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.