Yoga Chronicles: Say What?

“Come to your senses.”

So said J., the yoga teacher, guiding her class into a brief meditation. What can you hear, touch, smell, taste? What can you see, even from behind closed eyelids?

I was flabbergasted. The meaning of J.'s inviting phrase, most of the time, is “to regain one's good judgment or realistic point of view; become reasonable.” That definition couldn’t have anything to do with noticing the truck noise seeping into a peaceful studio on Eighth Avenue—or could it?

That’s what I like about language as well as yoga—how subtle shifts in emphasis open up whole worlds of inquiry.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms, by the way, the earliest recorded use of “come to one’s senses” was in 1637, when it meant “to recover from a swoon.”

Yoga Chronicles: Yes, Ma’am!

Photo source: Rivermaya

I’m sitting happily on my mat, awaiting the start of a basic yoga class. Roving around the room, still helping to settle the newcomers, C. begins the litany of the commands that will lead us into Sukasana, an easy version of sitting cross-legged.

“Extend your legs.”

I’m anticipating her instructions just slightly. By now I’ve done this many times, but I love getting told what to do. It’s like taking a test when you already know you will get a perfect score—very satisfying.

“Bend your knees. Flex your feet. Externally rotate your right leg—if you don’t know what I mean, you can look at what K. is doing,” C. says.

K. is me! I sit up a little straighter. Indeed, I’m extremely pleased to be mentioned, at least until my buddy R., a sixth-grade teacher, emits an emphatic noise from the mat to my left.

“Brownnoser!” she hisses.

I turn to R., roll my eyes, and laugh. Ha, ha, very funny! I hope that for a second we’re like two kids passing notes in the back of the class—you know, infinitesimally disruptive. Not teacher’s pets. Not brownnosers at all.

As class begins in earnest, I’m thinking that later I’ll set R. straight about how I’m really a rebel. (Not now, because C. just told us to close our eyes and focus quietly on our breath.)

I never do, of course, because by the end of the session I’ve realized that in a way what R. said is totally true: when it comes to yoga, I love following the rules.

* * *

That thought is a surprise. It shouldn’t have been, I suppose, since I’m seriously law-abiding, but then again: our lived reality and our internal experience don’t always jibe.

In my mind, I’m not malleable. I’m defiant. I live in a perpetual state of resistance. I’ll do what I’m told, I think, but I don’t have to like it.

How come, in yoga, I do?

It may seem weird to leap from the simple matter of accepting a teacher’s guidance to the whole matter of oppressive ideologies, but that’s where it goes for me.

I grew up with parents who’d spent their formative years fearing Nazism, McCarthyism, and religious fundamentalism—terrible things. All may have begun with an assertion of shared and ostensibly positive values, but they swiftly morphed into intolerance, and worse.

As I understood it—and mind you, these were simply the interpretations of a wide-eared child, with no comprehension of nuance or hyperbole—my father believed that social movements by their very nature consisted of people who had subordinated their individual will to some larger, collective imperative.

These people were sheep, but potentially very dangerous sheep. Before long, these they would be hard at work trying to impose their shared values and their rules on you.

My father opposed the Vietnam War and supported civil rights, but he did not seem to be in favor of antiwar rallies, protest marches, churches, politicians, team spirit, community activism, Ralph Nader, or block associations.

(Theater, movies, books, wildflowers, trees, houseplants, butter, Lorna Doone cookies, sorbet, shrimp curry, some dogs, and Thoreau were okay.)

A better child than I might have emerged as an impassioned foe of injustice and intolerance, but I emerged with a deep suspicion of group activities.

I had no idea what was safe to believe in. I had no confidence in my own moral fiber. I was afraid that even the smallest act of participation might be enough to lead someone as weak-willed as myself to a life of blind following.

I was terrified by what faith in anything, particularly if others believed in it also, might make me want to do. I might start telling other people what to do. I’d be a brownnoser one day, and a brownshirt the next.

Why not defy the group? To me, even the mildest sharing of divergent views felt like confrontation. I had no idea how to negotiate. Melting into the shadows seemed like just the ticket. Avoidance made me feel strong.

It can feel very lonely if you never allow yourself to care.

* * *

Almost from the very start, yoga has been able to trick me out of my ambivalence toward authority.

For most of my life, I believed that my refusal to really join with others was a sign of strength. Now, of course, I can see that defiance can also be a great mask for fear.

To me, almost any set of collective standards represents a form of coercion. If you want to play with the group members you’ve got to acknowledge their standards—and once you do, you’ll be using their lens to see how you measure up.

If you don’t measure up, then you fail. And if you do measure up and feel good about it, what about everyone else who doesn’t?

If you don’t want to fall into this type of self-hating quagmire, you simply refuse to join.

My first significant encounter with yoga came in the early 1990s, when I took a class taught by Roberta Schine at her Karate School for Women. “Be a C student,” she used to say, over and over.

I could hardly believe my ears. I was never a C student. Not only was I being given permission to fail, I was being given permission not to try!

The voice of authority was telling me it was just fine to ignore her. I could yield to my limits or my fears or my soreness and still be okay in there.

Yeehaw! From then on, I did everything she said. I loved her, and I adored those classes. Suckered by reverse psychology, or liberated from expectations, I gave the experience my unprecedented all.

That yoga experiment didn’t last long, because Roberta closed her school and went off to teach yoga to cancer survivors, but the legacy of those weeks lives on. For me, yoga remains an arena where it seems possible to obey without having to submit.

* * *

A basic yoga class, I sometimes think, is like a game of Simon Says—but without that malicious trickery! It feels like a safe place to surrender. Basically, I trust these people. It’s pretty clear that the last thing they want is for us to get hurt.

Once I’ve lowered my defenses, it turns out I can actually enjoy taking orders.

When C. says, “raise your arm,” I try. If I fall over, there’s no time to brood—there are more directions coming.

The commands run right through me. I don't think; I obey. We execute a whole sequence of postures on one side and move on to the other.

Sometimes a teacher may send us into a pose with our left leg bent, and later forget to repeat it on the right.

Most often, there’s a student who’ll call out the omission, sometimes to a chorus of mock groans.

Half the time I don’t even remember what we did the first time. I’m not attuned enough to my body to notice the imbalance, and my mind seems completely absent.

For me, the mix of arduousness and precision is often absorbing.

I am, in a strange way, fully in the present of each step. My brain seems to have no record of whatever movement just took place. There is no past and no future.

I wonder sometimes if this isn’t part of what’s so relaxing.

* * *

In the long run, yoga may provide an interesting illustration of a familiar point: that you have to know the rules before you can break them.

I don’t think I’ll always be able to let the teacher function as a surrogate consciousness, no matter how delicious that may feel.

Eventually, it seems, the—er—brownnosing would take a new shape. A devoted student would go home, practice the poses, and absorb the routines into memory.

I imagine with this kind of progress there comes a new level of responsibility: to know yourself and to take care of yourself. If you couldn’t achieve the positions the yoga schools dictate, you might have to adapt the asanas so that they would work for you.

One of the teachers, J., told us that new poses are still being developed; as she remarked, “the book of yoga is not yet closed.”

All of which could in fact make it exciting to absorb the rules. Because you could feel confident you’d never be confined by them.

(What’s scares me still, at least in prospect, is the thought that I might actually become a true convert. I might end up as a vegan ascetic wearing a sheet!)

If practice is supposed to teach you something, I guess what I’m learning is this:

It takes openness and discipline to accept and apply the rules that help—and courage to reject the ones that don’t.

Just as that serenity prayer says, the wisdom must lie in discerning the difference.

Yoga Chronicles: The Year of the Cow

photo source link

As 2008 came to a close, I made a New Year’s resolution to start taking yoga classes. Much to my surprise, I kept it—and several other resolutions, too. Go figure.

Ten months into 2009, I was struggling with a whole bunch of questions about what to do with my new practice. In lieu of a job, I’d spent the summer training for a bike ride. When that was over, I dumped all my anxiety and ambition onto yoga.

I wanted to advance, but before now I’ve rarely undertaken a sustained effort to get better at anything. In between feeling that progress was unlikely and unrealistic and besides a daydream of the ego, I wondered if I could become a yoga teacher.

Having tied myself into mental knots, I’d plan an arduous schedule of more advanced classes. I’d skip other acts of exercise to conserve energy for my proposed foray into the intermediate level, but then, week after week, I’d bypass the yoga classes, too. They were at all new times. When would I eat?

Anyway, I didn’t want to leave the basics classes I so love, or the people in them.

I wrestled with my ambivalence until the New Year drew nigh, and then abruptly settled on two 2010 yoga resolutions that I hoped would be simple and doable.

1. I would aim for two intermediate and one open class per week. Any basics classes I took after that would be purely for fun.

2. I would bring the spirit of a cow to my practice.

* * *

It’s the heifer part that really matters to me.

First and foremost, I thought I could use that cow image to shut my mind up. Get placid. Just stand by the fence and chew my cud. Swish my tail from time to time. Mooooo is practically Ommmm sung backward.

(Obviously, I’m not thinking of the kind of cow that gets tortured in industrial farming. I’m thinking of the apparently contented dairy cows I still sometimes see by a country road. )

Not surprisingly, I’d arrived at my notion of bovine inspiration while working through repetitions of cow pose, which is one of yoga’s basic moves for warming up the spine.

You start on your hands and knees, but then raise your head and neck at one end and your “sitting” bones (aka ischial tuberosities) at the other. Your spine drops and stretches into a shallow curve between the two elevated points.

The pose that alternates with this is cat pose—still on your hands and knees, you curl your back like a Halloween cat.

photos: Yoga Journal. Cow left, cat right.

As an aside, let me note that I often experience a fair amount of confusion while cycling through these two poses, and it almost always starts with the word arch.

Yoga may be all about the body, but there’s still plenty of room to get tripped up by language.

To me, an arch is something that goes up—the McDonald’s arch, the St. Louis arch. But to lots of people, it seems, an arch can also curve downward, like the smile in a happy face or a jump rope waiting for action.

As a result, about half the time when a teacher says “arch” I rise into cat, while everyone else descends into cow.

(This moving in the wrong direction is fairly typical for me in yoga, though it usually involves right and left.)

One of the things that I’ve come to love about yoga classes is the way in which coherent collective action and distinct individual experience are able to coexist.

To me, this often creates a wonderful sense of mystery.

The teachers are trying to invent language that communicates to the body, and we’re all absorbing the dozens of literal and metaphoric instructions in different ways.

I have no idea what is flashing through all the other students’ minds as they engage the stream of images that is likely to be invoked in the course of any given class.

(Lawn mowers, snakes, parachutes, jellyfish, sails, ferns, flags, Slip ‘n Slides—the list goes on and on.)

When somebody says “cow,” do all the other city people get excited?

Cows have big bony haunches, and when I envision them I get a little flamboyant about spinning my own pelvis so that my sitting bones feel hugely wide and very tall in the air. (If I were doing this as a human, I’d probably be a lot less exuberant.)

When I raise my head, it’s because I’ve had my neck comfortably lowered for gazing, but then I calmly raise my head to see what’s passing by. (Big brown eyes. Mmmmm. Look back down.)

It’s true I picked cows as my mascot because they didn’t seem like the types to indulge in overthinking. But there was more to it than that.

As I contemplated my intentions for the year ahead, one of the underlying questions was this: How can I stay with yoga for the long haul?

I knew that I wanted to cultivate discipline, to learn to work hard and to visibly try, but at the same time I feared it might be counterproductive to fight so hard at every step of my practice.

As much as it conflicted with every macho fantasy I’ve ever had for myself, I thought I should aim for something steadfast and gentle, like I imagined a cow to be. Something sweet.

Lately, C. keeps emphasizing that yoga is all about feeling in the body, and therefore about touch most of all. I buy that, and I’m fascinated by the idea of developing an interior sense of touch, but I’m surprised to discover that yoga has opened up other senses as well.

When I think of it, sweet can be a quality of movement—I’d certainly aspire to that—or a taste. But I was thinking of a particular scent, one I’d inhaled years ago during a magical day in the badlands of North Dakota.

The grasses were unusually lush and green, the sky pink and blue, and the breeze danced with the sounds of meadowlarks.

I could remember how amazing the fragrance of that prairie was, and I knew what it was like, but I simply could not bring it back to mind—not enough to use it in yoga.

What had it been like? After a while, I realized it was kinder, gentler, more nuanced version of cow dung—which made sense, since both scents came from grasses. I could readily conjure the perfume of cow dung.

Yes, at the risk of seeming ridiculous, I wanted my yoga practice to contain the smell (and smelling) of manure. How alert do I feel when I am capturing an unexpected scent? How delicate does my sensing have to be? How smoothly does the aroma flow through me? Can I move like that?

The associations went on from there. I’d first encountered cow dung while exploring the dairy farm that bordered the very first house I’d lived in.

I’d wade across the creek, squeeze through a slack, rusty strand of barbed wire, and stand daringly in the cow pasture. The fact that the manure coiled into a perfect circle—the proverbial cow pie—was totally amazing to me.

A while back I wrote about visiting the neighbor’s farm to watch the cows come in for their milking (see postscript). My sister has since told me it turned out it was off to the cows I had gone when I disappeared one afternoon and my father got so frantic he jumped in the old well to look for me.

So my cow idea has acquired another layer—a fresh narrative about the child who wants to explore and is loved at the same time. That childhood daring feels very much part of the world of yoga for me, along with the notion of being cared for, in a sense, by the teachers and the practice.

* * *

I’ve only invoked the cow a few times so far. As the Jaya newsletter said recently, I’m constantly remembering that I’m about to forget I ever had the idea at all.

I tried it once during the extended period of time in which we held a hip-opening stretch.

Head down, forearms on blocks, eyes watering, hands clasped in prayer, I began to imagine what it must be like to be a cow walking toward the barn with a swollen udder. Oh, those bones must ache. Was the cow in a hurry? Was the cow complaining? No!

(Speaking of hip openers, I’ve discovered that they bring up a lot of what the yoga teachers like to call “sensation.”

One of our instructors, A., told us with a smile that she’d once held ankle-to-knee for so long that she could taste the tears she’d shed on her fourth-grade playground. Once again, yoga had moved beyond touch, to memory and taste.

Apparently I’m suggestible, and there must be something about that pose and salt. The next time I tried ankle-to-knee I could have sworn my saliva was flavored with blood from my endless childhood sessions at the dentist.)

I'm not sure any of this is what you are supposed to be doing in yoga, but for now it’s fun anyway.

I realize a cow may be too clumsy and plodding and earthbound to serve as a lasting source of yogic inspiration, but for now those are my attributes, too.

And of course, there’s always that cow that jumped over the moon.

Pool Cue

Sometimes I feel like I don't have a thought in my head.

Yoga Chronicles: A Teacher's Notes

A while back, Ruthie Streiter began her class at Jaya Yoga Center by saying she’d been on the phone with a friend the other night, talking about what it took to be a good yoga teacher.

I liked this right away. It was a pleasant reminder that there are people trying to be good yoga teachers just the way I am trying to be a good yoga student. I felt in that moment all of us in the class had a common cause.

Unfolding a piece of paper, Ruthie read out a list of four key tasks for the instructor.

Sitting on my mat, I half listened and half began working feverishly to concoct an acronym by which to remember the four items. Later, of course, I could recall the acronym, but not what it stood for.

I emailed Ruthie, and she was kind enough to send me the list, which she said should be sourced to her friend, Kimberly Johnson. Here it is, partially (but I hope responsibly) paraphrased:

The Four Key Tasks for a Yoga Instructor

Instructors should help students to:

1. Connect to the breath.

2. Visualize. Visualization helps students to focus, sharpen observation skills, tap into creativity, learn how to use imagination to create and move energy and feeling, and awaken the inner senses.

3. Understand that there is constant change—or, in other words, to grasp the inevitable truth of impermanence. If we know that things are changing all the time, then we won’t cling or grasp as much; it’s easier to let go.

At the same time, teachers should:

4. Hold a higher vision for students even when the students don't or when it is difficult for them to keep it in perspective.

* * *

I’m not a teacher, but it occurred to me that this list might contain useful ground rules for any kind of instruction.

The ideas about breath and impermanence (1 and 3), for instance, are among the core teachings of Buddhist philosophy, and obviously these have wide applicability.

It seemed to me there was a lot to chew on in point number 4.

I'm sometimes envious of yoga teachers and therapists—who often promote enormous personal progress in the people they work with, but in ways that rarely leave their student clients feeling judged or criticized.

(It may sometimes help that students may as yet have no clue whatsoever about the ideal they are shooting for—it may take years even to know how far we are falling short!)

In both fields, I suspect, the pace of the project depends largely on the motivation of the student. What this means for the guides, I imagine, is that faithful adherence to a higher vision may require a great deal of patience.

Is there some way to integrate gentleness with higher vision if you’re in a field in which you must apply specific standards or there is some period of time in which the student must show improvement?

What if you’re a teacher who has to give a grade? Or an editor who feels the piece won’t be publishable if you don’t overhaul a sentence?

I don’t know the answers, but I’m no longer thinking about the question in quite the same way.

Above all, it was the point about visualization that hit home for me.

I’ve read about athletes envisioning a brilliant performance before the big competition, but I’d never played sports or thought that was something I could do.

As for visualizing where I wanted to be in five years, or imagining what kind of tree I might like to be, forget it.

It is very different, somehow, to be asked to behave like a tree.

If somebody asks me to stand like a gnarled old oak, I’ll give it the old college try. And if someone asks me to move like a willow, I’ll do something entirely different—especially if my eyes are closed and nobody’s looking.

This kind of visualization (through enactment, in many instances) is going on in yoga all the time. The English names for some asanas, like plank or corpse pose, already contain images.

It’s not unusual to be asked to imagine your heart as a flower or to breathe like a jellyfish or to think about grass blowing in the wind or the waves on the shore.

Much to surprise, I find myself actually building these images, experiencing them, somehow feeling that I can live them in my body.

It does feel like an act of creation—a path forged by metaphor, or simile, or analogy, or whatever it is. One begins to embody so many different things.

When she came to visit, my friend L. remarked that she’d never written so much fiction as when she was regularly taking yoga. Focus, observation, creativity, imagination, moving energy and feeling, awakened senses—it makes sense to me.

Yoga Chronicles: Spring Training

“How can you think and hit at the same time?” —Yogi Berra

* * *

“Do you want to know a secret?”

So asked C., the yoga instructor, staring down at a student. The student agreeably said yes. C.’s secret, delivered to the room, was that the basic techniques we practiced over and over were going to make the advanced stuff easier: they were the foundation.

I’m nowhere near command of even the fundamentals, but I had a flashing sensation of what a baseball player may feel in spring training—the pleasure of doing drills, fielding hundreds of ground balls, making the throw, over and over, until he knows in every cell of his being that he can make that play.

I’ve never played an organized sport, or even tried to master a disorganized one, but I was reminded of what my friend L. had said, long ago, about being a catcher.

There came a moment in the game when her body simply did all that she had trained it to do—automatically, without thinking—and it felt like joy. This was the first time I’d had any inkling of how you might get to that.

Barefoot and Posing

I’m an absolute beginner in yoga.

I’m a beginner in Buddhism, too, but at least my dalliance with Buddhism has gone on for a long time.

Even if I’ve never seriously meditated I’ve read books by people who do. I’ve contemplated a lot of their philosophy and to some extent begun trying to live by it.

I do have a sustained practice in the form of therapy. I watch my thoughts, but I also say them out loud to someone who has taught me what it might mean to live the questions (as she pointed out that Rilke said) and shown me by her own actions what openness and compassion can look like.

Over years of talking, things happen—the thoughts shift, they lose their substance, one’s ways of responding to the world become a little less fixed. That may be similar to what happens with meditation.

For me, anyway, the Buddhism and the therapy have been complementary. Buddhism taught me I could sit still and bear the miserable thoughts and feelings that were coming up in therapy.

Therapy gradually taught me that many of the thoughts I was most convinced were true were little more than a barrier against any experience of life I didn’t think I’d be able to manage.

At this point, I’m pretty much an absolute beginner in life.

Although in some ways I feel like a very physical person, all my training has been to lead with my mind. I’m sure that if you spent years on the cushion Buddhism would be a physical practice, but it’s less so if you read a book and then go sit for 15 minutes every now and again.

I’ve dabbled in yoga for years, too, without treating it as much more than a source of calm and exercise. It seemed too religious to get into at any depth, I suppose. My favorite parts were the various forms of lying down and then the deep rest at the end.

I wandered into the local yoga center to meditate, feeling guilty that I came so often for free, but resisting the invitation take classes at a place that I’d remembered visiting years before and finding too strenuous.

Eventually, though, something clicked. C. said, “You should come practice with us,” and I heard the word practice.

Practice. I could take my emotion practice and my watch-my-mind practice and toss in a body practice and see how they all came together.

Fireworks, is how.

Relatively speaking, I don’t think the classes are all that hard. Still, for me in the early weeks the physical effort was so overwhelming it was as if I’d lost touch with my mind entirely.

I went back to the time when I was ambidextrous, and I couldn’t tell right from left. I heard the words but I had no idea how to translate them into what to do.

I felt about five years old, disoriented and vulnerable—but this time trying not to worry about it.

With my thinking disabled, I had none of my usual defenses. Once at the end of class, I almost started to cry. There were moments of grief. I had tiny moments of feeling I could play. Sometimes I walked home nearly floating on my own sense of sunniness.

I had to go into therapy and talk about it all.

I suspect I was a little bit unnerved, because in the early weeks it seemed like I kept coming close to various kinds of accidents. I nearly crashed my bike. I practically set my house on fire.

I had this idea that I was trying to injure myself so I could get out of it.

Then I started to enjoy getting stronger. I’ve had tiny inklings of what it might mean to relax while feeling you were doing something that was way beyond your physical capacity.

I’m learning to visualize.

Some days I can almost balance. The next day, it’s hopeless.

The whole experience reminds me of learning to drive a car. The first time I ever tried to change lanes at 55 miles an hour was on Route 17.

Keep foot on the gas, look, signal, check the mirrors, steer, and not panic my father? I couldn’t imagine how anyone could put together the dozen things one had do get from one side of the road to the other in the tiny space of time allotted.

Once I stepped blithely into a lunge and now I’m only halfway through my checklist of body parts by the time the time the pose is over.

Still, I haven’t quit. Yet.

I’ve always done yoga with my eyes closed. I loved that that was an option—it helped me to black out my own self-consciousness.

I liked yoga the way I like swimming—you’re doing something in close proximity with other people, but you can pretend they’re not there.

It’s not like that this time. My eyes are still closed, but it’s not just because I’m shutting the other people out.

Somehow, this feels like a community. I really like the people, both the teachers and the students. There’s laughter. The classes are often a great deal of fun.

All of this is a whopping five months old.

I can see already that there’s a way to do yoga what would require a serious commitment. I bet you don’t really know anything for years and years.

It’s probably not for me.

Still, I’m intrigued. I’ve just started reading B.K.S. Iyengar. I like how many images there are when people talk about yoga. I like a spiritual approach that gives the body its due.

I found myself thinking I should keep my own yoga journal, because I can imagine myself being continually fascinated by experiences and ideas.

If everything that occurs to me now seems impossibly stupid a month from now, oh well. If perchance I stick with it, it might be interesting to see what I learned along the way.

Or not.

Okay, I’ve had the thought. Now let it go.