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Best Twist Ever

January 15, 2012

Brad WaitesYou gotta laugh at a workshop that promises The Best Twist Ever! (exclamation not included but certainly implied). It was the exact right tone for this upbeat and illuminating session with Purna Yoga teacher Brad Waites.

Waites, a former yoga instructor at Kripalu Center for Health and Healing, is a faculty member at Aadil Palkhivala’s Purna Yoga College. Purna Yoga is a specific technique that combines Iyengar-based alignment with heart-based meditation practices and more. I’ve taken classes with Aadil Palkhivala, and found that Waites presented this technique beautifully, and put his own fun-loving stamp on the class.

The best twist ever refers to Matsyangasana, a seated twist I had never seen before. Ardha Matsyandrasana (Half Lord of the Fishes Pose) is familiar to most yogis, and full Matsyandrasana is an advanced Ashtanga posture. But this was different. You start in Baddha Konasana, move one leg into half Virasana, and then, shifting to the outer hip of the non-Virasana leg and lengthening the spine in stages, you twist 180 degrees, placing your hands behind you, and lay down with your face turned to one side. Yep, like that.

The goal of the pose, Waites explained, is to stretch chronically tight intervertebral muscles. But instead of being a wrenching twist, achieved by leveraging a stable source (like your knee), this instruction teaches you to lengthen through the side body and spine, lift up through the lower abdominals, and position the hips so not to torque the pelvis, before you twist.

Through Waites’ careful instruction, we warmed up with a gentle Sun Salutation sequence, and practiced opening the side body with Triangle and Extended Side Angle poses, as well as various modified Gate Poses against the wall. Then we began to twist. The first stages (we were practicing three, but apparently there are five) felt good. But as we moved further into the pose, I began to get nervous.  The student in the class modeling the stages seemed to have far more mobility in her spine than I. I’ve experienced pelvic instability, and have some immobility in my lumber vertebrae, so I’m wary of anything that threatens to destabilize this area. Yet, I know that mobility is exactly what I need.  Remembering that I only had to go as far as I felt comfortable going, I decided to put my trust in Waites hands-on instruction and try.

To my surprise, I not only moved through stages one and two comfortably, but was able to reach the final expression of the third stage completely, laying my cheek on the floor while my body twisted into a position I would have never had attempted on my own. Wow, what a rush!

The feeling was shared. As we carefully unwound from the pose, whoops sprang from the class. One women commented that she felt taller. Everyone was smiling. And I was once again amazed at the quality of instruction at Yoga Journal Conferences, which has helped me again and again to move me beyond my comfort zone to experience yoga new and wonderful ways.

 

—Kelle Walsh

 

 

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Are You Digitally Distracted?

January 15, 2012

We’ve all experienced it: the Pavlovian reflex at the ping of a new email, half-listening to the meeting going on around you while reading a text from a colleague in another meeting, getting lost down the rabbit hole of YouTube video links or celebrity gossip coming up in your newsfeed.

But as yogis, aren’t we’re supposed to striving to reduce distraction and cultivate mindfulness and equanimity? How do smartphones, email, Facebook, and Twitter fit into the picture?

“Digital Distractions and Your Practice,” the panel discussion at today’s San Francisco Yoga Journal conference, hit the mark. Made up of meditation teacher and YJ’s Wisdom columnist Sally Kempton; Grist.org Executive Editor and Salon.com co-counder Scott Rosenberg; Congressman Tim Ryan (D-OH), author of “Mindful Nation”;  Gopi Kallayil, group product marketing manager for Google+, and moderated by YJ’s Editor in Chief (and former technology journalist) Kaitlin Quistgaard—yoga practitioners all—it was the right group of people to address a topic for our times.

That digital technology is and will remain an everyday part of our lives was a given. There were no calls to do away with our laptops or smartphones. In fact, one of the more surprising agreements from the panel is that technology serves many great purposes—for community-building and making connections (one inspiring example: the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu video conferencing from different continents and having the exchange streamed to millions of people on YouTube), leveling the playing field for access to information, as a tool for personal growth, and, yes, even for enhancing your yoga practice.

As Sally Kempton commented, technology can be viewed as an evolutionary tool, expanding our consciousness in completely new ways. Kallayil, furthering this theme, emphasized the the unprecedented opportunities we now have to connect with one another and support positive change on the planet. Using the example of the 7 billion cell phones in existence for Earth’s 5 billion inhabitants, he commented that “now the individual consciousness can be connected to the larger consciousness. That level of consciousness and connectivity has never been. That’s real power.”

Yet all also agreed that the experience of 24/7 connection and over-reliance on on your phone or computer (or Twitter feed, so on), presents a constant threat for distraction and overload.

Viewed through a yogic lens, however, the very things that pose this distraction offer great lessons for learning about our own habits and tendencies, and a platform for changing the experience.

Instead of falling into what Rosenberg called “email apnea,” the experience of holding your breath when answering email, he advises being mindful of what you’re doing, breathing consciously as you perform technological tasks. He also said that during meetings, he asks his staff to turn off smartphones and close computers, in order to stay mindful of the interaction they’re engaged in.

Kempton suggested that instead of operating “in the cloud” (which she wittily re-defined as functioning from the upper three chakras), move and breathe from the belly center while you work, well, in the cloud.

Kallayil, who joked that it was his job to “promote more things for you to be distracted by,” has rituals to stem the threat of digital overload: He does one thing at a time (no multitasking here); he commits to one minute of yoga and one minute of meditation per day, which typically lead to longer sessions (but trying to commit to 30 minutes a day of each just set him up for failure and self-recrimination, he said); and he puts weekly yoga practice—a class he teaches at Google headquarters—on his calendar as a non-negotiable standing appointment. It’s been five years and he hasn’t missed one.

Ryan got laughs when he advised not using your smartphone as an alarm clock, so that you don’t wake up  (literally) to the information overload that awaits. But he also warned that we can’t “beat ourselves up” over our reliance on technology; rather, we should strive to stay aware of how ever-present it is, and how humorous our dependence on it, as we find our own level of self-moderation, something that Kallayil referred to as “conscious and mindful consumption.”

Ryan also asked the audience if they would join him in committing to try and get a handle on email distraction, by logging in just a few times a day and grouping emails for more efficiency.

Technology. It’s not going anywhere, and it’ll most certainly become even more present in our lives in the future. But as today’s panelists illuminated, there are many ways we can enjoy the benefits of technology, and indeed celebrate its contributions, while keeping ourselves from getting distracted by it.

Here are some of the takeaway tips from today:

- Limit your personal consumption of digital technology, being mindful about what amount is right (and what is too much) for you.

- Do one thing at a time, putting your full attention to it. As examples: Read and answer an email before moving onto to another one; listen mindfully in a meeting without checking your text messages or email, etc.

- Pay attention to your breath as you work with digital technology. Are you holding it or breathing shallowly only into your upper chest? If so, breathe, yogis, breathe.

- Consciously move from your belly as you engage in technology to ground your energy.

- Create rituals around fitting your yoga and meditation practice—non-negotiable moments that you protect—into your life to balance the prevalence of digital technology all around us.

 

—Kelle Walsh

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Yoga for a Broken Heart

January 15, 2012

Photo: Tristan Von Elrik

For years, the fierce, compassionate activist Seane Corn has been bearing witness to humanity’s suffering and strength through her yoga leadership programs, humanitarian service tours, and emotionally moving vinyasa classes. This morning, I had a chance to watch her bear witness to her own deep grief—and to ours—in one of her relatively new workshops, Yoga for a Broken Heart.

“When my father was dying of cancer,” she explained, “he insisted that I begin teaching this class. He even came up with the name.” A yoga teacher himself, he wanted his daughter to help others process the grief that can burden their bodies, their breath, and their hearts. And I would venture to guess that he knew Seane would find a way to process her own grief about his own death by leading this intimate workshop, which blends her own personal stories, group discussion, and a breath-centric vinyasa practice—all designed to bear witness to, and even honor, the transformational quality of grief.

“Your grief is yours, yet universal,” Corn told us. “But if you don’t find a way to release it, it manifests in the form of tension, anger, stress, anxiety. You develop armor that prevents you from living your life authentically and openly.” She presented her own reflections about grief, and yoga’s power to help us slowly and authentically find our way through it.

After sharing several stories about her father’s final year, she opened the floor to the rest of us. One by one, our stories came pouring out—men and women of all ages, revealing painful stories of loved ones lost in a plane crash or killed by a drunk driver, the cheating spouses, the miscarriages, the children lost too early. I was moved by my fellow students’ willingness to bear witness to their own raw heartbreak in front of such a large group of virtual strangers. Somehow, Corn managed to created an intimate environment and hold the space for us to share openly.

Throughout the class, she asked us: “How do you feel in your body?” The answers came: “scared,” “checked out,” “angry,” “sad.” Over and over, she asked us to take in a deep breath, and exhale fully, to release some of the emotion that was building up inside. And although it may sound elementary, it was exactly what we needed.

Next, she led us through a comforting vinyasa practice, which featured nurturing warm-up poses, Sun Salutations, and a few classic heart-openers such as Camel Pose and Pigeon. “Let’s dedicate every movement and every breath to the story of our grief—to our lovers, our parents, our children and our pets—all the beings that have brought us to our knees, who have opened our souls,” she said. “They are our teachers, our spirit guides, and we wish them nothing but peace and happiness, forgiveness and strength as they continue forward in their journey.”

I can’t imagine what it’s like to lead a class for people who are grieving that is based around the stories of your own father’s painful illness and death. But I admire Seane Corn’s courage and her willingness to share what she’s learned about yoga and grief with others in the yoga community. “Grief transforms us,” she said. “It will make you love better than anything you ever have imagined.”

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Ashtanga’s Greatest Hits

January 15, 2012

David Swenson“You signed up for what?” one of my colleagues asked me at the presenter’s dinner last night.

“How long have you been out of your cast?” asked another, her eyes widening.

“Do you know the Ashtanga primary series?” probed the third.

Uhhhhh … I thought, my trepidation about David Swenson’s “Ashtanga’s Greatest Hits” growing. I hope I’m not in over my head here. I’d heard of the Primary Series described as “trying to climb up a glass mountain,” but every Ashtanga class I’ve taken has left me feeling elated and empowered.

Luckily, I think falling out of poses is fun. Sunday morning’s Ashtanga’s Greatest Hits was like a guided playtime for adults. As muscular, athletic-looking Ashtangis flew into poses I’d never even seen before (Swenson reassured us that these were part of the Advanced B Series, which isn’t usually attempted until someone has been practicing Ashtanga for at least six or seven years), I actually managed to lift up into a funny little variation of Eka Pada Koundiyanasana II, and Parsva Bakasana (which I’d also never attempted) was a cinch! I was surprised at how easily my still-strengthening ankle adapted to the class, but when Swenson told us that a lot of the tricky arm balances we were attempting were more a matter of skeletal balance than of muscular strength, it made sense to me.

Swenson lightened the challenging class with plenty of jokes and laughter. A student asked, “What makes my bum raise in Eka Pada Bakasana?” Swenson deadpanned, “Magic!” Laughter erupted. “No, see, you eat a lot of gassy foods and  . . .” Swenson continued. More laughter. As Swenson went on to describe that the lift actually came from the lateral muscles in the side body and pretzeled himself up into the pose, I looked around at all of the smiling faces and mentally confirmed what I’ve thought all along: Ashtanga is super fun!

-Ella Lawrence




 

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Rodney Yee Calls for Yoga in Healthcare

January 14, 2012

Rodney Yee is on a mission to integrate yoga into the healthcare system. In his keynote address at the San Francisco Yoga Journal Conference he described the groundbreaking work of Donna Karan’s Urban Zen Integrative Therapy Program, which brings yoga, along with other healing arts, into hospitals. Yee, a yoga teacher for 25 years, and his wife Colleen Saidman, also a teacher, co-direct the yoga therapy component of the program, training nurses and doctors to offer simple yoga sequences, breathing practices, and meditation to patients.

Yee says the moment is ripe for integrative therapies such as yoga to be taken seriously in medical settings. “The medical system finally has their doors open, partly because there’s a healthcare crisis in this country,” he said. Yoga teachers, he said, can play a crucial role in bringing self-care practices to patients. “The system is in dire need of what we have to offer.”

Yee and Saidman have adapted yoga poses to be done in a hospital bed along with breath and relaxation work. Yee said the practice can have impressive effects on people who are critically ill, offering relief from pain, anxiety, and sleeplessness. Hospital management agrees. UCLA’s Ronald Reagan Medical Center has signed up Urban Zen to train 300 of its doctors and nurses this year in the practice.

Yee said that the healthcare industry’s willingness to welcome in yoga as a healing art is an opportunity not to be wasted. He implored yogis who want to serve in a hospital setting to get the best possible training in practices that are appropriate for bedbound patients. “The real protocol of healthcare is Do No Harm,” Yee said, explaining that teaching bedbound patients takes a minimal, gentle approach and that teachers need to be grounded in their own practice of meditation and pranayama. “We have to create a force of yogis who are willing to be serious about learning to apply their knowledge in this environment.”

Yee’s point is well-taken. With the recent news attention on the potential for injuries in yoga class, and the healthcare industry’s historical resistance to alternative healing, it’s not a given that the practice will be easily accepted in medical settings. Yoga teachers who plan to work in hospitals should follow Yee’s lead and commit to setting a high standard for conscious and careful teaching.

–Carmel Wroth

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The Yoga of Money

January 14, 2012

brent kesselWhat does yoga have to do with money (minus the amount we spend on yoga classes, mats and clothes?!)? A lot, says Brent Kessel, a longtime Ashtanga yoga practitioner and owner of Abacus Wealth Partners, a personal finance consulting firm. Just as yoga can be applied to everything in life, key concepts and lessons from the practice can be applied to your relationship with money—with some powerful results.

In his packed seminar at today’s San Francisco Conference, Kessel explained how the yogic concepts of svadhyaha (self-observation), satya (truthfulness), ahimsa (non-harming), presence, interconnectedness, and the subtle body energies (prana, nadi, and bindhu), can serve as guideposts to help determine what your relationship is with money and how to transform it for the better.

You first have to be aware of your own emotional charges around money (svadhyaha), noting how things feel in your body when, say, you’re gripped with desire to run out and buy something—and how it feels if you let that desire pass without grasping at it. Second, you can’t truly begin to understand your relationship to money, and transform it, without being totally honest with yourself (satya) about it. “Feeling the fear that underlies money habits is the only way to undo the habit itself,” he said. “It takes courage.” Following ahimsa, you can bring awareness to your relationship with money without being judgmental, he added, by using a kind and gentle voice with yourself when a particular feeling about money comes up.

Kessel touched on other aspects—presence, interconnectedness, and energies of the subtle body—and how they relate to money and our relationship with it. He also had us pair up with a partner and look into our earliest money memories from childhood, and how they influence your attitude about money today, something he called your “inherited money message.” These messages help to reveal where you fall on the list of eight money-relationship archetypes Kessel and his partners have developed.  Based on the number of hands that went up when Kessel asked us to share our experience with this practice, people want to talk about their money issues!

The Yoga of Money workshop could have lasted a full day and I don’t think we would have covered it all. As Kessel reminded us, this stuff goes deep, and takes time to change. But it does change.  “Subtle changes equal big changes over time,” he said.

We all know that yoga goes beyond your physical practice, but I love when I get those a-ha! moments about other ways in which I can apply this study to another area of my life.

—Kelle Walsh

 

 

 

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Flowing with Shiva Rea

January 14, 2012

To open this morning’s “Prana Flow: Energetic Vinyasa,” Shiva Rea first spent time clarifying the terminology she was about to use, explaining how life energy, or prana, moves through our bodies and through the world. While chanting, we used our hands as “knowing instruments,” to effortlessly move through Apana (grounding and anchoring our breath), Prana (taking a lightening, filling breath), Vyana (pushing the energy outward around our bodies), Samana (pulling the energy inward to our cores), and Udana (lifting energy upward through the head). We placed our arms on each other’s shoulders and backs, creating a human mandala, and noticed how connected we felt while breathing together. And then, it was time to practice.

While it would be easy to interpret the title of the class to mean a high-energy Vinyasa flow, what we focused on was moving our own flow of energy through a series of poses that began with the Namaskars and ended with a series of challenging arm balances.

This was my first time practicing with Shiva (and my third yoga class since having ankle surgery), and as the advanced class flowed through Shiva’s fluid “Mandala Namaskars,” I realized my signature move (setting down my mat in the back of class and hoping nobody noticed me and my ankle brace) wasn’t going to fly—suddenly the class flipped around and my safe hiding place was front and center.

Through the first round of Mandala Namaskars, my monkey mind was practically shouting at me. Frustration: That concrete pillar is in my way! Irritation:  I have to go to the bathroom! Confusion: does everybody but me know what’s going on? Helplessness: my limited range of motion is making it necessary to modify nearly every pose.

Then, during the second round of Namaskars, my energy shifted. I shut my eyes and focused inward, and amazingly, my body led the way.  I flowed from Plank Pose to Virabhadrasana (Warrior) II with surprise—my body knew what it was doing all by itself. As soon as I had catalogued the fears I had been carrying around, my mind quieted, my body took over, and I understood on a primal, physical level what Shiva had been saying all along: “This practice is a collective journey along the prana that flows through us all.”

-Ella Lawrence

 

 

 

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Kirtan with Krishna Das

January 14, 2012

More than 700 people flocked to the San Francisco Yoga Journal conference tonight to sing with the Godfather of Chant, Krishna Das, and wow, did he deliver. Part kirtan (call-and-response chanting) and part satsang (a wise talk given by a spiritual teacher), the three-hour set featured seven of Krishna Das’s most beloved chants, prayers in at least two Indian languages, and his captivating stories about the time he spent in a Hanuman temple high in the Himalayas with his guru, Neem Karoli Baba (also known as Maharishi).

Sporting his trademark flannel shirt and silvery goatee, Krishna Das led us in three centering Oms, then sang a prayer “to the presence of grace that lives within our hearts.” He explained the meaning of kirtan early on, for any beginners in the audience. “What we are doing is called repetition of the divine names. Every time we repeat these names, we move more deeply inside our own heart.”

Even though he had a cold, KD threw himself into every prayer and every chant, and by the end of the night we were on our feet, singing, dancing, clapping, swaying. In fact, a group of dancers and bystanders circled the massive room like a ring of bhakti (devotional) fire, which seemed so appropriate to me. The circle was complete.

My favorite chants included a sweet but eventually rollicking version of “Jai Jagadambe,” which featured a slow, mournful solo from violinist Genevieve Walker; a buoyant take on “Jesus on the Mainline”; and a sweet, closing song, “Jai Bhagavan”—a lullaby that’s luring me to sleep.

 

—Shannon Sexton

-Shannon Sexton

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Art of Living with Elena Brower

January 13, 2012

elena brower

photo by Ross Partridge

I’ve heard so much about Elena Brower over the past year that as soon as I saw she was holding a daylong workshop at the Yoga Journal San Francisco Conference, I knew that’s where I wanted to spend my day.

I wasn’t disappointed. Brower is as charismatic and inspiring as I’d heard. A huge part of her appeal is her brute honesty and, well, her realness, curse words and all. When she talks about the Art of Living, it’s not theoretical. It’s a system she has lived, drawn from a combination of yogic philosophy paired with  life-coaching method created by a company called the Handel Group, of which she is a strong advocate. Admittedly, hearing Brower reference the “method” again and again, was at first worrisome. As someone who has been through the Landmark Forum series, I can attest to the validity of many of the teachings, but the blind adherence to the rules and ways of that “technology,” and the cult-like atmosphere that surrounds it, never sat well with me, and put me on high alert for anyone pushing any one theory or philosophy.

Yet what made this workshop truly unique, and ultimately successful, is that Brower weaves these methods into yogic teachings of the five shaktis, or “capacities,” as she refers to them. They include cit (awareness), ananda (joy and gratitude), iccha (the will to hold an intention), jnana (the power of knowledge or understanding), and kriya (action). Together with practical actions taken from her life-coaching path, it lays the groundwork for a pretty powerful mind-body-spirit action plan in the world.

We started out talking about getting clear on your dreams, and the need to be totally honest about the stuff that’s holding you back from achieving them and from being a powerful agent of love and change in the world.  There was a lot of sharing, with Brower revealing frank and gritty details from her own life story, and a handful of brave souls offering up their personal roadblocks to be work-shopped by Brower in demonstration her hybrid system.

Some of it was really interesting: writing down your intentions for each day in the past tense as if they’ve already happened, and emailing that list to a chosen group of people who will keep you accountable; and writing out your dreams and goals in specific areas (love, career, body), envisioning them as boldly and grandly as you can and in the present tense. When you come across areas where you can’t summon that same creative power is where you are blocked, Brower said. And that means purging,  a process that involves scouring your inner landscape to understand where the blockage comes from (your lineage or family history, most likely) and clearing it with complete honesty with yourself and with the other parties involved. This is when things got really raw, with Brower emphasizing that you cannot grow unless you get honest and clear about your issues and then forgive those whom you feel hurt by. She then took it further, saying that forgiveness isn’t enough. You must become a passionate servant of love to the difficult people in your life, telling more than one person in class that they needed to literally bathe the feet of the person who frustrates them “like this was your job and they are Cleopatra.” You know that Brower herself has done plenty of foot cleaning, so it made her prescription slightly less bitter.

As inspiring as this discussion was, where this class really shone for me was when Brower ground the lessons of the shakti power into movement, “connecting your highest energy and dreams to the most deeply held patterns” that hold you back. “The artful way of living,” she said, “is understanding how those opposites relate.”

By the class’s final meditation, I felt a buzzy kinetic energy moving from my heart chakra (anahata) up into my third-eye (ajna), and a delicious yawning expansion through my chest while I rooted deeply through my open hips into the ground. In that moment, anything really did seem possible.

—Kelle Walsh

 

 

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Wringing Out the Old With Seane Corn

January 13, 2012

“It’s not what you’re eating, it’s what’s eating you,” says Seane Corn emphatically as this morning’s daylong intensive, “Detox Flow Yoga: How Nutrition, the Environment, and Emotions Determine Your Vitality,” kicked off.

Thus began a morning of guided introspection and intense asana intended to strip away a buildup of the stresses we accumulate, both externally and internally. Corn began the class with an hour-long lecture/interactive discussion about some of the ways our bodies collect toxins: through the environment, through what we eat, and through the internal stresses we place upon ourselves, which she says are created by emotions we are avoiding, often by eating un-mindfully, drinking alcohol, or engaging in recreational drug use.

“What would happen if you didn’t have that cocktail every night, if you didn’t take that edge off,” she pointedly asked a student. “What would come up? Anxiety? Fear? That’s what interests me—dealing with those emotions.”

After the discussion, Corn guided us through several rounds of Surya Namaskar A and B, followed by what she laughingly described as the “internationally loathed core series” and a three-part sequence of gut-wrenching twists (if you’ll pardon the pun) and inversions intended to wring out our internal organs from the bottom upward (following a plumber’s sage advice that it’s easier to unclog a stopped drain by stirring up what’s stuck at the bottom of the pipe, then flushing it out from the top downward).

We held the poses for just long enough to get uncomfortable, while Corn sobered us with statistics about the levels of toxins found in our drinking water, our foods, and our high-tech devices. Just when things felt as though they were getting too serious, Corn would throw in a lighthearted joke or ask us a provoking question, encouraging us to seek answers within ourselves about how we want to show up—both at the Yoga Journal conference and in the world.

While resting in a welcome Savasana and listening to a few delicate snores emerge from the corners of the room, I kept coming back to a quote by  French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

After everything had been stripped away from my morning: the sluggishness left over from the holiday season; my delusions about who was ultimately responsible for my physical and emotional health (me, duh); what I was left with was a sense of profound happiness. So much so that a huge grin spread across my face in the dark ballroom. What a way to start off the conference: let the games begin!

-Ella Lawrence

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