Resistance is Useless!

"Resistance is useless!"
-The Vogons

Wrapping up a series of thoughts on why I practice and on the gratitude I feel for all that surrounds the practice...

Similes and metaphors abound as we try to describe how and why the practice works. My current experience in practice is shining some light on my physical body as a manifestation of all that takes place in the mental and emotional body.

With each day that we wake up and live our lives, we create patterns, habits, and tendencies. They show up physically even when we are unaware of them or choose to be unaware of them.

Sharath has been quoted quite a bit recently about the importance of starting a yoga practice with asana....and just maybe I am finally starting to understand viscerally what that is all about.

Practice, done with raw honesty, makes us aware.

And then: we have a choice. Change the patterns, habits and the tendencies or face the very physical consequences.

Although practice does have a way of bringing things out and up at a rate that we are capable of working with them, it is still often deeply uncomfortable. I'm finding that a mental and emotional tug-of-war is being reflected physically, as if practice itself is echoing Tim Miller, "Avoidance is not the answer."

I can twist the emotional and mental thoughts that arise to mean anything I'd like. I can create stories that allow complete avoidance of all that arises mentally.

But physically, I can't get away.

That the yoga practice starts with the physical to address everything else is genius. It makes perfect sense.

And for that, I am painfully grateful.

Mind Chatter

The physical part of practice is quiet. No doubt there are subtle changes simmering under the surface, but at the moment I'm enjoying the plateau. Breath has been steady and I'm finding myself moving through the practice savoring the familiarity.

I think of the Ashtanga practice as a lot like that venomous tentacula vine from the Harry Potter books. If I just sit quietly for a minute, I find that the practice has started working it's tendrils in everywhere. While I'm busy keeping my eyes on asana practice, the practice itself is twining itself up all of life off the mat.

The practice of "noticing" is making its way into the rest of my day to a greater and greater extent. I find myself in practice noticing a sort of under-the-surface chatter even though the asana and the breath feel quiet. The quieter the physical aspect is, the louder the mind sounds. The awareness of a seeming constant buzz of thoughts, anxiety, and discomfort with being truly still is making itself heard off and on during the rest of my day.

I find that I don't quite know what to do with it. Sometimes, just the awareness that it's there is enough to quiet the buzzing of mind chatter a bit and sometimes it's not.

Karandavasana

...so a pose post for a change...

I've been working on karandavasana for a couple years now and I'm really coming to love this pose, not of course because I do it with any special amount of grace. I definitely don't. I'm learning to love it because of the kind of work that it asks for.

The more days that go by as I practice this pose, the more aware I am of where my work is and where it is not. The physical strength to do the pose is building slowly and is becoming a little more accessible each day, but really I've been content to wait for it. I'm not one for a lot of extracurricular preps in order to "get" a pose. I'm more apt to just make a couple attempts in each practice and then move on....a sign of laziness perhaps, but that is where my practice sits at the moment.

The work that has me especially intrigued with karandavasana at the moment is not the physical work. The longer I do this pose, the more I see how much of this is in my mind. It fascinates me to step back and watch the mental processes change and evolve each day as I approach this pose. If I am going to take the pose as far as I can physically on my own without any assist from a teacher, I absolutely can't let the mind leave the present moment. As soon as I think one step ahead of where I am physically, the pose is gone. If I think about making the lotus while jumping into Pincha position, I go right over into a backbend. If I think about landing the lotus while I'm trying to move the legs into lotus, I fall out with no lotus.

It fascinates me and amuses me to watch the mind get bored and try to rush the process each time. I can almost hear it: "Are we still doing this pose? Why is this taking so long? This is too slow; let's move on to something more exciting."

When I finish karandavasana, I can almost feel the mental strength building...like chaturangas for the mind

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.

Yoga Dreams...

I had a dream last night about mayurasana. In the dream I was doing the pose (in real life, not so much). I woke up with my arms pinned underneath me and every muscle squeezed tight.

...good to know that I'm working on my challenging poses even in my sleep...

...bad to know that apparently my mind is a little obsessed with this one...

Being a Student...

I'm spending the week practicing with my teacher.....ahhhhh. There is just no substitute for time with your own teacher.
It makes for some intense practices when the opportunities arise only a couple times a year though.
Today's practice may have set a record for the number of times I looked up at my teacher during practice with a look that said: "Are you insane?!"...and then proceeded to put my best effort towards whatever seemly crazy request was being made.

That is of course why I have a teacher. :-)

Yoga Sutra 2.18-2.25: Moving the Viewfinder

Yoga Sutras 2.18 - 2.25:

"Nature, its three qualities, sattva, rajas and tamas, and its evolutes, the elements, mind, senses of perception and organs of action, exist eternally to serve the seer, for enjoyment or emancipation. The gunas generate their characteristic divisions and energies in the seer. Their stages are distinguishable and non-distinguishable, differentiable and non-differentiable. The seer is pure consciousness. He witnesses nature without being reliant on it. Nature and intelligence exist solely to serve the seer's true purpose, emancipation. The relationship with nature ceases for emancipated beings, its purpose having been fulfilled, but its processes continue to affect others. The conjunction of the seer with the seen is for the seer to discover his own true nature. Lack of spiritual understanding (avidya) is the cause of the false identification of the seer with the seen.
The destruction of ignorance through right knowledge breaks the link binding the seer to the seen. This is kaivalya, emancipation."

-translation by B.K. S. Iyengar

Thoughts:
This is a big chunk of Yoga Sutra for a single blog post, but as they all sound to me to be moving towards the same point I thought I'd just post this whole section.

What I'm hearing from this section of the Yoga Sutra:
I need the world to push against. I need all the things that irritate me and frustrate me and amuse me and impress me. I need something to be attached to in order to catch myself in a moment of attachment and get a glimpse of what that looks like. It's in knowing what attachment looks like that I can begin to see what non-attachment looks like. Practice has given me a method of really hearing how loud the world in and outside my mind is. It's only now that I know what the noise sounds like, that I notice when it's missing, when it's gone quiet.

"The conjunction of the seer with the seen is for the seer to discover his own true nature."

Something I that catches my attention throughout the Yoga Sutra that is echoed again here is Patanjali's suggestion that this non-attachment is a process. He does suggest that disentangling ourselves from all the stickiness is possible, but also seems to suggest that we won't learn to step out of our "relationship with nature" until we have spent some time tangled up in the web of defining ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in.

"The relationship with nature ceases for emancipated beings, its purpose having been fulfilled, but its processes continue to affect others."

I notice a sort of back and forth in life of feeling more deeply tangled in situations as they arise and then feeling space from them. Much of the feeling has to do I think, with where I'm standing when I look at life stuff. Moving the viewfinder has a lot to do with what I see and how caught up I feel in "nature" versus how much space I feel.

A great recent post by Patrick got me thinking more about what happens when you stand somewhere else.
Here's an excerpt:
"Nurture's not easy if you're a boy, especially if you're one with good exposure to gender politics. Obviously, nurture is marked feminine in this culture. I was having lunch last week in the campus center and sitting near a table of about eight college guys: sporty, trendy, loud. The energy coming off them, the sheer extroverted testosterone, was absolutely tactile, touchable, visible. Instinctively, I didn't care for it, because those guys mocked me for years when I was in my teens, but then I re-looked at them, imagined them as guys who'd maybe gotten curious about the US yoga trend and walked into my room. And that changed everything; they became powerful bodies with curiosity, with shyness, and immediately I developed a sort of intimate empathy with them. Just to play with it, I let my view switch from one to the other, reinventing the human beings in front of me by means of different lenses. Then it became very funny and amusing and I turned someone that I used to be, into a tool in my toolkit."

I love that! What if the next time I feel stuck, when I feel absolutely glued to one definition of a situation, what if I just stood somewhere else?

"The destruction of ignorance through right knowledge breaks the link binding the seer to the seen. This is kaivalya, emancipation."

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. :)

Yoga Sutras 2.12-2.17...the Grinchmas Edition

Haven't posted much on the Yoga Sutras recently, so here's a section to ponder on...

Yoga Sutras 2.12-2.17
The accumulated imprints of past lives, rooted in afflictions, will be experienced in present and future lives. As long as the root of actions exists, it will give rise to class of birth, span of life and experiences. The wise man knows that owing to fluctuations, the qualities of nature, and subliminal impressions, even pleasant experiences are tinged with sorrows, and he keeps aloof from them. The pains which are yet to come can be and are to be avoided. The cause of pain is the association or identification of the seer (atma) with the seen (prakrti) and the remedy lies in their dissociation.
-Iyengar translation

Thoughts:
This is definitely a time of year when I have difficulty getting off the hamster wheel...so to speak. I leave most family gatherings feeling insecure, full of self-doubt and just generally picked on. As the lone liberal yoga teacher, field biologist and vegetarian of the family, I do stand out...despite efforts to stay quietly in the background. The rest of the family have sensible stable jobs mostly having to do with either numbers or computers. "The holidays" leave me with that panicky feeling that you might get in a cave if you were afraid of enclosed spaces or on the edge of the Grand Canyon if you were afraid of heights. I have the urge to bolt and hide from all things "holiday" related until the whole business is over. Those who of you who love this time of year can feel totally free to think I'm terrible person...I understand.

How much of what I feel at this time of year is a mental and physical response to a pattern set off by a date on a calendar that I allow myself to respond to without pause....maybe not an "imprint of past lives", but an imprint of past decades for sure. Patanjali seems to me to suggest, that if I don't change the pattern, I'm doomed to repeat it, Groundhog's Day style, for a long time.

It reminds me of a great recent post by Claudia talking about our chances to pause and make the decision to do it differently this time.
She says: "I cannot always control the first arrow, my dad will die, my sister will stop talking to me, that will come, it's life. I can however, work on my reaction to this arrow, I can control my own reaction, observe what happens in me but not react, clean up my own neurosis."
...beautifully said and so true. That in essence is our work.

I like this section of the Yoga Sutra because it suggests that all the patterns we have created...even the "holiday dread" can be changed. "The pains which are yet to come can be and are to be avoided."

Unfortunately, it also suggests that there is work to do to shift the pattern and that work is mine to do....so much easier to complain about others.... "The cause of pain is the association or identification of the seer (atma) with the seen (prakrti) and the remedy lies in their dissociation."

Right then: I am not my job, my political views, the food I eat (or don't eat) and neither is my family. Despite their concern over what I do with life and my puzzlement over what they do with theirs, we do care about one another...and I think Patanjali would agree that if we can keep the focus there, it is enough.
"The cause of pain is the association or identification of the seer (atma) with the seen (prakrti) and the remedy lies in their dissociation."

Paradox and Contradiction

One of my students noticed a seeming paradox in the way the physical practice works with the mind. If the body is very uncomfortable, you can't seem to work on quieting the mind. On the other hand, if the body is very comfortable in a pose, the mind tends to wander off and start doing its own thing. Both are definitely true in my practice. If there are lots of little irritations in the body and it does not want to quiet down, then the mind doesn't seem to want to quiet down either. On the other hand, if the body is quiet and the mind is busy chattering, then I can be fairly sure that my most challenging poses will bring my attention back to the moment.

Practice is actually full of paradox and contradiction. In that way, it is a true mirror for life.

I've been thinking a bit about why we are able to "do" or "not do" certain poses....I put those in quotes as we all have our own definition of what "do" looks like. :)

I think there's both a physical and mental answer to that question. After 9 years of practice, I still do not lift up and jumpback...why?
The physical answer is that my upper body and core strength develop very sloooooowly. The mental answer is that I just don't want that transition very badly. I'm not all that fussed about it actually.

...but even with slow development of upper body and core strength, handstand drop-overs are really coming along...again why?

I've started to think that in order for poses to happen physically there are 2 things that need to happen in my mental practice. First of all I have to want to do the pose. If I don't actually want to do it, then I won't do the work....but paradoxically, I also have to be ok with the idea that even if I do the work, the pose may never happen. I have to be willing to do the work without expectation of results. There has to be non-attachment, but not apathy. Only then do I really pay attention to each breath and each moment. Only then is this yoga.

Mental Gymnastics

After a very full week, I keep thinking of that far side comic where the student raises his hand and asks his teacher, "Mr. Osborne, May I be excused? My brain is full."

It's been a very mentally, emotionally challenging and busy week...so my practice focus for this morning was breath. I set my attention on the breath and set my intention to watch the thoughts as they went by with minimal intervening.

What I noticed:

No wonder I'm so tired! By the time I'd finished the primary series I'd mentally relived most of my week and rehearsed everything I was set to do later in the day....as if living the week once wasn't enough, my mind decided it needed to go back and do it over again.

My mind is very inclined to rewrite every decision and situation so that I'm in the right and feel validated....ick.

My mind was very busy mentally planning, organizing and manipulating all potential activities for the day, the next day, the day after that.

Mentally, I spent lots of time in the past and in the future...but in this moment?...no, not so much.

My mind paused twice for a few poses each time and I had a brief glimpse of mental quiet. One pause towards the end of standing poses into dandasana and a second pause at kurmasana and supta kurmasana. This second pause especially interests me as this was the pose that I struggled with for years in primary practice. It still amazes me that after all the years of intense uncomfortable work in this pose, it now gives a the feeling of soothing my nervous system and quieting the mind like nothing else.

Day 3: Mysore Workshop with David Keil

After another great practice this morning, I'm most aware of how practice has shifted over time. What felt initially like a physical practice now feels much more like a mental practice. Certainly it still shows itself physically, but the hardest work is in my mind, not my body. This is all the more apparent when my teacher adds a new pose to my sequence. The practice becomes mental; approaching something new with the attitude that "with time and practice anything is possible". Over and over again in yoga asana practice I meet new poses or challenges within poses and have to make a mental choice about how to work with them. I can decide before trying or after a feeble attempt that they are too "hard". Sometimes, I take that easier road. I can also decide to leave the possibility open that the pose will happen even if I don't see how it will happen yet. This has been the more rewarding work. I have great hopes that, like the poses themselves, this work too will get easier with time and practice.