Tag Archives: Yoga

A Beautiful Place To Do Yoga, Even Alone: Everyday Magic, Day 405

Posted on September 8, 2011 | 3 Comments

Yesterday I rushed to Westside Yoga for my first class, hauling my computer and speakers and big pile of laminated poems. Strangely enough, no one else was there early……or on time for the class…..or even late.

At first, I was puzzled, even to the point of checking that I was there on the right day and at the right time. Then I realized why I was confused because of an immense blessing over the last 20 years. All my writing workshops have, for the most part, gone off without a hitch. People always showed up (and often early, holding the door open for me as I carried in supplies). I’m simply not used to being the only one in the class.

So I did what any sensible person would have done: yoga. I also wrote a little bit, and put the music up high so I could dance around the room. This yoga studio is a beautiful place to be with a bamboo springy floor, high ceilings, and big windows overlooking the field and woods. The air is light, the light makes the whole room glow, and there are lovely touches around the edges (like a small stone shaped exactly like a heart on a window sill). Who wouldn’t want to be here?

Obviously, at least some people, but I tell myself that this is a fairly new studio on the westside of town where most people don’t go to do yoga, and we’re all quite young in this endeavor. I also tell myself I will keep showing up, keeping putting out the word, and if what I’m offering is reaching people at the right time in their lives, they will come…….if not, I have no reason to doubt what I already know: doing yoga with intermissions of writing is a great combination. By the end of a session, we will not only have gotten a good workout, come home to our breath, stretched and strengthened our limbs and core, but also written some words on the page that speak of who we are, what we need, how we see the unfolding world.

Meanwhile, I will be there next week and the next at 5:15 on Wednesday. If you’re around, come join me, and let’s see what we can explore and celebrate in this beautiful place.

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Health

Tagged , ,

First Day of Being a Yoga Teacher: Everyday Magic, Day 404

Posted on September 7, 2011 | 2 Comments

Does this look like a yoga teacher to you? Maybe not, but let's just go with it.

For some years, I’ve been a writing teacher who incorporated yoga occasionally, but today, I begin my life as a yoga teacher who brings in writing. Waking up, I felt like I was about to start Kindergarten, but instead of a Cinderella lunchbox, I shimmeyed into my new exercise camisole and yoga pants. I feel excited. I feel a little nervous. I feel like I’m ready to walk to the curb and wait for the yoga school bus to scoop me up.

I also feel indebted to Linda Blackburn, my therapist (who has since moved to the Northwest) who, when hearing me say, “I know this sounds crazy, but I want to be a yoga teacher,” didn’t burst out laughing, but instead answered, “Of course you do.” That response, plus the support of friends — none of whom voiced the parade of self-doubt ticker-taping across my brain (“You’re too fat. You’re too old. You don’t look good in spandex’) — made it possible for me to simply follow where I was led.

And where was I led? After months of exploring teacher training options, I had a dream that I was visiting with one of my yoga teachers, Gopi Sandal, in a London loft, near where she learned yoga. She was showing me a picture of a yogi, then saying he was her teacher. “You’re my teacher,” I told her, and when I woke, I knew she was the one I would train with, so no surprise that a few months later, when she announced her first teacher training class, I signed up without a second thought.

Avoiding second thoughts is key here. There’s no rhyme or reason for a woman who can barely touch her toes and finds being still extremely challenging to pursue yoga, but yoga pursued me, which is to say that what yoga means — yoking, connecting — unfurled like a lily on the the water. I knew what Gopi said was true: that lily was inside me too, and beholding it opened up the heart of my life.

So here I go, ready to lead other people in doing what has been one of the hardest and most beautiful things for me. If you’re local, come join me at 5:15 at Westside Yoga.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in Spirituality

Tagged , ,

Choosing Yoga Over Typer Shark: Everyday Magic, Day 171

Posted on January 5, 2011 | 1 Comment

For years, I couldn’t understand what my kids saw in playing video games into oblivion, but then — just recently — I discovered Typer Shark. Turns out I was born to type very fast, killing sharks filled with words as they speed across the screen. And the better I got at Typer Shark, the longer the game. Earlier today, when I meant to do yoga, I found myself playing Typer Shark for 40 minutes instead (until, as is inevitable, the sharks got me).

What’s more disturbing is that as I played, I felt this frenzy take me over, wanting to keep going until I could get to the next level. My shoulders tensed, my eyes popped wide, my mouth got dry. What the heck was happening, and why was I still playing when obviously, this wasn’t a great way to relax or do anything of value? Besides, Ken is sure that the more sharks I kill, the more our oceans suffer.

So later today, with just 40 minutes between this and that, I rolled out the yoga mat instead. “You could play a quick game of Typer Shark” the shark-shaped devil in me whispered. “You could breathe yourself into health and nirvana,” the sweet but somewhat exaggerating yoga angel whispered. I let the angel win.

There are millions of diversions and distractions from showing up right where we are, and I’m as prone to rushing away from any given moment to waste my energies as the next person (maybe more so). But sometimes we have to listen to the more expansive angels of our nature rather than the quick-typing sharks, and at least for the last hour, the sharks lived. (Bottom picture: one of my yoga teachers, Gopi, making a very scary face, but hey, that’s yoga too!)

Second helpings:

Back to the Mat

The End is the Beginning

Yoga and Coffee

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Health

Tagged , ,

Writing Your Year Anew: Arrivals, Departures & Your Own Best Life: Everyday Magic, Day 164

Posted on December 29, 2010 | 3 Comments

Listen to a live podcast of this column here!

As 2010 dwindles down, I wanted to share a column I wrote for The Magazine of Yoga on what we want to invite in, release, mourn and celebrate in light of a new year. Please check this out, and also look at other inspiring articles in this lovely (free and freeing) on-line journal

→ 3 Comments

Posted in Magic

Tagged ,

Back to the Mat: Everyday Magic, Day 88

Posted on October 14, 2010 | 1 Comment

Today I jumped out of bed — well, not really jumped, more like rolled and crawled — and drank a quick cup of coffee in the bathtub, then aimed myself toward yoga class, telling myself, “no more excuses, just go.” So I went.

I love yoga, but between the recent travels, little enticements at home, addictive work and here-and-there-ness of my life, I’ve managed to miss going to a class for two weeks, which is not my life plan right now. Okay, so I did get a bunch of stuff done, but then again, I find it much easier to write for hours at this little computer than to turn myself upside down in downward dog even though I know how much I need the dog.

Bending and stretching, reaching and dropping, feeling the stretch in my legs and also the wobbly tiredness through my limbs, I felt good. I knew I was doing what I needed to do not just for my body, but for this mind that will keep spinning out movies and sit-coms of its own for hours, left to its own devices. Lying in the dark in corpse pose at the end, I felt like I had come home for the first time in weeks. “Stay,” I told myself. Then do it all over again.

→ 1 Comment

Tagged

Yoga Graduation Day!: Everyday Magic, Day 66

Posted on September 20, 2010 | 1 Comment

Today I graduated with 15 other women from a year-long yoga teacher training certification. Under the warm guidance of Gopi Sandal, our yoga teacher, and immersed in the deep wells of love and humor we created together in our group, we have sun salutationed and pranayama-ed and anatomy-studied our way through the seasons. The umbrella of yoga we did, were and learned was Bhaktivana Yoga, the yoga of devotion and the yoga of being fully engaged in the world, and along the way we learned about everything from soup (along with how to make all kinds of other things) to nuts (if you consider some of the more esoteric yogic practices). Mostly, we studied the practice of yoga as life practice: a way to continually bend and reach yourself toward the divine in concert with your body, community, thoughts and deeds.

Unlike a typical graduation, there were no caps or gowns, just yoga clothes, and instead of processing, we stuck our butts in the air in downward dog, and then crawled on the ground and arched ourselves into cobra. In fact, we did a whole yoga class, complete with highly-entertaining partner yoga. After climbing, sitting and leaning on one another all year, it was all homecoming.

After class, we gathered in Gopi’s living room with friends and family present for her to present a certificate to and say something about each of us (turns out I’m a warrior of truth and a spunky rebel girl) as we lit a candle and wrapped ourselves in the energy of the moment. Everyone was shining.

Then it was time to eat, and in keeping with our intentional confusion of the words chakra and chocolate throughout this training, we had a chakrolate cake (and yes, I did break my no-chocolate vow because it just would have been so wrong not to) along with much else. As has been the case each month during our meals at Gopi’s together, there were kittens to delight in and bump away from our plates, peacocks staring at us with that wry peacock stare, and the oxen, including one I love so much that I whispered to Becky, “My boyfriend’s back.”

Leaving didn’t feel like leaving for many reasons, not the least of which was that I’ll be heading out to Gopi’s tomorrow for yoga class and seeing these gals around. Yet it also was leaving an intensive study and making of community and stretching our bodies while expanding our hearts together in just this way. Over the year, I found our monthly 16-hours-of-class weekends thrilling and exhausting (although thank heavens we usually had naptime), waking me up in new ways while wiping me out in others. But I know this time we made and had together was precious and is now over in just this configuration of people and intent.

Whatever happens next, I’ve learned so much more about how to bend myself toward it, center my breath, and lean into the beauty of life however it unfolds — like a lily in the center in the my heart or thunderstorm in the center of the sky. Thank you, Gopi, and thank you yoginis — I love you all and to paraphrase e.e. cummings, I carry your hearts in my heart.

(Note: Photo of a collaged box? This is what we as a group made for Gopi and gave her, filling it with gifts. The collage holds images we love and also a bunch of pictures of our group over the year.)

→ 1 Comment

Tagged ,

The End is the Beginning: Everyday Magic, Day Five

Posted on July 18, 2010 | 1 Comment

I just walked in after my last class of yoga teaching training, finishing a year of one weekend each month devoted to doing yoga, studying anatomy, chopping vegetables while singing kirtan (call and response chanting), puzzling over The Bhagavadita and Yoga Sutras, and talking a lot about how to teach a spiritual practice. While there are many pages I could fill talking about how beautiful it was to be a group of vibrant women covering a wide span of years and to follow the lead our gifted teacher, Gopi Sandal — not to mention coming to experience how Bhakti yoga — the yoga of devotion — unfolded in my life, for now I just want to say something about endings.

All weekend, I knew this was the ending: This particular group of women meeting for 16 hours each month, these places where we met (at Gopi’s home and mostly at the Holiday Inn Express, dubbed the Holy Day Inn), this exact configuration of hotter-than-hell humidity and very large cucumbers and vibrant tomatoes punctuating our meals today, these moments we spent breathing together in Corpse pose or doing Sun Salutations in tandem. There was a bittersweet undercurrent that made our ordinary work together a little shinier, a little sadder, a lot more vivid. I told myself to pay attention to these moments as they unfolded, and such attention also brought to each moment more of its innate weight and greater lightness too. I found myself laughing and crying more easily, resting deeper, stretching further.

At the same time, as we lay in a circle at the end — our heads touching or almost touching in the center of the circle we made — I was also cognizant how this is the beginning of whatever is next: in our individual yoga practices, in our occasional ways we’ll do yoga together, in our connections when we run into each other in the parking lot of the Merc (our local food co-op) or on facebook. Just as yoga itself brings us back to the beginning — the beginning of the breath, the beginning of the open space in the mind when we lift over the steady noise of our thoughts, the beginning of not knowing, and the beginning of knowing in our bones and muscles how to reach past our previous limits and land in new strength and flexibility — so do the passages we make with good company. Together we’ve passed through a year of edges, in the weather, in each other’s lives, in our understandings, in our motions and stillness.

Not so surprisingly, signs of beginnings abound, particularly in seeing the small pea chicks at Gopi’s, just born a few days ago and guarded by a tired but attentive peahen and strutting peacock. All year long, we’ve been enamored with these birds who were very timely with their calls and perching outside the living room window at key points of discussion on yoga philosophy. Now there are more than two of them, including one new one with an injured leg for whom we wish quick healing and easy walking. After all, he’s just at the beginning of his own awakening, and like us, he’s ready to discover what life has to say to him next.

Gopi Sandal’s next teacher training class starts in Sept. — contact her through Bhaktivana Yoga if you’re interested, or just come join me at yoga there sometime. Top photo by Aly Youngster.

→ 1 Comment

Tagged , ,

Yoga & Coffee: Everyday Magic, Day Four

Posted on July 17, 2010 | 1 Comment

Sometimes things that normally don’t seem to go together actually were made for each other: cruise control and books on tape (or else, as I can well testify, beware speeding tickets or running out of gas), power naps and very hot or very cold afternoons, and yoga and coffee. While the last combination might make one a bit jittery, it’s the perfect way as I can tell to start the day, and not just coffee, but very good, just-ground coffee mixed with chocolate or vanilla almond milk and a touch of hazelnut agave. It’s the perfect breakfast food, an extension of sorts of the old Carnation instant breakfast drinks I downed on my way to high school back in the last century, but perhaps even better. I mean, there’s caffeine, chocolate, protein and sweetness not to mention the aromotherapy effects of brewing the coffee.

Then there’s the yoga. Today I drove to the Holiday Inn Express of all places for the final Saturday of my year-long yoga teacher training. Sitting on my mat in a circle with the 16 other women I’ve come to love and find great inspiration from, I alternately chanted Hare Krishna variation and sipped my coffee concoction. I had woken up feeling too tired to even imagine a downward-facing dog, and still a wee bit shaky from being a wee bit sick, but by the time I finished chanting, drinking coffee, and moving through a few sun salutations, I felt ready to burst out in “Oh, what a beautiful morning!” Lucky for my classmates, we were aiming ourselves into warrior poses instead, which funneled the sudden and alert magic of the moment for me through my extending arms and strengthening legs.

As I prepared to lift five or six bags of yoga books and props, including my mat and bolster, a friend came up to me, pointed to my empty jar, and said, “Please bring one for me tomorrow.” I nodded as we both giggled over the mutual magic we know of, and told her, “Absolutely.”

→ 1 Comment

Tagged

In the Batcave Doing Yoga

Posted on January 16, 2009 | 2 Comments

Today I hung upside down — a bat in a line of other bats. It was my first time doing this pose (see picture on right although I didn’t look quite as poised as this woman, and also, not quite as happy as the bat on the left). Still, I was thrilled. I was also terrified. As I hung there, after my very gracious yoga teacher for this class — Anne Underwood — helped me jump, pull myself up and climb into this inversion — I felt waves of panic. What if I fell and broke my neck? What if the ropes didn’t hold? What if I just freaked out in front of everybody?

As usual, I countered the fear by telling myself, “breathe, breathe, breathe.” Each asana, each breath, is a continual way to come home to my body, and to re-program how I inhabit my own body.

This month, I’m doing YoMo through the Yoga Center of Lawrence , a commitment to do yoga everyday through January. A few days ago, when I had a virus, I wondered if a prolonged time in corpse pose would count (“Hell, yes,” said Kelley), and some days I feel myself stretching, reaching, almost soaring through Sun Salutation. Often it’s just the old struggle: how to try my hardest without putting so much effort into trying that I make the pose hard. Today, at least, I found a way to hang. And in the hanging, there was no such thing as trying too hard or not hard enough. There was just the support of the wall, ropes, and Anne, the strength of my body, and the beauty of gravity. The hard part was surrendering to it all. Now that I’m upright, I want to do it all over again.

→ 2 Comments

Tagged

When Downward Dog Goes to the Dogs

Posted on September 3, 2008 | Comments Off

After a solid week of ecstasy over my realization that I was truly in love with yoga, the small punctures of self-doubt deflated my starting-to-soar mind. Luckily, my body is still a happy horse, although one that seems to be trotting or even walking slowly at times instead of galloping. I’m still going to yoga daily, and I’m still reading, watching yoga videos, and often — when standing in line or talking on the phone — doing some simple balance poses. But I’m also encountering my original response to yoga: it’s just hard for me.

It’s hard for me to get into some poses. It’s hard for me to hold some poses. It’s hard to remember to breathe. It’s hard to get down. And it’s hard to stand back up. At each class, I find myself going through a tragicomedy of emotions, starting with the thrill to being ready to go again, tthe surprise at how unflexible I became overnight, the trembling and hard breathing and onslaught of doubt (occasionally interrupted by looking at people around me step wider, bend lowerand reach higher), the reprimand not to compare myself to others, the second wave of doubt about becoming a teacher, and then — usually in the middle of Corpse Pose — a slow chime of joy that’s so exquisite at times that it’s all I can do not to cry on my mat.

I realize too how choking and hot this doubt can be — the same kind of doubt that has plagued many students I’ve worked with over the years about their desire to write and call themselves writers. While tabletop (a pose) and forward bends might come easy to some (but not me), writing always came easy to me. Yet whoever we are, and whatever we do, to practice an art is to bring yourself to your edge, breathe, relax and dwell there however long it’s healthy and productive, and then exhale slowly and stand back up.

I tell myself this while holding downward dog (a supposed rest pose that’s always been more like running a marathon for me). I also tell myself that like any good practice, I’m just showing up, trying to cultivate curiosity and drop judgment, and find greater compassion for living in a body, this body, forward-bended or stretched out, upside down or back on its feet.

Pictures: Me doing Downward Dog-With-Photography-Variation; other — someone on the internet I found doing Downward Dog.

Comments Off

Tagged ,