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!

Kāmabandha, Bound to Love

With Valentine’s Day on the horizon, most of us here in the West will be reminded of Cupid, whose name comes from the Latin cupido, “desire, love.” One dictionary suggests this word is “perhaps” cognate with the Sanskrit kupyati, “bubbles up, becomes agitated,” which I suspect some of us have experienced once or twice in our lives under certain circumstances with certain people. Another dictionary traces this word even farther back, to the Indo-European root kwep, a not especially poetic sounding word—all you need is kwep? Can’t buy me kwep? Kwep me tender?—that means “to smoke, cook, be agitated emotionally,” once again relational conditions at least a few of us may be able to identify with.

Cupid carries two different kinds of arrows, one very sharp and gold-tipped, the other made of lead and blunt. When struck with the first, we bid adieu to sanity and devote every hour of our waking lives to making the biggest fool in the world—think Jim Carey in Dumb and Dumber—look perfectly rational and intelligent. When struck with the other we react completely oppositely and inexplicably, at least to the other person, turn tail and run.

Since this is a yoga newsletter, we’ll turn our attention to India, which has its own version of Cupid, a randy young fellow by the name of Kāma. As with so many Sanskrit words, we have to be careful with the spelling: with a long second, kam (pronounced kuh-MA), it means “beauty, radiance;” with a long first (pronounced KA-muh), it means “desire, longing, wish.” As we might expect there are lots of words that are compounded of kāma: if I’m bound to love, I’m kāmabandha; if I’m lustful, I’m kāmabhik ma; and if I’m following my own desires unreservedly, I’m kāmacara.

Kāma himself is said to be the first creation of the Absolute at the dawning of the world. In the famous Vedic song of creation (10.129), we read that at the outset “all that existed then was void and formless,” after which “rose Desire (kāma) … the primal seed and germ of Spirit.” This seems to indicate that within each of us then at the very essence of our being is Desire, but not the everyday worldly desire to, just to pull an example out of my hat, date Kate Upton (or whoever you’d like to fill in here), but the original intent of Desire with a capital D, which is to know ourselves as we truly are and so be truly happy.

Kāma of course has a family. His wife’s name is Rati, “pleasure,” his younger brother is Krodha, “anger,” and his daughter is Trisha, “thirst.” Sounds like that might be an interesting Thanksgiving dinner get-together. We might expect him nowadays to drive a very flashy, expensive car, but traditionally his ride is a parrot, said to be the wisest of birds—Polly want a kwep-er?—or a peacock, which represents impatient desire. Like Cupid, K ma has a bow, his is made of sugar cane, its string a line of buzzing bees, his arrows are made of lust-inspiring flowers. Oddly enough, for we might expect just the reverse, K ma is worshiped by the yogis, because it’s only he who can free the mind of desire. I guess it’s good to know, as Alain Danielou writes in the Gods of India, that it’s not “pleasure but desire” that binds us all to suffering and blocks our way to liberation. He quotes from an obscure Upanishad: “He (and let’s add “she”) who hankers after pleasure with a view of enjoying it becomes addicted to desire. The sage partakes of sensual pleasures as they occur, with a detached mind, and does not become addicted to desire.”

Like most Indian deities, Kāma has a host of names; just a few are: Ishma, “spring,” Mada, “passion,” Smara, “remembering love.” He’s also known as Abhirupa, the “beautiful,” Dipaka, the “inflamer,” Kantu, the “happy,” and naturally Samantaka, the “destroyer of peace.” His special celebration, which we might compare with Valentine’s Day, is called Madanasava, the Festival of the God of Love, which is described as a pretty raucous affair, in which the castes mingle freely, kings and beggars alike, singing and dancing and engaging in behavior we’ll not describe in a family newsletter.

A few month ago, while researching another article, I had occasion to look up the word prana, familiar enough to most yogis, meaning “breath of life, respiration, spirit, vitality.” As I plowed my way through the complicated definition I ran across this beautiful phrase which I give to you to share with someone special on Valentine’s Day: tvam me pranah (pronounced, more or less: twam me pra-nuh-hah), which means, “To me you are as dear as life.”

And a poem that I penned especially for Rod and Colleen:

Will you be my Valentine?
If you will my Heart will shine
If you will my Brain will glow
I’ll light up from head to toe.
And oh my Lungs will sing and shout
My Liver angel wings will sprout
My Kidneys too will celebrate
Say you will, don’t make me wait.
My Stomach out its joy will pour
Oh how would it just you adore
You my wildest dreams surpass
Right down into my Pancreas.
When other lovers get the sack
Only Hearts in pieces crack.
But if you me won’t make your bloke
All my insides will be broke.
My Thyroids they will turn to gruel
However could you be so cruel?!
My Pituitary will be crushed
And look, poor Spleen, all chopped and mushed.
So once again, please don’t decline:
Will you be my Valentine?
Oh so happy would I be
In every vein and artery.

We are excited to announce that Richard Rosen will be teaching two workshops at Yoga Shanti this February: Asana as a Preparation for Pranayama in Sag Harbor on Valentines Day, February 14th, and Forgotten Hatha in New York City on Sunday, February 15th.

The Power of Pause

The day after Labor Day is known in these parts as Tumbleweed Tuesday. Yes, the traffic calms and you can eat at any restaurant that has the stamina to stay open. But these are just the visible signs of a giant East End exhale—it’s as if those of us still here collectively let go and say ahhhhhhhhh.

On that Tuesday morning, Colleen’s restorative sequence perfectly nurtures the heavy sigh, opening us up to a deep relaxation that brings us back to balance. And as a newcomer to the Yoga Shanti tribe, when I first came into the yoga room not familiar with this grand tradition, it was a welcome respite of calm before the impending wave of fall activity.

There is no stopping the engine that revs into high gear as back-to-school, work, and everyday life demand that we plug more deeply into our digital devices. Apps abound and the cloud holds the content of our lives. And yet this is just the dawn of the internet of everything.

So there is no denying our status update—we are fully connected. Always on. In fact, if you sleep with your cell phone, you are in good company. According to annual Pew Research studies, 65% of adults do it, and that jumps to 90% if your fall between the ages 18 and 29.

The irony is that while we are virtually connected 24/7, we are increasingly more disconnected from the present moment, from each other, and from our true selves.

The digital dominance in our life leaves little or no down time for the mind to rest. And we are already proud owners of a perfectly busy monkey mind. So now the mind is in hyper drive—over stimulated by the constant barrage of highly seductive digital distractions.

How do we slow it down? Who can hear their inner voice, take time to notice their breath, or look into the eyes of a loved one instead of a glowing screen?

I’ve been tethered far longer than most, starting down the digital media path in 1980. Learning to unplug was just a career survival strategy then, but now it’s a required life skill for everyone in our supercharged era.

Short of a full hog digital detox, here are simple ways to press pause, give your mind a rest, and make space to relax.

Schedule time for daily practice. Put it in the calendar like any other appointment—and be consistent. Make it a habit, and the magic will unfold. See Yoga Sutra 1.12 -1.16 to hack the roadmap to freedom.
Cultivate discernment—viveka—for what you decide to chase down the digital rabbit hole. Challenge yourself to get offline in a reasonably short period of time.
Pause your online sessions every 20-30 minutes to save your body and mind. Get up, stand up. Step away from the screen. Do some full breathing, and move around before restarting.
Place your bare feet or body on the bare earth for a few minutes each day. We are blessed to live by the ocean, so if you can do it on the sand, even better. This practice of earthing will ground and rejuvenate you.
Spend more time in nature. You’ll find it’s easy to exhale here. Simply enjoy and delight in the magnificence that surrounds us.
Do things that you love to do, sooner rather than later. Savor the feeling that arises as your engage in your chosen passion. Repeat often.
Experience precious time with family and friends, fully present. No devices. Lay down your weapons of distraction. The neuroscience tells us there is no such thing as multitasking, so remember what human interaction is all about.
Take short pauses throughout your day for breath awareness. Eyes open or closed. Sitting, standing, or lying down. One breath or one hundred. Whenever you feel like it, the breath is always with you, always available to help you navigate the inner terrain.
Love.

As Pema Chodron shares in When Things Fall Apart, “It’s a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately fill up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.”

Just remember, at any moment you can simply inhale, exhale, pause. How lucky are we? Om Om.

Meditate!

Like Space,
Meditate without center or limit!
Like the sun and moon,
Meditate in brightness and clarity!
Like the mountains,
Meditate, unmoving and unshakeable!
Like the ocean,
Meditate, deep and unfathomable!
– Milarepa

I am sitting in a room with many others and we are meditating. At the end of this hour-long session, chimes ring to call us gently back from this space of silent absorption. Our teacher observes us as we all open our eyes and start to move. At first she says nothing. Then moments later she shares her observations. As I listen, I realize that she has seen me. She has seen my mind. She has seen my restlessness, my eyes wandering to look around the room. She has seen my need to be done with the “silent time”. She has seen my impulse and eagerness to move, to stand up and start talking about what has just happened. How absorbed could I have been if what my teacher noticed about me the moment I opened my eyes was true? I had been seen… Caught in the act of making my meditation practice like the other activities I do, and then cross off a ‘list’ as they are accomplished. At first, I became flush with embarrassment. Then, I wanted a do over so I could get it right the next time. And, finally, I simply smiled with gratitude that I had been seen with love, and because of this I had an opportunity to learn and be more Self-aware.

The goal of meditation is to take us deeply into the experience of the Self. Each time we sit to meditate we are creating a pathway that leads us toward our goal; and, eventually, we are able to live in a continuous awareness of the Self. This kind of Self-awareness is a gradual process of discovery, exploration and practice.

But, “What is the Self?” Spiritual traditions refer to the Self in various ways, yet each one is pointing to the same thing. Each tradition uses words, analogies, metaphors or images to describe an experience that has the power to transform our perception of who we are from one that is small and separate, to one that is expansive and divine, all-encompassing and pervasive. We may understand Self-awareness to be getting to know one’s self, our habits, behaviors, tendencies etc. And this is true in understanding our personality. Yet the Self with a capital “S” that is spoken about in the scriptures of yoga is referring to our essence, our light, our natural state of being, pure consciousness.

The experience of the Self is not really so elusive. If we take a moment to reflect now, chances are the experience of the Self is very close to us. The Self wants to be known, to be seen, and finds ways to get our attention. One of the most common ways is with the help of nature. When nature naturally expresses her beauty in colors, textures, smells, sounds and tastes, she can catch us by surprise and for a moment we stop, breathe and take it in. We are suspended in time, totally present and absorbed. Has the sound of the ocean ever drawn you into its rhythm and breath? Has the color of the evening sky quieted your busy mind? Do the birds whisper in such a way that you can hear your own voice more clearly? Does summer fruit taste so sweet that you want to savor each refreshing bite?

When nature seduces our five senses, we can spontaneously experience the Self. And for those precious moments our thoughts dissolve, we forget what we are ‘supposed’ to be doing, and instead we savor the moment. Whenever we are fully engaged, absorbed in something we love, the Self is also present, and draws us into our own silence. This silence is not just the absence of speaking, but a silence that penetrates beyond the level of words and thoughts. The silence that lives below the surface of the mind. The silence that has nothing to do with speaking, or even with thinking, and everything to do with being.

So if we want to understand the very purpose of yoga we can begin to contemplate those spontaneous experiences of the Self that we all have from time to time, and through our practice we can learn how to invoke them continuously.

As I contemplated the experience I had with my teacher, I began to incorporate a change and added a new step in my practice of meditation that would support my intention to stay with the Self: A pause. A long pause, unfilled space, stillness in the body as I gradually emerged and opened my eyes. Even if my meditation practice only lasted 5 minutes with closed eyes, I sat for another 2 minutes in the same posture of receptivity as I opened my eyes. As I started to do this, I realized that on some level I was really uncomfortable with silence, with empty spaces or with what appeared to be moments of non-doing. This open-eyed reflection allowed me to transition and fully acknowledge and honor the power meditation had on my mind and body. And in my heart I was able to savor what I had received and to stay in relationship with the Self.

Just as our need to stay connected after positive experiences with others is a way to extend a feeling of love and fulfillment, pausing after meditation is a way to deepen and maintain the feeling of connection that the practice of meditation provides. Have you ever had a great meeting with a friend or a lover, and just after parting you call or text them to say again, “that was really great, thank you”? And perhaps, in that additional acknowledgment, a bigger space of love opens up inside. This is what we need to practice doing with ourselves, in silence, after meditation, or after savasana in a yoga class.

As a teacher of yoga, I recognize a similar tendency in students to resist those last moments of stillness–especially at a time when activity, communication, connection and accessibility have taken on a new level of importance and immediacy. We attend our yoga class, move the body vigorously, challenge ourselves mentally, emotionally and physically and when all that is done…we run. Of course, not literally, but within seconds we get reconnected to ‘the world’. Turn everything on and go.

Wait! Stay silent. Stay connected to the Self and to the experience of your own heart.

Meditate!

With love,
Nikki Costello