Breath and Opening

I'm spending a few days pulling in as opposed to reflecting out. I'm in Miami practicing with my teacher....5 whole days to be a student. :)

Practicing here is not like practicing anywhere else. The space where my teacher has morning Mysore class holds 5 students at a maximum. The space is small, intimate, and there is nowhere to hide. You could imagine that the adjustments and attention from an experienced teacher in that small group could spoil a person!

The best part for me personally about that space is the constant sound of David breathing. Even when he is on the "far" side of the room, I can still hear the sound of full, even breathing. As my attention sinks deeper inward, it starts to feel almost as if the room itself is breathing...inhale, expand, exhale, contract.

The Ashtanga Vinyasa practice really is a "breathing practice". With each trip I make here, I find the breath leading me into a steadier, lighter practice.

On this trip in particular, I started the 5 days of practice with some stress in my mind that had dug itself deeply into my body. In practice the day before I drove down, I had the feeling that I just wasn't getting any breath into those tight areas where I had deposited the stress for dealing with later.

In the first practice here, I felt like I was fighting my own body: trying to send breath into tight areas, realizing that I would have to let those tissues open if I was going to get some breath in there, noting that I felt some resistance to opening up...
...like all that I didn't want to think about right then would open up with the tissues...because of course it would...

Slowly after 4 days of practice with David, things are opening up and sliding back into place. One more day of practice to try to deepen the breath just a little bit more
....next, working to carry that back with me into my solo practice and teaching practice

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.

Observation and Clarity

so as of my last posting, I was headed out to a weekend workshop on observation with my teacher and looking for clarity...

After a weekend of seeing myself through others eyes, clarity has been found...if only briefly.

What I observe, or think I observe is a function of the eyes I'm using to to do the seeing.

My teacher and the friend I traveled to the workshop with both have a particular talent for making me feel very loved just as I am...

...with all my eccentricities, odd habits and my tendency to either rant loudly about the things I am most emotional about or not talk at all...a happy medium is not something I do well.

When I look through their eyes, I don't so much see good or bad or loud or quiet, just the complexity inherent in anyone worth getting to know...that is everyone. They've made space for all the idiosyncrasies that I often don't make space for myself.

A friend asked if, after all these years of practice, I had noticed any particular physical changes in my body....was anything different? His hypothesis: you could see differences just from the past couple years of practice in my shoulders.

so I went on a quest to track down some photos and find out...observation time! I started looking at childhood photos, followed it through the teenage years and then looked again at photos taken after about 4 years practice. I was startled. You can read my life in my shoulders...if you're looking...

Childhood: shoulders strong and relaxed...confident

Early high school: shoulders in and down...a sort of miserable hopelessness

Senior year high school: shoulders not as far curled in, but more tense...angry, defiant

After 4 years practice: shoulders stronger, starting to settle into the back, less tension...starting to find a way into balance

It's amazing what I see when I really look.

How to See

I have the feeling that someone has pulled the end of a loose thread and I am starting to unravel...

In the past few days I've tripped over (or walked into?) the edge of the door and left a nice bruise on my foot. I've hit my "funny bone" (what's funny about it, really?) on the top of the car door resulting in my whole hand going numb briefly and an additional lovely bruise. I returned to my bike at the end of the work day on Tuesday to find the back tire flat for the second time in a few days...

Is any of this really a problem...

I've been thinking lately, that really it comes down to what I see and how I see it, clarity or murkiness.

This morning's practice was cold (by Florida standards) but despite that, I reveled in it. I watched thoughts come and I watched them go. I set a pace for the breath and then relaxed into it, finding the feeling of being carried from one pose to the next. I'm content with the challenges that my practice presents at the moment. For the moment, I'm interested and curious about them without fretting about whether I will ever be strong enough to see them change. It's enough to feel the shoulders come alive as I lift and hop in nakrasana and yet know that there is so much more possible.

I'll be spending this weekend with my teacher attending his weekend "Observation Workshop". It's my favorite of all the workshops that he teaches aside from regular Mysore practice with him. He's the only person I know that teaches a workshop entirely focused on how to see. I'll be returning for my fourth round of this workshop...yes it's that good.

...because what I think I know about how things really are often comes down to how I see them.

Belated Gratitude

This may be the time of year when I lean most heavily on the practice.

I've often found it especially hard to see clearly over the weeks that are referred to by malls and movies alike as "the holidays".

Fellow Ashtangis who maintain an asana practice and a "parenting practice" often refer to parenting as Seventh Series. As I am not a parent, I won't presume to understand the depth of challenges that they uncover. I might though, presume to suggest, that being a daughter, or a cousin, or a niece, or a daughter-in-law, at times too approaches seventh series.

My biggest difficulty with "the holidays" is with my own feeling of murkiness.

Underneath the swells of expectation and disappointment that come and go over these weeks is the steadiness and constancy of practice.

Creativity and the Structure of Practice

A new Wired Science article says using a framework or a form to work within increases creativity.

The experiments are discussed here:http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/need-to-create-get-a-constraint/

The article has this to say: "The larger lesson is that the brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry. And this is why constraints are so important: It’s not until we encounter an unexpected hindrance – a challenge we can’t easily resolve – that the chains of cognition are loosened, giving us newfound access to the weird connections simmering in the unconscious."

...More evidence that it's bumping up against the supposed obstacles that opens up my mind and nudges me toward a clearer picture of reality.

There is wisdom in working within the structure of the practice.

The Cycle of Vulnerability and Withdrawl

I've been thinking a lot lately about vulnerability and my tendency to cycle through a mental phase of opening up followed by a phase of pulling in. A post on Expansion and Contraction from new blogger, Abhyasa, gave me some more food for thought.

It's interesting to me to watch where the fear and discomfort come up.

Physically, I associate opening up with back-bending and if that is true, then physically, open is my default. I have never been afraid of "doing" back bends. I was never afraid of dropping back. I have never been afraid of kapotasana. I have "lost and found" both drop-backs and kapotasana several times now over the life of my practice, yet even when they were tight or puzzlingly inaccessible, I wasn't afraid of doing the poses.

Physically, I find back-bending, at the least, energizing and at the most, euphoric...but for a long time that post-back bend exhilaration was almost always followed several hours later by a feeling of panic...a sort of vague feeling of vulnerability, a feeling that I had opened up too much. I'd have a sudden need to both physically and mentally pull in, curl into a ball and close up. The deeper the back bends and the more of them I was doing, the greater the need to close up once the post-back bend euphoria passed.

Mentally, outside of practice I followed the same pattern: the deeper the opening up, the greater the feeling panic afterwards and the greater the desire to pull in and withdraw.

For a long time, I felt a certain amount of guilt when the openness overwhelmed me and I closed down. Why couldn't I maintain openness all the time? Why the post-openness panic?

The wisdom of the Ashtanga sequencing is slowly working it's magic and the physical ups and downs are leveling out. Mental patterns are following the physical ones. Physically, I am sloooooowly building strength to match the bendiness I was born with. I notice as the body evens out, so does the mind. There is more steadiness underneath the openness and I am extremely grateful for every bit of it.