Cutting Through Doom

I woke up very early this morning with a sense of doom. Life is always a bit weird, but right now it’s downright bizarre—I can’t seem to calibrate, or make sense of what’s going on. Nothing was really wrong this morning, but all felt strange: the weather in New York was like summer around Christmas. The Presidential debates are incredibly unsettling. The media is feeding us fear. I’m missing my mom, I’m missing our kids. Life seems so fragile. Where is the tether in times like this?

Poor Rodney, to wake up to me having a hard time catching my breath.

Finally, I got up and started planning my Tuesday morning class. I picked up my favorite Pema Chodron book, When Things Fall Apart, looking for a spiritual teaching for my class. This is what I opened up to:

“When you wake up in the morning and out of nowhere comes the heartache of alienation and loneliness, could you use that as a golden opportunity? Rather than persecuting yourself or feeling that something terribly wrong is happening, right there in the moment of sadness and longing, could you relax and touch the limitless space of the human heart? The next time you get a chance, experiment with this.”

If we can become quiet, quite often a message or a guide will appear in a way that seems more than coincidental. Thank you, Pema, for being my guide on so many days when I have felt helpless. I hope this passage can help those who may be having mixed emotions at this time of year. Relax and use whatever comes as an opportunity. Beautiful, sage advice.

Balance

When I was six years old, I loved the balance beam. I felt so proud of myself, and brave, when I walked across without falling. One summer, my dad made me a balance beam out of 2 x 4s. I got a ton of splinters that summer, and quite a few bruises, but by August, I was joyfully skipping rope up and down the length of the beam.

For most of us, balancing around center is a fickle and fleeting experience. But the quiet steadiness found when we do balance around center is sublime. As a physical skill, balance diminishes as we age, and yet is increasingly important as we get older. Luckily, due to the brilliance of the human body, the ability to balance can be improved with practice!

When we practice balancing postures, we gain a visceral understanding of the fact that balance is not a fixed point. Rather we wander in and around center, and then we fall. Sometimes we fall quietly and lightly; other times we collapse in a heap on the floor. At the moment, the cycle of falling out of center and then finding center again is most interesting to me.

I like things (a.k.a. my life!) to be steady, even, and tempered, so that the emotional feeling of balance is never too far away. I imagine that many of us of us feel that way. Thankfully, life doesn’t cooperate with such safe, and sometimes lifeless, plans. For example, I had a baby in August. So I am now the mother of a five year old and a four month old. Needless to say, I’ve lost my habituated sense of center.

So day after day, now, I recalibrate and begin anew, the delicate dance of navigating equilibrium. I’ve heard “center” described as the place from which we can fall in all directions, and that is ringing true for me lately. Sometimes I am literally balancing the baby on one arm while playing with her older brother. Other times I am quietly wandering the depths of my heart, in search of the place from which I can love fully in all directions.

Life and Death and the Art of Presence

Life is passing too quickly and, frankly, it makes me anxious.

According to Richard Rosen, one of the age-old purposes of yoga, which predates many of the modern shapes that we take in class, was to live longer. No method has yet been proven to extend life. Perhaps, the stress relieving techniques do help, even though we never really know when our lives will end.

The practices of yoga help me discover where my body holds tension and fear, and then I can comb out the physical and emotional tangles. I find space in my body, and my mind calms down. I find courage by getting to know vulnerability, and strength and by discovering what scares me and sitting with it. The practices allow space for the current experience, whatever it may be—whether it is in the category of aversions or attractions. With these practices, I am better at being present, perhaps the only way to not feel like life is zooming by and that I am missing out on something.

Off the mat, a sure way for me to practice presence is to wander in the realm of nature, art, and music – to float in the cool, pristine waters of Lake Tahoe, to run down the sand dunes off of Napeague stretch, to be stopped by the color and composition of a work of art, and be rocked by a perfect song. They give me cause to slow down, look, feel, and pause as I gaze on in awe. I feel less like a processor and errand runner and just way more aware of what I want more moments in my life to be full of.

Here’s one set of techniques I find helpful: I focus my attention on the soles of my feet and spread the weight out more evenly through my feet. I shift my body awareness more to the back plane of my body and soften the front of my body. I practice relaxing the muscles and connective tissues near my forehead, temples, jaw, tongue, and throat. I try not to interrupt. I try to feel mini or maxi pauses throughout the day. These actions seem to be the best remedy for absorbing the world around me. Whether it be a beautiful landscape or a sick patient in the hospital.

Brene Brown, a social worker who gave one of the most popular TED talks, says that you can’t pick and choose the good or the bad stuff. You either numb yourself from it all or you are present for it all. She says to practice gratitude and joy in moments of terror, love, and passion. To be able to stop instead of catastrophizing what might happen, and to be grateful for the feeling of vulnerability because it means that we are alive. And, she says to believe that we are enough because when we work from a place that says “I am enough,” then we stop screaming and start listening. We are kinder and gentler to people around us, and kinder and gentler to ourselves.

When practicing like this, we are also putting our agendas aside. We can feel more pauses all day long. Perhaps every time we stop at a stop sign we feel one cycle of breath (more if there are other cars around). I feel moments of relief when I realize it’s less about getting anywhere and more about experiencing the process and the sensations along the way. More about being, rather than always feeling the need to do something.

A few months ago, I had a difficult conversation with my parents. It contained themes that had been festering for a while – grudges, cultural disagreements, unhealthy habits. I used every tool and technique I had learned from my yoga practice – posturing, pauses, and do-something-different – and it worked (this was no walk it the park, I feel like I had been prepping for this for years!). Gates opened, honestly flowed, connection and understanding ensued, and it continues. It felt like what might take years on a therapist’s couch unraveled in that conversation. I am so relieved that I don’t have to wait until possibly the end to have these conversations with my parents. The most challenging experiences can be so profound.

I recently heard a wise, brave woman in our community who had a recent loss say “we are all just helping each other home.”

Aren’t most of us afraid to die and can the knowledge that it is inevitable inform the way we live each day? Our yoga practices help us find space inside so that we can find connection to what is around us – and it can work the other way too (see floating in Lake Tahoe). Can we lighten up and find the courage to do what we have chosen well and be present for as much as we can so we feel less anxious at any given time and we are able to serve ourselves and others? I think I can, and I can start now.

Photograph by Lindsay Morris

The Still Point

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only dance.
—T. S. Eliot

S. Eliot’s poem, which has haunted my yoga practice for decades, came to mind recently at a London dance performance called Dust, Akram Khan’s contribution to Lest We Forget, a collaborative tribute to those who had suffered the pain of World War One. There was a moment in Dust when all the dancers moved as one body, and it created one of those magical seconds of intense hush in the audience where there is no past and future, no dancer no audience—just breath.

As yoga practitioners we know these moments, when stillness becomes movement and movement stillness, the ego mysteriously evaporating. But we also know times when no matter how adept our craft of asana is, it can become limiting, externally oriented, and performance-based, losing the quality of our original intention to practice.

How do we cultivate this quietness in movement, this presence? Fortunately, in yoga we don’t need massive orchestras and the grueling regime of rehearsal to bow to the sacred! Instead, in the middle of an asana, we pause, and come back to the breath—to the moment of being rather than becoming. Yoga helps us in the everyday of our mundane realities: walking down a busy street, doing the laundry, engaging in a challenging conversation, we come into the center of our bodies and experience ourselves from an embodied, compassionate place.

Most of the time, we live on the rim of the wheel of existence, getting battered by the rocks and mud of the road on which we travel. But through a meditative approach, we can come to the center of the hub of this wheel. Ajahn Chah, a well-known Buddhist teacher in the Thai Forest tradition, talks about “still, flowing water”—the place where nothing moves, but everything happens! For me, this image, remembered in asana, reconnects me to my breath, my core, the reason I came to yoga in the first place. It allows me to access the center of my physical being—my belly, my hara, my womb—and invites the movement to arise from a fecund, fluid reality, beyond my dry left-brain-dominant universe.

Did you ever as a child play with the light switch, trying to find the place between off and on? Perhaps not, but I did, and probably drove my parents crazy in the process! I see now that I am still playing with that notion, curious and enchanted by moments on the mat, in nature, in both deep trauma and the nuttier details of life, in great art, and the simple cyclical rounds of being, where the world stops and yet keeps moving—moments that are neither off nor on, neither flesh nor fleshless, neither from nor toward, reminding me that I am part of something so much bigger than that little “I,” where there is only dance.

Snapshot From the Map of Love

Son #1 left for a new college last week. Today I’m on the Cross Sound Ferry issuing Son #2 back to school in Maine, where he will complete his senior year of high school (without incident or infraction, pass Spanish, and fully partake in the gifts and opportunities this educational experience has to offer).* Little does he know that every time I look at him, I map his freckles. I’m cool: He doesn’t know that instead of really listening to how he’s going to spend all his money on truck parts, I’m swimming in his translucence.

Son #1’s departure wasn’t as smooth. I got caught in the anxiety trap, lost sleep, and clutched too hard. After the first few texts from him at his new school, I knew he had forgiven me. More importantly, he’d found a good place to land and learn. I have him in my vision (clear, bright, happy, healthy: thriving).*

“Worrying is praying for what you don’t want,” someone said. How did it take 50+ years to hear that? With the prospect of an empty nest, I take a day off, surprise my husband with the gift of my time, my presence.

Ocean swimming was glorious this summer. For me, there’s an edge to it. How far out can I go before I start calculating the distance between me and the bottom, and what might be lurking there? Can I let the liquid-crystal water hold me, or do I race for shore, heart pounding?

I think of another quote: “Let go and let God.” This is so much better than “Let go and let your anxious mind wreck havoc on everything you care about. ” When I catch myself there, it’s “Inhale, exhale, pause.”

So it’s September. We return to the work of our lives. Letting go and letting God, letting love, letting breath, meeting challenges, letting life.

*Manifestation practice. What else can a mother do?!

Bridging The Gap

When Rodney and I were students in the three-year teacher training course at the San Francisco Iyengar Institute in the early 1980s, we learned the backbends include both “babies” and (though the name wasn’t made explicit) “adults.” Among the former are Locust (shalabha), Sea Monster (makara, usually mis-translated as something like Crocodile, Alligator, or worst of all, Dolphin), Bow (dhanu), and Bridge (setu bandha), though there was some suggestion that this one is no longer a baby but more of a tweener, like a teenager. Most of us typically enter Bridge by lifting off the floor, but in Light on Yoga (hereafter LoY) it’s is achieved by dropping back from Shoulder Stand (sarvanga), thus its formal name, setu bandha sarvanga.

Setu is a very interesting word. We usually translate it as “bridge,” but it also means “dam.” It appears in at least four of the vedic upanishads (the brhad aranyaka, chandogya, mundaka, and the maitri) as a synonym for and two-pronged symbol of the atman or essential Self (with a capital S). As a dam, the setu is said to keep our sorrow-full, mundane world separate from what’s called the brahma-world, the “happy-full” heavenly realm. But as a bridge, it provides the way for us to cross over from here to there, and “upon crossing that bridge, if one is blind, he becomes no longer blind; if he is sick, he becomes no longer sick….[and] the night appears even as the day, for that brahma-world is ever illuminated” (chandogya 8.4.2). To be more precise then, the setu is a causeway, which is a raised bank of earth between two irrigated fields that serves a dual role. On the one hand it keeps the water contained in each field, just as the Self divides our world from brahma’s; but on the other, it allows the farmer to walk between fields without getting wet, just as the Self offers safe passage between the worlds. So what do you think? From now on should we translate setu bandha as the Causeway Pose?

This message is very familiar in the yoga world: What binds us is also the means of our liberation. In all schools of yoga the key that opens the door is the answer to the $64 question: Who am I? (for those too young to have lived then or too old and absent-minded to remember, the “$64 question” is a popular catchphrase from the 1940’s, referring to a question or problem that’s especially difficult). There’s nothing else we ever need to meditate on, no mantra, no image, no breathing rhythm, but this seemingly simple question. As the Indian jnani Nisargadatta Maharaj advises us from his own experience, “Give up all questions except one: ‘Who am I?'” Paradoxically though it’s extremely important that we don’t try to answer it for ourselves, that would just lead us back to our same old self (with a small s). All we need do is hold the question in our consciousness as much as possible as we go through our days, without any expectations, without even any hope of success. When the time is ripe, when we’ve been sufficiently “baked in the fire of yoga” (as Gheranda tells his student, Canda, whose name means “glowing with passion”), the answer will make itself known.

But be prepared, it will come as a shock, not because it’s so entirely new and alien, but rather because, in fact, the answer was staring us in the face all along. As the Sufis say, It was hidden in plain sight (in this regard, read the short story by EA Poe, The Purloined Letter). We’ll stop here for now and save the rest for another newsletter.

An Interview with Richard Rosen

What brings you to Yoga Shanti?

Well, you invited me. I enjoy coming to Yoga Shanti. It’s a beautiful place. I find the students very receptive, which makes teaching much easier. I’m already looking forward to my upcoming trip.

This year you’re going to be teaching an introduction to pranayama. What is the relationship between asana and pranayama?

Well, of course, this is modern yoga that we’re doing, but in the traditional practice, asana was always a preparation for pranayama. Pranayama was, for a very long time, an essential practice of hatha yoga. Not that asana was unimportant, but it was a preparation—it wasn’t an end in itself like it is today. Asana is a means of opening the body, and strengthening the body, for sitting and breathing. It is a very important prelude, but the real practice was, at one time, pranayama.

What is pranayama and why would someone want to start a pranayama practice?

Well, do your students breathe? (That’s a joke.) People nowadays are very concerned about their diet, and what they drink. People can go without food and liquid for a pretty long time. But you can’t go without breath for more than a few minutes—maybe 5 or 6 minutes, tops. It’s ironic then that people watch their food and their diet intake, but they don’t really watch their breath very often. The breath is really what keeps you alive from moment to moment.

I think what’s important about beginning a pranayama practice is to become aware of your own breathing. It’s important for people in general—but for a yoga practitioner in particular—to be conscious of their breathing, and to use it as a means of focusing or centering the self in the present moment. That’s how I would start the conversation about why pranayama is important.

Can you speak more to some of the benefits of pranayama?

It makes breathing more efficient. The average person’s breathing is labored in various ways because of tension or misalignment, so they use a lot of the energy they generate from breathing just on breathing, and they don’t have a lot of energy left over for much else. So with a breathing practice (which, of course, involves asana), you become more efficient as a breather, and therefore you generate more energy with less effort, and have more energy left over for other pursuits. Breathing becomes easier and more efficient. Breath is life. Pranayama brings in more life.

So the question to ask myself when starting a practice is, “Is this practice helping me to breathe more efficiently so I have more energy for my life?”

Yes, more efficiently, with more awareness—which is a good thing, because it keeps you focused on the present (because you are always breathing in the present). Having a sense of being present wherever you are, and watching yourself in that present situation, is a great benefit. It’s worth it just to get that much out of it.

What are you working on in your practice?

Lying down and breathing. You know, my Parkinson’s has had a huge impact on my practice. I have to adjust my expectations to accommodate the loss of flexibility, strength,and balance. So I’m experimenting with different ways of using props, and compensating for the loss of my former abilities. I’m trying to find ways to create a reasonable way to practice. And not only that, but how to apply that to my teaching, and helping students.

What are your daily rituals or routines?

I get up early. I study something. For a long while I studied Sanskrit every morning. Now I’m working on a book. (And right now I’m studying Toki Pona, which is a language that has 120 words. I’m trying to keep my brain active.) This book is getting down towards the end—I’m nearing the deadline. So, yeah, writing, studying, and I have a house out here in sunny California, so I work in the garden everyday, and I teach, and I travel. My favorite place in the whole world to travel is Sag Harbor. I really look forward to hanging out with Rodney and Colleen.

How does yoga show up for you when you travel?

Well, you know, Shri Aurobindo says, “All life is yoga.” There is no separation. All movement is asana. All breathing is pranayama. All perception is meditation. It’s just seamless. There is no…. I can’t differentiate. I don’t believe in practice anymore. Practice to me sounds like you are doing something for the future. You want to get somewhere. I decided I don’t want to get somewhere anymore. My feeling is that we are already all there.

Just two more questions: one philosophical and one more fun.

Great. Let’s hear them.

The Ego. What is it?

Think of the ego as a little human being—a little person—who helps you out in your life, and who often becomes a little bit selfish about things, and wants to be the boss. You have to assure it that it can help you to live your life happily, without it having to be the boss everyday. I feel my ego pretty clearly these days as a gripping in different parts of my body—mostly in my throat—and I just breathe into it and reassure it all the time that everything is fine. We’ll get along OK together without having to push things away or get angry or frustrated. I’m getting too old to be negative—although I am a pretty negative person.

That’s funny—I feel too young to be negative or angry, although I often find myself feeling that way.

Well, wait till you get to be my age. My feeling now is that you’re supposed to feel emotions. The whole thing about yogis having to be levelheaded, and feel the same in all situations—I don’t really go along with that much anymore. I think you need to feel what you need to feel, and that you need to let it go.

I don’t believe in God or the soul or anything like that. I believe consciousness permeates the universe, and that each of us is an agent of that consciousness. Consciousness wants us to live fully, and to feel everything completely, because it’s looking to us to supply it with experience. The reason the universe is here is so it can answer the question, “Who am I?” So I don’t think it’s useful to be calm all the time. If I feel like I am going to be angry then I just get angry, and I get over it as quickly as I can.

So the ego. I’m aware of my ego a lot. I feel it. I acknowledge it. And then it’s done. I get over it. We want to be respected, loved. Reactions to that are from the ego. But we don’t need to hold onto it. Everyone needs to be who they are.

So what’s the funny question?

Oh, it’s not a funny question. I’m not funny—I’m very serious. (That’s Jenny’s job to come up with funny questions, and she’s on vacation.) My lighthearted question is simply, “Who is your favorite writer, or poet or musician?”

Oh, here we go. Writer: Jose Sarmago. Poet: Wislawa Szynborska. Musician: Dwight Yoakam.

Now, can we take this off the record so I can ask you for advice on running a yoga studio?

Ha! I don’t know if I have much of that. I look forward to seeing everyone in August.

An Interview with Patricia Sullivan

I had the privilege of speaking with one of Rodney’s first teachers, Patricia Sullivan, last week while she was still glowing from a recent trip to Hawaii. Patricia is going to be teaching at Yoga Shanti at the end of this month, so I was hoping to get to know her a little, in order to make a genuine introduction to all of you. Her kindness and warmth allowed us to feel like fast friends. More and more, as we advanced in the conversation, I understood the depth of her knowledge and experience. Yet the tone of her voice carried nothing but kindness, humility, and curiosity. She shared her journey with me—with us—but she also inquired into what we are doing here at Yoga Shanti.

Patricia Sullivan: In a certain way, it’s hard to combine [the traditions of] alignment and flow in one studio, unless you have teachers of both traditions who welcome the other. I had been doing Iyengar yoga for years and years (and years), but the approach was getting so strict and patriarchal…. Being an old hippie, and coming from a background of questioning authority, I started having a hard time with a teacher who was so authoritarian. And yet I learned so much by approaching yoga in that way; not in the way of following the rules, but in the way of looking deeper into what detail and precision can bring to a yoga practice—how it trains the mind to really become more and more intimate with itself, with the body, and with the heart. If you’re open to that—if you want to engage in a thorough, life-changing practice, and surrender to that level of detail in your asana practice—then everything can flower from that. If you’re not taking it as a way to just do the pose better. It may improve your posture from the outside, but really what’s happening is the total alchemical transformation of the whole being. It can sneak up on you.

So, anyway, at some point, I was turned on to ashtanga. I guess it was sometime in the Eighties with Richard Freeman, and I quite liked his approach. Then, years later, I was living in Hawaii, and Eddie Modestini and Nikki Doan introduced me to the practice. They knew that I was a sculptor and an artist. They called me because they wanted me to do a portrait of Pattabhi Jois because it was coming up on his eightieth birthday. I took class with Nikki, and I appreciated her more gentle approach to the practice.

Joyce Englander: So what are you working on in your practice now?

I often start out with some breath work—something that centers me and allows me to settle into meditation. Working with kapalabhati, and following that with jalandhara bandha and breath retention.

I teach kapalabhati in a very slow way. There are a whole lot of people who can’t relax their belly for the in-breath if they do it too quickly, so I started slowing it down, and then slowing it down more. Now I can see that everyone in the room is keeping pace and their belly is actually relaxing so that in-breath can actually flow in without effort. Then we add the jalandhara bandha, and it’s really quite blissful. It’s a very simple way to begin the class, and bring everyone together.

Then I start working on floor poses, where I’ve found a marvelous unwinding effect on the back. The first few poses are more still. We hold. Then we might start doing some repetitive twists, that might last for 5-10 minutes—but I’m changing the way I’m doing it every few times I go back and forth. You end up using a lot of different parts of your body to stabilize and stretch and mobilize everything. My students seem to really love this. Then from there it changes. We might do sun salutations, but they’re slow, with lots of details. We do a couple of standing poses, sometimes more.

I have also studied a lesser-known postural realignment therapeutic methodology for people who have chronic injuries and chronic pain. It adheres with yoga nicely.

What’s it called?

It’s called Egoscue, after the man who started it. He was a marine in the Vietnam War. He was shot. He had a long recovery, and even after he recovered he couldn’t get comfortable in his body. He looked in yoga books and anatomy books, and he noticed that he never looked like the drawing of an anatomically perfect man: you know, where the ears line up over the shoulders, and over the pelvis, and over the knees, and over the ankles. He realized he didn’t look like that, and he wondered if he did, would he be out of pain. Then he started taking exercises from yoga and the marine corps and physical therapy, and he mixed them up, to try and get the parts of his body that weren’t working to turn on or off accordingly. He started helping people in the marines, and then through word of mouth, and going to the houses of people who were in pain.

You have to see people’s asymmetries. Where are their rotations? What do they do when they aren’t in tadasana? Then what do you do about it? For many of us, doing yoga is enough. However, this work can be very therapeutic for people with longstanding injuries, or big asymmetries like scoliosis.

So in a sense you have become a specialist over time. You’ve gone beyond being a general practitioner.

You think when you do yoga that your whole body is awake. But that’s not true. There are plenty of ways we can be fooling ourselves, or be asleep. Opening the heart and mind is a lifelong journey, just like the asana practice.

What brings you to Yoga Shanti?

Rodney and I have known each other for a really, really long time. We attended classes at the [Iyengar] Institute in the Eighties together, along with Richard Rosen. We were on the same trip to India together in the mid Eighties. His path was East Bay, and mine was San Francisco. I was leading teacher training at the Iyengar Institute there, starting in about 1987. I started teaching at the Tassajara Zen Mountain Training Center when they realized how helpful yoga could be for people who are sitting in meditation.

When I came to feel like I didn’t want to teach at the Iyengar Institute anymore—when I felt it was becoming too confining for me—I had just resigned, and I received a phone call from Rodney. He wanted me to teach in an advanced-studies program that they were beginning at the Piedmont Yoga Studio. So that began our deeper relationship. It was such a well-thought-out eighteen-month, 600-hour teacher training.

After Rodney moved, I kept my relationship up with Richard, who popped in on one of my classes in Ojai last year. After that was when he recommended I come to teach at Yoga Shanti.

If you could describe your teaching style in three words:

Awareness, acceptance, and self-love.

What are your daily rituals? Daily routines?

The way I start my day? In front of my altar with pictures of my loved ones who have passed away, and other inspiring people. I light a candle before I sit down. That’s really taking the larger world into my practice. I often read a few pages from a book for inspiration before I began my breath work, meditation, and practice. Those are the constants. Where it unfolds from there, I don’t really care so much—although, I love being able to end with some kind of longer inversion.

Whenever I cook, I have a figure (that I made, actually) on my stove, with a candle; so I always light a candle when I start cooking. I just do a little bow to her. She’s my kitchen goddess. You know, so that there’s a sense of connecting with everything, and kind of blessing the activity, because it can seem so mundane and so boring.

Sometimes I chant. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of dhrupad—it’s a form of classical Indian singing. I took a class in it because, you know, I bring chanting into my classes, and I wanted to know more. I don’t chant so much before I practice, but more in the evening, while I’m cooking—and, boy, that helps. It opens the subtle body. It’s very calming to the nervous system. The nadis are more open and you’re more grounded, so that which can seem to be a chore is suddenly part of another expression of being fully in the moment. You forget that, if you don’t light the candle and do the chant. But it’s not like I’m standing still while doing the chant. I’m working. I’m bringing it into the rhythm of the work. There are a lot of moments in cooking when you don’t have to be thinking, you know? So bringing in a chant can be very helpful.

What guides your food choices?

Nutrition, of course. But I live in an area here in California where you can get organic everything; grass-fed everything; pasture-raised, humanely treated chickens, so that if you eat eggs you know that they’ve been out in a pasture, etc. I like things that are light and easy to digest, but I’m very light myself, so I have to be careful not to eat too light, because I get too vata. I have to eat grounding foods. I like to make things that I can at least have one day later.

What trips you up? In some ways it’s the things that trip us up that keep us practicing.

Doing too much, and not leaving time for just being: that cultural disease. I never would have been drawn to Iyengar yoga if this wasn’t true, but I’m a perfectionist. That’ll trip you up. I always wish I could let good enough be good enough. Excellence can arise out of good enough. You know there is that saying, “Perfection is the enemy of good enough,” which is like saying perfection is the enemy of satisfaction. So I work with contentment, which I find comes from gratitude. When I remember to be grateful, I am content. It’s amazing how effective that can be.

Sculpture artwork by Patricia Sullivan

Your Perfect Offering

“Turn my sorrow into treasured gold…” – Adele, “Rolling in the Deep”

While scrolling through Instagram recently, I found an image of a beautiful pottery bowl. It was the faded green color of the Statue of Liberty with veins of gold running through it. The image was tagged #kintsugi, which I then looked up.

It turns out Kintsugi is the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with resin that’s mixed with gold dust. The philosophy behind Kintsugi is the beauty of repair – cracks are part of the story of an object, to be illuminated rather than hidden. The life of something doesn’t end the moment it has been damaged; rather, it can be even more beautiful for having been broken.

We’re rarely encouraged to showcase brokenness in our culture. When we do, it can make people uncomfortable. While at a baby shower last month, I opened up to an acquaintance about my painful journey to motherhood – including a stillbirth, two surgeries, a miscarriage and several fertility treatments – and she grew visibly uneasy; she would have preferred I cover up my scars. But, honestly, all that heartbreak that I was describing to her gave me some pretty powerful golden threads. The cracks are a part of my story, and my story didn’t end just because I broke a few times.

I used to avoid sharing my grief, because I was afraid I would erupt in sobs, unravel completely, and never be able to put my pieces back together again. But I soon realized that if I kept my sorrow inside, it would chew away at my insides like a voracious parasite. I was broken, and pretending otherwise would be a lie.

Instead of thinking of brokenness as something to be ashamed of, what would happen if we honored our breaks? Could illuminating our brokenness actually liberate us from it? If we celebrated our scars instead of trying to hide them, would we no longer be at their mercy? Could we become even more whole for having been broken?

Gold is stronger and more luminous than clay, just like skin that has been scarred is tougher and often shinier than unblemished skin. Perhaps it is in the places where we have been split open that we are our strongest and most radiant. The “damage” ends up being the most interesting part of us.

If there’s one thing we know about the human experience, it’s that no one gets out of here alive. And whether someone drops us, or we drop ourselves, or we just get banged up along the way—we are going to break at one point or another. We get to decide how we want to put ourselves back together. Sure, you can Krazy Glue the pieces in place and hope that no one sees your cracks, your chips, your hairline fractures, but maintaining a flawless facade to mask internal despair is exhausting, and sooner or later, you’re going to spring a leak. Owning what happened to you, being true to your stories, honoring your scars, and mending yourself with lustrous gold sounds like a lot more fun.

When you acknowledge your cracks, you are freed from their clutches, and brought to the awareness that even in brokenness, you are whole. Nothing can take away your completeness. Oftentimes it is only when you crack open that you’re able to catch a glimpse of that part of yourself which is unbreakable.

One of my favorite chants is from the Isha Upanishad: om purnamadah purnamidam purnat purnamudachyate purnasya purnamadaya purnameva vashishyate om. The rough translation is: “That is complete, this is complete, from the completeness comes the completeness, if completeness is taken away from completeness, only completeness remains.”

If Sanskrit isn’t your thing, Leonard Cohen does a pretty good job when he writes: Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There is a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.

You are a perfect whole—made all the more beautiful and powerful for having been broken.

Self-Care Tips For Winter and Spring

Self-care means taking time for yourself so that you can find a sense of wellbeing and balance in your life. There are three basic types of self-care: foundational self-care, which gives meaning to your life; structural self-care, which gives your mind, body, and emotional life stability; and practical self-care, which supports your daily functioning.

Few of us take care of our whole being (though many of us are good at maintaining our superficial needs). Plagued by anxiety, stress, poor nutrition, insomnia, and exhaustion, we get sick. I have worked in hospital settings in New York City and Haiti—and I teach three restorative classes a week at Shanti—and the one thing that everyone I work with has in common is a lack of balance. Everyone I meet is striving to be the best that they can be, but very few people are asking the question, “How can I work this hard and still maintain a level of balance in my life?”

Self-care can be just another item on your to-do list, or you can create new patterns in your life that include self-care as a way to maintain health, balance, and longevity. Here is one way I like to take time for myself:

I lay a soft blanket on the floor with a second blanket folded once to support my head. Then I swing my legs up onto the couch so that my calves are resting on the cushions, and my thighs are perpendicular to the floor. After that, I cover my eyes with an eye pillow, and put a few drops of a nice essential oil like lavender on a cotton ball nearby. If I have some time alone, I set a timer for 10 minutes, and just let my breath be easy. (If my son is around, I stay in that position until he jumps on me.)

We have asked our team of Urban Zen teachers at Yoga Shanti to share with you some of their go-to self-care techniques to regain balance through the winter…

Mary-Beth Charno

Certified Holistic Oncology RN, NP-S & Lead Teacher

My favorite home remedy for fatigue, exhaustion, and over-stimulation? I start with a cup of herbal tea, like chamomile. Sounds good already, right? Here’s what you do next: to a bathtub full of hot water, add 2 tablespoons of baking soda mixed with a generous amount of Young Living’s eucalyptus and lavender oils—about 20 drops each. Make sure to pre-mix the oils in the powder before adding them to the water (oil and water don’t mix, and will sit on top). Then slowly step in. If candles are lit around the tub, even better! Set the timer and begin your self-Reiki practice, taking in the scents of the gorgeous oils: eucalyptus to clear out the lungs, lavender to decompress. Come out of the tub like you do after savasana.

Then head to your yoga mat for a 30-minute restorative practice. Keep the lights low. Start with supported child’s pose for 3 minutes. Then side-lying pose for 5 minutes. From there move into a simple supported twist for 3 minutes on each side. Then an easy supported backbend for 5 minutes. After that do constructive rest for 5 minutes, and finish with legs up the wall or calves on the chair. It’s the best gift I can give myself, and I feel so much more spacious and at peace afterwards.

Gillian Cillabrasi

When I’m wiped out but need to keep going, I do some gentle movements, set myself up in a flat-back version of supta baddha konasana, cover myself well, apply the essential oils Joy or Valor to my hands, and do self-Reiki. It’s a no-fail 15-minute pick me up!

Keely Garfield

Whenever I feel a cold coming on, I rub massage-quality sesame oil into my feet, put my socks on, and go to bed! After that, I usually wake up feeling much better. Sesame oil is very warming, and draws toxins out of the body. Try it. (It works with my kids too!)

Maggan Soderberg Daileader

My favorite home remedy is using the therapeutic-grade oils for kids: peppermint on the stomach for bellyaches, PanAway for growing pains, and Peace and Calming when waking up from a bad dream.

Fanny Oehl

I’ve made this remedy a ritual two or three times a month. I do it in the afternoon, when I know I have a chunk of time. I lay down towels on my bathroom floor, and run a hot Epsom-salt-and-lavender-oil bath. I get out of the bath the same way I do from savasana—trying to move as a little as possible as I make my way to the floor and warmly wrap myself in my towels. In constructive rest, I run through the self-Reiki positions and finish with a belly massage. I stay until I’m ready to come out. I do not set a timer!

Kirtan Smith

Staying healthy during the cold winter months in New York City is a challenging proposition. One of my favorite tools for staying healthy is Young Living’s Thieves essential-oil blend. This powerful blend combines some of nature’s most potent remedies: eucalyptus, cinnamon, rosemary, lemon and clove, which, according to the FDA, has the highest antioxidant rating of anything they’ve ever tested! This is a powerful oil, so I suggest you diffuse it. Using a diffuser in your home or office can kill many airborne microorganisms, and the cinnamon-y/clove smell feels like the holidays!