Many people drop into their favorite group yoga class, with usually a number of studios, teachers and times to choose from. With an unlimited membership at a studio, why would a student choose private instruction instead?
Robin in Death Valley 108 degrees (image © Simeon Schatz)
I started teaching private yoga exclusively
I used to do 5-minute headstands every day. They influence pure calm and also reverse the aging process, as the blood flow switches directions. Headstands require arm strength and balance.
Staying up in a headstand at all costs is not a good idea though—the neck needs to be protected with safe technique.
I, indeed, learned the hard way. One morning I woke feeling hospital-bound; the day before I did a 7-minute headstand, and felt my shoulders sinking in the last 2 minutes but did not listen to my body. Sadly, I allowed my ego to guide me instead.
It was through the several weeks to follow that I remembered the articulate words of my austere—and very experienced—teacher. I remembered all of her demonstrations before headstands to properly place the hands, lift—pull-down, although inverted—the shoulders, setting up before inverting (and keeping that structure no matter what). I remember all of the partner exercises surrounding this. I also remember rolling my eyes, believing that I didn't need any of that "beginner instruction."
I was wrong. I did.
While hatha yoga stretches out your body, lubricates the joints, pumps blood and healthy fluids through your body while also reducing inflammation, what can you do—outside of yoga—to aid the process? When you could use an energy or emotional boost, a cool-down, or even stress management, how can you gain some holistic assistance?
Herbs.
image by simeon schatz
A pose is just the life force concentrating on its next move... Held steady within the vessel body, our minds are free form as time becomes unified without limit or boundary.
© 2012 Yoga Robin®
Is a true spiritual practice about respecting time—living by it and being on time for it? Or does the mere concept of time mess with creative flow in life?
...is most likely to live in a timeless place in your mind. To come down from that—to live with a real clock—is a downer. In this way, the clock can be a method of control, and becomes one to fight against in order to be free...
image by simeon schatz
Let's look at two different spiritual ideas to compare: mindfulness from Buddhism and illuminated thoughts from Tantric tradition.
Mindfulness seeks to empty the mind of thoughts, letting the thoughts go so that you are left with peace.
Tantra invites the thoughts to become illuminated, positive or negative, so that you have a beacon in which to focus for your true path.
Stop what you are doing now, no matter what it is, and for 15 minutes do nothing but close your eyes and breathe deeply. Try to breathe using ujjayi breath used in Ashtanga yoga or Pranayama meditation.
Make sure that you don't cheat yourself on your inhale or your exhale. Make them equal in length. Try 5 second inhales and 5 second exhales all through your nose, breathing through the back of your throat.
This breath is like an ocean with waves ebbing and flowing slowly. With your eyes closed you can even imagine waves moving to the rhythm of your breath as you look with the eyes of your soul.
While working a busy day, living a stressful moment at home, or feeling anxiously happy, this will be like transporting yourself to the beach...
You will be releasing toxins from the body and mind with this practice.
If you are scared to face something within yourself, you may sometimes feel that time is against you or that you cannot fulfill your wishes because of your fears.
The answers might be in your dark sides that you refuse to see. Yoga can have the potential to be the place to confront what's most deep inside you. This means that you have the power to confront your darkest side of you in your yoga practice.
A place for the bold... But ask yourself, "What am I scared of?"
Deep within our bodies. The best parts stay locked up in our joints and tightest places: hips, necks, shoulders, backs, and even feet. When moving through yoga with deep breath, these gems—as secrets—can become free...
In a big way.
Chill.
The beauty of solitude.
Magic.
Finding your soul.
The answers are coming.
Just lie here.
You will know what to do.. soon.
Ommm
photo by Ricky Tran
© 2010 Yoga Robin®
Are you a workaholic? Do you work extra hours because you really need the money, or do you believe your job really needs you, and that it's ok to take care of your job more than yourself? Or do you, for one reason or another, find yourself addicted to your computer whether it's work or personal?
You do know that if you are working too much, you are acting like you are not very important.
Maybe, without knowing it, you are covering up something basic in your existence and doing it through your work. Staying busy all the time with a task that does not cultivate your soul can be like a drug that you continually allow to drive you. But you can beat it if you recognize who you truly are.
If you need rationale outside of yourself in order to ease up on workaholism, remember that no one really gets the best of you if you don't nurture yourself first.
Coming into wholeness. Feel your peace. Be in love with your path in life.
Find it inside you. Let go of all that makes you worry. Be free.
Access this freedom any time! The truest side of you coexists with the emotional mind...
Imagine 3 buckets of water.
The sun is shining in all three, and they each enjoy the sun equally. One is muddy, one is stirred up, one is still and clear.
Reflection in bucket #1 is dim and dull, in bucket #2 is agitated, and in bucket #3 is peaceful.
Sun is the Self, water is the Mind, reflection is the Ego (mis-identification)
Some conclusions...
Can you find stillness and not stiffness?
Yoga is, no doubt, a great place to work on this. Some yoga classes are all about moving fluidly with your watery nature, as you, like a dance, find your way to balance. This can help with flow in life, moving with the body we are dealt in life and becoming one with it.
Life brings chaos and challenge sometimes. A challenging yoga class can help you mimic this challenge and give you the chance to relax into it. You can come out ahead of the game with your head on your shoulders.
Ashtanga yoga, invigorating and fast-paced, can be a place to find stillness and calm. A serious voice that instructs while also inviting you to find softness in the strength is important, especially in your neck and trapezius muscles that support your neck—a common place to hold tension.
Can you find the perfect balance between expansion and contraction of your muscles so that the end result is soft and still? If you cannot, your yoga could be harming you. Better yet, can you find it in your mind and spirit? It takes patience to traverse your oceans of time...
Other activities such as surfing require focus and strength. Learning how to ride nature's gem—the ocean—allows you to give yourself to it. It is pure fluid so you have no choice but to move with it. Can you find the strength in your muscles to protect you, fuel you, and help you get the most enjoyment possible, while still remaining soft and fluid, especially in the back of your neck?
I am now wondering where my fears are, going off the edge to find them in myself, in the depth of who I am. If I am bold enough and I don't turn back, I will be able to renew my patterns. This action will set me free.
In the dark shadows, I imagine I will sail through my depths as if a dream and find the silence I need and have searched for all my life. I know that the best stuff is at the very bottom.
More conspicuous and offset against the darkness, the gems and secrets are easier to see and feel. Sometimes they shine with luminosity like a beacon, with my name on them!
The bottom must be a bed of soft sand which I can dig my bare feet into and feel rooted, maybe for the first time. The ground of my soul. To touch this part of me is to release all that I previously imagined was hidden.
Transforming itself, no longer in the dark, I will invite it to be a part of my waking life.
As yoga speaks the poetry of your body, words speak the poetry of your soul. Yoga and words complement each together. Any type of activity can also be a way of living your yoga.
No stranger to a community of poets and those who like to verbally relay their words to others? Many have a vibrant and active lifestyle to go along with this love of words.
Like the wind off a clear blue lake blows its answers to the mountains, take time to whisper the secrets to your heart. Listen to every touch with your sacred ears. Sit with the words as they write themselves. There are no mistakes. It is all yours. You write it to share, so that you can touch something other than the normal, regular you.
As you move the prana in your body, and work through the chakras, you experience your purpose in the moment. Through your desires, your energy and your heart, you will most likely find the soulful words whispering to you gently.
Continue moving and you eventually can surrender to that which you've activated, feeling it clear out all that gets in the way of knowing your true intuitions and spirit connection.
Savasana, the final pose of any decent yoga practice is the place where you reflect upon your entire practice as it comes before your eyes from a distant cloud.
Savasana is one of the most important poses in yoga, reflecting true peace as the culmination of your practice.
This final resting pose, otherwise known as Corpse Pose, is a pose in which to wrap the fruits of your labors, your joys of movement, and your love for your body.
After moving the precious prana within your body through movements that flow through you, twists that wring out toxins, and peaceful moments in between that take your breath away, savasana is a time to celebrate and smile within. It's a place for stillness.
Celebrate your life force. You may have a tendency to ignore it as you move along in your busy day.
We go to yoga class. We start the class by making an intention. Then what?
Do we hold true to its energy every second of the class? No. We tuck it away in our heart and let it speak its own words to our soul.
For, the energy of a wish comes from within us and can hardly hide its wings when we are allowing the prana to circulate as we move our bodies in twists and waves.
What we feel comes from within. Before the words even articulate themselves to our being, we know what it is we are trying to say.
Sometimes we are silenced. Sometimes this is a blessing. In this inability to find words, our soul is telling us to go deeper. Look into the still pond of your being. Do not always rely on words. Look to the swirling space that doesn't want to hear your words and give it your thanks.
There is more to living.
Namaste.
© 2010 Yoga Robin®
Picking up where I left off in my article on an inquiry into your nature…
The idea of participatory spirituality has some more juice in me at the moment. First, I’ve been on a tangent speaking of shyness and opening up about my true expression. As if in a bit of a conundrum, I go back and forth in my life between befriending stillness and befriending the gems inside me that I can only get to by stirring up the darkness to see what’s lurking beneath that surface.
From the words of a song, “I swear that I can feel you creeping underneath my skin. It feels like heaven to me sometimes.” The feeling is all-encompassing. There is a quality of light within the dark—a yin/yang. The love is what I feel.
I can feel a side of me inside reaching out for expression, asking gently to not vaporize the energy of the expression into an emptiness, thereby bypassing it all together. It is telling me that there is much to be learned in feeling this darkness that I hide within the armor I’ve built like a child building a sand castle.
Sand is a good metaphor for this armor. It is made of rock, symbolizing strength. After many years of weather it can harden to an impenetrable substance, but if air continually moves through the tiny spaces (e.g., breath) between each grain, the wall can easily be knocked down in its softness. A simple symbolic hand can do the trick with one violent strike. Alternatively, I could douse it with my watery essence in a waterfall, or a slow drip to eat away at it slowly.
A soothing Italian proverb leads the way in my life now:
Chi va piano va sano va lontano. Chi va forte va alla morte.
(Who goes slowly, goes healthy and far. Who goes fast, goes faster to death.)
Taking time with the precious gems is most important. They have been in the dark so long, so once they see the light do I expect them to acclimate immediately? Give them time to adjust and evolve to become one with me again in their new form, with light shone upon them.
If I do they will become like a dream that I’ve always imagined but could never reach. Not until now at least.
© 2010 Yoga Robin®
Ever-changing, I seem in this moment to be in the middle of a silent breath between states.
Just as there are many forms of life, I notice that it is common for people to tag a style of being in the world, which then closes them off to other inspirations that could come spontaneously, from afar or from within.
There is a misty quality to knowing I am on the right path, regardless of the unknown.
I follow the mist........
There are uncountable ways to grow and evolve. Each has his or her own way, and to follow another's way is to not fully engaging with one's own inner guidance. I am influenced by many modes of thought but always, in the end, I follow my own visions.
In fact, my yoga practice has taught me this as well.
I just returned from a Bikram yoga class. What sticks with me is not the power of enduring the heat, but the power of discipline to control the mind.
Bikram yoga, unlike the Vinyasa Flow yoga which I have 13 more years of experience with, has many rules that are not necessarily inherent in many people. In my life and in my yoga practice I am used to living organically, letting my life take me in a flow. When I am practicing yoga alone, I have no plans in advance for my practice. I let my yoga practice take me.
Sure, there is discipline required with many styles of yoga, such as Ashtanga. But the movement inherent in this active style, where you generate your own heat, and move your own prana makes for a more organic practice inately.
Back to Bikram. What I feel in these classes is the necessity for discipline, as I'm led along a distinct path and how the discipline itself becomes the spiritual practice.
It is important to notice where the mind goes in any yoga practice, but in Bikram it is more about needing to stay with the group, listen to the teacher on cue, not close your eyes, drink water only when told, rest in savasana over and over, to name a few
Staying present helps. It does help me to stay peaceful when life on my path deals me too much chaos.
Sometimes it seems like some force is behind it all, dealing me one blow after another or all simultaneously to get the largest effect. It is in these moments when I know that I am being shown a serious sign to listen.
To know the lesson, I need to refocus because staying with each moment, breathing patience, is the only way to get through the most chaotic times.
In this way I dive into the chaos and embrace it. I do not freak out. Instead I laugh in a way. I invite each moment, dealing with it as it comes. In doing so, eventually I realize a miracle has occurred! I come out of the experience at peace and with a secret message...
From here in this space, absent of worries, I have more personal power. If I erase others' doubts and erase the pressures of needing to be more than I am, I can see the truth clearly.
To reach a personal space where I see people I care about as a resonance of my perfect heart beating, I feel freed of any negativity that could go along with feeding into chaos.
I cherish the point in my yoga practice where I no longer have to tell myself:
"O my mind, you talk too much. Do follow my heart that lives in silence." ~ Sri Chinmoy
Then I am free. It's like shooting stars have just gone off to remind me I am here in this sacred space...
When I’ve reached this place, I no longer know that I had a goal to get here in the first place.
It is then that I am able to truly see and feel the transpersonal. It is in the stillness that it all comes to me as the primary channel of my experience, making the most sense to me in an energetic form that cannot be described in words.
The ineffable feeling gets articulated within me, from a heartfelt space, in a poetic form. I have been given a gift with this mode of expression. It is what flows through my veins
