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I am writing this post with fast and furious fingers and sweaty palms, quite possibly from my morning coffee or the bright spring sunshine walloping all of Seattle right now. I am also experiencing a ginormous sense of overwhelm. Not overwhelm in the common sense of being eaten alive by to-do lists, but overwhelm in the sense of the feeling you get while standing in front of a vast blue ocean or a tall green mountain, and witnessing something very big and powerful.
Those of you that know me know that I am into this “sitting thing”. I usually say that “I sit”, and not “I meditate”, because sitting is a more accurate description of what really happens. I sit. And then I think about a hundred and one things that I should be doing, or the things I did and all the things I will do or want to do. It’s elusive, that quiet meditative mind.
And yet. And yet. Something interesting happened to me this morning. Shinzen Young talks about this phenomenon in his lectures The Science of Enlightenment. You do this thing called meditation. You *try* desperately to meditate. You pay good money to go on meditation retreats. When you come back and tell your friends what happen, they wonder if you’ve lost your mind for paying good money to go somewhere to “sit around all day”.
You might start to wonder the same thing. You might blow off sitting once, or twice, or altogether. Or you put it off, thinking, “I’ll do it tomorrow”.
But, by hooks or by crooks, by some miracle, or by some clever tricks, as Shinzen said, “if you can’t be disciplined, be clever.”, you sit, and you sit regularly, day after day, month after month. You start to see glimpses of what it means to live in the moment. You look at the world like a goldfish with that proverbial 3-second memory, or the proverbial curious cat that acts like it’s seeing everything for the first time, sniffing it, exploring it.
And boy, is it grand when it happens. It happens very fast, and it does not last.
But, no matter how fleeting, no matter how swift that moment comes and goes, it blows you away. All of the sudden, you start to understand that big word impermanence. You start to see the joys and the sorrows. I’m not even talking theory and hypotheses here. Those things happen right in front of your eyes, as if on cue. It’s very creepy.
(No, the irony does not escape me to reminisce the moment of “living in the moment”, but it must be captured and recorded somehow )
What am I trying to say? If you are engaged in this practice, this yoga thing, this meditation thing, this, dare I say it, getting in touch with your spirit thing. Trust the process. Really. Trust it even when you are weary and full of doubt. And get clever. Trick yourself into practicing when you least feel like it, on the cushion, on the mat, in the grocery line, or in traffic jam.
It will not give you a mountain of gold, it will not instantly make all your troubles go away. It will not automatically rid you of your destructive habits and general life shenanigans. It will not make you taller and turn you into a baller and give you a girl that you could call her.
I honestly can’t even tell you exactly what it will bring to you, because it would be arrogant of me to claim to know what *you* personally experience. What I can arrogantly claim, however, is that life is always coming together and falling apart at the same time. There will be so much joy, and so much sorrow. And there are no words to describe what it’s like, when you are in what they call the Witness state. Something this morning put me in an incredibly clear mind to see both, like a jolt of lighting or a flash of shooting star. To put it plainly, it scared me, it overwhelmed and amazed me, and it humbles me like nothing ever before.
I will say this, admittedly with a lot of caution and hesitation. I am beginning to see what Vyaas Houston talks about in The Certainty of Freedom.
I’m not a big fan of the terms the author used. (Last I checked no one enjoyed “the daily grind.” Who wants to be considered a “grinder”?) But the post is so pertinent to what I wrote last night about being a yoga teacher and entrepreneur that I will write a bit more about it here.
The author, “with over 15 years of intensive marketing, public relations, business development and management experience”, identified three types of people for professional service business “when looking at how to operate and grow effectively.” (And make no mistake, as a yoga teacher, you are a professional, and you are providing a professional service.)
The three types are:
1) Finders: the people who lead the business development. They bring in new business, create new relationships and continue to sell to existing customer.
2) Minders: the ship captains. They make all operations run smoothly, manage stuff, ensuring things get done.
3) Grinders: the ones who get the job done. In our case, this means teaching, and continue to learn how to learn, learn how to teach, learn how to communicate. This is the part everyone sees.
I’ve paraphrased the types a bit, because I find some of the language a little distressing, (”These people are the cogs of a business” is just so cringe-inducing to me.)
Each role is absolutely critical to the success of a company and they all think that they are the most important. Without finders you would have no new business coming in the door, and no new projects for your team to work on. Without minders you would miss your deadlines and fail to monitor and achieve your profitability and success. And without grinders, nothing real would ever get delivered to your clients.
There is one rare type of professional to look out for in a services business however. They are they type that can carry all three roles and flip between them as required, with ease. If you find one of these, be sure value it for the quality jewel that it is.
This is the part where, if you never thought of yourself as one, now’s the time to consider yourself a quality jewel if you are about to start a business teaching yoga. Things will change down the road. You might find that you don’t particularly enjoy doing one type of work and get someone else to do it, for example. When you first start out, however, you’ve got to be aware of what you’re in for and what you’ll be called to do.
I would say that the author missed out several other really Important Roles: an Incubator, someone who sees far and thinks big, and an Advisor, or Mentor, someone who can guide you through the growing pain. Okay, another post is called for, eh?
This is another post in the series I call New Yoga Teacher to New Yoga Teacher. It’s written specifically for… well, new yoga teachers, but I think it applies equally to anyone new to owning and operating their yoga business.
I came to this realization a couple months into being a brand new yoga teacher, and every day, I’m reminded of how true this is. Today, my friend Lyndi Thompson tweeted about Young Entrepreneur Advice: 100 Things You Must Know!, and I thought it’d be a perfect time to write this blog post. Here it goes: If you want to be a successful yoga teacher, you must learn to be an entrepreneur.
Now, the topic of being an entrepreneur can fill multiple libraries, and so is the topic of being a yoga teacher. So, I will set some parameters around this post as followed.
Assumptions
1) You are an independent yoga teacher, that is, you teach primarily at places where you must do the heavy lifting of marketing yourself and your classes. This might rule out places like health clubs and “mega” yoga studios, where there’s already a steady group of students.
2) You do not teach “pre-packaged” yoga. What I mean by this is the style of yoga that you teach does not have built-in “brand recognition” in the community that you teach. This is *not* to say that if you do, you are any less of an entrepreneur, but I am putting down some assumptions to reign in the scope of this blog post. I could also easily argue that if you teach a “brand name” yoga, you have to work just as hard to differentiate yourself from other teachers. What I’m talking about here, however, is about marketing, educating, and generating recognition where none existed before.
3) Your success directly depends on your ability, as they say in the biz world, to “attract and retain”. That is, you are paid by how many students come to class and continue to come to class, not a flat rate. Again, I am in no way saying that if this is how you get paid *now*, that you’re not an entrepreneur. I’m just setting the assumption that if you are a teacher who’s renting a space and keeping the profit, and if you are paid according to the number of returning students, you might be more motivated to go out and promote yourself, streamline your processes, and so on.
Okay, with that out of the way, here are some things I think a new yoga teacher ought to know, and do. While there are many, many little things to do, here are three big ones that have stood out for me as how you must act like an entrepreneur. Along the way, I’ll insert some quotes from the Young Entrepreneur Advice article, and of course, a yoga sutra.
Truth One: “This is the United States of James Carter. I’m the president, I’m the emperor, I’m the king.”
As a yoga teacher, you’re the CEO, the CIO, CTO, COO, you’re all the C level executives there can be. You’re also the janitor. You *are* the Marketing Department. You *are* Operations and Admin. You *are* Finance, and Budgeting, and Accounting, and Legal, and Sales. *You* are the Chief Networking Officer, and Information Officer, and Knowledge Officer, and Creative, and Customer Service, and Business Development, and Social Media, etc. The list goes on.
The first thing to realize is that as an independent yoga teacher, you are now a walking, talking, *real* business. You may rent out your own space and fully own your business, or you may work at a studio as a contractor, in both cases you are responsible for getting your name out there, establishing your reputation, gain and retain students, create ways to generate revenue and profit, both on and off the mat, perhaps hire and fire staff, and continue to grow. That, my friends, is an entrepreneurial undertaking.
As an entrepreneur, you will do everything, and you’ve got to figure out how to do everything better and more efficiently every day.
21. I did not realize the level of sacrifice that would be required to become not only an entrepreneur, but a successful entrepreneur. Don’t get me wrong, it is worth every single second, but I had no idea that friends and family would not be able to relate. – Amber Schaub http://www.rufflebutts.com/
Truth Two: “Early to bed, early to rise. Work like hell, and advertise.”
I don’t know about early to bed, but the work like hell and advertise bit was true when Ted Turner said that, and it will be true when you decide to be an independent yoga teacher. You’ve got to figure out a way to do marketing and promote yourself like crazy, and do it in a way that’s not sleazy and cheesy.
When you are virtually unknown, one yoga teacher among hundreds and thousands of others, you’ve got to start a marketing campaign, or several. If you don’t teach a kind of yoga that the general public has been exposed to, you will need to start from scratch to generate awareness for your business and educate people on what it is exactly that you offer. This is, as they say in the corporate world, business development.
This goes into a rabbit hole of figuring out your niche, (athletes, cubicle dwellers, gardeners, weekend warriors, etc.), figuring out your main clientele (do you teach children, senior, teens, or athletes?), and telling a compelling and concise story, (something like, “I focus on teaching for stress relief so I do a lot of calming stuff”). Pay a consultant an enormous amount, and they’ll tell you gotta build the pipeline.
Then you need to figure out where are you going to advertise, and where are you going to offer your service? Will you make flyers? Where will you post them? How will you know if one location is more effective than another? Aside from your “home base”, where else will you teach as a marketing tool? Perhaps in a park? At a retail store? In some circles, they like to talk about all those delivery channels.
Okay, you get the idea. Marketing matters. And if you don’t have a marketing department behind you, you’re it.
78. Relationship Marketing – I wish I had understood the importance of staying connected with past clients and nurturing relationships with current clients. Your personal life, your spiritual life and your professional life is all about the relationship. – Sandie Glass http://www.sandstormideas.com/
Truth Three: “However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.”
No stranger to strategies, that Winston Churchill, eh? “Strategy? Don’t you just… show up and teach yoga?” Au contraire, ma cherie. Strategy is the foundation of a successful yoga business (and perhaps all other businesses). This involves thinking about questions such as,
Where are you going to teach?
What day and time of day?
What else is offered in the area, by whom?
Who will you align yourself with for potential partnership?
What communication tool(s) will you use?
How much money will you invest in a particular thing, like building a website or renting space?
Will you incorporate your business?
What other products and services can you offer?
Will you be working another full time job while launching your yoga business?
Do you want to travel and teach workshops or teach on-going classes in one location?
Answering questions like these will help you sort out the pros and cons of each. No matter what you do, there are always advantages and disadvantages. You won’t be able to avoid the disadvantages, but knowing what they are, evaluating them, and taking them with calculation will help you deal with setbacks.
100. I now know that businesses are extremely organic & have a way of taking on a life of their own – now I know that though things don’t always work out as planned, there is always another opportunity around the corner…understanding this from the beginning would’ve saved me a lot of stress! – Rina Jakubowicz http://www.rinayoga.com
Yoga teachers have somehow gotten the unfortunate perception that we are “flighty” and ethereal and that our head is somewhere out there over the rainbow. It’s really too bad, because having your head screwed on right over your shoulders, with the left brain and the right brain working, you know, in union, is really what yoga should be about.
I haven’t talked about bookkeeping, accounting, budgeting, operations, and administrations. It’s also extremely important to have mentors and an Advisory Council. Perhaps they’ll be the topic of another post, but they are an integral part of being an entrepreneur as well, for obvious reasons.
Are you an entrepreneur? Are you a yoga teacher? Perhaps both? What are your thoughts? What have your experiences been like?
Sutra 1.14. This practice becomes well-grounded when continued with devotion, without interruption, and over a long period of time / sah tu dirgha kalanairantaira satkara asevitah dridha bhumih
In self reflection, I realized that I have developed a few traits over the years, like a certain sense of skepticism and snarkiness, all wrapped in a tongue in cheek live and let live perspective. I’d like to think that I can blame this on the years and years of reading websites like Gawker and Pajiba, but perhaps they’re just catalysts and convenient scapegoats.
One fun Gawker column is Blind Items, or #blinditems, where the author entices you with questions about lives of people you’d really like to care less about, such as, Which Famous Couple Is Splitting and Getting New Boyfriends? Resistance is often futile.
I think the lure of the Blind Items column is that it invokes our inner Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, Clue, etc. It gives us a rush of excitement to try to figure out Who Dun It. Oh, and of course, it gives us gossip. So, in the spirit of Blind Items, I introduce to you Blind Items Yoga, an occasional reporting on things that the wind from the rumor mills brings me.
To start with, here’s one for all you in the Seattle area.
Which yoga studio is packing people in wall-to-wall, and telling earnest students that they should come an hour early to get their spot, and refusing to refund passes if the yoga student just isn’t *that* earnest?
Oh, and if the wind from the rumor mills ever asked you for direction, you’re more than welcome to whisper in its ears: “Blind Items Yoga”.
Here in Seattle, there’s an indie alternative newspaper called The Stranger, wherein there’s a column called Last Days, which accounts for notable news of the last days in the last week, and it’s the inspiration for this blog’s format in Nikki Yoga News (NYN).
My Heart Will Go On
The 2nd installment of Intro to Yoga at Taj Yoga is off and running, starting Wednesday March 3, 2010, from 6:00 – 7:15pm. As always with Intros, for the next 7 weeks I will take the students through a rousing round of the different types of yoga postures, breath work, and dabble into the philosophy of what makes yoga, well, yoga. I’m glad to see new faces as well as familiar old ones from the previous Intro session. It’s always a ton of fun to get to work with students for an extended amount of time.
The 10th, yes, 10th! session of my 500-hour Yoga Teacher Training at Pacific Yoga came and went this past weekend of March 5-7, 2010. That means there are only 2 sessions left and I’ll be a 500-Certified Yoga Teacher (CYT). Big excitement! Big responsibilities! What does this 500 CYT business mean? It means I’ve gone through a certain amount of training that meets the Yoga Alliance standards at the 500-hour level [PDF].
Cora Wen, a long-time yoga teacher who has been tagging the world with headstands, or sirsasana, came to Seattle on Thursday March 4, 2010, and we got to hang out and had big fun talking about The State of the Yoga (Union). Har, har. I’ve gotta go for those cheap jokes when I can, ya know. Cora and I met up with Karen Lindenberg, owner and teacher of Phyzz Yoga, and we did some Down Dogs against the Seattle skyline at Volunteer Park.
I’m starting the next Yoga for Newbies series at Village Green Yoga this Thursday, March 11, 2010, from 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm. Hooray! I’ll be looking forward to new and familiar faces there.
This weekend, March 13 and 14, 2010 I’ll be back assisting the fabulous trio of Theresa, Kathryn, and Paul at the Pacific Yoga 200-hour Teacher Training.
I’m starting a new class called Yoga Happy Hour at Taj Yoga, where the emphasis will be more on working with the breath and doing restorative yoga poses. It’s on Friday afternoons from 5:30-6:45pm. As you know, starting anything new is a little bit of a risky adventure, and I’m trying to see if this time slot will work. I’m asking for your help to please let all your friends who live and work in the Crown Hill/Ballard/North Seattle area know!
Always On My Mind
Many, many projects are swirling around in my head right now. I’m feeling awfully creative. My right brain is seriously working over time right now. I’m interviewing local yoga teachers in a Support Local Yoga Teachers project. If you are a yoga teacher, please let me know if you would like to be interviewed!
I’ve been designing greeting cards and shirts in the theme of tongue-and-cheek quirky sayings.
The 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training has started at Pacific Yoga, and what a privilege it is for me to get to assist teachers Theresa Elliott in Asanas, Kathryn Payne in Pranayama, and Paul Bubak in Anatomy. It’s also great fun for me to get to know the next class of yoga teachers.
All I Have To Do Is Dream
Spring is around the corner, and I’ll be teaching a workshop for a Smoother Sun Saluation at Village Green Yoga on Saturday, March 27, 2010. 9:30 – 11:30 am.
I’m officially enrolled in the Traditional Yoga Studies 800-hour Distance Learning Course on the History, Literature, and Philosophy of Yoga, written and designed by Georg Feuerstein. I’ll be starting this after my graduation from the 500-hour Training in May.
I’m really enjoying teaching Yoga for Climbers at Stone Gardens climbing gym, and looking for ways to create videos for my climbing homies from far-away. Mini-vids are in the work, oh yeah.
I am actively working on another series of interviews and biographies on the senior and pioneer yoga teachers in the Pacific Northwest. If you have any information on any teachers who started teaching in the 60s and 70s, or even earlier, please, please let me know.
Drive, Reverse, Neutral, Park, Drive, Reverse, Neutral, Overdrive, Neutral...
Alright, it’s March! That means the First Nikki Challenge 28-Day Sit-off Meditation Competition is ovar! How’d it go for you? As you recall the rules were minimal. All I asked was for you to sit. That’s it! 60 seconds, 60 minutes, it didn’t matter. The goal was to create a habit, and as all of us know, if the goal is too lofty, we won’t even get started at all.
Kudos to you if you took it the challenge. And a HUGE THANK YOU to our Sit-off sponsors: The awesome people who gave us a little incentive to do our work. Okay, now what, you’re off the hook, right? Actually, no one was ever really “on the hook” with anyone in the first place, really, except with ourself. And that’s the hardest person to hold accountable with, eh?
If you’ve enjoyed sitting, and enjoyed the “sitoff” spirit, fret not, here comes the iEvolve 90 day Meditation Challenge. Yes, that’s a whole whopping *ninety* days, not 28 puny days. Also, this challenge asks that you sit for an hour a day. From their website:
THE CHALLENGE:
Meditate 1 hour everyday for 90 days in a row. You can sit for 60-minutes straight, two 30- minute periods, or 4 15-minute periods. Whatever works for you. Either way, that’s 90 hours of meditation under your belt! Start Spring 2010 off right and re-energize your practice and your life with our 90 day meditation challenge.
As you know, I’m a huge believer of doing things in an easy, steady, sustainable way. So, I’ve decided to tweak the rules a little bit (”they’re more like guidelines anyway”). I’ve decided to use the divide and conquer strategy. I’ve also included Pranayama as part of the sit. Let’s call it MPx4, Meditation and Pranayama by Four sittings a day. An hour seems like a lot, but 15 minutes? We all have 15 minutes here and there to spare.
Every Day Is A Winding Road
The Challenge calls for 90 hours of sitting, that’s 5400 minutes. My take is you ought to account for mishaps in life, and you ought to be able to make up for them.
If you miss a day, add another day to the challenge. For example, it’s March 1, 2010 as I’m writing this, but you’re reading about this on March 2, or 3. Who says you have to finish May 28, 2010? Why not May 29, or 30? This can go too far, however. You might say to yourself, “I’m putting it off until January 1, 2011, yeah, that’ll be my New Year Resolution!”
So, why not set a deadline of the last day of Spring, which is June 20, 2010? It’s like those punch cards where you get a limited time to use. That adds a whole whopping 23 days to the 90-day sit, that’s like 25% more for the same price!
If you miss 15 minutes, add another 15 minutes. If you’ve only done 15 minutes today, add 45 minutes to your “Credit” column, and save it for a make-up day. DO NOT binge and purge. Well, do it if you want to, but I strongly advise against the dieter’s mentality of having “cheat days” where you go berserk with everything in sight. Don’t think, oh, I’m not gonna sit today, but I’ll sit for five hours this weekend. It doesn’t work in the long run. It’s unsustainable.
The exception, of course, is if you’ve signed up for a sit where you really will sit for five hours, then I think it’s cool. What doesn’t work is the old college habit of cramming. It’s 10pm and that 50-page paper is due at 8am tomorrow morning? No problems, I have a whole *twelve* hours to write. Yeah, that rarely ends well.
Okay, here’s a recap:
The challenge is to complete 5400 minutes of sitting, a combination of Pranayama and Meditation.
You must do each session for at least 15 minutes.
You’re strongly encouraged to sit for an hour a day.
You have from March 1, 2010 to June 20, 2010 to complete.
Bonus:
Are you a math/stat geek? Keep tabs and quantify on your effort. For example, you can record when you sit, and do a tally on whether you do more Pranayama or Meditation in the morning, or at night.
Any time's a good time for a spreadsheet!
What do you think? Are you in?
When we take the meditation posture, we’re developing a posture and attitude of attentive openness to whatever arises, and this is actually a very brave thing to do. I think maybe we wouldn’t actually even begin on this journey if we knew how brave that is, to just sit, and open our minds, open our whole being, with attentive openness to whatever might arise.
Because in so doing, we’re actually opening ourselves beyond our usual habitual view of ourself and of reality. We actually don’t know what we’re going to see, and one of the first things that one gradually begins to perceive is that perhaps we aren’t quite who we thought we were.
…
We sit, and we just look, with an openness, as much openness as we can, and in so doing, we’re opening ourselves to letting go, or seeing through, or at least seeing exactly who we are and what we do. We’re setting ourselves up, you could say, for some of the ways, and eventually all of the ways in which we conventionally and habitually view reality, to let those fall apart, so it’s very brave. And this path, is considered the Path of the Brave Ones, which doesn’t mean we *are* brave, but it means we begin to cultivate our fearlessness.
- Pema Chodron, From Fear to Fearlessness, Session 1, Beginning the Path of the Brave Ones.
I absolutely enjoyed reading what Arnold had to say. He said what I wanted to convey in the idea of Santosha, but much more concise. I want to share it with you guys here. I also took the liberty to bold some texts.
We all tend to resist stress. To begin overcoming this tendency, admit that stress is a normal and desirable part of climbing. Accept this not just philosophically but in practice. When you encounter a stressful situation, accept the stress and explore its details. Accepting stress will help you see a situation as it is and avoid the distracting tricks your mind plays to satisfy its desire for comfort.
Acceptance does not equal resignation. It means simply that you avoid wishful thinking and illusions, and focus on gathering useful information about the challenge before you. Saying, “I wish these holds were bigger,” is an expression of resistance. It will not make the holds grow or help you use them. Saying, “I hope there’s a hold up there,” will not create a hold or help you respond if there isn’t one. Saying, “If only I wasn’t so pumped,” will not re-energize your forearms or help you find the least strenuous path through the crux.
If you want to embrace the light, you must also embrace the darkness.
LIVING YOUR YOGA: We all long for love, peace, and ease. But in order to fully experience them, we must also be willing to embrace our hatred, anger, and agitation. Today when you feel any strong negative emotions, really feel them. Cutting off negative feelings cuts off our ability to feel all emotions.
I especially enjoy this, because reading it feels like a long relieved exhalation. It’s given me permission to acknowledge emotions that I once thought were “off-limit”.
The Agony and the Ecstasy
One thing about the yoga and meditation world that I think “hooks” people in is the promise of bliss, and not just any kind of bliss, eternal bliss, ecstatic bliss, (uh, not to mention, yoga bliss hips). If you’re not happy, practice it. If you’re currently happy, you could be happier, all the time. My god, even the mat wash oughta be happy.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for happy, love, bliss, and more happy. Nope, nothing against that at all.
What I’ve learned though, that when we talk about abstract concepts like love, compassion, happy, spiritual, bliss, without setting any context, without any preconditions, we can run into all sorts of troubles when we’re not experiencing any of those emotions.
For example, let’s say something has gone very wrong, everything has hit the fan. My uncensored reaction might go something like this, “I’m so pissed! No, I’m fucking pissed! I HATE HATE HATE.” Or, perhaps something milder happened. Maybe I’m slightly offended by something. I might run off, get on my high horse and judge, roll my eyes and get all worked up. You know the drill.
Uh oh, but, I’m a yoga teacher! I’m not supposed to get upset! I’m not supposed to get livid! Quelle horreur! Seeing this, I might tell myself, “Oh, it’s okay. I’m fine. I’m supposed to be happy, and loving. Yes, I love everyone. And we’re all one. Ommm.”
If this is my approach to every crummy moment in life, I’ll end up with a lot of repression, won’t I?
It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia
I’m learning that in the context of yoga, things like love and happiness aren’t what we think they are. They’re not the–”I’m so happy it’s sunny out”, or, “I love this present you gave me”–kind of emotions.
Once, when my boyfriend was waiting to hear back from a prospective employer and getting worried and anxious, I told him to be happy and just enjoy the moment. He looked at me like I was out of my mind. “Be happy? How could I be happy when I may not get the job?”. “Is everybody who has a job happy? And all the unemployed people are swimming in giant seas of unhappiness?” I asked him. “Well, yeah. How could you be happy if you don’t make any money?”
I knew then that we weren’t talking about the same kind of happiness. My teacher Shinzen Young often talks about a kind of happiness that’s independent of any conditions. That’s probably the happiness and bliss that yoga teachers and magazines often talk about. But I’m not convinced that it’s clearly explained enough, especially in mainstream yoga. Or, perhaps the ambiguity is intentional. After all, my guess is “Practice Feeling Completely Rotten” doesn’t sell as many magazine copies.
All Fall Down
I’m finding out that taking the role of the Witness, the Observer (or Ishvara) means that I’ve got to call an Ace an Ace. Whatever emotion that’s passing by, no matter how dark, should be recognized. Oh look, there’s anxiety. There’s jealousy. There’s selfishness. There’s self-righteousness.
And the trick is to do so with a kind of tenderness, a kind of… well, love; love for my humanness. How human of me to be scared, to be hurt, to project. Practicing this way, for me, creates a kind of happiness that’s really sweet, and so hard to describe. “I’m happy that I can see how awful this experience is.” I know, it doesn’t make any friggin’ sense, does it?
Well, I can say more, but Pema Chodron has eloquently and concisely put it in one sentence as she talked about Maitri, the practice of loving-kindness.
“Maitri is not about feeling good, it’s about feeling whatever you feel with a compassionate attitude and with extreme honesty” – Pema Chodron, Awakening Compassion Lectures.
Have you ever felt like you were “supposed” to feel anything different than what you’re currently feeling? How do you work with that?
The Yoga studio scene in Seattle is seeing some changes as we transition from February to March.
+ Om Yoga of Redmond is closing its doors after 2 years. Owner Karen Herold is an amazing woman for having a full time executive job, coaching her daughters’ sports teams, and of course, teaching and running a small business. Kudos to her for having realized her dream, and I wish her lots of happy and joyful “me” time. The last day for Om Yoga is March 6, 2010.
+ Hot Yoga of Issaquah is officially Terra Yoga. On Saturday, March 6, 2010, there will be an open-house celebration with food and music between 1:00 p.m. and 3:00 p.m., and a dedication at 2:00 p.m. Owner Carina Ostebovik renamed the studio after her middle name, Terra. The old name also no longer reflects the diverse styles offered in the space.
+ West Side Yoga and Doga is a new studio that just opened this past week, with the opening night on February 20, 2010. Since Ashtanga Yoga School closed in 2007, there hasn’t been a pure traditional Ashtanga school in Seattle (that I know of). West Side Yoga Doga seems to be filling in that gap. The web site also says that they are the only Doga studio in the US. Here’s wishing them the best, and as Neil Young would say, “long may you run”!
Last night in class I put my students in a Restorative Yoga pose. I asked that the students let their mind stay in their body. One strategy to do so is to hang on to something you can hear or feel, such as the breath and sensations in the body.
It was especially noisy outside the Taj Yoga studio, with a party involving a couple hundred children under the age of 9 (I may be exaggerating on the number of children.) One strategy was to use the sounds themselves as the anchor to latch the mind on, without evaluating or reacting to them.
This is one way to practice Santosha, the 2nd Niyama. Niyama itself is the 2nd limb of Patanjali’s 8 limbs of yoga, which consists of 5 observances, or attitudes towards our own selves. Santosha is often translated to contentment–being content with what’s happening right here right now.
The word “content” can give the impression that it’s about being indifferent, complacent, or submissive, but in fact it’s about a choice to be poised. It’s the idea of “staying cool under pressure”, to stick around with the present moment, to not think that you’ll only be happy if this and that happened, some day.
This morning I read this article from the Seattle Times about a recent incident in the Winter Olympics in the Women’s Alpine event. It’s a story involving two of the US best skiers and Something That Went Wrong, which created some bad blood and public display of discontentment.
As I read this quote from Lindsey Vonn about her competitor Julia Mancuso, I saw some glimpses of Santosha, which I emphasize here in bold:
“She was at a huge disadvantage to have to run again,” Vonn said. “That absolutely was not what I wanted but it happened, and that happens in ski racing and all you can do is deal with the hand you were dealt.”
“It definitely has hurt me that she said some negative things about me, and all I can do is continue to support her like I always have been and hope that she reciprocates that.”
Here’s a short video I made last night in my kitchen about Santosha.
Muscles 'n Bones, Oh My! As you know I am big into learning Anatomy and everything that facilitates our movements. The books from Ray Long, an orthopedic surgeon and student of B.K.S. Iyengar, are beautiful to look at and can be a great tool in your exploration of hatha yoga.
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