Monthly Archives: July 2010

Optimal Health: Mental, Psychological & Spiritual Goals with Gary Kraftsow

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Tomorrow, I’ll be pulling myself out of bed at the crack of dawn, make some coffee, and head over to my friend Olivia Esuabana’s house. We will then make a 3-hour road trip to Portland, Oregon to see Gary Kraftsow, who’s been there all week doing a workshop on Optimal Health from a Viniyoga perspective.

I’m not trained in the Viniyoga tradition, but I greatly appreciate Gary’s book Yoga for Wellness, not to mention TKV Desikachar’s The Heart of Yoga, where I saw pictures of Sri Tirumalai Krishnamacharya’s for the first time, with whom–I was excited to find out– I share the same birthday.

I wanted to go see Gary after I read an article about him for my 500-hour teacher training titled Radical Healing as we discussed the pancha maya kosha model. After looking at his schedule for the next couple years, I realized that Portland would be the closest for me. So, two sleepy yoga girls will be on our way, cruising down and up Interstate 5 tomorrow, to see what Gary has to say to us about mental, psychological, and spiritual goals.

Myself, I’m most interested in hearing about facing death. In fact, it’s a big reason why I’m going. Death is inevitable, yet it’s not often talked about. Finding joy is not particularly a challenge for me these days. When I wake up in the morning safe and sound in warm bed with a roof over, and there’s hot running water, indoors plumbing, and toilet paper, life is awesome.

From the Shala Yoga of Portland website:

OPTIMAL HEALTH – The Viniyoga Perspective
with Gary Kraftsow

Saturday, July 31, 10:00am – 1:00pm & 2:30 – 5:30pm

Experience the methods to improve attention, focus, listening, and memory. Discover tools to increase self-confidence, self-esteem, tolerance, compassion, and discrimination. Discussion will include “spiritual” goals including finding joy, finding purpose, and facing death.

Seattle Yoga News: Anusara Yoga for Pregnancy with Jessica Jennings at Seattle Yoga Arts

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Today and Sunday I’ll be seeing Jessica Jennings, hailing from Los Angeles, at Seattle Yoga Arts as she applies the principles of Anusara to yoga for pregnancy. I’m not an Anusara teacher, but I understand enough of the vernacular to flail along with the kula. :)

Jessica is a certified Anusara teacher and a doula. She has a Masters in Kinesiology, for which thesis she worked with the Chief of Staff of OB/Gyn at Kaiser to create a program for pregnant women.

Me, I’ve never been pregnant, and I don’t exactly think of children on a regular basis. I have a lot of friends who have decided to get preggo, however, and they’ve often asked me about prenatal yoga. I’ve studied prenatal yoga in my teacher training, but I haven’t done a specialized workshop focusing on just prenatal, so I’m hoping this workshop will help me become more comfortable with working with pre and post pregnancy, as well as meet prenatal teachers in the area that I can refer my friends to.

From the Seattle Yoga Arts website:

Pregnancy can be a doorway for women to enter a whole new place of connection with themselves and their bodies. And yet there is so much unnecessary fear and anxiety surrounding pregnancy in our culture.

As yoga teachers, we can offer a sense of trust and groundedness through our words and our guidance, while keeping our pregnant students and their babies safe. This workshop will give you the information you need to begin to tap in to your own inner wisdom to help our pregnant students enjoy a transformative, joy-filled journey.

As yoga students, we can deepen our understanding of what it means to step into the flow of nature by exploring Tantric philosophy and the Universal Principles of Alignment within this inspiring context.

- Come get your questions answered about how to accommodate pregnancy with simple adjustments to traditional poses

- Learn about optimal prenatal alignment and sequencing, therapeutics, and inspiring themes

- Explore your own feelings/fears around birth in this love-fest of a weekend (men are welcome and encouraged to attend)

And Now For Something Less Sexy: Yoga Injuries

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If you hang out in certain circles, this past week was full of drama. The way that some people talk about it, you would think there’s a deadlock in an international peace talk.

I am talking about, of course, the The Yoga Mogul article from the New York Times about Anusara Yoga’s founder John Friend, which has gotten the whole interwebs buzzing. A lot of people have said a lot of things about this, I won’t contribute to that conversation. If you’d like to know what’s being said, the world is at your fingertips, only a Google search away.

Instead, I’ll point out something also from the New York Times, also recently published, and got nowhere near as much buzz: yoga injuries. It’s a blog post titled: Stretch – When Yoga Hurts by Lizette Alvarez. Even though there isn’t nearly as much attention to this post specifically and topic in general, to me, it’s actually much more interesting, probably because it hits much closer to home. As a yoga practitioner and teacher, I am confronted with the issue of working with bodily pain–past, current, and potential–on a daily basis.

I appreciate this post very much, Lizette Alvarez, wherever you are out there, thank you.

Here are some excerpts that totally resonated with me:

Training for yoga teachers can vary, and classes are so large in some studios that instructors do not pay enough attention to everybody. In New York, many people approach yoga with a no-pain, no-gain mind-set, with predictable results.

…

“The most common form of injury is the overzealous student,” said Dr. Loren Fishman, a spine specialist, yoga teacher and medical director of Manhattan Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. “The second most common reason for injury is poor alignment, and that is usually crummy teaching.”

…

The best way to avoid injury, particularly if your body is creaky, is to take it slow and make sure to nail the fundamentals, experts said.

When I didn’t know any better, I’d crank into my lower back in Up Dog and push my pelvis as far forward as possible to create a backbend. I have been told “lock it, lock it, lock it” and then “and push and push and push.” I’ve been in classes where I haven’t even fully come into a pose before I’m asked to move on to next pose. And now, in the same situation, out of respect for the teacher, I would keep my mouth shut. For my own sanity, I just don’t go back to those classes. Out of sight, out of mind, so to speak. If I don’t see what’s happening, then it must not be happening!

I’m very well aware that there’s potential for injuries *anywhere*, no matter what style or tradition of yoga. Pain is inevitable. Complete safety is an illusion, no matter how hard we try. Yet, the difference is in the intention and the awareness, or lack thereof. I once panicked at a meditation retreat, confessing to a teacher that I stepped on a couple ants after I took the vow of no killing, no harming. The teacher asked if I had intentionally stepped on those ants. Was I aware of the possibility of me killing them?

I’ve occasionally wondered if some yoga teachers and students out there are aware of the possibility of injuries. For a long long time, I myself was not. For a long time, yoga was 100% good. It had all those good-feeling words, which could only produce good things: truth and light and love and peace and heart opening and bright conscience. (As an aside: you can make your own yoga buzzword with my yoga jargon generator.) When I went through a period of doing a lot of vinyasa flow yoga, I injured my wrists, and my brilliant plan was to go to class even *more*, since it clearly would help.

I know we live on a planet with a core temperature of something like 3000 degrees Celsius, spinning around a wobbly axis, hurling through space with asteroids and rocks slamming into each other. As Jim Morrison said, “No one here gets out alive.” At the same time, isn’t the practice of yoga meant to help us with living in whatever condition with more ease? And if so, why are we not more interested in creating more ease in the body through injury awareness and prevention?

Further reading:

The July 13, 2010 issue of yogajournal.com newsletter brought this to light. (Thanks for sending it to me, Thom!)

A few I’ve read and recommend:

The Day I Did “Real Yoga”

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I have had a really hard day of traveling, starting off with a mobile boarding pass crashing, some poor planning on my part, some technology failure, long lines at the airport, missing a flight, working with the general anxiety of the consequences of running around worrying about the potential fees I’d have to pay, wondering when I’d be able to come home, all the plans I had made based on a flight depature and arrival time, etc.

Two weeks ago something similar happened. I was having a really difficult morning, driving to a part of the city where I didn’t know there was going to be a huge street fair, where you had to wait and sit in long lines of people and cars for hours just to move two inches. It was not a big deal, in the sense that nothing really tragic happened, no one died, no one’s house burned down. It was just me sitting in my car wanting to be somewhere else, not wanting to be stuck, thinking of the things I coulda shoulda woulda done to not have ended up here.

That day, and today, are the days I do “real yoga.” It’s often said that yoga is about becoming one with the divine. I think that yoga, or at least the test of my progress in yoga, is what happens when things “go wrong”, or in other words, shit hits the fan. Pema Chodron says that we’re always working with our “potential to be bothered”, the times when we don’t feel all that “light and love and the source of truth in your heart.”

All there is, or was, is a sense of tremendous unease, discomfort, a frustration, a nervousness, restlessness, rage, impatience. When I was stuck in the street fair and desperately wanted to be elsewhere (the World Cup final), every time that I had to put my foot on the gas pedal, I wanted to step on the gas pedal twice as hard. This morning, I wanted to scream at all the people in front of me at the airport, “stupid technology”, and my stupid phone. Everybody was stupid and everything sucked.

Well, almost.

For sure, I had those moments and thoughts. I also had moments of catching myself throwing what the authors of Buddha’s Brain call the “second darts.”

“First darts are unpleasant to be sure. But then we add our reactions to them. These reactions are “second darts”–the ones we thorw ourselves. Most of our suffering comes from second darts.”
Rick Hanson with Richard Mendius. The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom. Page 50.

When I became aware of what was happening, I called it out, “Oh yeah, this is fear, this is being frustrated as hell.” To me, this is what my yoga practice is really becoming about. It’s about the ability to go through really uncomfortable situations differently than if I didn’t do yoga at all. It’s not so much about ecstatic bliss and melted heart and unbounded love, the kind of love that soft drink commercials speak of.

Years ago I randomly picked up In Buddha’s Kitchen at a library sale, a book about a woman’s experience cooking in a Buddhist Monastery in Northern California (of course, right? ;) ). I remember a line a lama in the book said, “Anger is when someone shoots a thousand arrows at you, and angry is when you pick them up and stab yourself.”

I know I have gotten super good at stabbing myself, not just with an angry arrow, but with guilt, fear, judgement, impatience, etc., the whole enchilada, really. So yoga, however deep its roots or intricate its philosophy, however “real” or watered-down some of us debate about, really boiled down to something pretty simple for me today: can I stand in a long line at the airport not knowing which flight I could get on, and know that I’m breathing in and breathing out?

Relax and Renew ™ Restorative Yoga Training with Judith Hanson Lasater Roundup

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Greetings from San Francisco! This week I’m in a 5-day Restorative Yoga Teacher Training with Judith Hanson Lasater at Yoga Tree SF in the Castro. Today is the last day of the training, which has gone by too fast, which is always the case for me when I see Judith. (For those of you who’s seen me take notes on my iPhone and wonder how I do it, this is how I perfect that skill.)

There is so much good stuff from the workshop, and therefore so much for me to write, so much so that I don’t really know where to begin. In fact that’s what’s been holding me back, keeping me in my writing fear and procrastination. Whenever I’m overwhelmed with the sheer amount of things to do, and the time that I don’t think I have to accomplish it all, I sabotage my own attempt by sitting around, being worried, getting anxious, getting stressed out. Every time I think of the email I need to write and the email I need to respond to, they get more annoying, scarier, bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until they become some sort of insurmountable mountain in my mind.

As Judith would say, “Who knows what I’m talking about?”

For those of you that said, “What? Are you a moron? I never get stressed out over what I have to do,” to you I say, please write a book, I will buy it. For the rest of us who’s trying everything to live life a little more sanely, a little more joyfully, short of running off to a cave in the forest, I’m convinced that learning how to take care of ourselves is the ticket.

I first learned about Restorative Yoga in my first yoga teacher training, where I was astonished at two things: 1) how friggin’ amazing it feels, and 2) how, during the 10 years of doing yoga prior, I had never learned about it.

There’s a reason for that. I had been doing Bikram and variations of Vinyasa Flow Power yoga, where the emphasis, to me, was more about exciting the sympathetic nervous system than the parasympathetic nervous system. A practical reason is that Restorative Yoga includes the usage of props like blankets and bolsters, which would not survive in a hot yoga studio.

Naturally, as is often the case with encountering something good, I wanted more, and I had been wanting to take Judith’s training ever since.

So, I’m hooked, and I’ll be writing a lot more about this as I learn more and practice it more, and if you take classes with me, don’t be surprised if I talk about it in class :)

Here's me in a side lying savasana pose. It feels as good as it looks.

Here's me in a side lying savasana pose. It feels as good as it looks.

Thai Yoga Massage and Reflexology with Eric Spivack

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This weekend, I’m taking a workshop on Thai Yoga Massage and Reflexology for the feet and lower legs with Eric Spivack, who’s a certified Thai Massage and Viniyoga instructor.

I don’t have any intention of becoming a massage therapist or doing Thai Yoga massage, but I do have a long-running fetish for learning as much as possible about the anatomy, physiology, and energetic quality of the feet. The feet seem to be something of a forgotten area for most people, and I guess in a way it makes sense because most of us are encouraged to live in our heads, and the feet are the furthest away from the head.

I wanted to learn about the energy meridians and Sen lines. I want to understand why the ancient people thought parts of the feet had any correspondence with the rest of the body and the internal organs.

I’m finding that I’m not as “satisfied” with getting all my questions answered in this workshop. Maybe I am too much in my head :) . Maybe this is the place to slow down my need to intellectualize everything. I would ask why, why, why, and Eric would gently tell me that this is not the scope of this class (he has a certification program, where I’m sure he goes into much more technical details.)

What I *am* getting, however, is a lot of practice giving and receiving foot massages, and my feet are singing hallelujah right now. I’ve also gained an appreciation for massage therapists and how hard they work. Giving massages is pretty intense for the body (who knew? ;) ).

I’m also getting a glimpse at the rich tradition and history of Thai Yoga Massage, from the times of the Buddha, starting with Dr. Jivaka Komarabhacca, or Doctor Shivago (*not* Zhivago, for you smart asses ;) ). I learned the Pali prayer or invocation before a practitioner touches the body of a client, which is:

Om namo Shivago silasa ahang karuniko sapasatanang osata tipa-mantang papaso suriya-jantang. Gomalapato paka-sesi wantami bantito sumethasso arokha sumana-homi.

Piyio-tewa manussanang piyo-proma namuttamo piyo nakha supananang pininsiang name-mihang namo puttaya navon-navien nasatit-nasatien ehi-mama navien-nawe napai-tang-vien navien. Mahaku ehi-mama piyong-mama namo puttaya.

Na-a na-wa rokha payati vina-santi.

It roughly translates to:

We invite the spirit of our founder, the Father Doctor Shivago, who comes to us through his saintly life. Please bring to us the knowledge of all nature, that this prayer will show us the true medicine of the Universe. In the name of this mantra, we respect your help and pray that through our bodies you will bring wholeness and health to the body of our client.

The Goddess of Healing dwells in the heavens high, while mankind dwells in the world below. In the name of the Founder, may the heavens be reflected in the earth below so that this healing medicine may encircle the world.

We pray for the one whom we touch, that he will be happy and that any illness will be released.

Why Pali? It was the language of classical Buddhist texts, and Thai massage has a strong tie to Buddhism. In fact, Thai Medicine’s four major areas are:

  • Herbal medicine
  • Nutritional medicine
  • Spiritual practice – Theravada Bhuddism
  • Physical medicine – Thai Yoga Massage

I barely touched the tip of the iceberg this weekend, learning just a bit about Thai reflexology, but I’ll be putting it all to good use very soon. My mom is a hair dresser, and, as she stands on her feet all day, she suffers from a lot of pain in her feet. Given everything my mom has done for me, I’m hoping to show her how I appreciate all that by making her my guinea pig for practicing what I learned. :)

Dr. Shivago, the father of doctor of Thai Massage

Dr. Shivago, the father of doctor of Thai Massage

Seattle Yoga News – Sanskrit & Yoga Philosophy Study Group with Kathryn Payne

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One thing I started to realize as I got further and further in my yoga studies is the opportunities for me to practice Asana, and even Pranayama, are disproportionate in relation to the opportunities to delve into more esoteric subjects, such as reading the Ancient texts, and writing and pronouncing Sanskrit. (To be fair, not nearly as many people are interested in that. As my boyfriend once asked me, “Why are you learning a dead language? Do your students really care?”)

Any night of the week, I can spin around three times, throw a pebble, and it will surely land on a studio in which to lay my mat down. Finding a group with a learned teacher to discuss ishvara pranidhana and its practical implication in a modern world? My luck won’t be nearly as high. I am not *complaining*. I am *glad* that after a day of sitting in chairs too big and desks too high for me, hunching over a computer screen with my shoulders on top of my ears, I can stretch and bend and twist and invert and restore some alignment in my body.

I *will* say, though, that my physical practice grew leaps and bounds after I got to know the non-physical stuff, the… seemingly “only in your head” intellectual stuff. Like a pot of stew, everything started to complement each other, making the whole thing so much more tasty.

So, I am glad that my teacher Kathryn Payne has decided to hold more classes and workshop on Sanskrit and Yoga Philosophy at Sound Yoga studio in West Seattle. If you are in the Seattle area and want to dig deeper in this kinda stuff , this is a great opportunity. Having studied regularly with Kathryn for the past two years, I will vouch that she is a great source of wisdom. So come! And I’ll see you there!

From the Sound Yoga website:

SANSKRIT & YOGA PHILOSOPHY STUDY GROUP with Kathryn Payne
Dates: Tuesdays, July 13th & August 17 (2 classes)
Time: 6:00 – 8:00 Pm
Fee: $55 for both or $30 for a single two-hour class
Where: Sound Yoga in West Seattle (www.soundyoga.com)

In each class we will study by reading and chanting from source yoga texts. During these two summer sessions we will focus on the Patanjali sutras and mantra – maybe an Upanishad verse. Regardless of the material we will broaden vocabulary and deepen our understanding of the yoga through the power of its language – Sanskrit.

The course will continue to meet approximately once per month on Tuesdays evenings in the Fall. Dates TBA in a late Summer email.

To register, please send me an email at kp @ islandyogacenter.com to let me know you are coming and snail mail fee (check) to Kathryn Payne, 12601 Cunliffe Rd, Vashon, 98070.

Learning verse 4.24 from the Bhagavad Gita with Kathryn Payne

Learning verse 4.24 from the Bhagavad Gita with Kathryn Payne

Never Say Never – How I Learned to Love Chanting

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I had always thought that chanting was at best weird, and at worst, creepy.  My earliest memory of chanting was visiting my grandmother on my dad’s side when I was five or six years old, and she would sit with a little bowl and wooden mallet saying namo namo namo. I had zero idea what she was doing, it just did not seem like something I would ever do. It did not seem the least bit fun.

Fear of the Mysterious

My family is not religious, in the sense that we don’t follow and participate in any organized religion other than going to Buddhist temple for New Year’s and funerals. When my grandmother on my mom’s side died, I would listen to the monks chant and chant and chant during the funeral service. My mom explained that they were chanting for the peaceful passing of my grandmother, and I probably raised my eyebrow at that. How does that work? I asked, and when no one could explain to me, I dismissed it as yet another superstition.

That’s why, when I found myself in Sonia Nelson’s Vedic Chanting workshop this past weekend, I had to chuckle to myself a little. One, never say never, and two, don’t be so sure of a certain stance you take, it will surely change.

I began to “accept” chanting after I learned about its intended usage (I know, so romantic, right?) This is probably because of my personality and my science education, I need to understand something first, even on a surface level, in order for me to begin to connect with it. It’s also because of the fear that I would get brainwashed, that the things I say without understanding would have some bizarre magical power, and that they would take life on their own and like… I don’t know, make me run away and join a cult?

Another thing that’s made me skeptical of chanting is how it often invokes images of deities, and I don’t really care much for the god that has been used to justify political campaigns and wars.

The Beginning of Understanding

I began warming up to chanting after studying Sanskrit with Kathryn Payne in my Teacher trainings. I fell in love with the sound, I fell in love with the language, I fell in love with what the philosophy was teaching me, and I fell in love with chanting thanks to the relationship with the sounds that I’m making.

I began to understand, too, that the deities invoked by the chants are more or less symbolic, personified for the sakes of learning and teaching, because we can only relate to and grasp on to what we already have a mental concept for, so gods and goddesses it is. I also saw how chanting and mantras are tools to focus and still a distracted and wavering mind. When I found out about Sonia Nelson, without knowing much about Vedic chanting, I signed up for her workshop in Seattle this past June.

I’ll write about what I learned about chanting from Sonia in another post. This one is just to say that doubt is good, doubt is healthy, but now I have one more example of how things can change. Now I’ve got one more data point to remind myself that flexibility is not just nice to cultivate for my hamstrings. As Joseph Goldstein, in his Abiding in Mindfulness lectures, said, doubt should open the way for investigation, not a blind dismissal. And investigating is very much in the science spirit anyway. :)

Working on my hamstrings in Uttanasana with yoga teacher Michael Warner's help. "Shot on location" :) at Village Green Yoga in Issaquah

Working on my hamstrings in Uttanasana with yoga teacher Michael Warner's help. "Shot on location" :) at Village Green Yoga in Issaquah

The Value of Yoga and What We Are Willing to Pay For

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The week before last week, something came through my inbox that made me cringe for about 10 seconds. It was a deal from LivingSocial, the wildly popular site where you can get one wickedly awesome deal daily. The deal was for 20 sessions of Bikram yoga for $20 at a Bikram Yoga studio in Shoreline, a couple blocks away from where I live.

The Value of (Almost) Free Yoga

Something about this made me feel uncomfortable. Though I don’t know all the reasons that the feelings and sensations came up that way, I do know that I’ve been struggling with the issue of the value, or the perception of value, of yoga for a while. In my 500-hour teacher training, we had a session on the Business of Yoga where we talked extensively about the pros and cons of offering free yoga classes. One thing I walked away with was, there are different types of “free” yoga, and before jumping in and offering any kind of discount, we as yoga teachers need to be clear on what we are giving and receiving.

I know that we all value things differently, and how people spend their money is none of my business. I admit, though, that I’ve always find it funny that someone would say they can’t afford to pay for yoga, and yet would be happy to spend money on a frappuccino in the morning, another in the afternoon, and then a cocktail or two after work. And then you’d hear about them spending loads of money on diet pills and detox powder. It’s funny how our minds work in relation to things we deem as worthy of our hard-earned money.

In any case, I let that uncomfortable feeling go. You just cannot investigate every single feeling of unease in the world indiscriminately, and I felt like this was one battle I didn’t need to pick and get worked up over.

The Value of Public Transportation

A few days later, I misplaced my Orca card, which is a public transportation pass for buses and trains around the Puget Sound. I was really bummed that I didn’t get to use it when I needed it, and even more bummed that I had to now pay extra for the bus. For the first few times, I would try to plead with the bus driver to let me ride for free, since technically I already paid with my card, I just didn’t have it with me.

Then, it occurred to me that I was a hypocrite.

If you live in this area, you *know* that the traffic we have is atrocious. I myself take the bus partly out of what I call the Green Guilt, and party to preserve my stress and blood pressure level. It is an understatement to say that we *all* hate traffic and would love to do away with it all. And yet, we are not always willing to walk the talk and help make it better.

As a region, we debate about money to death and some of us get very upset about paying more taxes to fund better public transportation options. As a proponent of public transportation I will readily admit that I choose to drive to certain places because our bus system simply does not meet my needs. You would think that I would be willing to pay more to change that. But no, I was haggling with bus drivers over the fact that I didn’t want to pay an extra two dollars and fifty cents, and then I would get off the bus and pay the same amount for a tea bag that’s been marked up a gazillion percent.

I thought about how silly I was, that on the one hand, I want people to see that value of yoga classes, that what you pay is what you get, and on the other hand, I was being so petty about putting more money in a system that I use everyday. This thought made me laugh at myself while sitting on the bus one afternoon.

The Value of Accessibility

This whole analogy may not be the best one out there. I may have drawn some parallels that may be more like crooked lines at best. I know there’s a whole complicated issue of government subsidy and taxes, etc. It doesn’t matter. My point here is, I’m starting to see that yoga, like everything else, has a perceived value in people’s mind, and I would not do myself, my students, and my colleagues, any service by doing things that would devalue it.

My friend David Tolmie (hi Dave!) said that public transportation should be accessible to all, as should yoga, and I tend to agree. So the question is, how do we make it so that something is accessible, and yet still valuable? There has to be an equal exchange of energy. I am willing to pay a lot of money, over and over again, for yoga training, and I know many other teachers do too. How do we turn around and charge $12, $15, $18 for a class of yoga when someone else is willing to charge $1? What do you think?

I should also mention that as soon as I came to my mini epiphany mentioned above, I was happy to pay for the bus, and even extra when I didn’t have exact change. This past weekend, I found my Orca card. :)

Cat money