Body Joy – Bella Dreizler

How has my awareness of breath changed in relation to aparigraha?
Aparigraha means non-hoarding, non-possessiveness. It is the yama that asks us to let go of what we do not not need. I have had such a great experience around breath since reading the Iyengar quote in the Back Care Basics reading, the one about that last bit of exhale, the breath that we don’t expel, the breath that we cling to, being a fertile breeding ground for thought. Not that I haven’t read this before, used this technique before, played at the bottom of the breath with suspension. There is just something about it right now that is hitting me upside the head anew. And so in my morning meditation it is automatically where I am going and I am finding it to be utterly true. When I really focus on the out breath I find that there is quite a bit I am routinely holding on to and when I truly let every bit go and then pause for a moment or two in that place there is no thought except death-defying survival, contemplation of the ultimate letting go. There is so much concern for the arrival of the next breath that this simple practice supersedes all thought and for a thinking person like me, this is truly a gift. Something I can totally count on. It is like a charmed practice. The will to survive is so incredibly strong. Holding on is what we do….for several years now, since writing the book, changing the name of the workshop, watching myself loosen my own grip….letting go, letting go, letting go…

Teaching is a vulnerable profession. Each week my soul pours into the work, I stand up naked in front of a room full and then proceed to lay my heart out on the floor. There are times I go home wondering if any of it makes sense. Mostly I’ve learned, in my own makeshift teacher’s classroom, not to go there…just to put it out there and then let it go. But then the random email arrives, the heart felt phone call, a question from the aftermath and I’m clear this is what I am meant to be doing. And I wake up and do it again.

This week a student called after Thursday with a question we all come to eventually. Big crisis right before class, you know the story, we have them with regularity: heart ripped open, head spinning, body numb. The big debate commences: should I go to class? Maybe I’ll go and work with this craziness in my head, find brilliant answers on the dance floor, on the yoga mat. And, of course, when I get there, big surprise, the teacher is asking me to place my attention elsewhere. What’s a student to do? Honor my own needs for personal exploration in this moment or ignore what I need and do the drill?

We have all been there and I would venture to say that occasionally the personal exploration takes front and center, whether we want it to or not. I am offering this in the most gentle way I can here: if this is what happens all the time, if we allow our story- spinning heads to take the lead whenever it is time to practice, we are missing the point. The point being that we are learning to meditate. The point being that we are asking ourselves to consciously make a transition whenever we sit on the cushion, each time we roll out our mat, the instant we step over the threshold onto the dance floor.

Pema Chodron reminds us we can, indeed we must, “just drop it.…The world opens up and suddenly we’re there for what’s happening…We have the ability to drop the story line, to rouse ourselves…it’s a very advanced practice if you can do it when you don’t happen to feel like it. If everything is solid and intense and you’re wallowing in self-pity or something else, if someone says to you at that point, ‘Just drop it’, even in the sweetest, kindest, most gentle voice, you want to punch that person in the nose.”

And I am willing to be that metaphorical punching bag as I do whatever it takes to seduce us back home. Remind us that center has nothing to do with the story in our head. And, if in fact we give it a break for an hour or two, guess what? Things might feel really different when we walk out the door. Check this out…a mini-break from story-ville: take a full and complete breath in and then let it go. B.K.S. Iyengar said that an incomplete exhalation is “the soil, or base, for thoughts to arise”. So go ahead and really let all of the out breath go. Enjoy three more breaths like this following the last bit of exhale right into your center, somewhere in that territory between breast bone and pelvic bone, right in the very middle of you. Pause there with all the air gone and rest at home base, the quiet still point, the opinion-less place. This is what we practice for, touching into this calm nucleus. It is always there. It is more accessible with practice.

The dictionary defines transition as a process of changing from one state to another. If we are alive and awake we’re sensitive to these shifts throughout the day, the week, the months, the years. That in-between-time, that juicy holding-in-limbo time, that period betwixt A and B. Because of a single yoga pose on Saturday, this is where my own attention has been falling lately.

There are so many reasons I enrolled in this yoga teacher training that began in January and it certainly wasn’t because I had a bunch of extra time on my hands. If I did, it is certainly all spoken for now. One compelling reason was to deepen my experience of yoga as a spiritually transformative practice. I have come to the mat for a long time for a different reason: to balance the busy-ness of an active life with the ancient combination of quiet meditation and expert care for my physical body. It was an entirely different practice that opened my heart, moved my soul and nourished my spirit; 5Rhythms is where momentous insights keep resulting in revolutionary change.

So it was a big moment on the mat to feel my body deliver this news flash: that the way I was striving for the final shape of a particular pose was getting in the way of actually landing there. That my focus on the outcome was a hindrance. And there was something even juicier than that: I was missing the glory of the transition, the opportunity to explore every nuance of the edge, to allow myself to build tolerance and comfort in unknown territory. And I felt that deep bone knowledge that in order to develop grace in transition we must emerge from and return to our center again and again. One of those no-brainers for sure, something I could articulate from my head before Saturday, but there it was in my body, a no doubt landing. Several times a day I stop and practice that emerge and return, so different on my left and right side and I remember the juice of transition, or as T.S. Eliot put it in our reading this week, the intersection of the timeless with time:

“…Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint…”

Letting go of past and future, taking up the occupation of saints…..bella

The question is: what touched you from our weekend together, has stayed with you, has brought up other questions? It was a full weekend, including an orientation to chakras, several practices, one of them a group effort, personal sharing about our relationship to asteya and a particular sutra of choice, an orientation to meditation practice, prop ideas. But what stays with me is the asana lab, this precious opportunity to completely stop at one pose and be in observation of one or two students appreciating how it manifests in different bodies. This is totally the edge for me. After all these years of looking and wondering and applying and analyzing I am learning how to let go. How to trust to where my eye is drawn without necessarily being able to name why, how to intuit what is needed without having a ready reason for why, how to let years of clinical orientation take a back seat for guidance but not necessarily for driving the car. And to do it in a group where most everyone (except the teacher) is truly a beginner is what makes this possible. I have total encouragement to put on my beginner’s hat and start fresh. Look at some hips slanted to the floor and see a bowl of jelly tipped precariously sideways instead of a pelvis in a particular amount of side bending combined with flexion. To see a hip jut and not dismiss it by naming it a greater trochanter. To see the ski slope of the back body and not remember the name of every single vertebrae that comprises it. It is an unlearning that I am doing, a letting go of years of a particular way of seeing in order to open to an even greater vision, a more poetic orientation, how to look with the eyes of an artist at this incredible creation we call the human body but we know is so much more.

Asteya, the yama that is about non-stealing, is an issue dear to my heart right now…I am acutely aware of the way that I allow time with technology to steal time from other pursuits I know would serve me better. It is not about the phone or the TV, it is about time on the internet. It has had an insidious onset for 15 years. I remember totally resisting email until 1998 but once I signed on, it has been a steady downward-spiraling time consumer. Especially when it got so tied up with my work. After I sold the clinic it became a valuable resource for re-building my client and student base. Producing a web site, writing a newsletter, keeping up with Facebook posts…I know it has been integral to this 10 year re-start process but some days the work is done and I have difficulty disconnecting. Last Sunday I invited the community to take a Sabbath from it all: Stop Addictive Bullshit Behavior and Technological Habits. We had a beautiful Sweat Your Prayers in the morning and then I asked us to spend the balance of the day examining our relationship to technology in whatever way felt do-able. There were different levels of participation and it certainly instigated a conversation. I came home and totally unplugged. In the evening I was alone and watched the way the internet beckoned, especially since there was some heavy duty political changes happening in my teaching world and there was continual global breaking news on Facebook. Several times it was almost like a magnetic pull of my belly to the computer. Amazing. And in the end, I went up to my studio, pulled out my soul collage materials and this incredible series emerged: 5 pieces exploring the relationship between the genders, the perfect starting meditation for the class I am teaching tonight in honor of One Billion Rising, Eve Ensler’s VDay celebration. I doubt anything creative of this nature would have had the opportunity to emerge without this abstention. I don’t know how far I am going with this, but next Sunday I am also going to stop stealing my precious time and do the same thing. Stay tuned.

Sitting here in outpatient surgery, two hours til my biopsy determines what comes next…not to worry, nothing life-threatening here, just one of those curve balls reminding us we are not much more than flotsam on this great sea of life. I had this same procedure in 2004 on the bridge of my nose, pretty traumatic, this big gaping wound in the midst of my face, four trips in and out to get all the cancerous edges, a graft from behind my ear, months of healing. A huge medicinal dose of asking for help and graciously receiving.

I am older now, maybe a bit wiser, and it is a spot on my scalp this time, which feels not so threatening to my immense vanity. I know the drill. I feel patient and tune in to Buddhist lojong wisdom, 59 antidotes to mental habits that create suffering. I wrap my wounded little head around the slogan “turn all mishaps into the path” and remember I can choose to suffer all around this: “why me?….I don’t have time for this…this is so unfair….I hate this”. Instead I mine deep for learning, awakening that often shows up during dicey situations. I already observed in the lead time here how accomplished I am at denial, how quiet I need to get before I can actually feel fear or sadness, what a pro I am at self-distraction. I thought about what part these qualities play in courage, I contemplate my own courage.

Today I took serious comfort from “whatever you meet is the path” right as the needle pierced my skull and the dull reverberation of scalpel scraping ensued. I noticed (not for the first time) how my first response to physical stress can be anger, how short and terse I become with the very people caring for my health. I took this opportunity to turn that around, lighten up for god’s sake and we talked about music and movement and we actually laughed about how the doctor’s crazy dance lights people up. She poked and prodded and I focused on my breath, brought my agitated squirming to a quiet pulse.

And here, in the neon glare of Western medicine, I am grateful for this cutting edge knowledge and my privileged place of being a recipient. I feel the spaciousness we have been inducting on the dance floor all around my heart and it allows me to rest. I read well wishing text messages, feel my hubby standing by and know this spaciousness as love. That is our territory this week on Thursday and Sunday: to re-enter that spacious zone, feel our grounded fluid mobility and then add on this pulsing heartbeat, this aliveness, this life force. And see where it delivers us.

Spaciousness can get so lost in the din of current existence. After Sweat Your Prayers on Sunday I invite you to investigate a self-designed form of Sabbath. What piece of technology are you willing to give up for the balance of Sunday? Cell phone? Internet? Television? Maybe all three? The invitation is to
Stop Addictive Boring Bullshit And Technological Habits,
see what happens, shine the light on this insidious behavior and the way it has snuck in to the fabric of our lives and then have a conversation about it. Can you sign on?

Gabrielle says “We want things to stay the same but life is change; we suffer hurt in the adjustment.” And then she turns around and says “The soul is the part of us that can relieve our pain by turning our suffering into wisdom.”

Let’s dance our souls free together this week….love, bella

P.S. Home and resting with this sweet hole in my head…all is well.

What is truth to me?
I’m interested in writing about personal truth, truth that can actually guide in a way that won’t backfire, truth that I can count on in times of need. What I know is that it usually emerges slowly and often in a painfully circuitous fashion. Sometimes it is delivered via life throwing curve balls and the subsequent learning from experience…sometimes life has to throw the same curve ball multiple times before truth actually emerges. Some truth materializes from following someone else’s version. When we take on a disciplined practice and stick around long enough sniffing for truth, we might realize that any particular form, someone else’s path, is a journey toward truth but is not truth itself.

I wrote this poem less than a year ago, a time when I was really frustrated with a practice I have been devoted to for many years. I was feeling hemmed in, dictated to, wondering where the true Bella was. Where was, indeed who was the person without the form?

Krishnamurti said “Truth is a pathless land.”

And I say I can practice
on the road to this land
but all the places
where there are clear markers
will finally fade away
and there will be no sign posts,
there will be no arrows,
only a sensitive gut
honed by years of form.

Inside my body
inquiries regarding need
orient me toward truth,
the place where form informs
and never dictates.

And when the path is
paved in pulse and passion
I can drop it down
or turn to it any time
I lose my way.

But plans, by definition,
cannot be truth:
they live in the future and
truth doesn’t travel there.

When I lose my grip,
this fog of delusion
clears enough to see
that a particular path
will never deliver us
to pathless lands.

So what is truth to me? It is that place on the inside, accessible when I am still enough, a gut that never lies if I but pay attention. It is source unbounded by culture, age, rules, thought, conditioning, practices, scheming…oh, how long this list could be! It is that place of deep knowing that never goes away, just gets covered up sometimes in a fog of delusion, it is a pathless land.

This morning we caught the sun rising out of the turbulent surf surrounding the lava jut of Ke’ane, other worldy timeless space, home since Thursday. Every moment tumbles into the next and in post-Festival quiet bliss, reflecting and rocking on this sweet cabin veranda , memories fuse and refuse to settle into a defined captured experience. An interior spaciousness melds into this radiant expansiveness surrounding us and resists making a neat tidy story, there are only moments: dancing on pliant sun drenched grass with all the teachers, a full rainbow glistening above us; basketball gymnasium decked with sarongs, antherium bouquets cascading out of the hoops; Sangeet’s internal dark opening set, the rain beating on the corrugated roofing; the finches singing from the banana tree; my set ending with all of us spiraling out on the bluff, the resonant sound of om echoing the ocean call; papaya and pineapples and banana on a deck overlooking ancient taro farms; hula ceremony calling in the sky and the waves, the rain and the ancestors; Haleakala fire informing every staccato move; Amara’s exquisite set delivering us to total dissolve, skin serving as boundary no more; the weather moving through on the outside and the inside; a flock of white egrets passing by the morning yoga space; meditating each morning as night becomes day…images, faces, conversations, music, shapes, love. I am so full at this mid-way point.

Given time perspective, the sixties sexual revolution became named as such by history and perhaps this time point, in fifty years, will come to be known as the spiritual revolution. The theme for Tribal Spirit 2012 has been invoking the new. On a global level we are being called to shed all that is not working, not serving, step into what is new, fresh, calling. With dance after dance we brought this intellectual concept into our bones, our hearts, into our interior vastness, the tender rooted connection to each other, the bond extending unbounded through space and time, limitless.

To send this out, I’ll make my way over to the kitchen steps for some wi-fi that I completely avoided through our time here. Here I go, it has been incredibly nourishing to be off the grid. One more day before we move up to Haiku for the second half, a deeper immersion in the rhythms. Along with Sangeet, I’ll be assisting Amara with this workshop. I am amazed to be doing this work, living this life, finding such full and complete expression in my sixth decade.

I hear that Sacramento is just buzzing along with an awesome start into Thursday Night Winter (what’s that?) Waves thanks to Juliette, who will be offering it up again this Thursday as well as Sunday. Thank you so much sweet soul sister. If you did not pre-enroll, drop in for some great ju-ju. I’ll be home in time to do Thursday and Sunday the following week, bringing along all this energy and beauty to share. I checked in on enrollment for Write of Passage; it is hot and heavy and I cannot wait to share this experience with all of you so soon. Take this dive, it will shift you, I promise.

Sending love from this powerful land……bella

1. Comment on two ideas in the Ahimsa article by Mary Paffard

The yamas, one of the eight limbs on a yogic path, are guidelines for living an integral life. Some say the first yama, ahimsa, loosely translated as non-violence, is the wellspring from which all the others flow. Certainly we are moving through times that need the light this teaching has to shine on us. Yoga teacher Mary Paffard offers a unique slant on ahimsa: “it is the conscious act of not acting or moving out of violence that allows us to be what we intrinsically are—love.”

The study of human physiology has uncovered incredible support for this notion. All animals shed tears for the mundane purpose of eye cleansing. We cry the same for a bit of dust or a blow to the face: our lacrimal system does its blessed thing 24/7. But humans (and I wonder about the great apes, the large sea mammals, the elephants) shed another sort of tear chemically distinct from tears secreted for cleansing. We cry when our hearts are touched, we weep in empathy, we let our vulnerability spill for others to witness. And, in the world of evolutionary biology, this actually ends up serving us deeply. Visible tears contribute to the watery foundation of community where our lives depend on collaboration and support, on give and take, on asking and receiving. Tears are one way we have of expressing our need for help, for comfort, for assistance.

I opened the paper this morning and read about six species of Delta fish struggling to survive, David Letterman’s public awakening, the discovery of cancer-causing oil sand in Alberta, took in one more picture of Sandy Hook. Tears welled up again and again. Ahimsa is not something we need to practice or learn or strive for. It is our true nature, it is wired into us. It is a human response to the state of being human. It is the direct link between being human and being love.

In my practice this morning I let my focus rest on my approach to asana instead of on the pose itself. By quietly articulating every sensation, every thought, every feeling (and they seem to go in that order for me) I gently witnessed the subtle way I am violent with myself, the way I push quickly to my final edge in an effort to get the most from time, the way I can miss all the delicate and beautiful messages along the way, a lifetime pattern of getting things done now so I can pause later. This morning, as I took it so focused and slow, so gentle and articulate, beneath the physical sensation, past the evaluating mind, I encountered fear and the way it can flame into anger under stress or morph into tears under caress. I held my own hand tenderly and practiced ahimsa right there, right then, right here, right now. It is my true nature ready to finally be unveiled.

Alrighty then…I haven’t put this out there yet but I just dropped in to 5 months of Yoga Teacher Training at It’s All Yoga. What, you might ask, possessed me? I already teach yoga, I already have all kinds of letters after my name. Are you some kind of energizer bunny? And the answer to that would be that I am possessed— by a deep love of the practice—and these particular letters are long over due and yes, I admit, I am an energizer bunny extraordinaire. And I love that part of myself and ironically, yoga keeps the bunny in check (somewhat). So now I am leaving to teach in Maui in less than two days, haven’t packed a thing but need to complete this piece of homework by January 18: “You are required to start a blog of your TT experience at IAY. Some of your homework will be submitted via the blog.”

So this post will have to suffice and let me say this..after the first three day intensive, I absolutely know this was the right decision. The reading was inspiring, my fellow students are an open joy, the partner practice and the yin practice were just what I needed. Having the luxury of time to observe posture with a plumb line is something I haven’t done for many years…we are so incredibly unique and beautiful. Having the sun pour in the west facing window and listen to a dharma talk by Jack Kornfield touched me deeply…why are we here? I heard the echo of Gabrielle’s voice in the room…we are nothing and we are everything and it is when we start believing we are something that the shit hits the fan. I spent time pondering my values and noticing where my priorities do not necessarily line up.

And my favorite moments were in a yin practice where the assignment was to quietly voice everything that was arising moment to moment, the perfect assignment for someone who despite a long lifetime of potential awakening, has so much difficulty so often really naming what I am feeling. I certainly know what everyone else is feeling, expert projector that I am. But me? Here in the quiet support of being held, access was endlessly easy: stretch in the right hip, relief, bubble of fear, ache in the left shoulder blade, breath, sad, edgy sensation outer left knee, so much joy left from the Sunday Sweat….the endless parade of sensation and feeling that often eludes me.

And there it is in that last paragraph…the essence, the kernel of why I am doing this: “the quiet support of being held”. My turn to receive, be nourished, let someone else decide what the investigation is….stay tuned!