Happiness is...and A Blog Honor

Happiness is being sat on by your teacher and then having your leg squashed down your back! I so love my teacher's adjustment for eka pada sirsasana...ahhhh. I just cannot get into that sticky bit deep in the hip on my own.

I'm in Miami this week for 5 days of practice with my teacher. I always blanch at the cost of getting a place to stay down here, but I'm being rewarded with 5 days of practice in a group of just 4 students...yes just 4! I'm soaking up the attention. :)

...and in other news I was named a 'Versatile Blogger' by Nobel! Thanks Nobel...my first blog honor!!

The rules for acceptance of this award are these:
1) Thank the person who gave me this award and link them back to their post.

2) Share 7 things about myself.

3) Pass this award along to 15 recently discovered blogs and let them know about it!

Right then, check off number one.

Number two, seven things about me on no particular topics:

1. I'm a biologist in my day-job...native plant conservation, soil and water quality issues, that sort of thing.

2. I love the beach, but don't often make the trip...even though it's only a couple hours away.

3. I love the season in Florida that makes many Floridians flee the state...the hot humid summers...stellar practice weather!

4. My current favorite pose is nakrasana. It just feels so goofy and fun.

5. I'm terribly inept at all things mechanical...you'd never know that I come from a family of engineers.

6. One of the few things I miss about living up north is picked-from-the-tree-ripe apples.

7. One of the few things I miss about living in Miami is picked-from-the-tree-ripe mangos.

and 15 versatile bloggers....the envelope says:

1. Inside Owl...my hand's down, all-time favorite read in the blogosphere.

2. Reluctant Ashtangi...I know Kai has stopped writing, but the archives are still up and she a great attitude about practice and life.

3. Susananda...posts don't appear often, but when they do I can always seem to relate.

4. Yoga for Cynics...title says it all

5. Stardust and Fairy Magic...painting with words

6. Massivist Missive...incredible photos...like a photo journal of a thought

7. Leaping Lanka...great blog. If you are new to Jason's blog, be sure to go back and read the archives of their trips to Mysore...good stuff!

8. Furry Wombat...amazing photos!!...and always a good read.

9. Chin to My Shin...definitely a way with words. It's like you're there, walking in her shoes.

10. City Mouse Trailing Spouse...this one is a recent discovery for me. Love reading about the challenges of keeping practice and teaching going through life's transitions.

11. Comments from a Yogi Anatomist...the best info on practical anatomy advice anywhere for Ashtangis out there. I might be biased though, since David is my teacher.

12. Beets Butter and Mountaintops...honest, heartfelt, good stuff.

13. Damn Good Yoga...a great chronicle of daily practice life.

14. The Confluence Countdown...a newish blog, great read and especially fun for those going to the confluence (me!) as we countdown to the event.

15. Friday Bear...this one has nothing whatsoever to do with yoga. I just have a thing for bears....and who wouldn't like to see a cool bear picture in their google reader every Friday. :)

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.

The Food Experiment

Practice is at a happy plateau. There are plenty of opportunities for refinement of movement, breath, and attention, but no immediate frustrations. Even mayurasana has settled for the moment into something that I can move through without the sort of "ick" feeling that it's brought up for the last year or so.

...but leave it to this practice to keep quietly peeling back the layers even when I'm not really looking.

The one thing that I have been noticing in practice lately is a feeling of heaviness. I ignored it for awhile, not liking at all what it seemed to be pointing to....arg. My weight had crept up. I am very much an emotional eater and after a roller coaster spring, too much cheese and chocolate had made themselves felt.

So began the food experiment...today begins week 5.
What happens if I explore food in the same way as I might explore my asana practice?

The findings so far?...
I've constructed a number of patterns based on early mixed messages about food, health and body image. These patterns aren't serving me, but I'm finding the process of beginning to dismantle them very uncomfortable...uncomfortable in the early years of leg-behind-head kind of way...uncomfortable in the way of any pose that leaves you whimpering on the mat, staring into the face of fear and doubt. There is a lot here that I don't want to see.

The practice is good at being the rough spot to rub against as I shed habits like skin. Despite it's proclivity to point me directly at all the uncomfortable places, I trust it. I trust it because out of the years of practice is slowly coming a realization that I am not broken. I am enough just as I am.

Technique and Freedom in Practice

I enjoy seeing new students arrive at the studio and love watching them puzzle through their first Mysore class. I say as little as possible when they ask over the phone or by email. "How does it work?" I just encourage them to come and try it...because, really, what is there to say about Mysore class anyway? ...to borrow words from Pattabhi Jois, "You come. You do."


The Mysore style Ashtanga practice always reminds me of this quote from A Wrinkle in Time...

"Mrs Whatsit: A sonnet is a very strict form of poetry is it not? There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That's a very strict rhythm or meter, yes? And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is not a sonnet, is it?

Calvin: You mean you're comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it?

Mrs Whatsit: Yes. You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you."

The practice also reminds me of childhood piano lessons. I spent what seemed like an interminable amount of time practicing technique, learning notes, counts, scales. I was taking piano lessons because I wanted to play music, to create that indescribable feeling when a great song hits you and changes you.
Years went by before I could see that underneath great music is technique and to create great music that is outside the framework of technique takes an incredible depth of understanding of the framework itself.
I never really looked for that kind of depth when it came to playing music and I remain a very mediocre pianist.

I think I'm only just beginning to appreciate the kind of freedom that can be created from surrender to the strict form that is Ashtanga yoga practice.

The Confluence

I'm going to The Confluence.

...and any one who knows me really really well might ask me why?

I have a teacher. I was done sampling teachers and searching in that way on a morning in November in 2005.
I was at a small group, week long, Mysore workshop...just 4 people and our teacher. Late in the week, I was having a "tight hip" sort of day. It was the moment for supta kurmasana and it just wasn't going to happen. My hips were tight and both legs were not going to go. My teacher didn't push it, just helped me with one leg at a time and did so with no sense of disappointment or impatience in me or my practice. It might be the first time I ever really stopped fighting that pose and just let it be. That was it. I had found a teacher.

I've dropped into the occasional Mysore room in other cities while traveling for work or visiting family. These visits are a bit like any other visit to a new place. They're fun, but there's also a certain feeling of wanting to be "on my best behavior", to be polite and considerate...all those niceties that were well honed in my mid-western upbringing.

...but I'm not sure there can be much "nudging of edges" until you drop the niceties....and that I think builds on trust that only comes in time.

...so why the Confluence then...5 of the most senior western teachers, sure...but I've never met any of them.

Patrick has touched on the reason here

and Owl has reiterated the reason here
...here is an excerpt from Owl's post that so beautifully describes the reason I am going to the Confluence:
"The sophisticates who have done the work and then just let their awareness open up... who have the discipline to stay open and let stuff continue to happen to them... these are the ones who are more alive than we are."

I'm going to Confluence because I want to here the stories of "The sophisticates". If practice on the mat can differ so much from one day to the next even within the same body, then how different must the experiences of these 5 senior teachers be....and yet when I hear them speak or when I read what they have to share, there is a feeling that they have all arrived in a very similar place.
There is a sense that they take themselves and their lives very lightly.

More than anything else, during the 4 days, I am looking forward to hearing about the work that they put in to make such lightness possible. I've seen video clips of asana demonstrations by most of the teachers that will be at the Confluence workshop and they are beautiful to watch, but it is their lightness and ease in life that has impressed me far beyond what they can accomplish on the mat.

On teaching...

There's an interesting conversation going around the cybershala on teaching yoga and more specifically on teaching Ashtanga...You can read some thoughts from Nobel, Patrick and Claudia which has gotten me thinking...

I never intended to teach yoga.

I started taking yoga classes in whatever style was cheapest when I was 17...it was 1994. I took generic "hatha" classes, I took vinyasa classes, and I dropped in on some classes that today I'm not even sure what it was exactly. In 2001, I took my first Ashtanga class, a full led primary. After an hour into the class, I was sure I was going to keel over dead at any moment and was definitely sure I wasn't going to make it through the whole class.

I made it through the class and went back.

In late 2002 I moved to Miami and in the spring of 2003, I went to my first Mysore style Ashtanga class. I had found my "yoga home". I was a bit intimidated at the beginning of my first Mysore class while I sorted out how the whole thing worked, but I left that first class delighted with the feeling of being able to steer my own practice under the guidance of a teacher. I had done a home Ashtanga practice for most of a year at that point and found the best of both worlds in the Mysore room.

You know that feeling when you first meet a new boyfriend or girlfriend and you think they're so amazing that you want them to meet every one of your friends, so that each one of your friends will now also know how completely amazing this new person is?

...well, that's how I felt about Mysore style Ashtanga yoga...I was absolutely infatuated!

I spent 4 years in Miami soaking up as much yoga as possible. Every year on my birthday, I took the day off of work and went to the early morning Mysore class. It was a present to myself; there was no where else that I would rather have been.

When, after 4 years, we moved from Miami to a much smaller town, I was a bit heartbroken to leave my teachers. I had searched google and could find no evidence of any Mysore style classes in my new town. One of my teachers said just before I left, "If you don't find what you're looking for in a yoga class there, then you teach it."

I didn't find any Mysore classes in the new town. There was a led class at a local studio that I attended, but it just wasn't the same...and often it left me frustrated. I knew that so much more depth was possible from a yoga practice. I tried convincing the studio owner to try teaching Mysore classes. She wasn't interested. She was of the opinion that any kind of hands-on adjustment was going to cause injury and that I was going to "yoga hell" for even suggesting that they could be helpful. Most frustrating though, was not the lack of adjustments or assists, it was the loss of that feeling of steering my own practice, but with the support and encouragement of someone who had navigated those same waters before me.

...so I did a teacher training...200 hours over the course of about a year and a half.

...and I started a class

For the first year, I taught a class once a week at a community center for free. I had 2, sometimes 3, students. I was honest about how new I was to teaching. I'm fairly certain I learned more than the students did in that year, but they found something in those practices that kept them coming back. For that, I am grateful beyond words.

I did learn some useful, broad perspective sorts of things in the teacher training that I took...but really, what I've learned so far about teaching, has come from 3 places:

1-my own personal, daily practice...daily time on the mat

2-my teaching practice...teaching Mysore and learning from each class

3-from my teachers...guidance and ecouragement that comes from their years of experience

I've been teaching Mysore style Ashtanga yoga for about 4 1/2 years now and practicing for about 10. In the lifetime of an Ashtanga practice, that is barely any time at all.

On a more aware sort of day, I realize that teaching yoga is much like meditation. It's not something you do. It's something that might happen when the conditions are right. My job is to help students learn to set up the right conditions and then get out of the way, so the practice itself can do the teaching. Some days I do a better job than others. My teaching practice, like my personal time on the mat, is exactly that, a practice.

Interview with David Keil: Part 3

Part 3 of my interview with David Keil on Mysore style practice!