It's not a Rosary

About a week ago, I ran into some emotional issues with my oldest son.  As some of you know, my oldest son has autism and because of his autism, he often overreacts to situations that you and I would simply brush off.  This was the case last week.  First, we defused the situation and then I went downstairs to meditate on what we should do to help my son deal with this situation.  I did my best to review the problem from all angles and I tried to come up with any possible solutions but nothing really seemed like it was going to work.  I prayed and expressed my need for divine inspiration on behalf of my son.  I closed my prayer and composed myself for meditation.

As is often the case, my mind flooded with thoughts and concerns but unlike my every day meditation—well I say every day but I probably should say usual, because I haven't been meditating every day—my thoughts weren't random, instead, they were all centered on my son and the situation at hand.  However, unlike the few minutes previously when I had been consciously thinking about these things, I was now able to simply watch what I was thinking almost as if I were a neutral observer watching the situation from the outside.  I realized that he needed some sort of tangible reminder that he is loved and that he is very important to his mother and me but I was unsure what that reminder should be.  It was then that the first seemingly random thought crossed my mind:  Malas.  About a week or maybe two before this event, I had been studying about malas and mantras.  I have never used either and had simply been reviewing them out of curiosity.  Now, however, my study of them was presenting itself as a possible solution.

A mala is a string of beads, 108 beads to be exact, that is used as a tool in meditation.  The beads on a mala are used to help count how many times a mantra has been recited; so, instead of actually counting the number of times the mantra has been repeated, you simply move the beads through your fingers.  The next question was what should his mantra be?  What would help my son remember how loved and important he is?  Oddly enough, that was the answer:  Mom and Dad love me.  I still have to remind him that he needs to count, and I'm not sure whether it's the mala and mantra, but he does seem happier and more at ease.

Some of you might be wondering where I bought my mala for my son.  I didn't.  I made it myself.  I also made one for myself and for my wife.  Unfortunately, making your own mala is not as cost-effective as making your own practice floor.  Unless I can find a more inexpensive source of beads, I'm stuck making malas at twice the expense of what it would cost to buy them.  Still, I think that having made them myself was more important than simply buying a mala.

The title of this entry is It's not a Rosary and the reason for this is that people see the beads of my mala under my collar and immediately assume that it must be a rosary and that is very confusing to them.  The reason that this is confusing is that I am a Latter-day Saint (Mormon) and we don't use rosaries.  The moral of the story, of course, is that we shouldn't make assumptions.

Wellsphere, Wellness and Weekends

So, I have been puttering around the Wellsphere site—you can have a gander at my profile—and so far I'm liking what I see despite the fact the site is so very busy looking.  The great irony about the site is that it is wellness based and no sooner did I tell Larisa that I'd participate than I came down with a slow moving, gut wrenching bug.  I left work early Wednesday, stayed home Thursday—I slept most of Thursday away—and then I started to feel somewhat better Friday.

The end result of my bout with illness was that the early session on Saturday was extremely difficult for me.  Most of the session was spent in restorative poses, although that seemed to be just fine with my wife and daughter.  By the time the second session started, I felt full of energy and strength which was a good thing as there were actually three people in the second hour!

Tadasana

Everyone say hello to Jim.  Jim is my stick figure and will help in illustrating asana as I write about them.  Note that the plural of asana is asana and, yes, I have it written wrong in previous entries.  This is tadasana which is known as mountain pose.  Savasana is sometimes called the most difficult asana, if savasana is the most difficult then tadasana is the second.  The reason these two asana are so difficult is that they are so simple, I mean you just stand there, right?  Right but also very wrong.  Tadasana is all about alignment and just standing there is about anything but alignment.  Think about the last time you stood in line, you were just standing there.  When I'm just standing there, my arms are usually folded and my weight is shifted fully onto one or the other of my legs with my head tilted.  Tadasana is about aligning one's body.  In my case, my right shin is twisted to the right so I have to either align my leg bones or my feet as trying to align them both puts far too much pressure on my hip, knee and ankle.

Tadasana is the most basic standing asana.  Jim the Stick Figure is standing in tadasana above.  Begin tadasana by placing the feet a comfortable distance apart, about 2 to 3 inches.  The arches should be lifted and your weight should be distributed evenly to the ball, side and heel of each foot.  Your legs should be straight but the knees should not be lock nor hyper-extended with the hips centered over the feet.  The back, neck and head should be erect as if there were a string attached to the very top of your head that was pulling you toward the ceiling.  Your arms should be to the sides of the torso, fingers gently extended with the shoulders aligned with the hips.

I find that there are some basic problem areas when in tadasana:  Sagging arches.  I have very flat feet so sagging arches are a constant issue for me.  Remember to distribute some of your weight onto the sides of your feet, press down with your big toes and keep those arches lifted!  The next problem areas are the tightly clenched muscles along the back of the legs, the biggest offender here are the gluteus muscles.  These muscles are all absolutely positive that if they relax, you'll fall on your face.  Fortunately, that is not true.  The only leg muscles that you should feel tightened are the thighs, convince the others that they can just relax.  Continuing up the spine, our next stop is the back, chest and shoulders.  Make sure that back is aligned over the hips, the chest is lifted but not puffed out and the shoulders are relaxed and not pinched up toward the ears nor backward to the spine.  Finally, the neck and head should be aligned over the center line of the torso.  The chin should be roughly parallel to the floor.

The benefits of tadasana are subtler than other asana but include improved posture; stronger thighs, knees and ankles; and stronger arches/reduced flat footedness.

I like tadasana as it gives me a chance to be still and listen to what my body is doing.  I tend to visit each area of my body and give it a mental once over to evaluate how I am feeling.  I also practice tadasana when standing in line, it may look a little wooden but helps keep me calm and centered while waiting for the line to move.

Wellsphere

Oh look, another topic icon!  Over the weekend, Larisa Rozentals from Wellsphere asked me to think about allowing them to feature Everyday Yoga Blog on their site.  Judging by the WellMix 360 logo at the left, it looks like I am allowing them to feature my blog—for now that is.  Why the caveat?  If you've read my blog for any length of time, then you know that I don't like the Yoga commercialism mix.  From what I have seen, Wellsphere is a free community site that focuses on living healthier and so long as that remains the focus then I'll continue to participate.

Yoga and money, that's a very touchy subject in my book  Everywhere I turn I see yoga industry or an advertisement that equates Yoga and wellbeing with whatever product is being sold.  Even worse than the frenetic selling of yoga is how the practice of Yoga has been turned into the franchise of yoga.  The practice of Yoga is concerned with the body, mind and spirit of each student.  Commercial yoga, however, is competing with step aerobics and ellipticals to be the best thing to hit the gym scene since free weights.  True commercial yoga has brought the physical health benefits of yoga to millions but it has also increased the number of yoga related injuries.  Some of those injuries are related to over achieving students, asking your back to give that fictional 110% is demanding a back injury.  Good instructors, instructors that take the time needed to help individual students, largely prevent this.  Commercial yoga has no time for such instructors, time is money and money is what commercial yoga is truly about.

How do you know if you have a commercial yoga instructor?  Your first clue might be where you are practicing:  Are you at the local gym, rec center or a private studio?  Gyms tend more toward the commercial approach, studios lean more toward the individual approach and rec centers generally lie somewhere in between; however, like a book you cannot judge a class simply by where it is being taught!  The single most important and telling factor is the instructor.  Does the instructor take time to consult with individual students during the class or just stick to the set routine and call it good?  Does the instructor encourage discussion during the practice or is it all just the instructor talking?  (Just realized I need to work on that one myself.)  Are you important to the instructor or are you just another face in the nameless swarm?  What should you do if you realize that you have a commercial instructor?  If the class fits your needs and wants, then stick with it.  Personally, I would be out the door and looking for a new instructor in a heartbeat.

Remember, Yoga is about uniting one's body, mind and spirit.  If all you ever do in class is hop from pose to pose to pose then it isn't Yoga, it's just exercise.

Namasté

Do You See What I See?

I see yet another subject icon!  I realized that I also write about my journey toward instructor certification and what's happening in my Saturday classes.  With that in mind, do to some very unforeseen expenses that reared their ugly heads last week, I had to drain my instructor fund.  Oddly enough, the money is still unspent but it's basically waiting for the other shoe to drop as it were.  I'm not giving up, although this will set me back about a year.

Continuing the instructor theme, the classes the last two Saturdays have been great even with the low attendance.  Two weeks ago J came and this week she brought E along for the ride.  My wife is still the only one to brave the 7AM session.  I'll admit it though, I enjoy the time with my wife but I'm not so sure how much she gets from it . . . my voice tends to put her to sleep.  She's always claimed that she falls asleep because my voice is so soothing—I often wonder if that doesn't really just mean that she's bored to tears.

I often find that one of my most powerful attachments is routine.  My oldest boy has autism and while he is not absolutely bound to routines and schedules, unexpected disruptions of either causes him emotional distress.  I am much the same, working a 4/10 schedule I prefer to have Friday off rather than Monday because part of my Sunday routine is to mentally prepare for work the next day.  Switching that routine causes me no end of grief.  I also am much more comfortable with symmetry.  When I practice at home, my mat is evenly centered on my practice floor.  When I teach each Saturday, we're in a room with hardwood floors; more often than not, my mat is lined up with the slats in the floor and centered on the midpoint of the wall behind me.  To try and change that somewhat, two weeks ago I set my mat in the center of the room so I was facing the wall instead of having my back to it.  Still, I was nicely centered where I was.  This past Saturday, I thought I had done a marvelous job breaking from my routine by placing my mat diagonally toward a corner of the room.  I even went so far as to point this out to the second hour class.  It was then that I realized that my mat was perfectly aligned on the diagonal of the room.

Why worry about routine?  Why worry about how my mat is aligned with the room?  Because it is important that we not become routine, especially in our practice of Yoga.  Routine blinds us to the different possibilities that surround us.  Instead we should both embrace the familiar and try to see it through new eyes.  How many times have you come into tadasana during your practices?  When was the last time you thought about your toes, your shoulders or gluteus maximus during this pose?  I am constantly finding that all three areas are tensed, even though they don't need to be.  If I simply come into tadasana and don't make a conscious effort to think about these areas, then I suddenly realize that they are all tight as a bow string.  Even subtler, what about the alignment of your head, neck and back?

There are, of course, great benefits to routine.  If I practice the same poses in the same sequence every single day then I will quickly reach a point where I no longer have to think about what pose is next and my asana practice flows along almost dance-like.  Such a practice could easily become meditation in motion.  Just like walking the same path day after day, however, such a routine will limit one's ability to see new vistas and may even dull the senses to the point that sublte changes in the path walked go unnoticed.  Routines give us stability at the price of being blinded to new things.  Change and variety give grand new panoramas at the expense comfort and security.  Both are invaluable.

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities; in the expert's mind there are few.

Shunryu Suzuki-roshi

Namasté

A Different Point of View

I'm taking a little different tack with the blog.  At this point, this blog bounces from topic to topic and direction to direction much like a drop of water on a hot frying pan skitters around until it evaporates.  My fear is, that without some kind of guiding direction that, like the droplet, my impetus for writing will evaporate.  This being the case, I'm going to focus on one of at least three subjects each day:

The first focus will be on asanas and will be noted by the image to the left.  The purpose of these entries will be to share my thoughts on a particular asana.  I'll go over how to come into the pose, possible counter poses, benefits of the pose and my thoughts about the pose.  I'll add any such entries to the Stick Figure Asana Guide found under the Practice Sessions menu.  Ideally, those of you reading the blog will leave comments about the day's asana:  Do you like/hate this pose.  Do you know the pose described under a different name?  Most importantly, what can I do to better understand the pose?

The second focus will be on the philosophy and teachings behind Yoga and will be noted by the OM to the left.  Personally, I find that removing the philosophy from Yoga, as many gym yoga classes do so as to widen their marketability, is like removing my ability to taste and smell the food I eat.  Sure, I will still be able to sustain myself on tasteless food but no one can deny that there is much more to eating than just the nutritional side of things.  Some might argue that taste is not essential to our survival but I would beg to differ.  My wife regularly asks me to sample or smell foods to determine if they are still good to eat—of course, she might just be trying to poison me—regardless, my sense of smell and taste, while not as acute as hers, seem to have a knack of warning me off food that has passed the point of being edible.  To come back from my food tangent, practicing just the asanas is really no different from any other exercise routine.  Ignoring the philosophy of Yoga denies one the huge benefits from the spiritual side of one's practice.

The final focus will be on how Yogic philosophy and the doctrines of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints compliment each other.  I am a member of the Church—a Latter-day Saint or Mormon—and believe absolutely in the doctrines of the Church.  Over the years, I've found that Church doctrine and Yoga go hand in hand.  It is almost as if they were made for each other.

On a related note, there are many Latter-day Saint sites around the Internet and many of them have become little more than combat zones with the incessant flame wars that rage back and forth through their user comments.  This will not happen here.  I am not running a public forum here and will definitely use a heavy hand when it comes to moderating inflammatory comments into nonexistence.  In other words, if you want to say something—even if it's not favorable toward me or the Church—then do so with common courtesy and respect and there won't be an issue but if you're here to just play the troll, you'll find that you can't access the site any longer.

Namasté

Dharana

Having learned to withdraw one's senses, to allow the dust in one's minds to settle, it is time to practice dharana.  In pratyahara one becomes entirely passive, allowing thoughts and feelings to simply pass through without becoming attached to these sensations; rather, one acknowledges them and allows them to leave.  The goal is not to block out sensations and thought but, rather, to not initiate them in the first place.  This allows one to achieve a stillness and single-mindedness.  Such single-mindedness is needed to practice dharana.  In dharana, one focuses all one's thoughts and senses upon a single object.  This may be a mantra or the breath or a visual object or a thought.  The intent is to focus soley upon whatever object has been chosen to the exclusion of all other thoughts and senses.

Namasté