The Beauty of Solstice

I can remember a night last year when a delicious restlessness made me want to wander for hours through the city. It was humid with that satisfying damp smell rising from the asphalt as it released the day’s stored-up heat. The urge to walk endlessly felt familiar, triggered by the smells and the quiet openness of the city. There was a sense that only very slow activities were taking place in the syrupy air. Almost no one was out as I moved through the urban quiet, meaning distant sirens, a chorus of dripping air conditioners kicking on and off, cars zipping past, fragments of music and overheard conversation. As I walked to the Hudson to look at the river and sky, I had a pervasive feeling of balance, like floating in warm salty ocean water - bobbing gently through the night.

This impulse to walk and walk and walk is one that strikes me every year at this time – a personally recurring solstice event. My meandering was just another element contributing to this landscape of sounds, smells, and shadowy activities in an ever-shifting collage. What was happening in the heat was a melding of my external and internal worlds - the cityscape with my personal landscape. The pieces were distinct yet overlapping. I didn’t want to sit, stand, or talk. I wanted to move. As my body traced its trail block by block, I left my soft mark on the landscape that enveloped me, my skin’s surface a permeable wall faintly delineating inner and outer, me and not-me. 

In moments of connection to our world, we luxuriate in the feeling of merging with something bigger than ourselves, but we do so through our own individual sensibilities. As we move through our environment, how can we draw our experiences into our bodies and minds to more deeply appreciate our richly layered world?

The Beauty of Discernment

Inner Landscape I, 2008

“Being open to everything doesn’t mean you accept anything”

John Friend at the Anusara Certified Teachers Gathering,

May 17, 2010

The Sanskrit word shri means discernment - that which is auspicious, abundant, and life-affirming. Wrapped up in this word is the notion of selectivity, of educated choice. In yoga, in relationships, in life, shri tells us not to align with anything that comes our way, but to be discerning – to cultivate our own eyes, our own ears, our own palates, our own individual practices. Shri invites us to choose with wisdom.

There are teachers from all over the U.S and the world gathering in the Hindu Society in Morrisville, North Carolina for the annual Anusara Certified Teachers Gathering. We pull into the parking lot in the warm humidity of the North Carolina rain, grabbing our mats and bags and running in, having taken a wrong turn a few miles back in the rental car. We rapidly place our mats and grab our notebooks while waving to friends we haven’t seen in months or more across the room just as our teacher, John Friend, begins to speak.

John talks about our commonalities and our differences as a rapidly growing yoga community, addressing how we can expand and grow while maintaining our authenticity. We explore this idea of expansion from our own individual centers through asana and meditation throughout the rest of the day. To expand as a centered community we must do the exact same thing individually, cultivating our own strengths and particularities within a greater context.

 John Friend speaks at the Anusara® Certified Teachers' Gathering

The particular form or iteration of a pose that is efficacious for the person on the mat next to yours is not necessarily what best suits your own body and way of moving. John always speaks of our “optimal blueprint”, meaning that which is optimal for each person based on their own individual body, mind, and heart. In other words, don’t make trikonasana (triangle pose) look like the one you see on the poster, but use your knowledge of who you are, where you are coming from, and what your capacities are in order to move into your own optimal trikonasana. The pose is a set of parameters like an equation. You are the variable.  So in the ever-shifting variable of you, where does the pose reside?

The more deeply we cultivate our own individual gifts, the better able we are to grow in an optimal manner – we become richer, more fluent in the physical, verbal, and spiritual articulation of our own selves. The best we can offer to our community and to the world is the most refined, substantial aspect of who we are. 

The Beauty of Language, Yoga, and Paris

Double Self-Portrait with Flowers, 2008

Language connects. Movement connects. At the heart of any yoga practice is the notion of unity, connectivity. We are upstairs at a dance studio in the 11th arrondissement  in Paris – around us are the sounds of various practices happening in the building – the clattering of shoes in the hallway, the drumming from the African dance class coming through the open windows from across the courtyard, faint conversations from the stairwell and the studios around us.  Three of us, representing Spain, Portugal, and the U.S. are assisting my friend Sianna Sherman with her annual Paris Anusara workshop.

Yoga mats carpet the studio floor in a grid. The students stand up, moving from our seated meditation at the front of the room back to their mats to begin the practice. Voices chat and exchange information in French, English, Spanish, Portugese, Swedish, and Italian, and a hybrid patois emerges. The murmur of the French translator serves as a backdrop, but overall, he necessity of communication becomes more significant than the perfect structure of any specific grammatical system. Everyone develops their own way of speaking to their neighbors as the students assist each other in handstand, gesturing and modeling with their bodies when words fail. There are moments of depth and intensity and others of absolute hilarity as words are mixed up and terms are translated.

Paris yogis lunge & twist

Bodies shape the space around them – language delineates this from that – terminology designates a pose or an alignment instruction – hands on bodies adjust and move to offer people a deeper sense of connectivity and communication within their own bodies and minds. There is a sense of oneness and unity, but there is also clear diversity and uniqueness. The differences offer contrast, which enables us to recognize beauty in its myriad individual forms: an undulating ocean of particularities.

Sianna Sherman & Jason Nemer in Paris

Sianna tells a story of the Hindu gods Sita and Ram, who always long for each other, for connection. They are simultaneously distinct and united, and are often referred to as SitaRam - one word. When we practice yoga or anything that we love, we are affirming connection, creating unity, either within our own bodies and minds or with someone or something outside of ourselves.  In yoga we use language to designate a pose. We use language to refine the alignment of the pose. Then the pose communicates back to our bodies and reverberates within our MindBody. We foster unity through language – the language of words and the language of the body.