Tag: yoga

living tantra

by L. Valdez Karl

I discovered a nice site called Living Tantra and I’ve linked it in the Cyberpals and Whatnot sidebar.

Some Western yogis mistakenly believe that tantra yoga only has to do with tantric sex. A long time ago I saw Sting and his wife talking about their relationship on Oprah (probably around the same time that she gave yoga its requisite 15 minutes of attention), so if it’s on Oprah you KNOW that tantra just HAS to be something we all MUST incorporate into our lives (insert rolling eyes and sarcastic smirk smiley here)…along with finding the right bra and those jeans that fit PERFECTLY! Anyway….

In his book Living Yoga: A Comprehensive Guide for Daily Life, Georg Feuerstein writes that “tantra yoga is the path of ritual…and sexual rituals form only a small part of this yogic orientation. Tantra yoga is about realizing that our personal creativity is rooted in, or derives from, cosmic creative potential itself. From the tantric perspective, creativity is a manifestation of the feminine principle of the universe, the Goddess, called shakti“

Feuerstein also writes in his book Tantra: The Path of Ectasy that tantra emphasizes the cultivation of shakti as a path to infinite bliss. His says that tantric teachings are geared toward the attainment of enlightenment as well as spiritual power and are present not only in Hinduism but also in Vajrayana Buddhism.

In my my yoga training I learned that the word tantra in Sanskrit literally means “weave” thereby denoting that our yoga practices — and not just the physical aspect of yoga — are woven (or should be woven) into our daily lives as a beautiful mandala. Therefore, if we are living in a truly tantric manner, we are fully incorporating our yoga into our lives as a daily ritual, consciously taking it off the mat and into our lives.

The following ayurvedic practice/ritual is an excerpt from the Living Tantra website:

DINACHARYA: Daily Conduct

This is a short version of the practice of dinacharya. If you wish to fine tune this for your constitution (vatta, pitta, kapha), read more about the practice in one of the resources listed in the “Ayurveda” sidebar of Living Tantra.

VIEW

“Dinacharya” means daily conduct. Appropriate patterning or ritual conduct is the foundation of a healthy life. Dinacharya is balancing for all of the doshas: vatta, pitta, and kapha. It promotes healthy organization of the energy channels and the seating of the pranas, or internal winds.

METHOD

Wake up by 6 a.m. Pitta and kapha types can wake up earlier. If you can’t manage this at first, work your way into it. You can train yourself to wake up at this time naturally. It helps to sleep in a room that is not totally dark—one that allows some natural light to enter.

1. Before opening your eyes or getting out of bed, sense the energy of the day. Spend a few moments connecting with the larger cosmos. Breath through the top of your head directly into your heart space (the center of your chest, not the physical heart). You can visualize a golden, luminous stream of compassion and love coming to you from all of your spiritual teachers, past, present, and future, and from all realized beings. Feel a sense of grace expanding throughout the body, and radiate this stream of light from the heart space back to your teachers and all beings….

Also courtesy of the Living Tantra website is Indian Music for Global Yogis. You will see a widget in the sidebar where you can search and download everything from South Indian carnatic music to Krishna Das to vedic chants.

om namah shivaya!

shanti

n*ked yoga

by L. Valdez Karl

Since I am very curious by nature (some would say nosey), I check every day on the location of my readers. For those of you who don’t know, many blogs have a site meter that allows the blogger to see exactly how someone finds their blog and where they are in the world. I’ve started to notice how many people — I’m assuming men, or is that sexist? — from around the world do an internet search for “n*ked yoga” or some variation thereof and find this blog! I’ve only used the word “n&ked” in five posts and never wrote about “n%ked yoga”. I used the word in a post about ayurvedic massage, in reference to hippies, and wrote about Shiva babas at the Kumbh Mela in India, all of which are innocent enough.

I’m no prude, but all these searches are beginning to creep me out and from now on, any time I type the word “n#ked”, it will be typed with a character in it, and not the full word. In fact, I am going to go through my blog and retype each and every instance of the word “n&ked”, just like the way someone types their email address using the word “at” instead of @ to keep spammers away from their email addresses. Well…let’s say I will do that for all except one recent post, and you will probably be able to figure out why….:)

OK, I get the fascination with looking at n*ked pictures of whoever, but why “n#ked” and “yoga” together, lately and so often? Maybe someone can explain this to me?

Here are some of the latest searches during the past two days via Google and Yahoo:

“n&ked yoga women” from Pensacola, Florida

“n*ked yoga fitness center Chicago”, location unknown

“n%ked yoga” from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

“n*ked picture of Tamil actress” from Oman. According to Wikipedia “even though Oman is a modern country, western influences are quite restricted. The Ibādī form of Islam is also conservative like Sunni Islam and Shi’a Islam. About 75% of Oman is Muslim…” hmmmmm….and that dude found MY blog?!?

“n#ked yoga girls pics” from Arroyo Grande, California

“n%ked yoga pictures” from Kingston, Illinois

And this is just from the last two days. I’ve been keeping track of my hits since January.

Get a clue, guys — we know where you are!

reader warning: yoga rant!

by L. Valdez Karl



My birthday yesterday got me thinking about aging yoginis….me in particular, but in general the use of youthful yoga images in the Western media to sell a product…yes, let’s admit it, yoga in the West is mass-marketed and a brand name in some cases.

Feminists say that the older woman, that is, a woman over 40, is invisible in modern society. I’ve read more than a few articles about how older Hollywood actresses believe that there are few good roles for the aging actress in a culture obsessed with youth and Botox.

I will throw the question out there: is Western yoga culture guilty of the same offense? Think about the covers of your favorite yoga magazines and the pictures that accompany the stories inside. Think about the ads for yoga products. How many wrinkles can you count? Indeed, how many rounder bodies do you see, the more zaftig, Rubenesque forms?

Vanity Fair has a slide show on famous yogis and yoginis (thanks, Marilyn!) and while the photos are fabulous and I was glad to see master teachers like Desikachar, Jois, and Iyengar, I noticed that there weren’t many older women. Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa was featured, and I’m assuming that Trudie Styler is over 40 since Sting is in his mid-50s, but where are all the older women? Surely Vanity Fair could have found more than two…or am I just being overly-sensitive? And if I am being hyper-sensitive about it, so what?

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m getting tired of seeing the young, skinny, cellulite-free bodies in Yoga Journal and other yoga magazines. I want to see people in my age group and older featured in the articles, and not just in articles about “senior yoga” in chairs or yoga in nursing homes! And I certainly don’t want to see a 20-something yogini demonstrating the asanas in an article about yoga for menopause! I want to see older yogis and yoginis as cover models, wrinkles, saggy breasts, and softer bellies included. But I guess we’re not the right demographic age group — after all, it’s all about who buys what.

I plan on practicing and teaching yoga the rest of my life and the current collection of popular yoga magazines just don’t appeal to me anymore. I used to read Yoga Journal cover to cover and save each and every issue — now I barely skim it and it gets recycled very quickly. At least the YJ interview in the latest issue (ahem…on the last page) features Patricia Walden, an “old” yogini. My favorite yoga magazine is ascent, founded by Swami Sivananda Radha — you can count lots of wrinkles in that magazine!

You may have seen the movie Calendar Girls where “old” Helen Mirren and her “old” friends take off their clothes for a fund-raising calendar. If someone somewhere would do a calendar like that featuring us older yoga bodies, honey, sign me up! Sing the Body Electric!

I Sing the Body Electric — Walt Whitman, 1900

“…This is the female form;
A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot;
It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction!
I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor—all falls aside but myself and it…

Hair, bosom, hips, bend of legs, negligent falling hands, all diffused—mine too diffused;
Ebb stung by the flow, and flow stung by the ebb—love-flesh swelling and deliciously aching;
Limitless limpid jets of love hot and enormous, quivering jelly of love, white-blow and delirious juice…

Be not ashamed, women—your privilege encloses the rest, and is the exit of the rest;
You are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul…”

an attitude of gratitude

by L. Valdez Karl

Today is my birthday. And that scary picture of me (and my boyfriend Harry, or Hari as I used to call him) is circa 1971 when I was a young hippie chick in high school. I killed too many brain cells back then to remember who took that picture.

And how often do you get an email from The Universe on your birthday?….

Hey!! Sama, there’s not been a single day in your life when you’ve been anything but magnificent. Give this to yourself.

Every day you move mountains, touch lives, and perform miracles.

Every day you’re a success, a hero, an example.

And every day you change the world for the better…

The Universe

If any of you would like to get daily personalized messages from The Universe, you can sign up at The Adventurers Club – Thoughts Become Things. Yeah, yeah, I know…none of us need any more emails in our inbox, but it’s kind of neat to get a personalized message from the Universe!

I’ve been around the sun over 50 times now, and every year on my birthday I look back over my life. I can honestly say that I have no regrets, not even about the bad things I’ve experienced because I’ve learned lessons from it all. I don’t regret the drugs I took or hanging out with the people I hung out with, some good, some not so good, some wild and crazy, and others, just crazy. I moved out when I was 18 and never looked back, and for a while making it to age 21 was a little iffy.

Those of you who have read my very early postings know that I dabbled in yoga and meditation in my college days, when yoga was seen as the milieu of half-n@ked hippies sitting around chanting OM. My claim to fame is OMing with Buddhist and Beat Poet Allen Ginsberg at a hippie party, and no, none of us were half-n*ked, but I do remember some wacky tobacy and Ripple wine. On a quest for something more, I started reading the books of the Eastern wisdom traditions even earlier, when I was in high school.

Then my life detoured taking many twists and turns until I found the road sign again that pointed the way back to the Path. I believe there are no coincidences, and yoga brought me back home to myself, to the me that used to be, sans drugs and craziness this time. It is said that yoga connects or re-connects us to our True Self….I know it has in my case, and I’ve had a consistent practice for about 10 years now, and teaching for six. The rewards of yoga for me are so much more than physical — although the physical practice keeps me flexible and open and strong, the non-physical practice makes me whole. My meditation practice keeps me on an even keel, keeps me focused on the NOW, keeps me from becoming reactionary and held prisoner by my emotions or erratic thoughts. My spirituality feeds my soul.

A few years ago I had my birth chart done, and during our first meeting the astrologer told me that she has rarely seen a chart as powerful as mine because of the way certain planets line up. Pluto is very heavy in my chart, Pluto being the planet of death but also the planet of spirituality. She told me that according to my chart, the first months that I spend in India will be the most perfect times in my life to be there. She did my chart before I went on my first trip and she told me that “it will feel like you are going home.” She was right. Dead-on right. The waves of recognition that flooded over me the minute my foot hit Indian soil were too strong to be denied, and I had some deep emotional responses to certain areas in Tamil Nadu.

After my second trip to India I did my “astro travel” birthchart at Astro.com, and my Moon and Pluto (there’s that planet again!) lines intersect right through Tamil Nadu, in the exact spot where I travel. The crossing of Moon and Pluto means “there is a tremendous potential for transformation in this region…the path towards catharsis under Pluto’s guidance often leads through a valley of tears, but once you are through it, you will receive completely new insights. Mighty energies operate under this crossing. Repressed memories, past emotional hurts, and unprocessed fears come into consciousness to make you look at events of your past which you thought were long forgotten, as a result of which you experience cathartic releases…” Hmmmm….maybe that’s why I broke down in those Murugan temples…..

My astrologer has said that according to my chart I have not even begun to reach my potential, that my 50s will be a training ground for what will come after age 60, “taking it on the road”, as she calls it. All my yoga training and spiritual retreats are preparing me for what she calls an exponential explosion into the global realm, because the “Midwest is just too small for you. You came out of the womb looking to get out of the box…” A vedic astrologer told me, long before going to India was even a thought in my mind, that somewhere between 2008-2010 I would experience “divine grace.” I don’t know what that is exactly, but it sounds good.

I’ve always taken anything adepts have told me with a huge grain of salt, if things happen, they happen, I go with the flow. I traveled overseas — solo — for the first time in my life at the fabulous age of 51, and for whatever reason the planets lined up to take me to the heart of yoga. I returned six months later, once again a solo woman-of-a-certain-age traveler.

At an age when many people start thinking about retirement, I know in my bones that the best is yet to come for me. Many my age have health concerns, but I don’t concern myself with that. My arthritis is worse than some — I developed it in my 30s, and had shoulder surgery in my 40s. I had an ovarian cancer scare that required another surgery, and that’s when I created my mantra “I AM NOT THIS BODY, I AM NOT THIS BODY, I AM NOT THIS BODY”. It works for peace of mind and perspective, believe me. If I develop an incapacitating condition, I already know where I want to spend my last days, and it won’t be in an American hospital, I can assure you.

I regret nothing, and look forward to everything that will come my way, even the unpleasant things. I decided a long time ago not to dwell on the past or worry about the future. Life is a delicious ebb and flow and I want the entire banquet, not just a few nibbles at the buffet. Yoga cultivates many things, and one thing it cultivates is an attitude of gratitude. Thank you, Life, for being an excellent teacher.

a holding pattern

by L. Valdez Karl

WOO! It’s been a while since I’ve posted my musings and rants and it’s time to get off my lazy yoga butt (the “yoga butt” I’m supposed to get by doing yoga ONLY 20 MINUTES PER DAY! according to some fitness magazines), but just want to let my yoga peeps know that I have a plethora of posts percolating in this old mind….

like finishing up my stories from my March 2006 trip to India, telling you about my plans for India for December and January 2008, my 10 day silent vipassana retreat that I took at the end of December (the story of which might make you cry or smile), and my recent training with Sarah Powers at the Chicago Yoga Center. All these stories are swirling in my mind like the skirt of a Rajasthani dancer…but all in due time, kiddos…

I will be posting about my three days next week with HH the Dalai Lama in Madison, Wisconsin…three days of teachings and a public address. If being with the Dalai Lama wasn’t enough, I’ll be meeting a fellow moderator from the website IndiaMike who is flying in from New York for His Holiness’ teachings. The fab thing about the internet is that it brings us new friendships, and I have made a few along the cyberpath. So it will be very cool to finally put a face to the user name…from our backstage conversations at IndiaMike it already appears that we are twins seperated at birth!

namaste!

buying your way toward enlightenment

by L. Valdez Karl

Isn’t this great? I can’t wait to get my new VISA card that has an AUM or Buddha’s face on it!

I don’t know about anyone else, but when I saw an ad for this I let out a groan. Using Buddha or the AUM symbol to market something that is the epitome of a capitalist society just rubs me the wrong way. Sort of like when I see the images of Hindu gods and goddesses on underwear or see a cocktail called the “Buddha Bomb” on a menu — a tad distasteful to me, but maybe I’m just overly sensitive to things like that.

While I commend VISA for the concept of the card holders’ points going toward socially conscious projects such as Youth Aids or Rainforest Action Netork, there is also something about using these images to promote accumulating more unnecessary junk in our lives that is disingenuous to me.

To me, yoga and the spiritual path are about downsizing. Ridding our lives of clutter, both physical and emotional, in order to strip us down to our bare essence, to our True Nature. I know for myself that the longer I walk along the yoga path, the less I “need”. I may want things — who wouldn’t want a pair of $90 yoga pants with handpainted chakra symbols flowing down the legs? — but more times than not I ask myself, yeah, but do I really need them?

I could charge my next yoga retreat with this credit card, but when it comes right down to it, I don’t need a credit card with an AUM symbol on it to remind me to think globally and act locally.

A few weeks ago I taught a yoga class as a benefit for a local domestic violence shelter. I had a donation box set out in the yoga studio where I teach for about two weeks before the fundraiser. I raised a lot money, but I found it amusing when a student wrote a check for $120 for a class pass, and then could not even put $1 into the donation box. That’s OK — maybe she was still paying off her credit card bill that included those chakra pants, with the matching $150 Swarovski crystal sacred energy Shakti necklace, and the $80 eco-yoga mat that she carried in the $200 real leather yoga mat bag. Later I saw the same student buying a $4 cup of coffee at the Starbucks down the street.

Hmmmm…I wonder if she used that AUM card to charge that latte?

om muruga, goodbye madurai

by L. Valdez Karl

The last stop on the Madurai tour was the Thirupparamkunram Murugan temple, about five miles outside of Madurai. Unfortunately this was much later at night when everyone was tired, hungry, and complaining. Most of the people did not even get off the bus to walk to the temple.

The temple would have been the highlight of my day had it not been the last stop because it is a very important temple, one of the six abodes of Lord Muruga, an important South Indian Tamil god. Many people in the west are familiar with Ganesha, the god with the elephant head who is the son of Shiva and Parvati, but few know that Muruga is his brother. His temple is huge, carved in rock, and it is where Muruga married Deivanai, the divine daughter of Indra. In the main shrine, besides Muruga, the murthis of Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesha, and Durga are housed. There was no way I could have explored it in the time that was alloted to us, so I had to be satisfied with a quick walk-through. This made me a bit sad because for reasons having to do with someone in my life, I had promised myself that on this trip I would spend time at an important Murugan temple, maybe go to Palani, a town near Kodaikanal. I realized that instead of the bus tour, I should have hired a driver and gone out by myself to spend the better part of a day here. I should have planned my last day more carefully, but I was tired and wanted to rest my brain and leave the planning to someone else, even if it was a bus driver who did not speak English. Oh well…go with the flow, there will be a next time….

Less than 30 minutes was not enough time to explore this temple, so we piled back on the bus and headed back to Madurai, everyone quiet now for the ride home. Despite the heat, the dust, the migraine, the incessant touts that I experienced over these last few days, I again felt at peace here on a bus with strangers in a strange city in a strange land, and I almost fell completely asleep, dozing in and out of yogini dreams.

I woke up to people yelling. We were back in Madurai and people were yelling at the driver again. Apparently he wasn’t dropping people off at their hotels, he was dropping people off wherever he felt like it. It was late, and the streets were crowded with people walking to the Meenakshi Temple so the bus driver had trouble getting through the streets. I watched everything with detachment, as I usually did, a half smile on my face — watching group dynamics and mentally placing bets on who would win, on what the outcome would be.

Every few blocks he would kick people off the bus, and the people would complain as they tried to get autorickshaws to pick them up. Finally it came down to me and an older couple. I started to get off the bus and the husband started arguing with the driver. I assumed he was complaining about not being taken to their hotel, being dropped off in the middle of the street. They got in each others’ faces with much hand waving and head wobbling. It was just another Indian adventure for me. The husband finally got off the bus, the bus left, and the three of us stood in the middle of the street. Suddenly they start speaking to me, perfect English, complaining about the bus and driver. How funny, I thought, that they never said a word to me all the day, yet we had sat across the aisle from each other.

As we commiserated about the driver’s rudeness, the wife gave me their business card. They were from Andra Pradesh, a state north of Tamil Nadu. She was an artist, he ran some type of nature preserve. Two people whom I would haved loved to talk to during the day about two of my favorite subjects, art and nature. They told me to come for a visit…maybe one day…it is these chance encounters with people that I treasure the most from my trips.

They asked if I wanted to share a rickshaw with them, but we were going in opposite directions. I got back to my hotel and spent the rest of the evening in the roof-top restaurant, looking out over the temple complex, digesting not only my dinner, but also what India had taught me so far….more patience, being more present, and detaching from the outcome. Anyone on the yoga path knows that these are qualities that sink a little bit deeper into the consciousness the longer one does the work. But somehow, being here, my heart could open more fully, just as a lotus rises out of the mud and into the light.

Goodbye Madurai, hello Kodaikanal. Om Muruga…lead me from the darkness and into the light….

1938 video of Krishnamacharya

by L. Valdez Karl

following the ridiculous with the sublime, watch this 1938 video of Sri Krishnamacharya doing asana and bandhas at the age of 50. Sri Krishnamacharya, the grandfather of modern yoga, teacher of Iyengar, Jois, Desikachar, and my teacher, Srivatsa Ramaswami. Sri Krishnamacharya died in 1989.

I humbly and with gratitude follow this lineage. It was an honor and a privilege to study at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Chennai and I hope to return as soon as I can.

om shanti shanti shantih