Tag: yin yoga

Paul Grilley: how to be a good yoga student

by L. Valdez Karl

I spent 5 days with Paul Grilley in another wonderful yin yoga teacher training. this video was taken by Zach, who came from Michigan to the Chicago Yoga Center.

Paul is talking about being a courteous student if you are in a workshop or a class and you do not agree with what is being taught.

I have studied with Paul for 5 years now and what I love about him is that he kills the yoga sacred cow of “universal principles of alignment.” I will write soon about my experience in his training and post my own pictures.

http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=8312665546802322974&hl=en&fs=true

addthis_pub = ‘yogagal60510’;

body consciousness

by L. Valdez Karl


Those of you who have been reading this blog regularly know that I don’t treat yoga as a physical exercise or performance art. I know that people come to yoga for all different reasons, and many people say “so what if people just do yoga for the work-out? they’ll find the non-physical part of it eventually.”

my contention is…maybe.

remember what I said before: in the pre-Yoga Journal days, that is, when I dabbled in yoga and meditation in college in the early ’70s, the only people I knew doing yoga and meditation were patchoulli oil wearing hippies who had already been to or were going to India. They lived in communes or had studied with white-robed gurus who did not separate yoga and meditation. Yoga was meditation and meditation was yoga. what a concept!

I also contend that if one is “doing yoga” for only the physical aspects, it ain’t yoga. it’s acrobatics. it’s gymnastics. but it ain’t yoga. I’ve heard Desikachar, the son of Krishnamacharya, say the same thing. you can call a dog a cat a thousand times, but that will never make that dog a cat. it’s still a dog, no matter what you call it. so you can call your morning work-out “yoga” all you want, but that does not make it yoga.

what I find in my classes both with beginners and experienced students is that they are very disembodied. their bodies are in the room, but their minds are not. my teaching is very breath-oriented, and I can always tell when someone moves first, and then breathes. it’s become second nature to me. and when they are holding the asanas, I can always tell how they are “out there”, instead of “in here”, that is, in their own skin. the darting eyes, the twitching fingers, the hard bellies without the softness of breath, the constant adjustments without stopping to feel the asana, the need to rush on to the next asana, these are all dead give-aways of disembodiment.

I teach a slow flow vinyasa, moving with the breath, and also yin. Yin is a style that can make people uncomfortable in their own skin because they have to be still for at least five minutes in order to stretch the connective tissue (and thereby the meridians of the body) in order to facilitate opening and an increased flow of chi. it’s a style that teaches you to stop resisting, first in your yoga, but more importantly, I believe, in your life.

it is also a style that connects you to the concept of surrendering to your body. I think the concept of surrender is a dirty word to many western yogis because the western mindset is conditioned for resistance and hardness, in other words, “working out.” I believe that the way you do your yoga is the way you live your life…soft v. hard, resistance v. surrender, rushed v. slow, pushing away v. acceptance.

In my Mindfulness Yoga and Meditation Training we must do periodic readings and one reading was a chapter called “Sensations” from Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient: The Physical Foundations of Mindfulness by Will Johnson. as I was reading a light bulb went off over my head and I said “YES!, this is why people are uncomfortable meditating”. not because our minds run away with us, which is what people always say, but because we run away from our physical sensations. what comes up in asana practice or when we try to meditate draws us into the present moment and sometimes that’s a terrifying place to be. the present moment helps us experience life in the here and now instead of regretting the past or anticipating the future. the present moment helps us become embodied rather than disembodied. when we stop feeling our physical sensations, when we run away from them, when we are “out there” instead of “in here”, that is when the monkey mind takes over. that’s when I see the twitching fingers and the darting eyes.

it’s hard to be still because we are conditioned to run.

Johnson says that “it is not possible to be aware of the full presence of bodily sensations and lost in the involuntary monologue of the mind at the same time.” Buddha said that “everything that arises in the mind starts flowing with a sensation on the body.”

Below is an excerpt from one of my favorite blogs The Absent Mind. In this post Mike writes about meditation, surrender, and acceptance:

I’ve been feeling that I could actually meditate indefinitely, if not for physical limitations. And even then, I could probably bear any level of physical discomfort. Somewhere along the line, I passed a point where I stopped resisting or expecting anything from meditation. Or life for that matter. The two go hand in hand.

…I still resist life here and there like everyone else. But not nearly as much as I once did. With regard to meditation, I am in awe of the beauty of utter simplicity. A friend of mine once said that transformation is the shift from nothing is very satisfying to nothing is very satisfying. Brilliant, and oh, so True.

When people ask me about meditation, they often tell me they have tried it but can’t sit still for even 15 minutes. What can I tell them? Practice.

Here is another hint that might unlock the door for some. The reason that people can’t sit still in meditation (or any other part of life) is that they want to eliminate what they perceive as the negative. In the case of meditation, it can be mind chatter or whatever unpleasant thoughts or feelings arise. How many times have I heard the words, “If I could only quiet my mind …”?

But the problem with that perspective is this: reducing the negative in anything only changes the scale on which you operate. It never eliminates duality. For example, if you reduce mind chatter to the point where you only have a fleeting thought once every 2 minutes, you may still be just as annoyed by that thought as you were with constant mind chatter. There is no escape from thoughts, feelings, or any other forms of negativity. There is only surrender, acceptance.

As one of life’s most excruciating ironies, a funny thing happens with surrender. Gradually one opens up to the profound beauty in every movement, thought, feeling, or stirring. One becomes able to perceive even the slightest shift in energy, and the Silence of Pure Being arises amidst the storm of thinking, feeling, and otherwise being alive.

(emphasis added)

In my comment to his post I said that when people try to meditate they usually run from any type of temporary physical sensation. Mike said: “I notice this, too, when attending yoga classes. The most challenging (yet also most satisfying) aspect of the asana is the relaxing into body consciousness. Of course, this is why breath is so important, because it is synonymous with energy flow and the consciousness of the body.” (emphasis added.)

Mike said that he pondered the question, “why does consciousness follow this body around?” and when he asked his teacher, his teacher said “‘the body is consciousness.’ …there is no separation of mind and body, they are one and the same.”

mind + body = no duality. until we understand that, we’re not doing yoga.

if you can’t stand the heat…

by L. Valdez Karl

…get out of that yoga studio — or at least ask the teacher to turn it down.

I’ve been reading bindifry’s itty bitty brain basket blog for a while now. bindi is an astanga teacher in chicago. proving once again that it’s a small world, I already “know” bindi from the yoga studio where I trained although we have never met. such is life in the blogosphere!

bindi is in india right now so I emailed her and told her how I loved her post about cranking up the heat during yoga because I totally agree with her. bindi gave me permission to quote her blog:

“for all of you who like to turn up the heat in the yoga room to 80, hear me out. not everyone can tolerate that kind of heat. us pitta/vata people have a tendency to overheat. and that is not good for us. the yoga room seems to be a constant battle of heat/cold depending on the dosha make up of the individual. sharath talked about this last year when i studied with him in australia. he said there should always be windows open, ventilation at all times. and it is dangerous to have sweat dripping off your body because that means the body is unable to cool itself anymore. too many salutations is not good when you are this heated, and you should do less. and you should do more when you are very cold. when i practice yoga, i do not even turn the heat on. because it’s actually dangerous for me to over heat. there aren’t any totally closed rooms in india, so this western idea of a sauna room with steam on the windows & puddles of sweat is just that-a “western” ideal of yoga. we want the heat to “do” the yoga for us, instead of us making that heat ourselves by working hard. the room should not be heated above 69 degrees. the last thing you want to do is ingest other people’s toxins. someone like me has a real reason for needing to practice very early in the morning. especially in south india. and this is the reason. i lack kapha in my bodily make up. i like to make my own heat. too much makes me overheat. sick, even. and i turn very red & am unable to cool down for a long time. i lose my appetite, and get heat stroke.

i am reading an interesting astanga book right now called, “ashtanga yoga practice & philosophy,” by an australian named gregor maehle. he talks about this phenomenon. …here’s some paraphrased words from the book regarding heat:

‘care needs to be taken not to overheat. overheating is not good. sweating too much drains the life force from the body. 68 degrees is ideal for practice. heating the yoga room above 77 degrees produces flexibility, but decreases strength, stamina & concentration.’ he goes on to discuss how overly flexible people are lacking strength, a result of biochemical imbalance. and too much strength without flexibility restricts the range of joint movement.’ ‘a cold room increases awareness and attention to detail & pays off in terms of benefits. there is more learning if the temperature is low & the body becomes sturdier due to the awakening of physical intelligence.’

so please consider others in the room when you enter the yoga shala & take it upon yourself to turn the heat up to 80 degrees. if you are that cold, you need to do more salutations, move faster, and do not stop moving. sensitivity to others is supreme. and think about that when you close a window, too. because some of us are losing our life force.”

(italics emphasis added)

the yogis reading this know the yoga styles where it is customary to turn up the heat. I have done both styles and frankly I think it’s a gimmick. I think it’s a gimmick to cater to the western mindset of “it ain’t a workout unless I sweat.” I know that people who do Bikram yoga claim that they are more flexible after a class. well, yes, because it’s the heat that’s doing it, not the yoga. it’s a false sense of flexibility.

flexibility has everything to do with the connective tissue (tendons, ligaments, and fascia of the body), not the muscles. and the connective tissue must be therapeutically stressed (i.e., held) for a minimum of three to five minutes in poses like cobbler’s pose or pigeon or low lunges or hero, to name a few. that’s yin yoga. connective tissue must be worked every day, consistently, in order to achieve true flexibility. anything less, and connective tissue will literally shrinkwrap your joints. you don’t need heat to achieve the flexibility that working your connective tissue in this manner will give you.

In a vinyasa class we can create heat by holding the pose longer and watching the breath or by engaging in kumbhaka after the inhalation. But many yoga students can’t be still for that long. You don’t have to do “power yoga” or move fast to create heat. I sweat a lot anyway and I’m dripping with sweat if I practice in an unairconditioned studio during a hot midwestern summer. The sweat rolls down my face so I don’t need the heat cranked up.

bindi is right on when she talks about heat not being good for certain doshas. teaching pranayama indiscriminately in a group class without knowing the students’ doshas is also not wise. for example, kapalabhati breathing aggravates vata, and if the student is vata/pitta, and does kapalabhati breathing in a room that is heated to over 80 degrees…you get the idea.

is yoga about soothing and harmonizing the mind/body complex or is it about further aggravating an already stressed and aggravated body?

during my first training in India the class was predominately western yoga teachers. the asana class was the first class of the day, from 7 to 8 am, before the heat of the day, in an open-air room. all the classes were taught by Desikachar’s senior teachers.

one day a teacher was speaking about certain asanas and one of the American teachers asked, “but will it create heat?” The Indian teacher looked confused. “heat?” “yes, heat. like in the core.” the teacher still looked confused. “why do you want to create ‘heat’?,” she asked. now the American yoga teacher looked confused. she did not know how to answer that and remained silent.

the Indian teacher laughed. “South India is already hot. we do not want to create more heat! we do not understand this idea of ‘creating heat’ in your yoga classes.”

indeed.

thanks, bindi!

musical monday

by L. Valdez Karl

My regular readers may have noticed that I haven’t written much lately about yoga, Buddhism, Tibet, or social action, the subjects that are near and dear to my heart. For whatever reason as 2007 draws to a close, I find myself pre-occupied with other things: my impending trip to India, a medical procedure I will have next week, and teaching at a new yoga studio. but the drama never ends at the studio where I used to teach.

Another teacher quit last week for the same reason I left — the alcoholic dysfunction of the owner. It so happens that the teacher who quit was the only teacher who supported me when I had my confrontation with the owner in September. it had come to her attention that the owner yet again had taught her class in, shall we say, a less than functional state, and my friend decided, enough is enough, that she could not continue teaching at a studio that is based on lies and delusions and the denial and complicity of the other teachers.

as the saying goes, all things happen for a reason. I am enjoying teaching at the new yoga studio. I live in a suburban area about 45 miles outside of Chicago — think of the stereotypes about “white bread suburbia” and that pretty much sums up where I live. But all I have to do is drive 15 minutes and I’m in the middle of corn and soybean fields, and in another 20 minutes the landscape is dotted with farms and stables and farm tractor companies. I prefer that environment much more but we live where we do so The Husband can have a quasi-sane drive to his office.

The location of the new yoga studio can be called rural small town which happens to be right next door to a small university town. So the vibe and the mindsets of the students are immediately different. For one, they are appreciative of whatever style of yoga is taught at the studio, it’s yoga for the sake of yoga. There is no yoga snobbery. There is no sense of entitlement as the students had in white bread suburbia where Tyler and Tiffany are bought a brand new Hummer for their 16th birthdays. The students don’t come in the latest yoga clothes with the hand-painted chakras, endorsed by Seane Corn, don’t cha know — many come in sweat pants and baggy T-shirts.

So I am grateful to teach in this environment and am humbled by the response to my teaching. I did a second yin yoga workshop yesterday that had over 20 students and because the first two workshops were so popular, the owner asked me to do another one in two weeks. Twelve students signed up for it immediately after yesterday’s workshop.

Maybe humbled is too mild a word — blown away would be more accurate. One of my students who studied with me at the other studio lives in this town and has just gotten a job with the local paper as a free-lance writer on fitness. She gets paid $20 an article — I told you it was small town — but she is happy for it because as she says, it pays for a yoga class. She wrote a story about my first workshop that was entitled “Local Yoga Enthusiasts Thrilled as Popular Instructor Comes to Town.” She gave me a copy of the article yesterday and I got all choked up. really. wow. I felt like Shiva Rea. But you’ll never see a picture of me with my hair blowing in the wind.

Yup, all things happen for a reason.

i rock! so there!

by L. Valdez Karl

No one ever nominated me for the Rockin’ Girl Blogger Award that I’ve seen on many blogs by women, so I’m giving the award to myself. I liberated the badge from another blog, so there! Why? Because I most definitely rock! As it says in the side bar, I bow to Buddha but rock with Kali, jai ma!

My regular readers know what happened at the yoga studio that I left back in September, and that I dealt with lots of rage about the lies and deceptions the studio is built upon. As it turned out, tonight I start teaching at another studio where the vibe is the polar opposite of the old studio. In fact, the owner asked me to take over one of her classes. All things happen for a reason.

One of the styles of yoga that I teach is yin yoga so to introduce this new yoga community to it and to me, we planned two workshops. The first one was this past Saturday. To my amazement, 23 people signed up for the workshop. The studio was jammed. The next workshop is two weeks from now on a Sunday morning and 18 people have already signed up for that one, 11 before the first workshop was even given.

The studio is a beautiful, peaceful space with a number of Buddha statues, and at one end there is an altar with a large Buddha head surrounded by candles. As I was setting up the space before the workshop, listening to and chanting along with Krishna Das as he chanted Om Namah Shivaya Gurave, I was overcome with gratitude. Gratitude for the gift of yoga, gratitude for everything in my life, gratitude for life itself despite my physical afflictions.

No one was in the studio and I knelt down in front of the altar and began to cry. Chanting always does that to me. Sometimes I can’t even finish a chant because I am overcome. I asked my chant teacher in India why I cry so much when I hear vedic chants and she said that chanting cracks open the heart, that chanting brings old, painful samskaras to the surface to be released, that chanting opens the throat chakra to unite the mind with the heart.

I placed my hands in anjali mudra and chanted Buddham Saranam Gachhami Dhammam Saranam Gachhami Sangham Saranam Gachhami over and over again — grateful for Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. I told myself that if my life ended just then or if something untoward should happen to me, whether in my travels or a disease, I would gladly accept whatever comes because I have had a good life despite everything I have ever been through, in this life and in any past life. I know that no one can cause my suffering. My suffering and my liberation are my own.

I got up and opened the door and the students began to slowly fill the studio. I began to teach, ending the workshop by leading them in the First Foundation of Mindfulness.

I rocked. And I was grateful.

“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision of tomorrow.” Melody Beattie

no attachment, no aversion

by L. Valdez Karl

What would happen to pain if we did not label it as such? What would happen if we turned to face our obstacles instead of pushing them away?

I teach vinyasa flow and yin yoga. Yin yoga is a style that is still unfamiliar to many yoga students. It doesn’t make you sweat and you don’t feel like you’ve gotten a “workout” — “you mean you’re not moving? you’re just on the floor? no way can I do pigeon for 10 minutes, are you kidding?!?”

I believe that if you have strictly a “yang” practice like astanga or vinyasa, you are only giving yourself half the gift of yoga.

Because of my training with Paul Grilley and Sarah Powers and my own personal yoga and meditation practices, I feel that a yin/yang yoga practice offers a complete practice not only on the physical level, but more importantly on the psychic level. Working on these deeper levels is what leads to our personal transformation, and the changes we make in our soft tissue have a profound influence on the emotional, mental, and energetic levels. My own yoga practice deepened when I moved away from an alignment-based, precision-obsessed practice.

A quiet yin practice reveals our subtle body. We move from the gross muscular level into our bones, into the connective tissue deep within us. Many yoga students don’t practice in a way that invites stillness because many times the contemplative aspects of yoga are ignored in western yoga classes. How many of you sit in stillness for 10-15 minutes DURING a vinyasa class, i.e., at the end of class, not AFTER the class, only as an option? My study at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in India showed me how different yoga is there compared to the fitness classes labeled as yoga here.

In my training with Sarah earlier this year she said that “yoga is a process of fully inhabiting ourselves — body, heart, and mind.” Sarah believes that as a society we are so fixated on our bodies looking and performing a certain way that we neglect the spirit body. She said that Ken Wilber calls this “bodyism”, and I see it all the time in vinyasa classes.

There is nothing wrong in trying to perfect an arm balance or headstand, nothing at all. But if the only thing behind it is Ego, then it is only a performance. Non-attachment, non-Ego, is accepting yourself just the way you are in that present moment when your legs smash the wall and you crash down from a very shaky headstand — and smiling about it instead of swearing. I ask my students, “what is going to ultimately transform you? holding an arm balance for five minutes or sitting in stillness for five minutes?”

The stillness of yin yoga allows us to observe the rising and passing away of physical and emotional sensations. All of our life experiences reside in our body, and the emotional afflictions we all carry affects the body and hardens us, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Yin yoga is not just about cultivating physical flexibility, but our inner flexibility as well. Sarah believes that we can never truly soften if we do not investigate these sensations and turn toward our pain and discomfort, instead of running from them. This process is similar to vipassana meditation — watching, arising, abiding, passing away.

Sarah’s teacher training included a workshop called “Working with Emotional Obstacles Along the Path.” She suggests that we explore our personal responses to our sensations, and instead of pushing them away, confront them, because if we do not, our obstacles continue to live in our bodies. Sarah recommends a five step process:

* Recognition — Identify what is disturbing you the most. Emotional pain, illness, addiction, self-hate?

* Acceptance — Acknowledge the issue and explore how and where it lives inside you. Does it have a shape, color, size, temperature, texture?

* Impartiality — Let go of defining the issue as right or wrong. Let go of assumptions and just observe.

* Personification — Imagine this issue as a living being in front of you. Notice its gender, color, size, etc. Ask It what It needs of You, and if this need is met, how does that make You feel?

* Compassion — Give yourself permission to have this need as you begin to open to the expansiveness and clarity of your newfound Awareness.

Yoga, done with mindfulness, allows us to come home to ourselves.

TADA DRASTUH SVARUPE VASTHANAM
(Yoga Sutra-s 1.3)
“Then, the ability to understand the object fully and correctly is apparent.”

“In the state of Yoga, the different preconceptions and products of the imagination that can prevent or distort understanding are controlled, reduced, or eliminated. The tendency to be closed to fresh comprehension or the inability to comprehend are overcome.” (Reflections on Yoga Sutra-s of Patanjali, TKV Desikachar)