graciespeaks

Best New Persons of 2009--Angelica and Susan

Here's the next question for Gwen Bell's Best of 2009 Blog Challenge:

December 20 New person. She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to provide incredible customer service. Who is your unsung hero of 2009?

Two yoga teachers came into my life in the last five months, only after I made myself available to meet them (once again, when this student was ready, the teachers came.)

I decided toward the end of July to give up a longstanding weekly commitment in order to create time for new pursuits and relationships.  It was hard to move on but time.

On August first, I made my way to a class at Shores Yoga, not sure what I would find or whom I might meet.

My teacher on that Saturday morning was Angelica.  She and her class turned my expectations (based on a few yoga classes ten years ago) on their head.  She was knowledgeable (appealing to my geek side with Sanskrit names for poses and detailed explanations of why were doing what we were doing) and I loved her unexpectedly hip playlist.  The class was at once meditative and physically challenging, and I was never bored.  She was teaching a four-week intro to yoga class beginning the following Tuesday night, and that worked perfectly into my schedule. I was hooked.  I took as many classes as I could every week in addition to the intro.

It turned out that Angelica taught the intro class in August because its usual teacher, Susan, was on vacation.  When Susan came back in September, I still felt like enough of a novice that I could benefit from another four weeks of intro. So I took Susan's intro and her Yoga 1 classes on Monday and Wednesday nights as well as Angelica's Saturday morning class. 

Susan's classes (and playlists) were excellent, too, and different enough from Angelica's that I began to realize that I can probably practice yoga for the rest of my life without ever losing interest. A few times I was the only student (not good for Susan but good for me).  Susan worked patiently with me on poses I had a hard time with, especially headstand.  When I finally did a headstand in a Christmas Eve morning class, she smiled like the proud mentor she is.

Thanks, Angelica and Susan, for introducing me to yoga, for teaching me patiently when I couldn't remember a sequence for what seemed to me a ridiculous amount of time, for helping me battle my perfectionism with lightness and fun, and for becoming my friends. 

corpse pose

Most yoga classes end with a pose called Shavasana.  When I took a couple of classes ten years ago, shavasana made me want to crawl out of my skin or at least run from the room.  Now there's nothing better at the end of a physically demanding class than to lie on the floor on my back.

One of the purposes of shavasana is to give the body time to integrate the previous sixty or so minutes of movement, different than any other sixty minutes before or ever again, into its cells and muscles and tendons and organs and bones.

I've been thinking the last couple of days that I need a little life-shavasana.  In the past few months, and the past few weeks in particular, things are moving fast, and I haven't had, no, haven't taken, time to integrate.  And the result is that I feel as if the experiences are stacking up, unprocessed, higher and higher until I might tip over with them.  The last two days' tiny blog posts evidence my failure to use what I've been taking in.

So I was wondering what I need.  Not a nap.  A novel would work.  Maybe a movie.  Conversation.  A cup of tea. 

What's your shavasana?

what we do when we don't want to feel pain

During the long-held poses I mentioned yesterday, Seane would say, breathe into the pose.  And if you're not breathing into the pose, watch what you're doing to avoid feeling the pain. 

So I watched my mind as it tried to distract me from the feelings in my body and in my heart, and I saw that I did a few things consistently.

I thought about what I needed to do later (write blog, edit memoir, call Michael, eat dinner). 

I thought about things I needed to fix, problems I needed to solve, both in the moment and later (I could move my towel a little bit, or what if I move my hand? I think my headband is scrunching backward.  Better fix it.  And on Monday I need to be sure to [fill in the blank] at work). 

My other technique to avoid being fully in the poses was to overanalyze and overintellectualize everything that Seane had said before we moved to our mats.  (Well, what about this or that exception?  How can I really do x without doing y?) 

She said that we might begin to resist her, to find her annoying.  I didn't do that, but maybe only because I had created plenty of other distractions. 

She said that whatever we do to avoid the pain in a yoga pose is probably something we do to avoid the pain of life, and she's right.  I perfected disassociation years ago, and two of my favorite things are projecting into the future and planning how to solve the problem. If that's not enough, I overthink.  It's way too hard just to be in the problem, experiencing it fully.

It is often said that the first step toward solving a problem is awareness.  What do you do to avoid pain?

quote from an angel

Seane Corn emphasized first- and second-chakra poses today, and even though I did my last pigeon pose over three hours ago,  the yoga continues into the evening.   So I will only blog this one quote, which I wrote in my notebook after she told the story of a man she described as the first angel in her life of whom she was aware.  She was seventeen when he told her how to see God in everyone:

"Ignore the story, and see the soul.  Remember to love and you will never regret it."

a little yoga

I'm in Deerfield Beach this weekend for a workshop with Seane Corn.  Tonight was the first session and if it's any indication of what's to come, I have quite a couple of days in store.

In no particular order, sometimes paraphrased from Seane and sometimes quoted as best I can remember, here's what I took back to my room tonight:

1.    When I resist using props (and this would apply to yoga and to accepting help in any other part of my life) it's because I see needing help as failure, which I equate with death.  So using a prop feels like having "a slice of cyanide." 

2.    Everyone I have encountered in my life, whether they have helped me or harmed me, has been my teacher, has illuminated something for me that my soul needed to learn in its journey to learn (or remember, actually) how to love.

3.    I don't need to worry about passing for someone with more yoga experience than I have; it's about the breath.

4.    When I muscle my way through a pose or cheat with my flexibility, I risk hurting myself and don't fully experience the pose.  See 3 above: breath.

5.    My body remembers everything that has ever happened and that I have ever done.  When I repeat patterns, regardless of whether they are good for me, it's often because my body is remembering and repeating.

6.    I do yoga because it helps me present my best self to the world.  Without it, I turn to various anaesthesias, resisting and shutting down.

7.    In order to heal, I have to deal.

8.    It's a good thing Bindu recommended bringing Batherapy and arnica.

9.    I am blessed to have yoga.

10.  I am infinite spirit in a temporal body.  I am magical and mystical.

recession yoga

From Reuters via Elephant Journal.  Works for me.

yoga's "fierce journey"

I'm going to a weekend yoga workshop with Seane Corn in a couple of weeks, and I today I listened to her Speaking of Faith interview. 

She says, "When my heart opens [I see that] the people who have hurt or harmed me are also my teachers, they've provided fierce lessons that brought me closer to myself and therefore God, and also taught me about life.  I always pray for the people who have hurt and harmed me, and just when I think I've forgiven them, I forgive them again, because always that energy will rear its head, and I have to make sure that I'm constantly keeping myself clean, otherwise I'm holding on to that shadow of anger and . . . it keeps us disconnected from God."

I try to live this point of view, but as she says, it's a daily process, not a one-time forgiving event.  My intentions for the weekend will be to pray and forgive and clean and let go and keep praying and forgiving and cleaning and letting go.

a quote from a tweet

From John Friend, founder of Anusara yoga (@anusarafriend):

"'That by which you fall is that by which you rise.'

~Kularnava Tantra (scripture from which we get the word, 'anusara'.)"

a couple of blogs

I've been exploring yoga blogs, and these are two that I've been reading daily:

Bliss Chick chronicles creativity, dance, yoga, and spirituality, among other everyday and not-so-everyday topics.

My Embodiment  is the blog of a psychotherapist in yoga school.  She also writes about yoga's role in treatment of trauma.