photo credit: kevinpoh

“What’s the point of all of this?” a new student asked one evening after a class I was subbing.

A conversation that had begun with a question about alignment in Ardha Matsyendrasana had quickly morphed into something else.

“I mean, is the point of yoga flexibility? Spirituality? Listening to Radiohead?” asked the seeker, with a nod up to the speakers.

Note to self: remove Radiohead from playlist.

All jokes aside, possible answers were everywhere. If you asked someone in the lounge at the yoga studio, he or she might say, “Because it makes me feel better.” Patanjali says (YS 2.48) once yoga is mastered there is freedom from the pairs of opposites (duality). The Bhagavad Gita says yoga is the breaking of contact with pain.

“There are many reasons that people come to yoga. Why are you here?” I asked.

I turned the question back around to him because although he was asking me, it seemed like he was really asking himself. He said he started taking classes just to try it, and liked the idea of increasing flexibility and strength, but there seemed to be a number of different styles emphasizing different themes and he wondered what the end goal was.

“Why do you practice?” he asked.

photo credit: lululemon athletica

Initially, I told him, I liked being physically strong, the bliss I felt after practicing, and being able to bend and move my body in new ways.  A few years later, I began to notice the practice’s effect on my mind. Now, after years of studying and practicing ParaYoga, it’s about the soul.

“I practice to connect with that part of me that is untouched by suffering,” I said. “To remember that no matter what is happening, at my core there is a light that is always shining.”

The space between us got more still and for a moment I kind of wished I had that social apparatus where I minced words a little bit. Oh well.

“So at different stages people come to yoga for different reasons, and those reasons may change as your practice deepens. What part would you like to learn more about now?”

He said he was interested in learning the philosophy behind the practice, so I suggested that reading The Heart of Yoga was a good place to start.

The exchange left my heart feeling light and inspired. I had a moment of recommitting to meeting people where they are and then guiding them to a taste of where continued practice can lead. Of teaching in a way that leads fellow seekers across the continuum of their practice. And by continuum of practice, I don’t mean from Virabhdrasana II to Tittibhasana. I mean from “because it makes me feel better” to moving toward a mind and body anchored in a state of steadiness whether life is good or whether they are facing challenges.

photo credit: Aloriel

There is a little “b” for beginner next to my classes on the schedule at the studio, probably because on a physical level my classes are not advanced. What’s great about that little b is that it is an opportunity to take newer students from learning where to place their feet and to how to breathe evenly to shifting their energy using pranayama, bandhas, and meditation. It is such a gift to meet people who just want to move their bodies  and to give them that, and then something more. The best part is watching them leave with a small private smile, having gotten in touch with an inner spark with which they really needed to reconnect.

I think as teachers and as practitioners it is extremely important to have moments like the one that started this post. I am grateful for opportunities to take pause and ask what it is all for. And if over the years the answer is not getting less gross and more subtle, then perhaps it’s time to change how you’re practicing. Ask yourself: Is your yoga changing with you?

And if the methodologies we’re using to teach yoga in the West are not evolving and aren’t being used to create an effect on the whole person, body, mind and soul, then it is definitely time to change how we’re teaching. The old ways are no longer working and the systems that are out of balance are crumbling. We have a group of seekers for 90 minutes. If all we give them during that time hits the physical body, it is a missed opportunity.

It’s all well and good to be able to do tittibhasana. It’s more important to know who you are. Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive. We can have knowledge of both. But if practice and teaching is feeding the arm balance side over the Self-knowledge side, it’s time to redo the equation.

Have you been in a class lately that had a lot to do with cool poses, and very little, if anything about the encouragement of the soul? And teachers, how do you fulfill their desire to do a physical practice and at the same time impart the inner spark?

photo credit: rachel_thecat

I don’t think I’m alone in sometimes feeling adrift amidst the massive pop-culture scene of yoga and the tidal force of commercialism.   Although I continually seek to anchor myself in practice, I feel pulled back and forth from the surface waves of pop-culture yoga to the currents of ancient wisdom that flow deeply through the tradition.  I can’t say that I entirely despise commercialism, after all, I want to make a living writing about and teaching yoga.   But I do question the degree to which commercialism seems to be steering the communal boat of yoga culture these days.    Does the yoga community have the integrity to continue to plumb the depths of this tradition or will we eventually find ourself asleep, and drowning in shallow waters?

One recent response to the commercialized, celebrity yoga empire is the newly emerged anti-celeb yoga website thebabarazzi.com, which is full of sarcasm at the expense of yoga’s commercial paradigm.  On one hand, I love that the “babarazzi” are challenging the celebrity yoga-sphere.  They are shedding light on all of the ways we are deceived by this subculture into thinking that the pinnacle of the good life is a product of  FB “likes” and page views.  Recently, YogaCityNYC conducted an interview with one of the “babarazzi” about their site, who commented that:  “There was all this celeb yoga going on – everywhere.  People even calling themselves that. We thought, wait, the other side of this is missing. Where are the tabloids, the paparazzi, because the celebs types are dominating this discussion?   It needs some balance.”

I get their point, but here’s the thing, despite the somewhat refreshing shot thebabarazzi.com takes at the all too self-serious celebrity yoga empire it also does nothing more than continue to meander through surface musings. It too remains floating in a sea of superficiality, in a way unconsciously legitimizing the very thing it seeks to uproot.  Is this a good response in the face of the narcotizing threat of commercialism and celebrity culture?  Is this really the “other side” of celebrity yoga and what balance actually looks like?  After all the paparazzi – which this parodied website was named after – are, in actuality, a robust symbol of North American celebrity culture.  Sure, they expose the dirt on its shiny façade but they also perpetuate it.

photo credit: procsilas

So what is the true antidote to an over-emphasis on yoga’s commercial side?  What does real balance look like? I believe it comes down to this:  If commercialized and celebrity yoga is indeed the shallow surface froth of yoga’s greater complexity then what is needed is depth.  If it is a reduction of yoga’s multidimensionality then what is needed is expansion.  If it is a shiny but hollow vestige of something more substantial then what is needed is SOUL. These things are the genuine “other side” of the commercialization of yoga.  But, in order to balance the vigorous currents of commercialism the global yoga community must commit to yoga’s bigger picture.   I know we have to be able to make a living in a capitalist milieu.  But,  can we do that with the voice of depth, expansion and soul as our guide rather than commercialism as  as our master?  What might that look like?

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

What do you think -   Is commercialism really a threat to yoga?  What is required from the community as a whole to keep yoga from being drowned in it? Is there a balance point where commercialism and depth can be reconciled?  Do anti-celeb sites serve a purpose?

Photo courtesy of Jeffrey N. Zimmerman, Petaluma, CA

Be kind to everyone, and say I love you, often. You never know when it might be the last time you see them…

ceased to be a cliche on Sunday April 15, 2012. The words went, bullseye-like, straight out of my mouth and into my heart.

My boyfriend recently witnessed a murder/suicide. Up close, 25 feet away, and in a world of luck that he, too, was not taken down with a revolver.

Jeffrey Zimmerman is a family law attorney, a specialization I’ve come to realize is as much social worker as anything else, and hardly exemplifies the “evil lawyer” of jokes. After 30 years of experience, he still loses sleep at night, worrying about how to best represent his divorce clients, how to make the best out of what is so often a painful, confusing, soul-wrenching “procedure.” But what he wants most of all is to do the best thing for the involved children, to do what’s best for them.

When Jeff called me, just moments after it happened, and said, “My client has been shot,” I assumed he meant he had heard about it, that someone had let him know. When he added, “Her husband was waiting for her outside my office, he just shot her, then blew his brains out,” the world went surreal.

“That only happens on Law & Order” is now another cliche gone sour. It does happen, it did, in the sweet northern California town of Petaluma. I used to love Law & Order. It was my junk tv, my mind-numbing intake before bedtime. One note of “dun-ta,” and I was absorbed. But that was before I was reminded by the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, 1:15, to be careful of the company (read: entertainment) I keep, and my teacher underscored it when he cautioned against taking in violent or disturbing television, as we are ingesting those images and sounds that only seem like a mindless whiling away of time. They enter us by way of prana, and take root in the deepest recesses of our psyche, if we let them.

My yoga practice this week has been one of trying to assimilate what I ingested when I was force-fed brutal violence. How to rid my mind of the horrid taste of what happened, there on the sidewalk of this hip, Mayberry-ish town, home of the Butter and Eggs parade, which paradoxically, thankfully, will soon roll down the street within a sound of laughter’s distance from the scene. The scene where Kim Conover, second-grade school teacher, and mother to 21-month twins, and daughters aged 12 and 15, was slain by her estranged husband, who then turned the gun on himself. But not before looking straight in the eye of my boyfriend, the man who was working on the weekend to keep harm out of her way.

photo credit: St0rmz

Now, the families, the town, the school, are all heart-broken, marked by one man’s mind gone wild. My personal standpoint is one of knowing that when my boyfriend went in to meet with his client that Sunday afternoon, it was to help her get way from the man who had been frightening her. And that during those same moments in which he and his client were trying to ensure her safety, safety’s exact opposite waited in ambush outside, ready to take her life away.

When she walked out of his office that day, Jeff tells me she felt optimistic. She had been trying to get a restraining order from the police, but twice judges had denied it, for lack of enough evidence to warrant the action. But she walked out into the sunshine that day with some hope that this time, the law would have her back.

As has been recently examined in Yoga Modern, it is the challenge of the yogi to tolerate the intolerable, to see the divine even in the most “heinous” of people, even in the ones the world joins together to condemn. And now this is my practice, wrought in first-person.

I’m told, and I teach, that the most difficult of yoga poses are not taught to make us feel bad about ourselves because we can’t do them. The asana that feel like they are out to kill us are tools to hone our tolerance, are a sort of inoculation of “I can’t stand it” that strengthens the immune system of our forbearance.

But what is the practice to help us digest, assimilate, and/or eliminate the cruelest of memories that take seat in us? In this case, i was looking for even the smallest ray of light, such as the fact that in some of her last moments on earth, Kim Conover felt encouraged.

Because of my awareness of yoga’s gift of grace, I believe that little ray of light did count for her. I feel that in what was sadly her last hour on earth, she was with someone who was fighting for her, and who she knew was her advocate. And while it may have been drastically overshadowed by what was to follow, it matters that she had that, and that she was seen as someone who mattered.

photo credit: RickC

Can we find, and remember the blessings that a victim experienced moments before it’s “all over” as a crumb, however small, to weigh in? Grateful they had even one clear moment of grace? In Kim’s sense of relief, in the sweet taste of Skittles for Trayon Martin? 

photo credit: Fibonacci Blue

As my yoga sister and I caught up over tea after our practice, we talked of many things. I shared with her the sickness I felt after reading about Trayvon Martin for the past few weeks. There are many different opinions on the matter, but the fact is, an unarmed 17-year-old kid carrying an iced tea and a packet of Skittles was shot and killed. He is dead and his parents are suffering and although the matter is now in the hands of the justice system, the case has stirred up a lot of emotions for many Americans.

“Where is the divine in this?” my friend wondered aloud.

The question has been percolating in my mind since she asked it. Where indeed? I have bounced back and forth between twin emotions of rage and sadness with each article I’ve read. Disbelief that this could happen in 2012 with no arrest for 46 days. Nausea when reading comments on Web sites and finding some of the nastiest, most racist sentiments I’ve ever encountered. As the weeks have dragged on those emotions have given way to uncertainty as to whether this case is about a poor investigation,  racism, gun control, the Stand Your Ground law, or a mixture of all of these.

Now that Zimmerman has been arrested, the case will play out in the court of law rather than the court of public opinion. Having raised awareness regarding the case to the level of the national stage, I hope that Trayvon’s parents can now begin the work of healing.

I still find myself reflecting on where the divine is in this sad situation. For the hard questions in life I turn to yogic wisdom. Perhaps one way of finding the divine in this, or any situation that calls up the shadow, either of one person or of an entire nation, is found in the Isha Upanishad:

“The wise person beholds all beings in the Self, and the Self in all beings; for that reason he does not hate anyone.”  —Isha Upanishad, Verse 6

photo credit: h.koppdelaney

As I read that verse, I felt my heart open. It was still heavy, but at least it was unarmored. In seeing all beings in the Self, therein is the divine. In both Martin and in Zimmerman. In the beauty of a teenage boy captured in photographs, with his whole life before him. In the sadness of the aftermath of a life taken too soon, parents beset by grief. In the joining of voices of people of all races across the country, calling for justice in the form of an arrest so that the legal system can do its job. In the reminder that we still need to dig deeper and take an honest look at race in America and also gun control. In seeing that while Zimmerman’s fateful actions were driven by fear, the repercussions of that fear have sparked a dialogue that may yet move this country forward. In finding compassion for Zimmerman, a human being who is feeling his own grief about having taken Martin’s life.

Is it possible to view Martin and Zimmerman as teachers, exposing the very things about ourselves and our country that we don’t want to see, but that must be illuminated in order to heal and create actual change? I believe they have created an opportunity for each of us to embrace wholeness rather than divisiveness, and harmony rather than discord.

Can you see this, even with some difficulty?

photo credit: Lord Jim

Darth Vader breath, Ujjayi Breath, “Yoga breath…”  I got 99 problems and Pranayama is one. 

 I am so confused on how to breathe in yoga sometimes, it is downright distracting my down dogs. At the risk of being ostracized, roasted, and berated by the yoga community, I have actually been slowing and quieting my breath in my practice. Not focusing so much on the big breath, but more being cued by asana. Gasp. I find the more I practice, the calmer my breath flows, the slower my heart rate goes, and thus I move into a balanced magical state…sometimes.

According to our main man, Patanjali, I am in on the right path, no?

Fourth rung is Pranayama: The fourth of the eight rungs (2.29) of Yoga is Pranayama, which is regulating the breath so as to make it slow and subtle (2.50), leading to the experience of the steady flow of energy (prana), which is beyond or underneath exhalation, inhalation, and the transitions between them (2.51).

As the difficulty of the pose increases, and my flexibility decreases, my breath starts to quicken. To keep from going spazoid because of this “yoga breath,” I must be vigilant. I must cultivate more and more practice.

What I do understand  (I think) is that all-nostril breathing is necessary to keep the heat internal. Lucky me: my TMJ often kicks in and leads me to clenching my jaw. So recently, I have played with practicing with a slightly open mouthed, but still all-nostril flow.

Check out this instructional Yoga Breathing and Mistakes video (Really!), and below the 10 reasons why I’m confused about how to breathe in yoga.

Breathing Cues Commonly Heard in Yoga Classes:

1. Restrict the back of the throat by lifting your tongue to make it audible and even.

2. Inhale from an expanding chest.

3. Inhale from your belly.

4. Its a three-part breath: chest, mid-thoracic, belly.

5. Expand your exhale.

6. Biiiig inhale.

7. I can’t hear you breathing! (I plead guilty to having said this while teaching :/)

8. Hold the exhale.

9. You are breathing with your neck. Stop!

10. Work the breath.

photo credit: Lars Plougmann

See what I mean? I bet you’ve heard some killer and/or contradictory breath cues in class. Care to share below?

Can you help me catch my breath? What is a yoga breath? Is it different from one style of yoga to another?

Please, it is literally a matter of life, or death.

photo credit: Frances Lane

I’ve practiced yoga since I first discovered it back in 1975. Held in carpeted living rooms, (because you couldn’t even buy yoga mats), wearing baggy white pants and t-shirts, relaxing and breathing between each pose, groups of six or seven came together one evening a week to chant, breathe, and stretch. I bought Satchidananda’s Integral Yoga, and devoured every page. On my sheepskin rug in my little artist’s attic, I also practiced Transcendental Meditation, having been given my “personal mantra” in 1972. I preached yoga to everyone I knew at the time, like some kind of born again convert, yet was met with mild amusement by most of my friends. Still, that’s when I started teaching about the chakras, and the rest is history.

Lesser known about that history is that I’ve been a Pagan for just as long, having discovered a religion that supported my love for nature and the idea that the Divine could be a Goddess as well as a God. Paganism gave me a way to connect with the Divine in celebration with others; Yoga and meditation gave me a way to find that connection within myself, alone.  Both are paths to the sacred, and I can’t imagine being without either one.

While yoga gains prominent popularity as a spiritual path, Paganism has long been thrust into the shadows, probably the most misunderstood and misaligned religion in our culture. Since the Christian persecution that made the nature-god Pan into a dangerous devil, and burned women at the stake for practicing herbalism and midwifery, fear of Paganism runs deep in the collective psyche. What little that survived the brutal persecutions of the Inquisition had to be kept secret in order to survive. For that reason it has always remained in the shadows and misunderstood by mainstream culture. (Even coming out in this blog is a risk for my public life.)

Paganism is catch-all term, like Christianity, that includes many paths: Shamanism, Wicca, Nature worship, polytheism, Goddess religion, Ceremonial Magick and Faery tradition –just a few of the various forms, somewhat akin to Catholicism and Protestantism, or the branches of Methodist, Congregational, Christian Science, etc. The one that seems to most lift everybody’s eyebrows is Wicca, for it is the root of the word “witchcraft,” something that has a very bad connotation in most circles.

The actual derivation of the word Wicca is from the old English wicce, which meant wise ones,  while the word Pagan came from the Latin paganus, or country dweller – those who still lived on the land while others migrated to the city, or heathens, those who lived on the heath. Wicce was reserved for the elders who kept the lore (bards), medicine men and women with knowledge of healing, and teachers of the mysteries of life.

When patriarchy overthrew the Goddess (starting 5000 years ago) and then Christianity made masculine monotheism a tool of state in the Roman Empire, any one caught practicing these teachings was sentenced to death – and not a pleasant one either. While Christianity has committed more murder than any religion on the planet (see my book, Waking the Global Heart for more info on this) it was Paganism that got the bad rap. The worship of Nature, along with the cycle of the seasons, archetypal wisdom, and the equality of women, went dangerously out of fashion. Humanity lost an important piece of its soul.

After being involved in Paganism in the 80s and 90s, my public life as teacher and writer took me away from the creative circles I used to enjoy. For the last decade or more, yoga and meditation have been my main spiritual practice.

Last night, however, I attended the 50^th anniversary of the Church of All Worlds, a group I once served as High Priestess for over ten years. It was a small gathering of people who had known each other for decades. We held our circle “skyclad” as is sometimes the custom when weather permits, meaning clothed in nothing but the sky. Almost everyone in the circle was over 50, many in their 60s and 70s, with bodies big and round or thin and droopy, definitely needing a stiff yoga practice and some good Rolfing. But it didn’t matter—all pretense immediately dropped away as we sat, each on our own cushion, singing songs and regaling stories of our lives. There was no sexual energy whatsoever, just an intimate gathering of old friends honoring an ancient tradition.

I love yoga and the community that is growing around it. People are clean and friendly, physically fit and high-functioning. Yet sometimes I feel as if everyone is trying to be a carbon copy of each other – with trim little bodies dressed in Lululemon outfits, talking about the latest teacher they’ve studied with, and thinking they can solve all their psychological problems with more handstands. My criticism is that too often knowledge of current events, history and science, mythology –and even individualism–falls rather shallow. Group think is pretty strong, and group scorn even stronger.

By contrast, Pagans are notoriously well read, generally overweight and out of shape, eccentric to the point of weird, yet highly creative and tolerant of others. Pagan rituals are pageants of song and dance, poetry and costume, while yogis get high on repeating chants in foreign languages and creating group synergy on their mats. Both are viable paths to the sacred, yogis through unity, Pagans through honoring diversity.

These two worlds occupy my chakras in different ways, yet come together in the heart. Yoga aims toward transcendence, getting high in the upper chakras, finding the overarching supreme through energizing and liberating the body. Paganism is an earth religion – focused on the four elements of earth, water, fire, and air – largely lower chakras. Paganism could use some uplifting from yoga practices, while the yoga world could use a little grounding and permission to individuate.

We live in a time of religious syncretism. So many paths, ancient and modern, are coming together as a way to find our way back to the Divine and piece together our broken world into something that can thrive into the future. We can’t afford fundamentalism in any religion – each has something to offer, each has its blind spots and shortcomings.

It is time for each of us to find our core and speak its truth. To be individuals in service of something larger allows each of us to play our own song like instruments in an orchestra, playing a symphony together. To play well together requires deep listening as well as practice, practice, practice.

Together we can create a symphony in the song of creation. But can we listen without judgment?

I love Pinterest. Crazy about it. I can spend hours at a time collecting, cataloguing, and curating a world’s worth of captivating imagery. It reminds me of playing with paper dolls, something I did for hours on end as a little girl. Nothing could stop me. For me, both pastimes evoke a very special, essential feeling: Play.

In building my Pinterest boards, I’ve come alive with some much needed playtime. There, I can find and display just the right image to illustrate whatever strikes my fancy. As a curator (I was one by trade, long before “curating” became the au curant thing to be), the activities of collecting, cataloguing, and put-this-with-that to create a meaningful mash-up are critical skills. Not just any this will go with just any that.

In my heart of visual hearts, I would not have used the image above as a lead-in to this post. I might have used this, or this. I didn’t use the just right image to illustrate this post. Why not? Buzzfeed’s John Herrman says it well. In his very cleverly illustrated post “What does Pinterest looking like without copyrighted content,” he writes:

“These posts are against the rules and sort of against the law, no matter how silly that sounds. To continue existing, Pinterest is required to write terms of service that, if fully and actively enforced, would destroy the site.”

It was not my first choice of images. This was.

Wow. Against the law? But, all of those images we grab and pin are right out there on the Internet, and Pinterest pins them (most of them) just fine. Here’s the rub: Copyright. What exactly is copyright? I went right to The Source, the United States Copyright Office for the answer:

When is my work protected?
“Your work is under copyright protection the moment it is created and fixed in a tangible form that it is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.”

But what if the image you want to use on your blog is something you casually found on John Doe’s blog out of Nowheresville, U.S.A.? John isn’t going to know. He’s in Nowheresville, man, and I didn’t see that “C” in a circle, that’s okay, then, right? Back to the Gov:

What does copyright protect?
“Copyright, a form of intellectual property law, protects original works of authorship including literary, dramatic, musical, and artistic works, such as poetry, novels, movies, songs, computer software, and architecture. Copyright does not protect facts, ideas, systems, or methods of operation, although it may protect the way these things are expressed.” See Circular 1, Copyright Basics, section “What Works Are Protected.”

Yoga Modern is listening. We have a committed policy of only using images for which we have express permission from the creator, or from the copyright-safe bank of images via Creative Commons. So, while I am a  visual-inclined curator who happens to be a writer and editor, I cannot always select the Goldilocks-like just right image. Close, but often the images used are by concession. Sometimes I feel constrained by the law. Like I’ve got salt on my tail. Damn those copyrights, they are stifling my creativity. What’s up with their restrictions?

Maria Pallante from the Copyright Office:

We in the Copyright Office are proud to be part of a long tradition of promoting progress of the arts and protection for the works of authors.

Promoting progress of the arts and protecting authors? Sounds like the horns of a dilemma to me. (Hence the horns up there. I want to used this to suggest it’s a true Catch-22.) I really want to have the freedom to use any image I would like to. Plenty of other blogs do. I want to get a lot of attention for my posts, and a stop-you-in-your-tracks, maybe even salacious, image would help me toward that satisfying end. What’s a picky curator to do?

Pick her side. Ultimately, I feel my creative whims are not as important as non-stealing. Yoga’s got a word for that, and it does count here:Asteya. At first the restrictions set by Yoga Modern’s founders felt like a damper on my muse. But when I came to sit on it, when I stopped to think about my actions, I realized, I wouldn’t want anyone to re-print by photo without permission. Nor would I like it if I found a work by one of my visual artist friends on a website that I know would chafe their hide.

“To be realistic one must always admit the influence of those who have gone before.” Charles Eames, as seen on the Curator’s Code page.

So, I abide by these standards set by Yoga Modern. I respect them. It is good to be beyond reproach. And I want to give a shout-out to The Curator’s Code, which is “a suggested system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, celebrating authors and creators, and also respecting those who discover and amplify their work.”

Don’t get me wrong. I will still curate my way through just about everything I do (down to the inside of my refrigerator, for real). I have to, because (I’m making it public) “to share by creative expression” is my dharma, my purpose.

One of the most magical things about the Internet is that it’s a whimsical rabbit hole of discovery – we start somewhere familiar and click our way to a wonderland of curiosity and fascination we never knew existed…Wait a minute. Those are not my words. I wish I composed them, they are my sentiment writ large, but they are not my creation, another tip of my hat to Curator’s Code for that.

photo credit: Dan4th

 This is what I really wanted to use.

I wonder how much any of this matters to you, the reader. Do you care if this, or any blogsite honors copyright in their use of imagery?

Comment, please, let me know. Right now, I gotta go play Pinterest.

photo credit: Aubry Aragon

Yoga Modern welcomes new contributor, Pam Moskie. I believe you will find her words as riveting, as out of the ordinary as I did. In her first post, Pam enters the Yoga Modern stage full force (this is a good thing, a yogic thing). I give you, Pam Moskie.

Today I broke the rules of yoga in honor of the rebel in me.  Purposely misaligned asana, the defiant sounds of an Irish icon, the flames of my fireplace two feet away and the heat of my own fiery nature collide.  I am yoga-fied.  But this practice is not calm, nor placid.  It is not quiet, nor still.  It is fiercely alive, it is hot, and within it rises the insurgence of a voice that aches for expression.

I twist and contort my body in ways that, in one moment, flicker like the flames of the fire, and the next moment reflect the beat of musical protest emanating from my stereo.  Sinead O’Connor has always fascinated me in her outright willingness to claim her anger.   Anger at her mother, the church and society threads through much of her music and spurs her activism.  I have not had the same ability to claim my own anger, but, as I listen and move I feel the presence of an unsettled being rise up in me and spread itself out through my muscles.  This presence bears the countenance of a revolutionary, a defiant creature who presses herself against the cruelties of humanity.  She is what moves me, in chaotic fashion, from one dishevelled asana to the next.  She moves this way unwilling to be battered by an ego that often demands flawless alignment and seamless fluidity.  She is also what moves in me when I feel anger that I suffer – that anyone suffers – at the hand of our collective ego.

This is not the kind of anger that spills into hostile carnage on the world around me.  Before anger becomes manifested in violence it is a sensation, a force.  In me, it is a life energy that vibrates with the seeming potential of a supernova explosion.  When I feel it as energy, anger is a force strong enough to spur me into the courageous act of looking deeper, understanding more fully and responding to suffering in a conscious way.   It is a messenger, like all other emotions, to let me know some harm has been done.  And at the same time it offers me the energy to endure the aching voyage from ego to soul, time and again, day by day.  With my two year-old, my husband, or watching the 6 o clock news I feel the heat of an inner fury swirl beneath my flesh.  And if I can stay with the sensation long enough it reveals the ache of a tender, wounded heart beneath.

photo credit: CarbonNYC

Many times my yoga practice has channeled The Peacekeeper, The Sage, The Alchemist.    Today it channeled The Defiant One.  And on my mat I was able to claim the anger that inspires musicians, artists and protestors around the world and throughout history to confront suffering.  The energy that burst in life giving, mini-tantrums throughout my body fed me and vindicated my tender heart in its plea to be heard and protected.  I wonder, then, if yoga is not only a way to calm anger, but channel it.

Instead of placating this messenger of the heart can yoga serve to get us closer to its raw energy that it may feed our revolution rather than be seen as a barrier to it?  This is my hope, because for the bad rap that anger gets its raw simmer in my belly need not destroy me or the world, but rather may serve to incinerate the ego that keeps us in chains.

I would love to know how these powerful forces might serve even more widely. Tell me, how have you channeled anger away from the destructive, toward a greater good? 

photo credit: lululemon athletica

But this very style of yoga is the same one that is killing me. Or should l say I am killing it, my body that is.

This was the first class I walked into. This is the style I teach. This is my comfort zone.

Ahhh. Ow.

Crap, my back is acting up, AGAIN. I am in the process of rehabbing my practice. My body tried to make me go to rehab over the last several years, but I said no no no.

photo credit: Bhumika.B

ON MODIFICATIONS. The very word sounds abnormal. It’s alright I’m finding out, in fact its necessary to heal. Stepping back to move forward. Life does that sometimes. Slaps you in the face and shakes you to say, “Hey, listen, you are hurting me/you/your sanity, stop!”

Having been challenged since childhood to right now has made me into one tough cookie. Unfortunately, tough cookies don’t know when to stop. I think pain is normal. It’s abnormal to not be at a certain level of discomfort. I’ve been addicted to the burn. Well I’m about burnt to a crisp. But if I really want to develop as a yogi, I have to find flexibility in that trouble maker upstairs; the brain. Changing my thoughts has proven to be a slow process for this stubbornassana.

photo credit: Brett Jordan

So I compromise, staying in feeling only as long as that feeling doesn’t hurt. Bend me, don’t break me. I’m developing a vinyasa within my Vinyasa. Vinyasa 2.0. Updated, recharging and working the bugs out. In return, I am more efficient as I work feeling by feeling instead of pose by pose. I am in the process of healing the body. I am even exploring a restorative home practice. In retrospect, I know it took a whole lotta flowing to quiet the mind to get even here. Baby steps. After all, Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Maybe I am becoming a yogi after all.

Tell me, have you experienced something like this?

photo credit: Ian Sane

What’s the “G” word? The image that hovers above whispers the answer in your ear.

Okay, I’ll redirect and be direct (I am southern by birth, which can mean speaking politely is more important than being getting to the point): Is it okay for the yoga teacher to incorporate the word God during a yoga class? Or should Yoga, too, be separated from Church? Incongruity of that statement aside, what might it mean to the “average” student (outside of an ashram) to hear the teacher talking (teaching) about God?

The first time I heard a yoga teacher talking about God, it was Erich Schiffmann. Coming from a lineage of Yoga-Taught-in-a-Health Club, it sounded a little…odd. God? And while I am loath to adopt pop parlance, Really? You are talking about God during a yoga class? This is yoga, not God in his church. I had a lot to learn.

I am spiritual, it came to me naturally. It is part of my very psyche. But I had yet to disassociate the word from its Christian connotation. I still thought of God through the lens of children’s Bible books. While my family’s church attendance was hardly religious ( I mean that in both senses of the word), and I had not thought of myself as “Christian” since my teens, I still thought “God” referred to who Michelangelo painted him to be. I let it go at that, and went about my business of not thinking about that God, and meditating daily on supreme consciousness and a more amorphous Divine.

photo credit: carterse

“Wash your mouth out with soap.” 

It was during a teacher training I did with David Life in 2001. With these words, Life, a gentle man devoted to “no harm,” was adamant, almost forceful. He told us this in no uncertain words. The setting was a quaint, elderly YMCA Retreat on Lake George, New York. There about 65 of us in his six day training. I was living in Montana at the time, and the east coast was very exotic to me. First, most people there were from Manhattan (New York, not Montana). I was a bit more rustic. Not a rube, but neither was I accustomed to hotly dressed yogis, or to a steam-room full of women talking about the extent of their laser hair removal.

“As a teacher, don’t ever say you want to attend a yoga class just for yourself. If you do, wash your mouth out with soap!” He added, “Every time you step on your mat it is sacred.” Oh. I got it. It’s about reverence. In other words, God=the One=Source=the Divine=interconnection, it even equals me. God as the feeling of connection.

I was ready to be righteous about it. To go bold, and fearless, to talk about this open source God in my classes. It felt natural, after all, I was referring to nothing more (or less) than the exquisite flavor of being alive with devotion. It was, Bhakti Yoga. This became even more clear when I was blessed with one of the most marvel-ous yoga retreats of my multi-page dossier of yoga workshops. This time the setting was literally on a mountain top–the phenomenal Inner Harmony retreat center at Brian Head, Utah.

The week with Shiva Rea and Jai Uttal was extra-ordinary. It was Bhakti-fying. It deserves a post in itself, but suffice it to say, I came to realize I was not born to teach “just poses.” I knew that for me to present yoga that focused on physical anatomy alone would be wrong. It would mean not sharing who I am, that is, leaving my essence and most meaningful knowledge aside.  It would be selfish.

photo credit: fabola

Mother Theresa was once asked,

“When you pray to God, what do you say?”

She replied, “I don’t talk, I listen.”

“Then, what does he say to you?”

“He doesn’t talk. He listens.” 

On one level, yoga is about being present with “what is.” It is being in a state of awareness. I fervently believe yoga as “state” and “church” can be seamlessly aligned. To be in One, not two and separate. Of this I want to sing to my students. But often I hold back. I spared my students my heartfelt views of oneness (it sounds too much like that hotdog vendor joke), of awareness being aware of itself, or of Purusha, and highest consciousness. I didn’t want to possibly trigger anyone’s past negative, or sacrosanct, visions of “God.” (I once had a student turn in an evaluation that said while she loved my class and that I was clearly knowledgeable and passion about yoga, my “spiritual” talks went against everything she “held dear” vis-a-vis her church.

How do you feel about using the “G” word in yoga class? Should it be guised within yoga’s spirituality, or avoided altogether least it turn someone off, or offend them? Or, first amendment-like, should it be left out of the classroom completely, the separation of Church and State?