The Gita is a scripture without an outgroup—that is, even though it takes place on a literal battlefield, there is no rant against the opposing side; nor are there rants against unbelievers or heathen or infidels or whatnot. So anyone can approach the Gita without feeling their particular religious background or faith affiliation is under attack. Amit Mujmudar
Let’s throw out ‘faith’. It would be better to understand śraddhā as conviction or dedication. The word in and of itself breaks down to a unity of truth (śhrat) and hold (dhā to hold, to support, specifically support the mind and functions of mind, an attentional stability). Thus śraddhā means “holder of truth” or '“adherence to truth” or “in the pursuit of truth”. Which is lovely.
A long time ago, I was lost. I was facing crisis. I was hurting. Yoga helped.
These days, everyone is hurting. The crisis is ubiquitous. Everything feels like loss. We are scared. We are angry. We are tired.
Yoga can help us. I desperately want people to have these tools. I want people to use them.
Yoga is not the solution to our life problems. It is a way to help us address our problems.
The most important thing I can teach right now are the skills of self practice. Yoga is ultimately about taking care of yourself. Not needing a studio, a video, a lot of time, fancy gear, to be ‘ready’, but the radically effective practices of taking a little bit of time, every single day, to be self-aware and caring, honest and hopeful, dedicated and supported. I want you to do what you can, today. I want you to know how important it is.
I don’t exactly know how to best do this, best support personal practice. I’m mulling ideas and will keep telling you: take care, today. I’m here if you need. Just take care today. The glory of this is everyone already has the pre-requitisites; everybody should do their own practice according to their needs, capacity, and experience.
If you have questions (and you should have questions: questions are good! Teaching can only begin once you have a question. If you don’t have questions, you’re probably in a practice of avoidance rather than a practice of yoga), reach out.
If you want a tool of community, prompts, info, join Yoga Club on Mighty Networks. It’s like social media in being connective, you can chat and post and ask and message. But it is unlike social media in being a gated community, without any algorithm, less the toxic of meta and the manipulation of communication.
But please just start, today, for yourself.
It’s immediate and simple: how are you right now? Ask your body mind to show you.
Then stand up or change your position somehow (lay on the floor, cross your legs the other way, hold your arms over head, push your hand into something. Doesn’t matter.). From this changed position, explore the feelings/thoughts/mood you first identified. How does it look from here? How does it feel? What else do you feel?
Now take several slow, attentive breath.
That’s it, y’all.
A personal yoga practice takes that basic idea and makes it exquisite, evolutionary, consistant, affirmative and growthful. It should be supported by on-going learning, a teacher, some personal reflection. But it’s really as simple as what you just did.
Here’s what I suggest, what I can offer, right now:
I am going to leave the zoom mentorship at $50 for the time being. It is very important. Please take advantage of this. It works best if you schedule several sessions, not one. It’s like therapy that way. I’ll give some suggestions and ideas, you run with them, but then it’s important that you come back and we process. Then I can give you more. This is how you magically accomplish personal practice: you do your practice, but you do it within the context of mentorship, accountability and support.
I’m going to hold space every Monday at 7 am for Gayatri japa starting March 3. The tiniest bit of movement, pranayama, and meditation. The most essential and elegant of prayers. The a-priori, first, most exquisite of practices. I’ll tell you more every Monday. But you just show up Monday. Come once and get the feel. Come twice and get into the momentum. Come for several months and you’ve got stitha-prajña (established in your wisdom.). You can do this on your own, once you know how. But if I’m holding space consistently, your personal work with it will have a stronger support.
I’m going to start a once a month sangha on the Bhagavad Gita (also starting March 3). There is no better spiritual teaching for our time. I want this to be rolling admission, begin whenever, come as you are.
It’s said that music is good for us.
Mind body art science. That intersection is where mantra lives.
Listen: it’ll rewire you. It’ll move you. It has the capacity to soothe, to carry, to stabilize, to rock, to break you. It can show you god.
Funny thing: the ancient seers knew all of this. They knew what brains are. What humaning is. How difficult. They also knew how prone we are to disaster and suffering and causing trouble and pain. They knew how likely we are to feeling trapped and lost.
And these guys knew how simple practices can be liberation.
The oldest and I think most direct practice was/is chanting. I mean the real, true ‘authentic’ yoga. Thousands of years ago, some folks figured out how to harmonize what feel like the tensions of life. All this other stuff - poses and philosophy, fasts and art, mindfulness and life hacking - is really just a later attempt to repackage or over simplify something that has been true and proven and practicable for millennia.
I can’t possibly tell you how true this is in my body. It’s down in my cells. It’s in my sleep and dream cycles. It seems to have tipped my dangerous tending toward addictive and depressive and hot bio cycles to a roaring symphony.
It tickles my intellectual brain, starts to make all the apparent contradictory things you hear in yoga spaces and life spaces all start to fit. It all starts to fall together.
And I feel like a riptide.
This art science of chanting is vast. There’s a lot of crap out there to wade through. I’ve put together a ‘intro to Vedic chant’ course that will run Tuesday mornings 7 am CST on zoom beginning in September. 6 weeks.
Vedic chant is THE way to take yoga past poses. It is ancient. It is now. It is recognized as a world treasure by UNESCO. It is available to anyone, with the little caveat that you need to be taught how to navigate it. You need a teacher to initiate you. Once that’s done, the doors are wide open.
Anyone can chant. You don’t need musical ability or Sanskrit philosophy or a spoonful of religious dogma. The only ask is commitment, and knowing that I will ask you to unmute yourself and sing on mic and expect you to figure out how to practice for yourself for ten minutes at a time, several times a week.
Week One invocation and Ganesh start where all things should start, with an invocation to the god who removes obstacles. Discuss what invocation and prayer are in this tradition and for you personally, with a nod to cultural apporpraiton, modernity, post-religious lostness and spiritual longing. We’ll get a crash course on the six (main) rules of Vedic chanting and a primer on how a music practice sparks up the human system in terms of cognitive function, emotional balance, optimism and spirituality, physical balance and capacity, intellect and soul.
Week Two the power and beauty of Saraswati with Ganesha on board, we’ll now learn the invocation to Saraswati, she goddess of the power (I mean force) of learning, beauty, wisdom, creativity, and music. Keep learning some basics about chanting as you start to root around in the basement of your subliminal through a personalized practice. There is so much power and grace and flow and growth to harnessing our learning power and becoming a student. There is so much loveliness and beauty and compelling, attractive power to this whole show. We invoke her, next.
Week Three Initiation exploring THE Gayatri mantra The Gayatri mantra is like the top of the charts mantra for all of human history. It is so popular, has been for so very long, that there is richness and electricity just in the thought of it’s continuity throughout human history. All great teachers will say this is the greatest yoga thing, the only one you need, the start and the source and the heart of all teachings. Yet, partially because it is the one, it has been pop cultured, watered down, misused, abused, and infinitely mistaught. We’ll do some unpacking of harms and restoring of things to their place as you both learn how to do it right (yes, there is a right and a wrong here) respecting the lineage and at the same time plug it in to your individuality, your possibility, your contemporary thoroughly modernized humanity. Bonus: how and what oṃ is and how to hold it right.
Week Four The art of listening. Adhyayanam is the traditional method of transition, or handing on the teaching, or methodology of learning. This is so fundamental to ALL of Yoga that it will unlock doors for you, including the deepest and heaviest ones of your heart. And oddly, it is misunderstanding Adhyayanam that has so mixed up yoga in contemporary spaces and the spiritual marketplace.
Week Five the art and science of personal practice. There is a tensioning at the heart of being human, and of this path that is essentially a question of how to human a little more gracefully. How do we handle the firehose of information and stimulation and overwhelm that is life without drowning? But at the same time, how do we keep ourselves alive and not die of lack? Personal practice is the way. Let’s unpack all that.
Week Six: Unshakeable. Moving on, letting go, stepping forward. There is an art to letting go. And we’re all, every last one of us, control freaks. We’re fortunate and half way there if we are savvy to our personal brand of control freakiness already. As we wrap up this course, we’re both finishing and beginning. Whether you are moving on to study a new thing with me or others, or are simply taking what you’ve learned here home to mull over on you own, it’s important that we close right. Let’s look at closing mantras and the concept of offering, surrender, and freedom in Yoga philosophy and practice. We’ll touch on the imporance and pre-req of inner safety and the safety nets built into the tradition (and ways they have been neglected or ignored in your past or the industry.). We’ll discuss the discovery of safety in sensation, in lived experience, in practices as provided by yoga (in asana, in meditation, in daily ritual or special ritual, in Ayurveda, in sangha, and in your body and breath). We’ll look at the role of all techniques leading to meditation techniques, and how this deep neural plasticity work curates an inner resilience and resolve without you needing to cognitively do it. Let’s not forget to unpack community (healthy, unhealthy, but ultimately the most important thing) and general mindfulness (it’s all yoga!….but don’t forget to practice). We’ll dive a little, little bit into the mental game in the physical body, what’s happening in present moment awareness, letting go of future worries and healing ancient wounds. And letting go wouldn’t be complete unless we also explore the challenges of aging, an unfair world, physical and personal limitations.
This is a weighty course so far as impact goes. It will give you the foundation to study and learn forever. It will clarify and answer the super messy confusions out there. It will orient you, initiate you, and begin you. Yet its a relatively light class from your end:
six weeks, a tiny personal daily practice.
Live class Tuesday mornings 7 am CST via zoom for 6 weeks beginning September 3.
Recordings.
Audio and text tools to support your personal practice.
Humongous workbook for your forever.
send 3 recordings of your practice for personalized feedback and support.
$250 bucks.
Get $50 off for you and your friend if you sign up together. Everything is better together. Both of you will need to ask Karin for the discount code to do this.
Sign up on Mighty Networks.
I have always been taught that Yoga isn’t Hindu. I wasn’t taught this in an off-hand way, but insistent ones. I’ve been told Yoga is practical, which can’t mean dogmatic. Yoga isn’t a religion, doesn’t belong to any people, the whole point is to question and hone your own meaning of these things. ‘If it works’ is basic yoga pedagogy. Yoga gives us psycho-somatic tools that do in fact work, regardless of who you are or what you believe. I’ve been told.
And I think that this is true.
But I also think that a white person talking about how non-sectarian Yoga is is troublesome.
The mountain metaphor is intended to deflate, destroy, or right size the expectations of a yoga practice. We often get hooked into thinking it’s a rinse and repeat cycle. We do some stuff, we do savasana, and ahhhh we feel better for a moment. And then we go back to normal. Rinse and repeat.
The argument here is that rinse and repeat is not enough. There are summits to be climbed. There is an up. You have to go somewhere with the insights, steadiness, or release you glean from your practices.
You can’t both change and get to keep things how they are. This is the scary part. This is why it’s so hard to do the work of unlearning racism, and why our white relatives and neighbors and selves are so inclined to counter by saying all lives matter, white lives matter, we’re fine with the idea of the thing but what about me? We’re scared that parity will cost us something. We’re scared that this will hurt. I think we’re scared of Black people and Black communities but we won’t say it and that even that is just a way of avoiding how scared we are of ourselves.
Change, impermanence, and time are strangely embroiled in water’s curls; alluded to, a metaphor of sorts, but understood in a more-than-intellectual way. Felt.
To open ourselves to the experience of water - to listen to the water’s teachings, if you’ll go there - has something to do with the river of life, our tumbledness, our sources, and the rites of letting go. It has everything to do with power, rejuvenation, supplication, and baptism. Water is emotive, or emotions are water like. And there is some kind of relationship between water and the moon (one teacher told me our fascination with the moon comes from the way it changes, as we do. We are mirrors).
The injunction to heal ourselves - especially amongst us white folks - is a slip of the tongue and the attention span. It conveniently positions us as victims, powerless, and dealing with our own wounds while deflecting our attention away from very real and institutionalized privileges. It’s past time that we within the yoga community stop this myopic quest to live authentically. It’s not important that we speak our truth. It’s time we start to listen.
The challenge of course is balance - to somehow let our dark emerge to be transformed in the fire of wisdom but not lose ourselves in the process. Suppression won’t help. But letting our inner bile contaminate everything around us doesn’t help either. Silence, carved out space for retreat and healing, finding some ways to really just be with yourself will all help. Of course they are all hard things to do this time of year.
All the more reason to be conscientious about them.
If we don’t point to where our practices come from - or think we have any responsibility to the community - we’re negligent. Tias used to say if a teacher can’t talk about his lineage, the teaching is suspect. Which is not to say authority or credibility comes from a lineage or a guru, per se.
But our credibility and our authority don’t come independently, either.
at this point I recognize that everything can fall apart and I will still be okay. There is an underlying sense that I can handle the hard things in life. I trust that I can both take on and survive adversity. I have access to a deep pulse that drums steady even as everything around me- or inside me - feels unstable, unsafe, or just flat out wrong. I have this sense precisely because I have gone through transformation over and over again in these practices. Having gone through it, I trust it.
Fatigue is cumulative. Weariness grows. Think of the way a steady, slow drip of water will erode a mountain or a wall over time. Or the way you can handle one bad day, one set back, but after a series of setbacks your response is going to change. Eventually, you yourself change. There will be a proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back. One thing more and you might just crack down the middle.
We are, for all our modern gadgetry, primitive beings. We have bodies that are prehistoric and digestive tracts that precede the agricultural revolution. We have minds that are older than the industrial revolution, and we're simply not intended to be able to process a constant barrage of information, stimulation, environmental strain.
Ama is the sludge, the build up, the slowly or not so slowly developing layer of grime that weakens our immunity, dulls our enthusiasm, and clouds our vitality. It's a toxic wet blanket thrown over our cell's ability to communicate, and without clear communication between our 70 odd trillion cells, things go a little haywire. We'll get sick more often and sickness will linger, longer. We'll be prone to allergies, including food sensitivities. Our hormones will back fire and our inflammatory response will alternately spit and roar, roar and spittle.
Ama is
As spring comes in, we're aware of changes in the environment around us. The skies get lighter, and higher. The earth thaws. Something deep in plants begins to move like a white milky pap toward the surface and then breaks through. Animals are born, the rains come, the heaviness of winter becomes the green wild pulse of spring.
These are profound shifts. They are a regeneration process. And the thing is, something similar is going on in your own physiology at this time. But we tend to be so disconnected from seasons and nature that we don't recognize the signs, wouldn't know what to do with them if we did, we live more by our newsfeed and our work demands than our body's inner wisdom.
The ancient vaidyas encouraged people to go through seasonal shifts with a purification process known as panchakarma. Every April, I go through this process myself and guide others through it online. It starts April 1 and is four weeks of ritually cleaning out your gunk. I mean the emotional, and the physical, and the old, and the relatively new. For $100, you'll get
Stress and strain and less than optimal digestion are part of the world we live in. But there are things we can do to recover, rejuvenate, regenerate. You can feel spring, as a thing that is happening inside of you.
Last night I got a text from a friend. The Yoga Center of Minneapolis closed it's doors last night. No one knew it was going to happen except the few key players involved. I know how bad this can hurt. I know how many people are affected. This morning the word has spread and more and more people are expressing sadness, hurt, and confusion.
There is grief there. Grief is a complicated thing, both a process and not a process at all. It lasts. And it changes.
From a humble place, I want to make myself available to anyone who needs to talk. From a more humble place still, I will open my intensives/teacher training this summer to anyone who can no longer complete their work with The Yoga Center.
It doesn't fix everything, but it is something. It may not be the right fit for you. But we can have a conversation and figure it out. "Training" and "yoga teacher" and "Yoga Alliance" are all confusing topics right now. We'll address every one of them.
Deep bows,
Karin
