Ori hasn’t yet learned to criticize himself, so to him, his efforts are mini-celebrations in and of themselves.  Every time he doesn’t find balance, it leads him closer to finding balance.  His willingness to keep venturing into the land of falling is what will allow him to ultimately not fall.  The contrast is his greatest teacher.

One of the steps of yoga is abisheka.  It means “consecration” or “bathing”.  It’s what happens when your practice becomes you, without you having to work so hard to achieve it.  Like when you start dreaming in French, then you know you understand French.

Ori’s example teaches us to not turn away when things don’t go our way.  It shines the light on the fun of getting there, and even how we need to NOT get there sometimes in order to get there in the end.  If our eye is only on the end result, then we will miss all of the valuable lessons along the way.  In any process, when we judge ourselves for not achieving our goals, rather than appreciate what worked and what didn’t, we halt our learning.  The truth is that there is no such thing as failure, just getting closer to triumph.

Eventually Ori will learn to walk.  By bathing himself in walking (which includes falling), he will have a whole new range of freedom at his disposal.

I am reminded of a quote from Pema Chodron. Something to the effect of “presence is our greatest teacher and luckily it is with us in every moment”. Looking at it from this point of view I have a few more options.  If I choose to use this moment to reflect, I realize that I am so happy to have had this time with my family that given the choice, I would easily choose a delayed flight as the trade off for this valuable time with them.  Delays are a part of life and the other option is to never go anywhere ever, which is ridiculous.

A glimpse of perspective begins to appear.

Another option is to use this time to play catch up.  Emails, bills, scheduling changes, etc….even blogging.  Things that need attention that can be addressed with my trusty laptop.  I start to feel productive, a nice counterpoint to feeling out of control of my situation.

In Anusara yoga, you start with affirming what is.  Not necessarily liking it or approving of it, but just owning up to “okay, this is what is happening right now”.  Though we may not choose what is presented to us, we always have the freedom to engage in it however we want.  We can transform a delay into a meaningful phone call to a loved one.  For those who never give themselves a break, this may be a gift from the start!

The yogic point of view encourages us to transform what is given to us into something useful, ALWAYS.  By accepting what is without commentary or judgement, we can empower ourselves to act with clear intention.  In this way we shape our own reality rather than succumbing to a sense of victimization.

Not having control over what is around us doesn’t have to mean that we don’t have control of our actions and attitude.

I had just left a group meeting that I attend every Sunday and got into the elevator to leave by myself.  On the way down, the elevator did a few jerks and then stopped completely. I pushed more buttons to try to get it to move and realized it wasn’t going anywhere.  Fear set in and my imagination went wild with every stuck elevator scene I have ever seen in the movies where the cable snaps and I go plummeting down numerous stories to my death.  I was trapped somewhere between floors 3 and 4, according to the dial, and wondered if I could survive that. I decided to keep my phone in my hand, close to my chest in the event of a fall, that way I could call for help if I was alive at the bottom.  I admit it, when I spin, I don’t hold back.

Panic was clearly my first impulse.  I pushed the call button. The phone rang, went to voice mail and then put me on hold, playing…yes, of course…elevator music. Fuck. The irony was lost on me in the moment.  I eventually got tired of waiting for a human and hung up.

I stopped and took a deep breath.  Crazy as this sounds, I remembered what I had been emphasizing in my classes during the prior week. “Root your thigh bones back to get more grounded, then from that place of rootedness, you can engage more clearly.”  I tried it and it worked.  I still had an undercurrent of anxious buzz running throughout my body, but I could feel my legs again underneath me.  Then I remembered that I had just exchanged phone numbers with the host of our event jut five minutes ago. I called Mitch and he answered and was soon in touch with the

doorman.

In that moment, I was thankful that, if I had to get stuck by myself in between floors, I could have easily not have had THE ONE PERSON’S number who I needed the most.  During the hour it took for the repair guy to show up to spring me from my tiny prison, I spent the majority of the time speaking on my phone to Davy, the other guy from the meeting who had lagged behind.  Just last week, we had talked about how we hadn’t really had an opportunity to talk directly in the group meetings, and how nice it would be to do just that. Well I wasn’t going anywhere, and he graciously was going to talk me through this until I was safe and sound.

He reassured me that “Although your experience in the elevator right now might be scary, from where I am standing on the outside I know that you will be okay”.  It rang so true and echoed what one of my teachers had stated before.  “All you have is your own experience, but at the same time there is more to experience than just your experience”.  It transformed my wait time into an opportunity to get to know Davy better. How he made it to NY, how he knew the other guys in the group, and on and on until we knew each other better.  Next time I will specify that I don’t want to be trapped somewhere in order to get to know someone better, but not bad all things considered.

After an hour of waiting, a nice technician freed me from my tiny box and I crawled out, happy to take the stairs.

Though I wouldn’t choose to get stuck again, I am so thankful to have been surrounded by shri (beauty) in the forms of rooted thighbones and loyal friends.  The situation of being trapped placed me in a position to see and receive the abundance of Grace around me.

Among my clients are a couple of corporate accounts were I go to a work site and teach yoga to employees.  Teaching corporate yoga, in some ways, is the deepest way to experience yoga. It instantly brings yoga down off its pedestal, and makes it more real and applicable.   It becomes more connected to the daily act of living your life, much of which takes place at work.

On a purely physical level, any occupation comes with particular physical demands that will create specific postural habits that over time that may become injurious. Yoga is a great counterpoint to this.  The breathing employed in yoga focuses the mind and reduces stress, making it easier for workers to do high quality work.  It provides another way for people to grow interpersonal work relationships, not just shooting emails and reports past each other, but breathing and moving collectively.

It’s also a big time saver: instead of having to travel off site around work hours, the class comes to you.

Workplace yoga alters associations with the work place.  People feel valued that their company cares enough to provide this service to them.  When you feel valued, you create a deeper investment in your job and your company.  Employers also reap numerous benefits including less sick days from their employees, higher productivity, and in some cases, a reduction in heath care premiums for offering wellness in the workplace.

If you are curious about starting a yoga class at your place of business, I would encourage you to go to Human Resources.  Pitch it from the point of view of an immediate investment that pays off big in future returns.

]]> http://zandergishyoga.com/blog/yoga-at-work/feed 0 http://zandergishyoga.com/blog/less-than-ideal-circumstances http://zandergishyoga.com/blog/less-than-ideal-circumstances#comments Sun, 23 Jan 2011 22:45:45 +0000 admin http://zandergishyoga.com/?p=199 There are a number of different styles of yoga in contemporary culture as well as in the historical chronology of what has become yoga today.  Each one prescribes a specific practice and philosophical perspective for how to live.  Naturally there is a lot of disagreement as to what is actually “yoga”.

Now back up a few years ago.

I was telling a friend visiting from out of town about a Mom’s yoga group that I was teaching at the time, and how the kids would run around and play while we were doing the session. It was not a quiet environment and at some point in each session, each mom would have to leave her mat to tend to her child. When things were settled, she would return and pick up with the rest of the women. My friend was horrified and exclaimed, “I can’t believe you’d teach like that.  That’s not yoga!”

It flew all over me, partly because I felt like a sub-standard teacher in the light of her criticism.  But when I really thought about it, I realized that, according to some yogic practice, women wouldn’t be doing yoga in the first place.  What was provocative about this group’s practice wasn’t that they allowed their kids to run around during their practice, but that they set aside the time to practice in spite of less than ideal circumstances.  And in doing so, they made this their perfect yoga.

There is certainly yoga where the student fits into the yoga, but that can too easily become elitist and exclusive.  So what if you can’t squeeze yourself into it?  I guess you’re just out of luck, too bad, try something else.  Now some people love this, which is great!  But that isn’t the only way to have a rich yoga practice.

Yoga can include toys breaking and 2-year-old tantrums. It can include dogs barking, deliverymen knocking at the door when you’re in Down Dog. You could even say that’s the strongest practice, to be able to work in the midst of such chaos.  The point is to practice.  And whatever way that shapes itself will be perfect for you, because rather than not doing the practice because you can’t fit into some esoteric idea of what yoga is, you will intimately become the yoga by shaping it to your own experience.

The sages of the pine forest have become complacent in their offerings.  They are very adept at their rituals, having done them for a long time, but they have become technical and dry.  Likewise, the sages and their wives have become content with the status quo in terms of their relationships. Nothing seems that amiss, but Siva sees this uninspired dullness and decides to come down and shakes things up a bit.

After a number of failed attempts by the sages to rid Siva, who is now disguised as a brahmin, Siva reveals himself as Nataraja and begins the Ananda Tandava, the Dance of Bliss.  This rattles the sages out of their rut and they are then inspired to participate more fully in their own lives.

Siva appears as Nataraja when we need a rude awakening.  He calls us to view yoga as engagement.  It isn’t something that happens to us, but something that we create.  And if you are taking something for granted, your aren’t engaging as fully as you can and you have lost your creative power.

During the New Year, I resist setting “resolutions”, because it implies a need to fix a problem.  There is no problem that needs fixing.  We are all enough exactly as we are made, so there is nothing we need to acquire or relinquish to experience our own light.  I prefer setting a “New Year’s intention towards deeper engagement”. Rather than making a resolution to cut something out, i.e., NOT do certain things, how about clarifying a way to engage more deeply TOWARDS something?

Imagine the ways that you have become complacent or the areas in your life that have lost a certain luster for you.  How might you engage in a way that helps you rediscover the luster that is already there? In this way, we create the lives we want for ourselves, rather than settling for that to which we have become accustomed.

I looked at the Mrs. Claus next to me, who must have been no older than 23, and asked, “What is this all about?”  She said, “It’s Santa-Con!  There are 10,000 of us bar-hopping throughout the city today!”  I then noticed that many of the Santa’s had started early, armed with open beer cans wrapped in paper bags.  I giggled.

When I looked it up online, I found out that you have to donate canned food to participate, a tidbit of info left out by the Lady Claus.

Though I wouldn’t choose it for myself, I have to appreciate the way these folks were creating a fun ritual for themselves.  I thought about all the ways the holidays create expectations.  Holidays mean people coming together.  The more people, the more expectations come into play. These double for those of you that have a partner with families that have there own rituals, in addition to your circle of friends with all of their events.  I have some friends that I don’t see from right after Thanksgiving until after New Year’s, because their calendars get so full over the holidays.

It is important to keep a sense of center in the midst of this.  In Anusara yoga this is the balance between Muscle Energy and Organic Energy to create Balanced Action. Muscle Energy is the hugging of muscle to bone, it is the firming in to midline.  It creates stability on the body in order to keep the pose safe and supported. Organic Energy is the opposite, expanding quality of extending from center out into all directions. It’s the part that lets you go for it and stretch out to new places.  If Muscle Energy is you holding center, Organic Energy is the resulting expression of yourself in all that you do with others, i.e., parties, gatherings, dinners.  They inform one another.  If you find yourself getting depleted by all the holiday excitement, step back and apply a little more Muscle Energy.  Create some quiet time for yourself.  Recharge your batteries.  The more able you are to nurture yourself, the greater your contribution will be for others.

Then there are the things that I wouldn’t choose for myself, ranging from having an upstairs neighbor whose feet seem to be made of lead, to lost friendships and illness.

Loss and tragedy always seems to carry with it a scarcity of some kind.  The noisy neighbor is a scarcity of peace, the lost friendship feels like a scarcity of love and support.  Illness especially terminal illness implies a scarcity of time.  How can we find gratitude in that?

All year I watched and experienced tremendous transformations within my community.  My friend J is one of the many who lost his job in the recession.  He and his husband have had to cut back their expenses, including the sale of a boat.  The act of downsizing brings into focus that which matters most to them.  Although you can’t say the loss of his job is a blessing, you can certainly say that this strife has brought them closer together. They have engaged what is given and created something that is meaningful to them.

The opposite of scarcity is fullness, in sanskrit, purnatva.  Purnatva also means abundance, implying that it cannot run out.  If we can turn the scarcity of life’s tragedies into fullness, then we are engaging the practice of yoga.  It frequently isn’t a 50/50 proposition.  The transformation of J’s situation has not provided a new job for him, but it has provided an opportunity to make his relationship with his husband fuller.  It has illuminated an area of his life that is unrelated to the primary issue of job loss.  Except it is related, because J is the person who inhabits all of these situations.

Yoga invites us to embrace everything, not just the stuff we immediately like, and then transform it into something useful.  The yoga happens when we create something beneficent out of whatever is given.

]]> http://zandergishyoga.com/blog/the-yoga-of-gratitude/feed 0 http://zandergishyoga.com/blog/begin-again http://zandergishyoga.com/blog/begin-again#comments Mon, 15 Nov 2010 02:47:57 +0000 admin http://zandergishyoga.com/?p=178 It has been months since I’ve written on this blog.  There’s no good reason other than I let it get away from me.  Ironic that the yoga instructor, who is constantly championing his students to create consistent practice, fell out of his own practice.

Restarting the engines is very hard.  I have a friend who is a journalist and asked her advice on how to motivate myself to write again.  She said, “Get your butt in the chair and sit there until you write.  Even if it’s just one sentence.”  I was hoping for something more magical and less…..true.   In hindsight, I was asking for her permission for my laziness.

I’ve even convinced myself that my negligence is charming, a reminder that I am perfectly and fallibly human.  But wearing it as a badge of honor isn’t helping either.

The bottom line is, at this point, I am spending more energy avoiding the task of writing than actually writing.  Not looking at the elephant in the room is more draining than just seeing it for what it is.  It’s a waste of energy and time to continue this way.

So to start up again, I must do just that.  Begin again.  One word at a time.  At first I won’t worry about how inspiring it is.  I will just practice.  And once the practice becomes more consistent, the message will become richer.  Because one thing I know is that if I tend to my practice regularly, the rest will take care of itself.

More later………