feeling this, doing this…. 09/17/13

Book Club last night, intrepid women fearlessly tackling sticky issues, personal travails, the obstacles on our common journey to our birthright home, our essential goodness. Last night we dove into Getting Our Bodies Back by Christine Caldwell, a somatic psychotherapist working with the seeds of addiction that lie in the body. Recovery that focuses on cognitive treatment alone will miss a big boat.

Connecting the loaded word “addiction” with over-the-top substance abuse allows us to think of it as something bad that happens to other people. Her broader definition fascinates me. What if we sat on the bench with a heroin addict, curious about what we might have in common? If we are willing to look, we might recognize our brotherhood lies in the oh-so-human ways we skillfully and not-so-skillfully avoid feeling emotions. The strategies we habitually employ to cover up the difficult and even the joyful messages from our hearts.

There are the obvious habits, the ways we use food and alcohol and drugs that we deem socially acceptable. But how about those other times, if we are awake and honest, that we consume in order to turn the volume down, to take the edge off, in short…to not feel the intensity of our sometimes fiery, challenging and painful emotional world? The heroin addict puts it on mute, but perhaps we turn the volume down.

“He who feels it, know it more.” – Bob Marley

What I love about this read is that Caldwell goes beyond the obvious addictive qualities associated with ingestible substances. She explores the fascinating world of unconscious movement “tags”, and this is where it gets really interesting to me. You know these moves: hair twisting, shoulder hunching, nail biting, nose pulling. If you don’t know your signature movement tags, just be curious in the next hour. As you track, you may notice these self-comforting moves triggered in the moments things get a little stressful, a bit uncomfortable: some conflict, some boredom, some uncertainty. Perhaps these habitual movement tags are body arrows pointing toward addiction, toward not being willing to feel. Our own little convenient safe, numbness harbors. If we are willing to witness, track what is up in that very moment, shine the light of awareness…well, that is always the first step on the journey home.

This week we build on the stepping stone of attention to breath and sensation. Caldwell says, “By staying curious to a sensation rather than squashing it, we access our ability to let it inform and change us…This is me feeling this, doing this.” IIn the internal world of breath and sensation we claim supported time to listen to heart talk and witness emotion flow. And travel upstairs to watch mental rambling, catch the pauses, be gifted with insight flashes maybe. “This is me feeling this, doing this.”

On the mat, on the dance floor, we continue our exploration of relational belly instincts. In the Enneagram world, this internal self-knowing instinct is called self-preservation because we need to know what is going on in there in order to survive. For some of us, the invitation to stay inside, to not take a partner, to station ourselves within, will be so welcome, so easy. For others, staying internal for five minutes is a huge challenge. For some of us, this instinct might dominate, making intimacy or a sense of belonging relatively challenging. For some of us, this instinct is a blind spot, making basic grounded physical survival more difficult than it needs to be. For all of us, practice shines the light of awareness on this relational instinct and brings it into balance with the other two.

Eleven days until Movement as Medicine. I am inviting you to the social media world to help us spread the word. You can use Facebook to invite your friends to this event. So easy: click here: then click on Invite Friends and do it. Please. Purchase your ticket on line now to save $5.00 off the door price. Entrance for a family of three or more is $40 at the door; students/low income $15 at the door. The raffle is becoming a big draw! In addition to great bodywork sessions, we have two weeks unlimited at It’s All Yoga & a 10 class Sunday Sweat Your Prayers Card, a Lululeman yoga mat and (are you ready?) an iPod Nano full of Bella Waves. Come enjoy an afternoon of spirited FUNdraising. Can’t come? Please DONATE here.

Rumi says “Why not wake up this morning?”

This is me feeling this, doing this, sending you love…bella

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Last Yoga Teacher Training Blog… 5/22/13

What are your thoughts on teaching, being a yoga teacher, or your desire to be a yoga teacher now compared to before you started this program?

This part of the journey was so unexpected for me. I came into the training at a moment of transition in teaching yoga . On purpose. I had been teaching a Monday morning yang yin class for six years. I loved my students and I loved teaching for the way it pushed me to explore the edges of my practice and challenged me to pull that together week after week in a coherent way. I learned so much from teaching. What I noticed in the last year of teaching was that my home practice kept pulling to meditation and yin and, though I was devoted to taking yang classes, I had to push my home practice toward yang in order to teach Monday morning. For this and many other reasons it was time to leave that particular studio and the start of the training seemed like the best way to make this break.

Over the course of these studious months, I uncovered an unconscious motivation to take this training. Somehow, on some level, I felt this would “clean up” my home practice, give me the kick in the butt I needed to do the real yoga, the yang that I loved to take would become more integral to my home practice. And, despite a resistant beginning of clinging to my old comfortable ways, this has actually occurred. There was just no getting around those four asana work sheets that had to be completed every two weeks. They pulled me on to my mat for an active exploration and I actually loved it. I have gone to places in arm balances and inversions that were never available to me before.

Concurrent with all this study, I continued to teach the Letting Go workshops I have taught for so long. I began to really recognize how much I loved this form of teaching, how easy it came to me, how naturally I was drawn to practice the elements of this body of work, how much it continues to spurn my creative fire. I can’t wait til there is time to work on the next edition of the book. I watched myself teach several workshops without any notes or planning, seeing who was in the room, what they needed and just offering it up in a totally integrated way.

I woke up one day wondering why I thought teaching had to be challenging, wondering what it would be like to teach a weekly class from a place of unconscious competence. And then I turned 63 a couple weeks ago. There was something about this birthday that opened up the door to ease and I am standing on the transom right now and I am interested. Somewhere deep inside I know it is time to shape my life toward ease. Learning and creating are one thing, challenge and struggle are something else. Feeling like I am enough is like putting on a new suit of clothes. It feels shiny and crinkly, not worn in, not quite fitting to the shape of me yet. But I am putting this new outfit on. The old one is laying on the floor and I still feel vaguely guilty when I look down at it. Time to let go.

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Surrender: Yoga Teacher Training… 5-20-13

The question is: What, most simply, can you surrender to this week? Maybe program related, maybe not.

This week I had to write a bio and did a list of writing prompts to get me started. “Where can we find you when you’re not working? What’s your favorite way to spend a weekend or a Sunday afternoon?” I was whizzing right along and waxing eloquent on all the previous questions about my work until I stopped cold at this one. I pondered, I tried to recollect what I liked to do before I got this busy. In my kinder moments around this question, I celebrated the fact that I love my work, how it is incredibly woven into the fabric of my life, that a big part of my community is students and other teachers. How beautiful to be so in love with my work!

But after this kinder moment came a slide into despair as I realized that my busy-ness has totally stolen my “free” time for a snuggle up with a good book, getting my hands and feet packed with dirt digging in the garden, cooking up something totally impromptu in my robin’s egg blue kitchen, wind whipping by me on a bike cruise, a quiet pause of me and nature and breath and nothing else to do. And how the moments I cherish the most and seem to have so little time for have everything to do with family: a walk in the park with hubbie, grandbaby’s hand nesting in mine, my son building me some sushi, my daughter and I sharing a rare moment alone on the couch, a phone call ending with “I love you” from my dad.

So what I wish to surrender to this week, this month, this summer, what the heck—forever, is an attentive practice of pausing, of taking each moment for the precious work of art that it is, of getting my priorities back in order. I knew that when I signed on for this teacher training it would demand a shift. I have absolutely adored the weekends and the homework, the deep dive into a home practice that blossomed into a life of its own. Invaluable, precious, just what the doctor ordered. And the pendulum is very ready to swing back toward the middle and I am ready to surrender to this swing.

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Aruveda: Yoga Teacher Training… 5-15-13

Blog 2 – We had a very full weekend – what is still lingering, resonating, buzzing?

We spent three hours Friday night with an aruvedic practitioner, not my first exposure to this unique medical slant. Love to consider nutrition an integral step on the optimal health pathway and my personal approach has been moderation, balanced diet, as much local and organic as possible. I have done raw, done vegetarian, done vegan…for spurts of time….always come back to the middle ground. I am such a foodie, love my creative time in kitchen and garden, was totally born into it, both of my children are total cooks…it is just a huge part of my life.

So when someone suggests taking a look with a different perspective I watch myself be intrigued and be in total resistance at the same time. This little character who likes to hide behind the curtain and peek out, afraid to commit lest something will have to change in my precious ordered existence. I count on my native animal instinct for nourishment choices and the whole idea of questioning my intuition bugs me, that somehow what I am drawn to is the worst thing for me. The whole concept of “like increases like” begs a re-frame of intuition. Maybe I have to corral my intuition and point it in the direction of balance. Novel concept. Maybe our intuitive eating takes us out of balance, that yoga needs to counter our instincts, that knowing what is good for us and acting (eating) otherwise is the root of disease.

“Prajnaparadha” is the Sanskrit term for “crime against wisdom”, our very human propensity to choose against what we know is right. I didn’t know there was a term for this. It has been a topic of discussion with my patients and students for years. I watch my own tendencies to know what I need to do on the mat and then turn the other way and choose to not do it. There is nothing wrong here, it is the way we are built, and being in observation of it, being gentle with ourselves in that moment, not getting out the whips and chains…I know this is the only compassionate response that will eventually deliver us to what we need.

So many things to consider in diet that are “crimes against wisdom” and what I have taken on this week, what so obviously cools the fires of digestion (why would we want to do that?) and what I have always been drawn to for cooling my own fire….iced beverages. A big aruvedic no-no. That makes sense in a back door intuitive kind of way.

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Svadhyaya: Yoga Teacher Training… 5-1-13

I was supposed to blog about what was outstanding from the anatomy lesson on Sunday but I had to miss this weekend of training. California Spirit Fest was simply amazing and I missed the camaraderie and stimulating learning that has become part of my life since early in January. So this blog reflects the three qustions I answered about svadhyaya—the niyama that encourages us to take on self-study as a lifelong habit.

Svadhyaya

a) This teacher training is a beautiful well-mapped road in self study. Svadhyaya is my nature and has been as far back as I can remember. I have self-reflective poems from when I was ten years old, philosophical book reports from way back and a memory of deep listening to and reading from Baba Ram Dass well when I was but 18 years old. I don’t feel the need to make a plan for continuing education for when we are done with this course work because I will always be sniffing around for the next attention puller. That being said, it would be really useful to pull each asana sheet out and keep honing it. I dig around and find what is ringing true in my personal unfolding and that investigation becomes in service to what will come forth in the classroom. Each week in this current chakra journey has been like that. Now that we have really rooted into that instinctual survival, that ancestral lineage, and discovered the 2 bellies–tender & powerful—I wasn’t sure where to go with anahata. But during the memorial service in Sedona, I felt how the free flow of emotions happens when the heart channel is clear. That all the stuff that brews in 2 and seeks expression in 3 needs to funnel through 4 unabated—no forcing, no holding back, the way it is with children (thank you Rilke). I never quite felt it like this before; I could circle the chakras 50 more times and keep learning. Same with the yamas/niyamas. For me the key is keeping my awareness perspective all inclusive and broad. That way when something grabs my attention, I can naturally zero in and investigate.

b) I suppose I really don’t have much patience for super-challenging writing so I looked for a sutra translation more spoon-feeding nature. I am more interested in getting the basics, just enough to send me on my way to feel what is in it for me. Too much information or information I cannot really access frustrates me. I appreciated Mary Paffard’s out of the box slant on the sutras that challenged me to take on a new perspective, a great source of inspiration.

c) My deepest teacher of the last dozen years has been Gabrielle and even in her death, she continues to inspire me. She was never someone I was close to, a very private person, holding herself distant to most students, though not all. There was a clique-like atmosphere around her, an edginess, a danger I was aware of, did not know what it was really about but it drew me in, along with the substance of the teaching. I had been a good girl a long time and this wicked sensibility really intrigued me. Now in her passing the information is tumbling out and it is all much more clear and every day she becomes more and more human. I went through some real anger (and still am moving through that) along with deep sadness and there is a healthy dose of fear about the future. All of this unraveling has paralleled this training…quite interesting. So I would have to say that she was so NOT a serve it up on a plate teacher. She kept you moving until you were so fucking empty that whatever emerged had to be your authentic truth because nothing else was possible. I am grateful for the hours and hours I spent under her careful tutelage but none of them were simple or easy or spoon fed—every moment was held in the spirit of investigation, she was part of the circle of trackers, no one was in the middle or at the top. She took the life long seeker that I was, stripped away a lot of the baggage, amped up my awareness, honed my attention, crafted a keen witness and set me free. Grateful.

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