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.

The Beauty of Touch – Visiting Amma

First you wait in line on 34^th Street for a while, with an assortment of yoga teachers, Indian families, and assorted devotees in the 90° evening heat. Then you enter the Manhattan Center, taking a paper number, like at a deli counter, and move through the marketplace, distracted by the stacks of brightly-colored scarves, bronze Ganeshas and Lakshmis, books, cds, photos and essential oils. Somewhere beyond the market, there is rhythmic music and chanting which floats up through the space. Peering over the crowd, you can clearly see a plump, radiant-looking woman seated onstage under bright lights, surrounded by white-clad assistants and a long line of people.

Amma, who is known as a living saint, gives out hugs. She is highly respected for her addresses to the United Nations and her extensive charities that feed, clothe, and educate the poor, but she is most famous for the way in which she gives darshan, or blessings, in the form of an embrace. Amma has hugged over 25 million people all over the world. Sometimes she does this for more than 18 hours straight. This sounds unusual, but if you remember that touch, offered lovingly, is essential to human happiness, the meaning of the experience shifts. Babies deprived of touch suffer developmental problems. Pets are brought into nursing homes so that the elderly can have physical touch and affection in their lives. When we are massaged or have bodywork done, we often have an emotional response. Amma offers touch as a gift and as a lesson.

So what is the experience like? Her assistants line you up, wipe your face, ask you to remove earrings or glasses, then bring you forward into her arms. You are enveloped in her embrace. She smells good, like jasmine maybe. She chants a mantra in your ear, and then releases you, smiling, placing flower petals and a Hershey’s kiss in your palm, as the next person in line is guided into her arms.

You feel either calm or emotional, happy or released, a little spaced out and meditative. Maybe you go downstairs and eat a dosa or drink some of the fragrant chai, basking in the bhavana or vibe. Last year, sometime between midnight and dawn, hip-hop pioneer Doug E. Fresh, radiantly energized from Amma’s darshan, stood up and gave a 20 minute impromptu performance, freestyling and beatboxing his way into everybody’s heart. No one around me had any idea who he was, but still, he pulled the entire crowd up from their meditations and onto their feet, ecstatically clapping and participating in a call-and-response.

Touch does more than activate our pleasure sensors. It develops our brains and our awareness. It offers solace, which in turn creates connection and community. Think about this: How and when do you offer physical touch to the people in your life? What is the quality of your touch – even of your hand touching someone’s arm to tell them something? And most importantly, what message does your touch convey?

The Beauty of Body Art

 Marina Abramović performing Rhythm 0, 1974

Honey, a knife, feathers, grapes, a bullet, a gun, a rose, a whip. In 1974, artist Marina Abramović placed objects that could give both pleasure and pain on a table in an art gallery, and invited the general public to use them upon her as they wished. After 6 hours, she walked out half-naked, covered with honey and blood. The piece was over.  She presented her body as a canvas – a medium on which people expressed their impulses and desires.

Our body is our canvas – one of our primary means of self-expression. We clean it, sculpt it, feed it, starve it, push it to its muscular and energetic limits. We adorn it with clothing, cosmetics, jewelry, tattoos and piercings. We use it to dance, to celebrate, to experience pleasure and pain. We use it to communicate in a way inaccessible through words.

The purpose of movement can be practical: the cause and effect of exercise and diet. But movement can also be aesthetic: as ecstatic as a victory lap or as haunting as a Pina Bausch dance. Some feats of the body push beyond mere functionality to create beauty, grace, artistry. Abramović’s work might be read as more gritty and disturbing than beautiful, but it challenges us to contemplate our own bodies and their relationship to the world around them, so it is aesthetically provocative, and conceptually beautiful.

Think about this: How can we create meaning with and through our bodies? How can we elevate the quality of our movement so that it becomes art?

 Marina Abramović sits for 700 hours in eye-to-eye meditation with members of the general public, MoMA 2010

The Beauty of Dynamic Movement

(via tibchris)

Should I practice yoga or should I catch up on my sleep? Should I spend the afternoon drawing in my studio or should I clean my apartment? Should I cook a healthy dinner or order take-out, spending that saved time checking emails? Depending on my choice, I’ll end up more energized, organized, physically gratified, or creatively fulfilled.

Given the essential nature of all of these activities in my life, how do I prioritize? Most of the creative people I know bump up against this question on a daily basis, because we are almost never not working. We are in constant motion, the world around us is in a state of constant motion, and the only fixed thing, ironically, is movement.

So we need to begin the answer with the assumption that in a dynamically moving environment, things won’t slow down and it is simply a matter of figuring out where to step in so that you collaborate with time to move forward with it. When this happens, we call it being in the flow, whether it happens while running, dancing, writing, singing, drawing, cooking, and so on.

So first ask yourself: What is essential to my well-being?

On the most basic level this should include adequate sleep, good food, and exercise in whatever form inspires you. Your physical well-being should be cared for in order for you to address anything else.

And then ask: What offers me security and stability?

Without the basic needs of home and income tended to, all movement becomes frenetic, desperate, more about surviving than about living.

And finally ask yourself: What gives you pleasure?

Find the daily things that make your life into art instead of a cycle of obligation and routine. This depends more upon your perspective than upon the actual events of your day. If you are fortunate enough to love what you do OR to be able to bring love to what you do, the sweetness of life waits inside the smallest action, gesture, or event of your day. Step into your daily life by infusing it with your best intention and your most skillful artistry.

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.