Tiny Little Pieces

It has been a month since I last posted. That's too long. I love this blog; I love to write about practice and mothering and teaching and all matters that arise as I think through these issues. The passing of a month is a good sign that I have become a bit lost. I've tried to break it down here:

Life is complex. It is comprised of tiny little pieces, and I think we as humans are all too eager to make those pieces even smaller. Ever stay up really late with your partner, embroiled in an argument that starts to lose its way with the passing of hours and starts to divide itself into the minutia of repeating ideas, analyzing word-by-word, and emotions building on emotions? In other words, in such a situation, the complexity builds, the pieces divide into even smaller pieces as the stakes climb higher and higher (because you are both tired and confused and sad and angry). I think we make the pieces even smaller because we cannot wrap our minds around the big stuff: so, we focus on minutiae. It makes us feel better about the substance of it.

Or, maybe we are bored. Maybe we fill life with as many small pieces as we can because it keeps us distracted from the hard questions: we overcommit ourselves and our children; we give ourselves an endless number of options of foods and clothing and programs to watch; we say "yes" when we really know we just need to say "no" and sleep, or sit quietly, or feed ourselves. Those hard questions—Why isn't life happening the way I want it to? What comes after this? What does it mean to be happy?—are hard. They are simple and yet hard.

And so we pull ourselves away from the simplicity of it all by making more matter.

These last several weeks I have allowed myself to get pulled into the undertow of overcomplicating. I've divided my schedule down to the half-hour increment, I've gone hours without food because all-of-these-other-things seemed to need more attention. I've even let work bleed into those precious evening hours reserved for only partner and daughter. I've taken every life project I'm working on now and allowed it to divide exponentially.

What's more, every part has been infused with its own kind of fear. I reflect on the last several weeks, and I see a gigantic kitchen stove. Industrial. Many pots, some threatening to boil over. Me, worried (always worried) that I won't finish the grand meal in time (and yet it always gets done).

All of this...while practicing my sweet practice every. single. day. And, still. I've gotten sucked in. The grace of it has been that I saw it happening while it was happening...but I couldn't paddle against it. Didn't know how.

I surface today to type. I look around me, and I see, smell, hear, taste, touch.

I go back to yoga now...not just the practice. But the philosophy, the lens, the vast mirror that it provides to us. Practice divides itself into tiny pieces, doesn't it? So that we can know ourselves and vastness of our internal landscapes. But yogic theory reminds us, humans, how easily we create our realities and tell ourselves that they are true, unshape-able, confining. It's the great paradox: we explore the innumerable pieces of the body in order to open space. To free ourselves from over-complicating. But we get caught in the over-complexity and begin to feel that life has a stronghold on us...we forget that we are the masterminds of that reality.

The problem, I think, is that in splitting our lives into tiny parts—whether it is in work, family, or in practice—we lose track of the whole.

It's too big and too simple to imagine.

Breath

The other day my teacher sternly reminded me to breathe.

I am still stunned that I needed such a reminder. All of the practicing and writing about practice and thinking about practice that I do...and I needed a reminder to breathe?

Yes, badly.

I was in Baddha Konasana, and my mind was miles away from the breath, focusing on drawing my shoulders back, softening and opening my chest, reaching my chin to the earth. Focusing on the product of the pose, the end point. Squeezing my brain to see my body's way into the fullest expression of the pose I could find. Fighting the body, steering with the ego. Not noticing how my breath had become shallow, how my internal connection to the bandhas and the chakras had weakened, becoming only a wisp. My teacher reminded me to draw prana in through the breath, right into Muladhara, where the pose is rooted and flourishes.

The brain is atmospheres away from the root chakra.

We can get so lofty with seeking out the rightness, the finish line, the fifth breath. The realm of the thinking brain can be the arid, least nourished, highest points on the tree. If we practice from there, we are not nourishing the fundamental roots of the practice. The practice lives on breath. Without it, we do not see the benefits that fill the body all the way up to cleanse our critical thoughts; without breath, we can only force our way into each asana with a grinding, ego-driven brain-engine that thinks it can think its way into a pose.

The "Gap" of Anxiety

Each morning for the last couple of weeks, as I turn on the shower, I sprinkle four drops of peppermint oil on the floor of the tub. It's wonderfully rejuvenating, and it helps me to make the transition from the grogginess and blues of waking up to the spirit of awakening to the day and, on most days, the practice that lay ahead in the next few minutes. This little ritual, really, began when I read about it in a magazine and thought, "Hmmm....I could use a pick-me-up first thing in the morning" and "Hmmm...I could stand to nurture myself a bit more."

Lately, I have been wondering about those morning blues. They are composed of an underlying hum of anxiety about the day: What's in store? What do I have to do? Whom might I offend? What could I possible not see coming? Will I have enough energy at the work day's end for my daughter and family? How will I get everything done?

There's also another piece of the anxiety that punctuates that hum: when ____ is done, then you can _____. At the end of this day/week/month _______ is something to look forward to.

I know I'm not alone in experiencing these spaces of thinking and feeling. I hear these words spoken by friends and colleagues all of the time. In short, we can get swallowed up by the worry of what is/isn't to come, and we can easily look to the future to spell us from that anxiety.

But the thing is, in each case we're not being present. Eckhart Tolle recently posted this on his Facebook page:

Dear Friends,
Psychotherapist Fritz Pearls said:
"Anxiety is the gap between the now and the later."
Where is your attention? Do you live in "the later" more than the now?
Then you are trapped in your thoughts, because what is the future other than a thought in your head?
Only your thoughts can make you anxious!
Bring your attention to the now. Seeing, listening, breathing, feeling the aliveness inside your body. Welcome home.
With love,
Eckhart.

I am remarkably moved by these words because of the way they capture anxiety as a kind of time/space emotion. We're living in "the gap between the now and the later," and we're missing the now. His reference here brings a materiality to the anxiety that makes it, somehow, more transformable.

One thing that occurs to me is that we don't quite know how to appreciate the now. It may not be our fault...we may come by this honestly. I don't have to explain how our culture drags us into the undertow that pulls us away from the present.

But this morning, as I stood in the shower breathing in the smell of peppermint, I experienced something new. For the first time since I've begun this morning ritual, I thought of Christmas. Not the Christmas to come in December, and not the spiritual meaning of Christmas. Rather, my mind and heart were suddenly sitting right in the middle of the ethos of Christmas culture: togetherness, awakening, sweetness. My mind quickly took inventory of the now: my dear partner giving my daughter breakfast one floor below, the low pressure system slowing us all down outside, the blessing of health, the comfort of rest, the fortune of a career that I love, the grace of a Moon Day.

It occurred to me that these drops of peppermint every day have become for me a way of working against that undertow. The sensory stimulation draws me into a powerful place of presence because it connects the days to one another in a great reset. In a way, this ritual helps to cleanse what has come before and what is to come. It brings me only to the presence of now. There is no "gap."

And it occurred to me, just before I sat down to write this post, that a dedicated Ashtanga practice does the very same thing. Every day, the same practice with all of its dynamic and subtle shifts in energy, connects the days into one, long, present space of living. No matter what will come of the day, we have the incredible, cleansing gift of practice, and a teacher, a shala, fellow yogis with whom to begin the day. And there we are, all breathing, all trying to feel our bodies and calm our minds and connect to something bigger that connects all of us to one another.

After a while, you can look around and see that there is no "When _____, then _____." There is no "What if ____????" There is only the limitless expanse of now.

Prioritizing practice

Having children brings to the forefront new questions about priorities. In my life since the baby came, every decision bounces off of the child as a point of comparison, of relativity. Almost every want takes time away from the child, and begs the question: is it worth it? Is it as big, as important, as necessary? When my partner and I were in negotiations throughout the pregnancy—you will do this, I will do that—we talked about the many pieces of our lives that would shift when our daughter arrived. Hobbies, athletics, social time, my practice. We negotiated the day, and thanks to my partner's generosity and emotional fortitude, I have a steady morning Ashtanga practice.

But it has not been without the underlying ache of guilt. My child is now 27 months, and I am just now, just this week, starting to let go of that guilt. I started practicing again about six weeks after her birth...small pieces at a time. I would get to Trikonasana and she would cry to be fed. I would nurse, she would return to sleep, and I would pick up where I'd left off, getting to Marichyasana before the next nursing...and so on. All the way to the end. Nursing her became part of the vinyasa, and I breathed through the interruption, trying to ride it like a wave through the practice. Within a few months I was back at the shala on most days. And now, generally, it's 5 days in the shala and one day of home practice (Sundays).

No doubt, she was the practice. She is. And my mornings away from my family spill back into our family in more ways than even I, ever-observant and awfully-analytical, can register. I practice for myself...but I really practice for them.

Recently I caught a glimpse of the whole picture: the birth, the journey back, the undulation of time spent with child and time spent on the mat, the negotiation with my partner for that precious morning practice. And I felt in that broader capturing of the practice that the guilt had begun to fade. It fades partially because I see my sweet daughter now practicing with such consternation: her palms together at the heart center, with furrowed brow, copying the gestures of her mother without my urging her to do it. Why, the other day she was looking at a digital picture of herself cross-legged, and I heard her whisper, "Sukasana." She sends me.

As she grows, and as I see myself becoming a kinder, clearer, more consistent person (mother, partner, friend)—even if these changes are only noticeable to me, for Heaven's sake—I can release the guilt I used to feel for prioritizing practice. It has taken some time, and I have to constantly recalibrate it. But it is only by understanding the immeasurable strength and balance, patience and softness that practice has given me, that I have begun to truly give myself permission to stand by it as a gift I give to myself and, even more important, a gift I give to my family.

Sitting in Discomfort

My dear friend asked me the other day, "Do you find that yoga helps you in your work?"

My answer was long.

I live much of my life in academia, such a complicated space that could benefit from significantly more simplicity. I have recently been appointed as the director of one of our programs in the department, and in this role I have seen increased visibility: literally, I am at work for more hours, in touch with more people, and privy to more issues of protocol and policy than ever. While these new and numerous connections are wonderful in many ways, they also expose me to significantly more moments of awkwardness. The mix of moods, rules, hierarchies, personalities, and the alignment of the stars means that those moments of confusion, messiness, and emotional murkiness are bound to come up more often. On average, I see them a few times a day.

Historically, these sorts of awkward moments—a curt exchange, a stepping on toes, a miscommunication—would stay with me. I would sit in the emotional fallout during the event, I would take the haze of said fallout with me throughout the rest of the workday, I would bring it into my home, and I would take it with me to bed. All the while, I would ask myself, "How could I have done that differently?" "Will I be less liked now?" "Oh no...oh no...OH NO."

I think the reason for this downward spiraling in such situations is multivalent. If you're the kind of person who likes to have ducks all lined up all the time, the unexpectedness of this stickiness can be cause for panic—it disrupts the purity of control, of "perfection." Moreover, the emotional "awkwardness" or "discomfort" of these moments can be hard to identify. They're sticky because they aren't clear; they're confusing because they're often about someone else's complex life. We all bring our stuff with us to work: low blood sugar, too little caffeine (or too much), too little sleep, conflicts with family...it spills out. And while it can look like someone's really upset about something going on at a meeting, it might really be about something that happened at home, or a headache, or a childhood memory suddenly coming up and becoming the lens for THIS moment RIGHT NOW.

In other words, it's not always about us, but that's hard to tease out.

Either way, that discomfort, can sometimes be painful (I get belly aches and heart palpitations during interactions that involve conflict or miscommunication or grumpiness). And, now that I have a child and much stronger sense of family, I am viciously protective about what I put on them. But it's still a challenge to break away from the narcissism of letting those moments become all...about...you.

THIS is where yoga comes in.

Those asanas...those sweet, sweaty, twisty, burning asanas that we hold and breathe. Hoooooooold, and breeeeeeeeathe. And try not to panic. Take Kapotasana (my favorite challenge): voices love to swoop in and tell us that we're never going to get into—or out of—that pose. For others, it's headstand, or Paschimottanasana, or backbending. We get into these postures, and we're meant to find the balance between effort and ease. We're meant to see that balance as a connective force that brings us all together in the universe. That stillness of mind that is the purity of consciousness. That release from the external and journey into a place that is intimately shared by all of us.

And, in the beginning, it's really, really hard.

But then practice progresses, and we find that we can be in a challenging pose and keep it together. Listen to the breath, not panic. Soften the face. Meditate, be present, merge with the breathing universe.

Yoga gave me the lens for childbirth, and I think about it quite often. I still remember it so well...the pain of contractions and the full spaces in between. Resting in that kind of pain seems impossible. And then you do it, contraction after contraction. And though each contraction feels like a static seizing of the body, it really is more like a wave of movement. And it's really, really about saving a life. And that flow becomes something much larger than each individual contraction. One galactic vinyasa.

And then the baby is here, and the pain is gone.

Yoga also gives me the lens to sit in moments of discomfort with others and see some clarity, hear the breath. Let it pass into the next moment. Like the next asana. I find these days that I can sit in awkwardness, lack of clarity, the discomfort of clashing perspectives or emotions (which is really what perspective is so largely made of), and see it for the presence that it is. It doesn't have to cast a shadow over the rest of the day, over my time with my family, over my sense of self, over my sleep. It doesn't have to be any more than an exchange of human emotion that is hard to name or understand. And we can rest in the comfort that we are all human, trying, seeing our lives through our own lenses, stumbling.

Like we do in asana.

I have been waiting my whole life to be able to let go like this. I owe so much to practice.

Refuge in the Senses

Pratyahara, or sense withdrawal, is one of the eight limbs of yoga. We learn to control the senses, indeed to withdraw from them, as we learn to release ourselves from extrinsic influences, motivations, definers of identity and purpose. We draw away from our senses so that we can retreat into the spacious stillness of the mind, to connect with the Seer, the one who watches. We release from the senses so that we can find peace. Asana helps us to cleanse our bodies and minds; breath through the practice assists with this cleansing, and helps to give us a point of focus away from the laden messages of the physical body, and of the overthinking brain. But focus on something other than the outside world, and other than the brain's thoughts, is hard...for most of us.

Another possibility for some times when the mind becomes too full, and when disconnect in the practice seems inevitable, is to actually plug into the senses. It can be useful practice. I have lately been experimenting with going into the senses, and I have found that it has given me lessons in learning how to focus both in my practice and in my life.

The brain, though an inward thing, can become as congested as Times Square: bells, whistles, lights, voices. In daily work, in riding the bus, in rocking my child, in engaging in conversation and, yes, in practice, this chaos can be an intense, tightly woven cacophany that seems impossible to let go of. In these times, lately, I have found that the Seer can see it (which is a lovely new breakthrough), but that instead of the Seer finding stillness in the seeing, in the bird's eye view of the mind chatter (I am not there, yet...), I can go back down to the body and feel, see, hear, touch, smell.

My mentor told me once that the landscape of her mind and heart in her post-partum days, compounded by the delirium of lack of sleep, made her mind acutely challenging. No peace. No stillness. As a way to break free from the confines of her brain she would wander to the drugstore, stand in the shampoo aisle, and smell them all...one by one. The reality of the senses took her into the visceral reality of the body. The senses brought her out of the brain's overworking anxiety, the urgency and pain of new worries, and into the simplicity of fragrance, of self-care.

Likewise, I have found peace these days in the feel of the air's temperature on my skin, the smell of the shala, the color of the sky (so blue the other day!), the feel of the soap in the shower.

My brain, in danger of becoming even busier these days, could disconnect me from practice. But connecting to the senses of practice has helped me to stay deeply connected...perhaps even more so. I feel the sockets opening, I experience the breath with my ears and nerves, I taste how the air changes in Utkatasana as I open the throat, and I spend extra breaths in certain poses so that I can feel the tiniest of spaces opening between vertebrae. These sensations make me feel alive. These joint-freeing connections help me to know what prana is, help me to see all of us in the shala as an intimately life-full group of bodies moving and sweating and breathing and aching for something larger than ourselves. It's awesome.

This is not the goal, of course...down the road, one day, maybe I will draw away from these senses. Maybe I won't care about fragrance and the taste of the coffee and the color of the trees against the sky. Maybe I will find a space so still, so celestially serene and separate from the world around me that I will, truly, feel only the soulful connection that we all share deep with these physical bodies. But for now I savor the spirit I feel when I connect with humanness through my senses. It helps me to let go of the swiftly spinning narratives in my head, and the fears my brain is trying to tell me to hold on to, when I reach into something as subtle as the taste of water.

Oxygen

I've spent the last week in the mountains of Colorado (a week away for a family wedding...sort of a vacation), and what a difference it makes to practice at high altitude. In the first few days, the air, so much thinner, feels like it's got holes in it...or like the lungs have holes in them. In those first few days it feels like the air cannot get all the way up to the collar bones, cannot settle all the way down into the bottom of the lungs. The air loses its grip. It hovers in the middle of the torso, superficially functioning to breathe the body. Spinning its wheels. And two breaths per asana is especially helpful.

But then those first few days pass, and the lungs adjust and strengthen. They expand to welcome each movement of the vinyasa, and that catch up in the collarbones clicks in. The practice lightens, the breath radiates everywhere in the body. It's dizzying, and the post-practice euphoria is lovely.

Maybe it was the body's struggle to breathe that cleared the mind, or maybe it was simply the displacement and the purity of contrast. The trip away in that spacious place has given me some perspective on what it means to micromanage. Tending so specifically, technically, compulsively to tiny details of practice, of parenting, of work. I took all of that micromanaging to Colorado with me: worries about wet socks and dirty hands, emails waiting to be opened, little political fires back at home, tensions with my partner as we tried too hard to relax, waiting for family wounds to open up, anxieties about bedtimes happening at the right second. And I saw that micromanaging there, in the mountains, and it looked so strange. Like a down jacket worn in the hot summer. It's a lot of unnecessary managing...it's far too much for one person to take on. It's narcissistic to think that it's all that important, that my role in it is all that important, that if I take my hands off the wheel for a bit the darn thing cannot steer itself.

I practiced for the first time this morning back in the shala in my sweet city. My sweet city full of heat and sweat and air quality alerts... But with lungs blessed by the clean, thin, enriching oxygen of the high-altitude air, the practice felt like floating, like a soft sense of ease.

I'm trying to find that breath and breathe into my handle on life without white knuckling. As I lay in Savasana, I imagined that there was much peace to be found in between the hours I've so strategically stacked into my day.

That kind of micromanaging simply cannot last. It's not sustainable in any way that makes room for calm, happiness. It doesn't help to support calmness in my child. Or in my relationships.

I'm not sure that Colorado is the necessary medicine. I am sure that taking the body out of its environment for a while can challenge, heal, and mystify.

Affirmation of Love

I love yoga fundamentally because of how it continues to reveal to me that my mind makes my reality: the ego spins a narrative that I believe, and my practice shows me otherwise. Most often, the revelation is a good one. I wake, I worry that I won't be able to make my way into a pose, I anticipate the failure, I find the breath to ease in. I learn to worry less. I learn to think less. I trust in my teacher, and learn to trust myself. I take this strength into my life outside of the shala.

I love yoga for the marriage of opposites that I have come not only to respect but also to seek. Reversal of postures, the hidden power of the body behind the breath, the power of yoga to heal pain in the heart and bones that seems so difficult to remedy...these forces have encouraged me to see contrasts in new ways. Mostly, the contrast of hope and fear: hope is always sitting patiently on the other side of my fear, if I can remember to look for it. Parivritta Trikonasana shows us the other hand, the other side of the spine, the exchange in the support of the feet; Samasthiti and Handstand show us that we can find more than one way to grow out of the earth. Jumping back and through shows us a pristine balance between the effort of using strength and the ease of using softness in a vinyasa that allows us to gracefully move through the practice (rather than charging into it). These paradoxes balance, humble, relieve us of holding on too tightly to one emotion or idea.

I love yoga for the way it helps me breathe into my life: into my love for my partner, into my love for my daughter, into my connection to others. I can find the breath to move through the stickiness of misunderstanding, the thick haze of fatigue and and an overworked day, the confusion of change and uncertainty. The kinesthetic sense cultivated in asana helps us to see ourselves in space, to feel the position of body parts in relationship to each other...but also to find meaning in the relationships between our souls as they swirl through and around one another. I see color, I hear voices, I feel hearts more acutely because of the self-study required in this practice. The self is always connected to something larger...the lessons learned on the mat are always about more than the mat. They are a lens through which we can look directly into humankind and imagine its possibilities apart from all of the film of politics, old energies, fear of being who we are.

Commitment

I remember a story I once heard at a wedding. As the priest was blessing the bride and groom, he described an old couple he once knew. The couple had been together for decades, and he was fascinated by the depth and length of their relationship. He once asked them, "How do you do it?" The husband replied, "We make sure to go out to dinner once a week." The priest responded, "That's wonderful. Where do you go?" The husband responded, "I like Italian. I don't know where my wife goes."

I have been practicing yoga for almost a decade, trying lots of different styles and teachers and studios. But I have been in a long-term relationship with Ashtanga. Indeed, there have been many teachers and shalas as the practice and I have moved together, but we remained committed. In this committed relationship, we try not to become too attached to one another. Ashtanga doesn't hold on too tightly to me, and I try not to hold on too tightly to it.

And it has been this way for three years. Almost every day.

One might ask, "How?" I think this question floats just above Ashtanga discourse. And one of my answers is this: we take some time apart once in a while.

Once in a while, I practice something else. I have a favorite Rodney Yee DVD that I love. It's a delicious blend of Hatha yoga, with Ashtanga and Iyengar inspirations. It's 65 minutes, it includes his soothing direction, and it helps me to still feel connected to my Ashtanga practice.

Once in a while, I pop in to the studio down the street where I teach regularly on Saturdays. Just the other day, weighed down by too little sleep and some low back pain, I opted to spend my morning practice at a Yoga Rise class (a beginner-intermediate hatha class) taught by a woman who is becoming one of my favorite teachers. She is Kripalu trained, open minded, and wise. Her class the other day was just what I needed: slow, deep asanas for the knees, hips, and back. I was challenged by the precision of her direction, I learned a new way to see the origin of the backbend in the lower legs, and I was given the most wonderful Shalabasana adjustment I've ever had.

Plus, I get something from this class, and from Yee's DVD, that I never get it my own practice: a guided Savasana. One of the most beautiful elements of Ashtanga is the Mysore practice; it's an intimate, reflective, organic experience with the self, with the teacher, and with fellow Ashtangis. Indeed, it can also be quite astounding to lead yourself through Savasana after a 2-hour practice.

But sometimes, every now and then, I want the voice of a generous, sweet, ethereal yogi to talk me through the melting of my brain into my heart, the releasing of my anxiety into the Earth, and the letting go of tension from crown to toe. I want the smell of lavender oil as a teacher comes round and blesses each one of us. I want the release from my own inner voice.

These days, my daughter—who has in the last several months so gracefully been able to guide herself to sleep—now needs soothing rubs on her belly and back to help her calm her mind and heart and fidgety legs. Now that she is two, life has become a bit more complicated, and life has also become more obviously filled with channels of love that she can tap into when she wants. To manage the former, she lately needs a bit more of the latter. When last year at this time she was likely to wiggle out of a hug, she now wants the snuggles. She seeks them out. She cries when the back tickles in the ebbing daylight of her bedroom stop. I often soothe her all the way to sleep. I won't always. She'll need to learn that she can still help calm her own mind. But every now and then, she'll also need a soothing hand to help her.

This is all to say that the dedication to independence, the ability to calm and inspire ourselves forward in our commitments, is generously supported by the occasional seeking out of relief, of a change of approach, of a change of scene.

It also serves to help us to recommit.

Perspective

These last couple of weeks, my focus in practice is on softening my face, from the top of my forehead, past the jaw (the toughest part) to the bottom of my neck. I have been quite impressed by the impact this softening has on the rest of the practice. And so much of this softening has come from breathing in all the way into my heart, and all the way to the bottom of the exhalation.

This softening, which my readers know I have been deeply thinking about for the last year, has been a slowly permeating wave throughout my practice. And I am so surprised by it because I thought it would never happen. Amid the critique of my teachers who kept telling me to soften the shoulders, soften my back, release my hips, I could not see how it was possible. Folding forward to Uttanasana and Padangusthasana sent off alarms throughout my body, jumping back seemed to require so much exertion that my shoulder muscles barricaded around the joints, and handstand and Pincha Mayurasana brought up fear that actually seemed to freeze the muscle memory in the mind.

But in my practice these last couple of months, I have found myself softly relaxed, sort of floating with/on/through the breath.

I think this is part of the "all" that Guruji said was coming. This release of tension and anxiety into softness. It takes progression and practice...over and over and over, as one of my teachers once suggested when she explained how the practice is backward-forward, forward-backward. Moreover, this slow release has become part of a larger letting go. In work, in parenting, in trying/not trying to control the mysteries of nature, in relating to my teachers. For the few months in the late fall/early winter when I really let go and settled back into restorative yoga for a while, my mind had to come with me, or it just wouldn't have worked. And it had an impact that still resonates. Turning the dial of exertion way, way back now allows me to see how unfortunate it would be to leave that softness behind and grind through primary and second series sucking muscle to bone, drying out the joints, fearing the disappointment of my teacher, losing my purpose in the practice, and losing my breath. I have passed through all of those places, and may again. But I feel very, very lucky to see how it doesn't have to be that way. Forward, backward... Backward, forward.

It's so completely opposite how I would have been able to imagine it—that the practice can grow stronger and softer at the same time. I remember a fellow Ashtangi once asking me, "Does it get less painful?" At the time, I wasn't sure how to respond to her. I may have muttered, "Yes, I think it does."

But I now see that it does. Indeed, it gets more comfortable. I never thought I would ache to be back in Kapotasana, to feel my breathe reach all the way up to the top of the lungs. But there you have it.

Where Chitta Vrittis Begin

These days, my daughter wakes up before 5am and starts commanding her audience in her room. The audience is a bunch of regulars: "Friend" (a pink blanket with an elephant head with a rattle inside), Curious George, a grey cat, a very large giraffe, a musical seahorse, a small giraffe, all of the blankets in her crib, and the vast landscape of learning in her mind. I imagine a collage of pictures and words: the ABC song, numbers in English and in Spanish, phrases and phrases that she has picked up ("I said no," "That's not nice," "Look at that, Mommy!" "Oh my goodness"), names of foods and objects and holidays, questions, exclamations.

She only stops talking long enough to gather thoughts back up into a bundle before beginning the next scene of this cluttered, delicious multi-act performance. She is her own MC, she is all of the actors playing me, her father, her teachers, her friends. It's a variety show of her own life, a one-woman play, an open mic run completely by her.

This is the performance of my daughter's chitta vrittis, uncut.

Now, they do not plague her. They don't seem to sit heavily in her heart, keeping her from sleep, bringing stress to her belly, creating fear and worry and sadness. Now and then, she wakes up crying in the middle of the night. Sometimes I hear her talking, and I assume she's had a bad dream...something got all twisted in that mind of hers. Maybe it's about time for it to start getting messy in there, and I think my job is to try and help her keep the darkness away.

She'll have to learn to calm them down one of these days. I hope she will not have to work too hard to find stillness in the mind, to hear her own breath again.

Somehow...between these morning toddler rituals of reciting our lives while we wait for parents to unfold themselves from bed and come to get us (if we were lucky enough to have loving parents waking up to our voices in a nearby room), the chitta vrittis take on more power than they deserve.

3 Illuminations

In the last couple of weeks, I have encountered three new ways of thinking about the practice, and here they are:

1. First Surya Namaskara of the day: slow, slow, slow. I used to dive into it, only to find my sacrum, hamstrings, and hips yelling back to me, "We're not ready!" Why was I rushing? Sometimes, the tightness would be so much that I would have to bend my knees as I folded forward. But a couple of weeks ago, in my dusty 16th-floor hotel room in Atlanta while my partner was breakfasting with my little one down on Floor 2, I experimented with folding forward very, very slowly. Hips rolled like liquid over the femur bones and my face came to my shins. I will, for the unforeseeable future, not rush Surya Namaskara. Especially the first one of the day.

2. Baddha Konasana. My teacher blew my mind with this one just last week. I asked her how I can get my chin to the floor, how I can release my shoulders from pulling up on my feet too tightly. She watched me get into the pose, and she said, tuck your tailbone a bit. What? I thought (for...um...8 years or so) that I was supposed to stick my tush out when folding forward (you know, the whole "back bend before bending forward" idea). What I discovered, with her help, is that sticking your tush out internally rotates the hips. Tuck the tailbone slightly, and you will find that the groin and hips open (externally). Mind blowing. Take it into the Prasaritas, Upavishta Konasana, and the Eka Padas...and it's even more amazing. One piece of advice has revolutionized my whole practice—I have for a long, long time wondered how my hip sockets were ever going to open. Well, they were never going to (without serious injury) if I kept doing what I was doing.

3. Kapotasana. Is deepening these days. But I have noticed for the last year that the pose locks my sacrum tightly in place and it takes all the way to Yoga Nidrasana to smooth it out again. One thing that helps, as (I think it's supposed to): when I come out of Kapotasana and press my hands into the Earth to release my back (before coming out of the whole pose), I squeeze my knees together and deepen the backbend even more. The energy shoots from my low back all the way up my spine. It's pretty amazing, actually. This morning, when I came out of the pose, I nearly cried. This redistribution of the energy—and, apparently, utter cleansing of the root and heart chakras—helps the transition into the next several postures without the stuckness back in Kapotasana...

Building on this last point: indeed, I would say, the exit from the asana is really the entrance into the next. It's another off-the-mat illumination: transition out of inspires transition into...we can do this poorly, and we can do this well.

What's up: an unrevised list

Wow...a whole month since I've posted. March was a flurry. All month I would trip over ideas, realizations, and think, "I have to blog about this." My daughter is enjoying the last few minutes of her nap, and so I have drawn up a list of moments, thoughts, things. Not polished prose...just a list:

~The body chemistry seems to have found its way, and I am back to 2nd series. Oh, so lovely to be back in these backbends. Softer now. I have my wonderful teachers — David Garrigues, Luke Jordan, David Keil — to thank for nudging me along.

~Using soles of feet and sitz bones to open hips, and palms to open shoulders.

~Trying not to tighten tush and sacrum in backbends. Not easy.

~Up to Pincha Mayurasana in 2nd...DK calls this series of poses "the gauntlet." I have no idea why. (Just kidding about that.)

~My daughter is 22 months old now...she counts in English and Spanish, she sings her ABCs, she is trying very hard to jump, she colors in her coloring book, she asks for kisses now (where before we would just smother her with them, much to her dismay), and she says, "Love ya, babe." I am just now introducing her to The Sound of Music.

A bit more on "the gauntlet." For me, these poses—Tittibhasana A, B, C, and Pincha Mayurasana—are dark poses. They are dark because the Tittibhasanas reach way, way in to a space in the low, low belly that I have been trying to keep soft and sacred. The womb. And what I encounter there is loud and demanding—"Get out of this right now!" The fire in these asanas is amazing. I can feel these poses trying to clarify, cleanse, strengthen. And I don't know if my mind wants that intensity right now. Can a little one grow in that space inside of that wicked fire?

Pincha Mayurasana is a grave encounter with my shoulders—the same shoulders that I use to jump back now find themselves cowering in this pose. Afraid to hold the body straight up in the air, fearful that the whole body will topple. I am a wee person, which makes it so interesting to feel so heavy during these few poses...like the Earth is inhaling me down into it. It's a gauntlet for me because it's a test of mind and body. Right now, the two come to blows in this section of the series. We'll see what happens...

And springtime seems to be here.

How Can I Make More Space?

I recently asked my wonderful teacher Luke Jordan what I was doing wrong in Baddha Konasana. By "wrong," I meant, why can't I get my chin to the floor?

He floated over (Luke floats while he teaches...it's amazing) and showed me just how open the hips can be. He sat in Baddha Konasana, turned the soles of his feet completely upward and drew his heels completely inward, and proceeded to fold forward while I looked on in amazement.

And then he said this, and I am paraphrasing here: "I try to think less about the right way of doing it, and more like, 'How can I open more space?'"

Open more space...he sends this message often. He urges us not to get overly attached to correctness, and rather toward freeing the corners of the body, and of the mind.

It's the heartbeat of the practice, I think.

And so this is where my mind is during asana these days. I come to the pose, and I ask, "How can I open more space?" in the hip, the shoulder, the neck, the sole of the foot, the hands...the spaces between my fingers. And I find it.

Today, he folded me into Baddha Konasana, nose to the floor, and just when I thought I had reached my folding point, there was release in the upper back, and then relaxation. Relaxation! Unbelievable.

Lots of lessons in this idea, of course, and the flow into life off the mat is lovely. My mentor said to me last night that it helps her in her relationship to ask herself, "Am I taking the easy way out or the hard way out?" The latter, of course, is the greatest challenge. What is found in getting over ourselves, however, is opened space. An argument with a partner or child can tempt us to dig in our heels in stubbornness. But, as my other teacher, David Garrigues, has explained, it is so beautifully important just to be able to see that there is another way to feel. Not to negate, just to open sight. To take the hard route—to admit another person is right, to reach out a hand even though you're about to fall asleep angry, to hold a child who has just disobeyed you—is about opening space around a very stuck place in the heart and mind. It kneads the knot there. It creates possibility for anxiety or frustration to take a turn toward something lighter, more peaceful.

Opening space can be about folding forward in Baddha Konasana. The bliss and awe of seeing the hips open like that (without any post-practice soreness, by the way) is stunning on its own. But it is more, for our emotional blocks are like stiffness in the joints. And peace is much more accessible than we might think it is.

Yoga Chitta Vrttis

The chitta vrttis in the mind include a long, unending stream of thoughts about yoga. Philosophy, asana...heart, brain, belly. Truly, I don't know where I put all of this noise.

On the bus this morning, as we crossed the Schuylkill River, I caught my mind taking me back to the dropbacks from Wednesday, when my teacher was reminding me to use my legs. I watched as my mind drifted across the scene, swooped around the image of myself there, of myself in the mirror, of the inside of my body, of the bottoms of my feet. I heard my internal monologue tell myself, "Use the legs, use the legs, use the legs. Years of dance and gymnastics, and my feet turn out naturally now. I use the insides of my legs to stand up, and I need to learn how to use the quads and hamstrings. Need to. Must. This will ease the back, open the sacrum. Toes in, heels out, feet and legs ground into the Earth. If only I could... Next time. Next time."

It's inspiration, kind of. I carry it with me always... A friend asks me how I am, and I report on family, my work, my daughter's latest adorable antics, and what I have been thinking about lately in yoga.

Like this one: my teacher has revolutionized the way I take Parsvakonasana. For years I have been sinking into the hip. He said I was concertina-ing the hip...yes! I see it! I understand it. Holy smokes...how the heck did I not know that before? And since then I have been mindfully lifting out of the hip when I practice. Lifting and elongating the hip space, reaching the spine up from its very base, making space. Softly reaching. And off the mat, I imagine it before sleep, I see that hip socket in the middle of a meeting.

I seek out my kinesthetic sense as I promise and dream to do it better next time.

And, speaking of dreams, I dreamt the other night that I could put my leg behind my head so far that it crossed my middle back. The vrttis creep into my sleep...

It's noise...it is! It's also a witty, whimsical conversation with the self. It's inspiring, beautiful noise. It reminds me of when I was a child and we girls talked about back handsprings and splits and dance moves, and I have found such happiness in getting my soul back to a place that innocent and sweet. It makes me thankful for the possibility of opening even more space in the body, in the mind. It makes me thankful for the body as a window into something body-less. I am at the mercy of not knowing how or why or when. And I also know that practicing the very practice that brings this noise into the mind will hush it.

Repetition

A couple of days ago, my daughter came home from school and sat on my lap while we read book after book. When we got to Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? we got on a merry-go-round of reading. "More," she said, when we got to the end. I read it again and again, and soon she wanted to skip most of the words and just flip from one illustration to the next. Over and over. 7, 8, maybe more times...and all the while, I kept my focus on resetting my energy, my voice, my patience with each re-read. I imagined that I was reading it for the first time, every time.

This repetition, I thought...how easy it would be to check out. But I do not check out. Look how she is plugged into this book...more, more, more. It is bringing her comfort, exploration. She has new questions with every page turn. She's testing her memory, she's looking for some new way to wrap her mind around matching the images to the words I'm using to name them, she's looking for herself in the book. It's the same words, the same intonation of excitement: elephant! boa constrictor! children! But to my daughter, it is an exploration.

And so it is each day:

Surya Namaskara...inhale, arms up, exhale, Uttanasana...inhale, Ardha Uttanasana, exhale, Chaturanga...inhale, Urdhva Mukha Svanasana, exhale, Adho Mukha Svanasana...1, 2, 3, 4, 5...

Inhale, exhale...find pose, brain sinks into heart...inhale, exhale, deepen pose...inhale, cross legs and lift, exhale, jump back...

Every practice, repeat. Every inhale and exhale a turn of the page, a breath into the next familiar asana, and the repeated undulation of vinyasa. Even the repetition of chitta vrttis...familiar voices: why? Can't do. Did it! Ssshhh. Ouch. Wait...what? Lift...reach...soften...expand. Dinner? Guilt? Worry? Memories... Sssshhh.

It is sameness, this practice. But it is not at all sameness... On the page, it looks like a system of repetition, with the ongoing strangeness of being given new poses when we progress. But we inhabit the practice with the complexities of our worlds and minds and know that living inside of it looks different every time we come to the mat. And we long for what we will find out, though we have practiced the same practice for years.

See, it is a beautiful thing: our love for "more."

Ode to Snow

Philadelphia got many inches of snow last night. Snow day. Too messy to go to school for baby or Mommy, and so the fact that Nature is giving us no choice but to snuggle in together makes me so glad for it. Daily I struggle with the blessing and the heartbreak of a beautiful job and a small child who goes to a wonderful school each day. She has adorable friends and nurturing, patient teachers. But, ohmydearLord, I miss her so much. It isn't a complaint as much as it's a wish that our schools were in the same place, and that we could visit throughout the day and then go back to our learning and teaching. That I could go steal a kiss and a squeeze whenever I want, or watch her playing with friends or listening to a story...or, damn it, read the story myself. But this is selfish, isn't it? Maybe she's perfectly okay with this set-up. But, you know, if she ever missed me in all of the excitement of singing and reading and playing with friends...I sure would like to be right there.

Back to the snow day. She surely felt the bliss that filled our house this morning, and she and I softly orbited one another in the sweet space of our living room. We read books, played with Legos, sat in front of a giant bowl of snow and spooned it into and out of cups. During her morning snack, she dipped her raisins in the snow to see what it might taste like, and she shared her raisins with me, "Here, Mama."

"Do you want to run?" I asked her. Oh, yes. And we chased each other back and forth from the kitchen to the living room. She always spills over with glee when I catch her and tickle her. She rode for a bit on her wooden giraffe before suggesting, "Mama's turn," and she watched ecstatically as I made silly noises and bent my knees way up to get my feet to the floor on the wheely toy.

And soon it seemed like a good idea to switch spaces, and so up to the 2nd floor we went. She wanted to play on our big bed, and so we read more books, lying on our backs: "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?" Lately I read and leave out each animal: "I see a red ____." "Bird!" she says. "I see a purple ____." "Cat!" she says. She sat almost all the way through Pinkalicious, but also wanted to stand and then fall on the bed. And do "Criss, cross, applesauce," and hear me sing "Down, down, baby...down by the rollercoaster." More, she says. "Shimmy, shimmy, cocoa pop. Shimmy, shimmy rock." The sun came through the window — "Sun," she said, and squinted. And she watched the snow hang on the big tree in front of the house.

Lunchtime. How do four hours pass so quickly? She ate the peanut butter sandwich I had originally prepared for her school lunch today, and she fell asleep as I rocked her before her nap.

She is sleeping now. And I am watching her on the monitor while I work, knowing that at any moment I could just run upstairs and steal a kiss and a squeeze.

I'm the mommy, I remind myself. Her one and only mommy. And I thank the snow.

Parivrtta of Mind

Why do we revolve our poses? The revolution of asana twists the internal organs, eases openness into the joints, helps the feet to find the earth, elongates and cleanses the spine...

But it also brings us around to see the opposing iteration of a pose, the opposing forces of a stance, the muscles opposing those that held the body up while facing the other direction.

Perspective.

One of my mentors has a saying that sticks with me. When she is trying to show me the light of a situation, she soothes my ego by reminding me that awareness and lack of awareness might be "no farther apart than two sides of the same coin." Trikonasana and Parivrtta Trikonasana depict this paper-thin space between two spaces of awareness beautifully.

My dear teacher once told us that one of the many powers of yoga is its ability to bring our awareness to those emotions that oppose the ones we're having. It's not to discount or smother what we feel, but rather just to allow us to become aware of the other side.

Synthesizing his words with those of my mentor, and beginning to understand the revolution of asana in a more holistic way, I discover something new, something that challenges mainstream suggestions that the way out of hardship and heartbreak is linear. It occurs to me that it may sometimes be possible to get to the other side of a dark place without necessarily having to set out on a long arduous journey of slogging through our pain. In other words: though we may not be able to bring ourselves out of fury or sadness right away, we might be able to see that the other side of anger and sorrow sits quietly very, very close by. In this way, parivrtta of the mind may help to soothe and open the heart.

The Progymnasmata of Practice

In her book, Yoga: A Gem for Women, Geeta Iyengar writes, "Yoga...is the art of knowing oneself and knowing the eternal truth" (9).

These days I am teaching a course called Classical Rhetoric to most junior and senior university students. In this past first week of the course, we discussed the constraints that modern education place on the pedagogy of composition. These constraints too often give students a series of elements that must be in or shape their text, like a rubric, but do not offer much in the way of helping students to understand how the composition of that text will transcend the boundaries of the classroom, how it will help them in other texts, other contexts. Ancient rhetoricians believed, however, that students should have copia, a wealth of skills and strategies to select from, so that in any rhetorical situation they can access the appropriate tools for making a case. They believed that the arrangement of ideas in the form of an argument was not a formula, but an art, and they asked students to engage in progymnasmata, or "preliminary exercises" in order to cultivate a great strength and flexibility with rhetorical knowledge.

As a professor of English, teacher of yoga, and yogi I see more and more connections between the teaching of writing and the teaching and practice of yoga. I used to see yoga as a formula. Put hand here, tuck tailbone, put foot here, inhale, exhale, move foot to here...there, doing yoga! Well, it does begin there, but the spirit of doing yoga is not about the what as much as it is about the within.

In Ashtanga, the art can become hidden in the sequence, in the edification of poses over time, in time, with breath, with the progress forward. Practice and mindfulness and — yes, conversation — about what happens to us as individuals in the practice helps to resuscitate the art. What it means to be in the practice and in the poses is what Iyengar is talking about when she insists that yoga is about "knowing oneself." The postures become tools — like words, like the progymnasmata — for excavating the many layers and corners of self. While the practice heals, preserves, chisels, and cleanses the body — indeed, I have seen that empirical evidence in my own body — the delicate, whimsical, dark, blundering, forceful art of who we are in the practice is the precious thread that is so hard to find, pick up, hold on to. Yet we learn many, many asanas — and relearn, and reshape — so that we can turn toward a pose as we might turn toward a path in ourselves.

As with writing — that is, the art of articulating what is in our minds — the art of connecting to ourselves in practice is less visible to the eye than it is visible to the heart. It has a kind of energy. And yet, we might know it when we see it.

Works Cited

Iyengar, Geeta. Yoga: A Gem for Women. New Delhi: Allied Publishers Private Limited, 2005.

Another Post About the Jellyfish

We emerge from the holiday season, and from our journey home to the place where we grew up, a lighter and more mindful family. But it is only through this morning's practice that I can say that and mean it.

The post-holiday letdown is always heavy. For me, especially in moments when I am rocking my daughter — oh, how clean and honest those moments are! — I see and feel the weight of how fast time passes. How astoundingly quick her learning is, how difficult to remember as viscerally as I want to the belly of the day between its beginning and ending. The speed of time makes my heart sink. I don't want it to go by so fast...all of it, any of it. I can say to myself: in a blink another holiday season will be upon us. And I will be right. And I wish it were not so.

But practice is a saving grace, for it slows down time. Drawing the mind toward the innermost spaces of self quiets the fury of activity and noise in the ego and outside the body, and the stillness makes the moments long and deep.

Moving from asana through vinyasa to asana, I see the diaphragm as a jellyfish, the way my teacher has explained. Inhale, the jellyfish flattens; exhale, the bubble of its body lifts and opens. Watch jellyfish move, imagine the unchanging stretch of their evolution over millennia, and you will see how slowly time can pass. And then upon coming home, kisses and cuddles and words of soft sweetness, lightness buried in the work day, the strangeness of scenes we see over and over and over, and the will to find peace in the next morning's practice can become part of an easier passing through life. Maybe with less worry. Maybe lighter, longer, and with more space in the mind to remember it.

Work Cited

Jelly Fish. 28 April 2008. YouTube. Web. 2 Jan. 2011.