My pre-training yoga challenge has been great.  I have mostly practiced yoga every day for the last month leading to the training, although Sundays I have mostly taken off.  I have really enjoyed the benefits of just 15 minutes of yoga practice wherever I can get it. Last Sunday I did it in the grass at a friends house.  Why o’ why do I have to make things so much bigger and harder than they have to be?  Yoga doesn’t have to be the hardest pose, 90 minute sweat-a-thon I sometimes make it out to be.

I have been reading The Subtle Body by Cyndi Dale and this book has made me feel like it’s cracking my brain open.  I am reading about Energy Fields.  “Because of fields, reality is both local (here and now) and nonlocal, which means that everything is interconnected.  In many ways, the future of healing and healing modalities that link allopathic methods and complementary practices lies in the area of fields, simply because they are found both inside and outside of the body.  We are not isolated, closed circuits; we are interconnected brilliant beams of energy.”

I am also enjoying the Yoga Sutras of Pantanjali.

Sutra 2.33:  When disturbed by negative thoughts, opposite (positive) ones should be thought. This is pratipaksha bhavana.

Sutra 2.34: When negative thoughts or actions such as violence etc. are done, caused to be done, or even approved of, whether incited by greed, anger, or infatuation, whether indulged with mild, medium or extreme intensity, they are based on ignorance and bring certain pain. Reflecting thus is also pratipaksha bhavanam.

While you practice yoga, live life, climb mountains, ride waves, remember to turn that frown upside down and stick to the positive.  It doesn’t have to be that hard.

I am currently reading the second section, the portion on practice. There are also sections on contemplation, accomplishments, and absoluteness. The very first sutra of the second section (or sutra 2.1) really hit home today and I wanted to share it.

“The last part of Kriya Yoga is simple but great. It is surrendering to the Supreme Being. I understand this to mean dedicating the fruits of your actions to God or to humanity – God in manifestation. Dedicate everything – your study, your japa, your practice – to the Lord. When you give such things to Him, He accepts them but then gives them back many times magnified. You never lose what you have given. Even virtuous, meritorious deeds will bind you in some form or other if you do them with an egotistic feeling. Every time you do something, feel, “May this be dedicated to the Lord.” If you constantly remember to do this, the mind will be free and tranquil. Try not to possess anything for yourself. Temporarily keep things but feel you are just a trustee, not an owner.”

“Be like the mother who receives a soul, nourishes it for nine months and then lets it come out into the world. If the mother were to always keep the baby in her womb, what would happen? There would be great pain. Once something has ripened, it should be passed on. So dedication is true Yoga. Say, “I am Thine. All is Thine. Thy will be done.” Mine binds. Thine liberates. If you drop “mines” all over, they will “undermine” your life – or blow up in your face. But if you change all the “mines” to Thine, you will always be safe.

“Let us all dedicate our lives for the sake of the entire humanity. With every minute, every breath, every atom of our bodies we should repeat this mantram: “dedication, dedication, giving, giving, loving, loving.” That is the best japa, the best Yoga which will bring us all permanent peace and joy and keep the mind from the disturbances of chitta vrittis (mind stuff).”

Somehow the yogic scriptures can say “God”, “Him”, and “Supreme Being” and it doesn’t make me feel closed or uneasy like I would feel when studying the bible in Sunday school as a kid. I just thought this was a beautiful thought to keep in mind as I go about my daily business.

The idea behind the 3/50 project is for you to spend $50 per month in each of 3 local businesses that you would miss if they disappeared. According to the project, of every $100 spent in locally owned independent stores, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll, and other expenditures. If you spend that in a national chain, only $43 stays here. Spend it online and nothing comes home.

I personally don’t make many purchases online, I do mostly research, but I really appreciate hearing an actual cost of where I’m spending my money. This just reiterated the fact that so much of what we consume, some necessities and some not so, really have bigger costs than we often think about or realize or are told.

I really enjoyed my Buy Nothing Weekend as well, instead of participating in the excesses of Black Friday. I went out to eat at a local restaurant and bought some onions at a local grocery so I could cook for a friend. It really brought some awareness to my spending, it wasn’t really that difficult to minimize spending and to focus on local spending, and I look forward to trying to spend my money locally more in the future.

I also happen to be reading the Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan which I highly recommend to anyone who is interested in the true cost and implications of what they’re eating. I like to spend money on food, a lot of money, and I often wonder how much of the money I spend is necessary and how much of it is just me consuming for the sake of consuming, hoarding, listening to the pretty packages offered by Trader Joe’s pretty shelves.

I’d like to share some interesting tidbits from the book…
“It’s true that cheap industrial food is heavily subsidized in many ways such that it’s price in the supermarket does not reflect it’s real cost. But until the rules that govern our system change, organic or sustainable food is going to cost more at the register, more than some people can afford. Yet, for the great majority of us the story is not quite so simple. As a society we Americans only spend a fraction of our disposable income feeding ourselves – about a tenth, down from a fifth in the 1950s. Americas spend less on food than any other industrialized nation, and probably less than any people in the history of the world. This suggests there are many of us who could afford to spend more on food if we chose to. Aren’t we spending it on cell phones, tv, and other goods?”
“Our food system depends on consumers’ not knowing much about it beyond the price disclosed by the checkout scanner. Cheapness and ignorance are mutually reinforcing.”

During this perverse grace period, there’s no need for you to be inhibited as you unleash your tortured squalls. You don’t have to tone down the extremity of your desolate clamors. Unhappy Hour is a ritually consecrated excursion devoted to the full disclosure of your primal clash and jangle.

Here’s the catch: It’s brief. It’s concise. It’s crisp. You dive into your darkness for no more than 60 minutes, then climb back out, free and clear. It’s called Unhappy Hour, not Unhappy Day or Unhappy Week or Unhappy Year.  Do you have the cheeky temerity to drench yourself in your paroxysmal alienation from life? Unhappy Hour invites you to plunge in and surrender. It dares you to scurry and squirm all the way down to the bottom of your pain, break through the bottom of your pain, and fall down flailing in the soggy, searing abyss, yelping and cringing and wallowing.  That’s where you let your pain tell you every story it has to tell you. You let your pain teach you every lesson it has to teach you.

But then it’s over. The ritual ordeal is complete. And your pain has to take a vacation until the next Unhappy Hour, which isn’t until next week sometime, or maybe next month.

You see the way the game works? Between this Unhappy Hour and the next one, your pain has to shut up. It’s not allowed to creep and seep all over everything, staining the flow of your daily life. It doesn’t have free reign to infect you whenever it’s itching for more power.

Your pain gets its succinct blast of glory, its resplendent climax, but leaves you alone the rest of the time.

If performed regularly, Unhappy Hour serves as an exorcism that empties you of psychic toxins, while at the same time — miracle of miracles — it helps you squeeze every last drop of blessed catharsis out of those psychic toxins.

Pronoia will then be able to flourish as you luxuriate more frequently in rosy moods and broad-minded visions. You’ll develop a knack for cultivating smart joy and cagey optimism as your normal states of mind.

READ THE REST OF “UNHAPPY HOUR” HERE.

From Rob Brezsny, author of Free Will Astrology and Pronoia, the Antidote to Paranoia.  Both his astrology and book take you outside of your box and allow you to feel a little internal smile outside of the box of common culture.

Forgiveness is not something you do solely for the person who hurt you. It is something you do for yourself, for the sake of your own inner freedom. You forgive so that you can live in the present instead of being stuck in the past. You forgive because your grievances and grudges—even more than hopes and attachments and fears—bind you to old patterns, old identities, and especially to old stories.

“I’m this way because s/he did that to me!” you say—he or she being the unloving parent, the unfaithful lover, the guru who didn’t deliver. The problem is, when you hold on to the grievance, you also hold on to its shadow belief: “I must be flawed in some way to have attracted that hurt.”

When I began my own personal forgiveness project, the only tools I had were meditation and some basic yogic teachings about how to shift thoughts. I hadn’t a clue how to access the actual state of forgiveness, so I concentrated on trying to talk back to my grudges. My model was the instruction from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 2:33: “When obstructive thoughts arise, practice the opposite thought.” It became my discipline to notice my grudge-bearing thoughts and try to reverse them, usually by sending kind wishes to the person I was angry at. The practice cleared out underbrush in my mind. But trying to “do” forgiveness is different from experiencing the feeling state. Some of this has to do with the organization of the brain.

Many of these patterns play out automatically in the body, regardless of your intentions or rational decisions. That’s why my friend Lisa gets a knot in her stomach whenever she hears someone speaking in a certain angry tone of voice—even when the person isn’t speaking to her. It’s the same tone her mother used when she was displeased with Lisa as a child. This made Lisa anxious, and her stomach would knot up. Now she can’t keep her stomach from knotting at the sound of an angry voice overheard in a supermarket. In the same way, each of us holds countless ancient grudges in our cells, ready to be triggered by a chance word or careless glance.

Shifting those patterns requires more than practice and choice. It requires intervention from your own depths, from the awareness-presence that you cultivate in meditation. Brain-wave researchers mapping the brain states accessed during meditation say that meditation slows the patterns called delta waves. These patterns, similar to those activated in deep sleep, are associated with healing the body. Meditators learn to access this deep state consciously—with full alertness.

I recently read the testimony of a mother who experienced a spontaneous movement of forgiveness in a most unlikely circumstance. Her 20-year-old son had been beaten to death in a street fight. His assailant was tried and sentenced to a long prison term. The mother asked to meet with him after his sentencing because she wanted the satisfaction of telling him to his face how much she hated him for what he had done. When she was ushered into the holding room where she was to meet the boy, he was standing in a corner, shackled and crying. The woman said later, “As I watched that boy, so forlorn—no parents, no friends, and no support—all I saw was another mother’s son.”

Without thinking, she heard herself saying, “Can I give you a hug?” She says that when she felt his body against hers, her anger literally melted away. What arose instead was a natural feeling of tender connection with this suffering human being. That amazing story speaks to what forgiveness really is—a spontaneous and natural uprush of peaceful letting go, even of tenderness. This woman has no idea where her ability to forgive her son’s killer came from; she says she couldn’t have imagined ever coming close to having such a feeling. She treasures the peace it gave her.

She called it a gift from God. I’d call it an opening of the soul. The point is, heartfelt forgiveness—the natural, spontaneous opening to someone who has hurt you—is not something that the ego can make happen. The separatist, culturally conditioned ego-self, formed by thousands of years of judgment and vengeance, demands punishment as the price of forgiveness. When your heart forgives, it has stepped beyond the ego to grasp your innate kinship—even your identity—with another person.

An article on YogaJournal.com By Sara Avant Stover

“Yoga is a way to live.  We use the yoga mat to practice on and take our thoughts and beliefs into the world so that we may touch others. Yoga actually is the process of skillfully turning challenges, failures, hurts, and mistakes into opportunities.  As bad as it was is how good it can be.”

“Interruptions to one’s yoga practice or teaching are not necessarily bad things.  They are opportunities to realize that yoga never leaves you. Yoga waits. Returning from a hiatus also allows you to start fresh, to revisit old ground and discover new things. Often it has been briefly starting over that has made me love yoga all the more.”

• If you have lost a loved one, dedicate your class/practice to their specific virtues and acknowledge how every life leaves blessings behind for us all to bathe in. Use the opportunity to explore the idea of living fully now and guide students/yourself to consider the powerful legacy you might also want to leave behind.
• If you have been betrayed, consider how yoga philosophy and deeper self-awareness could have been applied to prevent the betrayal, and teach your class/remember the virtues of truth, friendship, integrity, and making life-affirming choices.
• If you are going through a crisis, teach/remember that the only constant in life is change, and that from crisis always comes opportunity.
• Take time in private to cry, grieve, and feel your experience fully.
• Make very sure you have an outlet for anger, disappointment, and hurt (so that your students never have to be your therapists). Reach out to peers, counselors, and your teachers for support.

Throughout, no matter how you are feeling inside, resist wishing your difficult experiences away. Trust that by feeling it deeply and sharing it honestly with others greater openness, happiness, and freedom await you. When this happens, there is no division between practicing yoga and living your life.

“Yoga and life cannot be separated—they exist simultaneously,” Sanford says. “Teaching and practicing through difficult times is part of grounding this realization.”

]]> http://www.roxtaryoga.com/teaching-and-practicing-through-tough-times/feed/ 0 http://www.roxtaryoga.com/lets-be-hontest/ http://www.roxtaryoga.com/lets-be-hontest/#comments Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:11:29 +0000 admin http://www.roxtaryoga.com/?p=42 An article about honesty and it’s implications by Sally Kempton from YogaJournal.com.

…
An argument for radical truthfulness goes deep: Lying takes you out of alignment with reality. This was Gandhi’s position, based on the insight that truth lies at the very heart of existence, of reality. A yogic text, the Taittiriya Upanishad, says that God is truth itself, while a Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, calls truth “the signet ring of God.” In psychological terms, lying disconnects us from reality and it always makes us a little bit crazy. Anyone who grew up in a family that kept secrets will recognize the eerie feeling of cognitive dissonance that arises when facts are concealed. That dissonance currently rages through the bloodstream of society; lies and secrets having become so embedded in our corporate, governmental, and personal lives that most of us assume that the president, the media, and our religious institutions are continually lying to us.

When the consequences of lying are so spiritually and socially destructive, why would an ethical person ever choose to tell an untruth? First, an ethical person might decide to lie if telling the factual truth would compromise other, equally important values. In the Mahabharata, the great ethical treatise of the Indian tradition, there is a famous moment involving a lie. Krishna is guiding the righteous Pandavas in a pivotal battle against the forces of evil. Krishna, who is considered by orthodox Hindus to embody divine truth in human form, orders the righteous king Yudhisthira to tell a lie in order to demoralize the enemy general. Yudhisthira agrees to tell the first lie of his life—that the general’s son, Aswatthama, has been killed in battle. Krishna’s position is that in a battle against terrible evil, one does what one must to win. (The position is similar to the Allied disinformation tactic in World War II, which misled the Nazi intelligence about the real target of D-day.) In short, Krishna makes the decision to lie because it serves what he perceives as higher values: those of justice and, ultimately, peace.

My college philosophy teacher used to make this point with a personal example. As a Jewish child living in Germany, she was saved from being captured by the Nazis because a Catholic family lied to the Gestapo about her presence in their back bedroom. For the family to have told the truth would have brought about her death. It was a small lie for a larger truth.

Another situation in which lying might be ethical is when the truth is simply too harsh for the person who is receiving it. A friend of mine, when diagnosed with breast cancer, told her 90-year-old mother that everything was fine, because she recognized that telling the truth about her condition would create too much anxiety for her already-fragile mother.

Conversely, there are times when telling a factual truth can be an act of disguised or overt aggression. When Fran tells her friend Allison that she saw Allison’s husband with another woman, Fran may be speaking out of concern for her friend, but she may also be expressing a hidden hostility or envy. Most of us can remember less dramatic but equally painful examples of bitter truth telling: disclosures made in anger, hurtful comments about a friend’s or partner’s secret vulnerabilities, revelations that destroy trust. In the past 30 years, especially in certain spiritual communities, there’s been a prevailing ethic that privileges full disclosure, public confession, and extreme transparency in relationships. The results have been liberating in some respects, destructive in others. So it seems vital that we each find our own way of balancing truthfulness with other values. One great yardstick to use is called “the four gates of speech,” which include the following questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? and Is this the right moment to say it? When we feel caught between speaking a bitter truth and keeping quiet, these questions help us sort out the priorities.

As I’ve said, balancing the relative value of, say, truth and kindness, is not always easy, and it requires a high degree of honesty—especially about your own deep inner motives. If the compulsion to be relentlessly honest sometimes conceals aggression, the decision to hide the truth because of kindness, or because the time is wrong, can be a cover for your fears or for the desire to stay inside of your comfort zone. Radical truth telling is simple. You just plunge in and do it, regardless of the effect it has on others. Discriminating truth telling demands far more attentiveness, emotional intelligence, and self-understanding.

As you begin to look at how you lie, it becomes possible to find out why you lie. My friend Alice is getting divorced and is facing a child-custody battle. Her lawyer suggested that she write a description of all the incidents in which her ex-husband had failed as a father and husband. She wrote a series of “He said, then I said” dialogues, highlighting the ways in which her husband had hurt her and their daughter. When Alice reread the document, she realized that she hadn’t included her own hurtful words and actions. Part of the reason she hadn’t was tactical: She wanted sole custody of their child. But another part of it was her need to feel justified about leaving her marriage. “Once I started to look deeper at these conversations, I could see that both of us were at fault. In fact, there were times I acted like a total bitch. I so much didn’t want to see myself that way that my memory would literally distort what happened.”

Alice was confronting what most of us would recognize as a particularly insidious form of untruth: the justifications, excuses, and blaming strategies that we use to avoid facing the gap between how we want to act and how we actually behave. For the postmodern, psychologically informed yogi, Patanjali’s vow to unconditional truth demands much more than a commitment to factual accuracy. It asks you to become transparent to yourself, to be willing to gaze unflinchingly, yet without bitterness or self-blame, at the parts of yourself that you are afraid to expose to scrutiny. Only when you’re willing to look at your areas of falseness can you discover the deepest possibilities of the practice of truth.

Here are the basics in the practice of truthfulness: Pay attention to factual truth. Notice and make a point of calling yourself on the urge to conceal embarrassing facts, make yourself look better, justify mistakes, or run away from confrontation. When you notice yourself telling an untruth, acknowledge that you did it. As much as possible, make a point of not saying anything you know to be untrue.

As you learn how to catch your own characteristic patterns of untruth—both inner and outer—you will also begin to notice that sometimes truths need to be spoken, and other times remaining silent is an acceptable alternative. In other words, your commitment to truthfulness comes to include an authentic and trustworthy capacity for discriminating speech. Truth is a genuine teacher. When you decide to follow where it leads—constantly asking questions such as, What is my motive for speaking? Is it kind and necessary to say this? If not now, how will I know that it’s right to say this?—the power of truth will show its subtleties as well as teach its wisdom. Patanjali says that through truthfulness we gain such a power that all our words turn out to be true. I don’t believe that he means we become alchemists, able to turn the base metal of lies into the gold of reality just through our words. Instead, I believe that he is actually talking about the power to speak from inspiration—to hold firmly to the truth that is not only factual, but that illuminates, that can be received, and that reflects the deeper state within the heart.

“In the world of yoga, you must remember that there are hell realms and heavenly realms and animal realms and other realms where souls abide. But the human realms are the most precious. Here in the human realms we suffer, but we also have the tools to wake up. And unlike the heavenly realms of the devas and brahmas, celestial beings, we have the desire to wake up. The human realms have just the right mixture of pleasure and pain to prompt us toward taking the path of liberation.”

“You have come to live in the gurus house, now. This is a very auspicious time, you know. Maybe thousands of lifetimes you wait for this. You must be very careful not to waste it.” Amrit talked about the preciousness of taking a period of time to live quietly, deliberately, away from the restlessness of our culture. “There must be movement back and forth from the mountaintop to the marketplace, but just now is a moment for the mountaintop. How will you use it, I wonder?” He talked about how yogis discovered the amazing potentials present in the “seed of the self” and challenged us to be yogic scientists, to experiment while we were at Kripalu with those ways of living that helped us to be fully alive. He urged us to tune in carefully to our energy, to listen to it, not to abuse it. “A conscious use of energy is the hallmark of the yogic lifestyle.”

Duh. This made me remember why I moved to Boise from California. It wasn’t just one seat of the pants reason, lets change things up, it was really to live on the mountaintop for a while. I took up meditation and became a yoga teacher there. The mountaintop told me a few things I’ve put on hold because of the dissolution of one single relationship changing. Silly girl. Time to remember what the silence said.