Royal Yoga Studio

I won’t be dishonest and say that life has been easy for me on a personal level in the last few years…it hasn’t. I’ve often been standing in the middle of a life that looks both like the most incredible expression of love and awareness, mixed like oil and water with failure, dysfunction and challenge. The dichotomy has been one of my most important teachers, a spotlight on my blind spots.

In yoga there is a belief in many practices that there is an ‘ultimate expression’ of a posture or practice. Say I’m practicing Triangle Pose. I look at teacher, Iyengar, this book, that website or video. I have it that my hands and feet look like this, I look this way, I fold forward this way, this much, all the while a image of perfection in mind guiding my practice towards the ideal. While having ideas, concepts can be crucially important in guiding any practice to deepening, there is a tendency to confuse deepening with ‘looking more like the way its supposed to be’.

This is a critical distinction in my life.

As a teacher I’m often putting ‘rules’ together to explain the way a certain discipline works. Its done with the idea that that there is no yellow brick road to creating mastery in a field. By that I mean we can’t simply model how the best do it, do it exactly that way and expect to have mastery. The process is never quite so linear. That master didn’t just practice to look like that; s/he spent years doing it this way, then switched to that way, then changed this, then studied with so and so, then go injured this way, then focused on this…you see my point. Each master ‘looks’ they way they do because of a long line of happenings that shaped their growth, aesthetic, direction, interests, etc. So I hold it that learning isn’t linear. In tango, the rules I set for beginners aren’t the rules I set for advanced beginners, which are not the rules I set for intermediate dancers, which are the rules I set for advanced students. In yoga the way I describe things to someone focused on getting flat abs is different from the way someone devoted to transforming their life through the ‘big’ yoga. You speak to where the student is to get from A to B, not A to Z.

Process.

And of course, rules are made to be flexed, ignored, broken. I want them to be! As a teacher I’m listening to when the rules no longer serve; then we move on.

I want to create for you the possibility that all absolute rules are teachers in themselves rather than truth. Its the difference between the road sign pointing to Chicago, and Chicago itself. If this is true, so what does Triangle look like now? Is Triangle simply a pointer to something deeper? Great, lets get more flexible. Yes, lets feel amazing as we increase health and vitality in physical body. But lets not confuse the practice, which is the process, with just a step on the road to a perfect yoga practice, which is the illusion.

Lets avoid the trap that language sets for us when we conceptualize these experiences, when we work on things, when we practice, explore, strive.

So in my dichotomous life, if I were to confuse struggle with anything but a part of my process, then I’m usually attached to life looking a certain way. In Eugene they have a saying: Don’t should on yourself. This moment, this feeling, this overwhelm, this joy, this struggle is my practice as much as my yoga or classes or thinking.

Now, a question for you: If all of this is true, why do we practice?

I look up over my computer and notice…this is another beautiful day. Maybe its time to walk up a mountain for fun today.

• What is responsibility to you?
• What does being present in your life look like?
• Can you tell the difference between what is so and what is not so?

or more pertinent:

• Do you live a life that is driven by questions or do you just know?

‘Teaching‘ for me is the empowering of another to have what I have, know what I know and have the tools to go beyond me in what they are pursuing in life. Its not enough to just educate. Its not enough to share or inspire.

In modern culture when do we spend time with ourselves?
Yoga. Meditation. Sometimes religion. Trauma. Disaster. Failure. Sometimes art. What else? We so often walk in a daze of knowing but of course what we know is so much of the time sophistry. Looks good, ain’t true.

Part of empowering another for me is creating the awareness to tell the difference between two similar things: distinction. Can you spot the difference between what she said and what you thought she said. The difference between what happened and the story your perception generated to explain it?

That question for me is founded in curiosity in my experience of life. Asking questions of myself and others. Creating a culture where I’m often being asked questions. And we find ourselves in the mess of the day to day.

And the onion is peeled, layer after layer.

What is in the center?

Love,
A

Sorry folks for no VB for today. I’ve acquired a nice case of pink eye from my little ones as well as something resembling strep; swollen throat but nothing in sinuses or lungs. Never had conjunctivitis before and as annoying as it is, its nice having clean hands all the time

I take this kind of thing as feedback from nature for how much energy I have and how balanced it is in my body. So this morning I went to the early morning open practice at Tamarack with Tom and created a focused practice to explore if this was true and to establish equilibrium again. It was short as I misremembered the timing so I had 45 minutes to play.

My hips were where I spent most of my time, trying to stimulate digestion and get energy running through spine, two places that felt ’stuck’. I noticed a marked decrease in arm horsepower, which I connected to tightness in neck/weakness in lats, possibly from the sickness. As I followed my curiosity it brought me to a place of stillness, sitting and creating two things in my head, which felt stuffed with wool, energetically. First I breathed opening into the skull, lightening and flushing whatever it is that’s stuck. Second I brought all heavy energies down into belly, again trying to lighten and drain the head of any sticky, heavy stuff.

Doing this took less than a few minutes and, as meditation often does, the stillness created more clarity on the intelectual level. I noticed that my days have been full of work, but unfocused, lacking the infusion of happiness that I aspire to, but often loose in the day to day. In this new space in the early moments of the day, I created a day of joy and openness. It was a new context to operated from, a new place to stand in the world that doesn’t change.

May you each find your excitement through curiosity this beautiful day, regardless of weather, money, future, past, stress, struggle, story. May you find your life by finding your day and bringing it back to your vision.

Cosmic hugs,
A

Hey all,

Simple continuation of hip openers we’ve explored before. Enjoy and let me know what your experience with these are.

A

A posture I do every day and important for balancing sexual, primal energies from the pelvis.

Next edition will be on strength exercises for developing this and other external rotation-bases postures.

A