The Secret of Yoga

"In order to be truly free, you must desire to know the truth more than you want to feel good. Practicing in a way that supports our lifestyle and everything we already know is not a challenge to our basic patterns of conditioning in body, mind and heart, because if feeling good is our goal, then as soon as we feel better, we will lose interest in what is true.” - The Inner Tradition of Yoga by Michael Stone

As a yoga teacher, I find that the following story gets repeated over and over.

I was approached by a student the other day. She wanted to know what she could do to improve her ability to do yoga. She hadn’t been coming to class lately because she had a fall and injured her hand. She did physical therapy for her hand and had gotten better to a certain extent but still found it difficult to do positions where she was weight bearing on her hands. She has been doing pilates and other exercise classes to keep her strength and conditioning up but she has not been able to come back to yoga. I suggested modifying by doing postures on her forearms, which did not seem like a satisfactory answer. I asked her if she still did the exercises her physical therapist told her to do and she said no; she seemed rather bored with that. I suggested that perhaps there were some things we could do to improve the range of motion in her shoulders. Often the site of the pain is not the cause of the pain and students who have pain in their wrists while doing yoga may actually have restricted motion in their shoulders. But she shrugged that off saying that there was not an issue with her shoulders. I suggested other styles of yoga and other teachers. I teach a vinyasa style of yoga where we use our hands for Down Dog and Low Push Up as well as Side Planks and Handstands. Perhaps she needs a style of yoga that didn’t do those things? No, none of that seemed to be satisfactory. I felt somewhat flattered that she wanted to take classes with me. But then I wondered if it was that or was it simply not wanting to let go of what used to be. I get that. Letting go is hard. But, in not letting go we get stuck, bound up in an attachment to something that had previously brought us pleasure. We want that hit of pleasure and we don’t want to be told that we can’t do what we used to be able to do.

Or, maybe we don’t want to be told that we have to do some work to get there. The other side of her dilemma is the idea of doing the work that she needs to do. For her, it might be to continue the exercises for her hand. Maybe she got 80% better and needs to keep going to get 100%. Maybe she will never get 100% better. (I don’t know the extent of her injury. But, as someone who has broken her wrist I do know a thing or two about rehabilitating a hand injury.) There is something entirely monotonous in doing the ground work to rehab an injury or keep ourselves in shape and our bodies functioning optimally. For myself there are certain remedial exercises I need to do to maintain healthy alignment in my hips and back due to my scoliosis and to make sure that my wrist stays feeling good. Those exercises are boring, but they work. I am tempted to skip them because they take up a lot of time. But I know if I do that I will eventually fall into my patterns and habits and be back in pain, again. These exercises are part of my work. They may not be exercises that you should do. Your remedial exercises would be entirely different depending on your body, your issues and what you want to work on.

A common quality we all share is a sense of impatience. We all want to be able to do things now. We don’t want to do the remedial actions, the baby steps, we want the end product, the final result. I once had a yoga student who would get frustrated because she couldn’t do what I could do. She took privates with me, once a week for a couple of years. She never practiced on her own outside of class. I thought she was doing very well for the amount of effort and work she put into her yoga, but that wasn’t good enough for her. She wanted me to tell her what to do to get better. I told her that she needed to do more yoga. I suggested that she take privates with me more than once a week, come to public classes, or practice on her own. But that was not what she wanted to hear. She eventually got frustrated and quit. I felt like she wanted me to tell her the “secret” of yoga, that one thing that would change everything; the one thing that seemed to be hidden from her and did not require any great effort. She wanted to feel good. She wasn’t interested in the truth. Of course, there is no such secret. There is only the work that we each must do.

29 Gifts

I was especially looking forward to reading Cami Walker's book 29 Gifts, the book I chose for January.  One of my students gave it to me for Christmas. Although I wanted to start reading it right away, I made myself wait until January First to pick it up.  I knew that I would devour it and I wanted to have it fresh in my mind for January.  It's quite an easy read.  I read it in the car on our drive up from Florida.

I thought I would do the practice of giving 29 gifts every day during the month of January.  It seems so appropriate after the gift giving frenzy of Christmas, where gifts are expected.  Who is going to expect a gift now? Maybe you'd like to join me?  If one person does it and it has the power to change their life, imagine if several people do it. We could start a movement!  Would you like to join me?  If you do, share something about your experience on my blog

The rules are simple:

• Give 29 gifts in 29 days. Set a date to begin so that you can begin with full intention.

• Start Day 1 with a short meditation about your purpose in doing this exercise.  Be clear.  If your intentions are vague, or the energy is half-hearted, your experience will mirror that.

• Consider beginning everyday of your challenge with a meditation and write out an affirmation statement for your day. Examples include:

• Today I give with love.

• Today I give with  gratitude.

• Today I give with joy.

• Today I give with abundance.

• Your gifts can be anything offered to anyone -spare change, cans of soup, your time, kind words or thoughts.  Anything you mindfully give another person "counts". That being said, watch out for gifts that are coming from the following places within yourself because you will likely feel drained when giving from this space:

• The Bartering Give: If I give, I am good and I will be rewarded.

  1. The Obligated Give: I have to give because it's expected of me.

  2. The Guilty Give: If I don't give I will have bad karma.

  3. The Begrudging Give: He's got new shoes on, he can't need money that badly.

  4. The Resentful Give: I Suppose I better give because it's Day 15, even though I just spent $300 on new brakes for my car.

• Give at least once a day for 29 consecutive days so that the energy around the ritual gathers momentum.  if you do not give one day, I Suggest starting at Day 1 to release the energy and allow it to build again.  If this is too much for you, just pick up where you left off.  The important thing is to not quit.

Please let me know how this practice is working for you.  Leave your comments below.

Patience and Breath.

photo by Robyn Graham

It took me about eight years to be able to touch the floor in a standing froward bend. I hope you don't get discouraged by that announcement. It might have taken me less time if I wasn't so obsessed with it. I remember when I started doing yoga again in the 90's, after being away from it for several years. I was tight. I would watch other people come into yoga class and they would be as tight as I was, but then I noticed that they began to get more flexible and I didn't seem to be making any progress. I kept wondering what I was doing wrong. My teacher at the time wasn't that particular about alignment. She wasn't particularly helpful, either. One day she asked me when I was going to get over my hamstring thing! I wished I knew. I thought the day that I would finally be able to touch the floor would be a memorable day for me because I wanted it so bad.

I kept working on my hamstring flexibility by trying harder. I tried so hard that my hamstring attachments at my sitting bones would hurt. I kept irritating them by pushing too hard. One day I finally tore my hamstring. Ouch! I kept practicing, afraid to give up my perceived progress. My sitting bones hurt almost all the time. My physical therapist wasn't much help. I had better range of motion with a torn hamstring than most of his patients would ever hope to achieve. I became even more interested in alignment and anatomy. However, it wasn't until I re-injured my hamstring and ended back in my orthopedic surgeon's office that I started to figure things out. My orthopedic surgeon gave me the best advice for healing my hamstring. I had asked him how could I tell if I was rehabilitating my hamstring or re-injuring it, because when you do physical therapy on an injury, it hurts! This is what he told me:

"When you have an injury, it hurts. Assign the pain you have a number from 1 to 10, with 1 being no pain and 10 being the most pain. So, let's say the pain is a 5 today. When you begin to do your yoga practice, try to keep the pain at the same level. If the pain goes up, don't let it go up by more than 1. When you stop exercising, the pain should return to the same level it was before you started. And (here's where the patience comes in) the next day, your pain should not be any worse."

So, you can only tell if you have gone too far by how you feel the next day! After he told me that, I didn't need too many of those next days where the pain would shoot up to a 7 or 8 to figure it out. I learned to back off, feel what was going on in my body and work smarter, not harder. When I stopped pushing myself so hard, my progress in forward bends developed quickly. I paid more attention to my alignment and to my breath. I cannot remember the day when I was finally able to touch the floor in a standing forward bend because the goal became so much less important than the process.

Are we sensation junkies? Do we push ourselves too hard to feel something? In our effort to feel something, are we not feeling what is already there? Perhaps what we need to feel in our bodies is a greater sense of ease. My Iyengar teacher would say that most students cannot differentiate between pain and a stretch. I know she was right in my case. Where are we trying to get to? What's the rush? Are we so focused on getting somewhere that we cannot appreciate where we are right now? Let me know where you are frustrated. Write in a comment below.

Do you have pain in your body when you are practicing yoga? Are your frustrated with your progress or perceived lack of progress? I would be happy to help you explore these questions. If you are interested, you can always schedule a private with me. Contact me by clicking here.

Several people have expressed interest in learning more about what is going on under their skin while they are doing yoga poses, without having to go through a teacher training program. I am in the process of putting together an experiential anatomy workshop for anyone who is interested in learning more about their anatomy while doing yoga. If this is something that you would be interested in, please leave a comment below. What three things would you like to learn about your body in yoga?