A Teachable Moment

Like many of you, I bought the six-year old in my life a giant Squishmallow plush toy last Christmas. It was the one thing she really wanted, and for weeks I was trying to find one that wasn’t hundreds of dollars. Why would anyone pay so much for these things, I wondered, and how do they make them feel so gross? In the end, I found a deal at Costco, and everyone was happy.

Yesterday our dog chewed it up.

I was sick, flat on my back, when it happened, and the kids were admirably playing by themselves while I slept, but that meant the puppy was unattended.

Was he mad that I’d thrown out the tattered remains of his dog bed earlier that day? He’d spotted me carrying it through the house. He was on the other side of the gate when I stuffed it in the bin.

My oldest daughter is convinced he was mad.

But why didn’t he destroy something of mine? I asked.

I was thinking the same thing, she said.

My nap ended abruptly when the Squishmallow’s owner came into the room, shouting and sobbing inconsolably. She had found her friend murdered and disemboweled on the floor of her room, murdered by another friend. I felt terrible for her and angry at the dog. I hauled him upstairs and put his face in it. I called him a bad dog, hoping that even if it was poor dog ownership, my daughter might feel my desire to stick up for her feelings.

Is there any chance the dog might somehow be able to link my displeasure with an act he’d committed in the distant past of five minutes ago? And that he might thereby be dissuaded from further destroying our shit? In truth, I wasn’t that angry in this instance, but sometimes I am. Angry at my lack of control. Puppies. Children. Myself.

How strange it is that we assume we can control our experience when we can’t even control our thoughts? Thoughts just arise, spontaneously, seemingly out of the ether, and if we can’t even control our own thoughts, which are precursors to our actions, how can we hope to control ourselves, let alone others? Throw in some additional randomness unrelated to the actions of sentient beings, like the car that won’t start or the roof leaking during a storm, and it’s pretty clear how much is out of our hands.

I’m not arguing that we should yield to chaos, but once we’ve embarked on a plan of action to improve an aspect of our lives or the world we live in, wouldn’t it be better if we could avoid feeding the self-referential thought loops about how we should have done this or that better or how we need to do those things better in the future?

Meditation can help with this, and not just in the way that learning to concentrate allows us to be selective about which thoughts we attend to, or even in the sense that we can learn to witness our thoughts with detachment so they feel less authoritative, but in the sense that it can help us recognize that we don’t exist in the way we tend to think we exist, that there is no self, no inner “me,” who needs to be promoted, berated, or defended.

After I put the dog outside, I got the shop vac from the garage and asked the girls if they wanted to help. It took only a moment for them to realize it would be kind of fun to play in the fluff.

After all, the Squishmallow wasn’t new anymore, and the puppy has destroyed so many of our things.

Besides, kids are good at letting things like this go. Better than us usually. They haven’t yet formed a rigid sense of themselves so there is nothing really for them to promote, berate, or defend.

In other words, there nothing for them to transcend, and in truth, there is nothing for us to transcend either because that inner me does not exist and has never existed, it just usually takes some looking for us to recognize it.

If you’re interested in learning how to look, you might want to check out Waking Up, the meditation app created by Sam Harris. In it you can find an ever-growing array of practices and information that can help with everything from learning to meditate to flourishing in daily life to dropping back into nondual realization (I should say here that I have no affiliation with Waking Up except as a subscriber).

And of course, I teach towards all of this in my yoga classes. You can find the in person and virtual schedules here.

Thanks for stopping by. If you want to get the posts by email, subscribe here. 👇

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May all sentient (and squishy) beings happy and free.

Bedtime in a Future that Never Arrives

What if this were the last thing you ever read in your life? Imagine for a moment that it might be. How would that change your experience?

As we go about our days, we tend to assume that we will continue to do the things we do again and again, but we don’t have to reflect for long to realize that at some point we will do each thing for the last time, and we never know when that will be.

This may sound like a gloomy thought, and if you were to dwell on it, it certainly could start to feel that way, but what if you could harness this knowledge to shift your perspective from one of reluctance or dread to one of eager engagement?

I’ll explain by way of example.

In my house, bedtime is often chaotic. Lots of shouting, crying, and wild behavior, and there are times when every step in the process can start to feel like an obstacle. Getting kids into pajamas, brushing teeth, reading book after book after book… Sometimes it goes smoothly (if not wonderfully), but often enough, it feels like a battle.

Yet if I can just take a moment in the midst of it and remind myself that THIS could be the last time I will ever brush my youngest daughter’s teeth, or help someone into a onesie, or read a beloved picture book, it can change my whole perspective on the situation, reminding me to see it as an opportunity to connect with someone I love and savour a fleeting aspect of one of the most important relationships in my life.

This reframing technique, which the philosopher William B. Irvine calls The Last Time Meditation, is taken from the Roman Stoics who developed tools like this to help them attenuate negative emotions, and I’ve found that it can be applied in a variety of situations to quickly shift my view.

Sometimes when I don’t feel up to teaching, for example, I briefly imagine what it would be like if this were the last yoga class I’d ever get to teach. Or when I don’t want to cook dinner, I imagine that this is the last meal I’ll ever get to prepare for my family. Even while writing this post, I asked myself what it would be like if this were the last thing I’d ever get to write.

Again, the point is not to dwell on the idea that all things eventually come to an end but to use–in the span of a few seconds–the fact of impermanence to help us rediscover a felt sense of what is precious about our chosen circumstances.

This is usually not necessary when things or relationships are new, of course, but as we all know, that luster wears off with disconcerting speed. This process, known as “hedonic adaptation,” and the way new desires rise up to take the place of desires fulfilled, was seen as a major obstacle to the tranquility sought by the Stoics.

In a traditional yogic framework, Patanjali, too, advocated pushing back against this human tendency. In his Yoga Sutras, the sage lists santosha, or feeling content with what one already has, as one of the five niyamas, or observances, that form the stable foundation for yoga practice.

“Without contentment,” writes Pandit Rajmani Tigunait, “we will never be able to slow the ever-spinning wheel of karma samskara chakra, the inexorable process by which mental impressions motivate us to engage in actions that, in turn, further strengthen the mental impressions.” (Tigunait, The Practice of the Yoga Sutra, p.172).

Put another way, each time we enact the cycle of desiring, acquiring, and then desiring something new, we reinforce the tendency to stay locked in a process where the baseline is constant seeking born of dissatisfaction with our current situation. What we want is always out there in some future that never arrives.

Unfortunately, most of the traditional yogic discourse I’ve encountered doesn’t suggest practical ways to directly access contentment. It’s often treated as if explaining its importance should be enough to allow us to drop this human hankering after something more than what we have. Granted, more contentment will likely arise with prolonged practice of yoga, but by contrast, The Last Time Meditation gives us a chance to quickly reframe things whenever we get caught in the cycles of desire or aversion that carry us away from what we really value.

The Last Time Meditation is certainly more of a top down, metacognitive (using thinking to affect thinking) approach than the bottom up (working with the breath and the body) or thought-transcending approaches familiar to many yogis, and because of that, it might sound like weak sauce, but if you mistrust it on that level, consider this:

In the year 65, Roman Emperor Nero was advised by his counselors that his tutor, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, had conspired against him and ordered Seneca to commit suicide.

Here’s how that went down:

“When the friends who were present at his execution wept over his fate, Seneca chastised them. What, he asked, had become of their Stoicism? he then embraced his wife. The arteries in his arms were slit, but because of age and infirmity, he bled slowly, so the arteries of his legs and knees were also severed. Still he did not die. He asked a friend to bring poison, which he drank but without fatal consequences. he was then carried into a bath, the steam of which suffocated him.”
William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy, p. 47

The way I see it, if Seneca could use his Stoicism to not only endure such a fate but upbraid his friends for failing to keep a stiff upper lip in the process, it seems like giving The Last Time Meditation a try might be worth the small amount of effort it takes. It probably won’t work in all circumstances, and it may not work for you at all, but if it does, it might just help you get everyone tucked into bed tonight in one piece.

🙌 ❤️ 🕉

If you’re looking for more useful methods improve your day-to-day experience, come practice with me. Here is my live class schedule (both in person and virtual) and here is my YouTube channel (for pre-recorded content). You can also sign up to get these posts by email so you won’t miss any of the other low-hanging fruit I like to dangle about. 👇

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Thanks for stopping by, and thanks, too, to William B. Irvine for his excellent intro to Stoicism, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy (Oxford University Press, 2009). Also, if you’re looking for a fresh commentary to the Sadhana Pada, portion on practice, of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra, Check out The Practice of the Yoga Sutra, by Pandit Rajmani Tigunait (Himalayan Institute, 2017).

The Doorway of Doubt

I had COVID last week.

It was my second time through, so I knew the drill.

I put on a mask, subbed out all my classes for the next five days, and isolated in the bedroom away from my wife and kids.

On day six, I felt great. I tested and was disappointed to see that the test was ever-so-faintly positive. I texted the studio where I was scheduled to teach the following day and told them the scenario.

Unfortunately no one could sub the class, so we decided that I would test again in the morning: if it came back negative, I’d teach; if not, we’d cancel class. I told them I’d let them know by 6:30.

The next morning I tested first thing. After 15 minutes, the test looked negative. I typed up a text to the studio to tell them I was good to go, but for some reason, I didn’t hit send.

Instead, I held the COVID test up to a different light, then another. I checked it under my phone’s flashlight. I guess I wanted some assurance that everything would be ok.

Within a couple minutes, I thought I saw a faint second line, but I could only see it under certain lights at specific angles. I couldn’t tell if my eyes were playing tricks.

I looked at the clock. It was 6:25. I had to make a call.

On the one hand, I told myself just to cancel the class and be on the safe side, but on the other, I didn’t totally trust my sometimes hyperactive conscience, and I didn’t want to be ruled by irrational fear. I wanted to show up for the students and the studio. I wanted to teach.

In The Yoga Sutras, Patanjali lists nine antaraya, or disturbances, to practice (YS 1:30). One of them is samsaya, or doubt. Of this disturbance, Richard Freeman writes:

“Doubt is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself; it simply means that you see two sides to an argument, or that you see two different ways to do a practice. If you cannot decide between the two sides or two perspectives, you are left in a state of confusion and doubt and you may think that since you do not know what to do, you will do nothing at all.”
Richard Freeman, The Mirror of Yoga, p. 160

I was stuck.

So instead of making a decision, I tested again.

Fifteen minutes later, the second test looked negative, but the positive line on the first test was still sort of there–if I held it up to the right light at just the right angle, that is.

It was 6:40 now, and I was literally sweating.

I realized this paralysis was neurotic–the stakes were probably not even that high–but if anything, seeing that it was neurotic only made me feel more anxious. What I really wanted was a second opinion (or rather, for someone to tell me what to do), but my wife was still sleeping. I wasn’t about to wake her up.

Five minutes later. I went upstairs and and woke up my wife. Ever-patient, she rolled out of bed, rubbed her bleary eyes, and said, “Yes, I see what you see.”

“What should I do?” I asked. “I need to let them know.”

“What do you feel comfortable with?” she asked.

I didn’t know.

I went back downstairs and saw a text from the studio. “Any word yet?”

I texted back that I thought it best to cancel class, and that, finally, was the end of that.

Except it wasn’t exactly, because the whole rigamarole had left a residue.

As Freeman further writes, “Generally we cannot accept doubt within ourselves because doubt means to us a betrayal of blind faith and our ego’s involvement in our practice, rather than a manifestation of our innate intelligence.” (Freeman, p. 161)

That was it! How had I gotten so tripped up by this? I felt like I’d failed.

I took my dog for a walk, and as we meandered through the woods, I remembered something I’d once heard from Ram Dass.

“I was trained as a psychologist. I was in analysis for many years. I taught Freudian theory. I was a therapist. I took drugs for six years intensively. I have a guru. I have meditated since 1970 regularly. I have taught yoga. I have studied Sufism and many kinds of Buddhism. In all that time I have not gotten rid of one neurosis. Not one! The only thing that’s changed is: where previously they were these huge monsters of “No! Don’t take me over again! Aaagh!” That kind of stuff, sitting in the bathtub, cowering. Now they’re like these little shmoos, you know? “Oh, sexual perversity! There you are! I haven’t seen you in days! C’mon in and have some tea!”
Ram Dass, “Promises and Pitfalls of the Spiritual Path” (talk), 1988

And this was true in my case, too. While there was something laughable about my antics earlier that morning, I was able to see that even in this case, I’d been much less victimized by my mind than I might have in the years before I had my practice–not only in the intensity and duration of the neurotic paralysis but in the amount of self loathing and recrimination that came up in the aftermath of being unable to immediately manifest my “innate intelligence” and make a decision.

Moreover, I was able to remember that even though I’d been thoroughly caught in my mind, a lot of the time when states of doubt or anger or boredom or craving or dissatisfaction appear, my practice spontaneously arises, giving me the opportunity to drop the thinking component and nonreactively observe the uncomfortable feelings as patterns of sensation in the body until they play out.

In other words, negative thoughts and emotions are frequently now doorways to meditation.

“It’s far out,” Ram Dass says in the same talk. “When you begin to realize suffering is grace, you are so… you can’t believe it. You think you’re cheating!”

The tools I’ve developed through practice have obviously not insulated me (or my wife) from all of my silly antics, but they’ve made enough of a difference that I intend to keep going, and I feel called more than ever to share them with anyone who is interested in giving it a try.

Here is my live teaching schedule (in-person and virtual), a link to my YouTube channel (for prerecorded practices), and if you want to get the blog posts by email, sign up here👇

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In with the New…

Happy Holidays! Just wanted to let everyone know that I’m offering a new virtual class through Ahimsa Yoga Studio on Fridays from 10-11 am central.

The class is called Gentle with Pranayama and Yoga Nidra, and it will employ gentle movement and breathwork to open the physical and energetic bodies, followed by an extended yoga nidra.

Yoga nidra is a guided meditation, usually performed lying down, which brings the yogi into a state of non sleep deep rest. It is a practical way to reduce anxiety, release unnecessary stress, and experience the subtler aspects of yoga. Here’s a post with some more info and resources.

Also, next Wednesday, 12/28/22, will be my last day teaching Vinyasa Flow at 8 am. All other classes will remain unchanged, and you can always see my current schedule on the Classes page.

I hope you are having a great holiday season and that 2023 is full of growth and awakening. Om Shanti.

🙏🕉💪🙌

The Hunger of Ned Greaves

Happy to announce my short story, “The Hunger of Ned Greaves,” has been published in the fall issue of J Journal. Thanks to the editors, Jeffrey Heiman and Adam Berlin, for including my work in this excellent edition. Follow the link below to read it now and/or order a hard copy from the J Journal website.

https://www.jjournal.org/post/the-hunger-of-ned-greaves

Awakening Your Heart’s Desire: Cultivating a Sankalpa

When I was in 8th grade, my dad handed me a pair of these.

Amazon.com : SKLZ Court Vision Basketball Dribbling Goggles : Basketball Training Aids : Clothing

Well not these, exactly. Mine were way weirder looking. Mine were more like a plastic platform that sat on the bridge of my nose and strapped around the back of my head–sort of a cross between a piece of hospital equipment and a push up bra for an enormous Barbie doll.

What are they? Oh. They’re ball-handling blinders. They train you to keep your head up when you’re dribbling so you can drop sweet dimes.

I wish I could show you the pair I had. I couldn’t even find photos of them on the internet, which makes me wonder if they actually existed. 🤔

They worked though. No doubt. Everytime I’d put the ball between my legs or behind my back, I would try to peek down, but when I had the goggles on, I couldn’t see the ball. I couldn’t see anything, and it helped me break the habit.

Most of us use all sorts of devices to help create boundaries for our behaviors–alarm clocks to limit our sleep, apps that lock us off the internet, fitness classes that charge us even if we don’t show.

We also have apparatuses to boost certain types of behavior–watches that send us digital stickers 🙌 when hit our steps, delicious cookies as a reward for getting through a rough draft, visiting this website to find some inspiration to unroll your mat.

You might say these technologies are as old as the carrot and the stick.

A lot of these methods work, but one limitation of even the best of them is that they usually only work in one specific arena and don’t do much to help us develop the ability to direct our energies in a general.

This means that even if we can rein in a particular behavior here or engender a new positive habit there, we don’t get much help with unexpected distractions.

In order to live a life that’s congruent with our aspirations, we need to develop an internal, holistic approach to stay motivated and reorient us when we start to stray off course. There are probably a number of ways to go about this, but one effective tool we can adopt from the yoga tradition is a sankalpa.

According to Yogapedia, the word sankalpa “comes from the Sanskrit roots san, meaning ‘a connection with the highest truth,” and kalpa, meaning ‘vow.'”¹A sankalpa then is a vow to stay connected to the highest truth.

Since sankalpas work from the inside out, we’ll start with the deepest part first.

Sometimes called your bhavana sankalpa, this part of your sankalpa is sometimes translated as your heart’s desire and can be thought of as an affirmation of your true nature.

Because you always are your true nature (even when you forget or can’t feel it) you formulate your bhavana sankalpa as a positive statement in the present tense, eg. “I am pure awareness,” “I am healthy, whole, and free,” or “I am at one with all beings everywhere.”

To find a statement you can connect with, you can begin by probing some of your existing desires. For example, you may have a goal to get promoted at your job, but to discover your bhavana sankalpa, you might question what achieving that goal will satisfy at a deeper level.

Is it acceptance? Empowerment? Security? Feeling valued? Maybe it is all of these things, so when you formulate your bhavana sankalpa, you might use language that includes aspects of your true nature that express that ultimate longing, eg. “I am a creative force, inextricably woven into the fabric universe, at one will all beings everywhere.”

What you come up with doesn’t have to be poetic or lofty, and you should try not to put too much pressure on yourself to lock down something perfect because it will refine itself over time. The important thing is that the words you choose allow you to tap into the felt experience of this inner truth. This is one reason why you might want to let your bhavana sankalpa take shape during savasana, yoga nidra, or other times when you’re in a meditative state and have more access to the wider dimensions of your being.

The second part of a sankalpa can be thought of as an intention. Your intention is something you use in the shorter term to bring you into harmony or manifest specific actions.

If you work with your sankalpa before your yoga practice, for example, you might consider what you need from that particular practice and set an intention to use the practice to bring yourself into balance. You could set an intention to use the practice to find some grounding, explore some type of pain or discomfort, stoke your inner fire, or work with a particular emotion.

You might likewise use your intention to help you fire off that email you’ve been avoiding or call a friend you haven’t talked to in awhile. You could also set an intention to attend to a particular creative project, professional strategy, or some aspect of your personal or home life.

As with your heart’s desire, it’s important to formulate your intentions in positive, declarative statements of fact, eg. “I meditate every afternoon,” “I paint when the appointed time arises,” “I am patient with my kids and provide a sturdy container for their emotions,” or “I listen to what my coworkers have to say and adjust my thinking and actions according to what feels true.”

By structuring your intentions as affirmations and then following through with them, they become welded to an embodied state, which empowers them. This does not happen, however, if you start your intention with words like “I will…” or “I hope to…” or “I want…” Statements like these have the unfortunate effect of reminding us that we are not currently who we want to be and don’t generate that internal momentum.

You may find it helpful to employ your sankalpa as part of a writing process. I write mine down at the end of my journaling practice each morning. For me, it’s a free flowing practice of writing out affirmations of my heart’s desire and intentions for the day. Some statements appear everyday while others come and go. I find that writing it down in this way brings more focused attention to the process, which helps to generate enthusiasm, a positive mindset, and great determination.

Working with a sankalpa is like planting a seed deep in your being. If you nurture it with the practice of gratitude and a feeling of devotion on a regular basis, it will grow and spontaneously blossom throughout your day.

You will even find that when afflictive states appear and start to pull you away from actions that support your values, your sankalpa will arise as an embodied state that will propel you back to your chosen course.

This is radically different from hearing your chastising superego telling you things like, “don’t do that,” or “you should really be doing this instead,” which usually doesn’t alter our behavior and only heaps shame upon us.

The conscious use of external tools that curtail certain behaviors and support others will always have a place, but to bring our thoughts, words, and deeds into harmony with our deepest calling, we cannot exclusively rely on devices, rewards, and blinders to alter our tendencies in a piecemeal fashion.

Instead we need to practice summoning again and again the felt experience of our higher nature so that we learn to flow, more and more, along the vector of our awakening.

Thanks for stopping by. If you want to join me for a practice, I teach virtual vinyasa yoga on Thursdays at 8 am central through Ahimsa Yoga Studio. You can sign up here. I also have a growing library of free, on demand classes on YouTube.

If you want to get the blog by email. You can sign up here. 👇

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Sleep Like a Yogi

A little stress is necessary. Stress is the body’s way of preparing us to tackle challenges. But stress is only healthy if it lasts a relatively short amount of time, say from the time it takes to prepare a presentation until the presentation is over, or from the moments leading up to a difficult conversation with with a loved one until the two of you are hugging it out in your favorite dress-up clothes.

If stress goes on too long, we call it chronic. Our bodies and minds get stuck in a state of arousal, which is unsurprisingly exhausting and can have a number of deleterious effects on our health and well being.

For many of us, this was a problem before the pandemic. Trying to live up to the bizarre cultural injunction to remain continuously productive and in active management of our lives from the moment we open our eyes until we go to sleep can do that to a person, and things have clearly become trickier.

Even if you can’t feel it directly, you might notice it as an increase in irritability or anxiety. Maybe you can’t fall asleep, or when you wake up in the middle of the night, you find yourself on the couch, dispatching a tub of ice cream as you binge watch adult cartoons.

I’ve been through all of this stuff, and while I’m not trying to claim I’ve got everything figured out, one of the most helpful tools on all these fronts has been the development of a daily practice of yoga nidra.

Yoga nidra (yogic sleep) and its Westernized twin, iRest meditation, are relaxation practices where you sit or lie down for anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour and allow yourself to be guided through a series of very simple awareness exercises.

The practice works by drawing your attention away from the repetitive, obsessive, and useless thinking that keeps you wound up to the felt experience of your body, breath, and awareness, which generates a profound state of ease, well being, and can become a gateway to self inquiry and meditative insight. Although the word sleep is in the name, the idea is not to actually lose consciousness but to learn how to remain attentive as you enter a state between wakefulness and sleep where your mind starts to open up.

Yoga nidra doesn’t require any special skills and can be done whenever it fits into your schedule. I do my practice when I put my two-year old down for a nap, which helps me reset and recharge for the afternoon of parenting, cooking, and anything else I need to handle before bedtime, but I’ve also used yoga nidra at night to help me fall asleep (or go back to sleep if I wake up) or at other times when I feel overwhelmed.

One of the coolest things about this practice is that if done regularly over an extended period of time, you’ll learn how access this defocused state of presence without needing a recording, so that you can spontaneously work with your attention to defuse escalating arousal states and find pockets of rest when you need them.

So without further adieu, here are a few practices I like:

The first is a 20-minute practice led by the founder of iRest, Richard Miller. He studied yoga nidra in a traditional context and then developed iRest to serve a Western audience. I like the iRest practices, and they might be particularly good for those of you who feel that the yogic trappings are too woo woo or conflict with your worldview or religious beliefs.

This next practice from Amrit Yoga is just under 40 minutes and is more traditional. I don’t know Amrit Yoga, but this practice is freaking lovely.

I’ve even recorded a couple myself.

If none of these are to your liking, keep looking. Sometimes it takes awhile to find the right length, format, teacher, etc. Fortunately there are lots of options available on platforms like YouTube and SoundCloud at a zero-dollar cost, so you can easily shop around.

If you want to learn more about yoga nidra, there are two Audible books I can recommend.

The first is iRest Meditation: Restorative Practices for Health, Resiliency, and Well-Being, by Richard Miller, which breaks down the elements of yoga nidra and offers short practices to help you focus on the parts that might be most beneficial to you.

The second audiobook is iRest: Integrative Restoration Yoga Nidra for Deep Relaxation, by Molly Birkholm. This book has a number of longer practices and dives deep into the philosophical roots of yoga nidra as well as some of the science behind it. Like Richard Miller’s book, it also breaks down the practice into its fundamental parts, but it goes further in exploring some of the therapeutic uses, including working with insomnia, stress, chronic pain, PTSD, etc. I use the practices in this audiobook frequently and like the way they are organized.

I’d like to add the disclaimer here that I have no current or former affiliation with any of these people or organizations except as a consumer. My intention is that these practices might be of service to you, and if they aren’t, I hope you found some insight, encouragement, or enjoyment from your time here today. I appreciate you spending it with me. 🙏 🕉

I teach a live virtual vinyasa flow class on Thursdays at 8 am central. You can sign up here 👉 Ahimsa Yoga Studios. I also have a growing library of recorded practices on my YouTube channel.

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Open the Chest and Extend the Spine

Hey everybody. 👋 I made a new video. This one is a 75-minute, vinyasa-style class at the wall with a focus on backbending. It also includes a fun and rather tricky transition from ustrasana (camel pose) to urdhva dhanurasana (upward bow).

The prep work for this transition includes a number of backbending variations that will help to open the chest, strengthen the legs, and work with your overhead shoulder mobility. The real benefit lies in this work (and the pranayama at the end of class 😉), so don’t worry if the transition feels out of reach for now, and if it’s easy for you, that’s great, too. 🙌 Either way, go slowly and stay with what feels right for your body moment by moment.

If you’re looking for a live led class, you can join me on Thursday mornings at 8 am central. Click here 👉 Ahimsa Yoga Studios to sign up.

Thanks for checking out the site today and the video if you’re so inclined. You can stay up with new yoga classes by subscribing to my YouTube channel or by signing up to get the blog posts by email. 👇

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There’s over two feet of snow on our roof, and it’s starting to melt. Giant cornices are forming over the gutters, and icicles are growing like prison bars over the windows.

They are starting to leak, the windows, and drips are falling ominously from the door frames, making the house feel a little like the Titanic. So while Nana (our two-year old) was taking her nap this afternoon, I shoved the monitor in my pocket and went up on the roof to try and break up the ice flow.

For the first 20 minutes or so, I pretended I was Superman, slowly destroying the Fortress of Solitude, but as I continued to work, I came face to face with the unavoidable truth that I was much more like Clark Griswold putting up his Christmas lights.

Around that time, I realized that this was obviously a blog post, so I snapped a selfie.

I felt self-conscious and a little ridiculous to be curating my experience, but then I encountered something unexpected. Just thinking about the blog triggered the practice of mindfulness.

So there I was, breaking up the ice and saying to myself, “breaking up the ice,” and then watching the next thought come. “Worried Nana will wake up from the noise.” Then the next thought, “Don’t fall, moron.”

After a bit, I’d fall into forgetting and start identifying with the thoughts again, but then I’d think about the blog and sure enough, the mindfulness would restart, and I’d be labeling: “Judging. Enjoying. Calculating. Seeking approval. Having fun.”

When I first created this website, I didn’t really think of it as part of my practice. I just thought it would be an entertaining way to extend my teaching and talk about the places where my life and my yoga practice intersect. I quickly came to realize however that it would involve a lot of svadhyaya (self study) and vichara (inquiry). Now today I discovered that thinking about the blog can trigger states of pratyahara (turning inward) and dharnana (concentration).

My assistant, who brought me the tools, taking the long way to the garage and crawling, for some reason.

In my last post, I pulled from Tantric texts and intellectually labored to describe a few of the formal practices that one can weave into a yoga practice to help make your life your practice and your practice your life, but it occurs to me that my experience today is a perfect example of the way Tantra works.

You do the practices and then they start to influence the way you write or do your job or parent, and those activities then become portals through which you re engage the practice so that one carries into the other until there is no difference between the two.

I’m feeling a lot of gratitude right now. Grateful for the moments of insight, grateful that you took the time to read this, and grateful even for the leaks in my house. 🙏

Live virtual vinyasa flow tomorrow @ 8 am central. Sign up through AhimsaYogaStudios.com

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Tantric Tools for Autoregulation

It happens fast. One moment, the tiny plastic skydiver is parachuting peacefully down from the second floor balcony, the next it’s getting shoved up someone’s nose. A retaliatory eye gouge that would horrify a Muay Thai pit fighter ensues, and suddenly, sobbing children are running out the front door in their underwear in five-degree-below-zero weather. And you? You’re standing on the porch, apoplectically threatening to cancel Christmas, which is still ten months away.

It’s no secret that kids are, shall we say, emotionally labile, and they are masters at infecting us with their insanity in ways that impair our ability to manifest our best selves. And in these pandemic conditions, with parents working from home (or not working from home) and kids doing school from home (or not doing school from home), we are not only trying to navigate the challenges of our occupations without the communities, equipment, peer groups, release valves, and support mechanisms on which we formerly depended, we’ve been thrust into a bizarro universe where we have to do things like try to convince a Farm and Fleet manager in Chippewa Falls that she should order an extra five-hundred units of dog chow while picking lightbulb shards out of a hyperventilating toddler’s foot.

By the time you get to your last Zoom meeting of the day, you may be in a state where you think you can cajole the head of the rail workers union into exempting you from a COVID surcharge that will force the closure of your Whitehall distribution center by playing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” and asking him where his belly button is. Yes, he may be a “big boy.” But do not ask him, “who’s a big boy?” You also must not remind him that “sharing is caring,” try to send him to time out, or withhold dessert if he does not comply.

A traditional method of studying the Hatha Yoga Pradipika

Even if you don’t have kids at home, you’ve surely gotten mixed up in similar fashion. The way we are cooped up and on top of each other (or isolated) all the time, it should be no surprise if you’ve inexplicably gone off on your partner or roomate or pet or fern or whatever. We’re still pretty stressed out, even if we’re sort used it by now.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already had some first hand experience with the ways that yoga can help you cope with stress, so I’m not going to travel down the rabbit hole of discussing the autonomic nervous system, increasing vagal tone, or speculate about the length of your telomeres.

What I am going to do is offer up a few tools from the Tantric tradition (the branch of yoga that teaches us to see the sacred in the mundane) that may help you train up your ability to shift gears quickly when the situation demands and take on challenges with your higher cognitive faculties intact. My intention is that you’ll be able to add these techniques into your existing asana practice, yoga teaching, or other regimes of training.

Here goes.

Kaya Sthairyam – kaya (body) + sthairyam (steadiness) Literally holding the body still. This is frequently taught as a seated practice, but the principles can be incorporated into even a vigorous movement practice. After a challenging posture, sequence, or set, put yourself into a hub pose and try to remain perfectly still. A hub pose is any symmetrical pose where you don’t have to use much concentration to maintain the asana. In studio classes, we are often encouraged to take child’s pose when the breath becomes ragged or we need a break, but the emphasis here is not merely on recovery. Instead, we are cultivating the ability to notice what is happening with the breath, the heartbeat, the energetic quality of the body, and the thoughts in the mind while in a state of arousal. If we can start to notice when these markers appear and practice not reacting to them (even at the level of fidgeting) we have a better chance when we are off the mat of stopping ourselves before we tip over into hyperarousal–and lose our minds or collapse into catatonic dissociation 😵. This practice can also help to cultivate pratyahara (turning the attention inward). As Swami Satyananda Saraswati points out in A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya, “After practising kaya sthairyam intensely for even a few minutes, you will find that the awareness spontaneously directs itself inwards.”¹ Child’s pose is one example of a hub pose. Some others are tadasana (mountain pose), savasana (corpse pose), the passive variation of nakrasana (crocodile pose), and for practitioners who are very comfortable in it, adho mukha svanasana (downward-facing dog).
Kumbhaka – Breath Retention. According to the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, “When prana moves, chitta (the mental force) moves. When prana is without movement, chitta is without movement. By this (steadiness of prana) the yogi attains steadiness and should thus restrain the vayu (air).”² Stopping the breath creates gaps in the mind, which can halt the inertia that carries thoughts and actions through their habitual patterns. By weaving these retentions into a physical practice, we can learn how to suspend our momentum and then restart it again on a clearer footing. Breath retentions can be of two types, antar kumbhaka (internal breath retentions) and bahir kumbhaka (external breath retentions). They are often practiced with the use of bandhas (energetic locks) and should only be performed once the breath is calm.
Pranayama – prana (inner breath) + ayama (to lengthen). Pranayama is one of the most effective and direct ways to explore and work with the energies of the body. It is well supported by yogic experience and a growing body of scientific literature³ that pranayama practices, when performed correctly, have salutary effects on the body and lead to more balanced, calm, and energized states of mind. Pranayama is most commonly thought of as a seated practice to be used after asana, before meditation, or on its own, but if we are willing to think of pranayama more liberally as extending the breath, we can also bring it into our asana practice. During breath-connected movements, see if you can make the inhalation or exhalation last longer than each movement. This can help you avoid the tendency to unconsciously accelerate in sequences like sun salutations or other repeated flows where you have to exert some effort. This practice of extending the breath can further be supported by thinking of each movement or static pose as a support for your breathing practice (rather than the other way around) and by noticing the brief pauses between inhalation and exhalation. If we can become adept at attending to the breath in this way during practice, it can trigger us to start using the breath to focus the mind and keep our energies within manageable bounds when stress arises in other contexts.

To learn to work safely and effectively with any of these practices, it’s best to find a teacher who can show you the way. Once you’ve had some competent instruction, you’ll have to experiment to find out exactly how they affect you and how to best employ them to receive your desired results.

I’d also like to add a caveat here: while I have experienced the described benefits of these subtle-body practices, I think it is easy to get lost in the weeds of trying manipulate your energies to fine tune your experience. Indeed, if you look through the classical texts like those mentioned above, you’ll discover that many of the practices can get pretty complicated and may start to feel esoteric or overreaching in their claims. Moreover, many of the recommendations for the application of some of these practices may not fit into your life in a way that will allow you to fulfill your worldly responsibilities.

For me, the greatest benefit of incorporating these techniques and their underlying principles into my practice has been the way they turn my attention inward, improve my tolerance for wide array of internal experiences, and help me work skillfully with different self states both on and off the mat. What’s more, engaging my interior landscape as a play of energies rather than as a narrative about what I think should be happening gives me a way to handle stressful situations that’s free of the baggage of my beliefs and theories, which gives me a better chance to avoid throwing fuel on the fire and reinforcing patterns of reactivity in me and my kids. Having trained in this way, I have at least a better chance of responding to changing circumstances in creative and intentional ways.

I hope you find some of these strategies useful. If you want to explore some of them with me, please join me for a class. I’m currently teaching a live virtual vinyasa class on Thursdays at 8 am central through Ahimsa Yoga Studios. You can always find an updated class schedule on my classes page, along with links to a few of my recorded classes on YouTube. From there you should be able to find more of my videos.

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1. Swami Satyananda Saraswati, A Systematic Course in the Ancient Tantric Techniques of Yoga and Kriya; p. 206; Yoga Publications Trust; Munger, Bihar, India; 2013
2. Swami Muktibodhanandanda; Hatha Yoga Pradipika; p. 150; Yoga Publications Trust; Munger, Bihar, India; 2014
3. PubMed.gov https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32669763/