Leaving Anusara.

         

This has been the longest time I have gone without publishing a piece of writing in over two years. I kept trying to write this piece and that piece, and frankly, I have  pages of fabulously rich notes, scribbles, and thoughts to play with at some point. What has prevented me from drawing them coherently into an interesting piece of writing has been the bottom falling out of a central component of my life, namely Anusara Yoga. If you’re reading this, you know the rough outline of what has happened or perhaps you know the gritty details or the hints and shadows of them. In any case, every time I attempted to develop a piece of writing for the past few weeks, it felt forced, stilted, beside the point.

I realized tonight, as I wrote my resignation letter, that this would be a purging of blocked words, a letting go of things so that I could clear the way for new words to come, new ways of thinking to coalesce. And as I type this now, I feel relieved, renewed. I am creating instead of leaving, forming instead of dissolving. I’m entering the upswing of a new cycle.

The following is my letter to my community. Some people will like that I published it here and others will not. I wrote a piece here last year in which I spoke about the need to smash apart the old to begin again, and so this is what I’ve done. This is the way I need to deal with it to feel complete. Putting something into words makes it feel real to me. It seals the commitment. To those of you I love who are staying and those I love who have left, I hope it’s ok with you all. It’s the best I have to offer at the moment.

Chidambaram OM

Dear Friends,
This evening I came to a calm, yet profoundly sad decision to end my business affiliation with Anusara Yoga. This has been a painful process for me, involving the same anxiety, sleeplessness, and tears that so many of you are also experiencing. I love our system of asana and believe it to be the most elegant and intelligent one out there. I deeply love and admire our community as well, and for over ten years now I have been in a continual state of wonderment over the ocean of talent, intellect, and creativity that I have encountered in Anusara teachers and students. I cannot imagine my life without it and without all of you.

Furthermore, and the toughest point in all of this, is that I truly love, admire, and respect John. He has been supportive of me in many ways, and his teaching has helped me to heal when I was going through a couple of tough times. He has changed my life for the better. I am amazed at what he created, and I am forever grateful.

After several days of emotional turmoil, I realized that I was resisting leaving because of my deep love for the practice and for our community. The problem was, I had fallen out of love with the organization. Did you ever end a relationship because you and the other person were playing with different rulebooks? This is what I’m talking about. And this is why I have to leave.

I would like to be very clear. My resignation is a painful and carefully thought-out decision. It is a decision whose roots are in thoughts, feelings, and experiences that I’ve had over a few years. The events and revelations of the past couple of weeks have sealed it, but that tiny seed of thought indicating my eventual departure has been gestating for a while.

I pulled away from the initial cascade of resignations that began Sunday, feeling that I did not want to make a major life decision quickly, simply because so many of my close friends had left. What is necessary for me in any major life event is to get quiet, to make sure that I am in a thoughtful and grounded place, and to act from that place with informed certainty. I wrote, I meditated, I taught, I spoke with friends and family, and I’m in that place right now.

My reasons for leaving are rooted in my belief that an organization cannot successfully and healthily exist when one person has control over so many. I have felt like a bit of an outlier in the past few years because I have resisted some of Anusara’s philosophical underpinnings, specifically the Shiva-Shakti Primer. I have also disagreed with some of its financial initiatives, such as the 10% dues we are asked to pay on yoga products, when so many of us can barely make a living.

I have not felt empowered to publicly contest either of these policies without potentially damaging my career within Anusara, Inc., and that is a huge problem. I am a person who once spent six months on a picket line at the Museum of Modern Art fighting for my rights, and for me to feel, at this point in my life, that I can’t voice my dissent is not healthy. A silently fuming person is not the person who I wish to be. A person who says one thing and then does another is also not who I want to be. I believe in boundaries but I don’t believe in constraints. There is a difference. In addition, I feel that there has been a culture of fear and secrecy that is the opposite of the transparency I embrace. There are far too many moments for me to cite here, but I welcome anyone’s questions for clarification. This is about my personal integrity and about how I want to move through the world.
I am still a certified Anusara Yoga teacher, although I will be relinquishing my license. I will fulfill the teaching commitments that I have planned in the next few months that offer credit hours to those attending.

There is no other style of asana I wish to teach. I firmly believe that this brilliant alignment system is the best there is out there. I will continue to teach exactly how I teach right now. I will honor all that I have learned from John and from everyone, both teachers and students, who have been with me through this wild and beautiful ride. I love you all. Thank you. I’ll see you on the other side.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.
- Rumi

With Love and Gratitude,
Susanna

My Decade of Beauty – Building the Palace Within.

Douglas with the Dikshitar Priests during the Homa, Chidambaram, Dec 2010 - photo Frank Andolino

How deeply do you wish to participate in your life?

To my teacher Douglas Brooks

Ten years ago today I sat in a room with 26 other people and listened as you said to us: You are sufficient unto yourself. Everything you truly need is present. The question is: How deeply do you wish to participate in your life?

This was day one of my Anusara Yoga Teacher Training, and I could say that I didn’t know then how much my life would change, which might make for a better story or at least build more drama for a later moment of epiphany, but the reality is that I did realize in this moment that my life had just shifted. I had no idea of what was to come, but I knew that I had stepped into something seismically upending.

My Eka Pada Koundinyasana by the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris, July 2011

What I did not know was that throughout the next decade I would begin to shift my identity away from the Susanna whose life revolved around the art world, organizing my weekly schedule around openings in Chelsea and my annual schedule around my residencies and exhibitions. I did not imagine that I would walk away from a highly coveted position at MoMA in order to teach yoga classes in the East Village and Soho, then in Paris and in Rome. At that point I could not have pictured myself meditating in a temple in South India and wanting to be nowhere other than exactly where I was. This paradigm-shifting moment ten years ago was not something that I had consciously sought out, yet clearly, beneath the surface, I had cultivated an internal space for it to take root and blossom. And I recognized it when it happened – that’s the thing.

Dancing on the steps of Palani Temple, Dec 2010

At this time last year I was returning from pilgrimage in Tamil Nadu with you. In an article I wrote upon my return, I proposed this: Make a pilgrimage within yourself. Treat this year like a journey. Visit every place you can find that resides within you. And then honor your experience, regardless of what you find along the way.

Dikshitars Priests at our Rudra Homa, Chidambaram, Dec 2010 - photo Frank Andolino

I had just moved through the humid and darkly ecstatic interiors of Tiruchendur. I had climbed past waves of camphor smoke, pressing the folds of my sari against my leg to mount the hundreds of steps to the top of Palani. I had woken up day after day before dawn in anticipation of the cacophonous temple music that preceded each sunrise, then stained the soles of my feet red with the spilled kumkum at Tillai Kali Amman Temple. I had craned my neck toward the Cit Saba in Chidambaram, my body sweat-soaked and immobilized by so many other bodies, all of us yearning for a glimpse of the dancer’s face gleaming behind the flames of the arathi, and pressing against the grate to see the rahasya as the Dikshitar priests drew open the curtain.

The external experience merged with my internal process, which was sometimes ferociously passionate, and at other times sweetly bewildering. I have written about all this and more, but the sensory experience still inhabits me so thoroughly that I soften my eyes and I am there with you now as I write these words.

During the Homa, Chidambaram, Dec 2010 - photo Frank Andolino

I have another teacher who showed me how people like me, whose minds are ever moving, ever flickering, sending off sparks of energy in all directions, can build palaces within ourselves with rooms upon rooms in which to meditate. In those rooms I can arrange things to create particular environments. Then I can go back and change it all around, redecorate to structure my meditations and to expand them. I have different rooms for different purposes and the content of the rooms gets rearranged when it suits me. Everywhere I’ve ever been and everything I’ve ever done resides in this inner landscape, my interior palace. This is the site on which I broke ground that day ten years ago. Although I was never not building it, that day was when I cut the ribbon and walked in. That was the day I began to lay claim to the palace within.

Roof of the Cit Saba (Hall of Consciousness), Chidambaram, Dec 2010 - photo Frank Andolino

I have already written that once you have been to Chidambaram, the temple takes up residence within you. And so it has. My friend Harrison Williams told me a couple of days ago that he dreamt of the temple, walking endlessly through its elaborate corridors. He remembered, with precision, where certain stones were cracked and loose and he could feel them beneath the soles of his feet in his dream as he made his way through, pausing to offer mantra and mudra at Ganesh, then Subrahmanya, at Dakshina Moorthi, and at the feet of Nataraja, just as you showed us.

Chidambaram Nataraja Temple Corridor, Dec 2010 - photo Frank Andolino

You have told us how in the north, the traditions tend to revolve around Tirtha – a place such as a river or mountain as a site of pilgrimage, whereas the southern traditions invite us to the temple to pay homage and to receive Darshan, the exchange of glances between the deity and ourselves. Inside of me I have temples, I have palaces, I have forests and fields. As I traverse my inner landscape, I wander across dry clear plains, rest in dense green thickets, and wind my way through the labyrinthine temples that have assembled themselves within me.

Tirukalakundram-view while walking up to the temple, 2010

There are so many places to pause, so many reasons to bow down. Nothing has become simple and streamlined in my creative and spiritual practices. On the contrary, everything has become infinitely more complex and so wildly beautiful. This is our tradition, which utterly suits me. And for this, on our tenth anniversary of study together, Douglas, I thank you again and again and again.

Satsang with Douglas Brooks, Swamimalai Dec 2008

Special thanks to Frank Andolino for the his beautiful photos of our time in Chidambaram.

My Double Life (or…Doing the Yoga of Art)

My Hummingbird Sky installation at Studio Salon – With Eastern Eyes  Nov 2011

"So you're not going to make art any more? You're just going to do yoga?"

I said something out loud about myself the other night that surprised me. It wasn’t that I was unaware of its truth, but the fact that I articulated it is as precisely and as forcefully as I did was somewhat arresting. I was perched on a stool at an art opening just in front of an installation of mine that ran along the side of a wall. I had been included in an exhibition called Studio Salon – With Eastern Eyes in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Four of us had work in the exhibition and I was speaking with another one of the artists who, like me, had spent time in India and who combined her life as an artist with her life as a yogi. This was clearly reflected in our work and we immediately found that we had volumes to talk about.

We were discussing the art world and I was remarking upon the ways in which my relationship to it had changed since I had become a yoga teacher. I said, At this point, my artwork serves my yoga. I paused and looked at those words hovering in the space between us, startled that I had said them out loud. And then the funniest thing happened – some taut internal sensation gave way, and I felt utterly happy.

My Pink Victorine installation at  Studio Salon – With Eastern Eyes  Nov 2011

What I had said was some sort of art world treason. Most people in the art world don’t even want to hear that you have a day job. You are supposed to do whatever it takes to make your work and the work is the point. But any job you hold is supposed to be disposable, as opposed to a career or a lifestyle choice. Artists work as art movers, as waiters, as temps. There’s a good reason for this since all of these jobs involve marketable skills, but minimal commitment. You can take off for a residency or an exhibition in another city, knowing that you can find a new position when you return. Your job is supposed to serve your work.

Art is something like a religion involving sacrifice and single-mindedness. This works for many artists, and it functioned well for me for many years. But at a certain point in time, in the midst of my deepening involvement in yoga, this way of being and thinking ceased to sit comfortably for me, and somewhere in there a significant shift happened.

MoMA Sculpture Garden Garudasana

I have spent years trying to keep my yoga life and my art world life separate. I have told myself the story that the art world doesn’t want to have anything to do with my yoga life for a long time, and that I somehow wouldn’t be taken seriously as an artist anymore if I revealed the depths of my commitment to yoga. The link to the yoga part of my website is slightly hidden in my belief that the yogis will happily dig through the artwork to find it, but that it’s probably best if the art world doesn’t see it.

And frankly, there are good reasons why I’ve nurtured this separation (or dodged the connection), namely because this assumption of mine has proven art world conversation after art world conversation to be accurate, and also because there’s a lot of terrible yoga-driven art out there. I have huge issues with the rainbow-y aesthetic and low-end psychedelia of much of the art I see in the yoga world. It makes me cringe.

In front of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (the best painting ever)

I spent years lecturing and writing for the Museum of Modern Art, and unabashedly still worship at the altar of Picasso. I made highly cerebral and conceptual work for years until yoga smoothed its brittle edges and filled it with both color and a greater physicality. I continue to be a tough critic of art that I see in Chelsea Galleries and can analyze in seconds what concepts artists are exploring, while being wildly over-opinionated about whether or not it seems to be working.

For the most part, the art world seems to find it interesting and vaguely provocative that I can organize my body parts into interesting shapes and patterns, and certain people ask my advice about beginning a yoga practice, but a number of my friends continue to be perplexed about the extent of my involvement in it. I was asked just a couple of years ago by a good friend, So you’re not going to make art any more? You’re just going to do yoga? I was taken aback and scrambled uncomfortably to explain that no, this was not the case AT ALL. But now if someone said that to me, I would just shrug it off, because beneath the question is a belief system that is simply different from mine. How do you debate in two different languages? Additionally, I’m so deeply in love with my yoga practice that I simply don’t care what people think about it anymore.

Puja with Dakshina Moorthi - with Douglas Brooks, July 2011

So how does my artwork serve my yoga? First of all, what needs saying is that yoga for me is far more than a physical practice. In addition to asana, my philosophical studies, meditation, pranayama, mantra, and mudra practices are huge parts of my daily life. The ideas that I explore and encounter in my studies of Hindu Tantra are mind-bendingly complex and can be applied to every conceivable aspect of my life. They are fascinating. And moving. And beautiful. And aesthetically ecstatic.

Inner Landscape #6 - one of my drawings

It is from this place of delighted inquiry and close attention that I make art now. This is how the art serves the yoga. The yoga is the thing that connects every aspect of my life – every breath, every gesture, every moment, every creative impulse, every line inscribed on paper, every delineated form. When I create from this place, I offer my best self. Everything that I am making right now is emerging from a fullness that was not previously realized or acknowledged, but now constitutes my center. And for that reason, I am making the best work of my life.

Hummingbird Sky Bakasana at Studio Salon – With Eastern Eyes  Nov 2011

Looking for God on the 6 Train

Waiting for the Train, Morning, NYC

 “If you are regular in your practice, you will shift the field”  – John Friend

I used to read like crazy on the subway. I would almost panic if, after procuring a seat, I opened my bag to find that I had left my New Yorker Magazine or my book at home (Was it on the table where I had inhaled my breakfast?  Did I toss it on the chair by the door when I put on my coat?).

But one day I became a yoga teacher and something shifted. Suddenly I had so much to do, so many things to think about, and so many practices to implement. I no longer had the desire to read on the subway, which was really very strange because I love to read. I crave books like food. For years I have shared a joke with my similarly-inclined friends about how I want to take a sabbatical from my life so that I can spend a year doing nothing but reading. Do they give grants for that?

Some of my Bookshelves

I remember my best childhood friend Kristen musing, It’s so unfair, they just keep writing and writing – we can never catch up. It was pretty funny, but there was an anxious passion beneath what she said – a desire to know as much as we could know and to travel down every possible avenue of beauty and creativity available to us. She ended up working in film in LA and I found myself in the NYC art world, supporting myself as an artist by commuting to the far reaches of every borough lecturing about art in the public school systems on behalf of MoMA. This brings me back to the whole subway situation.

Suddenly I wanted to be more fully in the experience I was having at the moment that it was occurring. I wanted to connect with what was going on around me – not that I wanted to engage in conversations with strangers, but I wanted to listen more and escape less. I wanted to soften to the richness of each moment and recognize the interesting-ness of everything. I wanted to become more sensitive, more aware, more engaged and entertained by the world. And the more I did it, the better it became.

Open 6-Train Doors

I no longer feared the unbearable boredom of the flickering lights, the jockeying for seats, the banality of the beige-yellow-orange subway seats or the clacking of the machinery. I was interested in it all. I admired the clean lines of the stainless steel doors. I wondered why the woman across from me tapped her foot so anxiously and whether the workmen in their dusty clothes were traveling to their construction site or headed home. I found myself listening for mantras in the patterns of sound – the screeching and clattering – the voices – the iPod music overflow – the newspapers – the multilingual conversations. There were so many stories, emotions, plans, and thoughts packed into a small space. Amazing.

There was this practice that I began to do, because, despite my new interest in my immediate commuter reality, its shoving, noise, and dirt still really got to me: people taking up precious subway real estate with their mounds of bags or their widely-spread knees, their dripping umbrellas, their open-air coughing…So I slowly began, one by one, to look for god in every person in my vicinity.

6-Train Rush Hour

Maybe I would choose the angry guy who crammed me into the corner with his backpack in my face – or the self-absorbed teen eating a pungent slice of pizza and dropping greasy napkins on the floor. I would take them in and then soften. I would think, someone loves this person. This person has aspirations, things they feel passionately about, personal tragedies and victories that I cannot imagine, yet are as significant as my own. And I could see these things in their faces, their postures, making me feel tender toward humanity. I shifted the field.

John Friend in NJ Oct 2011

I spent last weekend with my teacher John Friend. He alluded to that “feeling in the heart when a friend does something that reminds you of god,” and I had this flash of association – of the almost physical feeling of connectivity to the world around me when I regularly did my subway practice. John said that one of the first things his teacher Gurumayi said to him was, “See god in each other.” It was storming outside as he spoke about this, and he invited us to see our experience of the world like the storm – as having a layer of disorder or an appearance of chaos, but if you backed off just enough to see the individual raindrops, there was deep order and amazing beauty.

These days I do most of my reading in the afternoon or evening. Sometimes I can’t wait to get home and read my book. And when I do bring one with me on the train, I usually find that it rests undisturbed in my bag, waiting for a more settled reading time. I often skim through my emails or briefly peruse the NY Times headlines, but sometimes I stop myself, click off my phone, slide it into my bag, and choose to reenter that place of wonder at the world, which, since the moment I discovered it, has been continually available to me.

Subway Floor Cosmos

Saying Thank You - A Love Letter To My Teachers

 

Nataraja, Bristol, NY, July 2011 

Yes...That. I am that. That I am.

My Two Teachers
I have many teachers, but the two who are really the great teachers of my life are the ones who, when I first heard them speak, seemed to be voicing the contents of my brain. If you have had this experience, you know exactly what I am talking about. You are surprised, and think – wait – how did you…? but I…  and then – yes and yes again. Then the surprise gives way to a magnetic compulsion that makes you want to scrunch your chair or yoga blanket or whatever you happen to be perched on …right…up…close.

It makes you want to travel around the world to study with them and precipitates dramatic shifts in how you order your time and with whom you wish to spend it. Your initial amazement and delight pool into a profound sense of gratitude for this glimpse into the mysterious synchronicity of things. Resonance and Recognition. This is what happened when I met my teachers John Friend and Douglas Brooks.

To Backtrack for a Moment – Paris and Proust
I keep thinking about the first time I read Proust. I was studying in Paris and as I tackled the dense text, I suddenly realized that I was being moved by the quality of the language and by the beauty of the prose. For the first time reading in French – instead of translating in my head, instead of it being about comprehension – I had moved into a place of profound aesthetic appreciation. That was something.

The writing seemed strangely familiar. As I read, it felt as if someone had transcribed the phrases and ideas lining the inside of my brain. I was seeing myself reflected in his words – not just things I had thought about, but patterns of thought – an underlying structure that said – That is me! The differences between myself and a neurotic French writer born in 1871, who closeted himself in a silent cork-lined room so that he could write all 3000-some pages of his book were evident. Yet, the startling sense of recognition triggered a sensation of deep connectivity to the world around me, which is actually what he was writing about. And this experience is what I’m now talking about.

Post-practice with John Friend - Anusara Grand Circle-Wanderlust, VT, June 2011

On Recognition and Moving through Things
Many years later, I was going through a challenging period in my life – I had lost 3 people I cared about in 3 months in unrelated violent deaths. I was toughing it out, trying to be there for other people while I just barely kept it together myself. I felt as if I was held in place by lots of little overlapping pieces of psychic tape and messes of determined glue – a shifting collection of pieces.

I had been studying with John Friend for about 5 years, and had already had the above-mentioned recognition experience with him. He was in town teaching a series of workshops in Soho. Usually when I studied with John, I was like an excited puppy  – exponentially more bouncy and chatty than I normally am. This time I was in a place where I just wanted to find some peace – to stop grinding my teeth for a few hours and feel happy again. We put down our mats and gathered toward the front of the room.

As John began to speak, something in the tone of his voice shifted something for me, and my carefully taped together self began to come unstuck. I spent most of the morning crying and sweating in the bathroom, finally managing to fit in about 30 sniffling minutes of practice. He came over to me immediately at the break and I recall spilling some incoherent mess about what I was dealing with, as he took it in and held that space for me.

Exhausted, I went back to my apartment, showered, scrubbed everything off of myself, and when I returned for the afternoon session, I was on the other side of it – clear, clean, and actually slightly happy for the first time in months. The tone of recognition and acceptance within his voice had triggered a profound alchemical shift within me. He had invited me more deeply into a particular part of myself so that I could process what I needed to move through.

Great teachers speak to you from where you are. They don’t try to yank or push or pull you into where they want you to be. They remind you to move into the fullness of your experience, to embrace whatever rasa, or flavor of experience, you are in so that you can best figure out how to align with your current reality.

With Douglas Brooks - Swamimalai Subrahmanya Temple, Dec 2010, photo-Diane Stone

On Reflection and Thatness
I was in upstate New York studying with Douglas this past week. Near the beginning of a meditation practice that Douglas was guiding, there was a moment near the beginning when one thanks one’s teachers. He let us know that this was what he was doing and that we were welcome to do the same.

Look way back – he suggested – go to 2^nd grade. I decided to really go for it, and it was amazing how many people I genuinely wanted to thank. I tried to pare it down to my parents, my high school English and Art teachers, my college Art History professor, several of my Anusara mentors, and Douglas and John. But then I thought about all of my teachers’ teachers, and that kept multiplying as well – lines and lines of them extending in every direction. It was endless.

I met Douglas when he was invited by Amy Ippoliti to kick off our Anusara® Teacher Training in January 2002. I have extremely vivid memories of being floored at every single thing he said. It was brilliant. And totally new. And yet utterly familiar. To conclude one evening, we were asked to give one word or phrase summarizing our experience. People said, inspired – intrigued – exhausted – perplexed – blown away, and more.  The one thing that I could truly say, was Yes…THAT. I am that. That I am.

You know in a minute flat when someone is going to be a great teacher in your life. You can learn from many, but the great ones – that is always clear. And there it was again and again, and here it still is again and again: the vimarsha shakti, which can be loosely defined as the energy of you being reflected back to you. Being around my teachers makes me a better person because of this endless mirroring and self-reflection, this sense of recognition, the inescapable resonance, the sweet invitation to that.

Jet-lagged but happy - with Douglas - Tirukalakundram Vedhagirishwar Hill Temple, Dec 2010

Saying Thank You
I was away traveling for much of this summer – Vermont-India-Paris–Boston-upstate NY, and had intended to write something like this for Gurupurnima, the traditional time of year to honor one’s teachers, so this is slightly late. But I honestly think about my teachers every day, which somehow blended with the nostalgia or longing that kicks in for me at the end of summer and the fading august light, so I felt compelled to write this belated thank-you note.

So here it goes  – thank you to Mom and Dad for being the most ridiculously fabulous parents anyone could wish for, to my sister Jen for being a model of integrity, thank you to my academic teachers who believed in my creativity and my skills – thank you to my yoga mentors and inspirations – Sianna Sherman, Elena Brower Amy Ippoliti, Lois Nesbitt, Vishali Varga, Ellen Saltonstall, and Sue Elkind. You have all given me so much.

And thank you John. Thank you Douglas. I thank you all for offering me myself.

With John - Anusara Grand Circle, VT June 2011

Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. ~ Marcel Proust

Swollen With Light

John Friend-Anusara Grand Circle, Wanderlust, photo by Elena Brower

Notes from the Anusara Grand Circle - Wanderlust

Swollen with light ~ John Friend
I have just lowered down from another backbend and am staring up at the taut curves of an enormous white tent. My teacher, John Friend, has been talking about the burgeoning quality of the light at this time of year, the Summer Solstice. One little fragment of his talk still resonates: the idea of being “swollen with light.”  For some reason, this particular phrase delights me. There are a few pregnant women practicing and I imagine them light-filled, their bellies glowing like fireflies.

Pulsation
If you want to learn about the universe, get very quiet. Watch your breath as it moves through your body, initiating your inhale like you are pouring a glass of water. Fill the pelvis – the waist – the ribcage – the shoulders. Everything expands. Now pour out your exhale top to bottom.  What you just felt in your body is what happens in every aspect of nature, whether we choose to pay attention to it or not. The Sanskrit word for pulsation is Spanda. The passage of your breath. The pulse of your heart. The rise and fall of a day. The trajectory of a life.  The structure of a yoga class from the beginning invocation to savasana. Expand to contract. Contract to expand. Spanda.

Intentionality
Intention is an interesting thing in that it can be difficult to discern productive determination from needless grasping. Think about not trying to be like X, but rather, to be X. In this way, as John Friend said this morning, you ”put your will in the flow of the bigger will…then all we’re doing is lining up.” If you align so deeply with your desire, you become it. If you see your desire as a part of you, as opposed to something outside of you, the longing and the longed for become a unified dynamic: two parts of a whole, the question and its answer.

photo by Elena Brower

Dwelling in the wonder of not knowing ~ Hareesh Wallis
All good answers give birth to further questions, like sparks cascading from a firework. If we see an answer as a directional indicator rather than as an end, our worlds become vast skies lit up with the sparks and patterns of our sensibilities. We create our own personal constellations of questions, our own configurations of limitless light. “We dwell,” as Hareesh Wallis said, “in the wonder of not knowing.”

Raising the resonance ~ Elena Brower
Sometimes when I teach a class I feel it so acutely within my body that it seems as if I have actually moved through the entire physical practice. Sometimes when I assist a class I have the same experience. I opted to assist my friend Elena Brower today instead of practicing. The verbal instructions, the manual assists, and the physical practice formed a triangle of communication in which what was said, heard, and enacted upon “raised the resonance” of the experience. As Elena spoke of living ever-more fully within our individual choices and lives, I felt the words permeate my skin, soften my tired muscles, and open into a dense honeyed internal place. We finished in meditation, word, body, and intention melded into a gently glowing intensity.

photo by Elena Brower

We see all places as places of pilgrimage ~ Bill Mahony
Sometimes we journey to find a sense of ourselves. The strangeness of a different context can illuminate our particular qualities and habits. We leave home to come more profoundly home, which is why we’re all here. Bill Mahoney spoke about seeing every place in our lives as a place of pilgrimage. In this context, a place can be an event, a relationship, our connection to the world, or our sense of self. If we treat these “places” as sacred, our world becomes one in which every observation and interaction becomes rich with meaning and worthy of reverence. Our world becomes more substantial, our lives become a moving prayer.

Eversomuch More-So

Sianna Sherman and Douglas Brooks - Paris, May 2011

Yoga is virtuosity in becoming yourself
~ Douglas Brooks

There was a story I loved when I was little called Ever So Much More So. The story, written by Robert McCloskey, revolves around a stranger who comes to town selling shakers full of a mysterious product invisible to the eye and without smell or taste.  Everything sprinkled with it seems to become more essentially itself. The name of the product is Eversomuch More-So.  The people of the town shake it over everything, and are amazed to find that their water gets wetter, a squeaky spring becomes squeakier, and people’s individual characteristics such as a stutter or a tendency toward pomposity become more pronounced. Everything touched by Eversomuch More-So becomes its heightened self.

Two curious boys finally open the product’s container, which appears to be empty. Of course the stranger is long-gone, and the townspeople wonder if they have been swindled, but one older man pours it over the earth, and celebrates as the grass becomes greener, the birds sing more clearly, and the world becomes more profoundly itself in every way. So is it suggestion or is it real? The story ends ambiguously, leaving us wondering: how does something become eversomuch more itself?

I spent last week in the company of two of my favorite people –Douglas Brooks and Sianna Sherman – both of whom have distinct and powerful voices. I was assisting Sianna with her Paris Anusara teacher training, which included people from 17 different countries. The range of cultures, languages, and life experiences was impressive. I listened and gave feedback as everyone brought their particular sensibilities to the conversation, refining the structure and the poetry of their teaching.

Speaking to the group one night, Douglas stated: Yoga is virtuosity in becoming yourself. For yoga teachers in the process of honing their skills, this was particularly meaningful – essential, actually. If you parrot another teacher or take on a persona, your lack of authenticity will be evident.

But virtuosity in becoming yourself is about far more than teaching asana. This is about how you want to be in the world.  This is about gazing inside to recognize that you are the sum of your own individual particularities, and that no one else can speak from your experience, your voice.

Live fully in your strengths and vulnerabilities to sing the song of you. When your song comes from this place, it moves people. You have become eversomuch more-you. Your virtuosity becomes an opening, inviting others to sing their songs.

If you want fluency and depth in your life, you must cultivate a state in which you are always becoming more profoundly yourself. If you want to inspire people – to move people – to offer people a taste of their deepest selves, you have to step into your own virtuosity. Like attracts like. This is the yoga.


How can you invite your green to become greener, your water to become wetter?
How can you inspire your voice to arise from that fertile place of your identity?
How can you cultivate your virtuosity in becoming Eversomuch More-You?

The Beauty of Movement II

Still is still moving to me... ~ Willie Nelson

Definition: Wanderlust

a strong longing for or impulse toward wandering (Merriam-webster.com)
a strong, innate desire to rove or travel about (Dictionary.com)

About 15 years ago I spontaneously visited a friend in Colombia.

It was a particularly wet and miserable February in New York, and I was itching to be anywhere else. I called my friend Luis, and in a week was on a plane to Bogota.

We drove from the city two or three hours to some of the small towns surrounding it. Luis navigated rapidly along winding highways through the mountains, the damp high-altitude fog lifting to reveal trickling waterfalls along the sides of the mountains and explosively green foliage everywhere. Beyond the green in the lower altitudes, the mountains shone orangey-pink in the sun. We stopped by the side of the road, grabbed chunks of the mountain and crumbled it into a terracotta dust that stained our fingers.

At the time, many of the highways on which we drove were guerrilla-controlled, so speed was of the essence, as the guerrillas’ good humor in letting through the supply trucks and travelers’ cars vanished with the day’s diminishing light.

It was imperative that we arrive at our destination before the sun set. We drove through jungle, coffee country, arid towns famous for their clay work, and stayed in small colonial villages where the white walls around the central squares overflowed with bougainvillea, music and cooking smells. The diverse richness of it all was exhilarating. There was also a subtle but persistent edge of uneasiness lurking around the perimeter of daily life that, to my perception, compelled people toward a profound appreciation of the fleeting sweetness of the moment.  We decided that while I was there we should eat like crazy and dance every night. And so we did.

At the apex of our non-stop motion, I had a conversation with one of Luis’ friends who said that he did not leave Colombia much because he didn’t enjoy traveling—that he began to lose his sense of self when he was removed from his everyday surroundings.

This was a stark contrast to what Luis and I were experiencing. Inspired by our constant movement—walking, driving, dancing and eating, I expressed to him how passionately I love traveling; how I find calmness within the incessant movement. The strangeness of new places and experiences makes me acutely aware of my own habits and assumptions, which I find liberating. Movement offers me perspective. Perspective creates self-reflection. Self-reflection cultivates insight and empathy and so on.

Once you get a hit of the stillness held by movement and of movement‘s suspended stillness, no matter where you are, you carry the awareness of it with you. Multiple frames of a movie give us one flickering image. Stare at a still image for long enough and it seems to shift before your eyes. This is the pulsation of nature. In Anusara’s Tantric tradition we call the stillness Shiva and the movement Shakti. Stillness defines motion and motion stillness. We can’t conceptualize one without the other. The beauty is both in the difference and in the merging. We hold them in a continual play. I move. I stop. I pause. I wander.

For the first time this year, I decided to go to Wanderlust. It seemed ridiculous that I have not yet gone, given my love for travel and, of course, yoga. There are yoga teachers who wander all over the globe and there are others who stay put at their home studio. Both roles are valuable and I find myself somewhere in between. My travels make me a better teacher, but I also love the day-to-day relationships I have with my students. What seduced me about this particular Wanderlust is that it is on the East Coast, and is hosting the Anusara Grand Circle, which is the ultimate annual gathering for anyone who practices Anusara Yoga. So I get my fix of stillness—resting in the heart of my community—through my embrace of motion—picking up from my surroundings and leaping into a new experience.

From Wanderlust, I leave for India. From India, I fly to Paris. From Paris, back home to New York. I embrace the mirror that travel provides, holding up infinite reflections of my own identity. I bring back experiences, insights and new perspectives for my students. In August, I will rest, my stillness holding its whirling wandering history like a passionate pulse.

The Beauty of Alignment II

Once, in the town where Krishna lived, a venomous multi-headed serpent named Kaliya took up residence in the local river. Kaliya’s poison had polluted the water so thoroughly that any of the townspeople who went to take a drink, bathe, or even wash their clothing became sickened by its toxicity and died. The poison had begun to creep up the riverbanks, leaving a trail of dessicated grass and plants in its wake, and the cows eating the grass collapsed beneath the withered trees. Everyone was in a panic.

The young Krishna, realizing that he had to take action, leapt into the water, and as the stunned villagers watched, vanished into Kaliya’s thrashing, swirling, vortex at the center of the lake. They waited, fixated on the water’s surface. A few minutes went by in silence. Nothing. No bubbles. No ripples. No movement. The townspeople began to cry in despair. Krishna’s mother fainted and his father began to weep.

But then, in the midst of their tears, the townspeople heard a sudden splashing noise. As they lifted their heads, peering toward the river’s surface and pointing, a smiling Krishna began to rise up out of the water, balanced on one of Kaliya’s poisonous heads. Krishna began to play his flute and dance, hopping from hood to hood, as the dazed serpent slowly swayed, mesmerized by the rhythm. Subdued and remorseful, Kaliya apologized for his violent behavior, explaining that it was his nature, as a serpent, to be venomous. Krishna, acknowledging that it is difficult to control one’s nature, forgave him, requesting that Kaliya move out of the river and into the ocean, where his poison would be less damaging. And so he did.

Invite the story within. Kaliya is a thing out of place – a misalignment. A thing out of place can be toxic, but when placed properly, can be harmless or even advantageous. This is an essential tenet of yoga, and one that both of my teachers, Douglas Brooks and John Friend, emphasize. Douglas frequently points out that it’s called earth outside, but dirt inside. That stuff that looks so rich and fertile in your garden is simply a mess when it’s on your rug. One of John’s key concepts in Anusara Yoga is your Optimal Blueprint. The point of a pose is not to make it look like the version of it you saw on the poster, on the magazine cover, or even like the person practicing next to you. The point is to apply the alignment principles to yourself, building the pose from the inside out in a way that honors the particularities of your own body and lets your mind and heart sing. The point is knowing where to put things.

Alignment is a continual process of negotiation and renegotiation. Even when the waters of your everyday life seem still, there’s going to be something underneath – a thought, an incident - that will bubble up. And if it doesn’t emerge from the muck within it’s going to surprise you from riverbanks. The big question is: How are you going to align with the challenges? How will you choose to negotiate the vicissitudes of life so that your challenges lose their toxicity and take a more appropriate place in the landscape of you?

The Beauty of Desire

Morning Skies (II)

Desire is not a problem – it is our very nature. This is one of the first things that my teacher Dr. Douglas Brooks said when I met him nine years ago in the big kick-off weekend for my Anusara® Yoga Teacher Training. His statement continues to resonate as powerfully for me now as it did that first icy but exciting January day.

Desire is our nature. For me, this exuberantly exploded the popular trope that we are trapped and bound by desire - that we are mired in a cycle of always wanting more and that we can never be satisfied until we somehow free ourselves from that inclination. I listened and thought yes! The fact is that I enjoy my desire. I love that longing, that yearning, that delicious notion that there is always more to do, more to feel, more to accomplish, more to taste…and that my desire can take infinite forms, pointing the way toward a multiplicity of experiences and possibilities.

Desire is what gets me out of bed in the morning – the memory of how much I love that first flowery taste of my hot milky tea, that initial yawningly satisfying stretch of my morning Surya Namaskar, the promise of plans and conversations with friends, the excited wait for that satisfying press and scratch of pencil on paper as I draw. Desire is what motivates me, excites me, inspires me. Desire makes me care passionately about things and about people. I love that I can be moved to tears by a Picasso painting or a Fellini film or the taste of a distant hillside in a great glass of wine. I feel incredibly fortunate that I am so deeply connected to my desirous self that it repays me with joy on a daily basis.

I want to become ever more in touch with my desire. I want to step deeply into the flow of passion that moves through my everyday life. Join me: close your eyes, go inside for a moment, and reconnect to that glowing ember called desire that constitutes your very core.

The Goddess Who Pauses to Speak

Bagalamukhi

Pause for a split second. Now say what you wanted to say – clearly, concisely, and artfully. Within that tiny suspended moment, your breath shifts, your thoughts coalesce, your mind hovers between this and that, now and then, and finally chooses its self-expression. That moment contains a particular power. Its name is Bagalamukhi.

Bagalamukhi is the goddess who hovers just an inch above an nectar-filled ocean dotted with yellow lotuses, wrapped in a turmeric-colored sari and bathed in her own golden light. She is also called the crane-faced one, the length of her long neck showing that extended moment when the heart’s intention rises to the mouth and is spoken. In her right hand she holds a club and in her left, the tongue of a demon, reducing it to silence. For this reason she is sometimes called the paralyzer, freezing the demons of the mind and of speech. Her own silence accumulates power, so when she speaks, she says exactly what she means. She is that pause before your utterance that makes your words meaningful.

This is a practice of course – one that is not always easy and won’t always function every time you open your mouth, but as you cultivate the link between your mind and your speech, what you say begins to carry more weight and feels more authentic. Your articulations resonate more profoundly with the people around you and begin to create internal change as well, deepening your sense of who you are, where you stand in the world, and how you want to present yourself. When we run ourselves down or criticize others, our articulations are destructive. The more we speak destructively, the more we emanate negativity. Who wants to be around that?

Bagalamukhi is about pausing to cultivate your inner alignment so that what you put out into the world represents your best self. Words shape our thinking and ways of being in the world. As your lips are about to verbalize a thought or an opinion, call on that part of you that is Bagalamukhi, and in that hovering suspended moment, your intention coalesces into the gems of speech that adorn the ocean of your thoughts.

The Beauty of Habit and Ritual

At the Thiruvalamchuzhi Ganesh Temple, Tamil Nadu, Dec 28, 2010

This morning I made my tea, as I do most mornings, and sat down with it to think about what new habits and rituals I want to establish in the New Year. Our lives are filled with both rituals and habits, and it’s interesting to discern between the two. A habit is a recurring pattern of behavior, conscious or unconscious. A ritual is a symbolic action or behavior that marks an occasion or confers significance. The line delineating one from the other can be fairly blurry, but ritual can or should make meaning in your life. Preparing my tea and sitting to think is a habit that gives me pleasure, but it doesn’t necessarily have meaning beyond that satisfying moment. In contrast, here is an example of a ritual…

When I finish teaching a yoga class, I release my palms from prayer pose (Anjali Mudra), touch my left hand to my heart and my right fingertips to the ground. Release. Lift my head and take in the room. I’m not sure if I adopted this small ritual from another teacher some years ago or if I made it up, but the symbolism is clear to me – I am affirming the connection of my heart to the hearts around me, and honoring what we have just co-created in the space. It is a gesture that takes approximately 5 seconds, but it seals the experience for me, and fills me with gratitude for having yoga in my life and for being part of an amazing community. This ritual feels good, and after some years of doing it, necessary.

Think of the rituals we embrace: lighting candles, making toasts, creating new year’s resolutions, sharing birthday cakes, sending cards and emails, and more. Celebration, remembrance, reverence, and transition are all moments that call for ritual. Rituals can become rote, and turn into empty habits, but with a little attention, we can re-infuse them with meaning or simply decide that they no longer serve us. If we create the habit of a daily yoga or meditation practice, that habit can become a ritual, rich with meaning and substance.

In this New Year, I invite you to join me in examining old habits, forming new ones, and creating meaningful ritual that enriches our daily lives.

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.

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?