Honoring Your Home, Your Life Source, Your Energy Supply

It is getting to be that time of year again, when people start shoving leaves into oversized plastic bags and placing them at their curbs.

?

I have long since been confused by this practice. Not because I don't understand why this society has pushed keeping our properties so neatly manicured that we cannot bear to look at leaves or twigs or weeds amongst beautiful pesticide-green grass; but rather, because I cannot understand why we have bought what they are selling.

By which I mean, who in our right minds, honestly believes that leaves -- Nature's own dead skin -- belong in plastic bags, stuck at the curb, to be picked up and hauled into a landfill somewhere? How backwards is it to stick something organic in something that is not biodegradable?

Firstly, can it be agreed upon that Mother Nature is just that -- our Mother...? She cares for us, providing us a home, food, and life. Yes?

Secondly, I do not agree that your lawn, or anybody else's, should be cleaned up so obsessively that it is unclear what season we are in. Being Autumn. We act as though we are in denial that we are in fact subject to the cycles and changes and beautiful processes of Nature. If I find this insulting, how do you think Mother Nature feels about it? Besides, being so attached to appearance leads to superficiality and materialism.

And lastly, if we must clear our spaces of NATURAL debris, can we at least see to it that it is placed in something that is also of NATURAL construction, such as, a paper bag, not plastic...?

You may want to know, what has this got to do with yoga? Yoga is about awareness, simply put, for our selves, our community, our environment. And furthermore, yoga is about union, yes? Yoga comes from the root word "yuj," meaning "to yoke, to unite, to join." To join what? To join the individual Self with the universal Self. Well, if you don't agree that Mother Nature is a part of the universal Self, then I don't know what business you have reading this blog post.

"Letting Go of Urgency"

"One thing at a time. That's all we have to do. Not two things at once, but one thing done in peace. One task at a time. One feeling at a time. One day at a time. One problem at a time. One step at a time. One pleasure at a time. Relax. Let go of urgency. Begin calmly now. Take one thing at a time. See how everything works out?" -Melody Beattie


It becomes difficult to take it one thing at a time when you live in a society that emphasizes productivity. Getting things done. We tend to equate self-value with our accomplishments. So many of us fall into the habit of multi-tasking and dividing our attention so that we can "accomplish" more in shorter periods of time, pulling us further and further away from the present moment, further and further away from meditation, further and further away from the experience of yoga. We are always plugged in, always turned on, there are so many distractions. We must slow down though. By slowing down and giving ourselves to pause, reflect, and re-connect, we can come back to the tasks that need to be completed and be more efficient and more effective because we will have calmer, clearer minds.

What is our yoga practice supposed to do for us?

This post was inspired by a lovely conversation I had with two students after class tonight, Katherine and Mark (thank you).

In yoga, we want to take the body and the mind into the opposite place of where we normally take it on a day-to-day unconscious, unmindful basis. We want to break habits and patterns to free up space for potential, for change, for growth. All of life is growth. Don't kid yourself, that is the point.

So, during our practice, we want to try to move slower if we normally move too fast. We want to be more patient if we are normally impatient. We want to be compassionate where we are lacking; we want to soften where we are hard and stiff; we want to strengthen where we are weak and unstable. We want to find a healthy balance where we are working and we are challenged but we are not torturing or overexerting ourselves.

To understand this best, it is useful to understand the yogic idea of the three gunas, or modes of life: rajas, tamas, and sattva. Rajas represents activity and work; tamas is rest and lethargy; and sattva is purity, joy, bliss meditation. We ought to be balancing these modes throughout life, but most of us are dominant in one or the other at certain points. Many of us give little or no time to sattva, to quiet, blissful meditative time spent celebrating life; we move straight from rajas to tamas, often staying geared up in rajas when we are meant to be letting loose in tamas or letting tamas drag its heaviness into our appropriate rajas time. Meaning, we wake up in the morning and instead of taking time in sattva to be grateful for another day and to sit and pray or meditate or sing or do something we genuinely enjoy, we go straight to work, rushing from here to there, getting this and getting that done. Many of us will stay in that mindset even after leaving work, and then we cannot wind down in tamas time and sleep well. Others of us will at times wake up and never actually "wake up," staying in tamas and letting depression, laziness, and lethargy dwell in our bodies all day.

This is relevant because in order to practice yoga in a way that is healthy and beneficial and enjoyable for us, we have to realize what mode we are most dominant in. Physically, most bodies come to yoga for the first time in a tamasic state; few of us will be in a rajasic place. We want to arrive in sattva. However, we must first move to rajas in order to come back to sattva. We have to first wake the body up if it's been tired and unmotivated all this time in tamas; we cannot stay in the hyper, overactive place of rajas though because it is exhausting and can lead to restlessness and injury. So your yoga will feel very difficult at first and you will have to challenge yourself a lot and work what may feel like "too hard" for some time before you can find the peace, quiet, and stillness in your yoga practice.

Why do we practice yoga barefoot?

Every once in a while, when I have a new student practicing with their socks on, I like to let them know that as long as they are comfortable with it, we generally practice yoga completely barefoot.

Why? As a lifelong student myself, I always like to explain why to the best of my ability.

So here it goes...

Firstly, on the grossest level, being barefoot means you can see your feet better. Having socks on, you can see the general shape of the foot, yes, and it is much more intimate than having footwear of some kind on, but you cannot actually see your foot. The feet are very important in yoga, believe it or not. This is the foundation for many of your poses. So, you want to see and feel and understand the foundation in order to build onto that foundation, just like if your were trying to construct a building. What good would it be for you to try to put walls and a roof on something when you have little knowledge of the floor of the building?

Next, on top of seeing your feet, you can feel your feet much better if you are barefoot. When your feet can make contact with the surface beneath you, it will allow you to feel more grounded. You will find, in time, that you can actually begin to connect to the different areas of your feet than you ever imagined. This is going to be tremendously beneficial for everybody, but especially for those with any sort of foot issue, such as flat feet or high arches (more on this another time). 

And lastly, there are more subtle reasons why you would like to be barefoot. Allowing the flesh on the soles of your feet to make contact with the same surface you are practicing on will keep you more connected. There is an energy that flows through your feet, undoubtedly. You have so many nerve endings in the feet and the hands (which is how you can explain reflexology) and allowing those nerve endings to be stimulated by letting them touch and feel and make contact with surfaces is enormously beneficial. Being barefoot means just one less material or surface between you and the earth beneath us. And yoga is about unity; unity with body, mind, soul, spirit, and the universe.

What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

What would you do if you knew you could not fail?

What would you say if you knew you would not offend or be misunderstood?

What would you say, and to whom, if you knew what you had to say would not be misinterpreted, offensive, or hurtful?

What would you do if you were bolder?

A teacher of mine, Gabriel Halpern, once asked this question in a workshop:

What would you do if you were bolder?

Without the daunting task of disclosing any mortifying answers to this question, I think that unanimously the answer is that we would do more. Simply put. In the wake of being "bolder," we abandon fear. Without fear strapping us down, we are free to take flight and do all of the things we truly want to do. To live our dreams -- whether it be singing in public, skydiving, selling all of your possessions, saying "I love you" more often to more people, serving your community -- it's irrelevant what, it is the how to go about accomplishing these things. What do you need to let go of, what do you need to open up to to be (just a little) bolder?