Living Ashtanga

I Almost Didn´t

2010-12-17T14:51:00.000-08:00

Don't give up
'cause you have friends
Don't give up
You're not the only one
Don't give up
No reason to be ashamed
Don't give up
You still have us
Don't give up now
We're proud of who you are
Don't give up
You know it's never been easy
Don't give up
'cause I believe there's a place
There's a place where we belong

Peter Gabriel "Don´t Give Up"
*Gasp! Not "The Bhagavad Gita" or "Patanjali´s Yoga Sutras"???* :-D

Today I started my practice with pain in my lower back. I almost didn´t. Practice that is. I lay on the floor listening to Eurythmics and thought "Nah, my back is acting up. I might skip yoga today.". And so I almost did.

Then I somehow just got up, changed, rolled out my mat and practiced. I did it pretty gently, without thinking too much. The asanas were gentle, but I had a pretty fiery pace. I wanted the heat, so I went for it in big style.

And you know what? I would have been... well.... let's call it "less than smart" if I skipped today's practice. It fascinates me how after all these years of practice, I forget how important this is. Not that it stops me from practicing, but the mere fact of having the thoughts of "maybe I'll skip it today?" are interesting. Already while doing the Sun salutations, I felt like "God, this is good, what was I thinking?.".

So, try not to skip your practice when in pain. Instead, adjust what you have to, so that it becomes soothing and therapeutical. I have no idea where my pain came from. I have had a fast paced, stressful week. A lot of meetings, A LOT of sitting. Might be that. I don't know. But all the same: My practice is a major therapeutical tool. I feel so amazing now. My thoughts have settled down, I am comfortable and calm. I think I'll do primary for a couple of days, before returning to my regular practice. Monday is a Moon day, so there's some more rest. :-)

What I am trying to say is that I almost convinced myself that the way to handle an achey lower back was not to do yoga. And when people tell me they way back pain, I recommend yoga to them! Major case of tamas-attack! :-D (just in case: Tamas is the lowest of the three gunas, or afflictions. It brings about laziness, slows you down. Like when you have major trouble getting out of bed).

Let us not forget why we practice. Ashtanga yoga is training of spirit and mind. It's about not giving up and giving in to what seems to be reality, when you know better. Yoga is citta vrtti nirodha. Cessation of the movements of mind. This particular day, I managed to raise above the rut of my restless mind.

Progress. Nice. Thanks.

Yamas of Vegetarianism

2010-12-02T09:15:00.000-08:00

As Christmas is drawing near, all yogis are given a new opportunity to remind ourselves of and practice the first limb of Ashtanga Yoga, as presented in Master Patanjali's Yoga Sutras - yama.

As yoga practicioners, we focus daily on asana practice and postural techniques, on breathing techiques, health, different scriptures and many other aspects of the great art of yoga.

As we refine our minds, bodies and spirit, we start focusing on widening our perspectives and our compassion, so that they not only aply to other humans, but also to other animals and to nature, as we should.

I stated in an earlier post that vegetarianism is a crucial aspect of the practice of Ashtanga Yoga. For many westerners, it is also one of the most difficult ones.
When ethical and enviromental aspects of meat-eater-diet versus vegetarianism/ veganism is brought up, I have noticed that arguments often get heated.

For the yogis amongst you, here is a short presentation of yamas, applied to compassion towards non-human (and human) animals:

AHIMSA - non violence

Don't hurt them. Abstinence from violence, ALL violence is one of the corner stones of yoga practice and of many other philosophies and practices that resemble it.
As much as we humans try to rationalize it, eating animals implies that we accept that other living beings are killed. Everything and everyone strives to have a long and healty and safe life. So do animals. There is no reason to believe otherwise. The same way we used to enslave other humans, the same way we kill and butcher when we wage wars against each other and we managed to create "rational" reasons for that, we imagine that we have rational reasons for killing animals. All of us have an opportunity to widen our compassion and enrich our and others' lives by respecting all life and abstainings from eating meat and using fur. This is really real non-violence. Ahimsa doesn't mean that we are required to abstain from violence solely when it is convenient. Prime-ribs, meat balls and other meat based foods are cooked parts of animals that were held in captivity and killed.
Even a shell, what many of us consider to be but a mindless muscle has enough consciousness to hold on tighter to the surface when we try to touch it. This is because they too want to be left alone. They want to live. So, leave them alone.

Let us practice ahimsa and take a real high road. When you enjoy a vegetarian Christmas dinner, don't see it as difficult. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to practice ahimsa and it will surely inspire someone else to consider a path of non-violence and compassion.

SATYA - Truth

Don't lie to them. We breed animals on farms, we feed them, we tend them only to kill them and/ or skin them in the end. This poses a problem and a conundrum, especially for those amongst us who hold the opinion that eating wild animals/ game and so called organic meat is more acceptable ethically.
Consider a possibility that allowing an animal a so called good life only to kill it afterwards is the same as lying to animals. Imagine - someone loves you, is kind to you, feeds you and then they take your life. Organic meat is most often produced only so that it will be heathier and more tasty for humans. These animals lead good healthy lives, at least by human standards, and then they're killed and hung on a hook.
To breed something, to give it food, to let it procreate and so on, only to slaughter it and turn it into food is lying. It is not the practice of satya. This is not a white lie. Lies that lead to killing are mean when applied to humans and they should be considered so when applied to animals and other aspects of nature as well.

ASTEYA - abstinence from stealing

Don's steal from them.

Taking meat, territories, skins and milk of other creatures can be seen as stealing.

Humans are one of very few animal species that keep drinking milk as adults and that drink the milk of other species.

In many western societies, young calves are taken from their mothers right after birth and the mothers are milked and the milk they produce for their offspring is used for human consumption. Consider the ethical implications of this and try to imagine the situation if the mother and child were human.

Many western societies use more than their "share" of meat and milk. In a world where millions of people suffer of starvation and malnutrition. This is not practice of satya. If USA alone reduced its consumption of meat with only 10% and the freed resources were used to feed the part of the world stricken by hunger, the picture of world hunger would be dramatically changed. If the whole world consumed 10% less meat and these resources were directed to feeding the hunger-stricken part of the planet, there would be no hunger in the world.
And consider this: If India, where close to 80% of the population is apparently vegetarian, started consuming as much meat as USA does (when we consider the ratio of meat consumption compared to the size of the US population), our planet would be stricken with a global hunger and polution catastrophy.
When you consume an animal, you consume the vegetables, fruits, wheat, earth and water it "consumed". A vegetarian diet is uncomparably gentler to the ecology of Earth.

Eating meat is stealing from both animals and from humans and the planet.

Practice non-stealing, asteya.

BRAMACHARYA - sexual continence

Don't abuse them sexually.

In order to breed animals, create new breeds of desired size, taste, shape, or with desired quality of fur, animals are genetically modified, inseminated against their will and bred with partners they wouldn't chose naturally.

Cows are often inseminated with large devices that are inserted into their vaginas.

To consider this as acceptable, you need to decide that animals are things. These animals often need to be restrained or sedated when this is done to them. This is because they don't want to be inseminated, touched and genitally penetrated by their "owners" and against their will.

Seen through a prism of loving kindness, this kind of treatment is both ignorant and can be seen as sexual abuse.

So, leave them alone. We humans are an ingenious species and for all we need to solve, we are capable of finding better solutions if the present ones are inhumane and less-than-gentle to the planet. We could when it comes to this matter. If we wanted to.

APARIGRAHA - non-grasping

Don't take more than what you need.

In the part about non-stealing, asteya, I have already written about several parts of the world taking far more than what they need. This results in an imbalance that causes hunger and suffering in other parts of the world and also an ecological imbalance. Aparigraha is about not taking more than you need. Also when it comes to milk/ dairy for the non-vegans amongst us.

Very few people in the world, especially on the western hemisphere, need meat to survive. Very many people in the world, and again, especially in the west, would be healthier to themselves and kinder to the planet if they didn't consume any meat at all. The same thing with fur.
To my great disappointment, I recently saw fur in an otherwise fabulous yoga studio, full of great and otherwise aware yogis. And then there was that fur on their floors and chairs. In a yoga studio. Such a pity. So unnecessary.

Take only what you need. You don't need meat. And you don't need fur. You probably don't need dairy either. If you do, how much milk do you need?

Yama is easy....

When we honestly do what we can. It is a start for all of us.

People imagine that going vegetarian is difficult. It is not. Educate yourself about what you need and start.

If you have an aware relationship with your yoga practice, then vegetarianism is something you need to consider. It is probably as important a part of the yogic lifestyle as your asana practice is.

Really, do consider to apply the practice of yama to more than the human world. It is all the same world and mess and cruelty at one place will resonate somewhere else, sooner or later. The practice of yama is meant to be universal, which means that it is about animals and nature too.

This Christmas might be a nice time to start a more compassionate and kinder practice and spread some awareness to your loved ones too.

The Seat

2010-11-28T08:42:00.000-08:00

Sthira sukham asanam
Prayatna saithilyananta samapattibhyam
Tato dvandvanabhighatah

Asana is steady and joyful
Asana is effort turning into balance turning into stillness turning into revelation
Then, one is no longer disturbed by opposites

Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, sutra 46, 47 and 48

All of us enter the world of yoga with all kinds of different motivation, ranging from a wish for better physical fitness, to relaxation, to peace, fascination with Indian traditions and sometimes a mixture of all of these. Also, the gates we enter through are often times more or less different, as some of us start up in different yoga traditions and then move on to others, or sometimes we stay where we started.

The three sutras cited above are the only three in the "Yoga Sutras" by master Patanjali that specifically mention asana, or yoga positions. This is very interesing as asana is, for most of us, the first thing we get to know as we start practicing yoga.

A funny thing I think I see in almost everyone who sticks with yoga practice for several years or forever is that no matter why or where they started up, even if it was just with more flexible and stronger body as the only goal, a new spark gets ignited. Some people start reading the scriptures, some get curious about Sanskrit and/ or chanting. People start going to India and spend time and money on yoga workshops.

Asana practice, also in the Ashtanga yoga tradition according to Sri K. Pattabhi Jois, consists of many aspects: In addition to the yoga positions, asana, we practice bandha (the energy locks), dristi (the gaze focus), ujjayi breathing, in addition to a specific sequence of postures. In other words, a steady yoga practice gives us quite a bit to do.

It is very usual to get very caught up in the physical asana practice at first. A good friend of mine often uses the term "to master" when he speaks about different asanas. He gets unhappy and frustrated when an asana he considers desirable seems to "resist" him. Of course, this is a tendency I recognize from my own years of practice. I still go crazy. When I have to roll out (as opposed to elegantly leaving the position) of pincha mayurasana because I lose my balance, sometimes I get very frustrated. The physical practice gets the best of me.

At such times, it is useful to remember that going through this is one part of the practice. But what does it mean to master a yoga position?
In sutras 46 to 48, Patanjali tells us that a yoga position is to be steady and joyful. Through the effort that hopefully results in steadiness and joyfulness in any yoga position, we reach balance, through which we reach stilliness and then maybe revelation. This is a road toward dissolving opposites.

Patanjali doesn't say anything about a practicioner needing to tie him- or herself into a knot. We work on mastering our body, but mastering is not the same as coersion. It might even be the opposite of it. You master an asana as you would master anything else - by doing your best, wherever you are, step by step, respecting your body in the process. Wholesome discipline, folks. And maybe one day, you find yourself in a deliberate knot. Maybe not. But in a knot or not, hopefully we are nearer to balance and peace in any position, no matter how difficult we find it physically. Through this, we start deconstructing the world of opposites. We start liking the things we didn't like before. Like a great warrior, when we see challenges,we stand, steady in our breath and focus. And we stay and we breathe. And hopefully, we realize that there's nothing to get elated about, nothing to fear. Steady and joyful. This is one of the greatest things Ashtanga Yoga has given me (so far). One of the most tangible things.

As in an asana I might find difficult, I have started to be able to stay in challenging situations in my life off the mat and I stand and most often I am calm. Things are as they are, I need to stay, so I stay, and I don't lose my head. Mostly. This IS one of the gifts this yoga has given me. When I do get insane, it is comforting to know that I am capable of taking other choices. It actually helps remembering this.

This is how Ashtanga practice, seemingly turbulent, really is a meditation technique: You follow the sequence, your breath is strong and focused, your gaze is focused. Your thoughts might be racing but the asana sequence, the breath and the gaze bind them and you are steady and you keep doing what you need to do. This is how we work on turning the movement into meditation. After a while, there can be joy even in initially unpleasant positions and situations. You might have experienced things like this: You might be in an asana you find difficult, but you stay and you breathe and you find that you are actually quite happy. In this way, it doesn't matter how deep in a position you are on the physical level; you master it by mastering your mind while in the position. Yoga is staying present no matter what, leg behind the head or not. It does not matter. What matters is that you are doing your best and that you are present. For us westerners, our bodies are often times the most accessable tool when we start up this kind of work. Our bodies are then the gates into something far larger.

The physical progress will come with regular practice. Seen from this perspective, firmer and stronger, more flexible bodies are a bonus, but never our final goal. If physical progress is the only goal, we are still at the gates. Pre-yoga, someone called it (I don't remember who). Mental balance, joy, steadiness, stillness, peace and maybe glimpses of revelation of the fact that there is little to be concerned about is the real soul nutrition, while strength and flexibility are the toy in your cereal. The real yum-factor comes from the cereal itself. The toy is your additional gift. Strong, healthy body helps you detach from your body. You can meditate easier, you can start practising more advanced pranayama- and kriya (purification) techiques when your body is properly wired up for this. For this, you need to do your practice and find peace in your practice. This is so big! Finding peace in your practice. Gee....

The great thing is that through some effort, through realizing that an aware relationship with the tradition of our practice matters, we kind of start realizing, often cloaked in small glimpses of clarity, that very few things matter. A contradiction? I don't know. Ask me in 50 years. What I hope that I have started understanding is this: There is nothing to go crazy about.

And craziness is not to be underrated. One version is where you can get stuck up and arrogant in very athletic and advanced asana practice. This is not too constructive, considering the fact which tradition we apparently belong to. One meaning of the word "asana" is "seat", a connection to the ground. So to "take off" in ego-terms seems to be the opposite of what asana practice leads to. What it leads to is grounding and a healthier pespective on our egos.
The other side is where it is pretty easy to bliss out in a cross legged seated position, with a bolster under your ass. But go ahead and practice awareness and peace and joy in positions like lolasana (check out the picture above). Or any position that challenges you in some way. Practice not longing to get away. Practice not convincing yourself to get out after 5 breaths when your teacher asks you hold it for 15, especially if you are capable of these 15 breaths. Whether we do things like this, is what might determine if a position is a yoga position or a new party trick you can demonstrate to your friends.

I honestly try to have a pretty strong practice. I find it strong in its regularity, in my effort not to lose my mind and in knowing that the body-stuff is the tool for something larger. And this is when I started seeing it as "pretty strong": When I started getting flashes of awareness no matter whether I "liked" where I was or not. The practice is what it is, like it or not. Trancending the preferences, I think, has started to show me that I actually love what I thought that I didn't. The initial impulse is just that - an impulse; sometimes correct, sometimes less so. My job is to practice. Which I do. "Sthira sukham asanam" is serious stuff. Peace and joy in seeming adversity is radical. This is where we start tearing up the wrapping and going for the real thing.

And just to be 100% clear on this: I LOVE the toy in my cereal too. I love physical agility and strength. I love feeling healthy and flexible and strong. I don't think developing our bodies is mundane. I actually find it very important. And I especially love (what I think is) the fact that all this, as huge as it often is for me, is just a beginning of something far bigger. I trust Patanjali, you see. ;-)

A Leaf, a Flower, Fruit or Water

2010-11-25T04:04:00.000-08:00

Ashtanga Yoga is a demanding lover. All yoga is. Take wisdom from ancient scriptures and let it take you through your Christmas (or any other holiday) with humble ease and smoothness.

In chapter nine, 26th verse of "The Bhagavad Gita", Krishna states to the mythical warrior Arjuna that if something is given out of love and reverence, it will be accepted, even if it is just a leaf, a flower, fruit or water. The essence is not in what is given as such, but within the intent that infuses the gift. The intent creates the essence. It is the essence.

This might be especially relevant, on many levels, now that Christmas is drawing near.

As I stated in my previous post (and mentioned in several of the earlier ones), simplifying our practice in less then ideal conditions is sometimes a usefool tool that helps us maintain regularity of practice. This doesn't necessarily mean that you don't do an entire practice when you know you can, but that the energy of the practice is adjusted so that you, through that energy and your intent, show respect for wherever you are at, energetically, physically, timewise or all of these.
What Krisha teaches us in the abovementioned verse is that the inner force, the intention and the energy of what is given is what's important, and not necessarily the form of the gift. Show respect for this in your practice. You might even want to dedicate it to someone or something that drives you and inspires you. It might be your teacher, your partner, a cause or anything. When you hit an especially challinging piece of your practice, go back to what or who inspires you and "give" your practice to this person or cause. It doesn't have to be much. It can just be a straighter back in navasana or more active legs in kurmasana or whatever. You do it in the best way you can, safely and with love and you give it to them. Remember: "a leaf, a flower, fruit or water.". Easy. It doesn't matter. Do it with love and reverence and it will be enough.
If you, at some point, don't quite feel like dedicating your asana or your entire practice to anyone or anything in perticular, give it to yourself. Rather than just going through the motions,let yourself be inspired by Krishna and the lovely "Gita", and make the practice a gift to yourself. It doesn't have to be more complicated than pouring yourself a glass of clear icey water when you're thirsty would be. This means that gifting yourself with your yoga practice is not the same thing as you going all Cirque-Du-Soleil-esque-crazy on your mat. If it is not quite where you are (if it is, go ahead and swing it!), let what you do on your mat be this proverbial leaf or fruit or water, a simple and beautiful thing,you do for yourself from where you are. Remember that it is the intent, the substance that counts and not the form. The form grows out from the substance.

And then there's Christmas.....

And the spirit of giving?

"However humble the offering....". "The Bhagavad Gita" teaches us that it is the way we give and not what we give that is the real gift. The physical gift is the symbol. This does not mean that you should go to your nearest and dearest and go "I present you with these bird droppings with love..". :-) They probably won't get it. I am not sure I would either. If you can easily afford lavish gifts and you want to give them to your loved ones, by all means, knock yourself out. But if you are "temporarily short on cash", why not give them a flower, a simple book (a cheap edition of the "Gita" with a good translation and commentary?) or something along those lines and give it with love. Love will make it lavish. It is like the aforementioned straight back in navasana (when your lazy mind says: "droop!" and you know better and you straighten it instead) - you do what you can with the most love and kindness you can give. And that is the gift. It will most probably be accepted with the same love and gratitude.

Go back to the scriptures for simple and powerful stuff like this short passage from "The Bhagavad Gita". Many of you, if not all, who invest your time in reading blogs and websites like this one, tend to have vast amounts of dormant knowledge that gets triggered by the simple means of being reminded you have it and that you can put it to use. That is the beginning of yoga outside of the mat. Go! :-)

My Travel Mat

2010-11-21T13:31:00.000-08:00

I recently went to a work trip that took me from hotel room to hotel room, to friends' less-than-spacious living rooms. A possible threat to my daily practice? But this proved to be a non-issue, because, as it turns out, I have a super power. Or rather a super powered side-kick. My yoga travel mat.

Practicing while traveling is a challenge for most of us. If you are not a full-time yoga teacher, or a tough-as-nails yogic superhero (I'm getting there, just you wait), you will have experienced situations when doing your practice is difficult because your trip schedule leaves little time, or your hotel room is tiny or it is tiny AND the carpet is dirty and so on and so forth.

Whenever on the road, I have always taken yoga mats with me, for the last ten years or longer. Some have served me well, some not so well. For example, I love and adore my black Ashtanga-mat, but it is so heavy that dragging it around on planes and trains and to hotels around the world turned out to be a tedious chore. Plus the black mat is expensive, so if something happened to it, it would have been an unfortunate loss. PLUS I have had it for a million years, it has served me well, it still does, and I love it, so it's like endangering a pet (I know this sounded a bit overly attached :-D ).

Anyway, at a studio where I work, I recently got a travel mat. This is not a commercial site, so I am not telling which brand it was. There are probably several brands that offer them. It's light as a feather, it folds so easily that I carry it in my hand luggage, it has a superb grip and it doesn't slip on carpets (hotel rooms are a threat no more!).

So, I came back from a trip this morning. Hotels, tiny apartments, all kinds of crammed places..... For a week. And I practiced all over the place. Oh the beauty of it! I had a couple of hours between meetings (I couldn't practice in the mornings because we started early and the evenings were networking time, so it would have been socially unintelligent of me to just disappear), so I went to my room, rolled out my small, gorgeous mat and I practiced. And holy mother of Whoever, what a difference it made! Trust me on this. You have a choice to do your Ashtanga (or whatever your practice is) or not. And small adjustments like easy-to-carry-mats or improvised altars redefine your day because they make it super easy to make your practice a priority and squeeze it into your day. You realign your mind and body and (why not?) spirit in the middle of what could have been a mundane work thing and it is beyond kick-ass!

I swear that when I returned to my colleagues after my yoga sessions, I was refreshed beyond words. The practice took me to a completely different place and all that happened before it, that same day, felt like yesterday.

What IS the point of me writing this? It is this: Make it easy for yourself. If you don't practice when you travel, because your mat is heavy and big, get a travel mat. If you need an altar or whatever to meditate, put a couple of candles and a picture of your guru (or Jesus, or Shiva, Buddha, Lady Gaga, whoever) in your suitcase and make an altar. And do your practice.

My travel mat, a small, easy thing, helps me to re-create what could be ordinary, a bit uninspired, too-much-to-do-trips into a completely different thing. Find out what would make your practice easy when you are away to places that challenge the regularity of your practice and make those adjustments. Doing some yoga at a weird place does magical things to you. Sometimes there just isn't any time to visit local yoga shalas and -studios. Or there are none where you are. If you need to share a hotel room with somebody and you can practice without sticking your toes into their eyes, don't be shy and do it (practice, NOT stick your big toe in their eye). They might get inspired.

The more I do stuff like this, I honestly get Sri K. Pattabhi Jois' "Practice and all is coming" more and more. Transcending your "cannot" is practical magic.

After It All Went To The Dogs (and not the downward ones)

2010-08-12T12:30:00.000-07:00

I haven't been writing here for ages and ages. Many reasons for that, none particularly good. :-) I'm back, not writing marathone texts, but shorter stuff. That just might be the thing to keep me on track. Baby steps. Or baby asana?

About a year and a half ago, I injured my back. I'm not quite sure what happened. I had been to an intense and energizing workshop, where I did a lot of stuff and movement patterns I hadn't done often. A couple of days after, during morning Mysore practice, my lower back felt like it was set on fire. My range of movement got very much reduced. The body was protecting itself. The day after, the pain got worse. Everything hurt. Practicing. Walking. Turning around in bed. Sitting. Tying my shoelaces Everything. I didn't know a body could hurt so much outside of a hospital.
And of course, this influenced my practice. It was painful and it got irregular. I was in pain for quite a long time. But practicing wasn't murderously painful all the time. After a while, I found that I started blaming the injury for every "irregularity" in my practice. My asana practice wasn't consistent: "Oh I injured my back a while ago". I took shortcuts: "Ah, I injured my back." I didn't feel like practicing: "Oh, there's this stuff happening in my lower back......" The wheel of excuses turned into a big "chicken-and-eg"-thing. I didn't know what came first: my laziness or the injury.

A slight shadow of recognition that I had resorted to lame excuses in order not to do my best was gnawing on some far corner of my consciousness. Now, I have always taken quite a bit of pride in my yogic athletic abilities and I have had a secret feeling of inferiority about the stuff I didn't think I was "good enough" at. Some things I did as a pro. Some I didn't. Suddenly I thought I had an excuse I could chant forth every time I wanted to avoid or explain something and anything I wasn't content with in my practice (where did my oh so deep insights on santosha go???) :-D . I even convinced myself of all this bull dung. I lost a lot of strength. I lost some flexibility. My backbends weren't what they used to be. All because of lazy excuses. Oh lord, what to do, what to do? Roll out my mat perhaps?

I don't know what happened or when. I guess God saw me and thought "Oh man, that's lame. Is that what I put you on that planet for? Let me give you a hand.". I have no idea. I kind of remembered the "something is better than nothing"-idea.
I decided to practice again, at least for a bit, no matter what. If I just did the sun salutations A and B and the finishing sequence (backbends and inversions), I was to be content. So, I got back. And it is so delicious! So incredibly delicious. And it's not about doing a lot or just a bit. It's not about feeling fitter or not. It's about not being stupid about my life and what I am doing to myself. I am free to skip practice, as are we all. Then I asked myself: "Am I an ashtangi?". Yes I am. God, I am! So, onto my mat I go. Suddenly I found myself back in the yoga-freak-world. And I love it so! :-D

Why Vegetarian?

2009-11-18T07:58:00.000-08:00

By Vedran
Vegetarianism is tightly bound with yoga and is by many considered to be a crucial part of the yoga practice. The practice in this context is seen as bigger than just what happens on the yoga mat. It is taken far beyond – to kitchens, pantries and cupboards. But what does vegetarianism have to do with yoga?

My first steps
Many years ago, I was receiving meditation lessons from one of my first yoga teachers, a tall bearded yogic monk, originally Australian, whose many years in India left an imprint both on his external appearance, orange temple robes and all, and on his vast knowledge of yoga traditions and philosophy. This kind, soft-spoken man gave me lessons and after receiving one, I went out and practiced and after a while, I would be given a new lesson that I would then integrate with what I had learned previously. This was before I ventured into Ashtanga. I had a soft hatha practice, drenched into lots and lots of meditation and philosophy. So, one day, my lesson with my teacher ended by him saying that I couldn’t proceed further before I stopped eating meat. I don’t remember what I answered to that but it was something along the lines of ”okay, I’ll give it a serious thought”. Inside, on the other hand, I felt offended. I felt offended by him suggesting one aspect of how I was conducting my life was wrong and I suppose that I also felt somewhat hurt. His opinions meant a lot to me and knowing that he obviously not only did not approve of something I was doing but that he actually seemed to have defined it as “not good enough” definitely stung. I kind of decided that I did not need those lessons anyway. And who was he to tell me what to eat or not?
Still, after a while I picked up a book on environmental- and health benefits of vegetarian diet. The book (I don’t remember the title or the author) was a bit on the preachy side but the first seeds of the new, non-carnivorous me were cast into the soil. I slowly started educating myself on how to build up a sound meat free diet. I am not the kind of person who goes cold turkey (no pun intended) easily. Or at least I used to not be. I had to learn how to cook proper food. Living on random boiled veggies wouldn´t work for me. And so I started. I picked up tons of cookbooks and experimented with soy products and other types of meet replacements. Sometimes it worked very well, while other things were more in the yuk – department. I don’t do yuk. I love food.
After a while, I got rather good for a rookie and my diet was almost completely vegetarian. And then I visited my parents. My parents live in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a beautiful country with lots of beautifully tasting food. Unfortunately, my parents at that time, as most other people in that region, considered meat the only “real” food. Everything else is garnish. You don’t survive on garnish. They couldn’t get my new “fix”. Me a vegetarian? I am already too thin! I resisted for a while and then I broke completely. I woke up while I was in a restaurant with my close relatives and my brother said something like “Check out the vegetarian!”. The “vegetarian” was stuffing his face with minced meat of some sort, greedily devouring piles of the minced body of some animal. I felt so ashamed.
Short time after that, I came back to Norway, where someone served crabsticks at some meeting. They were disgusting. I think I had some. Then I stopped. I stopped, I went vegetarian and I never turned back. This was many many years ago.

The nature of the natural
I have noticed that people often tend to resort to the argument of “the natural” when we need to explain any kind of nonsense we do. Depending on what we need to explain, we depict the natural as desirable or something we need to distance ourselves from. So, while comparing someone to an animal most often connotes that the person isn’t too pleasant to deal with, we turn the argument around when we argue that something we take for granted needs to be the way it is because it is the “nature’s way”. One of those things is that when we kill animals, cut them up and eat their dead bodies, we do it because it is natural. We are at the top of the food chain. We kill because we can and feed on the lower species. Why then do we view it as repulsive when we who live in the political west hear that in some other cultures, they eat cats and dogs? How is that different from eating a cow or a sheep or an elk? Well, it’s not. It is as (un)natural to cut up a rat or a cat or a puppy and then consume their cooked corpse, as it is to do the same to a lamb or a cow, or a horse or what have you. Of course, we could argue that while it is natural to feed on animals, culture dictates which animal species are acceptable as food in a specific region or a given culture. And as far as being an animal goes, it seems like we are not supposed to act like animals when interacting with other humans while in our interaction with the animal species that our culture views as stove-friendly, we do choose to act like a dominant animal species, at the top of the food chain.
The difference is that a lion, a wolf, a bear etc. cannot decide that he/ she will feed on fruits, vegetables and nuts from this day on. We humans have both possibility and capacity to do so. There is nothing natural about us consuming meat of other animals. It is the question of culture, habit and convenience. In addition, the animals we eat are mostly not carnivores. We don’t eat wolves and tigers. We eat mostly vegetarian species, like cows and sheep. We eat them because we chose to. We chose to because there is a whole industry built around slavery, exploitation and ill-treatment of animals. We breed, genetically modify and slaughter other living beings in order to turn them into food. We cut up forests in order to grow crops to feed billions of animals bound for butcher shops and such. How is this an act of nature? If anything, it as an act against it.
To my great disappointment, I heard a renowned American self-improvement teacher say “Vegetarianism – done that – didn’t work”. He went on to say that he used to follow a “strict vegan diet” and that he got fat because all he ate was rice, pasta, potatoes and bread. Since when did stuffing your face with pasta, rice and dough become a “strict vegan diet”?? And then he said something like: “If you’re a vegetarian listening to this, here’s something you probably haven’t thought about: If we stop eating animals, they still aren’t going to stop eating each other! Those animals are going to die anyway! As are we!”. Oh gee, now, this is a well put and revolutionary argument! So, what does this mean? That we might as well start eating each other? A wolf is physically a carnivor and humans aren’t. And a carnivorous animal can’t just change his or her mind, so that the aforementioned wolf goes and has himself a lentil soup. Humans can.
And again – what about the environment? Apparently, it takes about 8-9 cows per year to feed a regular meat eater. Not because they devour these cows in their entirety, but because when you take all the parts of the killed animal in the account that a meat eater consumes during a year, about 8-9 animals need to be slaughtered to meet that need. It takes acres and acres of land and tons and tons of vegetables, fruit, wheat and what not, to feed one cow. So, when you eat this animal, you also eat all that it has eaten. The costs are grotesque! In comparison, vegetarians come practically for free. Check out Sharon Gannon’s “Yoga & Vegetarianism” for more facts.
And here’s the thing: Anything can make you unwell if you approach it in an uneducated way. Research links (check out “The China Study “and “Skinny Bastard” for the REAL hardcore facts) use of meat and dairy to the explosion of cancer and lifestyle diseases on the planet. And this doesn’t fail: The countries with the highest rates of meat and dairy consumption are also the ones most plagued by cancer, obesity, diseases of the respiratory and coronary systems etc. And sure, there are unhealthy, overweight and underweight vegetarians and vegans, but if you do it properly and intelligently, there’s nothing like vegan/ vegetarian lifestyle to make you healthy, energetic and gorgeous. I have been a super herbivore for most of my adult life and I am not overweight – I’m actually in a great shape – I am healthy and full of energy. So, no need here to eat a carcass or two. NOBODY needs this. Nobody.
A fellow yoga student once said: “All in the world is One, so in that way, you might as well eat a chicken or a cow as you can eat a vegetable!”. Really? Go eat your mother or your granny (or both! Knock yourself out properly!) then, baby. Or at least, eat your cat. No? Why not? Oh.
You either value life or you do not. If you don’t, you should start. If you truly value life, why should it be alright or in any way natural to torture and kill an animal and then consume its dead body? No matter what your stance when it comes to differences between humans and (other) animals, these too are creatures that want to live, that try to escape when they know they are in danger, they too get hungry and thirsty and care for their children. They do not want to end up in your wonton soup. If the are there, the chances are quite slim that they volunteered.

Yoga
In asana practice, we do all kinds of postures with names inspired by the animal kingdom. There’s dog, cat, cow, snake, locust, crocodile, fish, peacock…. When the ancient yogis and rishis designed these postures, they did so by observing the animals in nature. The postures are there as a chance for all of us yoga students to embody the energy of these animals, to connect and hopefully to raise our level of empathy. On an esoteric level, asana practice too deals with your karmic patterns, stuff that is stuck in your body, your bones, muscle tissue, in your mind and in your energy circuits. Seen from this perspective, when you put the suffering, humiliation, torture and death of another creature into your body – because animal bodies are loaded with energy, as are human bodies, and things happen when you enslave, imprison and kill any being - how can this be good for you? It is not good for you, it is sure not good for whomever you have eaten, it is not good for the planet we live on. If you do yoga, if you read books on yoga, have good and knowledgeable teachers, you go to workshops and belong to a yoga community and you still eat meat, there is no other excuse but ignorance or laziness. You’re allergic to soy? Big deal. You can get your protein in gazillion different ways. If you eat a good selection of vegetables, fruits, nuts and legumes every day, you will get what you need. You don’t need to shovel in beans every single day.
The phenomenal Jivamukti yoga teacher, Sharon Gannon, writes that the fact that we feed on other animals is a reflection of our slave driver mentality. These animals are born and raised in captivity and the sole purpose of their existence is to be killed and eaten. What if we viewed these animals as nations? If it seems far fetched, well, it shouldn’t be. These are complex beings that – let’s face it – don’t want to die. They die because they get killed. And we do the killing. If not directly, then by buying products that come from the industries that are based on slavery, mutilation and slaughter of other species. We are taught otherwise in our schools and in our society, but the core of the matter is that killing another species for their meat and skin is torture and murder. You want that? No one in their right mind wants that.
And what about the “organic meat” or game, the animals that lead good lives or even live in freedom? Some say it is okay to eat such animals, because they lived well and we also need to “control the population” of this or that animal species. What if we stopped shooting elk? Wouldn’t nature fall out of balance? First of all, where nature is out of balance, it is mostly that way because we pushed it out of balance. Human species has proved ingenious enough to come up with the most creative ideas, when we really want to, so we would surely find a way to keep nature restore balance in nature without needing to kill, if we wanted to. Secondly most hunters do not hunt game because they want to keep or restore balance, but they view it as sport. And what about the “good life in freedom”-thing? Does that mean that it would be more okay to shoot, cook and devour a free, happy human being than a poor one that has lived in captivity most of his or her life? No. It boils down to us arrogantly assuming that animals are things and that we own them. Nowdays, they come packed in nice plastic bags and boxes, all cleaned up, so that we as consumers need not reflect on how that meet got there. The cow or the goat donated it to the supermarket? Perhaps not.
And finally, if you are an ashtangi, or if you practice any type of yoga where you happen to chant a bit, have you ever chanted “Lokha samastha sukhino bhavantu”? In this chant, you wish happiness, prosperity and freedom to all beings out there. Yes, animals too. If you are an ashtangi, you have chanted this in the end of your practice, thereby devoting it to all the beings on Earth (and beyond, who knows?). And then, you go and eat them and dress in their furs? It is not a good feeling being a hypocrite. When we act like this, no matter what, we always know it, on some level. And it will always reflect in your thoughts, in your mind, in your heart, in your body. You can’t be really true to yourself and support killing of others. I know a great, fantastic and globally renowned yoga teacher that eats meat because of allergies to a lot of things vegetarians eat. This teacher says “I am a hunter” and honours the animals getting killed and eaten, their earthly and spiritual roots, their souls. With all due respect (because this is a person I admire greatly), what if somebody slaughtered this teacher’s family or lover and then honoured their souls and thanked them for their meat and skins? Unacceptable. As unacceptable as it is to kill any other creature.
I also heard a global pop star say “I am not vegetarian. I have never been politically correct.” What a pillar of enlightenment this person is. Not. It is not politically correct to be a nazi either. But still most of us wouldn’t want to be one.
To cut the preach fest here, if you are a meat eater and you are contemplating going vegetarian, do it. If you think it is hard, start thinking it is easy. It is easier for you to read up on how to maintain a nutritious and tasty plant based diet than it is for the chicken on your plate to be beheaded and get its legs cut off.

Now What?
Just stop. Stock up on some good vegan and vegetarian books (check out Sarah Kramer’s “La Dolce Vegan” – it’s easy to follow and the food is perfect) and educate yourself. Start ordering vegetarian food in restaurants. If they don’t have anything vegetarian on their menu, tell the waiter to tell the chef to make something. Demand. It works. It’s always a good test of a restaurant, by the way. If a chef can’t improvise forth a vegetarian dish, he is NOT a real chef. Why would you want to pay for something cooked by a sucky chef?
And remember: What you eat, drink and breathe creates you. Physically, mentally and energetically, it creates you. What you consume turns into your cells. The same way you wouldn’t eat just any crap out of your toilet and let your body turn it into your future cells, why would you want a decomposing and festering body of an animal (yes, fish too), to become a part of you. Because it really does become a part of you. And if you think “it’s not decomposing and festering!”, well do you know how long it stays in your intestines and simmers at body temperature? For days! And days and days! Meat! On 37 degrees Celsius! Whereas non- animal food shoots out of you quite quickly (forgive me any mental images this might have inflicted upon you). You feed your body and it uses what you give it as building blocks for a future you. Don’t turn yourself into a dumpster. Try it for a month. Try it for two. If you stock up on some good books, so that you don’t end up living on bread and rice only, you’re probably completely safe. If you do it this way, chances are, you’ll feel too fabulous to ever turn back..
Check your bookstores for good veggie cookbooks or go online and get them, if that is easier. Don’t get the books that demand you fly to faraway places in order to get the ingredients you need. Unless it is easy for you to go get a rare spice on a faraway mountain. In that case, be my guest. There are a lot of great books with simple and phenomenal recepies that you can make in a dash. When I travel, I always carry with me “Vegan A-Go_Go”, a book for vegetarians on the road that enables me to prepare super easy nutritious vegan food no matter where you I am.
So, don’t get stupid. Go veg! ☺

Bhujapidasana - Dare To Be Different

2009-07-06T14:31:00.000-07:00

By Vedran

Here’s a thing about the primary series in Ashtanga: after a while, you will slide through about half of the series with relative ease. You know the sequence and even if you are tired, even your muscles are tight or whatever, it will be fine. Breathe in – jump through, breathe out – land and bind, breathe in open the chest, breathe out – fold. You come to navasana , a position that many dread because it’s hard on the core, but as far as the technique goes, it is not terribly difficult. So you do it.
And then it comes: Bhujapidasana, the ”shoulder press” position. At most yoga schools, in the west anyway, it is not unusual to stop beginner classes here and go to the finishing sequences and relaxation after navasana. This is good, as it gives everyone time to work on the basics. On the downside of it, a lot of people will get stuck doing only half primary series for ages, long past the point where they could have challenged themselves further. Or some people will go on past navasana but maybe skip the bhuja pidhasana, kurmasana and even garbha pindasana/ kukkutasana sequences because they seem to be somewhat overwhelming in terms of what they seem to demand of your strength and flexibility. Yet, all of us being aspireing yogis, we know that the yummiest flavour of things comes from playing the edge and ultimately seeing it move.

Beginners: Land outside of the yellow brick road

In one of my favourite films, ”The Wizard Of Oz”, Dorothy and her companions are told to follow the yellow brick road while on their way to meet the great wizard. While their departures off the road caused them more trouble (but more sizzle to the film), the yellow brick road on your yogic path might sometimes turn out to lead into a rut and monotony. After all, the Ashtanga sequences were created to progressively lead you to new levels of body and mind awareness. So, here are a few tips that could hopefully help you to jump off the route of the known:
If you are a beginner in a relative sense – that is, if you are comfortable with the primary series up to navasana, the first thing to munch on when going into bhujapidasana is the landing.
When in your downward facing dog, finishing the vinyasa out of navasana, you jump your feet to the outsides of your hands. In the beginning, you can work first one and then the other shoulder under each respective knee. If this definitely feels like enough you might want to stay here for 5 to 10 breaths and move on to backbends and inversions, i.e. the finishing sequences.
But if the shoulders under the knees part was okay, then you press your knees slightly against your shoulders for stability (as mentioned earlier, bhujapidasana means ”shoulder press”) and try to sit down on your upper arms and lift your feet off the floor. You will probably need to transfer some weight forward, or else the weight of your thighs and bottom will tend to pull you down on your ass. Then you try to cross your ankles and have a taste of that. If this is enough, eather stregth-, balance- or flexibility-wise, you can stop here (for example if you are completely unable to cross your ankles or if you can´t keep the posture afloat) .
If you can go on, you breathe in and on the outbreath, you drop your chin to the floor/ mat, lift your hips up toward the ceiling and work your crossed feet backwards between the wrists, all the while trying to keep them (the feet) off the floor. Most people will struggle with the chin on the floor part, as this is not the easiest posture to keep your back long in. So, if you can only have your forhead or the top of your head on the floor, instead of the chin, this is completely okay. At this point, you might want to slide your hips a bit lower down from your shoulders, as this gives your shoulders a bit more room to open as you go down. This might also make it easier for you to place your chin on the mat, instead of the forhead or crown. And there you have it. You take five breaths here and then ride your vinyasa out of the position. And how do you do that? Still pressing your inner thighs against your upper arms, you breathe in and lift your head up, while your hips come a bit lower toward the mat. You straighten your legs into tittibhasana (it doesn’t have to be the strongest tittibhasana you can do – too much energy in this can drain you before you finish the vinyasa) and as you breathe out, you whip your legs and body back into chaturanga (maybe passing through a very short bakasana, but no fuss if you can’t).

Intermediate/ advanced: Leap into it!

If you have practiced the entrance into bhujapidasana described above, or any other modified version and if you are fairly comfortable with it, you might be ready to take it a bit further. And the way to take it further is to jump into the posture straight from adho mukha svanasana (the downdog). Chances are that in your first few (or many) attempts, your feet will have to touch the floor. No worries. If bhuja pidhasana is an asana you are okay with in general, this is the way for you to enter it. Sooner or later, you will be able to jump in without your feet touching the floor.
The trick is not losing your mind after you jump. Personally, I think it helps to think of, almost visualise, what I am about to do. And the second part of the trick is not to worry if your feet keep touching the floor. Actually, when you jump straight into the posture, the thighs will have a tendency to land in a more correct position in relation to your upper arms and shoulders, compared to what often happens when you work yourself in from standing. Jumping straight in, most of us are unable to jump the thighs high up on the shoulders, so you will not have to think about having to slide them down when you start leaning forward to touch the chin on the floor. Oh rejoice!
The jump-in method makes the position more fun to do. For me, it also made it easier to lean forward and down. One part of it is probably the more correct distance between thighs and shoulders but there must be something else too, as my feet (they’re big!) slide through between my wrists easier. What used to happen was that I had to walk them backwards and then lift them off the floor. Since I started practicing jumping in, they seem to slide without me having to do much (or any) walking.

So, next time you practice….

Next time you practice, given that you are generally comfortable with this position, try flying in instead of the easier version where you enter after landing your feet on the mat. At first, it might seem ridiculous, but come on, this is yoga we are talking about, so what did NOT seem ridiculous when attempted for the first time? Swing your adho mukha svanasana (down-dog)a bit forward right before you jump. This might make it easier. Make flying into the posture the way you practice this vinyasa, even if your feet touch the mat every time. Eventually they won’t. You can also ask your teacher to give you some pointers.
For those of you who practice this position and try entering it in a new way, this could be one of those little things that give your practice a bit more zest.
If you used to stop at navasana (especially if this is what you have done since the dawn of civilization), this might be the time, to give bhujapidasana a try. Try the modified version first and see where it takes you. It might just be well beyond the yellow brick road. And YOU just might turn out to be the wizard!

Thank you

2009-07-06T07:02:00.000-07:00

On May 18 2009, Sri K Pattabhi Jois died in his home in Mysore, India. The way I found out was unusual and even now as I am writing this, almost two months later, it seems unreal. I found out after I had held a class and as people were leaving, someone commented on how Guruji had been ill. And then she asked: "Has he died?" I answered: "No, of course not, he's probably fine!". And the girl behind the reception desk said "No, he died today." Unreal.

I haven't studied under him and I had always thought I would someday. I have been fortunate to train with many of his students. All my teachers have been his students, so through them he influenced me. They say he had a unique touch and could train even severely injured people. Alexander Medin, a great teacher, lovely human being and certified teacher once said that what Guruji appreciated was being seen as a regular human being once in a while, amidst all admiration of him as a guru.

No matter which yoga tradition you belong to or follow, K Pattabhi Jois has probably touched your practice in some way. For us ashtangis, he has been and will always be the teacher of us all. Now that his grandson Sharath has taken over as the leader of the Mysore Shala, the teachings of Ashtanga yoga are in the best hands they could possibly be in.

We thank you, Guruji!

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better: Yoga And Competition

2009-04-04T08:29:00.000-07:00

By Vedran

Your main point of reference in hatha yoga practice is yourself, your body and your mind. But what when the competitor in you leaps forth? How do we balance out our desire to excell with the need to be better than others just for the sake of being superior to someone?

You are on your sticky mat, flowing through your practice, floating through some postures, strugglig a bit with others, just your regular drill. Then your attention turns to the person in front of you, effortlessly lifting up into a handstand or seemingly levitating in her/ his jump-backs and jump-throughs. You feel a pinch of jealousy bubbling inside of you and you put some extra effort in whichever posture you are doing. Then you see the same person struggling in a backbend while you lift off like a yogic god. Self-contentment and a feeling of superiority washes through you while you notice how perfect your ujjayi is in your immaculate backbend.

We have all been there - either feeling inferior because someone else's practice (as far as yoga practice can be "mine" or "yours" or belonging to anyone) looks like Cirque Du Soleil compared with what you are doing, or thinking what you´re doing is better or more correct or advanced than what a fellow practicioner is doing. There are even "Yoga Olympics" being held, where people compete with each other at fields of contortion, flow, grace and what not. When it is a "yoga competition", is it yoga at all anymore, or not? Oh well, who can tell?

Ashtangis might be especially prone to this mode of competitive attitude, as Ashtanga Vinyasa is physically powerful and invites to a certain degree of athleticism. What better chance to sport some good ole testosterone rush and flex some prana driven muscle? Then again, a major part of our training as Ashtangis is exactly not getting carried away by the physical aspect of it all. Knowing the physical vigour of Ashtanga yoga, it is clear that this is one of the most challenging parts of the practice - giving your all, doing your best while doing the hatha practice and still not slipping into

What all of the teachers I have practiced with and under have conveyed to me is that yoga is a non-competitive practice. Because your body is just your own, like a fingerprint, with its very own and unique strengths, weaknesses, wisdom and fields to develop on, it is hard to see how you can compete. Could you compare fingerprints and then judge whether mine looks better than yours? During all my years of practice, I have always seen people generally less flexible or strong than me do one asana or several in a way I really admired. Or if we push it into a more comparative mode - better than me. I remember a guy that attended the same class as me for a couple of years that had the most spectacular utthita parsvakonasana (extended side-angle posture). His muscles were quite stiff all over and he himself probably wouldn´t have called himself an advanced practicioner. But he mastered the sequence he practiced and his utthita parsvakonasana was a thing of beauty. So, would I than be called a better practicioner because I can put my legs behind my head? Or he because of his Yoga Journal-esque utthita parsvakonasana? I doubt that. Because it´s not about what you do but how you do it. Nowehere in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras is it stated that enlightenment and mastery is achieved by being the best contortionist. It is about your inner attitude, about observances and how you apply your practice off the mat when you relate to the world and your fellow living creatures. You can be the most obnoxious and rudest individual in the world and still be capable of performing the most impressive asana sequences. Do the sequences and your mastery of the postures make you a yogi? Naw..... Being a decent, honest person that respects the world and its living creatures is as much a yoga practice as your endevours on the mat. Maybe even more?

I remember seeing David Swenson demonstrating the Ashtanga yoga primary series. Before launching into a beautiful, flowing and strong (oh god, so strong!) practice, he said that a physacally stiff person who doesn´t go so deeply into the postures but does them with good breath, concentration, reverence and respect has a stronger practice than the one who is ever so bendy but with scattered attention and constricted breath. The lesson?

Attitude IS everything.

Don't Compete - Create!

The attitude of competition comes from an idea that there isn´t enough beauty, power, strength, affluence etc. for everyone. If you think that someone else's acquirement of the world's physical and spiritual goods can lead to your lack of the same, you will feel the need to compete. And the truth is that there most definitely is more than enough for everyone.
The same applies to yoga practice. As stated earlier, the practice you do is going to reflect your body, your muscles, your skeleton, your internal states. As this is any yogi's starting point, competing is absurd. Your life (or lives, who knows?) has formed you and this is the work you need to do. Comparing this to anyone else leads to futile efforts and spiritual blindness.

Your work is to (re)create yourself, both as a physical being and as a spiritual and sensual entity. This process of creation is through grounding yourself in wherever you are in terms of your own self and your training, being true to the tradition and developing yourself from there. Your work is yours alone. Trying to "take someone on" on your yoga mat is both arrogant and unconstructive, as you attempt doing another person's work. Which you, naturally, cannot do because you are not them. Aren't you a lucky camper now?

Of course, we could set some standards to go by in terms of what constitutes an anatomically perfect asana, or how perfect breathing techniques are done and so on. But then, the practice turns into gymnastics and ceases to be yoga. Yoga is a practice of personal improvement and your own road to becoming a better person, so that you can enrich the world you live in by enriching yourself. You don't improve yourself or the world by trying to make someone else's work seem smaller or less relevant.
Your job is to do your very best and this is a big enough task. You are supposed to excell, but you excell for your own sake and you go on from there. There is enough good stuff ("Love Shack" by the B52's starts in the background) for all of us out there and you have no business making other yogis' practice seem worth less than yours. The only thing you acomplish is diminishing what you yourself are doing.

Plunge Into Santosha

Santosha, the principle of contentment, is one of my favourite nyamas (I shouldn´t have favourites, I know, I know...). Practicing santosha is not settling for second best. It is being grounded in the moment and in wherever you are and recognizing its worth so that you can go on and make it better (or stay where you are if that pleases you). It is the art of appreciation. And you know what they say: "Don't hate - appreciate!". Real contentment is knowing that you are never stuck. It is knowing that good things are going to get better and that the not so great things are going to get better as well. Santosha is loving what you have got and knowing that the power to do anything with everything you want to do anything with is all in your hands.

Where does competing belong in a perspective like this, my dear yogi? Well, it doesn´t. The practice we do is the same practice no matter what we do, as long as we follow a correct method and as long as what we do is done with reverence, respect and lightness of mind and spirit. If you judge your practice or anyone else's, if you compare them and deprecate yourself because the other person is steadier on their head, cut it out now. Being a competitive yogi is like skipping your practice - it weakens you.

What it boils down to is this: In yoga, there is no competition. When you start competing, you stop doing yoga and start doing gymnastics. Which is okay, just as long as you know that your yoga has gone bye bye. Give yourself a break if you don't quite like your forward bends or inversions or whatever. Start liking them, no matter what they look like. And leave other people and their practice alone. Get inspired looking at others, share their energy and share yours with them. Do not put labels.

Roll out your mat now. Enjoy it, dammit! ;-))

To Be Or Not To Be 100% Raw

2009-01-29T04:36:00.000-08:00

Now this one will be a bit off topic but I enjoy some coulinary radicalism, so I thought I`d post it even though it`s not about yoga as such. Many of us aspireing yogis, practice also through what and how we eat. I have never embarked on a raw food trip and the fact that many people get it to work well fascinates
me. A friend once told me he considered trying araw food diet. I thought "Oh God, no!". On the other hand, i always think that when I hear the world "diet". But then I thought I would educate myself. Quite accidentaly, I came across a fab article by Jennie Murphy. So, here it is:

By Jennie Murphy

There are many different ways to eat a raw food diet. There's low fat, high fruit, low fat low fruit, there's gourmet, there's no fruit, there's vegan and non-vegan, superfoods, or not superfoods, supplement or no supplement. There are so many different raw diets to choose from that I often feel for the new person coming to raw… there is so much different advice out there! Many people go through several different phases before they find the style of raw that fits them.

I myself started as high raw and was content with that. I originally did not want to be 100%. I did not want to be vegetarian either. However, in may 2007 I was fortunate enough to be helping out at the Mind, Body, Spirit festival in Sydney. There I met some beautiful people who had health glowing out of them. These people were 100% raw vegan; I've not eaten meat since.

I started out high raw, which was raw breakfast, lunch and two snacks and a salad with my dinner. The cooked portion was quite small. Evening meals were usually gourmet. Then I eventually got to the stage where I had cooked food once or twice per month. I'm still having cooked food once or twice per month but even that has changed. No more is that cooked portion chips or Chinese take-away. If I make myself some cooked food it's steamed veges. On top of a heap of shredded greens.

I'm two years into my raw journey. I'm still not 100% raw despite the perceived pressure to be. The other day I spoke to a lady on the phone. I've had dozens of conversations similar to this one. She was asking "How do I be 100%? I'm an all or nothing girl but this healthy food tastes like (insert swear word here)". I was not surprised as I've heard this many times before.

100% all or nothing. Where does that come from? I'm not sure myself. There are a lot of raw authors who are 100% raw vegan and even 100% raw non-vegan who are great advocates of being 100% raw. "The difference is unbelievable!" they say, "You will be blown away by the difference between 99% and 100% raw. Just try it" and so on. This is probably true. In fact, I believe that it is. There are so many testimonies out there of people living 100% raw lifestyles who are thriving. Whether they do superfoods, no superfoods, low fat, high fat, low fruit, high fruit... there are many, many people around doing various styles of raw and getting amazing results.

Then there are others. Who struggle. They get to X amount of days raw and then go crazy. Emotions surface that are too painful for them to ignore. 'Getting the crazies' is something I have heard once or more to describe how they feel on a 100% raw diet.

I'm one of those people. Recently I did a 100 day raw challenge. After day 35 or 36 I started to get quite agitated. I gave in on day 56, decided that raw food sucked, I could never be a raw fooder, I was too weak to be 100%, I must find another owner for my raw food business and went on a cooked food binge of biblical proportions. As the owner of a large raw food business I felt that I could not hold up my head in the raw community. I was ashamed which is a sad and unhealthy way to be.

It took me five weeks to get back on track. During that time I beat myself up like you would not believe. I lost all happiness about myself, loathed myself in fact, and just had no will power at all left.

During this time I got to talking to others. In Australia it seems we are so focused on 100% that we often forget to enjoy the journey. We are so keen to see some of our own make it that a lot of people try a style of raw for six months and consider themselves gurus! Perhaps this is why we feel pressured to move faster than we are ready. Some raw foodies become so enthusiastic that their approach can appear one-eyed and superior. Which is a shame because they could be quite inspiring.

All or nothing. I had opted for nothing. In fact, I vowed that I would never touch raw food again as long as I lived! Luckily, my loving hubby did not take me seriously.

So, to those who can be 100% and feel sane, hold your compassion, and still be yourselves I applaud you. I hold you as someone to be inspired by. However, if you are not 100% raw, I also hold you as someone to be admired and loved and I am just as inspired by you. As are many others.

100% or nothing? So, if this is you saying this, ask yourself, when you ate mostly cooked food, did you eat a 100% cooked food diet? No fresh fruit, veges or nuts at all? I do actually know a few people who have lived that way. But not many.

If you did not eat all cooked, did you still think 100% or nothing?

Lets look at 'all or nothing' another way. What about fitness? Lets pretend you have never been fit in your life. You have now decided to become a runner! So, do you go and book yourself into the nearest marathon, which, luckily, just happens to be in 4 days time? Or, do you get a training program. Ask around... get your running style checked to make sure you are not going to shred your joints in the first place? Hmmm....

Do you think that fitness and raw food eating should not be compared? I ask "Why not"? Are they are both physical activities? Sure there is an emotional aspect to them both as well, but in the main they are physical.

If you think that eating is more emotional, which it is for many many people including myself, let us look at an example of something else that is about emotional control. Meditation. You have just read about meditation, think it's the bees knees, the answer to all your questions, and have decided that from today you are going to meditate for 6 hours per day 7 days a week. You could probably do it! I'm sure many have. But, for most, you would be better off starting smaller and working your way up to meditating 6 hours a day. Starting with just 5 minutes two to three times per day.

In our society we are not really used to having to wait for anything. Everything is so fast. You want it, there it is. Banks make sure that most people can get a loan just by sneezing on their way in the door so you can buy yourself the latest house, car or handbag. Fast food outlets are everywhere along with microwave dinners to ensure you have a meal in five minutes flat with little to no effort. But going raw can take time folks.

Karen Knowler, a great raw fooder and life stylist from England took 5 years to go raw. Frederic Patenaude says it took him 10 years and he is still learning! Please do not give up after a day, a week or a month because you are an 'all or nothing' person. Have patience with yourself.

Train as you would for a marathon or even a 100 metre race if need be. Set aside time each day, as you would to learn to meditate, to plan what you are going to eat. Are you meeting friends at the local shopping centre and know they will all be at the food court for lunch? What can you pack? Is there a fruit shop nearby where you can get yourself some watermelon or apples while they have their deep fried whatever?

Are you going to a family dinner where you know that you are going to be questioned, even ridiculed by worried relatives about what you are eating? What can you tell them to calm their minds. What compromises are you willing to make? I told my family that I was doing a '8 week detox'. I also told my friends this. It was perfectly true, I was! At the end of the 8 weeks I told them I felt so great I would eat that way until I didn't want to anymore. Only one person objected strongly and I asked her to give me two years, promising that if, in two years I was ill or unhealthy etc, I would change back to eating a more 'regular' way.

Enjoy it! Never feel bad about what you eat. If you are 100% or nothing, then I challenge you to this, enjoy your food 100% of the time. Feel good emotionally after eating 100% of the time. Be YOUR friend 100% of the time. If you have a day that is high cooked, don't feel bad. Enjoy it for what it is, then... move on. Tomorrow is another day. Be raw then. Or high raw.

If you really cannot get around the whole 100% or nothing, but are finding 100% raw 100% of the time is making you 100% miserable, can you try and be 100% raw eighty percent of the time? The other twenty percent you can do whatever you like with! Remember, if 100% is what you want, you don't have to do it overnight. It's extremely rare that 100% overnight happens. Work towards it. Plan it. But most of all, enjoy the journey.

These are some thoughts I have that you may find useful. Or know someone else who does. Take them with you and do with them what you will.

Befriend Your Fears

2009-01-28T01:37:00.000-08:00

Shine the light of compassion on all that frightens you to find healing and freedom.

By Tara Brach

Maria described herself, during our first therapy session, as a "prisoner of fear." Her slight frame was tense, and her dark eyes had an apprehensive look. From the outside, she said, her life appeared to be going very well. As a social worker, she was a strong advocate for her clients. She had good friends, and she had been living with her partner, Jeff, for three years. Yet her incessant worrying about how things might go wrong clouded every experience.

When stuck in morning traffic, Maria was gripped with fear about being late for work. She was perpetually anxious about disappointing her clients or saying the wrong thing at staff lunches. Any hint of making a mistake spiraled into a fear of being fired. At home, if Jeff spoke in a sharp tone, Maria's heart pounded and her stomach knotted up. "This morning he complained that I'd left the gas tank near empty, and I thought, 'He's going to walk out and never come back,'" she said. Maria could never shake the feeling that just around the corner, things were going to fall apart.

Maria was living in what I call the trance of fear. When you are in this trance, fearful thoughts and emotions take over and obscure the larger truths of life. You forget the love between you and your dear ones; you forget the beauty of the natural world; you forget your essential goodness and wholeness. You expect trouble and are unable to live in the present moment.

Brain chemistry and genetics may predispose a person to excessive fearfulness, and it can be fueled by societal circumstances, such as the perception of a terrorist threat. Traumatic childhood experiences may also give rise to the trance of fear.

For Maria, the fear took hold in elementary school, when her mother was holding down two jobs and going to night school, leaving Maria to care for her two younger siblings. Her father worked erratically, drank too much, and had an unpredictable temper. "He would barge in at dinnertime, red-faced and angry, yell at me, and then disappear into his room," she told me. "I had no idea what I'd done wrong." When Maria was 13, her father vanished without a word, and she always felt that she had driven him away.

It is understandable that Maria's fear of her father's anger became linked with a belief that her "badness" made him leave. But even if your personal history is not so distressing, you might spend a part of your life worrying about the ways in which you aren't good enough.

Necessary Fears
Fear itself is a natural and necessary part of being alive. All living beings experience themselves as separate, with a sense of "me in here" and "the world out there." And that sense of separateness leads you to recognize that you can be injured by others, and that, eventually, the "me in here" will die. At the same time, you are genetically programmed to keep yourself alive and free from harm, and it is fear that signals you to respond when threats arise. It lets you know to hit the brakes when the car in front of you suddenly stops, or to call 911 if you are having chest pain.

The problem is that fear often works overtime. Mark Twain said it well when he quipped: "I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened." Think for just a minute about all of the time you've spent fearful and worrying. Looking back, you might see that much of what you fearfully anticipated turned out fine. Precious moments in life—moments that could have been full of love, creativity, and presence—were taken over by habitual fear.

Here's the good news: When you bring what I call unconditional presence to the trance of fear, you create the foundation for true spiritual awakening. In other words, as you learn to face your fears with courage and kindness, you discover the loving awareness that is your true nature. This awakening is the essence of all healing, and its fruition is the freedom to live and love fully.

Unsafe Havens
While the basic experience of fear is that "something is wrong," many people turn that feeling into "there must be something wrong with me." This is especially true in Western culture, where one's sense of belonging to family, community, and the natural world is often weak and the pressure to achieve is so strong. You may feel as though you must live up to certain standards in order to be loved, so you constantly monitor yourself, trying to see if you're falling short.

When you live in this trance of fear, you instinctively develop strategies to protect yourself. I call these attempts to find safety and relief "false refuges," since they work, at best, only for the time being.

One such strategy is physical contraction. When you stay trapped in fear, you begin to feel tight and guarded, even when there is no immediate threat. Your shoulders may become permanently knotted and raised, your head thrust forward, your back hunched, your belly tense. Chronic fear can generate a permanent suit of armor. In such a state, we become, as the Tibetan teacher Chögyam Trungpa taught, a bundle of tense muscles defending our very existence.

The trance of fear traps the mind in rigid patterns, too. The mind obsesses and produces endless stories, reminding you of the bad things that might happen and creating strategies to avoid them.

In addition to physical armoring and mental obsession, there are many well-worn behavioral strategies for reducing or avoiding fear. You might run from fear by staying busy, trying to accomplish a lot, or judging others critically to boost your ego. Or maybe you take the popular approach of numbing yourself by indulging in too much food, drugs, or alcohol. Yet no amount of doing or numbing can erase the undercurrents of feeling fearful and unworthy. In fact, the efforts you make to avoid fear and prove yourself worthy only reinforce the deep sense of being separate and inadequate. When you run from fear and take false refuge, you miss being in the very place where genuine healing and peace are possible.

Bringing compassion and mindfulness directly to the experience of fear will help dissolve the trance, taking you inside to the real refuge of unconditional presence. Compassion is the spacious quality of heart that allows and holds with tenderness whatever you are experiencing. It seeks to answer the question, Can I meet this moment, this experience, with kindness? Mindfulness is the clear recognition of your moment-to-moment experience. Here the inquiry to use is, What is happening inside me right now? Being mindfully attentive means that you are aware of the stories you are telling yourself and the feelings and sensations in your body. You can initially emphasize either compassion or mindfulness in meditation; both are essential when facing fear.

Unexamined Beliefs
One evening, Maria arrived at my office distraught and unnerved. A co-worker was sick and Maria's boss had asked her to step in as supervisor for their team of social workers. Sitting rigidly with her eyes downcast, she said bleakly, "Tara, I am really scared."

I invited her to pause—to breathe and simply be aware of the two of us sitting together. "I'm here with you right now," I said. "Would it be all right if we paid attention to the fear together?" Looking up at me, she nodded. "Good," I said, and went on. "You might begin by asking yourself, 'What am I believing right now?'" Maria responded without hesitation. "I'm going to let everyone down," she said. "They'll see that it was a mistake to ever hire me. They'll want to get rid of me."

When you are emotionally stuck, becoming mindful of what you believe at that moment can be a powerful part of awakening from trance. By bringing your stories and limiting beliefs to light, they gradually have less hold on your psyche. I encouraged Maria to simply acknowledge the thoughts as a story she was telling herself, and then to sense the feelings of vulnerability in her body. I assured her that if the process felt like more than she could handle, we could shift our attention—it's not helpful to feel overwhelmed or possessed by fear. After a few moments, she reported in a shaky voice, "The fear is big. My stomach is clenched, and my heart is banging. Mostly there is a gripping, aching, empty feeling in my heart."

I invited her to check in with the fear, to ask it what it wanted from her. Maria sat quietly for a few moments and then began speaking slowly: "It wants to know that it's OK that it's here...that I accept it. And..." At this point she became quiet for some long moments. "And that I pay attention, keep it company." Then, in a barely audible voice she whispered, "I will try. I want to keep you company." This was one of Maria's first moments of being truly compassionate with herself. Instead of pushing away her feelings, she was able to gently acknowledge and accept them.

Love Lessons
What Maria and all of us need is to feel that we are loved and understood. This is the essence of unconditional presence, the true refuge that can heal the trance of fear. As the Buddha taught, our fear is great, but greater yet is the truth of our essential connectedness.

If you've been wounded in a relationship, the love and understanding of friends are essential components in bringing a healing presence to your fears. You need the gift of this caring presence from others, and through meditations that cultivate compassion and mindfulness, you can learn to offer it to yourself.

And if you've been traumatized, I think it's important to seek the help of a therapist as well as an experienced meditation teacher as you begin deepening your presence with fear. Otherwise, when you allow yourself to reexperience the fear, you may find it to be traumatic rather than healing. In Maria's case, we spent several weeks working with meditative practices that develop unconditional presence. I acted as her guide, and when she became aware of fear, I encouraged her first to pause, because pausing creates a space for you to arrive in the present moment. Then she would begin mindfully naming out loud what she was noticing: the thoughts she was believing, the shakiness and tightness in her belly, the squeeze in her heart.

With whatever was arising, Maria's practice was to notice it, breathe with it, and with gentle, nonjudging attention, allow it to unfold naturally. If it felt overwhelming, she would open her eyes and reconnect to the sense of being with me, to the songs of the birds, to the trees and sky outside my office window.

Abandoning False Refuges
The challenge in facing fear is to overcome the initial reflex to dissociate from the body and take false refuge in racing thoughts. To combat this tendency to pull away from fear, you awaken mindfulness by intentionally leaning in. This means shifting your attention away from the stories—the planning, judging, worrying—and fully connecting with your feelings and the sensations in your body. By gently leaning in instead of pulling away, you discover the compassionate presence that releases you from the grip of fear.

My meditation student Phil got an opportunity to lean in to fear the first night his 16-year-old son borrowed the car. Josh had promised to return home by midnight. But midnight came and went. As the minutes passed, Phil became increasingly agitated. Had Josh been drinking? Had he had an accident? By 12:30 Phil was furious, trying his son's cell phone every few minutes.

Then he remembered the instructions on mindfulness from the weekly meditation class he attended. He sat down, desperate to ease his agitation. "OK, I'm pausing," he began. "Now, what's going on inside me?" Immediately he felt the rising pressure in his chest. Noting "anger, anger," he experienced the sensations filling his body. Then, under the anger, Phil felt the painful clutch of fear. His mind was imagining the police calling with the news that is a parent's worst nightmare. He leaned in, breathing with the fear, feeling its crushing weight at his chest. The story kept arising, and each time, Phil returned to his body, bringing his breath and attention directly to the place of churning, pressing fear.

As he leaned in to the fear, he found buried within it the hollow ache of grief. Then, drawing on a traditional Buddhist compassion practice, Phil began gently offering himself the message "I care about this suffering," repeating the phrase over and over as his eyes filled with tears. Phil was holding his grief with compassion, and as he did so, he could feel how much he cherished his son. While the fear remained, leaning in had connected him with unconditional presence.

A short while later, he heard the car rolling into the driveway. Josh barged into the living room and launched into his defense: He had lost track of time. The cell phone had run out of juice. Instead of reacting, Phil listened quietly. Then with his eyes glistening, he told his son, "This last hour was one of the worst I've gone through. I love you and..." He was silent for some moments and then continued softly, "I was afraid something terrible had happened. Please, Josh, don't do this again." The boy's armor instantly melted, and apologizing, he sank onto the couch next to his dad.

If Phil had not met his fears with unconditional presence, they would have possessed him and fueled angry reactivity. Instead, he opened to the full truth of his experience and was able to meet his son from a place of honesty and wholeness, rather than blame.

Fear's Gift
Several months after we had started therapy, Maria arrived for our session with her own story of healing. Two nights before, she and Jeff had been arguing about an upcoming visit from his parents. Tired from a difficult day at work, he suggested they figure things out the next evening. Without their usual goodnight kiss, he just rolled over and fell asleep.

Filled with agitation, Maria got up, went into her office, and sat down on her meditation cushion. As she had done so often with me, she became still, pausing to check in and find out what was going on. There was a familiar swirl of thoughts: "He's ashamed of me. He doesn't really want to be with me." Then she had an image of her father, drunk and angry, walking out the front door, and she heard a familiar inner voice saying, "No matter how hard I try, he's going to leave me." She felt as if icy claws were gripping her heart. Her whole body was shaking.

Taking a few deep breaths, Maria began whispering a prayer: "Please, may I feel held in love." She called to mind her spirit allies—her grandmother, a close friend, and me—and visualized us circling around her, a presence that could help keep her company as she experienced the quaking in her heart. Placing her hand gently on her heart, she sensed compassion pouring through her hand directly into the core of her vulnerability.

She decided to let go of any resistance to the fear and to let it be as big as it was. Breathing with it, she felt something shift: "The fear was storming through me, but it felt like a violent current moving through a sea of love." She heard a gentle whisper arise from her heart: "When I trust I'm the ocean, I'm not afraid of the waves." This homecoming to the fullness of our being is the gift of fear, and it frees us to be genuinely intimate with our world. The next evening when Maria and Jeff met to talk, she felt at peace. "For the first time ever," she told me, "I could let in the truth that he loved me."

As long as you are alive, you will feel fear. It is an intrinsic part of your world, as natural as a bitter cold winter day or the winds that rip branches off trees. If you resist it or push it aside, you miss a powerful opportunity for healing and freedom. When you face your fears with mindfulness and compassion, you begin to realize the loving and luminous awareness that, like the ocean, can hold the moving waves. This boundless presence is your true refuge—you are coming home to the vastness of your own awakened heart.

Tara Brach, the author of Radical Acceptance (Bantam), is a clinical psychologist and teaches Buddhist meditation at centers in the United States and Canada.

Use Your Core For Crane

2009-01-08T05:47:00.000-08:00

Trouble in Bakasana? Check this out!

By the lovely Barbara Banagh:

Bakasana, more accurately translated as Crane Pose, is the most important of all arm balances, since understanding how to do Bakasana lays the foundation for most arm balances. Arm balances are complex, and they reveal how the flexibility and strength that carry newcomers through many poses cannot replace skills mature yoga practitioners develop over years of practice.

Most people who fail at this arm balance have not distributed their weight correctly. The most common mistake I see is students lifting their hips so high that their poses are too vertical—they become diving cranes! Some people get the feet off the floor this way, but then their pose becomes very heavy on the arms. Crane Pose performed in this manner avoids the weight shift essential to understanding this asana and evolving into other arm balances. My feeling is, if you can't go forward enough to risk falling, you won't go forward enough to balance.

First, I want you to feel the abdominal and thigh action that is the core of support for Bakasana. Squat on your tiptoes and bend forward to position your shoulders or upper arms under the shins. (Some folks practice Bakasana with their knees pressed into the armpits—your choice). Strongly lift your head and chest while pressing the arms back against the shins. Without putting further weight on your arms, and keeping your chest lifted, pull your abdomen in and raise your hips to shoulder level. Though difficult, this action gives you a sense of where the real strength of arm balances comes from.

From this position, exhale, push forward from your feet, and move your elbows past your fingers so your arms slant forward. Keep your chest lifted! When you can do this, you will feel your weight shift from your feet to your hands, allowing the body to be lifted and supported by your arms. It's as simple as that.

You can practice this difficult arm movement without the added burden of your full weight by kneeling and pushing your elbows past your fingers while scooping up your chest. If you look at a picture of someone doing Bakasana well, you will see the dramatic angle of the arms you seek.

So remember, use your abs and thighs to keep your hips at shoulder height, push forward to shift weight onto your hands, and lift your chest. When you become adept, refine the pose further by straightening your arms and pulling your feet as close to your hips as possible, letting your hips rise. Most of all, keep practicing!

Barbara Benagh, YJ's 2001 Asana columnist, founded the Yoga Studio in Boston in 1981 and teaches seminars nationwide. Currently, Barbara is writing a yoga workbook for asthmatics and can be reached at www.yogastudio.org.

And here`s more:

(bahk-AHS-anna)
baka = crane

Step by Step

Squat down from Tadasana with your inner feet a few inches apart. If it isn't possible to keep your heels on the floor, support them on a thickly folded blanket. Separate your knees wider than your hips and lean the torso forward, between the inner thighs. Stretch your arms forward, then bend your elbows, place your hands on the floor and the backs of the upper arms against the shins.

Snuggle your inner thighs against the sides of your torso, and your shins into your armpits, and slide the upper arms down as low onto the shins as possible. Lift up onto the balls of your feet and lean forward even more, taking the weight of your torso onto the backs of the upper arms. In Bakasana you consciously attempt to contract your front torso and round your back completely. To help yourself do this, keep your tailbone as close to your heels as possible.

With an exhalation, lean forward even more onto the backs of your upper arms, to the point where the balls of your feet leave the floor. Now your torso and legs are balanced on the backs of your upper arms. As a beginner at this pose, you might want to stop here, perched securely on the bent arms.

But if you are ready to go further, squeeze the legs against the arms, press the inner hands firmly to the floor and (with an inhalation) straighten the elbows. Seen from the side the arms are angled slightly forward relative to the floor. The inner knees should be glued to the outer arms, high up near the armpits. Keep the head in a neutral position with your eyes looking at the floor, or lift the head slightly, without compressing the back of the neck, and look forward.

Stay in the pose anywhere from 20 seconds to 1 minute. To release, exhale and slowly lower your feet to the floor, back into a squat.

Anatomical Focus
Wrists
Benefits
Strengthens arms and wrists
Stretches the upper back
Strengthens the abdominal muscles
Opens the groins
Tones the abdominal organs
Contraindications and Cautions
Carpal tunnel syndrome
Pregnancy
Beginner's Tip
Beginners tend to move into this pose by lifting their buttocks high away from their heels. In Bakasana try to keep yourself tucked tight, with the heels and buttocks close together. When you are ready to take the feet off the floor, push the upper arms against the shins and draw your inner groins deep into the pelvis to help you with the lift.

Variations
The most accessible variation of Bakasana is a twist: Parsva Bakasana (pronounced PARSH-vah, parsva = side or flank).

Squat as described above, but keep your knees together. Exhale and turn your torso to the right, bracing the left elbow to the outside of the right knee. Work the arm along the knee, until the knee is firm against the upper arm, near the armpit. Set the hands on the floor, lean to the right, and lift the feet off the floor on an exhalation, balancing with the outer left arm pressed against the outer right leg. Straighten the arms as much as possible, though no doubt for most students the elbows will remain slightly bent. Hold for 20 to 30 seconds, exhale back to the squat, and repeat to the left for the same length of time.

Modifications and Props
Some students have a difficult time lifting into Bakasana from the floor. It's often helpful to prepare for this pose squatting on a block or other height, so that your feet are a few inches off the floor.

Partnering
A partner can help you learn to balance in Bakasana, especially if you are reluctant to lean forward and take your feet off the floor. Squat in the ready position, hands on the floor, up on the balls of your feet. Have the partner stand in front of you. As you lean forward he/she will support your shoulders with his/her hands, to prevent you from toppling forward onto your face or head. Stay for a few breaths, getting a taste for the balanced position, yet secure in the hands of your partner.

Preparatory Poses
Adho Mukha Svanasana
Baddha Konasana
Balasana
Plank Pose
Virasana
Follow-Up Poses
Adho Mukha Svanasana
Chaturanga Dandasana
Plank Pose
Deepen The Pose
The full pose sometimes causes varying degrees of pain in the wrists. Instead of spreading the fingers on the floor, curl them slightly. This should take some of the pressure off the wrists.

Thank you, Yoga Journal! :-D

Mastering The Jump-Through

2008-11-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

By Tim Miller

I can't seem to get anywhere with the action of jumping from Downward Facing Dog to sitting. I think I have broken my little toe trying to accomplish this task! I am not sure what is missing to do this.
—Name withheld

Tim Miller's reply:

This is a question I get all the time and a source of frustration for many who watch their fellow students gliding gracefully through their arms while they feel themselves crash and burn. Some are convinced that their arms are too short, others that their legs are too long. Meanwhile, the toes and the egos suffer.

One of the key things to keep in mind is that the legs are longer than the arms. In order for the legs to come through the arms successfully they must be as parallel to the floor as possible while in flight. The most common mistake I see is that students keep their hips high as they jump so the legs remain too vertical.

To build a sense of confidence and competence, first try this maneuver with blocks under the hands. From Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog), exhale and bend the knees deeply so the ribs come back against the thighs, lift the heels and allow the hips to descend. Keep the hips as low as possible as you spring forward. Ideally, the body stays in a full forward bend even as it comes through the arms.

Remember to support the movement with your breath. Jumping through at the end of an exhalation, when you are completely empty of breath, is best because the exhalation also facilitates deeper movement into the forward bending position. You will also find strength and support by engaging the abdomen and pelvic floor in Uddiyana (Flying Up Lock) and Mula Bandha (Root Lock). So as you set yourself up to jump through, remember to exhale, keep the bandhas engaged, remain in forward flexion, and stay close to the ground.

One final tip: The practice surface can also be a factor. A surface that is either too soft or too sticky can present problems. Most people find it easiest to do this on a hardwood floor, and some even wear socks to help their feet slide through.

Tim Miller has been a student of Ashtanga Yoga for over twenty years and was the first American certified to teach by Pattabhi Jois at the Ashtanga Yoga Research Institute in Mysore, India. Tim has a thorough knowledge of this ancient system, which he imparts in a dynamic, yet compassionate and playful manner. For information about his workshops and retreats in the United States and abroad visit his Web site, www.ashtangayogacenter.com.

Poses We Hate

2008-10-29T04:59:00.000-07:00

I have been a big slacker lately and I haven`t written anything for a while. But here`s a piece I really like and that anyone who practices yoga should be able to relate to. So, dig in:

No matter how advanced your practice is, surely there are asanas you'd just as soon avoid. Here, five top teachers divulge their nemeses and what they've learned by practicing them.

By Nina Zolotow and Jason Crandell

If you've ever experienced negative feelings or even—dare we say it?—hate for certain yoga poses, you're not alone. In fact, you're in very good company. Many popular and accomplished yoga teachers have also struggled with certain asanas, including some of the most basic ones. Patricia Walden, one of only two advanced senior Iyengar teachers in the United States, spent years hating "that God-awful Marichyasana I." Baron Baptiste, who offers his popular yoga "bootcamps" all over the country, used to get horribly frustrated when he did Garudasana, because he'd fall out of the pose if he tried to wrap his foot around his ankle. And popular vinyasa teacher and yoga trance dance creator Shiva Rea still calls her least favorite pose "Poor Me Purvottanasana."

Yet, as these teachers would be the first to tell you, the very poses we hate are some of the most valuable ones for us to practice. Fortunately, there are many tactics that not only can make it easier to practice those bothersome poses, but also can make the experience less daunting—and maybe even fun. If you apply the tips and tricks outlined in this article, you'll see why it's so valuable to work on asanas you struggle with, gain insight about just why you hate the poses you do, and discover how to turn your nemeses into your greatest teachers.

EVERY DIFFICULTY HAS A SILVER LINING

So why, you might ask, would you want to practice poses you loathe? For one thing, these poses often specifically address your physical imbalances; they build strength and flexibility in exactly the places that need it most. If you sit hunched all day in front of a computer, backbends may be difficult for you, but they're also just what your body needs. Or maybe years of running have left you with tight hamstrings. It would be no surprise if you despise forward bends, but those are exactly the poses that will move you toward physical balance.

In addition, doing poses you find physically difficult or that scare you can be a great antidote to staleness in your practice; it's exhilarating to take on new challenges. And even if you don't achieve immediate results, you'll often find that a sweet feeling of relief arises when you face difficulties instead of evading them.

Practicing poses you tend to shun also teaches you to cultivate equanimity in the face of challenge. When you take the time during your yoga practice to study how you deal with difficulty, you may gain insights that will assist you with the tough stuff elsewhere in your life. Do you ignore difficulty? Approach it timidly? Rush at it headlong? Become overwhelmed by it? Once you identify habits that aren't serving you, you can begin the process of pausing, taking a deep breath, and searching for a more effective approach.

Regularly facing the poses you find most intimidating can also help you change your self-image—from incapable to capable, say, or from timid to brave. For instance, Patricia Walden says Handstand is a "power pose" for many female students. She's observed that learning to get up and stay up in it builds so much confidence and mental strength that the experience is often life-changing.

SEVEN TACTICS FOR TRANSFORMATION

OK, so maybe by now you're kinda sorta convinced that practicing poses you find onerous might be a good idea. But where do you start? The thought of forcing yourself to do one of your least favorite poses the same old unpleasant way probably feels discouraging—and it's not the most helpful method, either. Instead, stand back for a moment and consider the following steps for transforming your relationship with these poses.

Identify Your Discomfort. Your first step should be determining exactly why you loathe a pose. Understanding why you dislike it so much is the key to figuring out how to come to terms with it.

One of the most obvious reasons is that it causes you physical discomfort or even pain. Such discomfort can take a lot of different forms. Many students say Sarvangasana (Shoulderstand) and Halasana (Plow Pose) make them feel trapped and claustrophobic. Others complain that their breathing feels constricted in twists, or that they just feel jammed and stuck in some forward bends and backbends.

Over time, you should be able to reduce and maybe even eliminate these discomforts. Do keep in mind, of course, that some mild muscle pain may be inevitable along the way as you ask your body to move and stretch in ways that it doesn't in daily life. (Caution: Always pay attention to sharp pain; it is usually an important message from your body indicating that you should back off immediately.)

Another reason you might hate a pose is that it causes you fear. Maybe you worry about harming yourself: hurting your lower back in backbends, straining your neck in Shoulderstand, or falling on your face in arm balances. Or you may experience so much disorientation—or sheer terror—in inversions like Headstand and Handstand that you find yourself making an unnecessary and exceptionally long trip to the restroom every time your teacher calls for them.

Finally, difficulties with a pose are often compounded by embarrassment or shame. Some students hate Chaturanga Danda- sana (Four-Limbed Staff Pose) because it makes them feel like a weakling; others suffer from performance anxiety in Virabhadrasana III (Warrior Pose III) and Ardha Chandrasana (Half Moon Pose), worrying that they are going to fall out of the poses in front of the whole class.

Once you've figured out exactly why certain poses are so irksome to you, you can begin to employ specific tactics to address your personal challenges.

Use props and pose variations. If you take a moment to think about it, you may realize that you already know variations and props to make a pose you find difficult much more accessible. If you need more suggestions, most teachers can give you a hand. Patricia Walden, Barbara Benagh, and Seane Corn all cite props and modifications as crucial in their work with difficult poses (see below).

As part of this approach, you can take small steps toward the pose without trying to do the full position. For example, your version of Handstand could be putting your hands on the floor and walking your feet up the wall. As you get stronger, steadier, and more confident, you can try lifting one leg at a time toward the ceiling. Eventually, you may find that you're prepared to tackle the full pose.

Repeat, repeat, repeat. Instead of holding a pose for a long time, do it briefly but move in and out of it frequently in a single practice session. With a difficult asana like Urdhva Dhanurasana (Upward-Facing Bow Pose), this strategy can help you find opening and ease.

Create a supportive sequence. This can consist of just a few poses, or you can develop a lengthy series that helps prepare your body for a pose you struggle with. You may be able to design such a sequence yourself, or you can get them from yoga books, videos, DVDs, Yoga Journal articles, or workshops that focus on a particular pose or category of poses. If you do take a class that happens to focus on your most troublesome pose or seems to make it more accessible, make sure to write down the sequence immediately after class. You can also ask a teacher to help you piece together a sequence that's tailored exactly for you.

Improve your alignment. Ask your teacher for feedback about your alignment too. You may be surprised to discover how much easier a pose becomes once you improve your alignment. Even if that doesn't happen, it's important to learn proper alignment so you don't fall into bad habits, overworking the places that are already strong or flexible and underworking those that are weak or tight.

Buddy up. Practicing with a friend often creates a relaxed, informal atmosphere that makes the whole experience easier and more fun. And having the moral support of a yoga partner can encourage you to be a bit more daring than usual.

Cultivate playfulness. Bringing curiosity, lightness, and self-acceptance into your practice can have a huge impact. Just as Baron Baptiste did with Garudasana, make peace with the poses that frustrate you rather than fighting to master them.

POSES WE LOVE

As you confront your resistance and fears, finding new ways to tackle previously hated poses, you'll discover the exhilaration and empowerment that come from facing difficulty. But remember that you're only human; taking on more than one or two hard poses at once can be frustrating and might even discourage you from practicing. So be sure to include your favorites as well. Try starting and ending your practice with your most beloved poses, and use them as tiny treats throughout your sequence. After all, these are still the poses that are most likely to lure you to your mat and provide you with the relaxing, comforting, and even joyful experiences that are as much a part of yoga practice as the challenges are.

POSES THEY HATE

If you've ever had a least favorite pose, you're not alone. Even yoga teachers have them, and they've shared their struggles with you.

Patricia Walden on Marichyasana I
(Pose Dedicated to the Sage Marichi I)

When I first started practicing this pose, it was a real struggle. I had natural length in my hamstrings but not in my buttocks or paraspinal muscles, so I was unbalanced; all my weight fell on my straight-leg side, and I had no ability to bend forward. My body felt dense and contracted, like a closed fist, and my breathing was restricted. There was no place in the pose where I could find space and freedom.

But I kept practicing Marichyasana I very regularly as part of a traditional forward-bending sequence. I would start with a modified version, sitting up on a blanket and extending my arms forward rather than clasping them behind me. This made it easier to elongate my waist and rib cage. I would repeat this version briefly two or three times on each side; because I had so much physical and mental resistance, repeating it was better than holding it for a long time. When I would finally come into the full pose with the clasp later in the practice session, it would be easier because of all the preparation I had done.

After about 10 years, I finally began to feel in Marichyasana the internal spaciousness and surrender that I love. Now it is one of my favorite forward bends. I think when you work through any difficult situation, it is a form of tapas [discipline and purification] and builds confidence and mental strength. You've taken on something really challenging and come out on the other side.

Barbara Benagh on Sarvangasana (Shoulderstand)

For many years, Shoulderstand was more than frustrating—it was a horror. I had old shoulder, collarbone, and neck injuries from an auto wreck, and even though I practiced the pose using a mountain of blankets, sometimes I'd still have episodes of intense neck pain. One day in class, I had only one blanket to use when my teacher said "Shoulderstand," and I felt a huge wave of anxiety. How would I do it without my Band-Aid blankets? Later, in a different class, I received a terrible Shoulderstand adjustment, had a temper tantrum, and decided to divorce the pose forever.

Eventually, though, I realized I missed the soothing qualities of the pose. So I decided to explore it again. To get in touch with the landmarks of my shoulders, neck, and upper spine, I started with my back flat on the floor in Viparita Karani (Legs-up-the-Wall Pose). Then I slowly developed my Shoulderstand through actions instead of by propping myself up. I found that if I pressed the back of my head and elbows down, my cervical spine and chest rose upward. Then, as I continued this rooting and slowly brought my pelvis higher, my legs floated and my body felt like a rocket ship soaring into space. To this day, when I lose that rocket ship sensation, I come down.

Shoulderstand continues to be difficult for me, but I finally feel at home while practicing it. It has taught me that you can try to avoid things, but ultimately they lie in wait for you. And it has also taught me that it's often best to walk away from something you're struggling with, chew on it, and return with a clearer perspective.

Shiva Rea on Purvottanasana
(Upward Plank Pose)

When I do Purvottanasana, I tend to feel compression around my sacrum. To avoid this, I have to work really hard to elongate my lower back and internally rotate my thighs to broaden my sacral area. Even when I do that work, I can't ground my feet well because my calves are so puny. And without that foundation, I can't lift my pelvis high enough to get a good opening in my front body. And the energy flow of the pose— it just feels so stuck. I did Purvottanasana almost every day for 10 years as part of the Ashtanga primary series, and it got incrementally easier, but I never really had a breakthrough.

Most of the time these days, I do Purvottanasana with bent knees. That lets me experience its strength instead of being blocked by my weakness, my spindly calves. I also use creative, fluid ways to approach the pose, like coming into it from Vasisthasana (Side Plank Pose) instead of lifting up from Dandasana (Staff Pose). This method creates more opening in the front of my torso and my shoulders. It also allows me to access my intuitive spirit to feel my way into my best expression of the pose. I think most of us experience lifting from Dandasana into Purvottanasana as a real grunt; coming into it more fluidly allows the inner bhava [the taste or flavor of the experience] to not be shocked by that energetic grunt.

Although I haven't exactly learned to love Purvottanasana, it's important to me not to avoid it, because it teaches me about my aversions and their roots. It has also helped me realize that there are many different paths up the mountain; there are ways to receive the opening of Purvottanasana without forcing my body or obsessing about perfect outer form.

Seane Corn on Parivrtta Trikonasana
(Revolved Triangle Pose)

I have a slight scoliosis [a sideways curve of the spine], so one side of my spine is really restricted. When I do Parivrtta Trikonasana on my challenged side, I have to be on my fingertips or even a block to get the spinal extension I need. On a physical level, the pose is really restricted; I can't breathe freely, and it often just doesn't feel good. And in terms of my ego, it's very humbling.

But unless I'm doing a restorative session, I always include Parivrtta Trikonasana in my practice, because I know the pose is one of my greatest teachers. Sometimes I'll just make it part of my warm-up. Other times I'll create an entire sequence around it and make it the apex of the session.

To prepare for the pose, I'll practice Sun Salutations to warm up my body and then do some hamstring-stretching poses and a series of basic floor twists. To come into Parivrtta Trikonasana, sometimes I start from Parsvottanasana with my hands on the floor, or I'll do a modified Parivrtta Trikonasana with my front knee bent so I can focus on the rotation in my torso. Parivrtta Trikonasana on my difficult side has definitely helped teach me humility—and patience, acceptance, and surrender. When I'm in a difficult situation these days, sometimes I think to myself, "Well, this is just Parivrtta Trikonasana." In the past, if something was uncomfortable, I might have just avoided it. Now, the more challenged I am, the more interested I am: Why don't I want to go there? What can this teach me?

Baron Baptiste on Garudasana
(Eagle Pose)

I struggled with Garudasana for years. I always had difficulty with the finishing act of wrapping my free foot around the standing ankle. There would be times when I could do it effortlessly, but other times I'd really have to work at it, which would often throw me off-balance. And it would really frustrate me to be in a group practice and see other practitioners who could do it so effortlessly. I had a lot of internal turmoil about the fact that I couldn't get the pose 'right."

But a few years back, I experienced a breakthrough with Garudasana, and this breakthrough wasn't physical, it was emotional—even spiritual. I just made peace with it. I started noticing that my emotions surrounding the pose were actually throwing me off-balance, so I stopped doing that finishing act; I gave up feeling that I needed to achieve anything in the posture.

I still include Garudasana in my practice, but I'm no longer working toward "accomplishing" it—or any other particular pose. I could probably do the classic, final form of Garudasana if I made that the focus of a practice session, using hip openers, lunge variations, Pigeon Pose variations, and even backbends to release my hips and pelvis. But these days, I focus my practice more on the movement of energy than on some physical outcome. My practice is a purification—a cleaning of the slate—so when I go into the rest of my life, I'm more at peace with things.

Nina Zolotow is coauthor, with Rodney Yee, of Moving Toward Balance and Yoga: The Poetry of the Body. Jason Crandell is a staff yoga teacher at Yoga Journal and teaches public yoga classes in San Francisco.

Glory Of A Modest Practice

2008-07-02T11:24:00.001-07:00

By Vedran

In April this year (2008), I went to New York to see my good friend Neil and to enjoy 10 days of überurban living. Neil's flat, full of personality and style that comes only with people who master the artistry of balancing out camp kitch with dark underground faboulosity, was also filled with boxes he still did't unpack after he had moved in. So, rolling out my yoga mat to do a little bit of holiday practice turned out not to be an easy alternative. No space for yoga??? Not being the one to be stopped by clutter, I got a pair of those yoga paws you see in yoga magazines. Prior to getting them, I really was a huge sceptic. Yoga paws are basically glove and sock looking thingies you put on your hands and feet and that work as a mat fixed to your palms and to the soles of your feet. Ana Forrest always uses them on her hands and before having to resort to them in NY, I never understood why. Now I know. So that you can practice anywhere. And practice I did - in this relativelly small flat, amongst boxes and kitchen utensils, I did my Sun salutations and parts of the primary sequence. Primary is always my first choice when I am out of my element. It´s very grounding and I feel it realigns my body. But the point is this: I didn´t have the time or space to work any of those exhalting Ashtanga acrobatics. Some days, I did some of the standing postures, simple backbending and an inversion or two. And that was it. The first thing is that this was far better than just skipping practice. The second is that doing these very simple things did wonders for my body. We did insane amounts of walking in the city - you know hows urban holidays exhaust one. But I felt great, my body didn´t stiffen and I had none of those tourist aches that sometimes appear when we are out of our element. No achey back, no sore feet, no leg pains. Nothing. Don´t you just love yoga?
Usually, people say that they skip practice because they don´t have time to do much. My point here is that doing just a little, as little as 10 minutes if you don´t have more, sometimes really is completely fine.

So, we came back to good old Norway. It turned out that I had picked up some nasty bug while in the USA and I got something that resembled a very nasty cold, only that this was a Godzilla of very nasty colds and it stuck its claws into me for about two weeks. I felt weak, tired, constanstly sleepy and cranky. During the worst days, I didn´t do any asana practice. When I got better, I got back on the mat for, if nothing else, some Sun salutations. One day I did the salutations, padangusthasana, padahastasana and sirsasana and I felt that it was definitely enough. During those days, I used the postures to wake my body up, to warm it up, to lubricate my unhappy joints and to sort of remind myself that the sickness that seemed to have grabbed hold of me wasn´t everything. Those short practice sessions (David Swenson - I love you for your short forms!) gave me glimpses of the healthy me. And while I practiced, I actually felt good. The sessions also reminded me of the importance of healthy discipline. B.K.S. Iyengar apparently says something like "Take an action. Any action. Just take an action", meaning that you should do what you can, no matter how small. Practice a few asanas and decide that that was today´s practice. It will be more worth it than you can imagine. It will keep you agile through difficult and stressfull periods and it will help you keep in mind that you are far more than the stuff, good or bad, happening in your life. A bit of modest yoga practice somehow removes the sense of drama from our lives, if just for a moment. But those are precious moment. If you can´t do a lot, well, do a little.

These are not pieces of transcendental wisdom that in a swami-esque manner set your awareness ablaze. These are small glimpses of knowledge gained while living a very regular life, while very regular things happen and obstruct us. We need not be obstructed. Do a bit of your practice if you can´t do it all. It is all practice. Practice is NOT giving it up. So, with your mat or without, with or without those weird yoga paws, work those asanas and pull yourself back into the moment. That´s whats it is all about. While fresh blood surges through your muscles and organs and you listen to your breath becoming more stable, there just might come a small moment of you being exactly where you want to be, being who you want to be, for a moment on your mat, or on naked floor (Edward Clark apparently never uses a mat, by the way). Then the moment will go away and you will have practiced when you thought you didn´t have the time to or whatever it was that told you that you couldn´t. This is some of the stuff that makes you a yogi. So, get to it and be one. You don´t need a turban. Remembering this during those short moments of sweet simple sessions is the glory of a modest practice.

David Williams´Open Letter To His Students

2008-05-20T13:00:00.000-07:00

David Williams posted an open letter to his students on his website, www.ashtangayogi.com, sharing some of his thougt on the AShtanga Yoga practice. The letter is insightful and based on many years of David Williams´practice and teacher experience. I felt it needed to be shared. So here it goes:

Open Letter

Greetings and Salutations from Maui!

When I teach Yoga, I am always reminded that there are some major concepts about how Ashtanga Yoga is taught and practiced, based on my personal study, observation, and uninterrupted practice, that I feel are important to share with my classes.

First, and foremost, I hope you can learn from me that in your practice, "If it hurts, you are doing it wrong." Through the years, I have observed that too many people are hurting themselves and hurting others. Yoga practice can be (and should be) pleasant from the beginning to the end. What is important is the mulabandha and deep breathing. With daily practice, it is inevitable that one will become more flexible.

I have learned from my own practice and observation that pushing your current limitations to get into a position can result in injury, which results in one needing to rest the injury to recover so they can resume their practice. This entire sequence of events is not only unpleasant, it is contrary to my belief that through slow, steady daily practice, one can achieve greater flexibility by generating one's own internal heat to relax into positions, rather than being forced into a position. I have observed this slower, steadier method is not only healthier, but it allows one to develop greater flexibility of a more lasting nature, than the kind that is forced. Unfortunately, as many have found, pushing one's current limitations can result in having to severely curtail or limit activity during recovery. This cycle can lead to unpleasant associations with one's yoga practice, rather than the pleasant experiences I work to instill, and that I feel are necessary for a lifelong practice.

In my workshop, I want to show each of you how you can do the Ashtanga Yoga series in a lifelong practice that is a totally pleasant experience. I suspect that when you first saw the practice, you said to yourself, "If I did this, it would be great for me!" So, here you are--you have observed the practice, and you want to continue it. The key is being able to continue practicing Yoga for the rest of your life. From over 30 years of observing thousands of people practicing Yoga, I have realized that those who continue are the ones who are able to figure out how to make it enjoyable. They look forward to their daily practice and nothing can keep them from finding the time to do it. It becomes one of the most pleasant parts of their day. The others, consciously, subconsciously, or unconsciously, quit practicing. It is my goal to do everything I can to inspire you to establish your Yoga practice not just for the few days we are together, but for the rest of your life.

Secondly, I hope to share with you my belief that the ultimate goal of Yoga is not to increase flexibility and strength. Increased flexibility and strength are simply the natural results and benefits of daily practice. While additional flexibility and strength are important and apparent benefits of Yoga, I believe the goals of Yoga practice are self-realization and keeping oneself balanced and healthy on a daily basis. Health is your greatest wealth. The body's DNA knows how to heal itself; all it needs is the energy. The energizing, rejuvenating Yoga practices can be the source of this energy.

Lastly, I hope you will find that my workshop is for everyone at all levels. I am occasionally asked if someone is "good at Yoga." I quickly respond that the best Yogi is not the one who is most flexible, but the one who is most focused on what he or she is doing, the one most intensely doing the mulabandha and deep breathing. It is with some sadness that I have observed people "competing with their Yoga practice." I have also observed others who are discouraged in their practice because they feel this competition and worry that they will never be able to do their practice with the flexibility and skill of others more advanced in the series. My goal is to convey the idea that the greatest Yogi is the one who enjoys his or her Yoga practice the most, not the one who can achieve the ultimate pretzel position. It is my belief, and I hope to convey to you, that in your practice of this moving meditation, what is really important, is what is invisible to the observer, what is within each of you.

I believe in the Yoga. I believe that anyone who has the desire can do the Ashtanga practice, perhaps with personal modifications, in a way that is totally pleasant. For years, I have said, "If someone said to me, 'You have 15 minutes, one hour, etc., do something good for yourself. You can use barbells, bicycles, or whatever,' I would start doing the Ashtanga Yoga Salutations to the Sun and First Series." If someone can show me something better, I am ready to learn it. In my 30 years of searching, I have learned five or six systems of Yoga practice. For myself, I have not found a better physical, mental, and emotional fitness program than the Ashtanga Yoga system. I hope you will feel the same after our days together.

I look forward to sharing my practice and experience with you.

Yours in Yoga,

David Williams

Is Yoga Enough To Keep You Fit?

2008-04-02T03:52:00.000-07:00

As stated earlier, a lot of us come to yoga because we want or need an alternative to those standard health-club fitness regiments. When we stick to yoga for years, it is usually because we find that yoga is far more than another fitness fad. Here`s an article by Alisa Bauman about the research concerning yoga as an excercise system. So, knock yourselves out! ;-)
Om shanti
Vedran

We sent three yogis to the lab to test the theory that yoga is all you need for optimal fitness.

By Alisa Bauman

When it came to the fitness benefits yoga can or can't provide, yoga teacher John Schumacher had heard it all. A student of B. K. S. Iyengar for 20 years and founder of the Unity Woods studios in the Washington, D.C. area, Schumacher was convinced yoga provides a complete fitness regime. But many people, even some of his own students, disagreed. Yoga might be good for flexibility or relaxation, they'd say, but to be truly fit, you had to combine it with an activity like running or weight lifting.

Schumacher just didn't buy it.

He knew three decades of yoga practice—and only yoga practice—had kept him fit. He didn't need to power walk. He didn't need to lift weights. His fitness formula consisted of daily asanas (poses) and pranayama (breathwork). That's all he needed.

Four years ago at age 52, Schumacher decided to prove his point. He signed up for physiological testing at a lab in Gaithersburg, Maryland. As he expected, Schumacher tested near the top of his age group for a variety of fitness tests, including maximum heart and exercise recovery rates. His doctor told him that he was in excellent physical condition and estimated that Schumacher had less than a one percent chance of suffering a cardiac event. "I've always maintained that yoga provides more than adequate cardiovascular benefits," says Schumacher. "Now I have the evidence that regular yoga practice at a certain level of intensity will provide you with what you need."

Evidence of yoga's ability to bolster fitness, however, goes well beyond Schumacher's personal experience. Yoga Journal's testing of three yogis also yielded impressive results. Even physiologists who don't do yoga now agree that the practice provides benefits well beyond flexibility and relaxation. Recent research—though preliminary—shows that yoga may also improve strength, aerobic capacity, and lung function. If you practice yoga, you already knew that. But if, like Schumacher, you've been told by friends, family, doctors, or even other yoga students that you need to add some power walking for your heart or strength training for your muscles, here's evidence that yoga is all you need for a fit mind and body.

What Is Fitness?
Before you can prove yoga keeps you fit, you must first define what "fitness" actually means. This isn't a simple task. Ask eight different physiologists, and you'll hear eight different definitions, says Dave Costill, Ph.D., one of the first U. S. researchers to rigorously test the health and fitness benefits of exercise.
Now professor emeritus of exercise science at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, Costill defines fitness simply as the ability to live your life without feeling fatigued. "For normal daily living you don't need the strength of a football player or the endurance of a marathon runner, but you've got to be able to perform your normal activities and still have a reserve," says Costill. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the largest exercise science association in the world, defines fitness as both related to your ability to maintain physical activity and related to your health (for example, people who become more fit reduce their risk for heart disease). According to ACSM, four types of fitness help to bolster health:

Cardiorespiratory fitness. This refers to the fitness of your heart, lungs, and blood vessels. The better your cardiorespiratory fitness, the better your stamina, the lower your risk for a host of diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer.
Your ability to move without feeling winded or fatigued is measured by your VO2max (maximal oxygen uptake), a technical term that indicates how efficiently oxygen enters your lungs, moves into your bloodstream, and is used by your muscles. The more fit you become, the more efficiently your body transports and uses oxygen, improving your overall VO2max.

To test VO2max, physiologists ask you to cycle or walk or run on a treadmill with a tube-like mask over your mouth. The mask gathers the carbon dioxide and oxygen you exhale, and the ratio between the two gasses helps to indicate how efficiently your muscles use oxygen.

There are other tests that measure additional aspects of cardiorespiratory fitness, including a lung function test, in which you take a deep breath and then blow into a tube to measure your lung capacity, and heart rate tests, taken both at rest and during exercise. Since equally fit people can vary as much as 20 percent in heart rate,this measure best indicates your own progress: If you become more fit, your heart rate generally drops.

Muscular fitness. This refers both to muscle strength (how heavy an object you can lift) and muscle endurance (how long you can lift it). Without exercise, all of us lose muscle mass as we age, which can eventually result in weakness and loss of balance and coordination. Because muscle is such active tissue, it also plays an important role in regulating your metabolism, with every pound of muscle burning about 35 to 50 calories a day.

In a lab, researchers test your muscle strength and endurance on specialized equipment that looks like an exercise machine at a gym but contains sensors that read how much force your muscles generate as they contract.

Flexibility. As most people age, their muscles shorten and their tendons, the tissue that connects muscles to bones, become stiffer. This reduces the range of motion, preventing optimum movement of your knees, shoulders, elbows, spine, and other joints. Loss of flexibility may also be associated with an increased risk of pain and injury. Tight hamstrings, for example, pull down on your pelvis, putting pressure on your lower back. In general, tight muscles increase the likelihood you'll suddenly move past your safe range of motion and damage ligaments, tendons, and the muscles themselves.
Body composition. Your body composition refers to the percentage of your body made up of fat instead of muscles, bones, organs, and other nonfat tissues. Though the use of body composition as a fitness and health indicator has come under fire in recent years by those who argue that it's possible to be both fat and fit, the ACSM and many physiologists continue to assert that too much fat and too little muscle raises your risk for disease and makes movement less efficient.

Physiologists can measure body composition in several ways. The simplest method uses a pair of calipers to pinch the skin and underlying fat at various spots on the body. This method works best for athletes and others with little visible body fat. For those with more body fat, a more accurate method is hydrostatic weighing—being weighed while submerged in water and comparing the result to your out-of-water weight. Because fat floats, the greater the difference between your submerged and dry weights, the higher your body fat percentage.

Experts have long recommended that we do at least three different types of activity to achieve optimum cardiorespiratory and muscular fitness, flexibility, and body composition. For example, the ACSM recommends building cardiorespiratory fitness by exercising at an intensity that raises your heart rate to at least 55 percent of your maximum heart rate (the highest rate you can maintain during all-out effort, generally estimated as 220 minus your age); muscular fitness by targeting each major muscle group with eight to 12 repetitions of weight-bearing exercise; and flexibility by stretching.

No one argues against yoga's ability to satisfy the flexibility requirement. But until recently, few scientists had considered whether yoga could improve other aspects of fitness. Now that's starting to change.

Putting Yoga to the Test
In one of the first studies done in the United States that examines the relationship between yoga and fitness, researchers at the University of California at Davis recently tested the muscular strength and endurance, flexibility, cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and lung function of 10 college students before and after eight weeks of yoga training. Each week, the students attended four sessions that included 10 minutes of pranayama, 15 minutes of warm-up exercises, 50 minutes of asanas, and 10 minutes of meditation.
After eight weeks, the students' muscular strength had increased by as much as 31 percent, muscular endurance by 57 percent, flexibility by as much as 188 percent, and VO2max by 7 percent—a very respectable increase, given the brevity of the experiment. Study coauthor Ezra A. Amsterdam, M.D., suspects that VO2max might have increased more had the study lasted longer than eight weeks. In fact, the ACSM recommends that exercise research last a minimum of 15 to 20 weeks, because it usually takes that long to see VO2max improvements.

"It was very surprising that we saw these changes in VO2max in such a short time," says Amsterdam, professor of internal medicine (cardiology) and director of the coronary care unit at the U. C. Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. He is now considering a longer, larger study to authenticate these results.

A related study done at Ball State University offers further evidence for yoga's fitness benefits. This research looked at how 15 weeks of twice-weekly yoga classes affected the lung capacity of 287 college students. All of the students involved, including athletes, asthmatics, and smokers, significantly improved lung capacity by the end of the semester.

"The athletes were the ones who were the most surprised, because they thought their athletic training in swimming or football or basketball had already boosted their lung capacity to the maximum," says study author Dee Ann Birkel, an emeritus professor at Ball State's School of Physical Education.

From the perspective of a Western scientist, the few additional studies that have looked at yoga and fitness all contain flaws in their research design—either too few subjects or inadequate control groups. One study, conducted in Secunderabad, India, compared a group of athletes taught pranayama to another group who were not. After two years, those who practiced pranayama showed a larger reduction of blood lactate (an indicator of fatigue) in response to exercise; in addition, they were more able than the control group to increase their exercise intensity as well as the efficiency of their oxygen consumption during exercise. Other smaller studies also done in India have found that yoga can increase exercise performance and raise anaerobic threshold. (Anaerobic threshold is the point at which your muscles cannot extract enough oxygen from your blood and therefore must switch from burning oxygen to burning sugar and creatine. Unlike oxygen, sugar and creatine are dirty fuel sources, creating lactic acid and other by-products that build up in the blood and make you hyperventilate, "feel the burn," and lose muscle coordination.)

Although the research on yoga is only starting to build, a convincingly large amount of research has been done on tai chi, an Eastern martial art that involves a series of slow, graceful movements. Many studies have found that tai chi helps to improve balance, cardiorespiratory and cardiovascular fitness, ability to concentrate, immunity, flexibility, strength, and endurance of the knee extensor muscles.

Dina Amsterdam, a yoga instructor in San Francisco and graduate student at Stanford University, is one of many researchers conducting a three-year study that compares the psychological and physiological benefits of tai chi as to those of traditional forms of Western exercise such as aerobics. (The daughter of Ezra Amsterdam, Dina Amsterdam was the inspiration behind her father's U. C. Davis study on yoga and fitness.)

"Though there haven't been a lot of studies done on yoga that are considered valid, there are numerous studies done on tai chi, with the current Stanford study the largest to date," she says. Because yoga shares many elements with tai chi but can also provide a more vigorous physical workout, Amsterdam expects future yoga studies to produce at least similarly encouraging results. But Amsterdam says she doesn't need additional research to prove to her that yoga builds fitness. "I haven't done anything but yoga and some hiking for 10 years," she says. "When I came to yoga, I was 25 pounds overweight and suffering from a compulsive eating disorder. Yoga completely brought me back to physical and emotional health."

Many yoga practitioners echo such thoughts. Jack England, an 81-year-old yoga and stretching instructor at the Club Med in Port Saint Lucie, Florida, says more than 30 years of yoga have kept him flexible, healthy, and strong. He's the same weight and height as he was in high school, and his stellar health continues to amaze his doctor. He delights audiences at Club Med by practicing Shoulderstand and other poses while balancing on a float board in a water ski show. "I'm an inspiration to people of all ages," he says. "I do things that 14-year-old girls can't do."

Stephanie Griffin, a 33-year-old director of business development for a pharmaceutical research company in San Francisco, discovered yoga after years of running marathons, spinning, and weight lifting. Before discovering yoga, she thought her intense exercise habits had turned her into a poster child for health and fitness. During the last four years, however, Griffin began doing more and more yoga and less and less running, weight lifting, and aerobicizing. As she dropped back on her hardcore fitness pursuits, she worried she might gain weight or lose her muscle tone or exercise capacity.

She didn't. "I have maintained my fitness and even enhanced it through yoga," says Griffin, who no longer has a gym membership. "And I like the way my body looks and feels now better than the way it did before."

Why Yoga Works
Exactly how does yoga build fitness? The answer you get depends on whom you ask. Robert Holly, Ph.D., a senior lecturer in the Department of Exercise Biology at U. C. Davis and one of the researchers on the U. C. Davis study, says that muscles respond to stretching by becoming larger and capable of extracting and using more oxygen more quickly. In other words, side benefits of flexibility include increased muscle strength and endurance.
"My own belief is that the small but significant increase in maximal oxygen capacity was due to an increase in muscle endurance, which allowed the subjects to exercise longer, extract more oxygen, and reach an increased maximal oxygen uptake," says Holly.

Then there's the pranayama theory. Birkel suspects that yoga poses help increase lung capacity by improving the flexibility of the rib area, shoulders, and back, allowing the lungs to expand more fully. Breathwork further boosts lung capacity—and possibly also VO2max—by conditioning the diaphragm and helping to more fully oxygenate the blood.

Birkel, Dina Amsterdam, and others are also quick to point out that Suryanamaskar (Sun Salutations) and other continuously linked poses increase the heart rate, making yoga aerobically challenging. And many yoga poses—particularly standing poses, balancing poses, and inversions—build quite a bit of strength because they require sustained isometric contractions of many large and small muscles. Of course, holding the poses longer increases this training effect.

Finally, yoga tunes you into your body and helps you to better coordinate your actions. "When you bring your breath, your awareness, and your physical body into harmony, you allow your body to work at its maximum fitness capacity," says Dina Amsterdam. "Yoga class is merely a laboratory for how to be in harmony with the body in every activity outside of yoga. This improved physical wellness and fluidity enhance not just the physical well-being but also permeate all levels of our being."

Are You Fit?
Given all this evidence, can you now confidently tell your nonyogi friends they're wrong when they insist that you should add other forms of exercise to your practice?
Maybe, maybe not. The answer depends largely on how much you dedicate yourself to yoga. Studies done on yoga have included more than an hour of practice two to four days a week. The yoga sessions included breathwork and meditation in addition to typical yoga poses. Finally, the asanas used in these studies included not just aerobically challenging sequences, like Sun Salutations, but also many strengthening poses, like Virabhadrasana (Warrior Pose), Vrksasana (Tree Pose), Trikonasana (Triangle Pose), Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward-Facing Dog Pose), Navasana (Boat Pose), Sarvangasana (Shoulderstand), Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose), and Plank.

So if you want to become and stay physically and mentally fit, make sure your yoga practice includes a balance of poses that build strength, stamina, and flexibility, along with breathwork and meditation to help develop body awareness. In particular, include a series of standing poses in your practice. As your practice expands, Schumacher suggests adding more challenging asanas such as balancing poses and inversions. "If you are just doing 15 minutes of gentle yoga stretches three to four times a week, you will also need to do some other form of exercise to stay fit," Schumacher readily admits. "I often tell my beginning students that they will need to do something in addition to yoga for a while until they can practice more vigorously."

Holly agrees. If you practice yoga for less than an hour twice a week, he suggests you either pair your practice with moderate intensity exercise like walking, or increase your yoga time or frequency. "But the best form of exercise is whatever you enjoy most and will continue to do on a regular, almost daily, basis," he says. "Should you do more than yoga if you don't enjoy other activities? No. Yoga has a lot of benefits, so do yoga regularly and enjoy it." Beyond fitness, yoga also offers many other gifts. It improves your health, reduces stress, improves sleep, and often acts like a powerful therapy to help heal relationships, improve your career, and boost your overall outlook on life.

All these positives are enough to keep former exercise junkie Stephanie Griffin hooked on yoga for life. Griffin had worried that, unlike her other fitness pursuits, yoga wouldn't give her the emotional satisfaction of aiming for and meeting goals. Soon, however, she realized that yoga offered her a path to constant improvement. "One day it hit me: I realized that my goal was to be practicing yoga well into my 90s," says Griffin. "For me, that is the new finish line. Practicing with that goal satisfies me more than any marathon."

Alisa Bauman stays fit through yoga, running, and fitness ball workouts. She lives and writes in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, where she is studying for yoga teacher certification under Mary Rosenberger at Accent on Yoga and Health.

Vinyasa - Taking Flight

2008-03-01T07:00:00.001-08:00

By Vedran

Vinyasa is one of the key elements of Ashtanga yoga practice. Vinyasa gives the practice its distinctive sense of flow and it keeps the heat up so that the body opens up and becomes agile and pliable. It is easy to forget this getting caught up in the acrobatics of asana. Yet, it is precisely the understanding and application of the vinyasa principle that fuels asana in Ashtanga sequences.

What most people seem to think of when they think of vinyasa in Ashtanga are the transitions between the positions that come after the standing sequence - the lift-offs and the jump-backs and the subsequent fly-throughs. This is probably due to the fact that these present a formidable challenge for most people, especially novices. In addition, they have a yogic acrobatic aesthetic quality that stimulates our egos, making us feel strong and agile when mastered. This is not to be looked down on, of course. Mastering unusal movement patterns is one of the tools yoga offers that teach us about moving beyond what we considered absolute limits, physically, energetically and otherwise.
Still vinyasa is much more than this. An often used translation of the word vinyasa is the "breath and movement system". John Scott writes in his "Ashtanga Yoga" book that in the literal translation of the word, "vi" means "to go" or "to move", while "nyasa" means, amongst other things "placing" or "planting". Vinyasa is co-ordinating breath and movement, so that they become one. In Ashtanga, there is no movement without breath. The concept of tristana - the union of vinyasa, bandha and dristi, points to the complexity of the system. In Ashtanga, there can be no vinyasa without ujjayi and these two without the gaze focus, or dristi, make for an incomplete practice. Every transition from position to position and within a single asana, every movement, has its own in- or exhalation. Surya namaskar A, for example, has nine vinyasas, starting from the first lift of arms putting palms together, to the last re-entering Samasthitih. I once read that Vinyasa in Ashtanga yoga practice isn´t something you do betwen the asana, but asana is what you do between the Vinyasas. This is actually a constructive way of thinking yoga practice. Vinyasa, supported by bandha, ujjayi and dristi is where the strength of our practice comes from. When the focus in Vinyasa is good and properly applied, one can feel stronger and more charged the further into the practice one gets. So, by the end of a practice session, when one would feel exhausted practicing most any other system of physical exertion, in Ashtanga practice with Vinyasa and bandha applied, one is more energized than when one started. Many yogis have experienced this: dragging oneself to the mat, tired and unmotivated and leaving the mat stronger and more energized.

Apparently, Vinyasa Yoga was designed specifically for householders. Householders are people who have social duties outside of their personal yoga practice. Unlike renunciates (sannyasi), householders (grihasta) cannot devote their entire existence to concentrated practice. Vinyasa yoga is meant to compress the practice of all eight limbs of Ashtanga into a two hours practice. The postures are not held for a long time, so that a yogi can´t identify with them. Vinyasa creates a relatively fast flow of one posture into another and, ideally, we create an awareness that witnesses our presence in different asanas. This is yoga.

The flow

The distinctive flowing quality of Ashtanga yoga is due to Vinyasa. Take Utthita trikonasana, for example: you breathe in - arms out - you breathe out - you bend to one side with your body centered over one leg. After five breaths, you breathe in to come up, breathe out and change side and so on. Every breath-coordinated movement is one Vinyasa, meaning that the flow comes entirely from Vinyasa. For people who are new to Ashtanga, this is one of the most fundamental things to learn, alongside understanding bandha and breath. Perfecting of individual asana can never happen without perfecting the transitions between the postures and between the fragmenst within a specific posture. The Vinyasa transitions are as much a crucial part of any posture in Ashtanga practice as whatever you might be doing while holding any posture. There are no pauses in a strong practice. It is all about movement linked by inhalations and exhalations. Very often, when people who have had too much focus on mastering the asana without paying attention to linking the postures, actually start learning Vinyasa, the whole practice and the feeling of it changes. This can feel like a fresh beginning og like being adjusted backwards and re-learning the practice. This is why the best way to start learning is to start with the fundamentals: ujjayi, Vinyasa, bandha dristi. This is what creates the flow.
Ashtanga yoga has spawned a great number of other practices, where different teachers have restructured the sequences and given the practice different names. You´ve got a gazillion types of power yoga, Vinyasa flow, Baptiste power yoga et cetera. A common denominator in all of these is Vinyasa. No matter what the sequences look like or how advanced or not the practices are, the movements are linked by breath and the focused by dristi. The rhythm of this powerful style of yoga comes from this linking of principles. And from this rhythm comes the beauty and strength. And the strength, of course, is built through the application of Vinyasa - this is how the practice gets its flowing ease. It might sound like a paradox, ease coming through exertion but this is perhaps the core of yoga - the ease and weightlessness amidst possible difficulty and challenge.

Vinyasa, bandha and dristi

For the flowing quality of Ashtanga practice to be possible, both strength and flexibility need to be built. The one doesn´t work without the other. Yoga give us countless insights about the operating principles of the body. One of the reasons for this is the fact that energetically and movementwise, yoga works by quite intricate principles. You can be strong, each part for itself, but if the strength can not be integrated, there will be yoga postures that just can´t be reached. Take arm balances, for example. If your arms, back and abdominals are strong, you will have a good physical platform for these postures. Still, if you can´t integrate the strength from these different bodyparts into a singular flow of energy and strength, you will probably have trouble balancing. That is why one sometimes sees people who don´t seem perticularly fit float up into handstands with their legs straight, while people with more obvious muscular strength can struggle to get their feet off the ground. This is first of all because it is not about the muscles but about sending the energy through your body by using bandha and channeling it into Vinyasa. And second - arm balances are about integrated strength. You can use only your arms to get up but you will lose strength rapidly. If the system works together, the energy will be rationed correctly and the movement will be executed with less physical effort.
This integration is reached by the union of Vinyasa, bandha and dristi. The energy locks, bandhas, need to be there for Vinyasa to happen at all - the psoas muscle well used is what swings you between your arms in float-through Vinyasa - and dristi, together with the ujjayi breath helps you to keep your focus. People often forget the importance of the focused gaze, dristi, while practicing. And yet, if you want to turn your practice into a moving meditation, which is what we are aiming for, the gaze needs to be focused. Just like every movement has its in- or outbreath, every asana has its focus point, or dristi. The efortlessness of a strong yoga workout is derived from a disciplined mind. If your mind is to be disciplined during physical exhertion, you cannot let your eyes go zooming from one place to another. Changing the visual focus will entertain the mind and there will be NO focus. This is the role of dristi - creating focus. Noticing where you are and observing. Even if you don´t know what the correct dristi is in a perticular asana, a rule of thumb can be to look in whichever direction you are streching. This will not always be correct according to the traditional Ashtanga method but it will, all the same, give you more focus than if you let your eyes rest on, say, whatever a person practicing next to you is doing. Focus the dristi, bandha and Vinyasa and you will breeze through your practice, no matter how hard it is.
Vinyasa heats up the body and makes the muscles more pliable. It also accentuates the importance of balancing the flexibility out with the strength. the lifting and jumping between the sides in each asana creates the stability needed to "bind" what has been obtained in the way of flexibilty. This is one of the most important methods of avoiding injury. The muscles need to be warm and where strength is used, flexibility creates the balance and vice versa. One should not aim for flexibilty that one is unable to support with strength.

Fly!

Vinyasa is perhaps the heart of Ashtanga. One of the biggest mistakes many yoga practicioners make is giving all their attention to the individual asanas, while Vinyasa gets neglected. You are not doing Ashtanga if you forget Vinyasa. It is as simple as this. It is not so unusal to see practicioners who skip the lift-offs and jump-throughs between the sitting asanas. Because they find it easier. And the thing is that it actually gets easier if you do it the hard way and do your lift-offs etc. If you never spread your wings, you don´t fly. You fall. And crossing those ankles, pushing up and jumping back and so on and so forth is how we learn to fly.

The beauty of the Ashtanga vinyasa method is in this incredible ease amidst the apparently bone breaking movements. It is not what you do but how you do it. Being able to contort into the most difficult postures is not what makes your practice yoga. If it was, all gymnasts would make grand yogis and they don´t. Breath, focus, what happens inside and, in the case of Ashtanga, Vinyasa, is what makes it yoga. I once read that Krishnamacharya wasn´t impressively flexible. But his bandha control, and through this, his Vinyasa, was so strong that he executed the practice beautifully. You can see this in some contemporary superyogis: Edward Clark doesn´t consider himself to be especially flexible but his flow is phenomenal, his bandhas strong and vinyasa breathtaking. So, his practice is powerful and truly amazing. It is HOW he does what he does and not about how flexible he is or not.

And what does it all boil down to? Perhaps to the simple fact that the fundemental principle in all forms of Vinyasa yoga is that the emphasis shifts from posture to breath. Asanas, as everything in life, are impermanent. What we search for is the formless. Gregor Maehle writes that the yogis search is for the formless, for what was here before the form arose will be here when the form ceases. The Ashtanga system is therefore organized in such a way that nothing impermanent is held on to. "Vinyasa Yoga is a meditation on impermanence", he writes.

Don´t hold on - let it flow. Feel the heat arise. And see yourself burn. What arises from the ashes might just be the real you.

Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga Explained

2007-11-14T03:45:00.000-08:00

“I have found Ashtanga Yoga to be the most complete and balanced routine of physical for the development of stamina, strength and flexibility. Further, its application as a therapeutic tool in the treatment and recovery from sports related injury is unsurpassed.”
Dr Calvo (President, Texas Center for Sports Medicine and Orthopedic Surgery)

So you think that Ashtanga is that Power Yoga practice, where you need to be an athlete to do it? You're burning calories and working up a sweat. This is the Yoga to take if you want to get into shape. It's not about that meditative-type stuff. Let`s separate the myths out – yes you do get pretty sweaty practicing Ashtanga Yoga and actually, yes, you will become very physically fit if you practice it regularly but it's also all about focus and meditation, along with breathing. If you want to get really literal about it, Ashtanga is Yoga.

The heart of Ashtanga practice is the six series of linked postures which last anywhere from 90 minutes to three hours. Most people only get as far as the first two series, the Primary Series, or/ and the Intermediate Series. The Primary Series is the foundation and meant to detoxify the body. Many Forward Bends are included. The Intermediate Series cleanses the energy channels, and back bends are involved. The four advanced series were originally only two, but they were eventually divided up into four because of their inherent difficulty. Those who accomplish them have an extraordinary amount of strength, flexibility - and humility. Linking the breath to the moves is what Vinyasa (flowing posture) is all about. Ashtanga is sometimes called Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga (and occasionally you'll also see its alternate spelling, Astanga).

Repetition of a sequence is part of the nature of the style but it is a comprehensive physical routine – working every facet of the body – the ritualistic nature enables the meditation because you don’t need to be concerned with what posture comes next and this allows you to focus on the breath.

Pranayama, or breathing, is one of three additional aspects which are crucial to Ashtanga. The specific pranayama performed is Ujjayi, in which the breath is inhaled and exhaled through the back of the throat, making an echo-like sound (some call it the "Darth Vader" breath). The other important practice involves the Bandhas or locks - tensing up parts of the body to control and enhance energy flow and protect the body. The two locks most often used are the Mula Bandha, or root lock, located around the perineum (between the sex organs and the anal orifice). The second lock is Uddiyana Bandha, or Upward Lock, in which the lower part of the belly, below the navel, tightens. There's also a third lock, the less-discussed chin lock or Jalandhara Bandha. The third key element is the Drishti (or gaze point) which is the focal point for the eyes. This soft focus point on or around the body stops the eyes and mind from being distracted by things around you, allowing you to focus on your own body and mat.

Sun Salutations are practiced to warm up the body (and usually Ashtanga is practiced in a warm room - although it's not as hot as some styles). Then comes the series of poses for whichever level of Ashtanga is being taught. Every Ashtanga class ends the same way - with a set of cooling-down postures and a good, long Shavasana.

Because Ashtanga Yoga is strenuous, it is possible to injure yourself and in truth, most injuries that happen during Ashtanga Yoga are the fault of the student themselves. The students that Ashtanga draws in are often go-getters who tend to be ambitious. Sometimes they push themselves far harder than they should, and that's when they get hurt. That is why humility and patience are so important in Ashtanga practice. And while Ashtanga doesn't have the precision of some forms of yoga, it is very important to get the technique right - the combination of breathing, locks and Asana. The proper technique, combined with the proper attitude, will keep injury at bay.

Ashtanga’s physical nature does not however mean that it is not accessible to everyone – irrespective of age, conditioning, fitness, flexibility, weight, etc. By using variations to suit you, focusing on the breathing, not being competitive and taking breaks whenever you need to, you can tailor the practice to meet your daily needs. As David Williams (one of the first Westerners to learn the style in the ‘70’s) says: "Real yoga is what you can't see. It's invisible. Otherwise you would have to tell people with physical limitations that they can't do yoga. Yoga is about union. You can't exclude people. You don't have to do this to do yoga . If you're not flexible, don't worry - there will always be someone with more flexibility, more strength, better hair. Ashtanga is for everyone, but the poses don't look the same on every body.”

The best aspect of Ashtanga is its freedom to teach you about yourself. It is not an easy Yoga style, and it will bring out all your frustrations, delusions of grandeur and petty emotions. The only real way to progress is not by becoming more strong and flexible, but by conquering these negative ego traits first. If you master your ego, the strength and flexibility will follow. Always remember - you outer world is only a reflection of what is going on inside you.

For a beginner to Ashtanga, we recommend guided classes. In the Self Practice format, students can practice Ashtanga at their own pace with more individual attention from the teacher, which provides an opportunity to move into new postures when it's appropriate. Guided classes are great for learning how to practice and also for the energy and esprit de corps that comes from everyone breathing and moving together.

Generally, most serious students gravitate toward Self Practice classes, where they are expected to know the proper pacing and sequencing of the practice, and supply their own motivation. Once Suryanamaskar A and B (Sun Salutations) and the traditional sequence of standing poses have been committed to memory, then one is ready for it. Some people prefer being told what to do and when to do it (another option here would be to do a Beginners Course to develop a foundation for your practice). For these people, obviously, a guided class is good. Others prefer to work independently and figure things out on their own. For them, a Self Practice class is good. But perhaps another perspective is that some independent spirits may benefit from the discipline of a guided class and some more dependent spirits could benefit from the independence that the Self Practice format provides. The most important thing, of course, is to practice, both regularly (at least 2/3 times a week) and for a sustained period of time.

“Practice is the best of all instructions.” Aristotle

Sources: Yoga Journal, All Spirit Fitness and David Swenson.

Embodying The Spirit: Understanding The Meaning Of Asana

2007-09-18T08:00:00.001-07:00

I recently read Judith Lasater`s incredibly insightfull article on the meaning of the physical side of yoga practice: asana, or yoga postures. I wanted to share it with you, so here it goes:

All I remember of my first asana (posture) class is the ceiling. Between movements we would be instructed to lie down on our mat and rest. I do not remember very much about what we did, but I do remember I wanted more. The next morning at home I practiced what I did remember; I was hooked and asana became a central part of my life.
What drew me to the practice of asana was an intuitive feeling that these movements were not just “stretching”; they seemed to have some greater connection with my soul. It was only later after years of training that I began to learn the deep symbolism each asana represents. I now believe that each
asana represents an aspect of myself and as such offers me a powerful doorway inward. Thus for many people the practice of asana can become more than a physical act; it can be a form of moving meditation.

The word “asana” is Sanskrit and is actually the plural form; the correct word for one pose is “asan”. However in English we tend to use “asana” as singular and “asanas” as plural even though this word does not exist in Sanskrit. Whichever word we use, asana are virtually as ancient as civilization itself. In fact, there are carvings dated from 3000 BCE which show figures sitting in the
lotus pose.(1) It is sometimes reported that each asana was created or “emerged” when a “rishi” or “wise forest dweller” spontaneously moved into an asana during deep meditation. Asana both reflect and are named for animals and objects as well as being named after sages from the Hindu tradition. Instructions for the practice of specific asana can be found in such ancient Indian source books such as the Siva Samhita and the Gheranda Samhita as well as the Hatha Yoga Pradipika.

Paradoxically, in the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali, generally considered the most well-known source book on the wider practice of yoga, no specifics of practice are given and asana is only mentioned in three verses, chapter II v. 29, v. 46 and v 47. Patanjali presents asana as the third step or rung in his ladder of practice after the ethical precepts (yama) and prescribed practices (niyama), and
apparently expects the disciple to explore more about asana on his/her own. More interesting to me than specific practice techniques however, are two other ideas about asana. First, that asana is both a spiritual practice all its own and secondly, that the practice of asana can beneficially effect our relationship to living a spiritual life in the modern world, far from the protected ashrams and retreats of ancient India.

In our Western culture of the late twentieth century asana has taken on a different face from what Patanjali would probably recognize. As asana practice has become more known and accepted it has permeated many corners of society. Yoga asana can be seen in the slickest fashion magazines as well as in popular health magazines, and the media quickly informs us which movie stars are now
practicing yoga. Asana has become a popular form of exercise for those suffering from over-doing strenuous physical fitness techniques. Asana is therefore being used as a palliative and therapeutic for physical injury.

Traditionally many teachers have taught that the main value of asana is to prepare the body for meditation by creating a strong back and supple legs so that the disciple can sit still for long periods of time. From this teaching comes the belief that asanas are “lower” or not as “spiritual” as meditation. But I feel the practice of asana has an even greater potential in the West. We may be captured at first by the lure of flexibility and strength, but we stay for another reason. Scientists are continuing to “discover” the pathways of connection between mind and body; in fact, some even say there is virtually no separation. (2) Yogis were aware, I believe, of this connection thousands of years ago and the asanas honor this connection. When we practice asana we honor that connection as well. But in the end we stay with the practice of yoga asana because it is a powerful non-verbal expression of the sacred. And practicing and living the sacred part of life is often sadly lacking for many people in the West today.

The expression of this sacredness has to do with the nature of asana practice itself. No matter how many times one has practiced a certain asana, when it is practiced now it is absolutely new. When one practices an asana that particular asana has never been practiced before; each asana is absolutely of this moment. Thus the practice of asana is a living artistic creation that has never existed
before and will never exist again, just as this moment is fresh. When we practice asana we have a chance to become present in this very moment. When we practice asana we have the chance to bring our attention to here and now, to the sensations and awareness we are feeling. We can observe our reaction, both positive and negative, to the pose; we can observe the sensations of ease and difficulty that arise as we stretch and bend. This is what meditation is, the consistent willingness to be in the here and now without being lost in our thoughts about the here and now.

The practice of asana, and especially savasana or corpse pose, is meditative. It can be the doorway to deeper states of meditation and gives the student the most important gift that can be given. This gift is called dis- identification. In Chapter I of the Yoga Sutras, Patanjali discusses the false identification of thoughts and Self. He teaches that this false identification is at the root of all misery. He further teaches that the practices of yoga are about dissolving this false identification. The great gift of savasana, for example, is that the student can begin to separate from his/her thoughts. As one moves more deeply through relaxation one begins to enter another state in which thought is experienced a surface phenomenon. Then one can begin to experience a little space between the thought and what is perceived as Self. One teacher has said, “The problem with our thoughts is that we believe them.” The problem with believing our thoughts is that we then act from them in a way that can cause suffering in ourselves and others. When a little space is experienced between one’s thoughts and the consciousness which is the background for thought, then thought does not have the same power. Thus with this dis-identification comes choice. When one dis-identifies with the thought one can chose to act from that thought or not; it no longer has as much power to control.

When one can act from choice this leads to freedom. The gift of beginning to understand the process of dis-identification is arguably the most powerful gift there is to receive. Another immediate gift that one can gain from asana has to do with the contrast between movement and stillness that each asana represents. In verse 46 Patanjali defines asana by writing, “Staying with ease is asana”. This means that asana has two main components. First, an asana is about staying still.
The word that Patanjali uses is translated as “abiding”. It is ironic that most people think of asana as the “movements” of yoga when actually asana represents the ability of the practitioner to stay still. And this staying still is a powerful practice. When one learns to hold the pose one learns to let the
stillness of the body become a backdrop for the constant movement of the mind.

This art of consciously staying still begins to teach the art of meditation. To explain further, during normal waking time, we tend to move the body around; we rarely sit still. I can remember the torture of my early years at school. I abhorred sitting still in my desk for hours at a time. Because we are normally moving our body around the movements of the mind are not so apparent. But when we learn to hold the pose and remain still, suddenly we notice clearly how
agitated the mind is. This “noticing” is at the heart of a meditation practice. When we notice something we then have choice, we have the choice to continue with that agitation or not. The second point that Patanjali makes about the definition of asana is that not only is it about being still but it has another. Patanjali teaches us that in order for a position to be an asana we must abide there with “sukham”, or ease. This is the most challenging of ideas. It is usually true for most of us that when we move into an asana we are at first most aware of the difficulty, the tightness and even the resistance we are feeling at that moment. It is rare that we have a sense of ease. So what can Patanjali mean by the use of the word “ease: in relationship to asana? One way I have come to interpret this “ease” has to do with my willingness to be in the pose. The ease then comes in my interpretation of the difficulty, not in the difficulty itself. In other words, the pose can continue to stretch and challenge me; perhaps that will never change. But I can become “easeful” in my interpretation of that difficulty. I can choose to remain present and allow the difficulty to be there without fighting it, reacting to it or trying to change it.

The wider practice of yoga is not about arranging our life so that it is perfect and easy and non-challenging. Rather it is about using the discipline we find in asana practice (and in the other practices of yoga as well) to be able to remain “easy” in the midst of difficulty. That is the true measure of freedom. When we learn this then everything we do and everything we say becomes an“asana”, a position of body, mind and soul which requires the attention that brings us into the present.

Footnotes

(1) Barbara Stoler Miller. Yoga: Discipline of Freedom. New York City, New York: Bantam Books, 1995. Page 8 back
(2) The New York Times. “Complex and Hidden Brain in the Gut Makes Cramps, Butterflies and Valium”. January 23, 1996. Page B-5 and B-10.

Good Yoga?

2007-07-23T14:26:00.000-07:00

By Vedran

The quality of your practice is, for the most part, defined more by what you bring into the practice than what you get out of it. Because what you brought in tends to color what you get given.

I used to be a freak about yoga. I struggled with my discipline in a following way: I would practice almost every day but I had a preconcieved notion of exactly what I had to get done in order to be able to see my practice asy "good". This, of course, resulted in quite a bit of strain as my daily yoga turned into a chore. So, "good" meant that I reall made myself feel the burn, that I was satisfied with the definitiaon of my muscles when I was done or that I finally did some position right. While I practiced, my mind was erratic. If I did my asana practice, I was good. If not, I was bad.

Over the years, I have come to learn that putting labels such as "good", "bad" or whatever on my yoga practice not only limits the practice but that it actually dulls it. Judith Lasater says that practice is being present in each moment. No matter if you are working the coolest bakasana ever or doing the dishes - you are practicing.
Yoga is not so much about thinking - it is very much about doing. This is reflected in what we often call good discipline: Overthinking what you are going to do, when you are going to do it, if you are hungry or not or maybe if you are tired often results in NOT getting things done at all. Do not think too much: Just roll out your mat. I find that this approach works well for me. I do it from the point I am at at that given moment. Wholesome practice is maybe not so much about the level of your athleticism but about you doing what you`re doing in the best way that you can. This means that 20 minutes of flowing, breath fueled practice done regularly is better than two strained huffing and puffing hours during which your thoughts race from yesterday`s bowel movement to today`s dinner. Yoga requires focus. In many ways yoga actually IS focus. So, we have to practice the dristi and we have to focus the breath and be aware of bandha control. If we are not, it means that we are preocupied by something else. In this way, your asana is not necessarily yoga.
Having said that, a little bit of self indulgence now and then can support your practice. Most of us who are mere humans aren´t always capable of keeping that guru-esque 100% fixed gaze on just the right points and that mula bandha sometimes gets forgotten. Or maybe a little bit of music helps you get through your practice? Maybe you don´t exactly follow the prescribed asana sequence?
On the one hand, you have got the so called bhoga yoga that Mr B.K.S. Iyengar calls "look good, feel good, do no good yoga" that pets your ego parading as your deepest Self, telling you that your pincha mayurasana makes you look like a yogic god(dess). On the other hand, there´s being honest about wherever you stand at any given point and simply taking your practice from there. This is not to say that you should aim for a sloppy practice. On the contrary - by being honest about the state of your body and mind when you are about to practice, you can practice truthfully and constructively.
It is naive to expect the same standards in your yoga practice no matter what state you yourself are in when you are getting on the mat. If you are agitated or nervous, a vigorous, strong practice can help you vent and balance out your energy. If you are tired or sleepy and expect yourself to have a vigorous practice (especially home practice), sometimes it will work but you will mostly have to push yourself instead of focusing on what you are doing and the practice will be strained and exhausting in an unwholesome manner. So, if you are tired or coming down with a cold, it might be better to do a softer practice or even restorative practice than doing nothing at all or going too strong and spending all your energy on asana practice.
90 minute full Ashtanga Vinyasa practice is great but if the options are doing nothing or doing something shorter or softer, go for the milder alternative.

What it boils down to, I think, is the following: What we aim for in yoga is far beyond words. It is beyond bendy hamstrings and supple spine. We train our bodies to be good transporting vehicles or containers, if you will, for kinder and more loving human beings. We are training and disciplining our minds as much as we are working our muscles and bones. If the body is strong and healthy, it will not be an obstacle when you are working on your Spirit, which of course is what we really are doing (so if you think you are the ultimate aim is scultping those gorgeous yoga arms, isn´t it great to know that the arms are just a bonus you get from working on becoming a better person? :-D ).

So, if there is anything that can be named "good yoga", then it would have to be a truthful practice that honours your body and mind. It is doing what you can, as often as you can. So, you have only 15 minutes? Well, do 15 minutes. You are guaranteed to feel much better just having done a modest practice on those days when less just has to be more. This is the best way of developing a regular home practice. Small chunks several times a week, or every day. This builds habit and regularity. Doing yoga becomes like brushing your teeth. You wouldn´t dream of skipping brushing your teeth when you are tired and in the same way, you wouldn´t dream of skipping your yoga.
Aim for longer practice when you can. When you can´t, there are myriads of approaches, depending of how much you can do. For example, do some Sun salutations, pick three standing postures, three forward bends, three backbends, three twists and throw in an inversions at the end. End doing at least five minutes of Savasana (basic-relaxation-posture). Selections like this can take you anything from 15 minutes to about 45. Make sure you always do some core work (remeber your bandhas) and some upper body work. No matter how little you do, always do at least one asana that you find difficult. This never fails to give you a kick. And don´t go crazy. Remember, you should love your practice. Difficult times that make practice difficult to hold regular show you, in a way, that you are NOT your mind. Your mind will try to trick you into thinking that you should drop it. I recently had an entire day when I was tired, scandalously unfocused and sleepy the whole day. My mind was telling me "Oh, no practice is the best practice today!". This is when the "no-thinking" approach is useful. I chose not to delve into why I should or should not do my asana practice. At one point I just rolled out my mat and did a modest, rather soft practice of 30+ minutes. I can´t tell you how delicious it felt! I felt better and my lack of focus was no longer a problem. What´s more, I rememberd what matters in life. It might sound mundane but it´s not. It is simple but not mundane. When I say, "don´t think", I don´t mean that you should turn into a moron. On the contrary, this is about a much deeper intelligence. Intelligence is much more that what is happening between your ears. Intelligence is not being the slave of your thoughts (who hasn´t experienced thoughts that tell us things we intuitively know are wrong?) and instead being aware in every fiber of your being! THIS is the real intelligence. This is what we are doing with our yoga practice. This is not the obsessive compulsive kind of control but calmly knowing what your real priorities are. It honestly turns you into a better person.

Finally, as if it is necessary to repeat it, your practice is not about how well you do any position. It is about you lovingly and truthfully doing all you can. Every day. Or getting there!

Here Comes The Sun

2007-06-19T14:28:00.000-07:00

That most familiar of asana sequences, Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutation) is as rich in symbolic and mythic overtones as it is in physical benefits.

By Richard Rosen

In many cultures, light has long been a symbol of consciousness and self-illumination. "The world begins with the coming of light," wrote Jungian analyst Erich Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton University Press, 1995). "Opposition between light and darkness has informed the spiritual world of all peoples and molded it into shape."

Our primary source of light is, of course, the sun. When we look at our closest star, we may see nothing more than a big yellow ball. But for thousands of years, the Hindus have revered the sun, which they call Surya, as both the physical and spiritual heart of our world and the creator of all life itself. That's why one of Surya's many other appellations is Savitri (the Vivifier), who, according to the Rig Veda, "begets and feeds mankind in various manners" (III.55.19). Moreover, since everything that exists originates from the sun, as Alain DaniŽlou wrote in The Myths and Gods of India (Inner Traditions, 1991), it "must contain the potentiality of all that is to be known." For the Hindus, the sun is the "eye of the world" (loka chakshus), seeing and uniting all selves in itself, an image of and a pathway to the divine.

One of the means of honoring the sun is through the dynamic asana sequence Surya Namaskar (better known as Sun Salutation). The Sanskrit word namaskar stems from namas, which means "to bow to" or "to adore." (The familiar phrase we use to close our yoga classes, namaste—te means "you"—also comes from this root.) Each Sun Salutation begins and ends with the joined-hands mudra (gesture) touched to the heart. This placement is no accident; only the heart can know the truth.

The ancient yogis taught that each of us replicates the world at large, embodying "rivers, seas, mountains, fields...stars and planets...the sun and moon" (Shiva Samhita, II.1-3). The outer sun, they asserted, is in reality a token of our own "inner sun," which corresponds to our subtle, or spiritual, heart. Here is the seat of consciousness and higher wisdom (jnana) and, in some traditions, the domicile of the embodied self (jivatman).

It might seem strange to us that the yogis place the seat of wisdom in the heart, which we typically associate with our emotions, and not the brain. But in yoga, the brain is actually symbolized by the moon, which reflects the sun's light but generates none of its own. This kind of knowledge is worthwhile for dealing with mundane affairs, and is even necessary to a certain extent for the lower stages of spiritual practice. But in the end, the brain is inherently limited in what it can know and is prone to what Patanjali calls misconception (viparyaya) or false knowledge of the self.

History and Practice
There's some disagreement among authorities over the origins of Sun Salutation. Traditionalists contend that the sequence is at least 2,500 years old (perhaps even several hundred years older), that it originated during Vedic times as a ritual prostration to the dawn, replete with mantras, offerings of flowers and rice, and libations of water. Skeptics of this dating maintain that Sun Salutation was invented by the raja of Aundh (a former state in India, now part of Maharashtra state) in the early 20th century, then disseminated to the West in the 1920s or 1930s.

However old Sun Salutation is, and whatever it may originally have looked like, many variations have evolved over the years. Janita Stenhouse, in Sun Yoga: The Book of Surya Namaskar (Innerspace Map Studio, 2001), illustrates two dozen or so adaptations (though several are quite similar). Our sequence here consists of 12 "stations" composed of eight different postures, the last four being the same as the first four but performed in reverse order. In this sequence, we'll start and end in Tadasana. (Station 12, not pictured, is the same as station 1 on p. 91).

The eight basic postures, in order of performance, are Tadasana (Mountain Pose), Urdhva Hastasana (Upward Salute), Uttanasana (Standing Forward Bend), Lunge, Plank Pose, Chaturanga Dandasana (Four-Limbed Staff Pose), Urdhva Mukha Svanasana (Upward-Facing Dog Pose), and Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward-Facing Dog Pose).

The transition from posture to posture is facilitated by either an inhalation or an exhalation. As you move through the sequence, watch your breath closely. Slow your pace or stop and rest entirely if your breathing becomes labored or shuts down altogether. Always breathe through your nose, not your mouth: Nasal breathing filters and warms incoming air and slows your breathing down, thereby lending the sequence a meditative quality and reducing the risk of hyperventilation.

To perform the sequence, start in Tadasana, with your hands together at your heart. Inhale and lift your arms overhead to Urdhva Hastasana, then exhale while lowering the arms down and fold your torso into Uttanasana. Then inhale, arch your torso into a slight backbend with the fingertips or palms pressed to the floor or blocks, and exhale while bringing your left foot back into a lunge. Inhale forward to Plank, then exhale and lower yourself into Chaturanga Dandasana. On an inhalation, arch your torso up as you straighten your arms into Upward Dog. Exhale back to Downward Dog; step the left foot forward on an inhalation into Lunge. Swing the right leg forward to Uttanasana on an exhalation, then lift your torso and reach your arms overhead on an inhalation to Urdhva Hastasana. Finally, lower your arms on an exhalation and return to your starting point, Tadasana.

Remember, this is only a half-round; you'll need to repeat the sequence, switching left to right and right to left to complete a full round. If you're just starting out, it might help to work on the poses individually before you put them together. (Visit www.YogaJournal.com for more how-to information.)

Many of the variations of Sun Salutation begin in Tadasana with the sacred hand gesture mentioned earlier. Most students know it as Anjali Mudra (Reverence Seal), but—in honor of the ancient yogis—I like to call it by one of its other names, Hridaya Mudra (Heart Seal). Touch your palms and fingers together in front of your chest and rest your thumbs lightly on your sternum, with the sides of the thumbs pressing lightly on the bone about two-thirds of the way down. Be sure to broaden your palms and press them against each other evenly, so your dominant hand doesn't overpower its nondominant mate. The pressing and spreading of the palms helps to firm the scapulas against, and spread them across, your back torso.

Since the sequence is, in essence, a humble adoration of the light and insight of the self, it's essential to practice Sun Salutation in a spirit of devotion and with your awareness turned always inward toward the heart. Make each movement as mindful and precise as possible, especially as you near the end of your rounds, when fatigue can lead to sloppiness.

Deepening the Practice
The sequence itself is fairly straightforward, but beginning students often stumble in two parts of it. The first of these is Chaturanga Dandasana: Lowering from Plank, students who lack sufficient strength in the arms, legs, and lower belly commonly wind up in a heap on the floor. The short-term solution is simply to bend the knees to the floor just after Plank, then lower the torso down so that the chest and chin (but not the belly) lightly rest on the floor.

The second sticky part is in stepping the foot forward from Downward-Facing Dog back into Lunge. Many beginners are unable to take the full step smoothly and lightly; typically, they thump their foot heavily on the floor about halfway to the hands, then struggle to wriggle it the rest of the way forward. This is a consequence both of tight groins and a weak belly. The short-term solution is to bend the knees to the floor right after Downward Dog, step the foot forward between the hands, then straighten the back knee into Lunge.

Success with Sun Salutation, as with all aspects of yoga practice, depends on commitment and regularity. An everyday practice would be best, but you might at first aim for four times a week. If possible, don't skip more than a couple of days in a row, or you might end up back at square one.

Traditionally, Sun Salutation is best performed outdoors, facing east-the location of the rising sun, a symbol of the dawn of consciousness and jnana. This might be a perfect wake-up routine in India, where it's usually warm outside, but it's probably not feasible in Michigan in late December. Nowadays, Sun Salutation is used mostly as a preliminary warm-up for an asana session. I do 10 to 12 rounds at the start of every practice—or after a few hip and groin openers—and a few more on each equinox and solstice to acknowledge the change in the light. On days when only a quickie practice is possible, an intense 10-minute Sun Salutation and five minutes spent in Savasana (Corpse Pose) will do you just fine.

Launch your practice slowly with three to five rounds, gradually building up to 10 or 15. If this seems like a lot, remember that the traditional number of rounds is 108, which may take you more than a few weeks to work up to. You can pace the sequence briskly to generate heat and cleanse the body-mind, or more moderately to create a moving meditation.

If you're looking for a more vigorous Sun Salutation, consider the approach of the vinyasa traditions such as K. Pattabhi Jois-style Ashtanga Yoga, which uses a jumping version of Sun Salutation to link the individual poses in their fixed series.

Variations of Sun Salutation are legion, and because of the sequence's malleability, it's easy enough to cook up a few of your own. For instance, you can make things more challenging by adding one or more poses: Insert Utkatasana (Chair Pose) after Urdhva Hastasana, or from Lunge, keeping your hands on the floor, straighten the forward leg to a modified Parsvottanasana (Side Stretch Pose). Let your imagination run wild and have fun.

Richard Rosen is a YJ contributing editor.

Come Rain, Come Shine

2007-05-29T04:02:00.000-07:00

By Vedran

All too often, when the Sun is shining bright and the weather is all nice and summery and I step into a yoga class, I think to myself "Naw, I don`t think that many people are coming today!". And all too often, it actually turns out to be true. It is very human and not at all strange to think that "On a beautiful day like today, why not skip my practice?". But what about those days when it rains and it`s too dreary and we skip our yoga classes? Or it snows and "it`s too cold to go to a class". Or something or other happens and we chose to do something other than our yoga practice? There is always and there will always be a reason to skip yoga practice. Observing things like these is a good opportunity to try to find out what your yoga is all about. Is it just about lifting your bottom a notch or three, streching your hamstrings or looking like your trendiest self as you strut through the streets carrying your yoga mat? Or is it about changing much more than your muscle tone? Yoga is a demanding lover. You get a lot but you have to put in a whole lot yourself. Yoga practice is not merely an excercise system. It is a spiritual, devotional practice that accidentaly (or not) includes amazing physical benefits. Our yoga practice mirrors the rest of our lives, like it or not. The physical part of it is there to remove physical obstacles form your path toward self-realization. If you skip practice in order to go get some suntan, it does say something about your priorities.
Yogananth of Pure Yoga, Hong Kong, quoted one of his teachers who said that doing one hour of yoga a day keeps the doctor away. And if you are a yoga practicioner and you think that you don`t have time to do half an hour of yoga practice daily, you might want to consider what this says about how much you value your life. You don`t have HALF an hour? Exactly what did you spend those thirty minutes doing? How much tv have you seen? How much time do you spend blindly surfing the internet? Or on mindless chatter about nothing and everything? So, you don`t have time to do your yoga?
Far from me fanatically propagating yogic asceticism, I think it is important truthfully reflecting on what you practice yoga for. We should all practice yoga because we LOVE it. We love it when it`s a breaze and we should love it when it`s hard. In his fabulous book "Light On Life", B.K.S. Iyengar says that there is so much focus on the negative in yoga because that is exactly the stuff we are working on. Those are the things we are working our way out of, be it physical weakness or rigidity or their mental and emotional counterparts. That is why we talk so much about the negatives. Our apparent helplessness in face of all things that stop us from being all the amazing stuff that we can be. In all respects. So, you want more strength, flexibility, you want to develop wholesome discipline and focus, you want to free your mind? You want to be the master of your mind? You want to get that vinyasa or your headstand right? And you don`t want to practice because it`s sunny or raining or snowing or because your favourite talk show host has announced a "shocking surprise" on television? Well, maybe you should reconsider. Nothing comes without a cost. The Sun will be there when you get off your mat.
Having said all this and having ranted about how we should practice relentlessly, I do firmly believe that not practicing is sometimes the best practice. Yoga practice should never be your bondage. It doesn`t always have to be pleasant, because often it isn`t, but fundamentally you should always love it. Yogis can sometimes slip into a kind of obsessive compulssion that torments them when they don`t get to practice. There will be times when you sleep in and you don`t get to do yoga. Or you`re somewhere where you just can`t roll out your mat. Or you`re exausted. There will be times when you in all honesty know that you just can`t practice. Well, rest, I say. Your yoga shouldn`t drive you nuts. At these times, we have yet another chance to remember that yoga practice is not just what you do on the mat. It`s also everything else! It`s being present where you are. It`s about honouring every breath and every moment. It`s about being your best self given the circumstances. It`s about seeing yourself mirrored in everything, knowing that awareness can take you through anything, being ancored in your breath and the feeling of your feet on the ground (or off). THAT is what makes you a yogi! And that is exactly the attitude that will get you on the mat when you actually both can and should practice, come rain, come shine.

Redefining Great Abs

2007-05-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

Forget all about the six-pack. Yoga builds strong, balanced abdominal muscles in a healthy, holistic way.

By Carol Krucoff

The instruction seemed so shocking, I assumed I'd heard it wrong. Then the teacher repeated herself: "Soften and release your abdominals." This was the early 1980s, and I'd just started taking classes in Iyengar Yoga. Conditioned to hold in my abdominals by more than 20 years of dance training, traditional fitness classes, and our "suck in your gut" culture, I found it surprisingly difficult to let go in that area. Yet over time, I learned to relax my belly and fill it up with breath. Free at last!

Then I moved to another city and began taking yoga classes with different teachers schooled in various styles of hatha practice. Each instructor presented an alternative approach to working with the abdominals. In one class, we were told to "draw the pit of the abdomen up" and "hollow the belly." In another, we were instructed to "lift the side waist" and "pull the belly toward the spine." A third class emphasized Uddiyana Bandha (Upward Abdominal Lock), engaged by "contracting the abdomen above and below the navel toward the back." When yet another teacher asked us to "lift from the center but without creating hardness," I found myself wondering if I was the only one who didn't quite get it.

Were these completely different viewpoints about the abdominals? Or were my teachers saying the same thing in different ways? Everyone seemed to agree on the belly's energetic importance--as the body's center of power, the abdomen initiates movement and is a repository for strong emotions, or "gut feelings," ranging from fear to anger. But the directions for engaging the abs were often very contradictory, esoteric--more metaphysical than practical--and at times, frankly, quite puzzling. What does it mean to have strong and healthy abdominals? How much does the yogic view differ from that of Western fitness? And just what did all those teachers really mean by their cryptic instructions? I intended to find out.

Clearing Up the Confusion

"There's a quagmire of confusion about the abdominals," says Jean Couch, yoga teacher, author of The Runner's Yoga Book (Rodmell, 1992), and owner and director of the Balance Center in Palo Alto, California. The central problem, she says, "is that people think they should hold their stomachs in, because the shape our society values as healthy and attractive is abnormally thin and held.â€ Since most people hold a low amount of tension in their abdominals all the time, she says, "they're unable to build abdominal strength, because you can never, ever strengthen a tense muscle. The only way you can strengthen your abs is to continually relax them--then you can exercise them as much as you want."

Despite the American fascination with rock-hard, washboard abs, she explains, a healthy muscle is actually "springy and elastic." Yet most people's abdominals go from "being held to being flaccid," says Couch, who urges her students to release their bellies and "align their bones naturally" so their abs can relax. "I never say, 'Pull your belly in,'" she adds. "I tell people, 'Elongate your spine,' which makes the belly automatically pull in." From this pulled-in--yet relaxed--place, she says, the abs are soft enough to allow deep breathing but elastic enough to be contracted when called upon, for example, to stabilize the body while balancing on one leg in Vrksasana (Tree Pose). Abdominal strength is important, Couch explains, "not to create washboard abs but to support vital organs and stabilize the skeleton."

This strength should be balanced with flexibility, says Joan White, an advanced Iyengar teacher and national chair of certification for Iyengar Yoga in the United States, "so we don't create further hardness and tension, but also so we're able to soften and release."

Many in the yoga community point out that the sedentary American lifestyle has created an epidemic of weak abdominals and a dangerous tendency to use back muscles to compensate. "Many people don't understand the difference between moving from the lower back and moving from the abdomen," says White. "When the abdominals aren't strong enough to do a pose, such as a [supine] leg lift, people will lift their legs by pulling from the lower back, which can cause injury."

Most yoga teachers agree that a strong, healthy abdominal region is essential to a strong, healthy practice. But it is difficult to find consensus about how to use yoga to develop that area. It's not as if each school of yoga consistently teaches abdominal awareness in the same way, using the same language. In fact, many teachers reacted strongly--almost as if offended--when asked how to examine this area in a detailed, muscular way. Because yoga is a discipline that seeks to unify, pinpointing one body part can seem inappropriate, almost baffling.

As Shandor Remete, an instructor at Shadow Yoga in Australia, explains, "Yoga isn't an exercise system, it's an energetic system. It's not about the size of the muscles but about the quality of the circuitry of wind, blood, and nervous energy that flows throughout the body." In fact, overdevelopment and hardness of the abdominals--or of any single muscle group--can be harmful, because excessive muscle bulk can obstruct energy flow and decrease the body's vital forces.

The Western focus on the body's physicality often ignores the emotional importance of the abdominal region, says Ana Forrest, yoga teacher and owner of the Forrest Yoga Circle in Santa Monica, California. "Some of our abdominal problems are related to lack of skillfulness in dealing with our gut feelings," she says, adding that "whatever happens on the mat is a paradigm for our lives. If we're not good at connecting with our center, perhaps we're not good at taking a stand for our truth and ourselves."

Forrest emphasizes abdominal work in each class, believing that it is helpful "for relieving emotional and physical constipation." But this very emotional component prompts some teachers to shy away from abdominal work in certain circumstances. "I've observed a lot of psychological baggage connected with the abdomen," says White. "It's a common place for people to hold anxiety, so if someone's feeling anxious, I don't want to create further anxiety and tension by giving them the chance to harden and tighten more in this area."

The Anatomy of Abs

Although many yogis are reluctant to focus directly on the abs, most exercise physiologists and fitness professionals have no such compunction. In our midriff-baring culture, "abdominals are one of the main areas people want to develop in an exercise program," says Tom Seabourne, an exercise scientist, martial artist, and coauthor of Athletic Abs (Human Kinetics, 2003).

Many fitness enthusiasts focus on developing the "six-pack" muscle, or rectus abdominis, which is actually a "10-pack" that runs from the pubic bone to the breastbone. "A straplike muscle designed for smooth, long movement, its main purpose is to raise your body from bed each morning," Seabourne explains. "The rectus is the most superficial and visible of four abdominal muscle groups that work synergistically."

The internal and external obliques, on the sides of the torso, rotate and bend the torso. "Your obliques are used in almost every activity," Seabourne says. Twisting is the key to training them.

The deepest layer is the transversus abdominis, which is located horizontally underneath the rectus abdominis and the obliques. One of the few muscles with fibers that run from side to side, the transversus generally functions along with the autonomic nervous system to flatten the stomach in "bearing-down" activities, such as childbirth and defecation, and is activated in expelling actions, such as coughing and vomiting.

Yoga is excellent for building healthy abdominals, Seabourne says, because it involves moving the body in various directions and angles through postures requiring stability and balance--often in an unusual relationship to gravity. "The key is flexible strength, and that's what yoga develops," he explains. "Too many people still think ab training is doing crunches, which does nothing for flexibility. If you just train for strength, your muscles can actually shorten. And if you train in only one direction, you're limiting your range of motion."

Alternative Perspectives

Building strength and flexibility in the abdominal and back muscles, which form the body's "core," is the main goal of Pilates--one of the most rapidly growing exercise systems in the nation. Unlike in yoga, students in Pilates always "exhale through pursed lips, because this creates a resistance that helps people feel the abdominal contraction," says Moira Merrithew, program director of Stott Pilates in Toronto. Throughout all Pilates exercises, she says, the inhalations are done through the nostrils and the exhalations are done through the mouth to help students focus on their core and strengthen the deep abdominal muscles.

Several classic Pilates exercises focus on strengthening the abs, with the goal of creating "optimal functional fitness," Merrithew says. One of the best known is the "hundreds," performed supine with the head and shoulders raised while the arms pump up and down by the sides in time with the breath to the count of a hundred.

To help people learn the often subtle engagements of the abdominals, "hands-on work is invaluable," says Michael Feldman, a certified Rolfer in Sausalito, California, who teaches functional-anatomy workshops. He suggests that instructors teach people how to engage the transversus by first palpating the hip points at the front of the pelvis, then asking the person to "draw the two hip points together by lengthening the back and hollowing the belly." Another important aspect is finding the sitting bones, "so people can learn to sit on them properly," Feldman says. "One reason the abdominals are so weak is that most people sit with their backs rounded, which makes the abs go slack."

Using alternative modalities and systems, such as Pilates and Rolfing, to access the abdominal region can be a helpful way to create a connection if you're not feeling it in your yoga practice. To truly augment your yoga, be sure to take what you have learned and experiment with it the next time you're on the mat.

Let Your Breath Be Your Guide

Tuning in to your breath through yoga practice offers yet another way to access and tone the abdominals. Many yoga teachers find it most effective to teach ab work and awareness through breathing exercises.

Toronto yoga instructor Esther Myers recalls that after a hysterectomy, she experienced "an inner emptiness that left me feeling unstable in standing poses in a way I found surprising." Deep abdominal breathing proved particularly restorative for Myers, who used pranayama (breathwork)--especially the pumping action of Kapalabhati Pranayama--to strengthen and tone her abs without the shortening and contraction of sit-ups and crunches. Intended to clear the nostrils, ears, and other air ducts in the head, Kapalabhati--which means "shining skull"--activates the deepest abdominal muscle, the transversus, to perform an action she describes as similar to a controlled sneeze.

Kathleen Miller, a yoga teacher and therapist in the Viniyoga tradition, says that "many people find it difficult to access the [lower belly] area from the pubic bone to the navel." To help students awaken this "sleepy area," she has them lie on their backs with their legs bent, feet on the floor and one hand just above the pubic bone. She then has them tune in to their breath and contract this area on an exhalation, feeling how the navel moves back toward the spine, stabilizing the pelvis and lengthening the lower back. "In time," she explains, "people begin to feel that every exhalation can be an abdominal event."

The lower abdominal region is the site where Uddiyana Bandha is performed; this bandha "has the effect of bringing one's awareness to this energetic core," says Tim Miller, director of the Ashtanga Yoga Center in Encinitas, California. "At the end of the exhalation, there's a natural flow of awareness to this area. Uddiyana Bandha occurs in a very specific location and is a subtle contraction that is fairly light and mostly energetic in nature." To locate this area, he suggests "exhaling the breath completely, then sitting for a moment in that state of emptiness."

In response to the many people looking to strengthen their abdominals, Miller assures them, "Each time you take a complete breath, you're toning the muscles of the abdomen." In addition, he says, "there's an incredible amount of ab work within the [Ashtanga] vinyasa--jumping back and jumping through require grace and control in the center of the body so you get a sense of lightness." A large part of the Ashtanga practice--especially the primary series--is "detoxifying and ridding the body of waste material," he says. "And a common place that tends to get stored is in the gut."

Once it's clear to a student that yoga practice centers on energetics and unification--rather than getting something exactly right muscularly--some teachers will suggest specific asanas for abdominal development. For example, Shandor Remete recommends working the abdominal region in many different directions, such as in Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutation). This series contracts the abs in forward bends, such as Uttanasana (Standing Forward Bend), and lengthens them in backbends, such as Urdhva Mukha Svanasana (Upward-Facing Dog Pose). He also suggests doing Hanumanasana (Pose Dedicated to the Monkey God, Hanuman) and Mayurasana (Peacock Pose), because they both build and require strong, supple abdominal muscles, as well as Navasana (Boat Pose) and Nauli (abdominal churning).

Go Exploring

Since weak abdominals and damaged lower backs are common in our culture, Forrest encourages her students to perform ab exercises daily to help stay injury-free. "Core strength is essential in every pose--and absolutely mandatory for doing advanced 'gravity surfing' postures and series," she says--for example, moving through a series of Handstand variations or doing arm balances such as Eka Pada Bakasana (One-Legged Crane Pose), Tittibhasana (Firefly Pose), and Astavakrasana (Eight-Angle Pose). Plus, Forrest says, "building core strength and awareness in the abdominals can translate to feeling centered and strong in daily life."

Forrest includes at least 15 minutes of abdominal strengtheners in every class, in part because she found that strengthening her own abdominal area was critical to her recovery from a back injury. "At first, people tend to really hate doing abdominal work, because it's a painful area that many find hard to access," she says. "But after a while, it feels really good to wake up and cleanse our insides."

On the quest to create healthy abdominals, it's crucial that students learn to trust the body's messages. As Esther Myers explains, "If pulling the belly in improves your posture and makes you feel energized and confident, that's telling you something. If it makes you feel tense and strained, that's also telling you something. In yoga, you can make decisions based on an inner knowledge of what the practice is doing for you."

And how to develop that trust? "Go exploring," says Forrest. "Find out what works best for you."

A frequent contributor to Yoga Journal, Carol Krucoff is a journalist, registered yoga therapist, and yoga instructor in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She is coauthor of Healing Moves (Crown, 2000).

Yoganista Fashionista

2007-04-29T15:45:00.000-07:00

By Vedran

Some years ago, I saw a billboard campaign by a major sportswear manufacturer (I´m not telling which) that had just launched a line of clothes and other gear apparently specially designed for yoga practioners. The message these billboards conveyed was that the manufacturer in question had stuff for you no matter what kind of exercise you were into. Their yoga posters sported the word "Yoganista?". I don´t know if this word existed before but since this campaign, I have heard it spoken by several people. Yoganista, then, is apparently a person who practices yoga and now there´s a whole collection of stuff, including some kind of yoga slipper that we can get to make our practice better. A yoga slipper? What does one do with a yoga slipper?
It happens that, when I tell people that I "do yoga", they reply "Oh, that´s very popular these days". 90% of these people go on to tell me that they have been thinking about doing yoga for ages. Because it´s popular these days. Yoga is being offered in most gyms, yoga studios are booming in most cities, celebrities tell us about how yoga has changed their bodies and lives. There´s no escaping - yoga and fashion have intermingled and it doesn´t seem likely that it´s going to change.
In the late 1990´s, the media wizzard Madonna publicly proclaimed her love of Ashtanga yoga. She sported an incredibly well trained and defined body and said she had become "gym free". She even took the renowned yoga teacher Duncan Wong, the creator of Yogic Arts, with her on her Re-Invention Tour so that he could be a spot on instructor while she was on the road. Yoga and pilates were the thing. The whole world followed, as it often does. Supermodel Christy Turlington wrote a book on yoga and launched a line of clothes meant for fashionable and comfortable yoga practice, Madonna´s friend and Oscar winning actress, Gwyneth Paltrow, appeared in the documentary "Ashtanga NY" on Sri K. Pattabhi Jois´ trip to New York, alongside Willem Defoe and a member of the Beasty Boys. Former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell released a yoga dvd, promising that everyone could attain a "Geri body" if they did yoga. Many yoga teachers reached celebrity status. Then Madonna fell off a horse and couldn´t do yoga for a while. She is apparently doing somethig else now. A new fad on its way?

It is easy to cringe about this. If yoga is about anything, it certainly is NOT about being a money machine and an exercise fad fueled by supermodels in Sirsasana. Trends come and they burn out. People get their fix and go on to seek the next big thing.
I have often rolled my eyes when someone told me how their gym now offers yoga classes. On the other hand, there might be benefits to be reaped here. Yoga has proved to be more than a proverbial flash in a pan of the exercise world. It stuck around for thousands of years before Raquel Welch and Madonna got turned on to it and it has displayed staying power for quite a few years after that as well. I actually taught a class in a gym for a short while and while I definitely noticed how people who had no idea what they were coming to, turned up in my Ashtanga class to "relax" after they had pumped iron, ended up facing their physical demons, often caused by pumping iron, and never returned again, there were others. These "others" seemed to have sensed that this "yoga thing" was something else. To my great joy, I noticed how some of them got themselves their own proper yoga mats and started developing into real yoga practicioners. People actually got the connection between breath and posture and noticed how their emotions got touched by the practice! What I realised was that yoga in gyms and on Madonna concerts can present yoga to a lot of people who would never be exposed to it otherwise. It turns on their inner yogis and turns them on to a lifetime of practice. Of course, there will always be people who try a yoga course or two and realise that yoga takes work and sweat and effort and that it´s by no means a quick fix and they go back to whatever they did (or did not do) before yoga. But what inspires me are those myriads of others who start up thinking they´re in it for the exercise and end up reading books, going to workshops, perhaps travelling to India and ultimately (India or not) understanding that yoga is a lifestyle and that the fat burn, flexibility and the "yoga body" are just side effects of something else, far more enormous. For amidst the nonsense of yoga slippers, teachers turning into tacky franchise owners and what not, there are so many people turning into bona-fide yogis, lives being changed and incredible teachers getting a chance to reach practicioners around the globe. This, I think, makes it worth while. Those chasing trends will go on chasing trends. They would with or without yoga. Some of them might realise along the way that they should give that sticky mat yet another try. And maybe they will stay. When I think about it, my practice didn´t start after three months of deep meditation in a cave in Tibet. It was because I had heard that people I respected and admired had started practicing. So I tried and stayed with it. I have an expensive and fabulous mat that somebody probably earns good money on. The bottom line is that using our heads is as good thing as ever. Has Geri Halliwell inspired you to do yoga? Great! Just realise that your practice will be yours and not Geri Halliwell´s or Madonna´s or Willem Defoe's and your body will end up looking like yours and not theirs because you´re you and not them. Staying with it is what it´s about, no matter what (or where or who) the starting point was. What makes us yogis is a steady, discipined practice and not developing the "yoga body". The fashionism in yoga should, if anything, be an ignition point for a lifetime of good practice. I think that it often is. If not, you´ll come and you will leave.
For all of us who have stayed: Go on - get those yoga pants if you REALLY want to (and can afford them), as long as you keep in mind that it´s about the effort. And breath and sweat. Never about the pants.

Face Your Fears Of Falling

2007-04-24T13:57:00.000-07:00

If you are avoiding arm balances, bear in mind that they develop core strength, keep the bones sturdy, and sharpen mental discipline.

By Julie Gudmestad

When an arm balance appears in the Yoga Journal calendar or magazine, interesting discussion ensues at my studio. Some students are intrigued, wondering when we will work on the pose. Others, from the tone of comments like "Not in this lifetime," appear to be in awe. One student, a triathlete who competes in Ironman eventsâ€”a 2.4-mile open water swim followed by a 112-mile bike ride and a full marathonâ€”provided my favorite arm-balance remark: "Why in the world would anyone want to do such a thing?" To which I replied, "I bet people ask you that too!"

Actually, my student's question is a very good one. Why should you bother practicing these challenging poses? Even though they are hard for most people, are there benefits if you accept the challenge and really work on them? And what can you add to your practice that might make these arm balances come just a little easier?

One reason arm balances are so challenging is they require both strength and flexibility. You may be very strong but still not be able to do arm balances if you don't have the necessary flexibility. And yet excellent flexibility is no guarantee of success if you don't have the needed upper body and torso strength. Many people, especially women, come to yoga relatively weak in the upper body. This weakness may be due to a lifelong lack of regular work with the arms, shoulders, chest, and abdomen. Unfortunately, the weakness usually progresses as the decades go by and is often a factor in loss of independent living skills; many elderly folks can't open heavy doors or carry their own grocery bags. Over many years, the lack of hard work that challenges the upper body muscles and bones also contributes to loss of mineralization in those bonesâ€”osteoporosisâ€”which can be a serious health problem.

So the practice of poses that include weight bearing on the arms is a good idea to help prevent osteoporosis as well as to build upper body strength. In addition, practicing any balance pose, including arm balances, helps strengthen the balance reflexes and prevent falls. The combination of osteoporosis with poor balance reflexes can lead to falls and broken bones (wrist, shoulder, and hip fractures are most common), with potentially life-threatening consequences for the elderly.

Building Strength
Armed with this information, do you feel more motivated to work on those arm balances? Good, because it's quite a bit easier to build and maintain strength and bone density earlier in life, rather than try to regain later what you've lost. However, it's never too late to begin work, because studies have shown that the body responds to challenge by building muscle and bone mass even in the later decades of life.

A good place for most students to begin, at any age, is with regular practice of Plank Pose and Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward-Facing Dog Pose). Both of these poses put moderate weight on the arms and shoulder bones and build good isometric strength in the pectoral muscles (chest), deltoids (cap of shoulder), and triceps (back of upper arm). All of these muscles must be strong for arm balances, and it may take months of regular Plank and Down Dog practice to build the strength required.

Plank is an especially good preparation for arm balances. It strengthens the weight-bearing muscles of the arm at the same angle, 90 degrees to the torso, that is needed for the prototypical arm balance Bakasana (Crane Pose), as well as many others. Scientific studies indicate that muscles are strengthened in the exact range of motion in which you work them, so you may be strong in one position, but the strength won't apply in another position.

While you're in Plank, it's a good idea to throw in some push-ups. If you're not so strong in the upper body, start with "mini-push-ups": From Plank on your knees rather than toes, let yourself down toward the floor just a few inches, then push back up.

With regular practice, you'll be able to go down a little deeper and do a few more repetitions. Eventually, you'll be able to go all the way to the floor and back up, and then it's time to start working full length from your toes. When you've lowered all the way down near the floor, bearing weight on only your hands and toes, you will of course be in Chaturanga Dandasana (Four-Limbed Staff Pose). This is also a good arm balance preparation, because you are bearing weight on your arms with the upper arms in line with your sides (instead of forward or overhead), as in arm balances like Astavakrasana (Pose Dedicated to the Sage Astavakra) and the rather advanced series of poses dedicated to the sage Koundinya.

Success in arm balances has another hidden ingredient: abdominal strength. Most balance poses, including inversions, require abdominal strength to support and stabilize the center of your body. In many arm balances, like Bakasana and Lolasana (Pendant Pose), the abdominal muscles must contract even more strongly to lift the weight of your pelvis and legs off the floor. So if you come to yoga without a regular practice of abdominal work, arm balances are likely to be a study in frustration. What poses can you include in your basic practice to build a solid foundation of abdominal strength? Plank Pose is again an excellent choice. Besides building chest and shoulder strength, it also works the abdominals. In an informal biofeedback study at our studio, one of our teachers found that Plank Pose elicited a stronger abdominal contraction than any traditional abdominal exercise, including crunches and sit-ups. This makes sense when you consider that in Plank the abdominals are supporting the whole middle of the body, preventing it from sagging with the pull of gravity.

Another great pose for abdominal strengthening isNavasana (Boat Pose). The abdominals contract in the pose to hold the torso up at an angle to gravityâ€”and to keep you from falling over backward. In addition, Navasana strengthens your hip flexors (the iliopsoas and rectus femoris) and thigh muscles (the quadriceps, including the rectus femoris) and is obviously also a balance pose. For all these reasons, it is an excellent conditioning pose for arm balances; unfortunately, it's also a pose not often included in home practices.

To make Navasana a little easier and to inspire you to include it more regularly, try coming into the pose by sitting on the floor with your knees bent up toward your chest, feet on the floor, and hands wrapped around the tops of your shins. Sit tall, lifting your chest and lengthening your spine. Slowly tip back, getting your balance as your feet lift off the floor. Keeping your chest lifted, release your hands and stretch your arms out parallel to the floor. In the first few weeks, you don't have to straighten your knees completely: Even with bent knees, you can feel the abdominals contracting. As you get stronger, you can gradually straighten your knees, keeping your chest lifted and lifting your feet above the height of your eyes.

Creating Flexibility
While you are working on your upper body and abdominal strength, a few key areas also need work on flexibility. These include the spineâ€”in flexion (rounding forward) and twistingâ€”and the hips. Squatting in Malasana (Garland Pose) works on both spine and hip flexion, which are so important in arm balances like Bakasana. To come into Malasana, start by standing in Tadasana (Mountain Pose). Next, hang forward into Uttanasana (Standing Forward Bend), placing the feet together so the inner edges of the feet touch. Then squat, allowing the knees to widen enough so the arms and shoulders fit inside the knees. Try to keep the heels on the floor; if they won't stay down, put a block or blanket under the heels.

Let your hips be heavy and your head hang down, relaxing your neck. Stay in the pose for a minute or so, letting your hips and back relax into the stretch. Eventually, your arms can wrap around your outer legs and your hands clasp behind your back.

Any of the sitting twists will help build rotational flexibility in the spine and rib cage, which is needed for arm balances like Parsva Bakasana (Side Crane Pose). However, the squatting twist Pasasana (Noose Pose) is especially helpful as a preparation for the twisting arm balances. In the beginning, it's good to use the support of the wall to add leverage and avoid struggles with balance. Stand near a wall with your right side about a foot from the wall. Squat down, again supporting your heels if they come up off the floor. Lengthen your spine and rib cage up, turn to face the wall, and place your left forearm between the wall and your right knee. Place your palms flat on the wall and use the leverage of your arms against the wall to help you twist more deeply.

Now that you know some ways to condition your body for arm balances, it's time to consider another necessary ingredient for progress: mental discipline. Just as much as you'll be excited by your first successes, you'll be deeply frustrated and discouraged by your failures. Arm balances are therefore the perfect poses to practice persistence in the face of challenge, as well as non-attachment to the fruits of your labors.

Balancing The Edge

2007-04-22T04:02:00.000-07:00

Sharon Gannon and David Life have written "Yoga is who you are.". Rather than being a quirky cliché, what it means is that whoever we are, our stuff- good and not so good - will show through our practice. The more challenging the practice, the more stuff will come up. This is when yoga really is revealed as far more than a physical practice. I find this to be especially true for balancing postures (for other people, other postures will trigger their target issues).
When I'm really tired or agitated, I often feel a tinge of flight reflex when I know that standing leg raises (Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana) are drawing nearer and nearer in my standing seqence. Leaning my chin toward my shin seems like such a chore and I am often tempted to just do the asana without leaning forward. Far from it being a purely physical thing, it is clear that what throws me out of balance is my generally unbalanced energy at that moment. I have done the posture countless times during years and years of my practice and STILL when my energy is a bit off, I find it challenging. On "good" days, it comes so easy that it`s difficult to imagine I ever found it difficult and then there are other days...
As in any other asana, what I find happens is that the practice communicates to us exactly what it is that we need. More stability, more strength, more focus, more breath. It tells us that in order to get to where we need to be, we need to release the mundane jitters of everyday life. Acknowledge them, keep your breath steady and release them. Shit happens and you don´t need to roll around in it but acknowledge that it happens and why it happens and take it from there. We need to know ourselves better and more honestly in order to get those asanas steadier and stronger. We all need to be truthfull to ourselves, both in our asana practice and at any other time, if we are ever to get to any place sensible. Mr Iyengar says that every cell in the body needs to know what to do. Now, this is a great truth. Since who and how we are, both at the moment and at any given time, is bound to seep into any posture we do (the harder the posture, the more of a challenge this will present), we need to direct our energy in a way that serves our purposes. This is extremely metaphoric for life. Things will happen as they do. Often times we like it, other times we don´t. And so what? Like leaning your chin toward your shin in Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana, the goal is knowing where you need to get yourself. Where do you need to go? So, at those jittery moments, I tend to take an extra breath, remind myself of exactly what it is that I am doing. I anchor my standing foot and try to spread the energy of my steady breath through my body. I try to inform every cell in my body of what the task is. And I relax. At a workshop Edward Clark did in Oslo, he said to us that we should think of what our dharma is, what we have to give to the world and put that into our practice. I loved this - it truly struck a major chord in me. The practice will inform us of where we´re at and who we are, if we are willing to listen. Now, we can choose to ignore this, but if we´re ever to get to any kind of goal that is worth while, where we really are at needs to be respected and acknowledged. If we don´t, something might snap, or the asana will seem impossible, or the breath will get uneven, or all those things at the same time. I remember when I started practicing Koundinyasana B (check out the picture), how I got all panicky and panting. I was all in my arms and I tended to forget to breathe. It was SO hard. So, first I decided that I just wasn´t strong enough. Then I tried it again and I just floated up. The difference wasn´t in my strength. What happened was that instead of just practicing the physical posture, I practiced yoga. Meaning that my breath was there, my focus was there, I was being honest and I took it from where I really was, instead of where my frantic, panting delusion told me I was. And It was delicious. The way it needs to be. The way my arms shook a little was delicous. The way it didn´t matter because I was really steady and there was delicous. Gannon and Life say that you can´t hold your balance - you have to reach for it. This, I think, is one of those things you can´t really grasp by analyzing what they might have meant by that. I honestly think that this needs to be practiced to be experienced and understood. You need to be thrown off balance and get yourself back into it to really understand. And then, the time comes when it actually does work. That´s how we balance the edge. That´s what yoga practice is all about.

Upcoming workshops in Oslo

2007-04-21T03:48:00.000-07:00

Here´s an update on what`s up on Oslo´s yoga front these upcoming weeks and months:

Yogacharya Venkatesh
A unique opportunity to study with a true Indian yoga master and to establish a full yogic lifestyle, incorporating all elements of Patanjalis sutras that will compliment your asana practice.

He is a very advanced practitioner, having earned the title of YOGA SAMRAT (Emperor of Yoga)and has developed his own system of ten asana series (atmavikasa). You will receive a lot of individual attention and Venkatesh's teaching style is well known for his precision, dignity, discipline and ability to grade and progess students of all levels.

Though he is an expert in all sections of Yoga , his
special and rare expertise is in back bending asanas.
He is the first pers onto introduce special courses on
flexibility improvement tecniques which are based on
very strong scientific yet traditional grounds .

Yogacharya Venkatesh and Hema
.Five day Workshop starting
Monday april 23rd - Friday 27th
The cost is 4,250.00 Kroner or £350.00

Weekend Workshop
Saturday april 29th - Sunday 30th 2007
The cost is 2,000.00 Kroner or £150.00

3 hours 600 kr per class
2 hours 400 kr per class

PENZANCE EIGHT DAY TEACHER TRAINING INTENSIVE WITH
EDWARD CLARK,ELIZABETH CONNOLLY, & DAVID COOKE

Open to those who are interested in developing and
progressingtheir understanding of yoga in a small
intimate class
maximum of 14 students
The cost is £1250 which includes
accommodation , organic food and teacher training.
Non-residential
£560.00

Deepen and develop your own practice with the amazing
Andrew Eppler at PRESENCE YOGA

Booking fee 1850kr
Contact: Gaute 0047 90 848412
e-mail : ga_as@yahoo.com
www.tilstede.net
e-mail Elizabeth : info@osloyoga.com
www.osloyoga.com

Actually, check out www.osloyoga.com for more info on all of the above.

David Keil will hold a workshop at Ashtanga Yoga Oslo from 26 May to 30 May. The focus will be on a deepers understandning of yoga anatamy. This will probably be an excellen one, both for those who attended his last workshop at Ashtanga Yoga Oslo and for those who are interested in the anatomy of yoga. Check out AYO´s website for more info.

Hot Buddha, Cold Buddha

2007-04-19T13:54:00.000-07:00

Commitment to practice is evidenced by your willingness to be present on the mat for whatever comes up right now.

By Judith Hanson Lasater

No matter how hard it may be to drag yourself to yoga class at the end of a busy day, inevitably you feel better when it's over, walking fluidly out the door with your sticky mat rolled neatly under your arm. At that moment it may seem inconceivable that you would ever resist practicing again. But somehow even the very morning after a great class, resistance to practice can arise. You may experience a mental struggle as you lie in bed, trying to decide if and when to get out of bed and onto your mat for that first Downward-Facing Dog Pose.

This experience of resistance is not just a modern phenomenon plaguing our overly congested culture. Throughout the history of yoga, students have struggled with exactly what it means to practice, what discipline is, and how to overcome recurrent resistance to practicing.

Very early in his classic Yoga Sutra, Patanjali provides a few verses that speak directly to these questions. After defining yoga as "control over the fluctuations of the mind" (Chapter 1, verse 2) and describing the basic categories of these fluctuations, he says, "Control over the mind's fluctuations comes from persevering practice and nonattachment" (1.14). These two guiding conceptsâ€”abhyasa (persevering practice) and vairagya (nonattachment)â€”are not just the key to overcoming your resistance; they are also the key to yoga. On the surface, abhyasa and vairagya would seem to be opposites: Practice requires the exercise of the will, while nonattachment seems more a matter of surrender. But in fact they are complementary parts of yoga, each requiring the other for its full expression.

Cultivate Compassion
Abhyasa is usually translated as "practice," but some have translated it as "determined effort," or what I am choosing to call "discipline." Unfortunately, there are few words as off-putting to most of us as "discipline." It brings back memories of being told to sit on that piano stool for 30 minutes and practice no matter what. Or in our minds we may have connected discipline with punishment. But the kind of disciplined effort Patanjali means by abhyasa is very different from the sense of force and even violence people associate with the word "discipline."

To me, discipline is not something that I force upon myself. It is something that I cultivate and which arises in me as a result of two things: my clarity of intention and my commitment.

To have clarity of intention requires that I take the time to examine and understand what my yoga practice is all about. Is it about stretching my hamstrings or about transforming my life? Do I use my practice to have a healthier and more attractive body, or to develop the awareness necessary so that my thoughts no longer run my life? Maybe I want both. After all, having a healthy body is not an unworthy goal. But in any case, it's important that we become as clear as possible, to the point of being able to write down what we want from our yoga practice. Over time, of course, this can change. When I started doing yoga, I thought I wasn't interested in "all that spiritual stuff." I thought I was doing yoga only to help cure my arthritis. But from my first class I felt deeply drawn to the whole of the teachings of yoga.

To lessen your resistance to practice, spend some time with this question of clarity. For just a few moments before you step onto the mat, ask yourself what your yoga practice is about today. Let your first focus be on clarity, not action. Whether your answer leads you to choose a physically challenging practice or a restful one, you will be more present with it if you are acting from a place of clarity. When you practice from clarity, you diminish the time you spend caught up in doubt and questioning. With your energy more focused, I predict you will enjoy your practice more-and thus, over time your resistance will decrease.

Beyond Clarity
While clarity is one of the necessary ingredients for abhyasa, a second equally necessary ingredient is commitment. Patanjali states in verse 13 that persevering practice-what I am calling discipline-is the effort to stabilize the state in which the mind's fluctuations are most often restricted.

These days, it seems many people are confused about the concept of commitment. For instance, I sometimes overhear people say that they would make the commitment of marriage if they knew how it was going to turn out. But that suggests they do not really understand what commitment means. In fact, if you know the outcome of an action in advance, it does not require that much commitment. What makes your commitment to practice is the fact that you don't know for certain how it will turn out, yet you still choose it as the best course of action.

Yoga is a practice not only of action but also of observation and faith. When we observe our resistance to practice and then choose to act anyway, our practice becomes an expression of our faith in yoga-a faith that comes from both our past experience and trust that our practice will sustain us as we jump into the unknown.

And so I practice without knowing how it will all turn out. Clearly, along with clarity and faith, my commitment requires some will and effort. As Patanjali says in verse 14, establishing a firm foundation in practice requires sustained exertion over time. Commitment to practicing means I practice if it is easy for me, and I practice if it is hard for me. If I am bored, I practice; if I am enthusiastic, I practice; if I am at home, I practice; if I am on vacation, I practice. There is a saying in Buddhism: If it is hot, be a hot Buddha. If it is cold, be a cold Buddha. This is the consistency and determination in practice that Patanjali means when he speaks of abhyasa. In the beginning, this sustained exertion may be an act of will, an act of ego. But as we continue, the practice itself creates a momentum that propels us through the difficult moments of fear and boredom.

This consistency of commitment is evidenced by the willingness to get on the mat and be present for whatever comes up in your practice right now. Practice is not simply about achieving a particular physical or emotional goal. In fact, when you exercise your clarity, commitment, and faithâ€”when you choose to practiceâ€”you have already reached many of the goals of yoga.

Exercise Nonattachment
But to truly achieve the kind of commitment and constancy that Patanjali calls abhyasa, we have to exercise the second activity he mentions in verse 12: vairagya, or nonattachment. Patanjali describes vairagya as the state in which one no longer thirsts for either earthly objects or spiritual attainments. Vairagya can also be thought of as release, surrender, and letting go. But just blindly letting go is not vairagya. Rather, the first constituent of this practice must be the wisdom of discrimination.

I learned this lesson very clearly one day on the streetcar. Fresh from teaching, feeling high and thinking myself full of compassion, I boarded the streetcar for the ride home. I felt full of love and grace and beamed at everyone around me. Suddenly, a very drunken man staggered down the aisle, leaned over me with a leering smile, and breathed alcohol into my face. This had never happened to me before or since. Maybe I was not as full of love and compassion as I thought; full of judgments, I recoiled and turned away. I learned that I was not as open and loving as I imagined-and also that perhaps the streetcar was not the best place to have "all my chakras hanging open." The universe had just given me a little lesson about discrimination.

The practice of discrimination leads to the next part of vairagya: understanding the difference between acknowledgment and acceptance. Many years ago, I somehow concluded that to practice letting go was to accept everything exactly as it is. I now have a different perspective. I have learned that there are certain things I will never accept: child abuse, torture, racism, willful environmental damage, the inhumane treatment of animals, to name a few. However, if I am going to practiceâ€”and liveâ€”with clarity, I must acknowledge that these things exist and not live in a state of denial.

Paradoxically, when I live with the deep acknowledgment of what is, then and only then can I live in clarity. Once I am living in clarity, I can choose my actions and let go of the fruits of my labors, becoming deliciously lost in the process of acting from compassion. If I just accept things as they are, I may never choose to alleviate my suffering or the suffering of others. This so-called acceptance is really complacency disguised as spiritual practice.

I have heard this called "idiot compassion." It means offering forgiveness and acceptance with no discrimination. Failing to hold the thief accountable for his crime is not proper application of vairagya; we can have compassion for his suffering and still require that he spend time in jail. Our compassion is only real and valuable when it will serve to reduce suffering. When we let go of our beliefs of how the world should be and instead acknowledge the world as it actually is, we can then work from a heart of compassion to alleviate suffering and to serve others (and ourselves) in the highest sense possible.

Only through discerning and acknowledging what is can we exert the determined effort of abhyasa in a way that does not resort to force or even violence against ourselves and others. When I am lying in bed, resisting practice, instead of blaming myself for my reluctance, I can marshal both vairagya and abhyasa. As I lie there, I can clarify my intention and refocus my commitment; I can acknowledge my state of resistance without accepting it; finally, I can choose to let go of attachment to the outcome of my practice session.

I can also let go of my doubts, fears, insecurities, and struggle, and let go into my clarity, strength, determination, and faith in the process of yoga. And I can remind myself that no path through life can be free of difficulty. Rather than trying to avoid difficulty, I can choose which challenge I want: the challenge of change and its growth or the challenge of remaining where I already am. Would I rather face the difficulties that might arise in my practice or the difficulties of remaining in resistance and living without the positive effects of my practice?

If I bring all this to mind, I am likely to get out of bed, step onto the mat, and enjoy my practiceâ€”and I'll be that much less likely to feel resistance when I wake up tomorrow.

Judith Hanson Lasater is the author of Relax and Renew (Rodmell Press, 1995) and Living Your Yoga (Rodmell Press, 2000). For more information on her teaching and workshop schedule, visit www.judithlasater.com.

December 2002

Living Ashtanga

2007-04-19T06:36:00.000-07:00

This site is about the study and practice of yoga. Since my personal practice primarily focuses on Ashtanga vinyasa yoga, there is bound to be a lot of focus on this type of yoga practice. Still, over the years I have realized the vastness and beauty of other kinds of practice - the precision and beauty of Iyengar method, the fierceness of Forrest yoga, the phenomenal force of Tripsichore yoga, the healing, soothing softness of restorative practice and so on and so forth. Or the blazing love of Bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion. Some people who see yoga as purely a physical practice shun the kind of practice Bhakti yogis do. And the truth is that Bhakti is what it all boils down to. Why we practice and why we breathe. It should all be devotion. If your practice is purely physical, it might be a nice start but a good headstand is not neccessarely good yoga. A good headstand is not neccessarely yoga at all. It is about much more than a toned triceps. It is my firm belief that no one way is the only way. Some fresh ashtangis will look down on other forms of hatha practice, as Ashtanga is a "strong" practice. The truth is that you can put strength in any practice. And you can have a weak and floppy Ashtanga practice if you practice without breath and focus. And you can have a strong, vigorous Yin yoga practice if your whole being is in it. That`s what I love about yoga practice. It really will tell you where you`re at, on every level. The thing about many of us is that we have no idea about where we`re at and we live caught up in our mundane, delusional everyday spin cycle. If this is the case, your practice will tell you this, if you`re willing to listen. So, this site is for all the yogis, it is for me and it is for those who are curios about yoga. It is for anyone.
Since I live in Oslo, Norway, I will try to hold anyone who is interested updated on yogic goings on in Oslo and in Norway. Still, I have decided to do the site in English so that it will be accessible for more people. So, whoever you are - enjoy! Namaste.