the writing on the wall

by L. Valdez Karl

Enjoy the silence.

A week from today I leave for my 6th trip to Ma India, my longest trip yet, 10 weeks.   My internal alarm clock goes off and my body and mind start buzzing a week before any India trip.  If you’ve been keeping up you already know with whom I’m studying and where I’m going.  I think what is making the buzz even louder is that my bones are screaming at me that this trip will not be like any other I’ve taken.  It is going to be very different.

2012-2013 will be transformative.  Maybe transitional is a better word because I feel like I am a turning point in my life.  For whatever reason a whole lot of stuff is ripening, maybe that’s the buzz I’ve been feeling for the last 6 months.  As a long-time gardener I am very in tune with a garden’s growth so a sense of fecundity is certainly not lost on me.   I recently had an amazing Tarot reading and one of the cards the reader pulled was that of a pregnant woman with a huge belly lying in a pumpkin patch entangled in thick vines…waiting to give birth but feeling like it will never happen.

For most of 2011 I felt stuck, trapped in the tired paradigm of what constitutes yoga in the modern scene, but also trapped in tired paradigms of relationships of all kinds.   How to digest traumatic experiences without having them fill our hearts with hate and despair?  I experienced despair last year that I have not experienced for a very long time.  Buddhi (intelligence) is the function of the mind that digests our experiences by wisdom so that they serve their purpose of growth and renewal.

Fecundity, growth, renewal…see a pattern?

Toward the end of 2011 I came to grips with my place in the Universe.   It’s about walking my path alone, shaking people up, turning things inside out and upside down.   You best believe I have plans for that when I return.  But that’s not an easy path and not always welcome, even in the yoga world.

The Tarot reader said that India mirrors back to me my true self, who I really am, and what I am capable of.  She said  there are many reasons I am drawn there but a major one is affirmation, people that bear witness to my work in this world.  I’ve always said that people “get” me more there than here.  Going back to India yearly re-charges, re-nourishes, and nurtures me in a way that nothing else does here.  This is the first time since 2008 that I will be traveling alone in India and I am going to relish it — no one’s agenda but my own.   Freya Stark said, “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.”

In her book Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff Rosemary Mahoney describes how I feel when I go to India, a solo woman traveler of a certain age:

I was alone, finally, with no one to protect me. I wanted to sing for happiness — a rare, raw, immediate sort of happiness that was directly related to my physical situation, to my surroundings, to independence, and to solitude. The happiness I felt that morning had nothing to do with the future or the past, with abstractions or with my relationships to other people. It was the happiness of entering into something new, of taking the moments simply for what they were, of motion, of freedom, and of free will. I loved not knowing what would happen next, loved that no one here knew me. I felt coordinated and strong, and the world seemed huge and vibrant. It was a relief to be alone…

My happiness was a feeling of physical lightness, of weightlessness, like drifting on air…

To prepare for her trip up the Nile, Mahoney read the Egypt travel journals of Gustave Flaubert and Florence Nightingale.  She writes that she recognized in Flaubert’s notes of 1850 the same kind of happiness she felt.  She quotes Flaubert as he witnesses the Nile:

I felt a surge of solemn happiness that reached out towards what I was seeing and I thanked God in my heart for having made me capable of such joy; I felt fortunate at the thought, and yet it seemed to me that I was thinking about nothing: it was a sensuous pleasure that pervaded my entire being.

Mahoney quotes Florence Nightingale’s reaction to a Nile sunrise:

It looks. . .so transparent and pure, that one really believes one’s self looking into a heaven beyond, and feels a little shy of penetrating into the mysteries of God’s throne…

This is the sunset taken from the top of a temple in Rameswaram and just beyond the horizon is Sri Lanka.   During that evening in 2006 as I stood at the top of that temple and stared into the limitless expanse of ocean, I began to cry as I imagined the monkey god Hanuman leaping from rock to rock to rescue Sita.   Like Flaubert, I also thanked the Universe that I was “capable of such joy.”  Such profound joy and pleasure that it indeed pervaded my entire being.

Finally Mahoney describes Flaubert and Nightingale as neither having “any desire to fit the tediously cliched expectations that society had slated for them”; that they both “prized solitude”; and both traveled Egypt during periods of “considerable personal uncertainty and self-doubt”, agonizing “over how they would use their talents and answer their natural impulses.”

I am a woman of a certain age who travels alone, relishing my solitude.  After traveling around the sun over 50 times, India was the first country overseas that I visited and if I can never return, I always carry India with me as a talisman.

I also do not suffer tediously cliched expectations gladly.

The wounds and arrows of my misfortunes sneak in sometimes when I’m not looking and I can only tend to them in the arms of the Mother.  One way of tending to them is by reading the writing on the wall and acting upon it.  The writing on the wall tells me “to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise.   I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes on as fruit.”   I will not die an unlived life.

The last card the Tarot reader pulled was called the Speaker of Trees and it contained a picture of a snake rising up through the center of the tree.  The reader said that the card means power, confidence, brilliance, communication of new ideas and plans, everything coming together.

I’m going home to shed my skin.

first uploaded at http://tudodeom.blogspot.com/

give me your misfits and outcasts and weirdos

by L. Valdez Karl

I’ve always been the square peg in the round hole and that upsets people sometimes, even in the yoga world.  The yoga world can be as politically correct as the non-yoga world when the first thing out of someone’s mouth is “you’re not yogic” or “you’re a hater” when someone questions yoga’s current status quo.   Believe me; in my 7 years of writing this blog I’ve been called an unyogic hater more times than I can count.

So when I read Rachel Held Evans’ post, “Blessed Are the Uncool”, I said HALLELAJAH.  I am not Christian and I don’t go to any church but I I think her post is perfectly applicable to the current yoga scene:  “Jesus taught us that when we throw a banquet or a party, our invitation list should include ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.’   So why do our church marketing teams target the young, the hip, the healthy, and the resourced?”

Look at any ad for any yoga class or any yoga product in any yoga magazine and you won’t see the likenesses of the women I taught tonight at the domestic violence shelter.  They wouldn’t be considered hip, they all have aches and pains and scars and they certainly aren’t resourced.  No one is marketing to them because they can’t afford the $100 yoga pants or the Swarovski crystal chakra pendants.

I’ve always loved Anne Cushman’s take on this in her Yoga Chic and the First Noble Truth written in 2003.  Yes, 2003 — ask yourself if things have changed much.  2003 is almost ancient history in modern American yoga commentary.

“So lately, I’m looking for a different kind of image to inspire my practice. The book I’m shopping for would show pictures of all sorts of people doing yoga and meditating. There would be old people, fat people, scarred people, profusely hairy people, people with bad skin and big noses, people with thighs riddled with cellulite, people with droopy breasts and flabby thighs and faces etched with lines from hard living. There would be people with cerebral palsy, people gone bald from chemotherapy, people paralyzed by drive-by shootings, people who’d lost limbs in wars. Some people would do the poses perfectly. Others would do them clumsily, propped up on sandbags and bolsters, unable even to touch their fingertips to the floor.”

Evans writes,  “…when the gospel story is accompanied by a fog machine and light show, I always get this creeped-out feeling like someone’s trying to sell me something.  It’s as though we’re all compensating for the fact that Christianity’s not good enough to stand on its own so we’re adding snacks.”

Substitute “yoga” for “Christianity” and “weights” or “Pilates” or “pole dancing” for “snacks” and you’ll get what I’m driving at.

It is true that there are now more and more yoga classes for underserved populations, but the face of modern American yoga isn’t just the young, the hip, the healthy, and the resourced.   Maybe if the marketing face wasn’t young, hip, healthy, and resourced, then yoga would truly finally become mainstream.   For real.

“And Jesus was a sailor
When he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain
Only drowning men could see him
He said “All men will be sailors then
Until the sea shall free them”
But he himself was broken
Long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human
He sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.”

Suzanne.  Leonard Cohen

Srivatsa Ramaswami: on mantras

by L. Valdez Karl

The latest from my teacher’s newsletter:

“In the olden days in India, especially in the South, women would not say the name of the husbands as it was considered disrespectful.  A census inspector will have a difficult time getting the name of the spouse from the wife.   One has to ask the other family members the name of one’s husband.   Likewise, many of the potent mantras are not directly mentioned but only through the name of the mantra.   If one wants to say the “OM” mantra one would more likely say the pranava mantra than just “OM” mantra, as Patanjali says in the Yoga Sutras.   The meditation or chanting of the mantra would be referred to as pranava dhyana or pranava japa.   Pranava itself is a beautiful word.   Scholars refer to it as a word derived from the root “Nam” or “nam” to bow (Nam prahvi bhave) as used in namah or namaste.   ‘Prakarshena nautithouti iti pranavah’, meaning pranava is the highest praise or obeisance to the highest principle,  here Iswara or Brahman.   Another interesting interpretation of this word comes from deriving the word from another root ‘nav’ (or nava) to begin or new like ‘novo’.   Since Brahman is said to be pure consciousness and never changes it is always new, always ‘nava’ and hence pranava.

There are other important mantras who have separate names.   The Gayatri mantra which is of the gayatri meter refers to the mantra starting with ‘tat savitur..’ and even though there are many other mantras in the Gayatri meter, only this particular mantra, the brain child of Viswamitra is referred to as gayatri.   Then we have another famous mantra “namassivaya”.   This namassivaya mantra is more often referred to as ‘panchakshari’ or five syllable mantra even as there are scores of other mantras which have five syllables.   ‘Om namo narayanaya’ my Guru’s favorite mantra is known as ashtakshari as it has eight syllables.   ‘Om namo bhagavate vasudevaya’ is a very popular Krishna mantra and is known as ‘dwadasakshari’ as there are 12 syllables in it.

The mantras especially pranava were chanted, meditated upon and referred to with considerable devotion and respect in the olden days.   Contemporary use of ‘OM’ on tea shirts, vests and other casual wares  is sometimes difficult to put up with.” *

*I have to say that seeing an OM tattoo on someone’s foot gives me pause.   Think twice before putting an OM tattoo below the waist — this shows respect.  Just call me old-school. – L-S

Happy New Year…to me

by L. Valdez Karl

The title is tongue-in-cheek.  I wish all my blog readers — and haters, especially the haters — a joyFULL and metta filled New Year and indeed, the same for all of 2012.

Looking back over 2011 I learned a lot this year — learned a lot in a somewhat quiet way, not so much in the hit-ya-over-the-head type of way.  And what I learned was yeah, it IS all about me.  Really.

The year started off with a bang as I had decided to stop writing after writing this blog for 6 years.   Then this Yoga B.I.T.C.H. returned, renewed and refreshed.   I did my thing all year, teaching my students and going for a few trainings, and then I hit the wall.  I almost quit teaching this year and then I got re-inspired.  I collaborated on a new and (we think) powerful Therapeutic Yoga Training that has garnered a lot of interest so far — but not where I live.  But I’m OK with that finally.  Esalen has asked us to send our yoga resumes.  Yeah, you bet your asana I want to teach at Esalen.  I’ve finally decided to conduct a teacher training and  I’m planning a Yoga & Spirituality Retreat in March of 2013 where the Therapeutic Yoga Training will be an option.

I also decided not to allow myself be ruled by the current yoga business paradigm because I am so much more than that.   Two yoga teachers who trust my vision are on board and if it’s meant to be, it will be.   I honestly don’t care what the local  yoga studio does because frankly, that business model is tired and stale and the people I want to teach to aren’t those people anyway.  To that end, I decided to start a non-profit corporation in spite people telling me not to do it.   Henry Ford once said that if he had asked people what they wanted they would have said “faster horses.”  Think about it.  I stopped allowing people without vision into my life.  But a praying mantis taught me my biggest lesson.

My biggest lesson was listen to my heart.

Of course I know that I’ve been doing that for years, listening to my heart and to my second brain, my gut.  But somehow I had lost my way a bit this year, I can’t explain exactly how.  Maybe it was by trusting people too much, by expecting to be treated as I treat people when I should have no expectations at all.  Yes, trust is a positive thing, but not at the cost of denying yourself.   My life lesson at this stage of my 57 years on this Earth is that I am not responsible for anyone’s happiness and no one is responsible for mine.  The key is to let go of everyone, and I mean everyone, who do not have your  best interests at heart, the ones who do not support you, the ones who can not make the least bit of effort to sustain a relationship.  Get rid of the “iffy” people as I call them.   Life is too short for peoples’ “bar talk.”  That’s over and done with, and like anywhere else, the yoga world has lots of bar talk.  My Kali Sister Svasti has some good advice about what she has learned in her 40 years on the planet.

While that lesson has been rolling around in my consciousness for quite some time, it took events of this year to solidify it.  Intuitively and energetically I know that my yoga trainings early next year in India — one with A.G. Mohan, and my 6th time at Desikachar’s school — are the culmination of my beginning.  A cycle has come to an end.  The long beginning was my 10 years of a yoga teaching.   I learned that you can’t seriously refer to yourself as a teacher unless you’ve taught for at least 10 years.  Sorry if that offends anyone.  On second thought, no, I’m not sorry.  I’m being real.

I also know intuitively and energetically that I am going to give birth to something potent and profound.  Don’t mistake my confidence for arrogance.  I know this as sure as I knew for two years that I had to be at the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar last year.  Spiritual adepts have been telling me this for years — that the years 2012-2014 are going to be a rebirth.  But you have to die to be reborn.  Dying never bothered me, it’s living that’s hard.

We’ll see what Varanasi has in store.  I’ll be there at the end of my trip at the end of March.  Varanasi is also referred to as Benares or Kashi, the city of cremations, a city of death and rebirth, a city that like Haridwar last year, I know in my bones I must be there at that time of my life.  North of Varanasi is Sarnath where Buddha did the First Turning of the Wheel of Dharma on the Four Noble Truths.  One city of endings, one of beginnings.  Between trainings I’m spending my time in Varkala in the south, where there is a 2,000-year old Janardana Swami Temple, a temple to Vishnu that is referred to as “Benares of the South.”   In Varanasi I’m staying near Assi Ghat, the same ghat where Krishnamacharya stayed when he studied in Varanasi in the early 20th century.  My India trips are always filled with such serendipity.

I’m ready for a new beginning.  I believe you either lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.   Those are your three choices in life and I don’t have time for vanilla or beige anymore.  As Danielle LaPorte writes:

show up.

shine.

let it go.

Happy New Year.

To me.

Therapeutic Yoga Training

by L. Valdez Karl

I am very happy to announce a new five day Therapeutic Yoga training, a collaborative effort with Mary Elizabeth Sheehan of Yoga Potential, Ft. Worth, Texas.

If you are a yoga studio, a retreat center, or a holistic center anywhere in the world, we will come to you — no destination is too far!  Contact either of us for more information.   This is an extraordinary training that combines three somatic modalites of yin yoga, trauma sensitive yoga, and Vedic Thai Yoga.

We are scheduling now for 2012 and 2013  —

“Each day will include lecture and discussion on the philosophy behind three somatic modalities, and body awareness practice via yoga, bodywork, and guided meditations. Both Linda and Mary Elizabeth will be in the classroom every day. Each day will last 8-10 hours including morning and afternoon breaks and a lunch break.”

Yoga connects!  Mary Elizabeth is a long-time reader of this blog and we finally met this summer.  Our energies and philosophies about yoga and healing clicked and after receiving Vedic Thai Yoga from her — and for those of you in the DFW area, Mary Elizabeth is an awesome practitioner — we decided to combine our modalities.   We firmly believe that these complementary modalities are very much needed in the world today.  Both of us would love to bring this healing to populations that can not get this unique training in their area.

This five day training will also be part of my Yoga and Spirituality Tour in the Himalayas to take place in March 2013.  The training will be an option to the 10 day package.  Stay tuned for details in 2012 — yoga studios who host my workshops in 2012 will receive “early bird” information regarding this tour.

“Linda was one of the first participants in the teacher training program my wife and I developed.   She has since participated in several others and we have corresponded on many issues about yoga, anatomy, and teaching.  I recommend her without reservation.” – Paul Grilley

Have yoga, will travel — contact us!

I got dem old-school yoga blues again, mama (apologies to Janis Joplin)

by L. Valdez Karl

There was an article in the Chicago Tribune over the weekend about how blues clubs in Chicago are struggling.  That is, not so much the blues clubs in the white, tourist areas of Chicago, but the clubs on the mostly black West and South sides:  “The official Chicago blues scene — a magnet for tourists from around the globe — prospers downtown and on the North Side, catering to a predominantly white audience in a homogenized, unabashedly commercial setting.  The unofficial scene — drawing mostly locals and a few foreign cognoscenti — barely flickers on the South and West sides, attracting a mostly black, older crowd to more homespun, decidedly less profitable locales.”  [emphasis supplied.]

The more I read this article I couldn’t help but think that what I was reading was analagous in certain respects to the modern yoga scene, especially when I read this:

  “So what happens when an indigenous music . . . gets repackaged for sale . . . ?  An art form starts to die.”

Much has been written about how yoga changed when it came West.  I was in a workshop with Paul Grilley when he said that in order for yoga to be palatable for Western tastes the spirituality had to be stripped out of it.   Sure there are many teachers who teach a classical or as I call it, an old-school style of yoga, but how filled are those classes compared to the ones where the teacher dazzles you with a one-armed handstand, kicks your ass, and sends you home with a two minute savasana and no meditation?  From my own experience when I taught at a studio my “modern” vinyasa flow class had a lot more students in it than my classical vinyasa krama class where I usually had three or four or none at all.

Naming themselves after a Muddy Waters song, the Rolling Stones visited the South side of Chicago, home of the urban blues, to pay homage to  Chess Records.   That was the rock and roll version of going to India to see where it all started, to experience the undiluted roots of their music.

Times and tastes naturally change in both music and  yoga.  Even vintage country music has faded away to the sanitized pop version of what it is now.  As the article points out the nature and purpose of the newer blues clubs is different from the old clubs.  At best, the newer clubs are filled; at worst, the bands serve up an endless repetition of songs like “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.”  In those clubs where blues music is watered down and branded, no one expects the music to develop to the next level.

The newer clubs give the people what they want in order to fill the place whether it’s selling T shirts or having the bands play the same old tired songs.   Just like the clubs, yoga studios give their students what they think they want in order to keep drawing them in — yogalates, yoga with weights, whatever it takes.

In comparing yoga and art, one of my students said that art is always difficult to describe or explain, but you know it when you find it.  Great art, like yoga, has soul.  Yoga has morphed and changed since it has come to the West and while nothing can stay the same, I wonder, like the musicians wondered in the Tribune article, what is lost when the infrastructure of the yoga music is shattered.

As one of the musicians said in the article, there will always be the tourist clubs that sell the blues “brand” but “you can’t look to the clubs and the club owners to pursue blues as a culture.  It is to them purely a commodity, nothing more than a bottle of whiskey, and how much money you can make off of it.”

Not an ideal way for preserving an art form, whether it’s music or yoga.

“Working Out My Karma: Struggling to Find My Dharma On and Off the Yoga Mat”

by L. Valdez Karl

Here is another guest post by writer, friend, and yoga student Sarah Militz-Frielink.  You can read the first post she wrote for LYJ entitled The Illusion of When.

Sarah was inspired to write this post after becoming disillusioned with the corporatized yoga that is currently playing in the modern American yoga scene.

If you like Sarah’s style, contact her at sarah (at) leavingdark (dot) com if you need a writer.  Sarah said that she is finally getting back into spiritual writing and is thinking of starting her own online non-profit magazine.

Enjoy, and comments welcome!

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It seems like just yesterday, I signed up for my first yoga class at the local park district down the street from my house.  That was eight years ago, and I have been practicing pretty much regularly to this day.  At the time, I had no idea what I signed up for or what a genuine yoga practice should look like.  I never anticipated all the challenges I would encounter along the way.  Probably motivated by the wrong reasons to try yoga, my underlying goal was to shed 30 pounds of baby weight that still clung to my body.  I had just given birth to my third child.  I was definitely lacking the spiritual discipline a true practice actually involved.  I just wanted results.  I did not know that a beautiful path lie before me where I would have to confront my own karma and struggle to find my dharma.

I guess I bought into the corporatized version of yoga: hot, sweaty, skinny, bodies on a mat glowing with a renewed sense of beauty, a calmer demeanor, and a compulsion to eat vegan.  When I use the term “corporatized yoga”, I am referencing the images that dominate all things yoga in magazines, commercials, DVDs, props, mats, and books.  Media and pop culture bombards us with a plethora of images—pictures of hot, upper-middle class blond females, doing handstands with ease.  And then there are the magazine photos boasting post-practice smiles plastered on flawless porcelain faces as the “model” promotes a new sport drink or yoga pants line. These images do not reflect a genuine yoga practice, one that seeks to unite the “human with the divine—all within the self” as the ancient yogis instruct us to do.

During my journey, I realized that these images conveyed a false sense of hope, one based in consumerism, vanity, and prejudice.  As if all bodies on yoga mats should look the same, as if all people who do yoga are skinny, blond, vegan, and Zen-like.  What’s worse is that these images brainwash Americans into thinking what yogis should look like or act like. If someone does not fit the norm, they are questioned along the way.  This is what I call a “yogaism”— a belief that those who practice yoga should conform to the norms of the corporatized yogi image and a discrimination against those who do not.

For example, I was once asked why I didn’t act enlightened all the time.  My coworker thought people who do yoga and meditate were like Buddha every second of the day.  “How come you aren’t calm all the time? I don’t get why you do yoga and are not in a continuous state of serenity.”

“That’s one of the reasons why I do yoga now,” I told him. “Because I have recognized over the years how much anxiety I had that I wasn’t even aware of; I know I’m not calm all the time.  Enlightenment is a process; it ebbs and flows.”

My coworker then responded that he disagreed with my statement about enlightenment. The people he knew who had a true yoga practice were always that way.  They were never anxious and always enlightened.  My practice then must be a sham.

I laugh now looking back on this. Who were these yogis he knew who were in a constant state of enlightenment?  Maybe he confused the ones in yoga magazine for real people in the flesh.  Maybe he knew yoga masters who practice in a monastery on a mountaintop because last time I checked we were all human and subject to moments of fallibility.

Yet on and off the mat, I am still working out my karma, struggling to find my dharma as I continue to question what a genuine practice should look like.  I now know a bit about what a genuine practice does not look like.   A genuine practice is not limited to hot, skinny, blond females, who are in a semi-drugged state of yoga bliss.   A genuine practice does not come easily.  It isn’t about increased flexibility or weight-loss.  There are times when you confront your own demons on the mat.  You realize that you have unforgiveness stored in your heart chakra.  You learn to love yourself and in the process love others as you slowly release pain from this life and (at times) the pain from previous lives.

A genuine practice does not boost your self-esteem.  You are humbled at the limitations of the human condition as you practice your poses.  You become aware of how you sell yourself out every day as a consumer in cultural capitalism.  How small acts of kindness (i.e. donating a pair of shoes to an impoverished child in Guatemala) do not change the system (i.e. the child still lives in hideous poverty).

You develop an increased sense of social responsibility as you come to grips with the excesses of the American lifestyle. The eco-friendly mat and water bottle no longer seems to compensate for the size your carbon footprint.

This is what I have learned about a genuine yoga practice.  It should not be based in a “yogaism”—one that excludes overweight individuals, persons of color, or working class individuals. Yoga should embrace all kinds of people who are different shapes, sizes, and colors.  Yoga is about making peace with self and others and embracing who we are—both on and off the mat.

energy and totems and mantises, oh my…

by L. Valdez Karl
may she have a fortunate rebirth

Before any of you start reading, check in and decide whether you believe in energy work, past lives, totem animals, or anything else that is considered new agey woo-woo stuff.  If you don’t, stop reading now because you will hate this post.  If you’re not bothered by what I am about to say, keep reading.

It is rare that I write about my energy work.  I’ve been told I have a gift, but for the most part people just think it weird or don’t believe me or want a definition of it that I don’t have.  Some people think I am a healer, but I never call myself that.  For one thing, I am clairaudient and clairsentient, always have been.  I am a reiki master, but I don’t like to call myself that either because #1, reiki is too puny of a word for what I do, and #2, I am not a master anything because it’s not about that.  Some have called me a “yoga master” but the word “master” embarasses me.  I have been told, however, that when I am ready to fully embrace my power, only then will I come into my own.

Just like in the yoga biz in the energy worker biz people in the West are impressed by pieces of paper and titles and with whom one studies and who talks the loudest about what they do.  Just like in the yoga biz the people with the most letters behind their names are the most successful, “successful” being a relative term.  I don’t advertise, never have, and I usually do energy work for free. I do my work mostly in the domestic violence shelter where I teach.  The women believe I am a curandera.  They don’t need to be convinced by any certificates.

People in India “get” what I do much more than anyone here.  Indians have a way of accepting siddhis as a natural aspect of the person while Westerners have that uberduality of mind that needs to over-analyze and separate and intellectualize everything.  Yes, I said siddhis because it has been written about for centuries in Yoga and Buddhist texts that siddhis naturally arise or are enhanced by yoga and meditation practice.  Western uberduality doesn’t track well with Eastern spirituality.  Western minds can not accept that sometimes there are no explanations for things.

Even energy workers need to visit other energy workers, so I go a woman who is above my level, so to speak.  I can’t explain what she does or how she does what she does, I just accept it, but the best way I can describe it is that she gets the mojo down to the cellular level and works on your DNA.

For a few months now I’ve been feeling depressed and stuck with my yoga teaching, so much so I have felt like quitting teaching.  During my visit with her she used the words “hopelessness” and “despair” to describe my feelings and she felt a deep sadness in me.  She asked how I would feel if I quit teaching and the first word that came to my mind was FREE.  I told her that I felt my upcoming trip to India was going to be some type of culmination, that I will be finishing a cycle.  She agreed.  I feel this in my bones just as I had felt for two years that I had to be at the Kumbh Mela in Haridwar in 2010.  Nothing was going to keep me from it.  According to my natal chart, I will see some big shifts during 2012-2013 — what my astrologer has read in my chart for the last 7 years or so has always been right on.  My journey thus far has been a long marinating of the yoga meat and as my astrologer tells me from my chart, I’ve been pregnant for a long time and the shifts will be a birthing of something new and different.  We shall see.

The energy worker told me that before a jump up the consciousness ladder, the person usually feels they are in their darkest hour and that there is no way out of the black hole of despair.  I have been feeling so stuck for months that I felt there was no way out.  She did her spiritual counseling and I got on the table for her mojo.  Every time she does her work I experience visions and this time was no different, however, I saw something that I have not seen in a long time, something I used to regularly see years ago in meditation:  me in orange robes on a ghat on the Ganges but all I saw were my hands and feet.  Now I know why the first time I saw a photo of a sadhu on a ghat on the Ganges in Varanasi made me weep uncontrollably — because it looked so damn familiar and filled me with such a sense of loneliness, it was like a longing of wanting to go home.  In my mind’s eye I also saw water, as if I was being washed over, like I was being dunked under water like in a Pentecostal baptism.  I was underwater on my back and could see blue sky through the surface of the water.  I was underwater but it wasn’t scary.  It was peaceful and I didn’t struggle and a thought flashed through my mind, “this must be what it’s like to die.”  After five trips to India I am finally going to Varanasi, ending my trip there.

Then I saw what looked like a segmented egg case or a cocoon, something symbolizing birth.  The end of it opened up and in my mind’s eye I watched but nothing came out…then the session ended.  I told her what I saw but I knew what I described wasn’t exactly right.  On my way home I visualized drawing that segmented thing on a piece of paper and it came to me — it was the segmented abdomen of a female praying mantis, ready to lay her egg case.

My vision suddenly became crystal clear because a praying mantis made her home on my veranda all summer.  Never left.  I saw her every day and I watched her slowly die there when it became cold.  Of course one can say that she never left because she had plenty to eat — my gardens go up the veranda so she had her pick of juicy insects to devour.  But she was always on my door or siding or in the chairs or on the table.  I was so tuned into her that I knew when she was dying and I would pick her up and stroke her head and body.  I would try to put her in a comfortable spot every day but she always found her way back to my chair.  Then one day she no longer moved.

People who have strong connections to the Earth know that animal totems pick us, we don’t pick them, so I researched the symbology of the praying mantis.  It is a powerful totem animal for healers and they represent stillness and going within.  I read that mantis medicine is about the creative process of becoming:  “if praying mantis is your totem or has crossed your path, you may be a hunter of hearts in a world that has closed theirs.  You may do this … as one who meticulously pursues his or her dream.”

In Native American spirituality there are those who can read “signs.”  Interestingly enough, for a long time I also had a bumblebee nest inside my veranda and bees, especially bumblebees, are also totems of spirituality.  For a few years a hawk would land in my backyard every New Years Day and stay in a tree all day, never moving.  Hawks are also powerful totems and are seen as visionaries and messengers in Native American spirituality, the first spirituality I ever studied:

“Often they feel misunderstood in that when they attempt to deliver an important message others may shy away from it….

Hawk medicine people like many who carry strong predator totems may be shunned by others who sense and fear their inner power. Others may sense that this is a person who can see straight through them and as many folks think in terms of judging things as being good or bad, they are afraid that the Hawk person will see who they “really” are…

Red Tailed Hawk – An intensified Life force, often those who carry this Hawk medicine have Pluto and Mars strong in the horoscope. These folks are able to achieve great things through persistence and sheer strength of will.”

A Native American friend named me Loba because he said wild women and wolves are always misunderstood and feared.  The hawk in my yard was always a Red Tailed Hawk and both Pluto and Mars are heavy in my natal chart.  My Mars is in Capricorn which relates to my Life Lesson:  Responsibility for Self Only.  The energy worker told me that my authentic path is ultimately walked alone:  it has to be that way because there are very few people who will understand it.  Pluto, besides being the planet of Death, is also the planet of Spirituality.

My bones tell me why I have been drawn to Varanasi on my next trip, just as sure as I knew why I had to be at the Mela at that particular time in my life.

One must die in order to be reborn.

my vinyasa root guru

by L. Valdez Karl

In Mahayana Buddhism there is the tradition of the “root guru”, someone from whom we receive the teachings directly.  My root guru in Mahayana Buddhism is Gelek Rimpoche.  I will always consider Srivatsa Ramaswami my root guru in vinyasa krama yoga.

I first met Ramaswamiji in 2003 or 2004 at the Chicago studio where I certified as a teacher.  I was a very newbie teacher and he was teaching a weekend workshop, his first time in Chicago.  The Friday night was the “Yoga of Sound” and it was advertised that over the weekend he would teach special vinyasa sequences that had not been taught in America.  I was intrigued because even that early in my teaching I had started to research places to study yoga in India.

Ramaswamiji is considered a chant master in India and the Friday night Yoga of Sound was all about chanting.  It was the first time I heard vedic chants sung in the traditional way and it cracked open my heart in a way that Krishna Das or Jai Uttal could never do, and still don’t.  I drove home weeping all the way.  I knew I had found my teacher and Ramaswamiji put me on the path to study at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Madiram.   When I saw my name in the Acknowledgement of his book The Complete Book of Vinyasa Yoga  I cried again because I did not even think he knew my name,

For me, Ramaswamiji is a true yogi, nothing more needs to be said.  In 2011 he is much more well known than he was when I first met him when barely anyone knew the name of the student who studied the longest with Krishnamacharya.  He now teaches a 200 hour teacher training at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles and the video below is about the training.  In the beginning you will hear his wonderful chanting and there is a short interview with him.  The rest of the video consists of students giving their impressions of Ramaswami and the training.

I thought it interesting towards the end of the video when a student said that she had been doing yoga for a few years but had never done yoga that had such a complete emphasis on the breath.  When a new student comes to me that is also usually the first thing they say to me after the first class, how emphasis on the breath totally changed their practice.  I have studied in this lineage for a long time so comments like that always make me go hmmmmmmm…….because what exactly is being taught in teacher trainings nowadays?  Is emphasis on the breath considered an “advanced” practice to be taught in a 300 hour training because if that is the case I have to wonder about that.  Breathing is basic, from Class #1, as soon as you step on the mat.  Every movement is initiated with an inhale or an exhale, mindfully, I don’t know any other way to teach.  Conscious breathing IS pranayama.  When I hear comments like that student’s it confirms my belief that yoga in American IS different compared to where I study in India.

Maybe I should try teaching my “Yoga of Krishnamacharya” workshop again.  Years ago when I taught at a studio I offered it for yoga teachers and well-seasoned practitioners only.  I was going to talk about the vinyasa krama method and offer a practice for shoulderstand.  I thought at least teachers would be interested in learning about the Source Scholar of Yoga, the teacher of Iyengar, Jois, and Desikachar.  No one signed up.

Just call me old-school.

“Asanas are yogic postures – stable and comfortable. Vinyasas are aesthetic breath oriented movements within those exquisite yoga poses.” — Srivatsa Ramaswami

“Asana will make the body light.
Pranayama strengthens prana.
Dharana purifies the intellect.
Meditation purifies the mind.” — Sri T. Krishnamacharya

“Nowadays, the practice of yoga stops with just asanas.  Very few even attempt dharana and dhyana [deeper meditation] with seriousness.  There is a need to search once more and reestablish the practice and value of yoga in modern times.” — Sri T. Krishnamacharya (excerpt from “Krishnamacharya: His Life and Teachings” by A. G. Mohan)

karma yoga and yoga community

by L. Valdez Karl

October is Domestic Violence Awareness month and before it ends I want to make you aware of statistics on domestic violence.  This is a post I wrote last year with things that may shock you.  Or not.

The yoga fundraiser on Saturday was a success in that a dozen people attended (mostly my students and others who know me) and once the cash is doubled by a private charitable trust, the shelter will receive a little over $1,000.  Included in that amount is a check for $300 sent by a woman who took a few classes with me a long time ago because she could not attend the fundraiser but she would “be there in spirit.”  Nice!

I met with the shelter director during the summer and we talked about starting a weekly yoga program, but at this point in time there is no money for it (I only teach one night a month.)  People always ask me, “why don’t they just apply for a grant so they can pay you?”  The shelter recently received a $20,000 grant from the Mary Kay Foundation and this is what the director told me about that:

“The $20,000 is general operating money that is really just filling a hole we had where we had lost funding over the last couple of years.  We are still running with a skeleton crew that are stretched way too thin.  On top of that, they have not gotten even a cost of living increase in over 3 years.  So that is my first priority as far as funding goes…then I can start thinking about new projects and expanding different projects.  The grant writer is still looking for money specific to a new and innovative way to help victims.”

“A new and innovative way to help victims” means my yoga program.  And so it goes.  And that’s why I do a fundraiser for the shelter.

For about a month before the fundraiser I busted my asana trying to get the word out — emails to local papers, emails to local yoga peeps, tweeting, Facebook, posting flyers in health food stores and coffeehouses, etc.  I understand now how people working for non-profits get burned out.  The owner of the dance studio where the fundraiser was held did a great job getting the word out, she put a flyer into everyone’s hand who came into the studio.  The Nia and dance community also helped spread the the word.  But one group was conspicuous by their absence, in fact, their silence was  deafening.  Need I say it?  The local community of yoga teachers.

I’m beginning to think that use of the phrase “yoga community” should be banned because it’s basically meaningless — at least where I live, but your mileage may vary.  The phrase is used (overused?) in the yoga blogosphere when people write about a group of teachers and/or students getting together for a cause.  My own “yoga community” (which will forever be placed in quotes) is relatively small and most teachers know of or personally know each other.  Hell, me and 7 other yoga teachers use the same massage therapist so every month I get the local yoga 411.

But it never fails to amaze me when a group of people that speaks so much about seva and karma yoga, and who think Seane Corn and Russell Simmons are so cool to occupy Wall Street, can be silent about something going on in their own locale, for a local cause.  To quote two yoga teacher friends (one who attended and one who helped spread the word every week, both who also consider themselves yoga outsiders), they were “amazed” and “horrified” that despite knowing about a yoga fundraiser for a local women’s issue, there was little interest shown by local teachers.  I did hear from two (out of the 20+ teachers who got my email blast) who told me they were sorry they could not attend.

Why is this so-called “yoga community” that is coveted so much so elusive?

Believe me, I get the fact that everyone has their own favorite cause that they donate to, my cause isn’t your cause, but that’s not the point at all.  I don’t care if someone donates $1.00 or $100, support is given in ways other than money.  Sometimes time and interest are more precious than dollar bills.  Don’t support someone expecting to get something in return.  I mean, really?  Read the Gita.  That does not even karmically compute.  Sometimes you do things to help, unasked.  Just ’cause it’s the right thing to do.

The kicker was when a local teacher who was a Facebook “friend” deleted my comment about the fundraiser and defriended me.  Wow.  Didn’t know promoting seva is such an evil thing to do.  She had posted on her FB page about an event at the local studio that was in the evening on the same day as the fundraiser.  I commented something to the effect, “don’t forget about the yoga fundraiser: karma yoga, go out to dinner, then go to the event.”  That was it.  Innocuous.  The thing is, I’ve known this teacher for about 7 years, I’ve been in her class, she’s been in mine, not friends (as I don’t use that term loosely), but acquaintances, knowing the same local yoga peeps.  Delete.  Defriend.  Uh, what?!?  The irony was that she had sent me a message a few weeks earlier about how important domestic violence issues are to her and she wanted to donate money.  Guess I’m not getting that dough now.

With one of the themes being superficiality, I always loved the way Burl Ives’ character in the movie Cat on a Hot Tin Roof spit out the word mendacity as something unacceptable.

When another blog reader posted this on my FB wall, I had to chuckle.  Good in theory, in practice, maybe not so much:  “hold a fundraising event for a local charity…the success of working and coming together to do something good close to home creates a perfect opportunity for students to connect with one another.”

Over the the past month I’ve had a good think about this whole “yoga community” idea/ideal that is perpetrated in the we’re-all-one-big-happy-kula, kumbaya.  It is something that some yoga person somewhere is always telling us to strive for, i.e., the collective yoga thang.  Buddhists refer to it as sangha.  The Universe must be sending me messages because just when I needed to hear it, I received another email from a relatively new reader in Canada.  The writer told me that while her yoga journey is not as seasoned as my own, she does know that “the ‘yoga community’ is the one you create, in your heart and in your space.  I only allow those that resonate my values into my space.”  Very wise.  And true.

I will also take the words of my Sister Kali Grrl, Svasti, to heart:  “work at defusing your road rage, and/or all those little things that niggle you in life. The stuff that makes you snarky, snippy or snappy at yourself/others on your bad days. Because my lovelies, THAT is all inflammation. And too much inflammation will make you sick.”   Because Svasti and others who resonate my values ARE my yoga community, my sangha, and it’s not necessarily where I live.  It was serendipitous to also read that “real communities live because of a passion that is shared by those who belong to it. And when it’s strong enough, that community can exist anywhere.”

I’m universal, and I forgot, for a short time, when I was at my lowest yet again, my passion all wrung out, that I am indeed swimming in grace.

In the end, does any of it really matter, that is, is it really important to me who gives a damn?  Maybe, maybe not, but a wise friend told me a long time ago, “stay passionate and keep holding that mirror up because somebody’s got to do it.”

But if you see Seane Corn, tell her to put her money where her mouth is and send a yoga sister some healthy bucks from her organization to start a weekly yoga program at the shelter.

Kumbaya, y’all.