
Moving toward truth
Here’s a truth about yoga:
Half the folks came thinking this was a physical practice. Often, they’re hoping for something ‘accessible’, ‘holistic’, or ‘peaceful’. Once they are in, though, they realize their mistake: rather than being a perfect physical practice, these folks start having what we’ll just call Spiritual Awakenings or Startlements. And yoga isn’t very good exercise, turns out. And it isn’t what you’d dare call ‘peaceful’, either. These people suddenly find themselves faced with their Soul.
The other half of the folks came in thinking of their spiritual needs or mental health. Much like the first crowd, they quick realize their mistake: yoga isn’t heaven! We don’t get enlightenment! Problems still exist! Exactly like the first half of folks, who at first blush seem these folk’s polar opposite, the Seekers find themselves tripping over something unexpected. What this crowd trips on could be called reality.
Alas and alack, all of the humans turn out to be not so different after all. And once we’ve realized our mistake, we’ve got a question to ask ourselves.
Are we in it for the truth?
I mean by that, of course, the juncture of soul and real life.
Next funny truth: this same dichotomy seems to happen to what we’d call yoga teachers. Half of ‘em are wracked by questions of ‘should I teach yoga?!’ and doubt. The other half of what we’re calling yoga teachers are overconfident and not really teaching yoga, but some gimmick spun out of their own ego. They call it yoga, but….
Same question we need to ask ourselves: are we prepared for the truth?
These are just my mulls as I prep to teach three collected sūktams beginning in November. Śraddhā sūktam is a hymn toward/prayer about what is often called faith, but I hate that translation. Śraddhā is not ‘faith’ like a catachesim, I believe in this god who has these attributes and therefore I hold this identity. No is śraddhā faith as in I trust everything’s gonna be alright in the end, I’ll just thoughts and prayers and sankalpa my way threw life. My teacher says we shouldn’t translate śraddhā at all, just use the word itself. But people inevitably start wondering about their own meanings. I have a philosopher friend who translates it as the opposite of ‘faith’; he calls it self-confidence or conviction. I think there’s value in that, but I’d dig a little more. Some aspect of śraddhā has to do with admitting we don’t know, feeling the intensity of our curiosity, stoking the embers of our hunger. All understandings of it have to do with Truth. And how that sets you off on a path…
Agni sūktam follows. Agni is fire, tapas or commitment, will power. Again, there’s a lot to explore here. We have free will (don’t we?) but mostly we get in our own way. Motivation, dedication, action are more a sigh and pissing away than a lived experience of agency and empowerment. What is that about? How can we screw up less and feel better?
And finally Medhā is generally translated as ‘intellect’, ‘memory’, or some aspect of learned by heart Saraswati. It is all of those things. But for my subversive purposes here, I’m going to tell you that Medhā is the outcome of being in it for the truth. It’s grace. It’s a combination of honey and dhi, which word shows up in Samādhi (enlightenment, self-transcendence), buddhi (awake consciousness, our buddha nature), and dhyāṇa (meditation).
It’s rather lovely to teach these three together. It’s quite traditional to do so. In fact it’s quite traditional to say these are the prerequisites, the first things folks should learn, the seed that carries everything else in it and foundation without which you’re probably going to be confused, if not wholly lost.
It’s also lovely that these three are exquisitely simple. They are beginner friendly. Anybody can learn them. Doesn’t matter what you believe, or how old you are, or if you can sing. It doesn’t matter what caste you belong to or gender you are. It doesn’t matter whether you are fascinated by spirituality and deeply committed already or have no idea what to think about it all.
Anyway, the course is up. I’ll start November 4 and go all the way to the end of January 2026. You can sign up or read more about it. I’ll tell you more a couple of times between then and now.
For today, just sit with the feeling.
Peace.
K
On hard pivots
fall freak outs and balancing
It’s pretty common for me to talk to people who are longing for - or feel the need for- a change.
This common truth becomes almost ridiculously predictable every fall. I wish y’all could know: it’s not just you, but almost everyone. And if it’s everybody, it means you’re not crazy. It means you’re on to something.
Some iterations:
people experiencing burnout
people feeling they know what they need, but have ‘somehow’ slipped, forgotten, or gotten off track
people feeling scared/anxious
people feeling fed up and hoping that if they find the right practice, everything will change
people feeling a little empowered because of an experience, and now wanting to ‘commit’ or ‘go all the way’
The experience is real. Taste it, savor it if you can. Let it teach you something about reality and who you are.
But I’d caution hard against sudden decisions, major life changes, trying to control your life though too many metrics (diet, exercise, finance, break ups, quitting your job or firing your in-laws).
Life will give you the changes, and the pivots. You don’t have to make them.
Rather than ultimatuming yourself, shaming yourself, or setting yourself up for failure, many of the traditional practices of this time of year are intended to be very short lived. Not new-life-path, but a reset. A couple of experiences, a couple of days, one afternoon or weekend of winterizing and putting away the summer.
If we give our body a couple of easy, short, consistant experiences with yoga āsana our body itself says: oh yeah, this feels like coming home.
If you give your body a day or two of massage, or bath, or naps, your life energy tells you how much it is still actually in there.
If you give yourself two or three meditation or mantra experiences, your intellect shouts out how fun and helpful it is.
If you go to a yoga class, or sit down with spiritual friends, or meet with a teacher, or spend ten minutes one morning reading spiritually nourishing texts, your being responds: “I LOVE this!”
Once this happens, we don't have to ‘discipline’ ourselves; instead, moving forward is fueled by knowing and love. We move on with love that knows and knowledge that is love - there are declensions there that are rich and soothing, stabilizing and true. Most love is blind and selfish, but not this kind. And most knowledge is flimsy, but not this kind.
Changing this way is much nicer than trying to hard pivot.
The next phase will happen naturally. You can’t even stop it if you tried.
Some traditional practices for fall/transition:
ten days of chanting a mantra you have previously studied
panchakarma or seasonal detox (specifically the way it is intended to be SHORT. This isn’t a new diet. It’s a very short period of time to let your system catch up and let go).
moon gazing/meditations. (This can be any noticing of the shifting light, and the intensity of moon in this season. It also has to do with remembrance and love-for-others, even those far away or passed.)
declutter and winterize
physically: warming, stabilizing, rhythmic. I tend to pare my practice down to emphasize balancing, inversion, and savasana.
intellectually: love, letting go. Which often requires a shift toward spiritual practices.
Meaty. Substantial. Bigger than you can chew. At first, this seems like the opposite of letting go. It isn’t really. It’s new notebook smell or a ball of yarn, a good book that isn’t escapist, but hearty. It’s the principle of nourishing yourself as a human being: prepping the larder in a sense. I’m not a gardener at all, and by extension have no capacity for pickling and jarring. But I’m good at making pies. Think thanksgiving, harvest festivals, soups, toasty warm things, ghee.
memorial services. go visit your dead and appreciate your own wizening. G said the other day ‘20 year old me would be so amazed by almost 50 year old me’. Own a little bit of that for yourself.
local: rather than far-flung or you going off on some vacation and pilgrimage, this is a season of homecoming. Support local schools or spiritual centers. Get neighborly. Volunteer. Make a local difference. Support small businesses. etc.
The most important thing
This is one of those that I spontaneously felt a need to say to a mentee who was over-planning, thinking, and worrying. I quickly needed to say it to five more people who were also stuck in debating themselves, procrastination, feeling ick about themselves. I have since come to realize is a Root Truth or principle:
Don’t worry about it.
Just do one thing today.
The power of that is irrefutable and gives you both clarity and courage and wisdom for the next thing.
Prayer and Invocation: September class
Whenever climate dispair enters the conversation, a friend says: Nature is still naturing.
She means: the laws of nature still hold. To say something is ‘broken’ is not quite true. This is what heat, and pressure, and wind patterns do. This is fire. This is ocean. This is sky. This is earth.
There was a singed maple leaf on the sidewalk this morning: curled, red, so brittle it tottered in the very little breeze.. It’s too soon, I thought. But also, maybe not: there are always a few in August. There is always that first moment of realizing summer is pretty much a wrap, the dark is coming fast. I felt a little flush of joy, and a blanch of sadness, and a shudder for how complicated conversations about the weather have become. I felt all of those things at once, but not in a conflicted way. That capacity of feeling is probably the main thing yoga has done for me, which only starts to sound serious when you realize it’s not just about the flickering conflicted thoughts of a moment on the sidewalk: the capacity holds true around things like depression, politics, god, or one’s self.
Whenever climate dispair enters the conversation, a friend says: Nature is still naturing.
She means: the laws of nature still hold. To say something is ‘broken’ is not quite true. This is what heat, and pressure, and wind patterns do. This is fire. This is ocean. This is sky. This is earth.
The traditional invocation mantras as handed down within the Krishna Yajur Veda lineage, Mysore.
What grieves us isn’t nature or the end of nature. It’s the personal landscapes and lives affected. It’s the sense of loss and of danger. These human things. Once we’re rightly naming our grief, how it feels and how we respond tends to change. Specifically, what happens is what the Dali Lama intended to happen when he chided folks for asking God to bring peace to violence: that’s not god’s fault, he said. Be better humans.
Anyway. Every September I host an Intro to Vedic chant course. One way you could understand the Veda is coming to understand and be in a different relationship with universal laws or truths, including the laws of nature. Yesterday I finished setting the up the course up: registration is open.
I call it ‘intro to Vedic chant’, and it is that. It is a kind of basics, initiation, set you all up ignition series. But in my heart, it’s nothing so pleb. In my heart, it’s ‘invocation and prayer’.
In other words, it starts us in on the important stuff.
As always, please take good care of yourselves and reach out if you need anything. As another friend says: be excellent to one another.
xo,
K
Bhagavad Gita Book Three: Unending responsibilities
Now here we are in book three. Heart is beginning to swim along, one stroke at a time. Like the karate kid, waxing on and off, he’s doing the thing but can’t help asking: what does this have to do with actual fighting? When do I get to the real thing?
Life is unending responsibilities. Life is hard.
That isn’t a harsh teaching. It’s a liberating one. Other spiritualities have said it in other ways, and psychology has a plethora of variants, but the fact is life is hard. First off, we are mortal. Secondly, we are social. And finally, we are complicated individuals with sometimes conflicting needs.
Krishna reminds Arjuna of this in book three, and cautions him not to make life any harder than it has to be. The old saw about there always being some pain, but we do not have to contribute suffering into the deal. Without mortality, other people, and individuality there could be no love. No freedom. No hope.
If we feel life should be other than it is, we’re creating our own suffering. If we want to bend life or other people to our will, we’re authoring hell. If we simply roll over and feel victimized by it all, we’re making the biggest suffering yet: denying the soul and abandoning hope.
Life isn’t ONLY suffering. Love is real, too. Given these two truths, our actions matter. Our orientation makes a difference. We’re either helping or we’re not.
This is largely the teaching of book three. With several philosophically dense forays into psychology and a smattering of poetic stunners.
Karma, SPIRITUALITY, and Dharma: This Sacred Life
In book one, we are given a visceral telling of the suffering heart. We either take too much responsibility, in an enmeshed way, or deny our responsibility in a disengaged way. Either way, we set up an inner conflict and banish our better nature to the wilds. This causes a physical upset and churning. Eventually, the churning confuses our minds and leaves us with delusion. (Ragas (desire) leads to shoka (grief) ends in moha (deluded intellect), in which we confuse right and wrong. Then we are spiritually lost.
In Book Two, thankfully, our delusion recognizes itself and asks for help. And god smiles.
Then basic yoga philosophy/spirituality/psychology is laid down. (Only our most superficial layer is mind, under that a tangled and turbulent ocean of stories and habits, archetypes and beliefs. These are constantly framing our every thought and perception though we’re unaware of this happening. We don’t see what we’re doing but blame outsides. Under even that there is enlightened awareness, and under even that you have a soul. To navigate your way out of worldly suffering, then, you actually have to pause and about face. Rather than staying in the superficial, realize what you are doing to yourself. Go even further and realize you have a soul and this is all a spiritual question.)
Good. But what are we actually supposed to DO? The wave is coming! The world is on fire! I am sad and confused!
Ah, says the teacher. Philosophy by itself is nothing. What you really need is not so much philosophy as yoga. Yoga is philosophy in action. Specifically, skillful action. Not flailing, not giving in, but following some well designed according to human anatomy and perennially proven steps: swimming is one kick and alternate arm stroking, then the other, over and over again. There is a world of difference between pity and compassion. This is obvious if you compare self pity and self compassion. Yoga is the skillful move from futile pity to real and active compassion.
Now here we are in book three. Heart is beginning to swim along, one stroke at a time. Like the karate kid, waxing on and off, he’s doing the thing but can’t help asking: what does this have to do with actual fighting? When do I get to the real thing?
Transmission and Translation
Us modern western folk stumble across yoga and pick it up. Oh! What a pretty thing, we think, holding it like a shiny rock. I want this, we think.
“āchāryāt pādamādatte, pādam śişyah swamedhayā | pādam sabrahmachāribhyah, pādam kālakrameṇa ca”
Much of my mentorship with Michael Stone boiled down to talking about transmission and translation. Us modern yogis wouldn’t realize these are important things unless we were explicitly told so: after all, this pretty gee-gaw was right here in front of us. It’s human nature to want it for our own. It’s natural to assume, having read a word, that we understood the meaning. Some of us even learn Sanskrit, and then think for sure we know. Others of us ritualize forms to an acuteness, thinking we’re doing the same thing the ancients did.
Transmission is how spiritual teaching and philosophy are done. Yoga, Buddhism, and Vedanta all have a rich lexicon and lineage here, but transmission is part of all spiritualities and philosophies. It’s the socratic method. It’s students and teachers. It’s curricula, time, and pedagogy. It’s sacred texts but also the cultural practices surrounding the texts. It is exegesis of sacred texts, and a community of people who have more information and experience than you do. We can also see the idea of transmission in things like therapy, twelve step programs, and craft or apprenticeship.
Transmission suggests that there is a vastness behind the words and provides access to the vastness. There is an unspoken (but assumed) difference between karma kanda - the bare on the page things - and jñāna kanda, the unexplicit, subtle, symbolic and personally relevant meaning of things.
The synthesis of karma kanda and jñāna kanda unfolds in the context of teachers, having a personal practice that is guided or mentored by those teachers, and ongoing community and experiences that provide us with the good of sangha, mirrors, examples, and support. The unspoken reality of transmission is the fact that no ‘thing’ is actually being handed on at all: this process evokes direct personal insight in the student, rather than handing on a secret wisdom that has been unchanged for millennia and is available only through initiation. The understood consequence is an actual regard for handed on technologies, artifacts, symbols and cultural wealth.
All this is assumed in the context of transmission. But since we are reading in translation, not only across cultures but across time, these things need to be made explicit.
If then, we’re starting to play with transmission, we next have to realize we are dealing with translation. Often, in translation, literalness kills the meaning. We need to develop a dialectical approach, an exploratory and inquisitive open earring. But we also need to understand that translation works in two directions: to merely look for meaning quickly leads to spiritual consumerism and escapism (aka cultural appropriation) or unexamined false equivalency and reductive thought: saying something like the Gita is Vedanta’s ‘bible’, or that śāntiḥ means ‘inner peace’. Coming to understand, through translations, has to do with examining our own projections as it much as it does grasping something outside our current referents.
"Selfless Service”
In all the English translations of the Gita, book three is titled 'karma yoga’ or ‘selfless service’. This is where translation and transmission are important. It isn’t that this translation is wrong, but “selfless service” requires teaching, practice, and self realization to hold up. Without these, it is prone to valorizing meekness. As meekness and self abnegation have been used against people for centuries, this is a real danger.
Karma yoga means much more than selfless service.
Karma means action, and refers to the underlying or background (implicit, not explicit, transmitted not read) philosophy of sankhya. In Sankhya, ‘things’ are not fixed; existence itself is constant change. We too are constantly changing. Life is a verb. Hope is a verb. Suffering is a verb. Self is a verb. Love is a verb. As modern prophet Octavia Butler says, “god is change”.
Change means possibility. Change is not pure chaos. It isn’t moral relativity. Change unfolds according to natural laws. We can influence, but not control. We can participate, but we are not god and cannot save the world. We are not totally free, but we are never absolute victims.
How change unfolds evokes the gunas: rajas is frantic, tamas is thick and clingy or resistant, sattva is a goldilocks just right.
Karma means more than Sankhya-n change, though. Also referent here is the background vision of the Veda and the revelation of the Upanisads.
Both take the bare fact of life and render it sacred. They posit an understanding of religion or spirituality that is ultimate and personal. This is it. Bless. Both the Veda and the Upanisads suggest that a practice of seeing ordinary, often painful life as sacred transforms suffering and liberates the individual. But this requires effort. There are thousands of mantras and teachings here, and it takes a body ten thousand attempts, but the basic idea is that life can become a spiritual journey, the body mind itself can be seen as a temple, ordinary human spirit can overcome all conceivable obstacles.
Given all of that, karma does not mean self-abnegation or saccharine charity. We cannot ever fully believe nor live in any ethos that requires one’s own diminishment.
The vision of the Veda and the unfoldment of the Upanisads posit: every moment as sacred, the mundane as potentially holy, the smallest actions as being the only true path.
Dharma
If we look at the world, or into our hearts, we see: change is real and constant but so too are connections. Every action has consequences.
Trying to control or feeling helpless have consequences.
Doing your best also has consequences.
Dharma - in this context - means recognizing all of that as true and putting your feet on the ground, your shoulder to the dharma wheel, and prayer on your lips. A slight variance between being alive and living our lives: to love what is mortal, to engage with humanity, and to believe in oneself. Dharma also means recognizing we’ll have to keep doing this, over and over again. Every day. For the rest of our lives. It means renouncing fantasy while adhering to hope, realizing this isn’t a contradiction. Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water, goes the saying: after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
There is something to human mind (sankhya, the Veda, and the Upanishads all have their gems to give narrative and reveal what it is, but I’ll just say that it is) that balks against reality. We aren’t good at it. Dharma is, in a sense, highly unnatural.
Each of us has a life to live, a role to play, and we shimmer all the way into the galaxy. This is one of the ways I was taught dharma is: every individual has both rights and responsibilities/dharma to self, to society, and to the cosmos. These are not opposite pulls. There is only one gravity. None of that, if sincerely done, is a contradiction.
We heal ourselves and the world through small, intimate, personal actions. This can seem impossible or contradictory, but isn’t. Unfortunately it is the grasping or understanding this that stands in the way of experiencing it. This is one step at a time philosophy, or one day at a time or just for today understanding of our human capacities. It baffles, but it also works.
It works because the karmic truth of world suffering is that it happened one moment, one action, one person at a time. Trauma happens relationally, so healing must also be relational. Ideas are not the same as being. We can talk, hope, wish, pray, or debate what needs to be done endlessly, but everything begins with a single immediate step. We do not have to have all the answers or be perfect; we only have to be ourselves and answer the moment best we can.
Two Objections
In good practice, objections are vital. They are wonderful. They are food and safety and lead us somewhere. Let’s consider two big ones.
1) Living my own life and meeting my personal responsibilities isn’t enough (because of suffering in the world).
True. You will never save the world. But it is an underestimation of the world to think you could or should save it. There is no contradiction between your own fulfillment and contributing to the welfare of humanity. Not so long as you see your own fulfillment as inclusive of love.
2) “unending responsibilities” sounds exhausting! Productivity culture is killing us and is oppressive.
True. But conflating karmic responsibilities with some kind of marxist capitalism is the confusion here. Dehumanizing ourselves isn’t the point of karmic responsibilities. This objection isn’t a mistake or a problem; it gives us something to start working with. Everybody’s got some serious prior patterning and unexamined potentials as regards “responsibility”. Unraveling the pattern and realizing the potential - personally - is the way. This ends being an enrichment and truth discovery, rather than a goad over the head.
In the Beginning/In conclusion
Book Three suggests that we challenge the separation between spiritual life and ordinary life. Dharma isn’t something you have to seek; it’s who you already are and the life you have been given.
Our heartfelt and bodied responses to this teaching are not a problem; they are clues. Do you object with number one, “this isn’t enough!” or number two, “it’s all too much!”?
The very first thing Krishna says in this book is that understanding is hard, but doing one right thing is easy. He appears to be contrasting understanding (jñāna) and action (karma). That apparent contradiction will be taken up later. For now, I just say he isn’t contradicting: understanding is not separate from doing, it simply takes a long time and direct experience. Knowing comes from doing, not vice versa.
Two śastras come up in discussion:
Venerable Samu Sunim “The Dharma is intimate, immediate, spontaneous, and obvious”
and poet Mary Oliver’s
The Buddha’s Last Instruction
“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.
Why yoga matters now: emotional regulation and resilience. Big picture, and two tools to use today.
yoga is a toolbox of emotional regulation and personal resilance.
Let’s define those terms. It’s important to know what it is we’re doing.
Emotional regulation, at first blush and in common parlance, is something like ‘calm down’ or ‘feel better’. But that’s not what it really is. Emotional regulation is about connection.
Resilience does not mean unflappability. It is not a holy aloofness or a pasted on smile. It isn’t a Nietzchean what doesn’t kill you or a grin and go on. It is a vivid capacity to do hard things.
The emotional landscape is harsh.
In our fatigue, depression, anxiety, resentment, burn out and insecurity, yoga is more important than ever.
In the upcoming three day workshop, I both want to provide solace and support, and I want to kick some butts (hearts) into gear. We know enough, we’ve got tools, or at least we have suspicions and questions and a longing.
It’s important that we get clear on what we’re doing, what yoga is (and isn’t), so that we can navigate our way through this positively. It’s important that we navigate our way through: our doing so is how we most effectively support others, change the world, make a difference.
And we can make a difference.
One of the key understandings here is that yoga is a toolbox of emotional regulation and personal resilience.
Let’s define those terms. It’s important to know what it is we’re doing.
Emotional regulation, at first blush and in common parlance, is something like ‘calm down’ or ‘feel better’. But that’s not what it really is. Emotional regulation is about connection.
Resilience does not mean unflappability. It is not a holy aloofness or a pasted on smile. It isn’t a Nietzchean what doesn’t kill you or a grin and go on. It is a vivid capacity to do hard things.
Emotional regulation
We have all been socialized to ‘regulate’ in terms of hiding our emotions, staying calm for others, or behaving in accepted or rewarded ways. Some emotions are valued and other’s aren’t. In psychobabble, the emotional toolbox we’ve been given often involves masking, repressing, ableism, and code shifting. In extremis, this might come down to internalized oppression and abuse.
True regulation, though, means:
feeling your body, including a capacity to navigate unpleasant sensation or discomfort, find resources for pain management, and accurately assess threat and dysmorphia. This gives us compassion and understanding of things like dissociation, numbing, projection, compulsivity. Both acceptance and new choices abound. We can stop hating or trying to control ourselves all the time.
feeling safe in your body - in at least some aspect of your body. This is something that often has to be learned, and compassionately learned, especially as regards trauma, pain, gender dysmorphia, ablism and ageism, etc.
emotional literacy: being able to name what’s happening inside
emotional discovery: human body brains are hardwired to experience an incredible array of emotions. Discovering our emotional capacity opens our world, reveals depths and possibilities we weren’t aware of, and has a real tone of befriending yourself.
reaching for support instead of shutting down. or running away
an evolutionary and expansive flexibility to our responses, in an upward and outward spiraling way
this both implies a reclamation of things that have been neglected, denied, or stuffed so far down they’ve become hell monsters of the truly mythic deeps and darks, AND it means we are able to express the appropriate things at the appropriate times. We know the antisocial edge of expressing the wrong thing at the wrong time in the wrong way. But we also have beaucoup ness: physical, artistic, meditative, spiritual and social ways of expressing what needs to be expressed without inflicting harm or building up consequences.
The Yoga tradition is rich with tools for mitigating challenge and resourcing the good, beginning with our sense of agency and capacity.
For the sake of brevity and utility here, it’s most important to say
-emotional regulation is learned. Our plastic brains have a capacity to relearn, and our tissues adapt to input.
-Yoga has a unique understanding of suffering, and an ultimately positivistic and humanistic orientation in the face of suffering. We’re not aiming at neutral, nor a return to before we were broken, but at something good out of intrinsic challenge. There is a yes and an affirmation of will at its source. This doesn’t deny or suppress difficult things. We can feel seen and acknowledged. Painful, ugly, and sad things are validated and realized. But they are not only validated: they are seen as potentially and positively transformative. Healing means moving beyond coping to integration; resolution means uplifting; regulation means hope.
Resilience
I think I was given an image of resilience as grit. As taking another hit. As being like one of those inflatable punching bags, generally posing as a clown and weighted at the bottom such that it kept bouncing back no matter what. Problem with this was, such an idea is secretly resentful and dependent on the damage. It’s a negative definition, and a pretty rough way to relate to either yourself or the world. I thought of resilience as toughness. I’ve always been tough. I’ve been praised for it. But sometimes that toughness was causing harm. I identified with my brokenness.
Yoga insists that people aren’t broken.
Through practice and a lot of training, I’ve come to understand that resilance is
adaptive:
which isn’t the same thing as taking another punch. Resilent folks adjust to difficulty and stressors, finding ways to grow and discover. Their well-being is enhanced. I think ‘wellness’ is a shit word, we should start replacing it with ‘welfare’. I’m going to start a whole holy campaign, a marketing blitz, in which we take on the wellness industry with welfare. It isn’t individual. Health markers are more determined by public health than personal choice; at the same time it is true that exercising choice where we’ve got it makes the difference. We all do better when we all do better (Paul Wellstone).
Resilience is recuperative
which is more than ‘bouncing back’. It is a reorienting and mastery of setbacks and challenges. Resilience demonstrates mental strength and employed emotional regulation. It is vitalizing.
Resilience is resourced
Resilient folks develop and utilize so many tools to manage stress and adversity that they reach a point of instinctive, intuitive, magic seeming knowing how to make anything work. These tools include seeking support, problem solving, maintaining positive attitudes and cognitive savvy.
Resilience is mentally well
there are so many contextual things to be said about mental health; forgive my brevity. Point here is that resilience can help protect us, and it aids in living with mental-health challenges.
Resilience promotes psychological capital/wealth
I have a teacher who frequently says ‘the only real wealth is spiritual wealth’. This involves a heck of a lot of unpacking and teaching and practice, but is ultimately true. Resilience is correlative to the positive psychological resources of hope, optimism, creativity, trust, and self-efficacy, which help in hard times. Us. And others.
Resilience is dynamic and a process. It is fluid.
Resilience is a learned capacity. It develops over time. Through experiences. It is not a flat line understanding of homeostasis, but an evocative aliveness.
Resilience is connective and social
Resilient people have strong and varied social networks and resources, a fractal like web of bonding, interrelating, learning, reflecting, responsibilities, impact and opportunity.
Two tips or tools for today: #1 resource your feels #2 take a break that isn’t social media
#1 Get down get down
There are enormous healing potentials, rivers of it, veins and jewels of it, waiting beneath the surface. I mean the surface we mostly glide over in looking away. I mean the thing we stand, sit, walk, run, dance, sleep, and eat upon. This stunning green and bluey ball hurtling at a thousand miles an hour around it’s own axis, spinning at 230 kilometers a second through a mind-boggling expanse of void, without seeming to move at all. Earth is the primordial maternal presence. She hushes and cuddles. She lullabies and washes. She feeds and she loves. Her thick web of consciousnesses has possibilities for healing that are - by definition -limitless.
The earth is a recycler. She asks that you pour out your feels to her. Next time you’re watching a sunset, passing a garden, standing by water, seeing the earth’s body from a window in a plane, or glimspe the moon, notice that pull she has. Listen to the ask she’s making of you: She hungers not so much for your guardianship, but for your emotional response. She is begging for your sorrow and rage, confusion and anxiety, darkness or hot piss. She wholly takes it off our hands. Wholly. She wants what we’ve got to offer, and will turn it to nourishment. She leaves us cleared out, like a good belly laugh, hard work out, or ugly cry does. And while those things work too, they might not be easy. It is relatively easy to get down on the ground.
Roll around.
You’ve got eyes ears nose skin and tongue. Spend a minute tapping your sensory perceptions.
Pour your feelings out.
Feel gravity, and its reciprocal support. Feel the - again, literally infinite - possibilities of letting go.
Taste stillness.
Then you can remember who you really are.
Personally, ‘grounding’ requires regular practice. It doesn’t require particular understanding or the right mood. It just takes a surrender of time. It’s less about ‘focus’ than what feels in some ways the opposite: a hugeness of letting go.
Fact: I don’t always know what’s right for myself. I certainly don’t always know what’s right for the world, or the planet. But I’m sure the earth herself does know. If I want to tap into what she knows and get out of my limited knowing, I’ve got to routinely spend time with her.
Fact: the vast healing potential she’s got is always there. It is never not there. It’s just below the surface. It’s deeper than you think. It’s waiting for you.
Advanced practice: you yourself are earth. “Under the surface” is also your innerness.
Super advanced practice: all cultures have some ‘Mother Earth’ teaching, and we can personally and emotionally access it pretty quickly. It’s harder to find that same force in relationships. Relationships feel scary and opposite of unconditional love and truth. But the force is there, too. It is love.
#2 take a break that isn’t social media
The human nervous system toggles. We cycle through attention and distraction, sleep and wake, circadian rhythms and breathing more through the right or left nostril all day long. The most important skill - first skill - that yoga teaches is the pause. This refines forever so it becomes more skillful time management, knowing what sucks our time and being able to redirect ourselves, knowing how to state shift or reframe a thought, making our time meaningful and knowing what a lifetime is, specifically our own. But it starts with the capacity and training of pause and know you are pausing. Work and accomplishment require regular breaks. We eventually learn how to best manage ourselves, down to food and light and boundaries. Social strife and interpersonal healing.
But it starts with the pause.
Thing is, most of us only ever ‘take a break’ by checking in with an electronic screen of some sort. I know how hard this is. I know how easy. I know that every single one of the screens has some benefits to it too. I’m not a luddite. I make my living online.
But I know the difference between taking a break where I grab the phone, lean back into a slouch, munch mindlessly and punch at buttons with my thumb and a different kind of break where I stand up, move my body a little, refresh in some way, refuel in some way, and genuinely set a boundary between work/tasks/news/phone and my mind body.
For now, I’d just suggest brainstorming half a dozen break things that do not involve your phone. Then do one. This is going to take practice. It’ll be hard. At some point you might have to set some rules for yourself around the phone or tablet. But you can’t even get to that until you have some alternatives that aren’t phone based. Don’t be surprised if you go five seconds and then your busy brain says “okay, done! lemme get back to that screen”. Push back on that. Give yourself an honest five minutes to feel your feels, go for a walk around the block, eat your lunch without a screen, spend at least five minutes with a pet or plant, read or listen to a song. The breath is a classic: you can manage four breath. Do a couple yoga poses without the phone in the room. You have to curate this list yourself. It is also limitless. But you need to start with a few clearly defined ideas.
Advanced: get to 10-12 breath. Do it every day.
Super advanced: context is everything. Theoretically, based on the tradition, we’d get so bloody good at our responsible life (I mean work/resources) we have half our time back, plus honest to god retirement. Without being appropriative or exploitative. Possible? Yes. Difficult and long term, for sure.
Gratis #3 do it every day. Personal, self directed, daily practice is the real yoga. There are - ahem, limitless - possibilities for what that can be. We tend to overthink/expect/do and then procrastinate/not do anything at all. I’m saying this to validate your experience and remind you it’s human, you’re not broken. Daily requires a plan, support, and check ins. It happens in tandem with mentorship and community. I don’t recommend you try to reinvent any wheels or self help your way. You’ll just go more crazy.
In closing
Again, these are the exactly the kinda things I wanna lay out and discuss and plot into your brain over the upcoming workshop. Seriously recommended for yoga teachers. Mental health professionals and educators and caregivers can use it. This is vital for human beings. Good stuff, all round. I’ll say it for you in Sanskrit and point out the relevant sūtras if you want.
If you can’t make the workshop, join us on mighty networks for convo, accountability, good people.
I’m always available for a 1:1, if that’s what you need.
Bhagavad Gita Reflections: Initiation and not getting lost
What is the difference between going down a rabbit hole and a spiritual journey?
Paradox is everywhere and life is confusing. Sometimes we replace one paradox with another paradox and feel like we’ve grown or changed. We tend to do this all the time: new person, but same relationship dynamics. New diet, but same wrestling with our feelings via food. New job, same attitude.
“What is the difference between going down a rabbit hole and a spiritual journey? ”
When it comes to yoga, the apparent paradoxes are all over the place, and the ability to pick up a new thread or new idea is tempting. But I don’t think yoga is about paradoxes so much as it is about resolving paradox. What’s more important, I think humans are capable of change, rather than merely reshuffling the deck. How now and what?!, you should be wondering.
The Bhagavad Gita can often feel like a mystery: a compendium of paradoxes. How can we do our work but not care about outcome? How can self realization end suffering in the world? How can fighting our fight lead to inner peace? How can there be something eternal and unchanging in us, if everything is literally change? Reading it independently leaves folks - as it left me - with a sense of oh that is so beautiful, but I don’t understand it.
Here is one such paradox: I think it’s enough to think something beautiful and not understand, because beauty itself is healing, AND I think misunderstanding can lead to projection if we’re not careful. This is how religion becomes harmful.
Resolution here is a fine and subtle distinction, mostly in keeping our misunderstanding in front of us and being willing to reduce it.
AKA, ongoing learning.
Here’s the next paradox: the Gita is so rich, there are so many possible discoveries in every tiny passage and backstory, that we could spend years ‘exploring’ but not really learn anything at all.
Resolution is possible there, too. Again, it has something to do with right relationship to beauty and humility. It also has something to do with consistency (accountability? Stability? Growth?) in a student teacher relationship and a consequent personal practice. But the 4 years, then 6 years, then 3 years, then starting all over again method of study I’ve done personally (rabbit hole or spiritual journey, depending on how you look at it) is not something realistic for most folks at this time in this world.
Years and details aren’t required for healing and understanding, either.
I’m trying to present the Gita in a way that meets the great pain and confusion of our current world. Very come as you are, no commitment required, there is something valuable to even a little. To uplift the beauty and keep the humility in front of us, while creating a frame for folks to be consistant in self care and soul work.
My motive is largely to help discern the context so that folks don’t get lost in the details or detours. To point out the big picture that folks often can’t see for the wealth of details.
Book Two, Sankhya Yoga, for example, has a narrative thread:
Initiation and asking for help. The beginning of yoga.
Presentation of the yoga philosophy: you have a soul. The end.
Insistence that philosophy has to be applied in life: Yoga is skill in action.
Which lays the foundation for book three: karma yoga or yoga in action (Monday June 2, join us!).
Of course, each one of my bullet points can be a pandora’s box. It is supposed to raise personal questions and make us think. It’s supposed to prompt furtherness, rather than a final answer.
It’s book three, the introduction to yoga, that drops words and questions about ‘karma yoga’, ‘jñana yoga, ‘bhakti yoga’. At first, this discernment of different ‘kinds’ of yoga feels exhilarating. It affirms different aspects of who we are. But I also think we can miss the point, there: there is only one yoga. Action, knowledge, and devotion are different aspects of the same thing.
What is the difference between going down a rabbit hole and a spiritual journey?
I have some ideas. A rabbit hole is preyas (that which satisfies or relieves immediate need for distraction or numbs us out) while a spiritual journey is shreyas (that which might be uncomfortable or difficult in the moment but inclines us toward truth, like doing ten minutes of studying a language is tedious but required for mastery, or doing the dishes is unpleasant but leaves a clean feeling and us better prepared for the next meal or day).
But I think it’s just a useful question to ask yourself: is this a rabbit hole? Ask today, but ask yourself tomorrow too. Thus: learning rather than mere distraction. Self as the common denominator.
You can, if you like, catch up on the first three videos. But you don’t have to ‘catch up’. You are welcome to join us at any time, and I will catch you up in real time. That’s my job, not yours.
All the recordings and info are here.
Bhū
this song does what all Vedic mantra does, what I’d argue all yogic techniques do: it has a surface or superficial meaning, but if we are given this mantra through lineaged oral tradition we are also re-enacting, incorpoating, or discovering within ourselves a truth that goes down so deep the superficial meaning blanches. There is a process involved in studentship, in other words, that takes you from one kind of understanding to something completely other. This process is lost if folks google their way to enlightenment.
Yoga is often appealing because it’s spirituality celebrates nature and we live in a world that has very nearly destroyed the planet. Rather than creating a duality between the secular and the divine, in which ‘the world’, ‘the body’, and the experience of being human are rendered taboo, yoga validates earth, and water, fire, and the flesh.
The Bhū Süktam or hymn to Mother Earth of the Taitirriya Saṃhita, Kriṣṇa Yajur Veda is one of the oldest songs of humanity. It brilliantly speaks to this reverence for the planet as divine. It’s also one of the first Vedic mantraḥ-s a student should learn, as it lays out a narrative of the entire spiritual journey while providing the literal bricks and tools for our own unfoldment.
More, this song does what all Vedic mantra does, what I’d argue all yogic techniques do: it has a surface or superficial meaning, but if we are given this mantra through lineaged oral tradition we are also re-enacting, incorpoating, or discovering within ourselves a truth that goes down so deep the superficial meaning blanches. There is a process involved in studentship, in other words, that takes you from one kind of understanding to something completely other. This process is lost if folks google their way to enlightenment.
This set of mantraḥ-s is practical. They are also initiatory: their beauty and promise calls us in. Past being practical and pretty, they create a context of learning; like a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, or a brilliant teacher can provide examples, stories, and experiences in which a student can do the thing themselves (discovering in the end not just the thing but themselves), the Bhū Sūktam gives us the seeds of yoga, enlightenment, transformation, spirituality, Vedanta, sacred ecology, rest and comfort, support, promise, and Truth. The mantraḥ-s are also exquisite, revelatory, emotive and refined: this isn’t simply a poem, and the poet is not just any poet: the rishi is a brahmarishi and the mantras are the earth herself, singing. All of this cycles and churns and develops in us until we ‘get it’. I haven’t time or patience here to go into what that means, other than to say it’s important. Come to study the Bhū Sūktam and I’ll tell you all about it.
All Vedic Mantra teaching happens on our social network, Yoga Club. This involves an extra step on your part, you have to click and agree to some basic humanistic respect. It’s worth it. It takes us past the googling toward enlightenment stage of our practice.
Vīrabhadrāsana
I wanted to make a video for someone, and that turned into a bit of a tutorial on āsana in general. Enjoy!
Today/Tonight is Mahasivaratri, the great night of Siva. It’s when your consciousness explodes, and you realize you’ve been in a fog all winter. Or that ‘this too shall pass’ is, actually, true. It might have grief in it. Or joy. Or relief. Feelings being varied, it might have some of all of that.
Sivaratri is when the God Siva comes down from his mountaintop meditation and joins the world. Consciousness comes to being. Or Consciousness marries power and action (siva, pavarti).
Sivaratri is when Siva did his cosmic dance, thrumming the cycle of reality into being with beginning, happening, and destruction.
Sivaratri is celebrated as the return of the light, the victory of light over darkness, and/or inner awakening.
It’s a good time to pray or reflect.
It’s a wonderful time observance.
I wanted to make a video for someone, and that turned into a bit of a tutorial on āsana in general. Enjoy!
Personal Practice: Finding yourself
A person who practices at home is discovering themselves. They are listening to themselves, meeting themselves, starting to work with the delicate questions of self-discipline and taking responsibility, self guidance, and meditation. This also means facing and undoing perfectionism, procrastination, waiting for the right mood or moment, and unrealistic or irrational thought patterns and goals. Home practice is where you truly learn to support and be with yourself. It also involves sitting in the midst of your actual life - your living room, your stuff, your schedule, your thoughts, your feelings. It is an incredible journey of self-discovery. It’s the beginning of integrity. It’s a process of developing somatic and emotional literacy, which is also somatic and emotional discovery. It’s becoming your own healer, friend, I can be so bold as to say ‘destiny’. After all, that’s what the ancient texts say. I’m not making this shit up.
Unpacking what yoga is, what it means, takes years and years. Maybe lifetimes and lifetimes.
“Now, personal practice tends to start as all or nothing, a big mess, once in a while, binge and purge cycles. Once a person has the desire or willingness for it, they tend to get overwhelmed and confused, thrown around by all the possibilities. ”
But I will assume - since you are here - that you know “yoga” does not mean postures. Postures are one of the tools of yoga. But just like a fork is not food, and you can have food without a fork and eat without a fork and sometimes forks are used not for eating and etiquitte but as weapons, the tools of yoga (here, poses) are not ‘yoga’: you can do yoga without the poses fork, and just because someone is wielding the poses-fork does not mean that they understand anything.
Okay, so we know that yoga does not equal poses, but poses are a tool. Next thing to learn is that yoga is about the self. Maybe not at the beginning. But if you want understanding, learning, and something that actually changes the way your body mind functions rather than a stop gap, yoga is a self thing.
I mean that yoga begins and really starts to take off only once a person begins a home, personal, self guided practice.
Discerning the difference between yoga classes and home practice is hard. Most of us have enough experience with classes (or, increasingly in our internet based world, a video) that we now have certain expectations of what ‘practice’ should look and feel like.
But your home practice tends not to look or feel like a class. In a home practice, you aren’t trying to replicate the experience of class on your own, you’re letting go of that and just meeting yourself. I repeat: home practice isn’t supposed to look, feel, or be the same as what happens in a yoga studio.
A home yoga practice: no video, no teacher guiding you, no fancy studio with pretty smells and a lovely distance from your home responsibilities. Please note that there is nothing wrong with going to a yoga class. But home practice is different, and more important.
A person who practices at home is discovering themselves. They are listening to themselves, meeting themselves, starting to work with the delicate questions of self-discipline and taking responsibility, self guidance, and meditation. This also means facing and undoing perfectionism, procrastination, waiting for the right mood or moment, and unrealistic or irrational thought patterns and goals. Home practice is where you truly learn to support and be with yourself. It also involves sitting in the midst of your actual life - your living room, your stuff, your schedule, your thoughts, your feelings. It is an incredible journey of self-discovery. It’s the beginning of integrity. It’s a process of developing somatic and emotional literacy, which is also somatic and emotional discovery. It’s becoming your own healer, friend, I can be so bold as to say ‘destiny’. After all, that’s what the ancient texts say. I’m not making this shit up.
I suppose that is exactly why most people have a hard time doing it. The old quip about most unhappiness being an inability to sit in a room with oneself.
Home practice is sitting in a room with oneself.
It is only here that you start to actually learn yoga. You learn how much you know and what you would like to learn more about. You learn what you can do and you learn what your excuses are. You learn to be self-motivated, and you really start to discover your emotions, your patterns, your beliefs, and your needs.
If you explore the source texts or listen to good teachers, they will tell you over and over again: yoga is self discovery. Yoga is self-realization. Yoga is self discipline. Yoga is self-liberation.
Which has to mean, if you take it seriously, that yoga is something YOU. DO. YOURSELF.
Teaching people that yoga practice is yoga class (and this is sometimes extended to teacher training, or retreat, or a renunciate life, or an influencer persona, a monk, a perfect handstand), is often doing a disservice to students. They are not being given tools, but following the leader and building deep subliminal patterns of DEPENDENCE, not independence and self exploration. They develop attachments and all sorts of projections around and at the teacher, other students, or the various environmental and time things of a studio. They aren’t learning consistency or discipline so much as expression and exploration (good things, but consistency and discipline are more important if we want healing and liberation). They aren’t learning presence and self determination, but escapism.
Escapism is a very hard pattern to unlearn.
Something happens when you try to practice in your own space. Without a video or music (there are times music can be part of the practice, depending, but if we’re listening to music we tend to be zoning out and listening to the music, not listening to the breath, our own mind, or our body). Something happens when you try to recall what you have learned, what you know, how to do, on your own. Something - all sorts of realizations about your mind, your motivations, your habits - comes crystal clear when we start to choose/think/do “I can do this for myself. I can handle this. I will.”
Now, personal practice tends to start as all or nothing, a big mess, once in a while, binge and purge cycles. Once a person has the desire or willingness for it, they tend to get overwhelmed and confused, thrown around by all the possibilities. I have heard five hundred stories about how a person ‘committed’ to peloton or meditation for two weeks, and then went nine months without. A thousand stories of how someone went to teacher training and then felt more lost and imposter syndromey than before they started. I’ve heard so many people say they wish they could meditate, or had a spiritual practice, etc etc etc.
Hence: working with a mentor or time honored thing is helpful.
A mentor can make suggestions, validate your experiences, help you focus, give you ideas and resources, keep you accountable while also challenging your perfectionism or unrealistic, irrational thoughts and behaviors.
Just a couple things to keep in mind:
five minutes, one pose, a few breath, two minutes of meditation IS YOGA. Your home practice may not involve a yoga mat, a change of clothes, forty five minutes, savasana, or sweat.
At first, people start with something like ‘one yoga pose’ or ‘I’m going to meditate’ every day, and it is often the last thing they get to in the day. That’s okay! It’s a great start.
At the most true and basic level, it doesn’t matter what you do. Something is 100% better than nothing. Doing anything that gets you into the body and the present moment, brings awareness to breath, makes a choice is good enough. Anything that soothes your soul and reminds you you have one works (prayer, meditation, gratitude practices, devotional reading, mantra recitation, sacred objects like an altar, candle, worry stone, murti). Dance for a minute. Take a couple of big stretches. Get into your five senses. Tap, massage, or stroke your own body. Focus the eyes on the horizon if you’ve been staring at the computer screen or indoors all day long; focus the eyes on an object close to hand if you’ve been running around all day. Sigh out loud for five breath, blow through your lips like a horse to relieve facial and jaw holding, stand in mountain pose to feel present and grounded, warrior to feel your strength and courage, or tree to find equanimity. Lie down and progressively relax for a few minutes. It is all, all, good and you do actually know enough. For some people, setting a timer for 5, 10, or 15 minutes and scrolling through this stuff is a great beginning. For others, setting a once a day reminder. For some, connecting it to something like your morning coffee, leaving the office end of day, brushing your teeth, or a ‘trigger’ like noticing tight shoulders or held breath. All golden.
Next, finding a consistant time in your schedule is the deal breaker. This is entirely dependent upon your all ready happening life: kids, family, work, time management basics. For many, morning practice is easiest. But for some, work and family make this difficult. After work or evening makes more sense and should be embraced.
Having a plan, an outline, something you have previously memorized or are currently working on is how you break through the ‘what on earth, out of all the possible things I could do, should I do?!’ This doesn’t mean that you’ll do the same thing for the next seven years or forever: it means this is what you are doing now. Repetition and mastery and process, actually addressing your goals and needs, your personal situation, starts to come into focus here. It’s not just ‘yoga’, at that point, but personal revolution. It is growth. It is learning. It is overcoming your personal likes and dislikes or moods and dependency on the situation or time or convenience. But that does require perseverance, commitment, dedication, and lots of repetition.
Consistency does not mean every single day, but generally over the big picture course of time. We kill ourselves with the ‘I missed a day, I have to start all over at the beginning’ mentality. The more consistent you are over several months, there will be a great scattering of days you didn’t practice but a general trend toward progress. This, too, is very basic human psychology stuff. It’s the difference between ideals/perfection/someday and actual practice.
My main point here: you have all the tools you need. I will probably draw out each of the bulleted points in future, but for now it’s important people hear and have reflected back to them: you have the tools, you have the capacity, you know enough and are enough. Once we start a personal practice, studio or classes become a wonderful supplement. They can be for fun.
If you want to chat as a way to hone in on your own personal practice, I’m around. If you want to bring some traditional yoga and the implicit self practice that happens in mantra recitation, two new classes are beginning in May. (Bhū Sūktam Tuesdays, Nārāyaṇa Sūktam Thursdays).
Whatever you do, please remember that you have enough, you know enough, you can take care of your mind body today. Given the external stressors these days, your own wellbeing is vital. It may feel frivolous or self-indulgent: this isn’t true.
Why it's harder to practice when the world is on fire
Why is it harder to get to the mat when you are stressed and tired? It’s not you. You’re not crazy. It’s neuroscience.
Funny thing. We know that yoga helps us manage stress. We know it sometimes inclines us toward feeling pretty good. But when we are stressed and feel like crap, getting to the mat is harder than at any other time.
Why?
Don’t beat yourself up about it and don’t think you’re crazy. What’s actually happening is that our nervous systems are dealing with more allostatic load. We’re hyped up and exhausted and scared. A nervous system that is overwhelmed, under resourced, and scared does not want to practice yoga. It wants to run around and be busy. It’s looking for activity and double checking the phone. We want to look at the news. And sometimes we’re avoiding the news but compelled to vacuum, go for a run, or scroll through happy puppy videos. We might be craving a bit of physical, but it’s unlikely to be yoga. We’re craving distraction so deeply the crave is instinctive. Things that numb will take the edge off and our body mind knows this, privileging things like the phone, Netflix, alcohol, bingey food. But taking the edge off is not a good strategy in the long run.
“Stress isn’t necessarily bad, and our bodies respond to stress positively. However, if the body’s stress responses are turned on too frequently, for too long a period of time, a kind of wear and tear begins to happen. The response systems become disregualted. ”
So what do we do?
Know you’re not crazy. This is what a nervous system does when the pressure is high. Know, too, that you (and your students) will come back. Trust me. I’ve seen this happen to me personally and in the yoga world over decades. During extremity (like Covid, and now this) people can’t do yoga. In a month or so, they will come flooding back as their system realizes it needs yoga. In a while, you yourself will come back.
Set the bar as low as you can. One pose*. Promise yourself to do one pose, every single day. If you can do it at the same time every day, even better.*
One Pose wonder
When I say ‘one pose’, I mean moving in and out of one shape, on the breath, for 8-10 breath.
I have three that I use for myself and have used for students with incredible success.
Cakravakrasana (all fours with an upper back backbend on inhale, child’s pose on exhale). Truly follow the breath and slow the breath down a little bit each time. Move forward slowly on the inhale, and slowly move backward with every exhale. This tends to be langhana, bringing us closer to the parasympathetic state.
Bhujangasana (cobra to forehead to the floor). Lie face down on the floor. With every (slow!) inhale, lift and reach your heart area forward and upward away from the floor. With every exhale, rest your forehead or one cheek back on the floor. Don’t use your arms to push up; look for movement in your spine. This is slightly more brahmana (uplifting, toward engagement in our system), but will still work like magic.
Balance one one leg choose a ‘pose’ if you like, but this is kinda fun in that it doesn’t even have to be a ‘pose’. You can play tilt a whirl if you want, challenge your balance, or look for the big beautiful poses so famous in yoga magazines and social media. Try to stick with the principle of engaging with the breath in a long, slow way for 8-10 breath then repeat on the other side. Maybe you find tree pose on exhales, and something weird on the inbreath. Or just move your arms to a wide stretch and back to a prayer. The big muscles engaged will harness your nervous system’s and chemical metabolism’s attention, the balance aspect will steady your mind, the stabilization will get to core/belly/spinal movements that encourage nervous system regulation, and the realization that one thing makes a difference will leave you in a better place.
Why does this work?
Inevitably, people tend to feel a craving in the body mind for more, or at least a flush of competency. We immediately feel better. You can do more if you want, but hold to your simple commitment of one is enough. It’s more important that you repeat this tomorrow, and if you overdo today you are less likely to come back tomorrow. If you have a memorized sequence, it’s easy to roll into it. Consistency is better than intensity. Intensity has to be built up over time.
With one pose, you have hooked behavioral attention to the breath.
You’ve deepened that mind-breath connection to include some movement.
And you have meet your own needs, honored your commitment to yourself, shifted gears completely.
If, just if, you can hook this one pose to the same time each day you’ll be harmonizing with all sorts of neuroscience about time, stress, and agency.
Dork stuff: what is allostatic load?
It helps to recognize that there are diffrent kinds of stress. Some is personal (work, family trouble, disease, job loss, moving, grief) and some is impersonal (social strain, uncertainty, pervasive fear).
Beyond even that, there is something known as allostatic load. Allostatic load is a concept articulated by neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen and psychologist Eliot Steller in 1993. It's the price the body pays for adapting to stress, the biological consequences of prolonged stress responses. Stress isn’t necessarily bad, and our bodies respond to stress positively. However, if the body’s stress responses are turned on too frequently, for too long a period of time, a kind of wear and tear begins to happen. The response systems become disregualted. Depending on who we are and what we’re starting from, allostatic load may effect blood pressure and cardiovascular mechanisms in the body, cholesterol levels, blood sugar, cortisol levels, and a whole litany of inflammatory markers. Mood, concentration, sleep, and appetite bear the consequences.
Rebuilding our resilience - aka our capacity to do hard things - is vital for long term outcomes, but it’s also a way to immediately feel better.
Try it. As always, if you want support and guidance, I’m here.
Bhagavad Gita Reflections: Bhisma
Myths raise so many questions. Maybe that is their point.
I’m hosting a sangha contemplating the Bhagavad Gita the first Monday of each month, one book at a time. Yesterday I provided some of the context and background of the first book, Arjuna’s sorrow.
One of the difficulties of texts like the Gita is the slippery bluntness of mythology. Mythology is absurd. It’s raises more questions than it answers. No matter how you look at some of the stories, you can’t make them resolve to fairness, right, or even a very pretty picture. Why is it okay for some humans to consort (that’s a euphemism: I mean love and have sex with) gods, but other people are karmically punished for it? I don’t know. Why does a mother need to drown her infant children to absolve past karma? I don’t know. How can a person be both an animal, a god, and a person?
I simply don’t know.
Some of the stories upset me. They hurt. Whatever little sense I can pull out of them doesn’t feel edifying. I can’t find virtue in it. It doesn’t feel right. I don’t understand the myths, but I feel them. I feel them as an actual clenching in my body and tightness in my throat. Why are such upsetting things passed on as spiritual wisdom? Why on earth would a person assent to these stories, let alone glorify what they do to your blood pressure?
Myths raise so many questions. Maybe that is their point.
As always happens after teaching, some of the topics stay with me for several days. The thing lingers like the smell of a dead person you loved hangs out in their jacket for awhile, and you know it will disperse, and you are both saddened and gladdened by the fact. Influence is a little bit cognizant, but mostly not. Influence is emotive and atmospheric, more of the instinctive than of the intellectual.
Bhisma! I keep thinking today. Bhisma is the grandfather of the entire war. He loves and advises both sides, though he sticks to his responsibilities and the Kuru kingdom. He sticks with the bad guys even when everybody knows they are the bad guys. He sticks to his responsibilities of state, but he also allows the Pandavas to win by telling them exactly what they need to do to kill him and thus shift the balance of power; he bows out to let the younger generation ascend to the throne. He bows out, but on his deathbed he passes on all the wisdom of statecraft, ethics, spirituality, and dharma to the incoming regime. Bhisma is, the tradition holds, a good man. He is the epitome of a good man. He is the root source of ancestor reverence. But how is this possible? How can a good person be on the wrong side of history?
I remembered a conversation with a friend in which we discussed our remaining, ouchy love for people who hurt us. We all have some people we needed to break with for our own sanity if not survival. In quiet voices, we talked about how difficult it is to sever when you hoped that the break, if nothing else, would cause them to change their ways. But we did the right thing. We took care of ourselves and moved on. We set boundaries. We went on to live a better life.
We talked of how much we still love them, though we wish things were different.
After about sixteen years of a contemplative life, a thing happens. We start to feel compassion, - even, sometimes, a mournful kind of gratitude - for the folks who raised us. We become much more honest and aware of our own imperfections. Done right, this widens into a more cogent self.
I also thought, smelling Bhisma in the spring dirt, of the perennial question of historic wrongs. Our ancestors were assholes. The founding fathers were slaveholding misogynists. Old literature and history baffle us with their antiquated standards. We don’t know how to appreciate the past, love what we love, and similtaneously know the wrongs within it. Our ancestors also suffered. The founding fathers did, actually, wrest out one of the most noble projects of human history. I personally will always have a soft spot for William Faulkner.
“Mythology helps us mold coherent narratives that help us - surrounded as we are by the cacophony of the daily - grasp the dramas and changes we ourselves go though.”
One of the things that kicks me into bafflement and wonder every time history and patrimony comes up is the fact that Toni Morrison read - I mean contemplatively and compulsively reread - the King James Bible. I mull this endlessly. Most of us dismiss such a text. But I dare not say we are smarter than Toni Morrison was.
The religious answer I’ve been given regarding Bhisma holds that somebody had to play that role so that we could learn the lesson and restore things to right. In his heart, Bhisma knew god wanted him to play this role, so he was willing to be the bad guy in his actions. You can’t know other people’s hearts, the teaching says. Search your own.
Religious answers don’t help me much. Not if I take them as religion. I mean rules to follow. It’s like the story of Abraham in the Bible, willing to sacrifice his own son: the only possible moral here is taking the intervening Angel as as aspect of Abraham’s absolute love for his own kid, while the dictate of the previous angel presses Abraham to stay open to the will of god. An allegory, in other words, of the scary asks devotion requires and the building of trust that comes when we’re willing to consider the asks.
I thought of bell hooks, too. Her own childhood was a violent and morally disappointing one. She left this world with a desire that her family know she still loved them.
Bhisma! He is the story of love being messy, and the shortcoming of passing judgement lest we be judged (our age will also appear barbaric), and the ultimate fact that people are more than one thing. This doesn’t absolve, but opens to both forgiveness and accountability.
Stories like the Gita and the Bible aren’t rules to follow. In the conversation (not recorded, but the best part of these Mondays), we talked about the danger of moving through the world with the lens of good versus evil. If we do that, it’s too easy to believe god is on our side. It’s easy to forget that god is on the other guy’s side, too.
The only slightly less dangerous way of moving through this world is to constantly reexamine your own heart.
Rather than being ‘lessons’, mythology (literature, history, the contemplative life) hit us with feelings, regurgitating themes we recognize in ourselves. Sometimes they give us new ways to think about the stories we tell ourselves. Maybe - and I think this is valuable - they make us realize we’re telling stories, pause for a second, and gaze into the screaming silence behind the stories.
There is a clash and constant, ongoing flood of events, individual wills, and circumstances in this life. Mythology helps us mold coherent narratives that help us - surrounded as we are by the cacophony of the daily - grasp the dramas and changes we ourselves go though. I think they do this more by emotion than reason. Funny thing is, the process doesn’t berate reason. It elevates reason.
Laying Sūtras on your Body: Integrating Yoga Postures and Yoga Philosophy
This June, over the summer solstice, I’ll be leading a workshop from Yess Yoga in Minneapolis. I want yoga teachers, long term yogis, and those interested in finding their own feet in a yoga practice to come.
This June, over the summer solstice, I’ll be leading a workshop from Yess Yoga in Minneapolis. I want yoga teachers, long term yogis, and those interested in finding their own feet in a yoga practice to come.
There has been a little bit of an awakening in yoga land. Ten years ago, most people in our culture assumed that yoga meant postures. This is still heavily believed, but studios and pop culture generally are a little bit aware now that yoga is not limited to poses. We know there’s a philosophy. We sorta get the impression it’s a sprirituality or has something to do with mindful, purposeful living. We understand that it is ancient but know very little of the actual details.
I’m proud of us for the little bit of awakening we’ve had. I’m glad that students suspect there is more to it than poses. I thrill every time someone reaches out with curiosity, confusion, a mystified what in the heck is this magic kinda question.
The picture above basically captures our reality. We start with the first circle, in which yoga mostly equals poses, but has a tiny little bit of philosophy in it.
Then, we start to understand that yoga poses are actually the tiny part. They are only a part. They are minor. They may not even be ancient, and might have more to do with European caletsthenics than Indian philosophy.
I think we need one more model. Something that can bridge or resolve these two circles.
Otherwise, we’re still just as stuck as we were.
Come spend three days learning about yoga bodies, yoga anatomy, and yoga posture from a lineaged standpoint. I think it’s exciting. It’s also affirming, reassuring, clarifying. Expect lots of movement exploration, lots of discussion, and lots to move forward with.
Registration is here.