Yogi Rose

There’s something very special about the Texas Hill Country in the spring time.  It has a lot to do with the bluebonnets and all the other wildflowers that splash our lawns and roadsides with bright colors.  There is an unspoken agreement between neighbors and residents of the Hill Country to mow around the flowers, preserving nature’s exclamations of beauty and life as long as we can.  With the butterflies dancing about the flowers, the birds singing in symphony in the trees, and the sweet smells of honeysuckle lingering on soft breezes, it is the absolute perfect time to venture outside for some yogic walking!

You might be wondering what that means.  What makes yogic walking any different from regular old walking?  The answer is not much.  It’s really a matter of focus, intention, adding in some stretches at the end of your walk, and of course, offering yourself the wonderful gift of savasana to close your practice.  Yogic walking is an excellent way to bring your practice out of the classroom and into your home environment.  It offers an aerobic element and can help bring awareness around tendencies in your everyday postural alignment you might not have noticed before.

To get started with a yogic walking practice, choose a pleasant route (in your neighborhood, at a nearby park, etc.) that will take about 20-30 minutes to complete (1/2 to 3/4 mile, depending on your pace).   If you want, begin with a 5-10 minute centering.  You can center yourself in whatever way feels right for you.  You might sit for a few moments, just noticing your breath, your physical body, and then your thoughts and emotions.  The intention here is to acknowledge what is happening internally for you and to invite your awareness into your present moment experience.

Begin walking with a slow pace, paying attention to the sensation of your feet meeting the ground with each step.  Notice if you are walking solidly, with all parts of your feet (except your arch) contacting the ground.  If not, are you tending toward walking on the outer edges of your feet or the inner edges?  Notice if this way of walking feels supportive for you.  Is there discomfort in any parts of your body, like your knees, hips, or thighs?  Make any adjustments in your gait that feel supportive for you.

Having checked in with your feet, find your perfect walking stride.  You want to keep a brisk pace that will raise your heartbeat, but not so fast that your posture suffers.  Often times, when we try to walk too fast, our body compensates by leaning forward.  This can strain the back and neck.  Your perfect stride should allow you to keep your shoulders aligned over your hips.  Just as in Mountain Pose, stabilize your core by drawing your abdominals toward your spine and encourage a long spine by lengthening up through your crown.  As you find the pace that best supports your ability to maintain this postural alignment, notice how it feels.  Is it different from the way you normally walk?  What is different about it?

Having checked in with your postural alignment, notice your breath.  Breathing in and out through your nose, establish a rhythm that supports your level of aerobic activity.  Meditate on your breath, witnessing its sensations as you inhale and exhale.  Notice how focusing on your breath helps to keep your awareness anchored in your present experience.  Are there any scents in the air?  Honeysuckle, fresh-cut grass, burning wood, laundry, food cooking?  What sounds do you hear?  Birds chirping, dogs barking, treetops rustling, kids laughing?  What about sensations in your body?  Breezes kissing your skin, sweat trickling from your hairline, sun raising the hairs along your arms?  Or perhaps there is a discomfort in part of your body.  Perhaps an adjustment in your pace, gait, or posture would be helpful.

Just like when you are practicing yoga on your mat, yogic walking is all about diving into your present experience.  Often times, when we go for a walk, our minds race with thoughts.  All sorts of worries, plans, lists, imaginings, etc. preoccupy our minds, so that we arrive at the end of our walk feeling just as stressed and/or distracted as we were at the start.  Yogic walking invites our minds to relax and simply enjoy, moment to moment, all the little beauties inherent to nature.

At the close of your walk, find a quiet space where you can cool down and stretch.  If you want, light a candle or an incense.  Sit down in easy pose and take a couple of falling out breaths.  Continuing to breathe with a steady, even pace in and out through your nose, bring your right ear to your right shoulder, with your left hand on the floor to stretch your left shoulder.  Hold a few breaths and then switch sides.  From here, you want to stretch all your major muscles (hamstrings, quadriceps, hip flexors, calves,  back and abdominals.)  If you want, you can complete the flow of postures suggested below, holding each for 5 breaths.

• Forward Bend (flexing your feet to stretch the calves)
• Cat/Cow
• Pigeon (each leg)
• Plank
• Cobra
• Extended Child
• Cow Face (or Triceps Stretch)
• Boat
• Knees to Chest (lying down)
• Bridge
• Happy Baby
• Knee Down Twist

No matter which stretches you choose, be sure to give yourself the gift of savasana at the end of your practice.  As you lie in savasana, scan through each of your body parts, relaxing each muscle as your body settles into the support of the ground beneath you.  You can stay here as long as you like, but try to be with stillness for at least 3-5 minutes.

I wish you joy, peace, and balance as you embark on your yogic walk!  Namaste.

Check out this article from the UCLA Newsroom, reporting on new findings that regular meditation practice strengthens the brain.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/evidence-builds-that-meditation-230237.aspx

If this inspires you to start your own meditation practice, try this simple technique.  Find a quiet place to sit in a comfortable position, on a small cushion or folded blanket if you like,  upright with relaxed shoulders.  Close your eyes or gaze softly downward.  Begin to notice the subtle sensation of your breath passing in and out through the tip of your nose, and keep your awareness focused there.  You will notice your mind wandering, jumping from thought to thought.  That’s okay.  It’s normal.  Each time you notice your mind wandering from your breath, simply label it as thought.  You can say inwardly to yourself, “thought”, and then return your focus to your breath.  This will happen again and again.  Our minds are used to being very active, so settling down into a single-pointed focus on our breath takes time and practice.  Just keep noticing when your mind has strayed, label it as thought, and return to your breath.  Do this for 20 minutes.

The Little Lessons…

Recently several of my students, at separate times, presented me with an article about the dangers of yoga. The article discussed the very real fact that yoga can lead to injuries, especially when practiced with a fervor that does not honor the body’s signals and limitations. One very wise student (Ginny), pointed out the article’s reference to the struggle many modern yoga practitioners face, sometimes unwittingly, with “ego and obsession”. There is always someone in class, in a magazine, or on the internet who can do a more challenging pose, or can do a pose with greater precision or depth. It is a very real part of our nature to try to be the best, to push ourselves beyond our limits in the pursuit of some idealized goal.

My initial response to this article was to receive it with gratitude. It had opened up a discussion, not only in my classes, but in the broader public discourse, about something that needed to be brought to light. As yoga has grown in popularity, there has been a lot of talk about its myriad benefits. And they are many! But the truth is yoga can lead to injury when practiced carelessly. We are putting our body in some funky positions, doing things our body may not be used to. And more importantly, we all have different bodies, different limitations, different edges. Discussing this article opened the door to discussing the importance of honoring our bodies where they are at and establishing a comfort with developing a practice that supports us rather than harms us.

As I sat with awareness around the whole topic, a deeper level of understanding also blossomed. I began to think about what inspires my own personal yoga practice. For me, the physical postures have always been a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. My practice has been informed by the 8-limbs of yoga, only one of which is asana (physical posture). I have found that practicing asanas has not only prepared my body for prolonged periods of meditation, as was its original intention, but it has served to detoxify my body of stored-up stress and tension. It has connected me deeply to my body and all its wisdom, informing me of places in my body that are holding tension, emotional build-up, and memories of past traumatic experiences. It has provided me with a way to let go of those toxins and return to a feeling of comfort, balance, and peace within my physical experience.

My personal practice of yoga has always been driven by my intention to cultivate contentment, resilience, concentration, and perhaps most importantly, the capacity to be truly engaged with my present experience. To me, this is one of the greatest jewels a yoga practice can offer. I have practiced with the intention of learning to, in the words of Deepak Chopra, In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside [me]. The discussion inspired by my students presenting this article to me reminded me to share this other aspect of my yoga practice with my students. I realized I had over the years of teaching drifted from an emphasis in my classes on pranayama (breath awareness & control), pratyahara (sensory withdrawal), dharana (concentration), and dhyana (meditation and observation of the mind) to mostly focusing on alignment and deepening of the asana practice.
As many of my students already know, we began focusing with more intention on this aspect of our practice. That is not the focus of this article, however. What I would instead like to reflect on here is the incredible gift my students gave to me, probably without knowing it, by simply bringing this article to my attention. This served as an inspiration to me to re-examine myself as a teacher and reminded me to bring the fruits of my personal practice into the classroom. The truth is, each and every class I receive the gift of my students’ unique presence and inspiration in so many unspoken ways. And thinking of all this reminds me of how life has a way of offering us lessons in the least expected ways. We are all each other’s teachers.

Sometimes life unfolds in the most agreeable, easily-recognized-as-beautiful way. Other times, life offers us challenges, opportunities to see ourselves and the world around us in new, refreshing, and enlightening ways. The key is to be receptive to the lessons of those challenges. In the context of a yoga class, this sort of challenge may come in the form of a limitation, a condition that suddenly interrupts or shifts our practice, or an inability to relax into savasana. In these moments, it’s so helpful to remember that the point of our yoga practice is not to reach some imagined level of perfection. The point of our yoga practice is to come to know ourselves (body, heart, mind, and spirit) more deeply, just as we are, and in doing so, to become actively engaged in supporting the unfolding of our own unique path.

I thank all of you for supporting my path in the many ways that you do, and it is always my intention to support your path to the best of my ability. I encourage you to explore your relationship to yourself, to the other people in your life, and to the world around you each time you come to your mat. The time you spend with yourself in mindful awareness of your present experience can offer a multitude of little lessons.

P.S. Special thanks to Leslie for reminding me it had been a long while since I’d taken the time to write a blog entry.  Namaste.

The classic symbol for Thanksgiving is the cornucopia, “the horn of plenty”, overflowing with an abundance of good things.  On Thanksgiving, we take the time to recognize and honor the blessings of our lives – the people who ignite the light of love in our hearts, the gifts of our sustenance (home, food, etc.), and the countless bearers of joy and inspiration, whatever they may be for each of us.  And if we’re really paying attention, we remember to give thanks for the simple fact of our existence, the breath of life that flows through us moment to moment, without our even having to think about it.

All this giving of thanks feels good.  It realigns priorities, redirects our focus to all that is important and beautiful in our lives.  In other words, it opens our hearts to abundance.  It’s easy, in the daily grind of things, to overlook our blessings.  The people and things in our life that bring us comfort, joy, and love can become like background noise – always there, yet barely noticed.  They get overshadowed by the daily struggles, concerns, and stresses that seem to be shouting for our attention.

One of the most amazing gifts we receive from our regular yoga practice is the gift of silence.  As we turn our attention inward, witnessing our breath and our bodies intently, we inevitably turn down the volume of our life’s preoccupations.  We create a sense of spaciousness in our bodies, our hearts, and our minds as we slow down and flow with the rhythm of our own breath.  Then, like the horn of plenty, the space we have created can be filled to overflowing with awareness of the richness of our lives.

On this day of Thanksgiving, I invite you to set aside a few moments to open yourself to the abundance of your life with a simple breathing practice.  It can be done this morning, before the activities of the day get underway, in the afternoon as your meal settles, or in the evening as you reflect back on your day.

Find a quiet space to sit in a comfortable position.  Take a couple of falling out breaths (in through your nose, out through your mouth), and begin to turn your awareness inward.  Take notice of your breath, just a gentle focus on the sensation of your breath entering and leaving your body, for a few minutes.  Then, as you breathe in, feel a sense of spaciousness expanding in your heart.  As you breathe out, feel your breath connecting you to every living being around you.  After a few minutes, breathe in with an awareness of being filled with the many blessings of your life.  You can focus on one or a few special blessings you would like to honor, or simply receive with your breath a general awareness of all your blessings.  As you breathe out, release your attachment to those blessings by sending the gift of your abundance out to your loved ones, to the world as a whole if you like.  Do this until you feel a sense of completion.

When you’ve completed this practice, notice how you feel.  What is the quality of your breath?  What has shifted in your body?  How does your heart feel?  What is your state of mind?  Opening to abundance is merely a matter of perspective.  And we get to choose, moment to moment, what perspective we want to energize within ourselves.  Consider what it might feel like to invite the energy of abundance and gratitude into your life on a daily basis by setting aside 10 minutes each day to do this practice.

In closing, I would like to extend my immense appreciation for the many beautiful spirits I am blessed to share my yoga practice with each week.  Thank you for your presence in my life.  May your Thanksgiving Day be filled with love, joy, and an abundance of all that brings you happiness and health!

P.S.  If you happen to experience indigestion after your Thanksgiving meal, Legs Up The Wall is a wonderful posture to support your digestive system.  A few minutes of lying on the floor with your legs extending up a wall can ease digestive problems.

I’m so happy to announce the Om Vibrations Yoga & Music Experience, coming to Boerne’s Cave Without a Name on November 11-13th.  With a variety of yoga classes and informative/creative workshops above ground during the day, and live kirtan and other musical performances in the cave at night, this event will offer many opportunities for self exploration and growth.  This is a 3-day event with on-site camping available.  I’m looking forward to sharing my enthusiasm for yoga, music, and nature with a community of kind spirits.  Hope to see you there!  Event details at http://www.omvibrationsexperience.com/  Please share with anyone you think might be interested!