I know some of you perceive me to be borderline OCD as you jokingly comment when you see me folding the blankets after class, or parking your mats on the red dot at the very beginning. I would arguably rather think of myself as fond of orderly aesthetics and a lover of organization, hence the choice of architecture as a career, I guess. I am a firm believer in how your surroundings can directly affect your psyche. Simply put, disorganization in your environment creates disorganization in your thinking.

Are you able to think concisely and work effectively in a messy room? If your work place looked like Katrina, Celia, Mitch or any other hurricane has just paid you a visit, would you bother sitting at your desk? If your local yoga studio was dirty and slapdash would you take class anyway? Would you find it conducive to relaxation? Would it still evoke a place to practice peace and get away from it all?

Gotta love the red dot!

A few weeks ago I came back to the yoga h(OM)e Studio and found this unsightly sight (see photo below). After the initial negative and anti-yogic inner dialogue gushed in my mind, I got positively inspired as it fueled ideas for the next cycle of teachings. Dharma talks on the 5 afflictions or kleshas seemed like an appropriate focus to develop over the course of the following weeks. Beyond the obvious importance of structure and foundation and how all it takes is one blanket folded improperly to send the whole pile toppling over, blankets folded ambiguously were in fact a visual metaphor for how disconnected we all are from each other. How easy we are at forgetting that our individual actions always and inextricably affect a whole.

Yoga identifies the root cause of all illness in the world as being Ignorance. Ignorance (avidya) is the first of all 5 afflictions (kleshas) eclipsing our comprehension of who we truly are. It is in effect the father of all other four afflictions and if you can overcome (1) ignorance, then (2) pride, (3) attachment, (4) aversion and (5) fear of death will obliterate as well.

By ignorance, yoga does not mean lack of knowledge as in “I don’t know much about science or biology”, but rather refers to the wrong knowing or mis-knowing of your true self. Your vision is skewed and your world is upside down because you mistakenly think of the material and physical world as being more real than the unity that connects us all. Yoga means union and it is no coincidence that once you pick up the practice, your world starts shifting toward a more upright position, darkness slowly gives way to light, your vision is being adjusted and the wrong knowing is corrected. You now begin to remember you are part of a whole.

Yoga ≠ Ignorance

Back to the blankets metaphor, I’ll take advantage and clarify to the dubious among you that what appears to require tremendous effort on my part in tidying up comes easy breezy. Yes! I admit that it is partly due to having inherited an archi-textured mind! so nothing to show for there, yet one thing I worked hard and will continue to until the day I die is attaining a consciousness that always includes others as part of any equation. I try living my life never forgetting we are all one.

Still tempted in calling it a disorder? and now that you “know”, can you carry on living a life with ignorance at its foundation?

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them ~  Henry David Thoreau

BEFORE                                                                             AFTER

Last week, we focused on pain and yoga. We addressed the subject from the physical perspective and looked at how pain can pay us a visit when we are not present in our bodies, or when we are moving into asanas from the ego, we talked about developing muscular strength rather than muscular flexibility, introduced the notion of active stretching v/s passive stretching and a bunch of other cool enlightening concepts.

This week I would like to focus more on the emotional aspect of pain.

Better brace yourself, the truth will hurt!

When physical pain manifests in the body, often times it will carry along with it all our past pains at once. Do you ever get that feeling when you are hurting somewhere in the physical body that your entire life sucks? You start questioning your job, your relationships, you think things along the lines of:  No one loves me / I am such a looser / Why is this happening to me? / Maybe I deserve this / I don’t deserve this …etc. All the drama resurfaces through that one pain that has come to pester your existence.

Eckhart Tolle author or the Power of now and a New Earth, called this phenomenon “pain-body”. The tendency to perpetuate our emotions, to revive and reenact them over and over again. We all know a someone who has no willingness to let go of the past, holds on tight to situations, accumulates more and more stuff inside, carries the burden of their past with them in their minds at all times.

Here’s WHY it happens:

Every time you are unable to let go of situations that have already occurred in the past, the past being an hour or some twenty years ago, you are allowing the emotional pain of that situation to leave behind a residue of pain that will parasite your entire being. The wicked part is that it merges with every single other pain you have had in the past and will create a deadly cocktail of pain. This bundle of pain will then manifest, at some given and appropriate time, in your body through illness, disease, chronic pain…..

Here’s HOW it happens:

Since the body doesn’t recognize the difference between an action and a thought, a worrisome or fearful thought automatically implies to the body that it is in danger and will cause it to respond accordingly, even if you are lounging facing the sea while sipping margaritas. The heart beats faster, the muscles contract, and breathing becomes uneven causing a buildup of energy that is really the product of mental fiction, because the threat is not real. This artificially induced energy now has no outlet to vent. Part of it will be recycled into the mind generating even more anxious and negative thoughts; the rest turns toxic, goes lodging itself somewhere in the physical body and lurks until it can actively interfere with the harmonious functioning of the body.

In the power of now, Eckhart Tolle’s observation of two ducks in a pond helps illustrate what the pain-body is really about. One of the ducks gets really close to the other triggering a fight. Tolle reports that the fight doesn’t last very long and soon after the ducks call a truce and float off in two opposite directions, they vigorously flap their wings in the attempt to shake off any residual negative energy that built up during the fight. They peacefully go about heir usual business as if nothing had ever happened, as if they knew how pointless it is to hang onto the past, since it is already dead. The Ducks are always present in the now!

Now, if ducks with human minds existed, they would keep the fight alive by thinking about it, by talking about it, by calling one friend and bitching about it, by calling another friend to get a second opinion as to what happened, they would make up an entire movie based on thoughts such as: I don’t believe what he just did / Who does he think he is? / He thinks he can invade my space just like that / He doesn’t own the pond / I will report him to the duck police…..and on and on and on, hashing it out for days, months and sometimes sadly for years.

We better fully face and see our negative emotions for what they are on the very spot and in the moment they arise or trade our human mind with the one of a duck. Maybe that’s what it takes to find peace. Why can’t we embody the mighty presence of a tree, the peacefulness of a flower, the naturalness of a cloud? Have you ever seen an animal hold a grudge or a plant seek revenge or a bird have a fit or water plot an attack?

So here’s a plan Stan, if you want to deny pain access into your body, next time you feel angry or sad or anxious or frightened or jealous or mean or annoyed or irritated or resentful or frustrated or impatient or worthless…..try flapping your wings…. it works!

******

Music playlist  FLAP AWAY

Click here

On January 5, 2012, the first day of my training in Unnata Aerial Yoga, the New York Times ran an article with a shocking title How Yoga can wreck your body.

Seriously people?

On that same day and the few that followed, my inbox kept flooding with emails from all over the globe. Friends, yogis and non yogis alike, people I hadn’t heard of in a long time, basically all asking if I had read the article and what were my thoughts on the subject.

What were my thoughts? Appalled….that’s what my thoughts were…

Given that my training barely allowed me with time to scratch my head, I was fulminating all over from not being able to respond. My main criticism was that the article was ludicrous and that yoga duh! can hurt your body indeed… as much as going to the gym and overstretching a hamstring from overdoing it, or tumbling down on a soccer field in the attempt to catch the ball and hurting your shoulder in the process, or even throwing your back while engaged in some stupid household cleaning chore. They might as well have called the article: “How jogging, climbing, boxing, skiing, basketball, soccer, ice hockey, curling, mindless driving, reckless drinking, crossing the street can wreck your body”

If you are going to talk about the disadvantages of yoga, you owe it to your readers to address the numerous benefits as well. Why not convey stories of people who broke their backs in some accident and were only able to rehabilitate themselves by picking up a yoga practice, people who fought depression, insomnia, addictions, eating disorders, compulsive behavior for years and how only Yoga was able to remove the gloom and doom from their day. Why not mention that when yoga is done with mindfulness and kick ass alignment, yoga can and will actually heal? How come Mr. Broad failed to mention those?

Incapable of digesting the infamy of what turned out to be one hell of a controversial article, I sat down one evening and wrote the following:

There is truth in this narrow angle view for sure, but I find the title to be very misleading, there are 20 million people practicing yoga in the US only. That in itself means it must be more beneficial than it is wrecking. Also, I think it’s important to remind ourselves that Yoga is not one direct line to heaven, it’s more of an “ups and downs” kind of journey, just like life itself. Yoga is a practice that is mainly designed to remove the blockages that prevent us from seeing our true selves and beat the ego so that we can keep our attention on what is essential, so that we can remember where we came from, so that we can efficiently manage our emotions, so that we can be centered and happy, so that we can get off the not so merry-go-round crazy cycle of ups and downs and find peace. Yoga is a revelation for self-inquiry and self-connection. It is the perfect compass which allows us to find our place in the world. Yoga is a wonderful tool for helping us become more fully ourselves.

If you keep your mind on that rather than how cool it is to come into all these funky postures, then safety can almost be assured. I think the biggest mistake that people make when they get into it, is to think that through practicing yoga they will become invincible.

Also, there is a good reason why there is a multitude of different styles out there, simply because there is a multitude of us out there as well, different body types, different physiology, different histories, you just have to choose wisely. Choose according to what your body needs not what your mind likes and stay humble. Yoga is about practicing humility really. I discovered an interesting fact lately, is that the words human and humility share the same root, HUM from the word humus which means earth, ground. Think about it, if humans were more humble, more in touch with the earth, there would be less wars, hunger, violence, abuse of the environment..etc. Asana means seat in Sanskrit, your seat is the earth and if your connection to the earth is firm and stable then only joy can be the result of this connection, not harm…only joy.

One example of how disconnected people are from their bodies for instance, (hence the pains and aches) is how they get all excited about wanting to stand on their heads when they clearly don’t have the necessary strength YET to hold themselves upright but they are so keen on impressing themselves and others that they are willing to skip all the steps leading to a safe headstand, mirroring what we all tend to do in life, constantly looking to the future, dwelling on the past and renouncing the present completely. They choose to pretend it’s fine to strain, confusing it with hard work or discipline and they carry on pretending over and over and over until the body says: no bloody more.

Yoga is not asana only, it is kindness, compassion, grace, softness, sweetness, strength, suppleness, fluidity, non harming, cleanliness, truthfulness, non steeling, non excess, non attachment, surrender, perseverance, awareness, dedication, breathing, concentration, contemplation, meditation, oneness. We are all these things and more, and rather than strengthening all those, we choose to strengthen the most destructive part of who we are: EGO.

As a conclusion I say if you can remember every time you assume a pose, (let me reiterate clearly: EVERY TIME YOU ASSUME A POSE) that yoga is all these things at once then yoga is for you, if not, Pilates is a good option or …..simply f*** yoga.

Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it ~ Dee Hock ~

Our focus this week is on creativity. It is the invisible force behind all things manifest. All you can see in the world is the result of the incredible ability we have as human beings to bring forth into the physical world, that which has been conceived on a mental and emotional level.

So let me stop right here and mention how wrong you are if you never thought of yourself as a creative person. “I am a banker, I am a doctor, I am a microbiologist..hell if  I am creative!”  You see how easy it is to identify with the things that we do, rather than the essence of who we are? Newsflash people! every human on this planet is creative regardless of their job description. Yes, that means you included.

An action as simple as sitting in your kitchen chopping the ingredients for a salad, is an act of creativity. You are not “making” a salad, you are creating a salad.  At the other end of the spectrum, just like sculptors, we are constantly creating, shaping and reshaping our world through thought, word and deed and everyday we become artists as we paint the canvas of our life.

Convinced now?

I consider putting a yoga class together to be a creative endeavor or at least thinking of it as such fuels me with the impetus to choreograph every class as if it was a Broadway show. The dharma talk, the selection of a sanskrit chant, the sequencing of the postures, the music playlist, the lighting, the temperature in the room, the layout of the mats, my level of energy …are all active components of a class and they all take root and spring from the focus of the week.

Every week I think about a theme that I would like to address in class, without having any clue on how to bring it forward to my students. At this stage, I am just seduced by the idea, and the more I think about it, the blanker my mind gets. But then almost systematically, as I am practicing my meditation or pranayama or asana, driving, brushing my teeth, listening to music, or any other time when my mind is quiet and engaged in a state of no thought, a neon light comes flashing in my mind: “the show is on- blink- the show is on- blink- the show is on”. An idea trickling one drop at a time, will soon turn into a gentle thin stream then flood my brain like an untamed river with thoughts running wild. The tweaked, honed and refined result of this process is no other than what makes a class. I am ready. Curtain up!

This I have learned: In a moment of no thought, ideas become abundant and once you allow them to rise to the surface then you can think them through, not the other way around. This is how the classes I teach usually come into existence.

What I am trying to say is that we all have the ability to unleash our creativity by simply reminding ourselves that we are swimming in an ocean of consciousness that is pure creativity. Whatever it is you need to create is already present in the form of an idea somewhere in that ocean of consciousness. Don’t think it, don’t force it, don’t loose sleep over it, just reach out and grab it. It’s waiting for your magic.

Since we are at it and worthy of being mentioned, I have found through years of practice and quite a lifetime of creativity that the easiest way to have a breakthrough is by always checking my ego at the door.

Here’s an example: Just like everybody else, I have bad days and on those days I still have to teach classes. If I allow the state of mind I am in to enter the room, I can guarantee suckiness throughout. Luckily, precious yoga has taught me that I am no other than a teaching tool or instrument. Consequently, as soon as I take on the role of the teacher, my state of mind “du jour” is going to dissipate and with great fascination each time it happens, I will feel the creative force working through me. I have no idea where it comes from, within or without? Does it even matter? All that matters is that it is saving the day.

If I allow my classes to be infused with whatever mental state I am in on certain days, the result will be a shallow and uninspired class because it would have been the result of a forced or artificially manufactured creativity. Similarly, if you step on the mat and try to force your yoga, you get things like injury, or a restricted breath, or the worst kind: a thinking yoga rather than a smart body/breath connection, or even the very common competition with the girl next to you: she is more flexible,  she can stand on her head, she has cool pants…etc

Sophia Loren and Jayne Mansfield at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills

Because we are not taught the efficacy of our creative potential, we almost forget that we have this ability. The ability to create any world we want. We don’t pay attention to the process of thoughts unfolding into words, words inspiring actions and actions creating the environmental conditions we all experience. I don’t mean to send you on a guilt trip, but if you don’t agree with the world that you see or dislike it in any way or even find it ugly, I can’t hide the truth from you any longer and you must know at this stage that you are partly responsible, you had your fair share of creation in it and you blew it, just like me, just like the rest of the stupid planet. But relax! we can still fix it. There is a simple correction process that can put our innate creativity to much better use if we awaken to the understanding that just like we were able to create the world as we know it today, we can also create a better one. All we need to do, rather than complain and get uselessly frustrated is to start looking at it, thinking of it, speaking about it and acting on it, the way we want it to be.

Creativity starts with a vision, you see it in your mind, you verbalize it through words and carry actions along the same lines. You are a visionary, always been, always will be. Be one now!