Category Archives: Yoga Tips

Breed and Feed, or, How to Detox and Do Other Things Good Too with Savasana

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I once described Savasana to my boyfriend–who doesn’t do yoga–as, “taking a sanctioned nap in public”, to which he asked quizzically, “You pay people to do something you can do at home?” I laughed, “I guess you can look at it like that.”

In fact, if I didn’t know better, I would look at it exactly like that. And when I didn’t know better, I saw very little value in Savasana, if at all. It didn’t help that in certain yoga tradition, the teacher simply ended class with, “Thanks for coming, now lie in your sweat and your neighbor’s B.O. I’m leaving the room for some fresh air.”

Ok, I’m being a brat, I know, my point is, in my experience, there’s usually very little instruction in how to do Savasana in most public yoga classes. If I don’t know what to do, I’m either going to pass out and fall asleep, or I’m just going to get up and leave.

If the value of Savasana isn’t widely taught and understood, fewer and fewer people will learn it, do it, care about it, and ultimately benefit from it, and that is a crying shame.

This leads to scenarios where students can complain to studio directors if a teacher keeps the class in Savasana for “too long”, and in turn the well-intentioned director, who want happy customers, will ask teachers to not do Savasana, or minimize it.

This leads to scenarios where, when Savasana time comes, for those who’ve come to know, love, and appreciate the nap (like yours truly), but don’t know the benefits beyond getting some much needed sleep, and therefore don’t do the appropriate practice in Savasana.

This leads to scenarios where, teachers go on yoga forum asking things like: “Why is savasana a key aspect to yoga classes? How do you explain it to your students who may feel they don’t need to pay someone to “just lie on the floor” for 5, 10 or more minutes?”

In this post and a few that follow, I hope to make a case for the yoga pose Savasana: what it is, how to do it, and why we care about it at all.

There are multitudes of interesting things about Savasana, but perhaps the most relevant topic to write today is something closest to home for most of us who just celebrated the Holidays Season in North America, starting with Halloween, then Thanksgiving, all the way to New Years.

That topic is digestion and elimination, or, the more trendy and PC word is: detox.

How Savasana helps with detoxing

I don’t want to rehash the list of benefits of Savasana that you can read everywhere. I want to talk about what happens in Savasana and how it helps you digest, or detox.

You may remember the autonomic nervous system from school, divided into sympathetic and parasympathetic systems. You may also know the sympathetic system is associated with the “fight or flight” response, nice and catchy and easy to remember.

Think quick! What’s the equivalent catchy response for the parasympathetic system? Wikipedia will tell you that it’s “rest and digest”. But, I’m here to tell you another one that’s much easier to remember: “feed and breed”. It’s much more colloquial and down and dirty, not something they always tell you in school, but our memory works best with down and dirty things, like learning swear words in foreign languages.

What’s involved in feed and breed? Put it another way, what’s *not* involved in feed and breed? Sometimes it seems like almost a full time job for some people in our culture to keep us preoccupied with those exact two things. Feeding and breeding are big business.

Now think about what prevents you from good feeding and breeding? Bad food, for sure. Bad sex, certainly. What goes in must come out, and if you can’t digest, pee, or poop, it is not a good day in any measure.

Think about the last time you were in the mood for love, were you in a fight or flight response? Were you stressed? Depressed? Anxious? Or were you more relaxed? That’s the parasympathetic nervous system in action.

Let’s have Wikipedia come to the rescue and articulate things more eloquently:

To be specific, the parasympathetic system is responsible for stimulation of “rest-and-digest” activities that occur when the body is at rest, including sexual arousal, salivation, lacrimation (tears), urination, digestion, and defecation.

And the good people of Wikipedia (when they’re not showing creepy mug shots) have provided a useful acronym for the functions of the parasympathetic nervous system too, SLUDD: salivation, lacrimation, urination, digestion, and defecation.

Our days are filled with stimulating activities that call for a well functioning and active Sympathetic Nervous System: driving, work meetings, answering emails, giving speeches, working out, etc.

Yoga asanas demand quite a bit of us as well, thinking about what to do, where to move, protecting or preventing injuries, worrying about doing the right thing, looking good, etc.

The Parasympathetic Nervous System is the counterpart of the SNS. It’s the Yin to the SNS’s Yang. It’s the eggs to the SNS’s bacon (for you bacon fans out there). It’s the coke to the SNS’s rum. Ok, I may be taking this too far, but you see where I’m going. These two systems go together.

The problem is we as a culture has gone so far off the Sympathetic Nervous System’s deep end, that we don’t even know how to relax. We think relax is sitting on the couch watching Dancing with the Stars with our favorite drink. We think relax is watching Tom Cruise scale up sky scrapers with a bare hand.

Don’t get me wrong, these are awesome. I have nothing against holding down the couch or Occupying IMAX. Those activities, however, are fun, but not necessarily relaxing as far as our body’s physiology is concerned.

Now, think about what happens to your nervous system in Savasana. Let’s set the mood: the lights are down so it’s nice and dark, you’re well covered and warm, your eyes are closed, the floor is dry, clean, and flat. You’re not eating, drinking, driving, walking, running, dancing, moving, talking. You’re lying flat down on the floor with all the props you need to support your body position and weight.

It’s the perfect trigger to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, aka, say it with me, the “feed and breed” response. This is where the PNS “mediates digestion of food and indirectly, the absorption of nutrients.” (Wikipedia entry on Autonomic Nervous System.)

“Great, I’m sold on that,” you say, “but why do I have to pay someone to do this?”

You don’t. Plain and simple as that. Just like how you don’t have to pay someone to watch you do pushups, pullups, or situps; how you don’t have to pay to have someone to time you to run around the block or up the hill.

Or, maybe we do have to pay someone to count our pushups and time our Savasana. We need someone to give us instruction, techniques, refinement, encouragement, and the big A, accountability.

If we don’t learn how to, and do, Savasana in class, if we don’t make it a daily habit under someone else’s watch, what are the chances we will do it on our own? If we don’t learn how to relax in a controlled setting, much like having training wheels on, how will we relax when we’re in “real life” and shit is hitting the fan? (Or… not coming out well?)

And… on that note, I’ll finish writing for now. But I am not done with all the amazing things that happen in Savasana and the benefit you get from it. So, ask for more savasana, and I hope you’ll come back for more soon.

GABA and Yoga, or, Why Do Yoga More Often

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Why do yoga?

Why do yoga when you could do so many other things in the world? You could read, write, draw, sketch, hack, paint, sing, strum, play, create. You could Facebook, FaceTime, Tweet, IM, email.

You could cook, shop, eat, drink, hook up, catch up with friends, do all your duties as a mom, dad, girlfriend, boyfriend, daughter, son, wife, husband, employee, manager, entrepreneur, this-will-be-my-year-get-up-and-goer.

Why do yoga when you can go for elite fitness level with Crossfit, or do Zumba, Hula Hoops, Cha cha cha, and dance your heart out? Why do yoga when you can kickbox, lift weight, run, climb, surf, bike, walk, hike, fly, swim, dive, golf, dribble, pitch, drive?

That was a trick question. You can, in fact, do yoga while you’re doing all those things I mentioned and more.

A more specific question is, why do yoga asana, pranayama, and meditation? Why lay out the mat and get on it? Every day?

One answer is a neurotransmitter called GABA.

GABA, or if you prefer more syllables, gamma-aminobutyric acid, is mostly classified as an inhibitory neurotransmitter. (I say mostly because according to my Googling and Wikipedia’ing, scientists are still working out if it’s an excitatory neurotransmitter in early brain development.)

Sidebar: Excitatory neurotransmitters stimulate the brain, like dopamine. Wee! Inhibitory neurotransmitters tell the brain to chill out and hold the horses back when the excitatory neurotransmitters have had too much coffee. Famous Inhibitory Neurotransmitters include serotonin.

Ok, back to GABA. Why do you care? Maybe you don’t, but give me a few more minutes and I will tell you how learning about the existence of GABA has given me all the motivation I need to do yoga everyday.

Since it’s that time of the year where we make promises to ourselves, this might help give an extra kick if one of your promises is to try yoga, or do it more often.

But first: Cerebrospinal fluid. (I can’t even say it one time fast).

Cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), Liquor cerebrospinalis, is a clear, colorless, bodily fluid, that occupies the subarachnoid space and the ventricular system around and inside the brain and spinal cord.

In essence, the brain “floats” in it.

It acts as a “cushion” or buffer for the cortex, providing a basic mechanical and immunological protection to the brain inside the skull.

If we were depressed or have anxiety, and if certain scientific findings are reliable, it’s likely they would find pretty low amount of GABA in our cerebrospinal fluid.

To jump to conclusion (with good reasons) for GABA: good to have in adequate amount to keep the funk away.

“How does one get into this GABA business?” you say. Two studies done in 2010 have shown that you get it through doing yoga. (Shocker, I know.)

A pilot study by Harvard Medical School and Boston University School of Medicine showed that people doing yoga postures and breathing for an hour increased their GABA levels by 27% over the control group, who read quietly, also for an hour.

After that pilot, they did another study. They asked 19 yoga practitioners and 15 walkers, all healthy people, to do yoga or walked for an hour three times a week for 12 weeks and measured their GABA levels.

Here’s what they concluded, in their wonderful academic research publication language:

The 12-week yoga intervention was associated with greater improvements in mood and anxiety than a metabolically matched walking exercise.

This is the first study to demonstrate that increased thalamic GABA levels are associated with improved mood and decreased anxiety.

It is also the first time that a behavioral intervention (i.e., yoga postures) has been associated with a positive correlation between acute increases in thalamic GABA levels and improvements in mood and anxiety scales.

What’s really important to note here is they measured three times: once before the study, once before the activity, and once after the activity. They found that the GABA level went up only *after* the yoga practitioners did yoga. In other words, yoga is like a pill or shot that you take. It’s not a one-time deal.

If you fancy it, you can read the published study in all of its glory in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. [PDF link].

I came to learn about these studies through a talk that Dr. Kelly McGonigal gave at the International Association of Yoga Therapists’ (IAYT’s) Symposium on Yoga Therapy and Research (SYTAR). That’s a lot of words and acronyms. I assume you don’t care too much for more associations and conferences and acronyms.

You probably care more about knowing your options in case you get the blues. If so, it may be assuring to know that there’s a viable option to improve your mood, reduce stress, and relieve anxiety with no adverse side effect. There is a catch, though, the effect wears off, so you have to do it daily.

I cannot recommend enough this YouTube clip of Kelly McGonigal talking about Yoga and Mental Health. It was clearly filmed with a hand-held camera, so there’s that Blair Witch, Cloverfield shaky thing going on.

But what’s more scary than witches in the woods or monsters overtaking Manhattan is that nearly one-quarter of the adult population in the U.S. will experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. That’s one in four of us. That could very well be me. I live in Seattle, the gloom and doom capitol, after all.

Kelly also mentioned that the implication of the studies mentioned above also applies to things like addiction and eating disorders. Learning all this has given me a stronger-than-ever conviction to continue my practice and to get on the mat every day.

Earlier, I asked, “Why do yoga?” Why do yoga when there are so many other fun, exciting, attractive, titillating things to spend time, money, and energy on? As I mentioned, there’s a bit more to yoga than doing Sun Salutations, but for our purposes here, I’m talking about do-no-harm asana, pranayama, and pratyahara (more on pratyahara in the upcoming post about savasana).

For me, it’s not so much that I do yoga *instead* of all these things, because like all things in life, having an addiction and dysfunctional relationship with yoga is totally possible and probable.

I’ve resolved to do yoga *so that* I can do all kinds of things and go through life with more zeal and with less manufactured fear, stress, and anxiety, which seems to be aplenty right now.

More awesome GABA + yoga reading:

I came across this excellent blog post by Emily Deans, M.D., a psychiatrist in Massachusetts. She talked about two things I found note worthy. (Thank you Emily, if you’re reading this.)

1) Drinking (a lot) can also help a person deal with stress, and so’s popping a pill. So no need for yoga, right? It turns out “when these substances are constantly in the brain and then rapidly withdrawn, you suddenly have overexcited GABA receptors and you can get unfortunate side effects such as insomnia, anxiety, and seizures.”

2) The study about walking vs. yoga got me curious. Both involve physical exercise and breathing, so why the difference in GABA levels? Emily wrote:

Yoga isn’t Paleolithic. I don’t see our distant ancestors practicing downward facing dog. But yoga combines physical activity with forced acute attention on the present. Lose your focus in tree stand, and you lose your balance.

In my mind, yoga and other mindful meditation practices emulate, to some respect, the focus and attention we had to have while hunting and gathering. We couldn’t be thinking about the mortgage or Uncle Phil getting drunk at last year’s Christmas party. We had to be focused on the trail and the prey.

Here’s to a year of great traveling, whatever trail you’re on. To bastardize The King’s lyrics: A little less drama a little more GABA baby.

Yoga News Alert: New Yoga Studio Coming Soon to Richmond Beach

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Yesterday evening, my mom and I went to Richmond Beach for a walk after dinner. As I closed my car door in the upper parking lot of the Saltwater Park, ready to take the wooden stairs down to the beach, I saw, sitting off to the side of the sidewalk, by a tall shrub, a guy sitting on a rock staring off into the Olympic Mountains.

Immediately, I was drawn to the composition of this image; all the elements are there: blood-orange sun setting, mystical-looking mountain peaks, glistening blue ocean, contemplating man. You get the idea. It was one of those pictures you might see on calendars at Barnes and Noble, or on inspirational posters corporate HR people hang up to compensate for the decidedly non-inspiring ubiquitous gray cubicles.

I approached the guy, blurting out, “Do you want a picture taken?” He turned around, studying my mom and me for a moment. “No thank you,” he said, and then followed up, “Do you live around here?” “Just up the hill,” said I.

As if it was the answer he wanted to hear, right on cue, he handed us a flyer, “I’m opening a yoga studio here. You should check it out.” I scanned the yellow flyer in my hand, and thought out loud, “This is really weird. I teach yoga.”

And that’s how I met Glenn Tousignant, who’s opening a new studio in Richmond Beach, a neighborhood in the city of Shoreline, aptly named Richmond Beach Yoga.

My mom taking a picture of the sunset at Richmond Beach Park

This morning I met up with Glenn at the Richmond Beach Park again. We threw a frisbee around and talked about things, mostly yoga and meditation things (shocking, I know). Then after Glenn had had enough of running after my left-handed, embarrassing excuses for frisbee throws, we headed about a mile up the hill, where he showed me the studio space.

I always get a kick out of seeing when things are being built. It’s some sort of egotistical satisfaction of having an insider look at something that’s still coming into existence–unknown to the world–like a reporter getting the first scoop.

I looked at the floor covered in butcher paper and blue painter’s tape, imagining the bamboo hardwood floor underneath. I looked at the ceiling with wires running across, thinking of the decorative light fixtures that will shine down.

Glenn’s business partner is Angeline Johnston, whom I’ve actually met at LakeView Yoga in Bothell, and am happy to find out that she’s currently going through the 500-hour teacher training at Pacific Yoga with Theresa Elliott and Kathryn Payne, where I graduated from.

I have a feeling that these two will put together a great schedule for the Shoreline, North Seattle, and Richmond Beach community. Glenn’s already talking about having daily sits, Restorative Yoga, and he did not kick me out when I mentioned Alignment, so hooray!

“You know what’s crazy, we haven’t even known each other for even 24 hours,” I said to Glenn after he told me about his journey to here, a quaint beach town suburb (he’s from the East Coast, a city boy, etc.). However, he said something that makes me feel confident that Richmond Beach is in good hands.

While we were running around on the buff of the Beach Park, throwing a circular piece of white plastic in the air, talking about yoga styles and all their idiosyncrasy (or syncrazy), Glenn said, “You do yoga to ultimately sit, right. So eventually you just do enough for maintenance [to sit]. Yoga as an addiction is valid.” To that I say, hallelujah, brother.

So, if you live, work, go to school in this part of town, or just passing by, do check out Richmond Beach Yoga when it opens at the end of this month. It’s on 8th NW & Richmond Beach Road, and buses 301, 304, and 348 stop right in front of the parking lot.

I live less than a mile away from the studio, and if Glenn is cool with me not talking about the “English Bulldog determination and Bengal Tiger strength”, but rather stuff like, “Drawing up the inner corner of the outer eyes of the armpit chest”, you might see me show up as a sub from time to time as well.

I’m reminded that just last week, Bizeebee founder Poornima Vijayashanker tweeted about this Wall Street Journal article: Study: Yoga and Pilates Studios Poised for More Growth

If you’re looking to stretch your entrepreneurial muscles, starting up a yoga or Pilates studio may still be a safe bet, despite a profusion of them around the country.

Revenue for this niche is expected to increase over the next five years in the U.S. by an average annual rate of 5.0% to $8.3 billion, according to a report released Tuesday from consumer-research firm IBISWorld.

With that, I wish Glenn, Angeline, and Richmond Beach Yoga lots of success.

Richmond Beach Yoga under construction

Whatever Serves You Right

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I was catching up with my friend Grant, who’s also been coming to my classes at Village Green Yoga in Issaquah for the past year or so. He sheepishly looked at me and said, “I have to confess something. There was a Groupon for one month of hot yoga near my house. It was super cheap, so I bought it.” He looked at my face for a reaction and followed up quickly, “But I’m not gonna continue. It’s like an accident waiting to happen in there.”

I laughed, “My god, I thought you hurt a small cuddly animal or something.” I had been pretty vocal about hot yoga, so I think I know why Grant felt like he had to “confess” to me.

But, and this is a big but (now that I’ve made a big butt of myself for hot yoga fans out there), I also believe that there’s a time and place for everything. I told Grant, “Hey, as long as you’re getting something good out of it, then the yoga has done its job.”

I remember a homework from my 200-hr teacher training, where we were asked to think about what we want or expect from yoga, and then reflect on whether our current practice supported that. We don’t all want the same things in life, so it certainly follows that we don’t all want the same from the practice of our own choosing.

Often times, we have no idea why people do what they do. Let’s say you’ve been wanting to work out before work for as long as you can remember, but have never had the discipline, will power, or sleeping habits to do so. If there’s a yoga studio nearby offering classes at 5am. Well, regardless of your style preference, it may be that you sign up to have someone hold you accountable so you can create that habit.

Yoga classes serve different purposes for different people. Maybe someone is in hot yoga because it is just so friggin’ cold and miserable in Seattle right now. Or, maybe someone just really needs some structure and something predictable in their life, and the format gives them that. And of course there’s also the obvious reason that they just really love the style, the school, the teacher, the studio, the community, etc.

I am reminded of a post I wrote almost two years ago titled “Do What Feeds You“, where Stacy Lawson, the owner of Red Square Yoga, told me “I gotta do what feeds me, not what eats me up.” As long as we understand the pros and cons of whatever we’re doing, and we choose our actions deliberately, that is all we can do.

Janet MacLeod Workshop Recap

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I live really close to Tree House Yoga, an Iyengar yoga studio in Shoreline, a suburb adjacent to Seattle on I-5 North. This past weekend, Senior teacher Janet MacLeod came up from San Francisco for a workshop, and though I had never worked with her before, I came to see what I could learn from her.

Janet immediately put me at ease with her smile and Scottish humor. She told us stories from classes she’s taught, like when Mr. Universe came to her class all oiled up, and classes she’s taken, like the time she was in a really small class with Geeta Iyengar, and Ms. Geeta “seemed to be everywhere I turned to”, which kept people on their toes (and heels) because, as Janet put it, “usually you’re in class with 800 other people, and you can get away with a thing or two.”

Her jokes made me temporarily forget that I was working really hard. We were in variations of Upavistha Konasana for what seemed like eternity, her instructions for Salamba Sarvangasana put me in the most hardest shoulderstand I’d done yet, and I could barely maintain a seat with Jalandhara Bandha for Pranayama for any respectable length of time.

One thing Janet said that’s stuck with me is about the asana and our resistance: “When you’re doing an asana, there’s always a part of you that resists, that doesn’t want to do it, so you have to work with that.” She said that this is a theme that Prashant, Mr. Iyengar’s son, works with a lot.

This reminds me of an article I recently read about some truths and myths of being fit, in which the author, Daniel Duane, learned from rehab specialist Kevin Brown that: “Somewhere inside every man’s body, there’s a weak link, a weak muscle waiting to fail.” Kevin Brown’s job, working with world-class athletes, was to find the weak muscle, and of course, make it strong.

How true is that for some other things in life too. Sometimes the resistance is more, sometimes less, but it’s always there. For me, waking up at 5 to go to the gym is a daily negotiation. Meditating at least 15 minutes every day? Another struggle. Creating? Designing? Writing in my blog, or writing anything? Pulling teeth. Wisdom teeth.

This is like, some sort of sign for me, who’s constantly working with things like writer’s block and designer’s block and yoga blocks (ha!). The work is clear, in Asana, Pranayama, and in matters off the mat: there’s always something resisting, how can we figure out what it is? How do we work with it?

When The Real Party Begins

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I’ve been reading Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice, by Mark Singleton, and it is nothing short of mind-blowing. It’s clear Mark has done extensive research and found substantial evidence to show that the physical yoga practice as we know it today is not exclusively “Indian”, and not all of it came printed on a leaf from 5,000 years ago.

This newfound knowledge challenges me in a number of ways, such as the concept of “real yoga” or “traditional yoga”. I learned that the physical aspect of yoga is a synthesis of numerous Movement practices. As Mark wrote:

The history of modern physical culture overlaps and intersects with the histories of para-religious, “unchurched” spirituality; Western esotericism; medicine, health, and hygiene; chiropractic, osteopathy, and bodywork; body-centered psychotherapy; the modern revival of Hinduism; and the sociopolitical demands of the emergent modern Indian nation (to name but a few).

(He’s an academic researcher, if you can’t tell :) )

I’m reminded of works like Reggie Ray’s Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realizations in the Body, and realized that humans have always had a complex relationship with our physical selves. We seek pleasure with it and we mortify it in hope of finding paradise. We glorify it and we detest it, sometimes in the same breath.

With the way most of us live now, attached to a chair and a desk or a wheel, the body is paying a prize. Naturally, physical fitness is the first thing that needs some TLC. You can’t get to Bliss without going through the physical layer, the Annamaya kosha. I suspect this is why yoga has gotten so bodily focused, certainly to extreme degrees in some cases, but hey, it goes back to that addiction thing.

I had always been vaguely aware that a part of a yogasana practice is the innovation of the practitioner, and teacher. How could a craft that’s mainly experiential not be influenced by the people who must experience it intimately in their own body first? Now I know for sure, that for yoga to work, it cannot be packaged and frozen in time. It cannot be merely recited and regurgitated. Its context must be understood.

The tradition of yoga is to adapt and evolve.

And so, with the understanding that yogasana is influenced by a multitude of factors, like people, culture, sociopolitical trends, etc, I’m reminded of a postcard I bought at a coffee shop.

Let me explain.

I used to frequent Cherry Street Coffee House in downtown Seattle, and one day, I met Ali, the owner. He exuded this other-worldly vibe that I couldn’t quite pinpoint, but I was mesmerized. Shortly thereafter, I saw a collection of postcards made by Ali, and I understood. When I read cards like this, and this, I smiled. Here is a man that doesn’t need no stinkin’ yoga! He already understands what it’s all about.

My favorite Ali card of all, the one that I bought many moons ago and have carried it with me to all corners of the world as I moved east, west, north, and south, is one that says: “The party begins when what you want for yourself you want for everyone else. It doesn’t matter which book you are reading.” I see this portrayed by an image of Egyptian Christians protecting their Muslim countrymen while they pray. This image has gotten 1300+ comments on Reddit, including this one:

“I was there! they placed newspapers and towels on the floor so we wouldn’t pray on the hot asphalt, I love Egyptian Christians and although I am Muslim I would die defending any one of them.” – Reddit user sayyeddy.

Egyptian Christians protecting their Muslim countrymen while they pray during protests in Egypt. Image via Reddit http://imgur.com/NhC4m.

Egyptian Christians protecting their Muslim countrymen while they pray during protests in Egypt. Image via Reddit http://imgur.com/NhC4m.

And with credit to Ali, I say, “The party begins when what you want for yourself, you want for everyone else. It doesn’t matter which yoga style you’re practicing.”

Ali Ghambari reminding me of the Big Picture.

Ali Ghambari reminding me of the Big Picture.

A Motivational Tip to Meditate (and Do Other Things in Life)

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“If you can’t be disciplined, be clever.” – Shinzen Young, The Science Of Enlightenment.

Motivation and Discipline are in that category of abstract concepts that sells books, DVDs, and seminars, not to mention hopes and dreams that we will be a better person tomorrow than we are today.

It is also elusive to us at one point or another. For me, it’s daily. Everyday, I keep thinking that I will go to bed earlier tomorrow, that I will read more books, that I will organize my closet. But when tomorrow becomes today, I lack the same motivation or inspiration that I had yesterday.

For the longest time, I struggled with the motivation and/or discipline to meditate daily. Then I discovered Shinzen Young and his Science of Enlightenment lectures where he gave one little tip that rocked my world. He was addressing the typical challenge of finding time to meditate and … well, just doing it. “If you can’t be disciplined, be clever”, advised Shinzen. Sign up for a retreat and send in the full amount of money. Put it on your calendar. Buy the plane ticket. Create the conditions where you can’t easily back out.

Following this advice, I went on a 10-day Vipassana retreat to kick off my sitting practice. I figured if I could survive that, I just might pick up the habit. This worked, to some extent. After sitting for 14 hours a day, sitting for 10 or 15 minutes doesn’t seem so bad any more. However, I’ve had much more time to practice *not* meditating daily. 10 days is nothing compared to two decades plus. And because the habit of not meditating is that much more ingrained than the habit of meditating, it’s still a daily conscious act of telling myself: I will meditate today.

Telling myself that I will do something doesn’t always mean that I do do it. More often than not, I find an excuse not to follow through. Having an intention is well and good, but without execution, it’s moot. So, I’ve  devised some clever means to “trick” myself into doing my meditation.

  • First, I put my cushion right by  the side bottom of my bed . I see it every day, and if I don’t do my sitting, it’s there to remind me, or actually, to make me feel guilty. I don’t do well with guilt trips, and I’m using that to my advantage.
  • Second, I have a meditation clock (from Now & Zen) which I place right in the center by my bed. I can’t get in bed without stepping over it. Sometimes I put the clock on my bed before I leave my room in the morning. I can’t get under my covers without touching the clock and putting it elsewhere. That extra little bit also reminds me to do my sitting.
  • Third, I put my yoga mat next to my bed as well, not rolled up, but spread out, basically to block the entrance into my bed. I put it there because I know that I would make excuses that I’m feeling “too tight” to meditate, and that I just need to stretch out a bit, maybe do a down dog or two. If my mat is elsewhere, there’s no chance that I would make the extra effort to go get it, especially if it’s night time and I’ve already changed in my PJs. Since my mat is right there, I have one less excuse.
  • Fourth,  I decided that I would meditate before I go to sleep every day. So, the only time that I don’t meditate would be when I don’t go to sleep. This makes it so that I have to do it every single day, save a few exceptions. Night time also works because, again, I have less excuses. In the morning, I might be running late, I might need to do this and that, etc.

The success of building a habit, any habit, depends on the consistent timing. I know many teachers would tell you to meditate whenever you can. The idea is to just do it, regardless of when. I understand this philosophy. Instead of enforcing a time, which can be rigid, giving yourself the permission to do it any time can increase the probability that you’ll do it. However, for someone like me, who can come up with a really good excuse *not* to do it virtually any time of day, this doesn’t work so well.

In yoga, and in life, having a will, determination, goal, or purpose is often the first step to making some sort of desirable changes. I don’t usually lack motivation. Staying focused on what I’ve resolved to do, though, takes more work, since I’m not always focused :) . To make up for that, I try to be clever and trick myself into doing the things I know I want to do, if only my will weren’t so weak and I had more discipline.

Does my cleverness work perfectly all the time? Not even close. There are times when I’m so tired that I trip over my meditation clock and don’t even think twice about meditation. There are times when I don’t spend the night at home with my clever arrangements. But, most of the time is better than none of the time. As Shinzen Young said, “any number of time is infinitely more than zero.”

I write this post in hope of giving you one way to kick your meditation practice in gear. If it works for other things, so much the better. If you have any tips, for meditation or otherwise, please let me know.

Revisiting the Definition of Yoga, Part II

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Last week at a workshop with Tias Little, I ran into Janell Hartman, a fellow yoga instructor friend, and one who gave me my very first yoga teaching gig: she asked me to sub for a Punk Rock Yoga class when my 200-hr certificate still smelled of fresh ink.

We were catching up and talking about life when she told me a story of when she worked in Social Service. She was conducting an ice-breaker type of group exercise, where everyone would stand in a line, she would make a statement, like, “I like the ocean”, or “I like dogs”. People would take a step forward if the statement is true for them, and one step back if not.

Everything was going along smoothly, until she said, “I have a regular self care routine.” The stepping forward/stepping back halted. Two people out of a group of 40 stepped forward, and a good number paused, not knowing where to go. After a couple minutes, some stepped forward, and some stepped back. Some remained in their place.

This story was so revealing to me. What it says to me is

  1. Not a lot of us have a regular self-care routine
  2. Not a lot of us know what self-care really means in the first place

And hey, honestly, just because someone is “in the industry”, just because someone might be a yoga teacher or a wellness educator, doesn’t mean that they have a regular self-care routine. Knowing something and doing it are two very different things.

When I took my Restorative Yoga Teacher Training with Judith Hanson Lasater, on the very first day, her homework for us was:

  • Unless you go to bed at 10pm, whatever time that you regularly go to bed, go to bed 30 minutes earlier (this I failed miserably)
  • Whatever activity that you do for the next 5 days (the duration of the training), ask yourself, “What component of this activity includes taking care of myself?”

That one single question alone was a rude awakening for me. It made “turn the light back on itself”, as the Zen saying goes.

Judith went on to make a very strong case for self-care: If you are tired, if you are exhausted, you cannot be compassionate. And being compassionate is the seat, the foundation of teaching Restorative Yoga.

As a dedicated student of Yoga thought and philosophy, very often I find myself digging in old texts and sayings, ruminating about how Yoga is defined in this book and that book and by this person and that other translation. Sometimes the definition stares at me in the face, and I don’t have to go hunting for it. Yoga, I would say, in whatever form and definition, must involve self-care.

Revisiting the Definition of Yoga, Part I

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C’est le Devoir

I’m doing an 800-hr correspondence course with Georg and Brenda Feuerstein’s Traditional Yoga Studies. Among the reading materials (like a study binder the size of a small child) is the book The Yoga Tradition: Its History, Literature, Philosophy and Practice.

I’m reading a part where Georg is talking about the etymology and connotations of yoga. Among the ever-popular definitions of “to yoke” and “union”, yoga also means “conjunction of stars,” “grammatical rule,” “endeavor”, “occupation,” “team,” “means,” “aggregate,”, etc.

I was immediately drawn to the meaning “endeavor”. I like that definition a lot, which dictionary.com defines as “to exert oneself to do or effect something; make an effort; strive.” It’s from the Middle English endeveren, from the phrase putten in devoir to make an effort, assume responsibility; and Ancient French se mettre en deveir.

If you’ve ever studied French, you may have dreaded the word devoir, but there’s no other way to learn something like 52 ways to conjugate all those verbs.

I like the concept of doing your homework and striving for something. I mean, I don’t always *like* putting in the effort and doing the homework, or doing the work. But, since I’m on this path, where there’s bound to be traffic jam, uncourteous drivers, detours, potholes, and bad road signage, it’s a good reminder for myself that I am not here to only pick flowers on a red cushy carpet.

I also like that the dictionary defines endeavor as an attempt, an effort to strive for something. It does not say the End, the Destination. In his workshop this past weekend, Tias Little stressed many times over that there is no “there”. You do not simply “achieve” a pose. You might be *in* it, and by in, I mean, the observing, the noticing, the development of sensory skills.

The prefix en means “to cause to be in”. My interpretation is that there is a deliberate intention here. There’s awareness. That’s the se mettre part, the putting of oneself in it. There’s willingness.

C’est l’ Exploration

Last week, I started another Yoga for Newbies series, and in the very first class, a student asked straight up, “What is Yoga?” I was taken aback for 2 seconds, because that is a big question, but I’m glad she brought it up, because it’s that sense of inquiry that makes a yoga class … well, yoga. (Inquiry is really what yoga is about, but that’s another topic).

I gave the classical definition from everyone’s “starter yoga definition”: Patanjali’s, that yoga = citta vrtti nirodha. We were moments from savasana, and I said that one thing yoga helps us is how to deal with the chatter in our mind, the kind that, even if you don’t invite it, shows up anyway.

When I learned this definition for the first time, I thought this was it, that I had cracked the code, that I had discovered what yoga is. But no, time would eventually teach me about other mentions and interpretations of yoga in the Upanishad, and the Mahabharata, and people like Vyasa and Shankara. And I know it doesn’t end there. The exploration has just begun.

And of course, it is not really about who said what. It’s useful, for sure, to know intellectually, to be informed and educated, but the real deal doesn’t happen until I actually check it out for myself, in the “real” world, where traffic jams happen every day. As Tias Little said today: “It’s one thing to fill up notebooks with notes, it’s another to actualize the teaching.” The emphasis here is the verb *act*.

So, guys and girls, there’s another contribution to the question “What is Yoga.” Tune in next week for part II. In the mean time, what the heck is “grammatical rules?” I mean, really?

Support Your Local Yoga Teacher – An Interview with Laura DeFreitas

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I first got to know Laura DeFreitas about a year and a half ago when she became an independent yoga teacher and started teaching at Taj Yoga, where I teach now, and where I was doing my yoga teacher training with Pacific Yoga at the time. Wanting to support her new business, and as a teacher trainee, I got a super good discount with Laura (that really sealed the deal) I signed up for a one-year membership with her.

So, I got to practice with Laura for a year. She primarily teaches Vinyasa Flow and Yoga Nidra, which, if you have not tried one of her classes, you really ought to.

I met up with Laura in Ballard at a Thai restaurant, and we talked about the practice and business of yoga over delicious Pad See Ewe (no tofu, extra eggs :) ). Laura finished her training in 2002 after college and has been teaching since 2003. Her influences are: Ashtanga, Yoga Nidra, Universal, and Iyengar in her 200-hr teacher training at Pacific Yoga.

What made you want to be a yoga teacher?
I was a gymnast for 15 years, took a break when I entered college and felt like something was missing, not only physically but something else. I feel like I’ve always been a seeker. I discovered yoga through a girlfriend of a coworker, took an intro series, and from the first class just knew this was something I wanted to learn more about. I did it as much yoga as I could. Then I discovered the Pacific Yoga Teacher training. It felt like coming home. Yoga speaks to me on that level of spirit I felt I’d been missing in my upbringing.

How did it become your profession?
I just hoped that I would be good at doing it [yoga]. The students were the ones that told me that I should continue and teach. I started teaching more and working less. It took me a couple years to make me realize that this is something I could do professionally.

How did you get your initial jitters out of the way?
I rented a small space and charged 5 bucks and taught my coworkers, whom I already knew, and that helped a lot.

What has changed the most since you started teaching?
I’ve changed from “spa yoga”, to a “no apology” yoga. This started as an internal shift. I’d catch myself getting nervous about teaching difficult poses and then noticed that I would back down in order to ‘protect’ the student thinking, “This is too hard, they’re not gonna want to do it.” I realize now that this is the place to work and there is a lot to be learned right on the edge of physical, mental and emotional intensity. My classes still leave you feeling great and I offer a Yin Yoga class to balance the vigorousness of my general classes.

How would you describe your classes?
I like think my classes move you into stillness. Yoga Nidra is infused into the movement. My primary influences are Astanga and Universal Yoga. Lately I’ve been drawing a lot of inspiration from Seattle Ashtanga Yoga teacher, Troy Lucero. Classes are modified to suit the level of the student base.

How did you discover Yoga Nidra?
I was at the 8 Limbs advanced training, and Anne Phyfe taught Yoga Nidra. It was one of those moments where you’re like, wow, I need to know more about this.

What’s the hardest thing about being a yoga teacher?
I think yoga is undervalued, it’s more than exercise. Getting that across to people in subtle ways is one of my intentions as a teacher.

Seattle Yoga Teachers Laura DeFreitas and Lux Sternstein at Laura's 1-year anniversary party at Taj Yoga

Seattle Yoga Teachers Laura DeFreitas and Lux Sternstein at Laura's 1-year anniversary party at Taj Yoga

Laura teaches primarily at Taj Yoga in the Crown Hill neighborhood of Seattle. You can find more about Laura at Laura Nidra Yoga.

Here’s Laura on the value of yoga beyond the physical: