Shradda

Wikipedia defines Shradda this way:

Śrāddha (श्राद्ध, shraaddha), Hindu ritual performed for one's ancestors, especially dead parents
Śraddhā (श्रद्धा, shraddhaa), the Sanskrit term for "faith", in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

B.K.S. Iyengar, in his translation of the Yoga Sutra defines it this way:
"trust which comes from revelation, faith, confidence, reverence"

On the cusp of a new year and on the tail of a visit with family, I find myself leaning hard on the practice: shradda.

Occasionally, when I've been jumping into Bakasana B, but not landing it, because I was holding back, not really going for it, my teacher has said to me: "Shradda, Christine. Trust it."

Those are words I remind myself of over and over again. Shradda. Trust it.

There are big risks ahead. There have been days in the past weeks where I felt like I was drowning in uncertainty. Waves of fear and doubt were knocking me over. Doubt voiced by well-meaning people was swamping my confidence to the point where I felt knocked to the beach, eating sand.

A recent post on Deborah's blog touched a nerve as I was reminded that I have the opportunity to explore this relationship with fear, doubt, and trust daily. As she shares from her workshop with David Garrigues, second series is very much about risk-taking. It is not, however, blind risk-taking in a close-your-eyes-and-throw-yourself-over-the-cliff type of risk taking, but rather a practice in walking toward what you know you can do with eyes wide open...even when it scares you more than anything.

Yoga Sutra 1:20 says "Practice must be pursued with trust, confidence, vigour, keen memory and power of absorption to break this spiritual complacency." -Iyengar translation

...and I'm reminded that life, which the practice mirrors, must be pursued in the same way.
Shradda. Trust it.

Finding Strength

I've been thinking a lot about strength lately...especially since the fun Friday, where I joined in with people from all over the world and practiced with Sharath via live streaming video.

I've been doing the primary series for a while now....long enough that several years ago, it stopped feeling hard. There are still places in that series to work (Hello jump through and jump back!) and I imagine that there always will be work to do in primary if I look for it....but it doesn't feel hard like it did at the beginning.

I think the change in perception comes from two places. One, the obvious, I'm stronger and more flexible. I can move in and out of postures more efficiently and with less effort. The second reason that I suspect primary seems easier, is that I tend to compare it to the feelings I have practicing intermediate...which is a whole different kind of challenge.

...so back to Sharath's led class... Besides an odd missed count or two, there were two poses that really caught my attention when I was practicing along with the streaming. The first was headstand. The second was utpluthi. I noticed them both for the same reason. I realized as Sharath was counting that I don't usually stay in either of those poses for that long. Somewhere along the way, I had started cheating myself of chances to work on increasing strength, something I keep saying I want....interesting. As I was hanging out there in headstand, waiting for Sharath's voice to say I could come down, I noticed something. It's not that I'm not strong enough to stay there. Actually, I noticed, I am. What really happens is that my mind gets bored. Mentally, I start to wander off topic. I start thinking about breakfast, how late I am for work. I let the mind talk me into something it finds more exciting.

I'm noticing this is really the beauty and the challenge of intermediate series for me. It's building on the willingness, developed in primary, to stay and breathe where I'd rather not. In all the places in intermediate where I tend to "give up the pose early", it's really not the body that I'm wrestling with, it's the mind. Karandavasana is not so much about the strength to hold myself up, but more about having the mental willingness to lock the attention onto tiny shifts in balance for the duration of the pose and most importantly to keep it there. When the mind goes, the pose goes.

If I'm really working in my intermediate practice, then the series of poses added over the last couple years by my teacher, pincha mayurasana, karandavasana, mayurasana, and most recently nakrasana, produce a kind of mental anguish by the time I'm done. My body will feel good, very alive, nicely stretched, muscles gently sore...but my mind will feel like a wrung out sponge.

...just when I find that, physically, I'm getting stronger, it becomes clear that there are whole other dimensions of strength.

Think of Your Practice in Terms of Decades...

A student of Tim Miller's once said at a workshop that I was attending that Tim had advised her to think of her practice in terms of decades rather than in days or months.

It's been more than 10 years now since my first led Ashtanga class. I've been hanging on for about 9 years of regular practice; it's been a mix of Mysore classes and home practice. The biggest shift in that time has been a move from focus on the physical to focus on the mental. I found the primary series exhausting and daunting for a long time. I don't now. It's comfortable, familiar and soothing to my nervous system. On the one day a week that I practice primary now, it's a joy to do.

It's interesting to me that although the poses that present my daily challenge in the intermediate sequence ask increasing physical efforts from my body, it's really the mental challenge in this sequence that I find the hardest. Kapotasana is an intense, deep stretch, but it's really the mental challenge of convincing myself to go there and then to stay there that I wrestle with. It's much the same with Karandavasana. That pose asks so much strength from my body. The biggest challenge for me is staying with it and using all the strength that I have to do what I can. It is so easy to let the mind convince me that "I can't" and then give up and fall out before I really have to.

A similar shift has mirrored practice on the mat in my life off the mat. I started practice with a lot of physical irritation. I wasn't crazy about the body I was given and would have gladly traded it in for a different model. I felt glued to body image issues lingering from childhood and teenage years.
...and while there are still ghosts of that "stuff" that I notice from time to time, I am physically generally comfortable now.

The big lesson of the first decade for me seems to be: "when the body goes mostly quiet, you can really hear the mind...and it is LOUD!"

The primary series has done it's work and for the most part left me with less "physical white noise". Now I watch the second series push all my buttons and listen to my mind yell in protest. I can't wait to see what the next 10 years will bring. :)

Be Careful What You Wish For...

Yoga Sutras 2:7-10

"Pleasure leads to desire and emotional attachment. Unhappiness leads to hatred. Self-preservation or attachment to life is the subtlest of all afflictions. It is found even in wise men. Subtle afflictions are to be minimized and eradicated by a process of involution."
-translation by B.K.S. Iyengar

Backbends have returned to my body after a few months of being mia. For the moment the tug-of-war between comfortable leg-behind-head and comfortable backbends has reached a truce. Backbends are deep and the feeling of being in need the the tin man's oil can for my hip flexors has receded. Physically, practice feels good...but along with the physical practice comes the mental and emotional layers of practice.

In my body, the return of deep backbends has brought the return of backbend "stuff"....all the stuff that you hope you might not have to look at...until you open the body and there it all is, waiting for you. When my physical practice is comfortable, the challenges appear elsewhere.

The 4 sutras above from Yoga Sutra book 2 are a good summary of my week; I've been oscillating between attachment to pleasure, irritation, impatience, and feelings of self-preservation. It's nice to think that if Patanjali felt that these sutras were important enough to include, that I likely have lots of company here.
I like that the sutra that follows these suggests that moving beyond this "stuff" is a process. The word process suggests to me that this too will take time.

Knowing When to Eat the Cake...

Ashtanga yoga practice seems to have quietly, when I wasn't looking, rearranged my life. Others have noticed that it has happened to them as well. Slowly, habits change almost imperceptibly. Diet changes and sleeping patterns change. These might seem like obvious changes made to accommodate a strong physical practice....but lately I've noticed 2 new layers emerging.

First, I notice that while I'm inclined to stay with the patterns of diet and sleep that provide the most energy for morning practice, I'm not attached to them. Most of the time I'd rather minimize sugar and go to sleep early...but sometimes I'd really rather eat the cake with a complete acceptance of the after-effects of cake. If I was looking in from the perspective of someone who had never done this practice, I might expect it to, at some point, squash any desire for the "complete experience of cake" (literally and metaphorically speaking), but that is not what has happened. Instead, practice is slowly providing the space to see what I really want in a particular moment. It's increasing engagement with life (cake and all!) rather than avoidance of it.

Secondly, ...and I wonder if this is the influence of second series... I notice changes in relationship habits. New habits in relationship are emerging in the same way as lazy habits of choosing food without awareness were quietly subverted by practice and emerged as new habits of choosing food that is sustaining. As a self-described introvert (time to set the label aside perhaps?) habits in relating to the people who daily cross my path have, until recently, been sliding down a well-worn groove probably first carved out in my pre-teen years. Slowly, practice subverts what I thought I knew about myself. Layers peel off one by one and I am surprised by moments of openness and contentment.

Evolution of Practice

Fair warning this post is a bit rambling and mostly just a collage of thoughts about practice that have been tossing around in my mind.

My practice over the past few years has been an adventure, physically, emotionally, and mentally. I made the transition from primary practice to intermediate practice in the traditional way. My teacher added on one pose at a time making for a loooooong practice for a few years before my practice was "split". Those long practices opened me and drained me. I went through phases of "post-practice euphoria" (which I remember someone in the blogoshpere referring to as the "really good mood" side effects of second series...love that!). I went through phases of feeling "too open", a feeling of overwhelming vulnerability. I went through phases of feeling anxious, a kind of post-practice anxiety hum throughout the day.
Phew!! When they called the sequence "nerve-cleansing" they meant it.

When my teacher split my practice a year ago, practice seemed to shift into a new phase. At the same time my practice was split, my teacher suggested I do the newly shortened second series only practice with full vinyasa....all the way up to standing and back down between each pose. He also suggested I do it that way for 3 weeks before I decided how I felt about it...good call on his part. For 3 weeks, it felt really HARD! Every time I came up to standing, there was a wave of lightheadedness...it seems I had some breath work to do. By week 4, I loved the new practice. While there were still unsettling "nerve-cleansing" experiences, I felt like there was some ground underneath me again.

Practice seems to have shifted into a new phase once again. Strength has been slowly building to support the openness. Practice is feeling strangely steady and strong although it's now accompanied by a bit of unfamiliar tightness. I'm loving the new steadiness, but am interested to see whether this will be a short-lived phase or whether it will stick around awhile. :)

Yoga Sutra 2.4-2.5: What is Real?

Yoga Sutra 2.4-2.5:
"Lack of true knowledge is the source of all pains and sorrows whether dormant, attenuated, interrupted or fully active."

"Mistaking the transient for the permanent, the impure for the pure, pain for pleasure, and that which is not the self for the self: all this is called lack of spiritual knowledge, avidya."
-Iyengar translation

B.K.S. Iyengar says this in the commentary on 2.5:
"Naturally we make mistakes, but when through want of understanding, we fail to reappraise or reflect, error becomes a habit."


Thoughts:
This brings up a question in my mind. What is real and where has "error become a habit"? In what situations have I moved through with a fair try at equanimity and grace and when have I reacted out of habit instead of reflection?

These two sutras really parallel my asana practice at the moment. I'm finding that second series is a very different kind of work for me than primary. Second series asana practice is digging right in to every fear, vulnerability and insecurity. As layers of carefully constructed "self-protection" unravel, I'm asking these same questions more often. Am I that?...or is this a habit, another layer to peel off? Have I been mistaken avoidance of insecurities and vulnerabilities as strength?

It brings to my mind again the zen proverb on Beryl Bender Birch's website "Only when you can be extremely pliable and soft, can you be extremely hard and strong."

...Ah, lots of work to do here...

Thoughts on "Heart-opening", Vulnerability, and the Ashtanga Intermediate Series

There has been some discussion lately among yoga practitioner friends and colleagues about "heart-opening". I've been a sceptic when it comes to the experience of "heart-opening". All the talk has sounded an awful lot like new age babble to me. The way I have often heard heart-opening described sounded just a little too easy to me. You just stretched the "heart-center" (chest area) and suddenly you were a warm accepting person. In my experience, if it's that easy, then it's not for real.

After a few years of practice in the Ashtanga primary series, I was willing to concede that some emotion was stored in the body. Anger and general stress show up in my body as overall muscle tension...especially in the jaw and shoulders. If I head into my yoga practice still mentally holding on to anger, then I find it very difficult to release the "activity" in any of the muscles. In my body, anger = tight!

Over the past couple years, as I make the transition from primary series practice to second series, I am slowly being convinced of the reality of heart-opening...though not quite in the way it is often described. Heart-opening cannot be coerced or forced. It happens or doesn't like everything else in practice. It's not a warm and fuzzy feeling either. It is intense, uncomfortable, exhilarating, and sometimes downright scary.

What is slowly coming out of second series practice is a willingness to suspend my disbelief. This practice, if I am to do it fully, asks that I be both willing to be vulnerable and willing to move toward fear. This, I think, may be the seed of heart-opening.

There are days when I feel like the intermediate sequence asks too much of me. When life stuff is at its most daunting, there is a feeling of "walking the plank" as I move into that first backbend. I have to make a conscious choice to be willing to open up the body physically which does, as it turns out, also require that I mentally and emotionally open up. If I try to hold back mentally and emotionally, then the muscles themselves will also resist. It seems they are, after all, connected.

Years of practice have created a foundation of trust in this practice and in my teachers. It is this that has allowed for an increasing openness in all aspects of practice on the mat.

The next adventure...watch to see how this will translate off the mat!