituals of meditation and asana, the sound of the flute connected us, telling the story of our love for our own practices.

The reason why I share this moment is to make a point about practice. All of these people are brilliant practitioners who had converged for a weekend Intensive at Dig Yoga in Lambertville, NJ, along with the brilliant Tantric scholar Paul Muller-Ortega. These individuals have more skill in their fields than most people dream of acquiring in a lifetime. But what do they do first thing in the morning? They practice. Clearly, they all have a natural gift, but without practice, the gift might never have emerged or fulfilled its potential. Their brilliance, like everyone’s, is in a state of continual evolution. Without practice, it can’t grow, develop, or flourish. The gift shrivels, like a neglected plant.

Accepting that moments of frustration and dissatisfaction are part of a whole that also contains contentment, curiosity, and sometimes ecstasy, is part of being a mature practitioner of any art. Yoga-running-writing-painting-cooking-singing-whatever. My teacher, John Friend, reminds us of how many times he had to fall in a pose to get to where he is now. And it never ends. That’s the beauty of having a practice. As Paul Muller-Ortega said to us on the last day of the Intensive, “You cultivate this path with love, commitment, dedication, vigilance…Life is the process of refinement.” And to refine, you have to practice.

The Beauty of Boundaries

River Bank (via makelessnoise)

“Clear Boundaries - No Limits” -Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy

Boundaries are different from limits. Boundaries delineate, cultivate, and protect. Limits obstruct, denying possibility or real growth. In my yoga class I tell often tell my students this: Imagine your body as a river. Without riverbanks the water would have no direction or force. The riverbanks create directionality, purpose, here-to-thereness. The riverbanks are parameters, just as any particular yoga pose or asana is a specific set of parameters. When you move into an asana, you pour your body into a specific configuration that creates an effect. If it is a backbend or an arm balance the effect is often agitating and exhilarating, channeling the energy up and out. If the asana is a deep hip-opener, the effect is generally grounding, calming - the waters settle. We apply alignment principles in order to best serve the body’s energy flow – expanding and narrowing the riverbanks according to the form of the asana and the individual needs of our bodies.

Boundaries allow the asana practice to deepen in a clear way. For example, there is a basic form for down dog, but within that form you can personalize it, bringing your body’s particularities and your own associations to it. Limits would deny the expansive potential of down dog, dictating, “only do it exactly like this.” Once you shape your body into an asana, you choose your boundaries. Let them be strong but malleable, like the banks of a river.

Now, invite this concept into your mind. Invite it into your heart. Apply it to any particular situation or relationship. And then ask yourself:

What kind of boundaries do I need here?

Where have I created limits instead of boundaries?

How can I be as wildly creative as possible within the boundaries that I’ve chosen?

This is doing the yoga.

The Beauty of the Farmers Market

Via Lizard10979

Looking, smelling, touching, tasting. For me, the Farmers Market is a party of the senses. One of the upsides of teaching a 7am yoga private is that by 8:15, I am wandering through the freshly displayed fruits and vegetables in Union Square. I find myself in the inspiring company of restaurant chefs and sous-chefs in their white kitchen jackets, conversing, inspecting, and buying in bulk. I follow their lead as they descend upon the sugar snap peas, the bunches of fresh herbs, the wild garlic and mushrooms.

The first Farmers Market thrill for me each spring is the emergence of favas and ramps, and after that wild strawberries. That was a few weeks ago, although you can still find them here and there. Now suddenly this week lavish orange squash blossoms are everywhere and the green curling shiseido peppers which are so amazing just seared in olive oil. Or a bunch of the most delicious french breakfast radishes dipped in goat butter and sea salt. Amazing raw milk cheeses and fresh eggs – fresh as in feathers stuck to the carton and you have to rinse off the stickiness before cracking them. And then the flowers…you can smell the roses from yards away, gently squeeze the snapdragons, inhale the scent of lilies and gaze upon sunflowers…

Touching and eating things that have recently been in the ground makes me feel that much closer to the earth. As I go through the frankly sensual process of gathering, preparing, and eating my Farmers Market meal, I feel clean. There is less of an intermediary between my food and myself. I have thwarted the takeout container and the hastily prepared meal. I am reminded that the tons of concrete, steel, glass, and miles of electrical wiring that surround me can’t entirely obscure the innate relationship of my body to nature.

So take the time this week to find one perfect peach or tomato or ear of corn. Look at its shape and color. Feel its texture. Inhale its fragrance. And then don’t do anything else while you eat it. Being mindful of our senses offers us a deeper, more satisfying experience of ourselves and of the natural world in which we reside. 

The Beauty of The Guru

Gopala Aiyar Sundaramoorthy, my teacher's teacher.

Maybe it was the person who first taught you to read. Or perhaps that teacher who saw something special in you and urged you to push just beyond what you thought were your limits. It could have been a friend or family member who extended him or herself for you, showing you how to be a better person in the process. Or an artist, a writer, an athlete who ignited something inside you that made you want to dance or paint or write or run as brilliantly and as beautifully as you ever had before. That person on some level was a guru - a spiritual guide in your life.

The word guru comes fraught with all sorts of associations in our culture – there is an implication of a submissive worshipfulness that is anathema to many independent and free-thinking people, myself included. There are stories of gurus with fleets of Rolls-Royces and/or dubious behavior in their personal lives. For many people I know, it is a term that evokes a certain uneasy feeling. None of my teachers will allow this term to be applied to them. We dance around it, embracing its true meaning, but not its sometimes unfortunate associations.

Let’s make this simple: Gu can be defined as darkness. Ru can be defined as illumination. The Sanskrit word guru means the one who draws you from darkness to light. That would be a teacher. But here’s where it gets interesting for those of you who aren’t into geeking out over Sanskrit grammar: a guru can be anyone or anything that offers you an illuminating experience. I think about the dazzling brilliance of my college art history professor but I also think about the beauty and tenacity of a blade of grass popping up through the NYC concrete.  Both sweetly and ferociously affirm life. Both take the role of guru in a particular manner.

This past Sunday, July 25 was Guru Purnima, which, for yogis, is the annual celebration of our teachers. It always falls at this time of year on the full moon (purnima = Sanskrit for full moon). A flurry of yogi messages criss-crossed on Facebook, as so many of us in the Anusara Yoga and the Rajanaka Yoga communities thanked our teachers and each other. So to my teachers, my gurus, to all of you who inspire me, push me, encourage me, and coach me through life…Thank you!

Ask yourself this:

Who are my teachers?

To whom am I a teacher?

And then:

Thank them…via phone, email, letter, or face-to-face conversation.

With this gesture, you become the teacher too.

The Beauty of Choosing Happiness

“First happiness is a choice. Then it is a practice.” Jason Nemer, co-founder of AcroYoga

You have to make the choice to be happy – it is like anything else – sometimes it is graceful and effortless and sometimes it seems beyond our grasp. When petty irritations arise or a sense of futility or loss dominates our days, it’s time to ask yourself,  “Do I want to live in this place?” I was discussing life on and off the mat with friend and fellow yoga teacher Siri Peterson. When we teach, we put our best selves forward. So what happens if we carry that off of the mat and into our daily lives? Both of us are in the art world - I am a visual artist and Siri is a dancer. Both worlds can be viciously competitive environments, which, after a while, leave their imprint. Although competition is a reality in any professional world including yoga, the overall tone of the yoga world is one of openness, assistance, compassion, and warmth. Needless to say, we both lead slightly divided lives.

I decided this week to take that best self from the studio out into the streets. Normally, if someone slammed into me in the subway, I might snap at them or fume, feeling irritable and wronged. If a student pushed past me at Virayoga, where I teach, or shoved aside my things to put down their own, what would I do? Not much, actually. I would think, “that person really needs class today,” and then seek them out, acknowledge them, let them be heard. And that would feel good.

As a yoga teacher I make an easy choice to be my best self. Anger begets anger, just like sorrow does sorrow and happiness - happiness. When we default to anger or irritability, we perpetuate the grasp of those destructive sensations in our lives. Don’t get me wrong, feeling the entire cycle of emotions is an essential part of being complete human beings, but getting stuck in the ones that drag us down is a problem.  This goes for sadness as well. When something painful happens, feel it fully – go to the depths, but then rise back up. Choose to surface. This is both liberating and empowering. Think of the sensations in your body and mind when you feel any particular emotion. What feels the worst? What feels best? What serves you most in your daily actions and interactions? Choose to constantly move toward that feeling, that emotion. Dedicate your day to it. Your week.

All week, my experiment has been surprisingly smooth. It has actually been easier to not succumb to negativity in that my mood stays balanced, my interactions graceful. I feel happy. But still, it is a practice. So try it. Begin like this:

Inhale into anything that feels stuck or blocked inside your body and mind.

Exhale whatever is not serving you.

Repeat this as many times as you need.

And then choose happiness. Again. And again. And again.

It’s like answering to the universe. And answering to the universe opens up the vastness of your heart.