I've always loved yoga's approach to the conditioning of one's state of mind, but my fascination was recently refreshed when my husband and I went to see three nights of music in Miami over the holidays. We spent our days quiet and blissful, walking on the beach, watching the people and the waves, and we filled our nights with the kind of music that swept us up, body and mind, and just let us hang-glide in the bliss of music that made us dance and laugh, throw up our hands and scream with the pleasure of deeply felt, celebratory music. And, as we hung there, that state of mind started to become more familiar, broken-in, and so much easier to find in the days that followed, like a favorite spot in the woods whose path just needs to be re-beaten every now and again.
It was my most tangible experience in a while of the yogic practice of familiarizing oneself with bliss. If yoga means balance, then vacation, time in nature, time with music and beauty that feeds our souls, all serve to balance our daily business-doing state of mind with its complete opposite: reminding us how to play, and beating open the path to the parts of our brains where we are still children, innocent, open, curious and ready to play.
In yogic philosophy, samskara is the term used to refer to states of mind that become habitual. It is a fact with which every practicioner of yoga (and every conscious liv-er of life) will eventually contend. Samskara can be thought of as the ruts in a road when wagon wheels keep finding the same path to drive on, until they are deep and nearly impossible for future wheels not to settle into. Samskara, from the words "sam", meaning same and "skara", meaning action, refers to the habits of thought that just become the familiar way our brain works, until that sameness starts to feel to us like wisdom... instinct... when all it is, for better or worse, is simple, blind habit.
Throughout our lives, our brains are remaking themselves, just like our bodies are, in order to make themselves optimal for the tasks that are required of them. So, when what we experience day after day is stressful, drama-driven and chaotic, then that is the state to which our minds most readily default, even to the point that they are so much more comfortable with drama that they will find it even where it does not exist. Conversely, when we make a practice of finding and lingering in bliss.... or at least in peace as a mid-point to bliss... that state is easier to find the next time we are in need of it.
In yogic meditation, mental ruts are what mantras are created to address, every time we exhale. Poetry, scripture, song lyrics, quotes from favorite books or people... anything that ushers your mind into a state of calm, hopefulness, benevolence, gratitude. It's also soothing just to meditate on breath itself: inhaling strength, exhaling tension; inhaling joy, exhaling frustration; inhaling light, exhaling dark. When we are finally able to rest in a mantra, our bodies respond the same way they do to things like laughter and celebration: we become more alkaline, and so less prone to inflammation, our parasympathetic nervous system engages to lower our blood pressure, and we release even our deep, habitual tension.
In asana yoga, have you ever changed your whole state of mind just by adopting an open-hearted, exuberant posture, and breathing deeply into the extension, just taking up space? Since we throw our faces to heaven and our hearts open in moments of exuberance, our bodies can effect the same change inversely, reminding our minds of the path back to the state of mind that has inspired that posture before.
I'll write more in the future about learning mental quiet, but I can't leave this subject without also inviting comment on the off-the-mat mental peace that grows out of the same mindfulness we practice on the mat when we are finally able to rest in a difficult posture. When we can be both calm and challenged at the same time, when we can keep our breath relaxed and joyful while our bodies are working, we are learning to let our calm exist next to our discomfort: to observe the work without reacting to it and losing our peace. Then is when whole-body transformation takes place. The muscles we are trying to strengthen can finally take responsibility for the work that is theirs, and the muscles that have been straining under habitual tension can melt into the breath.
Our bodies have the potential to be powerful teachers for our minds, and our minds for our bodies. Just like practicing a difficult pose strengthens our bodies' ability to be there, practicing a positive state of mind strengthens our minds' ability to be there. I'd love to hear how you as practicioners learn to be familiar with the state of mind that allows both effort and surrender, strength and ease, focus and adventurous play. May that be the mental posture from which we move into the moments in life when we know we need to establish a new pattern: cultivate a new strength, let go of a habitual tension, compose a new mantra, and just breathe the bliss!
Namaste!
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
Baby's First Blog
Never having had a blog before, but having kept many diaries -- under various more sophisticated-sounding psuedonyms, and to varying degrees of usefulness for venting, dreaming, envisioning and romanticizing -- I would like to approach keeping a blog in very much the same way, with the exception that this blog is meant to allow venting, dreaming, envisioning and yes, perhaps the tiniest amount of romanticizing on the topic of yoga very specifically.
The beautiful thing about yoga, however, is that it is a practice by which our body and our breath -- the things with us more constantly than any frame of mind or resolution to a certain philosophy -- become teachers that permeate every moment. So, every moment is an opportunity to learn, and every activity is a teacher, so every detail of life is fair game for a blog about yoga!
I'll use this first post to explain the reason for the blog's name: Practical Grace. Grace has been a favorite idea of mine ever since I learned as a little girl that in addition to referring to the kind of strong, fluid ease of movement we strove to create in dance classes, it is also the undeserved, unearned kindness we receive from our Creator. There are graces all around us: the beauty of nature, the kindness of the people who love us (and who don't), and the circumstances that nurture us even when we know we are undeserving of such nurture. It was a part of that childhood lesson as well, that as creatures showered with graces, we are meant to extend that same grace to the people we encounter -- never seeking vengeance, being kind to the unlovable, and forgiving even when it is hard.
As practicioners of yoga, we are taught to meet our bodies with grace, as well, and here is where grace becomes practical, and practice-able. We are taught to meet our bodies in just the state they are in this day, and to breathe with gratitude right there. Then and only then is the progress we make genuine and sustainable. Vinyasa krama is the sanskrit term for taking the right step at the right time, when our bodies are ready to take the next step, moving deeper into the potential of our bodies as they open and grow strong. As a dancer in background, I am quite familiar with the approach to a body that simply insists, pushes, demands to the point of damaging a body rather than honoring it as a vessel that has the potential to carry us into old age with all the strength, ease and fluidity of our youth.
The definition of forgiveness I have always liked best is relinquishing the right to hurt the person who has injured us. We don't have to say that what they did was not wrong, we simply leave their fate in the hands of God, or Karma, instead of punishing them with our own actions. So, as we approach our bodies with grace, we must leave out of our approach any grudges we may have against them... our frustrations with shape, range of motion, injury, must all dissolve with our slow, relaxed exhales. We must practice, as intently as we practice our breath and our posture, meeting our bodies with undeserved, unearned kindness, forgiveness, patience and even, when we are quite grown up, gratitude.
May that be the place from which I always teach, and may it be the lesson my students most internalize into their own yogic journeys. Namaste.
The beautiful thing about yoga, however, is that it is a practice by which our body and our breath -- the things with us more constantly than any frame of mind or resolution to a certain philosophy -- become teachers that permeate every moment. So, every moment is an opportunity to learn, and every activity is a teacher, so every detail of life is fair game for a blog about yoga!
I'll use this first post to explain the reason for the blog's name: Practical Grace. Grace has been a favorite idea of mine ever since I learned as a little girl that in addition to referring to the kind of strong, fluid ease of movement we strove to create in dance classes, it is also the undeserved, unearned kindness we receive from our Creator. There are graces all around us: the beauty of nature, the kindness of the people who love us (and who don't), and the circumstances that nurture us even when we know we are undeserving of such nurture. It was a part of that childhood lesson as well, that as creatures showered with graces, we are meant to extend that same grace to the people we encounter -- never seeking vengeance, being kind to the unlovable, and forgiving even when it is hard.
As practicioners of yoga, we are taught to meet our bodies with grace, as well, and here is where grace becomes practical, and practice-able. We are taught to meet our bodies in just the state they are in this day, and to breathe with gratitude right there. Then and only then is the progress we make genuine and sustainable. Vinyasa krama is the sanskrit term for taking the right step at the right time, when our bodies are ready to take the next step, moving deeper into the potential of our bodies as they open and grow strong. As a dancer in background, I am quite familiar with the approach to a body that simply insists, pushes, demands to the point of damaging a body rather than honoring it as a vessel that has the potential to carry us into old age with all the strength, ease and fluidity of our youth.
The definition of forgiveness I have always liked best is relinquishing the right to hurt the person who has injured us. We don't have to say that what they did was not wrong, we simply leave their fate in the hands of God, or Karma, instead of punishing them with our own actions. So, as we approach our bodies with grace, we must leave out of our approach any grudges we may have against them... our frustrations with shape, range of motion, injury, must all dissolve with our slow, relaxed exhales. We must practice, as intently as we practice our breath and our posture, meeting our bodies with undeserved, unearned kindness, forgiveness, patience and even, when we are quite grown up, gratitude.
May that be the place from which I always teach, and may it be the lesson my students most internalize into their own yogic journeys. Namaste.
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