Tuesday, November 20, 2012

And So It Begins!

I just love teaching beginners. There is something powerful about being with someone as they take their first few steps and breaths into this healing practice. I wrote down some notes that I have been using as part of my five week series with Brand New Beginners, and also my Yoga 102 classes. They are not original material, in fact most if not all, is synthesized from what I have learned studying from the awesome books and teachings of Pema Chodron, and also from Donna Farhi. Some of the material is also based on my reflections from practice. With that being said, please enjoy these thoughts and see how they may even inform your practice no matter how long you have been on your yoga journey!

How to begin practice


I believe that Yoga is about befriending what is. As Pema says you learn to welcome the present moment in as if you had invited it in. It’s all you ever have so you might as well work with it rather than fight it, reject it, or wish it to be something other than it is right now. This really helps to ensure that you practice more with compassion and acceptance rather than aggression.

How do you do this?

You begin by noticing what is--shifting from thinking to awareness, from external to internal. You start with breath and from there ride the wave of the breath more deeply into your body.


You then work on feeling what is- really allowing yourself to feel into the body, letting sensation after sensation reveal itself to you. Noticing where tension is, where resistance and clinging are. Notice where is there space and openness too.


You practice allowing what is. Let the process of revelation continue without suppressing, denying, hiding, etc..Letting things be rather than letting things go. When you try to let go of tension, when you try to let go of thoughts, very often their grip on you tightens. It's like "don't think about an elephant", and that's all you can do. When you practice just letting things be and continuing to just breathe anyway, then something quite profound can happen. You simply join with breath to create space and ventilation around tightness, clinging, and stale stuck energy in the body.

This is the practice of aligning with the flow of life. Abiding with the fluid energy of life. Practice then becomes and opportunity to learn how you can create an optimal channel for vitality and openness to flow through you. Rather than moving and quickly trying to get from point a to b, you can learn to slow things down and notice all the incremental stages and steps in-between a and b. You can practice letting the body wrap itself around the breath--which feels so much different than contorting the body into shapes it's not ready to be in.


This is also an opportunity to practice moving into space/stillness. You can find the natural gaps and space between breaths, and between movements and allow time to stop and sink into the pause. Learning to find this pause is sacred as the pause is a tool you can learn to take with you in the moments you are prone to enter into automatic pilot mode, or into habitual ways of being that do not serve you.


Most important, I think, is to remember that this practice is not about more and more poses, or even deeper expressions of poses. It's not a race nor a competition. It’s about going deeper into life and refining your awareness of and connection to your life force. Rather than poses, it’s about process. It is mindfulness in motion. It is about being here fully and engaging in your world fully.

Enjoy this practice as it will give you so much to enhance your life and relationships!



Sunday, November 11, 2012

Heart Fire Practices

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

This is the work. To invite the element of fire to burn through whatever separates us from our deepest source of love. To invoke dissolution or burning of our stories of separation and to ignite the flames connection, compassion and generosity to burn bright.

We open with ritual to connect to the fire of our heart and to open to love.

Meditation on fire element

Heart Breath Ritual

Anne Lamott - "Lighthouses don't go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining."

I love this quote. It’s a reminder that all we ever need is this moment. We don’t have to go looking anywhere outside ourselves to make a difference in the world. We make a difference simply through our beingness and from expressing our deepest gift of love to the world. We simply show up and live our lives deeply and powerfully in the moment.

It sometimes seems and feels like everyone is waiting for a big moment to shine. But really every moment & every interaction is a perfect opportunity to support you in teaching love, giving love, and opening to love. This means our relationships, our house, our work, our current circumstances exactly as they are. Our task is to simply show up and express our deepest gift to the world, which is the manifestation of love. Your “job in the world may take many different forms, but your real job is to give, express, and open to love in every interaction. Heart Fire is the remembrance of the job you are here to do.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the only thing required to live a heart centered life is the willingness to do so.

How do we get there?

We start by practicing Ahimsa- which according to Pema Chodron is softening what is rigid in our own hearts. We begin to inquire and notice do we open or close to this person before us, this circumstance, this moment. Life is just a series of moments to learn to love more deeply. As we look into our individual moments our intention, our prayer is not for the circumstance, moment,  or person to change, but for us to change. We use the mantra-- “In order for things to change. I must change.”

What is it that changes?  It’s perception. You are working with your heart/mind consciousness. You’re simply opening to a new spacious place in your heart. According to A Course In Miracles, a miracle is just a shift in perception. You are opening to miracles.

How do we begin to bring forth this energy?

One of the deepest gifts we can give to ourselves and the world is our presence and it’s the foundation of heart centered living. The willingness and ability to reside in present moment time.

How do we do this?

It begins with acceptance of what is. Allowing. Letting be. As Pema Chodron says we begin making friends with what is, befriending the present moment as if we had invited it in--it’s all we ever have so we might as well work with it.

We work with abiding with the fluid energy of life. So much of our suffering comes from wishing things to be different than they are. From distancing ourselves to the flow of life as we reject, cling to, resist, and suppress the expressions of life manifesting in our own experience. All the while life is happening now and we’re not here to experience it. We’re off somewhere else.

This process begins our journey into self compassion and compassion for others. We bring awareness to our story maker--which tends to fuel our habitual response. We greet our thoughts and emotions with understanding, and compassion. Rather than trying to let it go or push it out we just ventilate and give everything space and allow it all to follow the natural flow of life.

There is research that shows that the lifespan of any giving emotion is actually only 1-1.5 minutes and it's our stories that we create about the situation, person, etc.. that keeps adding kerosene to the fire so to speak. So if you can sit with that energy, free from story and just breathe into it--it will eventually pass on through just as all things do. The important thing is to stop feeding it. So when you practice meditation or if anger just arises--you see it, don't push it away, and let yourself feel it. Stay with the emotion, and if you start to notice yourself fueling it with stories just label it "thinking" and just stay with the energy. Pema calls this leaning into the energy. You lean in and give it ventilation with your breath. If that feels like it's not working you lean in and get curious--notice where the energy is in your body--does it have a texture, tone, vibration, color, etc... get to know it. And lastly you lean in and transform. Notice the energy and stay with it, free from story and then take your hands to your heart, breath into your heart and cultivate an attitude of appreciation or gratitude and try to feel it all through your body.

You can learn to begin to stay with these intense energies by practicing with smaller issues. You can pause by engaging in a pausing practice of just taking three deep breaths and noticing all that you can about them, and even noticing the gap and space between the breaths. Reside in the space and pause and notice how the body feels. Do this anytime you feel “hooked” by strong emotions or when you feel like you are about to do something from a place of automatic pilot mode.

This begins to set the stage for us to have compassion for others. From this compassionate abiding we can then do work on forgiving others and releasing them from the stories we have created about them. Knowing full well we are not our stories, neither are they. As we reside with the fluid energy of life within us we tap into it with our interactions with others too.

For more info on working with conflict with others please see my section on Mindful Dialog and also my work on using the Yamas and Niyamas in conflict.

We closed the session with the following forgiveness meditation.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

The story of you.

"Once upon a time there was a woman who was swimming across a lake with a rock in her hand. As she was getting close to the middle of the lake she began to sink because of the weight of the rock. She would go down below the water and then pop back up again. As she did this, the people who were watching from the shore were screaming at her to drop the rock. She continued to swim until she could no longer hold herself above the water and even though people were shouting to drop the rock, she wouldn’t do it, and just before she went under one last time, not to come up again, the onlookers heard her say, “I can’t, it’s mine.”
One of the things that I love about yoga is that it supports us in getting clearer about what is us, and what is the story of us. We get to this place by way of making contact with our internal witness. That spacious grounded place within that clearly sees the way things really are--without story.

The story maker within all of us is strong and without clear insight into its nature we can be so deeply enmeshed in our stories that we lead our whole lives in fear, shame, guilt, remorse, delusion, and despair. Usually stories revolve around projecting into past or future our ideas of what should/should not happen to us or others. Good signs you're in story mode are thoughts such as "I really should have said...", "They should really do it this way", "I can't possibly do this",  "They can't get away with this", "I'm not this enough", "They are not this enough", etc..


There are many more concoctions of story manifestations but to some degree or another many of us circulate these variations around in our minds, and like the woman who wouldn't let go, we drown because we hold on so tightly to who we think we are, what we think we need, and what we think we should be doing.


Yoga practice gives us a chance to meet our stories head on, and with compassion greet our stories with understanding. As Byron Katie points out in her book "Loving What Is" it's impossible to drop our stories. Thoughts come from nowhere and return to that same no where. She says rather than trying to let go of our stories our task is to simply meet our stories with understanding and they very often let go of us. Their grip is not so strong and we can then be free and in the present.


When you practice this week meet your stories with understanding and see what happens. Remain open and spacious as stories come up "I can't", "The teacher really should have done this", "I'm not this enough to do this", etc.. See if the grip of your story softens just a bit, and notice who you are and what happens when you are free from the entanglement of your story maker.


I'll leave you with a great practice to support you in this journey. It's an exercise from my book "Heart Fire: Practices To Awaken, Expand, and Engage Your Heart" called "Practice cultivating the witness through listening". Try this exercise, even if you’ve never meditated before. Sit in a comfortable position and close your eyes. 


Let your breathing be calm, so that you don’t have to think about the breath at all. Now take a moment to listen to the sounds around you. Notice that in the instant that you tell your senses to listen, all of your thinking stops momentarily. The idea with this meditation is to gradually lengthen the amount of time that thinking naturally suspends by staying in a state of active listening. In the listening state, we are receptive and open, taking in auditory information through our senses. Almost instantly the mind starts naming the sounds we hear. Start to notice that, and let it go. Say to yourself, “I’m naming again.” And then come back to listening. 



Become even more acutely aware of any sound that enters your perception. Let curiosity be your guide, and stay interested in what arises. Don’t try to figure it out. There isn’t a right way to do this. There is only listening. 


The idea isn’t to stop the flow of thoughts altogether. This isn’t possible. The mind will keep thinking. That is its job. The idea is to become less attached to identifying with those thoughts. And in that process, the witness naturally grows stronger, and more familiar. Just remain in a state of active listening without naming as long as you are comfortable doing so. When you’re 

ready, open your eyes.