Stitch in the Side

I'm nursing an injury right now...it is a challenge, and it could keep me from practicing for a few days. I think it might have occurred when I was climbing over the seats in the car to drag my enormous backpack and the carseat (with my 19-pound child in it) out of the car, loading the carseat in the stroller, and hustling across the street on a very rainy day on Monday. What did I think I was, a yogi? I remember feeling a little strain in an intercostal muscle...but I practiced all week through it. On Friday, the body would have none of my antics. I had to stop, and I have been trying to rest it (apart from, you know, demonstrating jump-back to my students in class this morning...sigh).

What comes with the injury: frustration, a little anger, some worry that I won't get back to practice, fear that it is permanent, some sadness...but there's something else that I haven't been able to identify. Something good and quiet. There's no negotiating with the injury right now, and I can hear my teacher's voice in my head telling me that it won't last long, that somehow feels peaceful. It's not the loudest of the emotions; it sits softly in the corner while the others duke it out. But it's there, and that is promising, I think.

Her Stories, Our Sleep

She's starting to connect her consonants, and I can almost hear the words behind the one-syllable babbling that is so sweet. It kept us both up last night...the stories began at 2:45am, continued for an hour, picked up again at 4:00am until she talked herself to sleep, and then resumed at 6am. She was delighted by every turn of the plot, and she spoke dynamically with a voice that rose and fell from mutter to holler. I think those times were when the plot thickened. My grandmother wondered whether she was trying to share a dream with us. What is she saying? Who is she talking to? Does she know we are so very nearby? She must know... And though we earnestly tried to go back to sleep, and though we couldn't, it was no less of a tremendous thing. How amazing that is...a year ago it would have been enough not to be able to sleep, and the grumpiness would sit there in the insomnia and steep and fester until the sun would gently help us into the day, or until practice would untangle the aches from working so hard to chase sleep down. But these stories she tells us are their own glowing orbs of pure discovery and wonder. Not being able to sleep is an old story...her stories are the best kind of new.

On Spring

The Music We Are

by Rumi

Did you hear that winter's over?

The basil and the carnations

cannot control their laughter.

The nightingale, back from his wandering,

has been made singing master over

all the birds. The trees reach out

their congratulations. The soul

goes dancing through the king's doorway.

Anemones blush because they have seen

the rose naked. Spring, the only fair

judge, walks in the courtroom, and

several December thieves steal away.

Last year's miracles will soon be
forgotten. New creatures whirl in

from non-existence, galaxies scattered

around their feet. Have you met them?

Do you hear the bud of Jesus crooning

in the cradle? A single narcissus

flower has been appointed Inspector
of Kingdoms. A feast is set. Listen.

The wind is pouring wine! Love

used to hide inside images: no more!

The orchard hangs out its lanterns.

The dead come stumbling by in shrouds.

Nothing can stay bound or be imprisoned.

You say, "End this poem here, and

wait for what's next." I will. Poems
are rough notations for the music we are.

Works Cited

Rumi. "The Music We Are." Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing. Trans. Coleman Barks. HarperCollins e-books, 2007.

"Home" Practice

Almost every morning, I wake up early and practice at the shala, where my lovely community also practices. And there, together, with our teacher, we engage what is almost a dance of yoga. A diversity of paces, breaths, transitions into asanas...but somehow synchronized with meaning and devotion. The warmth of the room envelopes us, our beloved teacher attends to each one of us individually and as a community, and we all drink in the sweetness of the practice.

My daughter still wakes up at least once per night, and I have grown accustomed to it. The fatigue sort of washes over me when I hear her calling for us, but it seems to fall away when I am rocking her back to sleep. And usually I find my way back to my own sleep, and I rise early for practice.

But yesterday the fatigue kind of stayed with me all day, and by afternoon I was cached and ill. This morning, I let my body sleep, and I woke up to practice at home.

Practicing at home (sung to the tune of "Gardening at Night" by REM) is a quiet conversation. And it seems to me that it is quite close to the heartbeat of Ashtanga. Apart from my community, I hear only my own breath. Without my teacher near, I practice without an audience other than myself, and that audience tries not to watch too closely...it tries to be still. Because I have been working on quickening my pace, I sometimes practice with Sharath's voice. His pace is fast, but his voice is gentle, and it calms me. The smell of the room is new, it's not quite as warm, my mat is at the shala and so I practice on my other mat. I can hear the floor creak beneath me. And it seems, quite profoundly, actually, that my home is not my yoga home at all...the shala is my home for practice.

But even that is not quite so. The body is the home for practice, and practice can travel anywhere. Later this week, I will be practicing in a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. I have practiced by a hotel pool, in my college neighbor's living room, on the 25th floor of the Custom House in Boston, in my niece's room next to her white princess bed, on the landing between the two second-floor bedrooms in my mother-in-law's home, on the lawn by the lake on a beach towel in Western Maine, in segments between nursings next to my daughter's Moses basket, in my sister's dining room, and on my aunt's porch. The practice adapts, the body adapts. And those scratchy white towels can be a mat on a sketchy motel carpet.

But I will be glad to be at the shala in the morning.

Who We Are in the Practice

On Sunday, I practiced in the morning and then attended the second day of my teacher's workshop. Four beautiful hours of theorizing the practice, and then practicing what we'd theorized...delicious. My teacher discussed several issues, but the one that captivated me most was the idea of layers in the practice. He explained that the breath, the bandhas, the drishti, and the way in which we make our practice our own are all layers that we can explore one at a time. The part about making practice our own caught me... In my seven years of studying/practicing yoga, and in my twenty-one months of studying/practicing Ashtanga, I had never heard it before. I had taken to yoga in the same way I have taken to so, so many things: show me exactly what to do, and I will practice it until I can do it exactly right. Tell me how big and high the hoop is, and I will jump through it.

I have called it "my practice," but it has never been my practice. Until just recently...

It's important to acknowledge that it is Guruji and his teacher who brought the practice to us. In many ways, it is his gift, his practice that we are doing. And, to be sure, our beloved teachers, who have worked so hard to learn the practice from Guruji so that they can bring it to us...yes, we practice for them, too. And, technically, we all share the practice — six mornings a week all around the world thousands of people are going to their mats to practice the same series of poses. It is our practice.

But what my teacher was talking about was a new spin on practice that rubs me the wrong way, in all of the right ways...as he explained in the first part of the workshop, we have to be in touch with what compels us to practice. The teacher can guide, and the practice is there — but we are the ones who bring ourselves to the mat. This past Sunday, he discussed how Guruji also tapped in to the individual qualities that each person brings to the practice, the way each Ashtangi moves from asana to asana in her own way. Guruji respected and worked with this uniqueness.

For many years, I have been focused on doing it right. I don't know whether I knew that I had a right to bring myself to it. I don't know if I ever even considered it. I have always followed my teacher...just my teacher. And I have tried to quiet my mind.

But I dig on this idea of making the practice my own. I have a bottomless well of respect for Ashtanga...I will strive to develop into it in all of the mysterious ways that I trust are embedded it in. At the same time, this nudge in the direction of developing an understanding of who we are in the practice, what brings us to it, what we bring to it...it couldn't have come at a better time.

In the last few months, I have been meditating on how/when we learn that our time is our own. From birth, we are shuttled about by structures — parents' time, school, nap, eating. And we hop onto these trains that are systems of activity that govern us — sports, classes, jobs. It's easy to fall into the perception that we are being made to take things on, or forced to squeeze our days around the obstacles of what we have to do. It's easy to feel the guilt of not doing, whatever that means to each of us. And it's easy to lose track of how we have made choices that we can unchoose, how we can wiggle our uniqueness inside of what may seem like a tight container of have-tos. It's easy to let these structures become our reality. (I love Kino MacGregor's fish tank analogy on her A Journey, A Workshop DVD.)

I asked my teacher about guilt on Sunday. What do we do with the guilt that we encounter when we don't want to practice? I fear that I will let down my teacher, or my classmates...or myself, even. I loved his answer, mostly because it wasn't really about "practice" or "don't practice" at all — it was about not letting guilt push you around. You see/feel your guilt, and you don't take it seriously...you become stronger than your guilt. So...you don't practice. Or maybe you do. But your guilt has no say in the matter.

How does guilt connect? While we come by it honestly, guilt sucks the life out of what we do; it forms a roadblock between ourselves (and what we might uniquely bring to what we do) and the thing itself. I think it resides in the same place in the mind where we also cultivate the tendency to resign our agency to something or someone else. That is, it is one of many forces that drive us outside of ourselves, whether it is toward a teacher, a partner, or a cause. And while the devoted practice of being generous and loving is crucial, it is as important that we study the extraordinariness that we bring to our own relationship to the practice.

This is the layer that I am going to live in for a while. I have set up a quiet little camp there.

Works Cited

MacGregor, Kino. A Journey, A Workshop. Miami Life Center, 2008.

Faster Than Thought

I have learned that, with my teacher's help in Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana, I can lift and hold my leg above the strain of the hamstring. That is, the teacher helps the leg to rise up in front of the body, helps it to turn out to the side while the hip drops and relaxes, helps it back to the center as the head lowers to the leg...and then, as my teacher and I leave the leg, it stays comfortably held up in front of me. No strain at all. We work so that the extended leg is above the strain.

So, lately I have been feeling stuck. I haven't written overtly about it, but I think that part of the subterranean feeling was, yes, part of the practice, but also not knowing how to get unstuck. As it turns out, I was stuck in stiffness, stuck in thought.

This past week, I expressed to my teacher that I was concerned that I was not making progress in Janusirsasana C. This asana is more about the hip than the toes or the foot or the knee...something in my hip was not letting go. So he showed me a few ways to wiggle more into the pose. But I could tell that he was still thinking. (Truly, there is a weight to it in the shala. But it's not weighted thinking in a heavy, burdensome sense. It seems that he is imagining, creating new ways and reaching back into familiar ways to help his students in their practice. There is something positive and light about this invention. Anyway....) So he came back over to me, and he told me that he wants me to work with speed. "You...go faster." As in, practice faster. He told me to think of a jazz musician or a race car driver: "Faster," he said. "But don't hurry."

So I practiced faster. And he said, "Not fast enough."

So I came back the next morning, and focused on practicing even faster. And he said, "Is this faster than you usually practice?" And I said, "Yes." And he said, "Not fast enough."

Pause.

And he said, "I want you to be breathing as if you were running." Oooooh.

Wait. Wha-haaat? I thought the practice was supposed to be slow and deep and long. I thought the practice was supposed to take me away from my fast-paced life and slow me down. In fact, a couple of months ago I deliberately slowed myself down even more, trying to achieve this languid, liquidness. Hoping it would trickle up to my brain.

But I was completely wrong. My intentions were good...but my approach was the opposite of that which would accomplish peacefulness.

"It's an experiment," he said.

And so I did what he said. I started practicing quite fast. I started breathing heavy. I started to sweat much more. I felt a kind of momentum. I was tired and winded, yes...but my body was warm. Warmer than it had been before, even though I was spending less time in the poses (because a 5-count of breaths is shorter when the breaths are shorter).

And I started to think less...and fidget less...and my joints opened a bit more. I moved quickly into Parvritta Parsvakonasana — much faster than my usually laboured process. I took out much of the shifting about before jumping back, which helped me to connect the seated asanas more fluidly. And sooner than I expected, I was done with Primary and moving into Second Series, with energy to give to those poses.

I set my fascination aside as much as I could, but during dropbacks, I asked him what his hypothesis was for this experiment, and it was as I thought, as I had experienced (this organic understanding of the lesson can be refreshing; it reveals an evolving connection to the self). He told me that he wants to help me to think less, to warm the body and open the joints so that I can progress in Janu C (and in Supta Kurmasana, for that matter). And so that I can move more into Second Series. He told me that Guruji often encouraged speed, that it was essential to the practice. He said that Guruji attributed stiffness to "too much thinking."

Too much thinking.

So the slower practice was not accomplishing what I thought it was...it was a relaxed, languid practice. But it wasn't softening me. It was giving me far too much time to fuss about. And it was keeping my joints cool.

And, I had been wondering all this while why Sharath's and Kino's Primary Series are so speedy. Why so fast? Because it is meant to be a swift practice, a synchronized practice. At a workshop a couple of weeks ago, my teacher talked about how the asanas work like branches that spread out from a single core set of principles. The core remains steady while we practice each asana, and after each asana we return back to that center. Swiftness helps us to keep the practice together, like the ida and pingala around the sushumna nadi...like vertabrae on a spine. I often tell my students that a thesis works like this — the evidence hangs on the thesis, which holds the argument together. I now understand my own metaphor in a new way.

And the speed helps to streamline the connection between mind, heart, and body. As with the teacher helping the leg to rise above the strain, so the swiftness — and steadiness — of practice helps to keep the mind from racing. It cannot race because the body and breath are working together — there is less room for the mind to get a word in edge-wise. The mind must fall into the heart. There is a profound efficiency to it, but it is intended to be without strain, without stress. Just do it — the conversation between mind and body is short and sweet.

In this experiment, I see an illustration of how lightening it can be to give the mind less of an opportunity to be idle, less of a chance to tell us a story about why we should fear, or resist, or worry. Though these emotions have their utility, I find that the stories my mind tells are like Dementors; they take the life out of my practice, my rest, my work. And to practice languidly, for me, right now, is to indulge them. Recall that the patronus requires intense focus on a single idea: joy. The fractured, wandering, frayed mind cannot conjure a patronus...

Yes, the powerful, energetic, beautiful practice is the well-conjured patronus.

Balasana

A mother and her daughter practice at the shala. This morning, our teacher was away, and so the daughter was our teacher. Aside from the fact that this woman was a gentle, kind, generous teacher, and aside from her beautiful energy that made practice beautiful, I was most struck by how she adjusted her mother. The mother rested in child's pose, Balasana, and her daughter gently applied pressure up and down and around her mother's spine. She kissed her mother on the back, and then lovingly massaged her neck. And I watched and wanted to cry.

I don't know this mother-daughter relationship that I see in practice; I am sure that it is immensely complex. But the moment I saw was pristine. I cast my faith in the hope that it was part of an iron-clad bond, and I marveled at the deep irony of mother in Balasana, daughter as teacher.

I imagined my daughter and me, twenty-five years from now. And I hoped, I hope, that I merit that same tenderness from her. I have not known her for very long. Much to learn..volumes. But our love is raw, and urgent, and necessary. She takes me for granted, and I think that's beautiful. But I see her studying me with fascination. I see her face when I walk into the house and she loses her breath with excitement. And I watch her depend relentlessly on me as I nurse her. Wrapped up in all of this caring, which will change forms through millions of seasons of being mother and daughter, I intend never to lose her respect.

And never to take her for granted.