Tag: gratitude

My Mindful Week: At The Core

This week, I stole several aspects of the physical yoga practice from Southern Star Yoga Center’s Mary Solomon, who once taught a class all about “hugging the midline” of the body. There are a few different ways to incorporate a block into any of several yoga poses that help teach the body to draw its two sides together toward the midline, the center line between right and left. Place a block between the knees for bridge pose, and for chair pose. Hold a block length-wise between the forearms for chair pose. Hell, get two blocks and do both–go crazy! Having something to squeeze against, in the knees and/or the arms, helps me to lengthen my spine from the center and out through the tailbone and crown of the head.

To encourage a three-dimensional “hug to the center” muscular engagement, I invited students to visualize their spine as sitting very deep inside the body, and to imagine it as the strong, central structure around which the rest of the body is constructed. This is true–although the spine is closer to the back side of the body, the part we can feel is a bony protrusion of certain vertebrae that extend out significantly from the central part of the vertebrae and the spinal cord. When you feel the back side of the body engage, imagine that the center of the back, between the shoulders, lumbar spinal muscles, between the hips, is wrapping in and through that seam, deep to the center of the body. On the front side of the body, imagine a line from the notch of the collarbones down the chest and abdomen, through the bellybutton. Feeling the abs and front body engage, imagine those muscles wrapping in and through the body, to hug against the spine. From the side, imagine the shoulders hugging in to the center of the heart and lung space, the hips hugging in to the central base of the spine, the waist and ribs hugging against that same central column that is the spine.

Beyond the physical body, I invited students to consider the idea of their “core” or “central” or “authentic” Self. What I mean by this is the Self of the individual’s own internal experience. For most of us, a lot of our time and energy goes into generating language, expressions, and behaviors to connect and communicate with others. Connection is crucial to our survival, and this time and energy is spent for very good reasons. However, most of us do not spend sufficient time in solitude, in connection to our inner experience and Self. How is there any difference? I want to ask when I think about this. Is the Self of the behavior and language not the same? I think the true answer is both yes and no. I think of my Self as containing different aspects that are all genuine, but none can exist without the others. To steal a very ancient way of conceptualizing this, an individual Self is like a lotus–made of many connected petals, a stem, a root–all the same plant. If the root and stem systems don’t feed all of the leaves and petals, the plant will be in poor health. This practice of observing the mental/emotional/spiritual core Self, is about feeding the innermost petals of the flower, not just the largest ones on the outside.

I might notice that I have a very social Self, who craves to be around other humans, is effusive, and dances shamelessly during daylight hours, even. I have a work Self, who when I’m healthy is productive, efficient, and tries not to be too worried about being wrong, brash, or overly assertive. I have dysfunctional outward-facing Selves of a few sorts–crying after too much to drink, being pushy, not listening (or failing to understand) because it wasn’t convenient for my ego–in addition to my dysfunctional inward-facing Selves. As ever, there isn’t a right or wrong thought to have about what is “at the core” and authentic for you, in a given day, at a given moment. The point is to practice reaching inward. This is grounded in the Yoga Sutras as swadyaya, “self study,” a way of increasing knowledge. We try to observe our physical body, our mind, and our emotions and our spirits in ways that make them more perfectly aligned. Ideally, we align the aspects of our being in a way that helps us turn our behaviors toward our highest values. Effective self-study requires self-honesty and humility–the willingness to see aspects of yourself that might not look ideal to you, willingness to be silly or to not have a goal or an agenda. It might be willingness to be compassionate toward a Self you find who has done damage to yourself or to someone else. It might be willingness to truly enjoy what you enjoy, for its own sake and not for how it makes you look to someone else.

For a very, very long time, I have had a Self who, in private, or with trusted people, loves to make up interpretive dances just to be pretty. Today, after I had worked on some personal time in my yoga, I put on a song I have been loving all weekend, and made a little loose flow with it. I’m not good at making videos, so this is probably a highly inconvenient way to share it. I’m kind of tired and sweaty, and I could come up with a million things to say about alignment and what’s not perfect. But none of that is the point. I think “Easy Silence” is a song to sing into the core of your Self, or to your yoga mat, or as gratitude to every Self who has ever stepped onto the mat seeking ease, quiet, peace.

Easy Silence Flow RoughDownload

If you would like to watch something that actually looks and sounds good, and was made by professionals, this is a seriously beautiful live performance. I do also think this song has mantra-esque qualities.

I breathe.

Sassafras: What’s In A Name?

A couple of years ago, I was in the middle of the decision to make a huge change from working full time as a practicing attorney with a couple of yoga classes per week, to teaching as much yoga as possible. I’ll talk more about that later, but this post is about my desire to treat my yoga business like a business–to make it into something adaptable and identifiable as something other than my actual Self. Like any human, I need to work on my Self without necessarily also working on my business, so creating that boundary was important to me.

Without an attachment to any one teaching space, I would be bringing “my” yoga to multiple different kinds of spaces, including private clients’ homes, dedicated studios, gyms, and a farmer’s market stall. I wanted to create some structure, some inspiration, some roots, for the yoga I would be putting out there. Eventually, I came up with Sassafras Yoga because of the Sassafras tree, native to my Mississippi. It’s a small, more brushy tree that tends to live at the edges of woods and ditches. It grows three distinct types of leaf shapes on one plant, and that represents to me the unity of mind/body/spirit. I always want that unity to be at the center of the yoga I practice, and the yoga I teach. Sassafras is very hardy and tough, and its root can be made into a tea that may have medicinal properties. It turns absolutely beautiful colors in the fall, which I just like. It’s also very fun to say.

My brainstorming and doodling came up with an image–an alchemist’s symbol for the element copper–with the three types of sassafras leaves hanging on it. I commissioned this copper wall hanging from June Caldwell Art, to put together this idea of what I want to bring to my yoga teaching.

Sassafras Yoga, in short, is what you get in a class or workshop with me. It is Mississippi rooted, you find it kind of everywhere. It is strong and healing. It is concerned with bringing your mind/body/spirit together. To each class, I try to bring simple mindfulness exercises to a basic pranayama (breath), asana (posture/movement), and meditation practice. Mindfulness exercises might be a simple invitation to focus on the breath, an exercise based in cognitive and/or behavior psychology, an ancient metaphor or parable, or a quote to focus on during yoga practice. Always, the goal is to help you relate to yourself any little bit better, to make your body feel any little bit better, and to remind you that your mind and spirit matter, and deserve care.

A note of gratitude: I wouldn’t have a yoga to call my own if it were not for the many teachers I have had over the years–in yoga, in literature, in philosophy, in art, in music–and as I describe what I think of as “my” yoga, it feels ridiculous. I didn’t invent yoga, so what do I even have to talk about? (This is called minimizing, one of my common cognitive distortions, which we’ll get to. Later.) But the thing I now remind myself is, each time I come to the mat, I invent that yoga practice, right there, in that moment. I invent that process of steadying my breath, of observing my mind, of strengthening and stretching my body. And I wouldn’t have these moments now if other teachers before had not shared, if they had said “I didn’t invent yoga, so what could I possibly have to offer?” So recognizing that I often tell myself distorting, minimizing things, I offer what I have, knowing that I have received powerful insights from simple offerings. I think of “my” yoga as a twig of outgrowth from a tree of human knowledge that stretches back over millennia. The yoga that will mean the most to you, of course, is the yoga you actually DO. I encourage you to look around your community for a class, and find out what your local yoga teachers have to offer.