Everything has Changed and Nothing has Changed

Today I will teach my first yoga class since the birth of my son, Liam, on August 27^th. Earlier today, I realized that this first class back will be the same as the last class I taught the day before Liam’s birth—Yin Yoga at Evolution. That realization—picking up right where I left off—makes the following post feel particularly appropriate.

One of my earliest experiences with yoga was practicing with a Jivamukti Yoga CD. Recently, I have been reminded of something the teacher, David Life, says at the end of the practice on this CD. He says,” Everything has changed and nothing has changed.” As a new mother, this message resonates deeply with me. Clearly, everything has changed, but also I have the sense that nothing has changed—that this too has somehow always been a part of me, that something within me remains unchanged, that motherhood is simply (or not so simply) a new manifestation or blossoming of my true self, which has always been and was meant to be.

We all have this unchanging place within us—this true self, this still point in the center of a whirling vortex, this spirit, this soul—however you like to think about it. It is the place that is most uniquely you and which most connects you with all beings in the universe. It is the place I connect with when I place my hand on my son’s chest, over his heart, and tell him he is perfect just the way he is and that everything he needs is already right there inside of him and has been since the day he was born.

As I’ve thought more about this idea of everything changing and nothing changing, I realize it represents for me a synthesis of many key yogic ideas. In the ever-changing landscape of sensory information, bodily sensations, thoughts, and feelings, it is the journey back to the true self—the discovery of the jewel in the lotus—that is our yogic journey. It is the journey through the sage Patanjali’s eight limbs—from the yamas and the niyamas to the asanas, pranayama, sensory withdrawal, concentration, meditation, and bliss. It is the wisdom in the word Namaste—that there is a place in each of us where the entire universe dwells, and when I am in that place in me and you are in that place in you, we are one.

Hit by a Wave of Emotion

Hit by a wave of emotion
I can stand firm
     or be swept away
I stand firm
It breaks over me
     and washes away again

Nurturing Ourselves

"In the end, our children are likely to act and live as we act and live. Nurturing their inner lives means nurturing our inner lives, for their sake."

I shared this quote with my De-stress Yoga class today. It comes from this weekend's "On Being" interview, "What We Nurture," with wife, mother, grandmother, Jewish Buddhist teacher, and psychotherapist Sylvia Boorstein. You can listen to the full program here.

As I shared with the class, I think we can all relate to the feeling that we are somehow being selfish when we take time to nurture ourselves. In reality, the time we take is not just for ourselves, but for those around as well. I invited the class, and invite you, whether you are a mother, father, son, daughter, aunt or uncle, to bring to mind someone in your life for whom you can be a role model by taking the time to nurture yourself.

To all of the mothers, Happy Mother's Day! Namaste.

Working with Slogans

In my restorative and yin yoga classes this week, we’ve been working with slogans from the book, “Comfortable with Uncertainty”—a compilation of teachings by American Buddhist Nun Pema Chodron.

Pema Chodron describes slogans as “revers[ing] ego’s logic.” She says, “[They] are not always the sort of thing that you would want to hear, let alone find inspiring. If we work with slogans, they will become like our breath, our eyesight, our first thought. They will become like the smells we smell and the sounds we hear. We can let them permeate our whole being. That’s the point. These slogans aren’t theoretical or abstract. They are about who we are and what is happening to us. They are completely relevant to how we experience things, how we relate with whatever occurs in our lives. They are about how to relate with pain and fear and pleasure and joy, and how those things can transform us fully and completely. When we work with slogans, ordinary life becomes the path of awakening.”

Through our restorative and yin practices, in which we hold poses for longer periods of time, we can (and did) allow some of these slogans to wash over us—absorbing whatever we might have to take from them in the moment. I invite you to do the same. The slogans are listed below, along with suggestions for accompanying restorative and yin poses. If you’re unfamiliar with restorative or yin practice, I invite you to simply read through the slogans—perhaps one at a time, perhaps all at once—and sit with them for a while. And always remember to breathe, and to be gentle and compassionate toward yourself.

Slogans:

1.     All activities should be done with one intention
“Breathing in, breathing out, feeling resentful, feeling happy, being able to drop it, not being able to drop it, eating our food, brushing our teeth, walking, sitting—whatever we’re doing could be done with one intention. That intention is that we want to wake up, we want to ripen our compassion, and we want to ripen our ability to let go, we want to realize our connection with all beings. Everything in our lives has the potential to wake us up or to put us to sleep. Allowing it to awaken us is up to us.”

2.     Of the two witnesses, hold the principal one
“…you’re the only one who knows what is opening and what is closing down. You’re the only one who knows. One kind of witness is everybody else giving you his or her feedback and opinions. This is worth listening to; there’s some truth in what people say. The principal witness, however, is you. You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is—working with it rather than struggling against it. You’re the only one who knows.”

3.     Change your attitude, but remain natural
“The fundamental change of attitude is to breathe the undesirable in and breathe the desirable out. In contrast, the attitude that is epidemic on the planet is to push it away if it’s painful and hold on to it tightly if it’s pleasant.”

4.     If you can practice even when distracted, you are well trained
“And when you can’t practice when distracted but know that you can’t, you are still training well. Never underestimate the power of compassionately recognizing what is going on.”

5.     Don’t expect applause
“…expect the unexpected; … We can begin to open our hearts to others when we have no hope of getting anything back. We just do it for its own sake.”

6.     Abandon any hope of fruition
“‘Fruition’ implies that at some future time you will feel good. … As long as you are oriented toward the future, you can never relax into what you already have or already are.”

7.     Practice the three difficulties
Notice where you’re stuck. Acknowledge the associated emotion. Drop the story you are telling yourself about it and feel the energy of the moment. Feel how you are cultivating compassion for yourself, and recognize that there are others who feel the same as you. Breathe in the emotion for them and for yourself with the wish that all will be free.

8.     Be grateful to everyone
“'Be grateful to everyone' is about making peace with the aspects of ourselves that we have rejected. Through doing that, we also make peace with people we dislike. … other people trigger the karma that we haven’t worked out. They mirror us and give us the chance to befriend all of that ancient stuff that we carry around like a backpack full of granite boulders.”

9.     Always maintain a joyful mind
“… in unblocking our hearts, we’ll find that every moment contains the free-flowing openness and warmth that characterize unlimited joy.”

Restorative Practice:

Supported bridge pose (slogan 1), waterfall (slogan 2), supported supta baddha konasana (slogan 3), legs up the wall (slogan 5), supported seated twist (slogans 6 and 8), savasana (slogan 9)

Yin Practice:

Wide-knee child’s pose (slogan 1), dragon (slogan 2), pigeon (slogan 3), dragon second side (slogan 4), pigeon second side (slogan 5), sphinx/seal (slogan 6), dragonfly with twist (slogans 7 and 8), dragonfly (slogan 9). Close with a supine twist to each side, savasana, and quiet sitting.

VIDEO: John Friend on Yoga and Green Business

I always enjoy seeing the connections being drawn between yoga and going green. Check out this interview of John Friend, founder of Anusara yoga, by Bill Roth, founder of Earth 2017. They discuss bringing yoga into businesses and how that can connect with sustainability and green business practices.

Breathe, Awaken, Remember: Takeaways from a Conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn

This week, the American Public Media radio show, On Being, features a conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn, renowned scientist, writer, and meditation teacher. You can listen to the full interview here.*

As I listened, there were a couple pieces that particularly stood out for me. The first was a quote from the end of Walden by Henry David Thoreau (which I am finally reading for the first time and will surely have more to share about in later posts). In the third to last line, Thoreau writes, “Only that day dawns to which we are awake.”

Krista Tippett, host of On Being, puts it this way, “any moment in which we’re not aware, any moment that we’re not attentive to, is lost.” “You’ve abandoned your own life,” adds Jon Kabat-Zinn. And he goes on to say, “all you have time for is this, because there’s nothing else than this.” All you have is time for this—meaning whatever is happening right now, because there’s nothing else than this in this moment.

One way to cultivate this wakefulness, awareness, attentiveness, and presence in yoga and meditation, is through the practice of continually coming back to the breath. Each time we come back to our breath, we come back to mindfulness, to wakeful consciousness. It’s a lifelong practice, again and again—with gentleness and loving-kindness—to remind ourselves to bring our minds back to the breath, and in so doing to come back again and again to being fully awake. As we keep coming back to the breath and back to mindfulness, we also begin to catch glimpses of something else—glimpses of the true self, who we really are, beyond our thoughts, beyond our bodies, beyond our emotions. The true self that is and was always there, from which we have strayed, forgotten, and are called to remember.

This brings me to the second piece that stood out for me in Krista Tippett’s conversation with Jon Kabat-Zinn—the poem “Love after Love” by Derek Walcott. You can hear Jon Kabat-Zinn recite the poem here.

The time will come

when, with elation,

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror,

and each will smile at the other's welcome, 

and say, sit here.  Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine.  Give bread.  Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit.  Feast on your life.

 

*My thanks to Martha, a wonderful teacher at evolution, who reminded me what a source of inspiration this program could be.

Green - Unifier of Opposites

Just read this email from DailyOM. Another wonderful connotation of the color green. For more on why I chose the name YogaGreen for this blog, read my very first post, "Welcome!"

Unifier of Opposites 

The Color Green  

The color green balances our energy so that in looking at it we feel confident that growth is inevitable.

Green is a combination of the colors yellow and blue, each of which brings its own unique energy to the overall feeling of the color green. Blue exudes calm and peace, while yellow radiates liveliness and high levels of energy. As a marriage between these two very different colors, green is a unifier of opposites, offering both the excitement of yellow and the tranquility of blue. It energizes blue's passivity and soothes yellow's intensity, inspiring us to be both active and peaceful at the same time. It is a mainstay of the seasons of spring and summer, thus symbolizing birth and growth.

Green is one of the reasons that spring instigates so much excitement and activity. As a visual harbinger of the end of winter, green stems and leaves shoot up and out from the dark branches of trees and the muddy ground, letting us know that it's safe for us to come out, too. In this way, green invites us to shed our layers and open ourselves to the outside world, not in a frantic way but with an easygoing excitement that draws us outside just to sniff the spring air. Unlike almost any other color, green seems to have its own smell, an intoxicating combination of sun and sky--earthy, bright, and clean. In the best-case scenario, it stops us in our tracks and reminds us to appreciate the great experience of simply being alive.

Green balances our energy so that in looking at it we feel confident that growth is inevitable. It also gives us the energy to contribute to the process of growth, to nurture ourselves appropriately, without becoming overly attached to our part in the process. Green reminds us to let go and let nature do her work, while at the same time giving us the energy to do our own. 

For more information visit dailyom.com