Monthly Archives: December 2014

Yoga, Ethics, and Abuse—Who are We in This?

Posted in Philosophical Inquiry, Teaching by

images

It really does seem that the sexual scandals in the yoga world just get worse and worse. I have been one all along to ask, “Why are we surprised by this?”  And yet, truthfully I am a little surprised this time too. It’s as if to say, “Okay, you are not yet horrified, look at this. This one will get you.”

The latest revelations go right to the heart of one of the most internationally respected traditions. This time children are involved. Painful. And yet, once again, “Why do we continue to be surprised?” I think it’s because we are innately so hopeful and loving inside. We really want our elders and our teachers to be wise and have the answers that we ourselves are looking for. Of course we do. We are still immature in our personal development. That’s not a negative assessment of the situation at all. We are evolving humans and as humans grow they look to their elders and spiritual teachers for guidance. It’s natural, and good teachers do help us to put one foot in front of the other and wend our way through what can be a treacherous, but hopefully an ultimately rewarding journey.

There are good people in the world. There are yogis who sincerely practice the yamas and the niyamas and are more successful in their efforts than many of the famous gurus who have fallen so hard. You, the reader are likely sincere and devoted.  But please, let’s stop stop equating having some degree of insight into the nature of reality with being a good person. It would be great if they automatically went together – Insight and Goodness – but clearly they don’t.

The ways that people have been seriously victimized by these unscrupulous teachers is horrible. The latest horror, involving children! may finally be enough for us to be forced to look very deeply into this problem and pull out its roots…within ourselves. Because, yes, you did not abuse anyone. But you do have qualities and feelings and very difficult thoughts sometimes.

These very sad events have had devastating effects on the victims. As responsible members of the yoga community we need to inquire into who we all are. We can help ourselves to grow from this and we can help shed light on the situation so that it doesn’t have to continue to happen.

When we raise our teachers onto a pedestal we  project way too much on them. We give them too much power, and much worse, they ACCEPT the power. We see this over and over again; power – especially when we imbue it with imagined spirituality – is extremely dangerous. Even those of us who consider ourselves to be pretty savvy about all this continue to have little twinges of surprise when the next big guru falls. Come on, you do too…

What we need to do is realize that having cravings, qualities that are less than comfortable, thoughts that make us feel uneasy, desires that feel unwholesome is all part of being a human being and that every human being has these waves within. As long as we think another human being may be free from this – being human thing – we will be willing to think that we are less than he or she. This is how we give them too much power.

There is great personal responsibility in this. This isn’t the easy path. It can be difficult for you to fully admit all that you are, and still call yourself a yogi. But not only are you a yogi but your honesty is part of the depth of your awareness. You are a human-yogi. Perfect. Rise Up! Take Action! Take personal responsibility!

(See: Idealization, Yoga, and the Guru Problem and Yoga Teachers – Time to Take Off Your Masks)

Why Do We Make New Year’s Resolutions?

Posted in Philosophical Inquiry by
Quan Yin in her Glorious Imperfect Beauty

Quan Yin in her Glorious Imperfect Beauty

What is the nature of a resolution? What does it do for us? Do resolutions prove to be effective? Do New Year’s resolutions assist our growth and evolution in the way that we hope?

Usually resolutions are designed to help us improve in one way or another – to assist us in cultivating healthier patterns and habits. We often resolve to quit something or take-up something new, something we think will benefit us. Commonly, the subject of resolutions have to do with simple changes in behavior. We resolve to eat more healthfully, stop being so impatient, or late to appointments. We resolve to exercise more, do more yoga asana, meditate regularly, start a pranayama practice,  or maybe, quit drinking coffee. You get the point.

Why do we do this? Is it helpful to look into the past and the future to plan our moment to moment behavior? Somewhat, yes. We do learn about how our actions in the world affect our experience of it. However, obviously, because these resolutions never hold, there is an inherent problem with them.

The problem is that all of the behaviors that we would like to alter, actually take place in one moment after another and involve some kind of outside-in control. “Don’t do that” or “Do this”, we say to ourselves until around January 20th by which time we have totally let go of our plan.

By then we have added the extra- great bonus of feeling bad about ourselves when we don’t succeed with our endeavor. Perfect set up for increasing the suffering around our own recognized unwholesome patterns.

Try this: NO RESOLUTIONS

Start where you are in each moment. Pause for a few seconds to recognize the vibrating mix of awareness and life-force that you are sitting in. Let that be the field from which you make a decision…in that exact moment about what action to take. Then do what you want.

You may be surprised by what you “want” to do.

Try it.

Shoulder Stability, Prana, and Embryology

Posted in Embodied Anatomy, Practice, Teaching by
Artwork by Rebecca Haseltine. Click on the image above to view more work.

Artwork by Rebecca Haseltine. Click on the image above to view more work.

The Embryological Spirals are an Important Key to Experiencing Wholeness in Body and Mind
The embryological spirals underlie our development and they remain integral to our structural health.  The embryological developmental patterns are very deep within us. They remain at the level of our earliest experiences of pranic flow. As the life force flowed…so our limbs grew. When we return, through memory and current feeling, to the level of this healthy flow of life force we become much more able to secure the health and integrity of our joints. At this early time there were no joints and the flow of prana was seamless and continuous. It still is, however, often by practicing ill-advised movements we actually disrupt this flow. We mean to be doing well. We are really trying our best. But there is so much more to the healthy flow of life force than the musculoskeletal system.

Yoga has always taken us to the level of prana flow. That is what the practice is about. By exploring the embryological streams of life force that are still flowing within we gain a window onto a healthier experience of our embodied state. Asana becomes a celebration of life force…without sacrificing any stability and support in body or mind. Our sense of self takes on a more unified feeling-sense. We begin to experience ourselves as complete wholes when we touch into this sacred level of awareness and manifestation. So much of our life is involved in fragmentary conceptual thinking and activities. Our yoga practice offers a different way of experiencing ourselves. Don’t bring a fragmentary mind to your yoga. Look underneath and see the Unity in motion.

Many of us are familiar with the sensation of flow and warmth in the marrow of our bones and how the affinity that marrow and organ have for one another creates a seamless connection through joints. In Embodyoga® we work with this integration of organ and marrow as a useful means of stabilizing joints.  Now that we are exploring the growth of the arm and leg buds at the level of the initial pranic flows we have a good window into this experience by remembering and feeling the integration of organ and marrow. I feel that the marrow continues to flow within the bones along these original embryological pathways. Although it is useful to look at the shoulder girdle therapeutically and otherwise from the perspective of adult bone and muscle, I feel we can go deeper to set the templates of pranic flow back on track. By revisiting the embryological spirals we can affect change in the present at our current anatomical level.

Finding the Embryological Spirals of the Upper Limbs
The embryological arm spirals are movements of growth. As such they are definitely not simple rotations at joints. In finding the embryological limb spirals we have to feel them developing from the central body outward. The directional movement of their growth is key. Without the directional movement they are not embryological spirals, but something else.

The arm buds begin on the back body. We feel them with our shoulders shrugged toward the back. The shoulder blades are stabilized (external rotation) onto the rib area. As the arm buds begin to grow they travel forward on the upper torso and begin to rotate inward at what is now the joint area and down toward the current region of the attachment of the deltoids on the arm. From here the spiral begins to turn outward again and travels – simply – with no further rotations all the way down the rest of the arm to the hand.

How to Do It
•    Feel for the beginning of the spiral in the back/side body at the top portion of the developing upper torso. Firm the scapula onto the back rib area. This draws the shoulder girdle toward the back body. It involves bending the elbows (so that the spiral has a directional way to grow through the arms) and an external rotation where our current top ribs and scapula are.
•    Stabilizing the beginning of the spiral here you can begin to open your arms and allow the inner spiral to start to express at the level of our current glenohumeral joint and the upper deltoids. This rotation continue about a third of the way down the humerus bone.
•    Below the deltoid the next spiral starts to develop – into an external rotation now – that passes through our current elbow and all the way through our current forearm to the hand.
The limb is developing through these smooth spirallic currents from our torso and outward and is more like a flipper than a fully developed arm. There is no bone at this point. It is important to follow this movement from the center through the periphery – toward the hands and fingers – as a directional movement that unfolds the arm buds into limbs.

anya purvottanasana beach

Explorations in Asana
•    This can be explored initially in seated or standing with the arms free to move.
•    Another good way to explore this is in constructive rest position on the floor with the arms open upward as if holding a big physioball. Slowly open your arms out wide on the floor following the embryological spirals as you move.
•    The same position (big physioball) can be taken at the wall in a quasi-utkatasana with the upper-back on the wall.
•    Continuing with the upper-back stabilized on the wall introduce garudasana-arms noticing how garudasana utilizes the embryonic spirals perfectly.
•    Standing postures using the development of the arms from the core to periphery in entering postures.
•    All of this can also be felt with layering on of the later developmental patterns that come in the first year of life on land: child’s posture, yield and push, hands and knees, downward dog, plank, and twisting child’s pose.
Weight bearing postures should have clear embryological spirals underneath everything that is done with the musculoskeletal system. This is a big missing link in yoga techniques that are being offered as therapies for stressed shoulder joints. Shoulder injuries are so common now and I believe that the embodiment of these spirals can be of tremendous help.

How Meditation Works—Thinking is Not a Problem

Posted in Philosophical Inquiry, Practice, Rest and Meditation by

ShivaDevi

Meditation is directed toward seeing life as it is. Regular practice can help us to experience directly the fundamental nature of life. It is about developing choice; choice to see and experience all the layers of our personal and universal existence. It is about seeing the fullness. Becoming able to witness the underlying support of the divine along with the beauty and richness of our human form.

Meditation effectively clears the obstacles to our accurate perception of the nature of life. The obstacles are the habitual patterns of perception and response that we explored in the previous article. (See Meditation is Natural). When we are locked into these habitual patterns our vision of life is basically limited to continually viewing our own thoughts and feelings – over and over again. When we become curious about the nature of our perceptions, question whether we can trust them fully, and what is actually going on – we are ready to meditate.

Meditation works because Awareness itself is already clear and Awareness itself is the foundation of the thinking mind. Follow any thought to its source and you find Awareness – Awareness without a thought, just Pure Awareness. Awareness is intelligence itself and nearly infinite potential. The natural movement of this Self-Aware-Intelligence is to express and create. The natural expression of Creative Intelligence through the human mind is to think.

Thinking is the healthy and automatic expression of intelligent and creative life force in our human form. Thinking is the wholesome function of the mind. It would be futile to try to stop the mind from thinking for more than a brief time. As long as we are alive our mind will be churning out thoughts, like our body will be churning out feelings. There is no problem in this! It is part of our design. We do, however, want to be able to put our thoughts into the perspective of their source. This will spontaneously support the most effective and useful action in the world.

Harnessing the Mind’s Inherent Curiosity and Intelligence.

Since the mind is highly intelligent at its source and is always thinking, skillful practice would be to harness the mind’s natural curiosity to experience its own nature. Since the subtle levels of our individual awareness are tinged with the qualities of the subtle nature of who and what we are all made of – sat-chit-ananda – awareness-consciousness-bliss, when we begin to follow any thought or feeling to its source we get closer to experiencing the deep comfort that is always emanating from our core. Bliss is the subtle nature of thought and feeling. Because this level of bliss – ananda – is so comfortable, when we use skillful means in meditation we are naturally drawn in to this deep feeling of comfort.

This is a completely natural and automatic movement of the mind because the mind does seek greater happiness and comfort. When left to its natural function the mind will turn toward what it prefers. Often the mind gets caught on the surface levels of awareness and doesn’t remember its source.

When the body-mind system is tense the mind tends to get caught on the surface. The mind literally ruminates over the stresses and strains of experience. The superficial layers of thought are just not as satisfying, or deeply comfortable, as the deeper layers. And when our mind is restricted to the surface layers of experience, through tension and repetitive thought patterns, it becomes dissatisfied. It’s own intuition tells it that there must be something more than this.

Often the mind needs a little help to start the journey inward and let go of the tension that is holding it on the surface.

INNER GRAVITY OF TRUTH – THE INWARD AND THE OUTWARD STROKES OF MEDITATION

Pure Awareness has an inner gravity – a strong force – that pulls our individual consciousness to it. A good technique will allow us to become swept up in the pull toward the comfortable emanations of Pure Awareness. It is pleasurable. We like it. We release into it and saturate in the healing qualities of clarity, rest, and rejuvenation. Intuitively, we all know this is our source, and yet we often can’t even imagine that it can be touched, experienced, and that it can be expanded into our conscious awareness.

It is actually easy once you know how to do it! It’s easy because it is satisfying… it feels good and it is the natural direction of the evolution of consciousness. All we have to do is get out of our own way! In order to get out of our own way we use skillfully chosen techniques that assist the mind in relaxing for a moment, so that the deeper fields of Pure Being can draw it in. As the mind moves effortlessly inward it enjoys the release and thereby finds it easier to relax. The process continues based on the increased comfort and relaxation and the mind dives deeper. Eventually it forgets itself, even if just for a moment. This process is extremely healing and restful for the entire body-mind-nervous system complex. This is the inward stroke of meditation.

The inward stroke – the diving in through the layers of consciousness to the deepest experiences of comfort and even bliss – creates profound rest in all layers of our being. It has the effect of releasing deep stress from the system. Interestingly, the release of stress causes an upward flowing of the mind, back toward the surface layers, in the form of thinking. In the process of stress releasing, thinking increases. This is the outward stroke of meditation.

Together, the inward and the outward strokes, provide a process of healing that is resonant with all of nature’s healing rhythms. Nature evolves in cycles of rest and activity. We see this in so many areas of life: life and death, day and night, summer and winter, spring and fall. We live by cycles of rest and activity. We sleep every night and we are active during the day.  We are born and we are young and we cycle into old age and we die. We inhale…and then we exhale.

Stress that is wound up inside cannot be released without an action. The action is a kind of unwinding of nervous system tension that has wrapped around itself and created a kind of knot. As the knot releases, it is expressed in thought. It can be a single thought, or a long dreamy series of thoughts. Thinking is an integral and important part of meditation! It is the outward stroke, so to speak. It is the result of deep experience and it clears the field of personal consciousness from the very stresses that block our clear vision of life as it is.

It is the nature of intelligence to be clear. It is the nature of your very essence to not be deceived by the convoluted workings of your mind. We sometimes think of the thinking mind as a young child, busy with the task of individuating from its parents and arguing for its separate existence. As the good parent we respect this process of individuation and enjoy it as a natural part of development but also know that the child is not in charge. The parent is the container for the child, keeping it safe. Left to its own devices a young child would have no frame of reference, no container for its development. Children need loving parents. Let the deepest layers of awareness become your container, your frame of reference for all that you perceive.

Meditate.