oak tree yoga blog

Strong Centre

2012-02-28T14:24:00.000Z

Life can be very difficult. I don't believe that there was ever a life without sorrow and challenge; loss and grief; doubt and insecurity. That there is joy too, and that joy provides the constant backdrop to the vicissitudes of a normal life, is our gift. This abiding joy/love/peace is what we connect to, with practice, even through our deepest sadnesses.

I admit that I have had dark and doubting moments where I have wondered, what is the point of yoga? What is the point of breathing deeply and moving up and down your mat and sitting very still, when life feels as though it is falling down around your ears and when the people that you thought would always be there are lost to you, or when the things you thought were certain suddenly seem very fragile and perilous, or when you have tried your best, but feel that you have failed, in spite of those best efforts. Sometimes life feels as though it is slipping through your fingers; it seems to be rushing away from you as you desperately seek for something to hold on to, some rock to rest on.

Here is what yoga has given to me in my darkest moments, and what I hope it will give to you when you go through them.

Yoga has given me the strength to feel my place on the earth and in the scheme of things; it has helped me to stay grounded and sure-footed, even as the ground has seemed to shift beneath my feet. It has given me flexibility and the understanding that change is inevitable and that nobody can hold back the tides of life. Yoga has helped me to ride the waves of life, as huge and frightening as they may have been, rather than have them drag me under. Yoga has given me the capacity for perspective: to see my troubles set against the backdrop of beauty and joy that I see around me. My life will come and go, but that beauty will remain. Yoga has given me the growing gift of self-compassion and love and compassion for others, no matter how they might have hurt me or themselves. Yoga has given me insight and clarity; I make mistakes, don't you? I am human, aren't you? I only seek to learn from those mistakes and to make my way through life with kindness, not judgement.

When you find yourself at a low ebb, don't forget your practice and how much you can depend on it. Trust it to bring you strength, flexibility, self-understanding, compassion, resilience and perspective. Know that you can drink from that deep well of peace and love that exists at the centre of yourself whenever you choose; that the only thing that stands between you and it, is your resistance to it. Have faith in your practice and in yourself.

Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Anton Chekov

Dreaming of Ashrams

2012-02-28T13:40:00.000Z

Ah, but it's hard keeping up your yoga practice (not just on your mat, but out inthe world where it's supposed to be) in your ordinary life where childrenforget to give you letters from school and then you must rustle up a project onVictorian Toys in an evening and out of what you can find lying around thehouse; and someone who is probably late for work (or just cross) sits on yourtail all the way to school and you drive all the way there trying to findcompassion for them and resisting the temptation to drive v e r y s l o w l y so that they back off and leave you alone, or overtake you and get on their way;and there are distractions everywhere you look; and people can be... well, justannoying sometimes, and hard to love!

I've been thinking about ashrams and retreats and how wonderful it would bejust to practice all day long and to have time for your little break-downs andmoments of self-doubt, without trying to have them while you're cooking fishfingers for supper and listening to the simultaneous stream-of-consciousnessramblings of a 9 year old girl and an 11 year old boy. How wonderful it wouldbe to find your way to your yoga mat for meditation every morning to practicewithout feeling remotely conflicted (I ought to do some laundry). Orto get down to some asana practice that lasts as long as you want it to and isnot curtailed by the need to be somewhere at some time.

But life is here to teach us and it is in the fire of life that we test ourbeliefs and convictions. And I am here on this earth as a mother and mychildren are a gift to me (some gifts are challenges too) and the times that Ifind myself wishing I were somewhere else, somewhere peaceful are very humanmoments. I am reminded of Leonard Cohen, who spent some time as a monk, and who saidthat all monks know that they have failed because they are unable to live in the real world and I think I know what he meant (although I don't know if I agree with him - I have never been a monk), but it is easier to find peace and stay with it when there is less of the world around to bother you.

When I have been on retreat I have been focused and at peace and undisturbed from my practice and it has been joyous. It is a gift to myself to feel this way and I will make sure that I give myself this gift more often in my life. But this body is where I live and this practice is what I have. It is what it is and what it is is wonderful and positive and transformative and clarifying and it has helped me in ways that I might have expected and ways that I haven't. It is better to live your dharma badly, than to live someone else's dharma well, says the Bhagavad Gita, and the futility of wishing your life were (just a little bit) different is obvious.

We find our peace where we can. We aim to give our love continually to everyone. We make a corner of our bedroom a little sacred ashram space and we commit ourselves to going to that place every day, for as long as we have, to renew that vital connection, to refresh that centred peace. We turn a dog walk or the baking of a cake into a mindful practice of grace and gratitude. It's life. It's what we can do. And we make ourselves into yogis and yoginis both on and off our mats, rather than thinking things have to be or look a certain way before we practice. In this way we set ourselves up to succeed, rather than to fail and we take the gift of yoga as we find it and how it really is.

Why Meditate? Part 2

2012-02-08T14:00:00.003Z

There are many scientifically proven and physically measurable benefits to meditating, some of which I described here last month. But there are also more esoteric, spiritual reasons to meditate. The idea of being on a spiritual path may not be your cup of tea, but for me, it's the reason that I go to my mat every day; it's the reason that I immerse myself in the study of yoga; it provides the deeper meaning to my life, describes it's purpose and brings comfort in the form of the teachers, students, yogis who have gone before me. I am in the foothills; their view from the mountaintop continues to inspire and motivate me to continue to deepen my yoga practice.

I meditate to connect. When I meditate, when I move deeply into a state of peace, for some reason that I am not sure of, but which mystics from all major religions and modern and ancient yogis have described, I feel absolutely connected with the world around me. This feeling of connection reinforces my sense of belonging in the world and is at once both humbling and emboldening: I am just one small being, almost completely insignificant, yet I am me, with my own unique talents, capacities and gifts. In a forest of trees, I am only one tree (just the same as all the others) and yet I occupy this particular space and, if you look closely, I am entirely unique. What I have and who I am is something to be shown to the world and shared, not limited by my own self-doubt and shyness.

When we feel/know/understand that we are connected and that we are all the same/different, we can more easily reach out to others. We can connect with them: the grumpy, the judgemental, the brave, the sad, the cowardly, the annoying, the quiet, the loud, for we know that we too are all of these things to a greater or lesser degree; that there is nothing that any other human does that we do not have the capacity for too. If I reach out to you, then you are more likely to reach out to me, and then we are more likely to understand our connection and how deeply it runs. If I reach out to you and you refuse me, then I still know that our connection is unbreakable, and so I continue to move towards you no matter what. And humans need to connect; increasingly science proves what we have long suspected, that connecting with other human beings, animals and nature is crucial for human health.

Connection brings me contentment, because when I am connected I know that I already have everything that I need; that I don't lack anything. How could I lack anything, when I am here in this right place at this right time doing this particular life?

When I meditate I connect with something greater and much more beautiful than me, but I acknowledge that I am a small and insignificantly beautiful part of that great whole. All I need to do is to carry on carrying on with my life.

Without meditation and yoga practice that sense of connection comes (that feeling of being in the right place at the right time; the realisation that when I stop fighting, the answer comes; my wonder at the beauty of the world), but it is more elusive; it comes and goes. When I meditate, then every morning I consciously reconnect with life, so that I feel, know and love my place in it for more of my day.

'Only connect' wrote EM Forster in Howard's End: connect with others, that you might understand more and judge less; connect with everything that you might find humility even as you come to honour your own brilliant uniqueness.

If I connect with the world and with everything on the world, then I am humble because the world is astounding in its glory; if I connect with the world then I look after it, because nothing in it belongs to me, and yet I am profoundly grateful for it; if I connect with the world then I am not afraid to show it my love, or to receive love back from it. I am it; it is me. Only connect.

Everyday Mindfulness

2012-02-02T15:28:00.003Z

It's been a busy week. It's February and it's cold and I have felt a little low on energy. The place where I sit to meditate in the morning is FREEZING... I've been wrapping up in blankets and wearing a hat to keep warm (which I find strangely heartening, as it reminds me of meditating in the Shrine Room on Holy Isle). I can see my breath when I breathe.

So at 6.30 in the morning my warm bed is so very much more appealing than a cold mat in a cold room. I've been making it there still, but only for 20-30 minutes, and I've been missing out on my usual 60 minute meditation.

When I don't meditate/meditate less I remember what life was like before I started meditating ... my emotions start to have me in their clutches and I feel at their mercy instead of being able to observe them more dispassionately for the temporary sensations that they are. My sense of connection with the rest of the world (be it human, animal or plant) seems to lessen and I miss it, that deep sense of peace and of being an essential, yet insignificant, part of a beautiful and grand whole. I find myself feeling a little more impatient, a little less grounded, a little more disturbed by noise, arguments, traffic, adverts... by all the things around us that constantly demand that we take our attention away from the heart of ourselves and out towards them.

It's good sometimes, to have a short time away from your practice, or to reduce it - it helps you to remember why you do it.

There is no dead end on a spiritual path. We are walking it all the time; it doesn't have to take any particular shape or form, or include any particular method or technique.

Having less time to come to my mat this week, I remembered that everything I do is my practice. Brushing my teeth, I am simply brushing my teeth, not planning dinner; walking the dog I am feeling my feet on the floor, the sun in my face, watching the joy of my dog, not thinking of that evening's class. Baking a cake, I am absorbed, full of enjoyment, in that one particular task.

Simple mindfulness. Being here now. All of me. Not my body in one place and my head in another. The whole of me fully engaged in each thing.

With this as my intention, even loading the dishwasher becomes part of my practice and my mind and heart feel at ease. With this as my intention, I don't miss out on the experience that I am actually having by my letting my head run away to the future or the past. With this as my intention, I find that in any given moment, I am ok; there is peace; there is joy; there is love. With this as my intention, I don't steal myself away from myself: I am complete.

As Swami Rama put it:
"People are caught in their self-created misery. First they build a high, thick wall separating daily life from what they consider spiritual, then they exhaust themselves trying to demolish it."

This week, I have been dissolving that wall and in the process have been remembering that everything I do, say, think and feel is my practice and my path.

Namaste.

Compassionate Listening

2012-01-24T12:16:00.000Z

Compassionate listening is one of the most profound gifts that we can give to someone.

Compassionate listening means looking at someone as they talk to you; concentrating on their words; listening to the things that they are saying and noticing the undercurrent of things unsaid that flows underneath. Compassionate listening is paying attention to someone absolutely and thereby placing infinite value on what they have to say; it is letting them know that what they have to say is important and that they deserve to be heard.

Compassionate listening is when you stay silent in order to allow another person's words to emerge; it is resisting the urge to butt in, or to speak, or to comment, or to relate what they have to say to something in your own life... all of these things might come up later in the conversation, but while your friend is speaking, all you are doing is listening wholeheartedly to them.

Compassionate listening is staying open-minded and freeing yourself from the instinct to judge; compassionate listening is giving the gift of unconditional attention and a benevolent, kind open ear.

Compassionate listening does not mean that you have to listen to someone speaking abusively about another, or about themselves, or that you have to sit for hours while someone bemoans their lot in life. With strength and kindness you are free to set your own boundaries; you are allowed to decide when you need to leave; you can trust yourself to know what attitudes you find acceptable.

The flipside of giving compassionate listening, is receiving it. Your voice is important too and your stories are as deserving of being heard as everyone else's; if someone is prepared to bestow upon you their compassionate attention, then don't be afraid to speak; let them hear your questions, your vulnerabilities and the stories of your life. Feel yourself worthy of being heard.

Compassionate listening is very rare indeed. Catch yourself the next time you are out with a friend and your phone beeps and you go to read a message while they are talking. Know when your attention is wandering, or if you are someone who likes to interrupt with your own stories or advice. We are human, after all, and there is so much around us to distract us from one another. You can only try your best to give the gift of compassionate listening whenever life presents you with the opportunity. By being mindful of what others have to say, you can let them know that they are worthy and that you have time for them, you can help to lighten their load.

Everything is to prove that we belong

2012-01-20T10:42:00.000Z

Everything you do, everything you are, everything that happens to you and because of you;
The people who are around you, the air you breathe, what you see, the things you love;
Your life in your body, your place in the world, the lives you touch in known and unknown ways;
The friends you love, the troubles you have, the times that test you, the days when everything is just right;
The rows you have, the people you hold, the ones who drive you crazy, the things that make you cry;
The times you bask in love, the times you feel alone, the days that you are brave and the days that you are not;
The birds you feed, the nature that you love, the animals that you keep, the world around you.

Everything is to prove that we belong.

There is nowhere else.
There is no other body, no other life, no better way.
We make choices, we live, we love, we learn and we move on through.
It's hard to believe sometimes, but it's all as it should be.
Difficult to trust in the unfolding of our one life, but
Everything is to prove that we belong.

Thank you, Vanessa, for asking me to think about this x

Why Meditate? Part 1

2012-01-17T18:32:00.001Z

Life - even life in a safe, democratic country with good access to health-care, education and freedom of choice - can be very stressful.

The unexpected occurs; our family relationships are sometimes troubling; getting to and from work can be difficult and being at work can be challenging and stressful (according to research by the Mental Health Foundation, more than 50% of workers believe that stress from work is making them ill*) We might be going through divorce, coping with bereavement, or dealing with similarly difficult life-change, or we might just be getting stressed out from living our ordinary day to day lives.

Symptoms of stress include anger, sleeplessness, loss of appetite, lack of energy, anxiety, depression, worry, brooding, breathlessness, chest pains, physical discomfort from tense muscles and back pain. Stress makes us more susceptible to illness and less effective at focusing on tasks that need to be done.

And these are stressful times: researchers have found that levels of 'ordinary' stress experienced in the 80s and 90s are equivalent to what would have been considered clinical stress in the 1950s.**

So we are living with higher levels of stress, more of the time. Our nervous systems are designed to supply us with certain hormones to enable us to deal with threatening or stressful situations in the moment, but these chemicals are not designed to stay in our systems long-term and there are negative health implications from being permanently stressed, including high blood pressure and heart attack.

Meditation can help with all of these problems and more. Meditation helps us to find a still point within ourselves from which to stay rooted in the midst of a busy life. It helps us to maintain clarity in any situation, so that we do not lose our temper so often, but are more able to communicate our feelings effectively without resorting to violent language or action. Meditation helps us to maintain calm, even when life gets difficult. It helps us to be able to respond to each situation in that moment as skillfully as possible and to move away from habitual ways of being (passive, aggressive, short-tempered, shy, fearful) to ways that are more productive and positive. Meditation helps us to be more effective in all that we do.

These skills help us to live in a more positive way, enable us to have a more positive impact on the people around us, and help us to live a more positive, constructive, fulfilling life.

Meditation is no more than the skill of mindfulness. Mindfulness is simply knowing what you are doing, when you are doing it; being able to be present in each moment, rather than allowing your mind to run away with you. There is nowhere far away enough; no way of running fast enough to escape your own worries. Meditation helps you to see things clearly, to accept the things you can't change and change the things you can; it helps you to understand more about WHO you are and WHY you did something, rather than mindlessly moving from one situation to another, seemingly with no end to your stress levels and sense of inner discomfort.

The great thing is that EVERYONE can meditate. There is comfortable seated position for everyone. There is a technique that works for everyone. Yes, even for those people who are convinced that their brain is so busy that they could never successfully meditate. Even for those people who are impatient. Even for those people whose 'to do' lists never end. Even for those who are often lost in the richness of their own imagination.

There is one proviso: you have to do it. Like all the paths of yoga, you can't just read about it / think about it / talk about it and hope for some benefit. You must do it. That is all. Every day for five minutes / fifteen minutes / sixty minutes... whatever time you have, whenever you have it and in whatever way that works for you.

If you have a yoga practice, you know that you can build strength, resilience and flexibility to your muscles. In meditation, you simply bring those same qualities to your mind.

"Meditation brings wisdom, lack of meditation leaves ignorance. Know well what leads you forward and what holds you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom."

Buddha

Click below for other articles on this blog about meditation
How to Meditate 1
How to Meditate 2
How to Meditate 3

*www.bemindful.co.uk
**Professor Mark Williams, University of Oxford

Powerful Kindness

2012-01-14T15:53:00.000Z

That the world needs more kindness in it is self-evident. That we take responsibility for increasing the amount of kindness in it ourselves is essential.

Tolstoy wrote "everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself." But yogis do focus on changing ourselves first; of opening ourselves to the unbounded resource of love and compassion (maitri) within and allowing it to shine out on the world. I long to be kind; the only thing I really want to teach my children is to be kind; I believe that being kind is the most important thing a human can do.

I have been thinking about the different flavours of kindness... There is the gentle, quiet, accepting sort of kindness, of course, but there are other types of kindness too and I have been thinking in particular about powerful kindness; kindness that has strength and authority behind it; kindness which transforms; brave kindness which is not afraid to speak out.

There was nothing soft, meek or compliant about the angry kindness of Mohandas Gandhi as he stood up for people, first in South African and then India. There was nothing accepting or quiet about the kindness of Nelson Mandela as he fought for people's freedom from apartheid. Someone who inspires me greatly, is a woman called Jo Manuel, who teaches yoga to handicapped children; she has taken it upon herself to set up a studio and a charity dedicated to bringing the benefits of yoga to these children. She is amazingly strong and powerfully kind; she's not the kind of woman who takes no for an answer.

We don't all have such enormous battles to fight, but we are often confronted by scenes of unkindness in every day life and concomitant opportunities to be kind. It's the kindness that we direct towards others when we stand up for something (an old lady being unfairly treated at the Post Office/a shop assistant being bullied by a customer); where we speak out against that, instead of simply smiling our sympathy and staying silent. It's the kindness that we direct towards ourselves when we stick up for our point of view or give ourselves something that we need (time, space, the freedom to choose differently). We don't need to be aggressive, but we can opt to be bold and to stand up alongside someone who is experiencing vulnerability.

This is the powerful kindness that takes it upon itself to effect change for the better, whether it's setting up a charity; changing the attitudes within a large corporation; or working positively with people on the borders of conventional society.

This is the bold kindness that engages with the mad, the sad, the bad, the lonely, the old, the vulnerable, the weak, the weird and the unusual and not from a position of benevolent superiority, but from a standpoint of equality: we are human, you and I, we are the same.

I have two aunts who are mentally handicapped. I know how rare it is to be out and about with them and for someone to engage with them wholeheartedly; to direct friendship and warmth towards them. They are different; they look unusual; they respond to your questions in unpredictable ways. The truth is that there aren't many people around who have the strength of kindness necessary to approach my aunts and to be open and kind to them.

And I'll give you an example from my own life. It's easy to wander up to someone collecting money for charity and give them some money. I might take a moment to chat to the collector; give them a smile; make a connection with them. That's kind. But when a girl in my local town approached me, explained that she was homeless and asked for some money for a cup of tea, I had to reflect that my response was not quite the same. I did give her some money. I didn't judge her, or wonder if she really wanted a cup of tea; it was clear that she needed money more than I did and I didn't need to know what it was for. That's kind too. But I could have been kinder: I didn't stop to have a chat with her; I didn't ask how her day was, or comment on the weather, as I might have done with someone collecting for a charity. And that wasn't good enough really, was it? Something about the fact that I didn't suggests a divide between myself and the homeless girl, when of course, we are exactly the same species of being, just experiencing life in different ways at the moment.

I figure that I need to get even braver and more confident with my kindness, so that I can share it not just with the people who essentially look like me and have chosen/are living a similar life to me. I don't want to give kindness from a position of difference, but from a position of sameness, a position that says: I am very lucky in my life now; you are having a hard time, please let me help you.

So often it is fear that holds us back. I think I was intimidated by that girl; I was unsure how to respond. Other times you don't know whether to speak up or not and while you are wondering if it's your place, the moment has passed. There are times when you are not sure if you will be met with hostility, or if you will say the wrong thing. But all of these are things that you can and will get over. I guess I'd like to be strong enough to be kind first and ask questions later.

And I recall the times when I have spoken up; when I have engaged wholeheartedly with people and how rewarding it has been; how those people have taught me something interesting and different about life and how to live it and how I have ended up being grateful to them for showing me life from a different perspective.

The curious thing is, that in the midst of my ponderings about how I can get braver with my attempts to be kind, I came across Kunzang, the Buddhist nun I met on retreat. She is the embodiment of strong kindness - her Mahakala practice, which had such a strong effect on me, is all about wrathful kindness - and we talked a little about how sometimes kindness needs to be very, very strong indeed. She went so far as to say, it sometimes needs to be cruel. The fact that I instinctively recoiled at that idea suggests to me that it is important that I spend some time thinking about it. One day I'll tell you the story of her 50th birthday and how she drove a 30 ton truck across the border from South Africa to Zimbabwe to give food that she had collected to people who were hungry and in need - powerful kindness.

My work is to keep on cracking open my heart and building my strength, so that I can be brave enough to be more kind to more people, more of the time. That I might see the sameness between us all more than the differences. That I might let my instinct for kindness override my shyness, my reluctance to speak out of turn, or my fear.

Holy Isle 6

2012-01-04T21:21:00.000Z

Tonight is our last night. Although the storm still rages outside, the forecast is for sunshine and low winds tomorrow afternoon. I am happy to be leaving, but also sad, as it is unlikely that my path will cross again with any of the people here.

It's also unnerving to be moving back into the real world. It has been so wonderful to have the time to meditate three times a day; to contemplate and reflect quietly and to be around a disparate group of people who nonetheless share my interest in a spiritual path. It is so quiet here and I am wondering how I can bring some of that silence back with me into my everyday life. Of course, there is silence in meditation and in yoga practice and I have access to the silence within myself, but I worry about just how busy the world is now and how many ways there are, in any moment, of taking our attention out of our bodies and hearts and away from each other.

oOo

Turn off the phone; unplug it at the wall. Designate a couple of days a week as screen-free days at home (no, t.v., no computer, no wii, no DS). Pick up a book. Regain the habit of being able to sit quietly and do nothing but silently reflect. Teach your children that there is a value to silence and that taking time for contemplation is crucial if we are to stay healthy; that we are not built to be constantly bombarded with information, messages and images.

Pay attention to yourself. Are you ill? Are you tired? Do you need to rest? Do you need to walk? Do you need to eat? Your body is the home of your spirit in this lifetime, so take good care of it, so that you can be well.

Pay attention to other people. Look at them and really listen to them when they talk to you. Take a moment to chat to people as you come across them. Remember our common humanity and that whatever and however we project ourselves to the world, we are all of us looking for understanding and for love.

Pay attention to the words you speak; choose words carefully and speak with kindness to yourself and to others.

Express yourself. Create something, just for the fun of doing it. Knit, draw, bake, write poetry, sing songs.

Meditate! Every. Single. Day. For five minutes or five hours; the time you give to it is not so important as the commitment you bring. It will help you; it will change you; it will make you stronger, braver and more true. You will learn how to rely on the strong, warm heart of yourself. I know this to be true and I have been blessed this week to spend time with other people who either understand this, or who are just beginning to see the truth of it.

These are some of the gifts and commitments that I will take away with me when I leave tomorrow.

oOo

Holy Isle is a very small island off the west coast of Scotland. To get here I took a car, a plane, two buses and two boats. It is a retreat centre run by Buddhists for the good of anyone and everyone, of any faith or none, who has the good fortune to end up here.

If you come here, you will be accepted; you will be treated with kindness; you will be served delicious food. You can hike; you can swim (if you are brave enough!); you can volunteer to help in the kitchen, or in the garden; you will be left in peace or you can enjoy company by the fire, just as you wish at any point during your stay.

If you do come here, you will be very lucky indeed.

If you do come here, remember to pack a waterproof coat.

Namaste.

Holy Isle 5

2012-01-03T19:20:00.000Z

There was an amazing storm this morning and some people wouldn't go out in it, but I loved it. The sea was high, the waves crashing onto the rocks and white-horses and gusts of sea-spray for as far as you could see. I went across to the little house to meditate as usual at 7.30 this morning in the pitch dark and the wind nearly knocked me off my feet; by the time I had reached the little house my face (the only bit of me that was exposed) was soaking wet, I thought from rain water, but my lips were salty and it was sea-spray that had soaked me - the air was full of the sea.

It was lovely to sit in a warm, quiet room and meditate while the storm blew outside, we emerged to angry, lowering skies and more icy rain and to the sight of a little sheep trundling along, nibbling the grass as usual, as if this were no more than a breeze. I guess they are built for this weather.

The boat that ferries us across to Arran can't come over in a storm this strong, so we are all stuck on the island for at least two more days (we were due to leave tomorrow). There is nothing to do about this but accept it and be glad, because there are worse places to be stranded! Although we had no electricity today, there has been the comfort of the wood-burning stove in the dining room and, as the kitchen is connected to the generator, a hearty lunch and dinner; when it got dark at about 4.30pm someone lit hundreds of tea-lights and they made everything look so beautiful that when the electricity came back on halfway through dinner, we turned the lights off again. And the friendly Dutch man has a guitar and a girl from Brighton has a mandolin and so there will be music this evening, and the electricity is back on, so there is light and warmth and everyone has everything they need.

So I've had to change my flight and I miss my children and I'll have to cancel the yoga class I was due to teach on Thursday, but I am lucky that everyone at home is safe and happy and that I have the support of family and friends, so that this is an inconvenience and not an emergency. I feel very grateful for that.

Holy Isle 4

2012-01-02T09:22:00.001Z

Day four of the new year retreat at Holy Isle...

OK, so sometimes, it is very, very difficult to be on retreat. The feelings and thoughts that plague you in your weakest moments at home may rise here and there really is no escape from them. There is no friend to call for encouragement; your partner is not here; there is no tv or cinema to distract you; there is no cake shop; there is no wine; there are no cigarettes; whatever your method of numbing your difficult emotions is, you probably won't find it here.

But, there is the comfort of strangers. There is the comfort of sitting with someone you met only days ago and will part from in several days, most likely to never meet again, and there is telling them your story and hearing theirs. There is the gift of compassionate listening - so rarely found, when life is so busy out there and everyone in such a rush - the gift of paying attention to someone else as they speak. And in having that depth of attention reciprocated entirely, and without judgement. And then there is the gratitude that rises within for the gift of their having spoken and listened with love and honesty.

And of course, none of our stories are new or original, for none of us gets to escape the simple fact of being human and being human sometimes hurts. I sat with a friendly Dutch man last night and we told each other our stories over several cups of tea, and as I walked up the stairs to bed, I realised that I felt lighter; that my troubles seemed less weighty. And I have his kindness to thank for that.

oOo

And I wonder if we shouldn't really call this a retreat, as to retreat implies to be defeated somehow, to withdraw in the face of something we cannot overcome, to recede. I think that it is more accurate to call this a refuge: somewhere safe and sheltered, where you can take time to give yourself whatever it is that you need: time to heal, time to grow, time to think, time to lick your wounds, time to reassess, time to be quiet, time to be free of other people's needs, time to focus on your spiritual path without interruption, time to explore yourself honestly, time to reflect. I think that there are people here this week who are doing one of more of all those things and probably more besides. But these people have not in any way been defeated by life, on the contrary, they are brave enough to confront themselves and their motivations and actions honestly. This requires courage. These people have not retreated from life, but they have sought refuge: somewhere safe and quiet to stay for a time while they work patiently and compassionately through whatever it is they are dealing with.

And there is a storm coming tomorrow, which will have the power to knock us off our feet (which happened to one of the residents here during the last storm). Seventy-five mile an hour winds will batter the island. And we'll all be safe within our refuge.

oOo

Meditation at 7.30am as always and I feel myself full of love and peace and I emerge again from the little house to a bright, clear and blustery day. And today I am going to walk as far around the island as I am able to go, which means going all the way to the top. It feels like a good day for climbing a mountain.

oOo

And I did climb the mountain and it didn't rain once and the sun came out and made everything more beautiful than it already was. The wind was so strong that I sometimes felt that it would blow me off the mountainside, but I kept low and balanced and calm and, of course, I arrived back in one piece; and the cup of tea that I had when I returned home was delicious.

oOo

I took myself off to meditate in the little house after lunch and had been there for almost an hour when a Buddhist nun came in with a couple of other people and started doing her practice. It was amazing! Lots of reciting prayers in Tibetan and every once in a while she would bash some cymbals together; it was the most incredible thing! Perhaps it was because I was already deeply into my meditation, but the sound of the cymbals crashing seemed to go right through me, taking all the dark with it and leaving only light. It's called Mahakala practice and you are only allowed to practise it if you have been initiated, but anyone may listen (this lovely nun, Kunzang, is South African and is staying here this week to acclimatise herself to being back in the world before going home to South Africa - she has been in a closed retreat on the south of the island for fourteen months). She's a joy to be around - very happy and bright and funny and irreverent. She's a poster girl for Buddhist nuns! It is a joy to be around people who have chosen a spiritual path and are full of sunshine; it's not always the case that people with a strong commitment to a spiritual path embody peace, love and joy, but this lovely lady does.

Holy Isle 3

2012-01-01T19:14:00.002Z

Over new year I went on retreat to Holy Isle, this is day 3 of the blog I wrote while I was there...

I had such a beautiful meditation this morning. All my worries and doubts about myself evaporated and I was filled with light and love and beauty. I emerged into clear skies and a sunny day and vowed to make the most of the sunshine today, so went on two invigorating (it is sunny, but still VERY windy) walks.

For my second walk I took the opportunity to climb up towards the top of the island - it felt like a day for tackling mountains - and I made it about halfway, which feels about right for where I am just now, before turning back. Tomorrow I intend to walk the whole thing - it will take me about four hours and I'll head off straight after breakfast.

The previous days of yoga, meditation, bracing seaside walks and early nights made this a very positive day, but as can happen on retreat, this evening all of my troubles seemed to return with a vengeance and my evening meditation left me feeling unsettled. It's hard sometimes, when there are no distractions and you spend so much time quietly with yourself, because there is no escape from yourself. This is true of all life, of course, but we are so good at finding ways of hiding from ourselves in everyday life. There are no such escape routes here on the island and this can make it difficult. Taking a long, hard look at oneself isn't always the easiest thing, and doing it with compassion (rather than beating yourself up over all your stupid mistakes) is harder still.

Nevertheless, I have the comfort of a warm kitchen with an open fire; my books; my journal and later my bed. And I am sure, quite sure, that when I wake up tomorrow I will feel better again.

Namaste.

Holy Isle 2

2011-12-31T15:01:00.000Z

Over the new year I went on retreat to Holy Island; this is day 2 of the blog I wrote while I was there...

There is something sublime about rising in darkness to go over to a converted boat house to meditate. We trudge through the damp dark to a warm, wood-panelled room dedicated to prayer and meditation. We sit for an hour or so and then emerge into the half-light feeling fresher, cleaner inside, clearer mentally and more at peace.

And the wonderful thing about being on retreat is that, if you desire it, you don't have to 'be' anyone. People respect your personal space and private intention as nowhere else. So if you want to chat, there are plenty of people to chat with, but if you choose to be silent, you will be left alone. Nobody will think anything of it. It is very comforting to be with people who don't need you to be anyone or to show them who you are, and who don't think anything of it if in the morning you chat away merrily, but in the afternoon you eat lunch alone and then curl up in a corner with a book.

Perhaps this freedom is quite hard for some (we're so used to using short cuts to suss people out - if you have children, what you wear, what job you do), but soon enough everyone seems to settle into just being here.

oOo

I sit through a meditation session alongside a Buddhist nun and marvel at her open face, bright eyes and cheerful, child-like demeanour. She smiles, not to make you happy, or to demonstrate to you that she is happy, but because there is so much joy in the world that she simply can't help smiling about it. As a child would. I wonder when and why and how we learn to guard our joy and fascination with the world and why we seem to value seriousness over light-heartedness. It seems to me that the serious work of life is staying light of heart. This nun has found a way to rewind that guarding process. We should all find a way to do that.

Retreat to Holy Isle 1

2011-12-30T20:50:00.000Z

Over the new year I travelled to Holy Isle off the west coast of Scotland to stay at the retreat centre there. This is the blog I wrote while I was there... I'll post them all here over the next few days... Happy new year!

The distance I have travelled to be here feels like partof the retreat: I have taken a car, aplane, a bus, a ferry, another bus and a small fisherman’s boat. It's a very long way from home.

The island is shrouded with rainclouds when I arrive andthe sky is very dark and very low; a cold, persistently heavy rain is fallingand the ground is boggy underfoot. Thesea is a cold, hard grey, yet when I look out of my bedroom window later, I see that there is someone out there sailing a laserdinghy.

It is wildly beautiful here. The island rises out of the sea, charcoalgrey, green and red. It is protectedfrom the worst of the Atlantic by being between the isle of Arran and themainland, but it is still lashed by strong winds and pelted with rain. It doesn’t get very cold here; but it doesn’tget very warm either.

It’s hard not to feel a little out on a limb when youarrive. It is very quiet; everyone isfriendly, but they are strangers. Thereis no escape from the island and there are none of life's usual distractions (tv, radio,internet, telephone). But you can read and walk and meditate and practise yoga and I have done all these things today.

To help me get my bearings and to make the most of what littlelight there was here before darkness fell, I walked about half a mile southtowards the first of two lighthouses situated on the south of the island. I had been told that I might get a mobilereception here and I did, so I sent a text home to let them know that I had arrivedsafely. On my way back, I thought that I could pop down there every day and check my messages or perhaps makea phone call. Then I realised that I absolutely didn'twant to do this; actually, Iwant to switch off my phone and leave it switched off while I am here and whenI get back to my room I put my ipod away too. The world, with all its noise can wait, I am onretreat from it.

Back in my room, I find I can hardly keep my eyesopen. It feels as though years of the noise, busyness and over-stimulation of modern life has just caught up with me and it’s all I can do tofind my way down to supper. Over spicylentil and carrot soup and homemade bread, I find that a lot of other peoplehave experienced this same overwhelming tiredness.

After supper some of us trudge over to the old boathousefor an hour of Chenrezig meditation, a Tibetan Buddhist compassion practice. It’snew to me: everyone sings a very long prayer, with a break in the middle forsome chanting of a mantra and then back to singing more prayers. It’s not what I am used to and I probablyprefer silent seated meditation, but it’s good to be in this warm and cosy roomwith such a nice group of people and to hear them sing their prayers.

I think, on the way back to the main housethrough tonight’s storm, how lovely it is that there are so many differentpaths to peace: a path for everyone. All you have to do is be open to the possibility of it,respect other people’s choices, and work to discover, by trial and error,by providence, or both, which is the one for you.

Recognition vs. Rejection

2011-12-16T18:12:00.000Z

The notion that you are already good enough is a difficult concept to acceptfor everyone that I have ever met. Different people meet this problem with different solutions…

· I know people who don’t bother to try so thatthey can never be found failing;

· I know people who work so hard, all the time, toprove themselves that they seem to have no time for learning how to understandthemselves;

· I know people who give too much, all the time,because they place everyone else’s importance above their own;

· I know people who go around doing everythingthey can for everyone, because they have placed a sense of their own self-worthin being perfect for everyone else;

· I know people who have lots of stuff, as thoughthat will prove to the world, if not themselves, that they are succeeding, thatthey are good enough. Since having lotsof stuff is this society’s main indicator of success, then having lots of stuffseems to prove something. But how many unhappyrich people do you know/have you heard of? Clearly ‘stuff’ is not the answer. We see evidence of that fact every day, but seem collectively to refuse toaccept its veracity;

· I know people who need to be perfect: perfectjob, everything done properly, being in the right place at the right time withthe right items. As if being in controlof everything is proof of something.

The fact that it is very difficult for us to feel goodenough probably stems from childhood and the way that we were brought up. However, it is not sufficient to drop theresponsibility for our lack of self-worth at the feet of our parents. Larkin’s view

They fuck you up your mumand dad,

They do not mean to, but they do

might ring true, but it doesn’thold the answer. Many of us were lovedand cherished by our parents and yet we still feel that we are not good enough,we still find it hard to truly love and care for ourselves. In addition to that, anyone who is a parentknows how much they love and wish the best for their children; that we are notthe first generation to have done so is self-evident. Thus, in spite of our best intentions, eachgeneration finds the same difficulty in finding a true and lasting sense ofself-worth, no matter how loved we were as children.

The answer therefore must lie within us and not in thesearch for someone else to blame for our lack of self-love.

Buddha identified the cultivation of compassion and love foroneself as a crucial practice for living a loving, successful and kindlife. It was his contention that astrong sense of self-worth and self-love is necessary if we are to truly carefor others. This makes sense. If we are living in a judgemental paradigmwhere what we do/say/achieve is the only measure of our self-worth, then itstands to reason that, despite our best intentions to the contrary, we judgeother people in the same way instead ofaccepting ourselves and other people for who they are (good enough before theyeven get out of bed in the morning).

Thinking that you are good enough has nothing to do with complacency – you arestill able to engage in life fully, to achieve and work hard and be fullycommitted to life when you have love for yourself. Indeed, you may well be able to achieve more,do better, live more fully, when you are not wasting so much of your time andenergy proving your worth to the world because you don’t really believe ityourself.

There is a relationship between a lack of self-love and fear. When we believe that our real selves are not worthy of love, then we are afraid of revelation; we are afraid that if people discover who we really are, they will find us lacking and reject us. It goes like this: if you knew who I really am inside, then youwouldn’t love me/like me/want to know me; if you knew how unsure I was about being able to do this task well, youwouldn’t respect me; if you knew how vulnerable I feel in this situation, you would laugh at me. I suspect that alot of this has to do with the conditioning we had as children - within our home,our extended families and at school we learnthow to be a certain way to avoid being uncomfortable. As we grow up it is that personality that we present to the world – it gets us by, it gets us liked, it helps us toavoid pain. Part of our spiritual pathis dissociating ourselves from this personality and revealing who it is that wetruly are. For some of us, it might bethe case that we have lived for so long with the personality that works for us and the people around usthat when we come to look for our true self, we can’t find it; we don’t have aclue who that person is or was, or where to look for him/her.

To reveal our true self to the world can be inconvenient (everyonearound us has been used to our projected personality and their habits; the trueyou might not fit in so well). To revealour true self to ourselves and then to others requires the greatestcourage. If you are rejected now, thenit’s the real you that is being rejected. How do you take this? Withcourage. This is what you say:- here Iam in all my strange and wonderful glory; some people will like me and somepeople won’t, but I don’t need everyone to like me, because I understand thatin the same way as I don’t like and want to spend time with everyone I meet,not everyone is going to feel positively about me. BUT I can cope with some people not likingme, because I believe in myself and my own worth. I am brave enough to let some people not likeme.

It’s going to be such a relief! You won't need to prove yourself with yourhumour or your intelligence or your knowledge or your capacity to get things done oryour ability to bake cakes or the fact that you can run marathons or earn a lot ofmoney or have a fast car. You will trust thatthe people who love you love you for who you really are now and not because ofwho you could be one day, or what you can achieve, or how well you fit in, or what you have.

So there will be no fear, because you are beingauthentically yourself – there is nothing for anyone to find out aboutyou. There will be trust, because youtrust yourself and you are therefore able to trust others; when you are beinghonest, trust comes naturally because there is nothing hidden in you. This is unconditional trust – nobody has to prove to you that they can be trusted, you trust them because you have nothing to hide. And it works the other way too:- even if someone else has something to hide/something that they are afraid of, you understand that they are, without doubt,intrinsically good enough and deserving of your respect and good feelings,however they might be projecting themself to the world.

A life without fear is a good life. Fear takes up too much time and too muchenergy. When you are free of fear yousleep well, you eat well, you take care of yourself and of others, you haverespect for yourself and for others; you can give without needing gratitude inreturn; and you can receive without needing justification.

But it all starts with you. It all begins with your search for your authentic self and with havingthe courage to reveal that person to the world without fear. It begins with trusting yourself. You do this by living from your centre;you constantly ask yourself is this the truth? Is this what I really feel? Isthis the right decision for me now? Am Ibeing true? Am I being authentic? Did I give as much as I could have in thatmoment? Why did I hold back from thatperson?

This way you get to live more, love more, feel lessresentment and less anger (if you are being true to yourself, you have verylittle to be resentful and angry about). Then your life becomes more about what you can do for others than whatyou can do for yourself.

That we know so few people living authentic, individual lives,free of society’s definitions of personal success lets you know that it is notan easy path to follow. But it iscrucial, absolutely crucial, that you begin.

Tantra 2 - Windows to Transcendence

2011-12-15T19:00:00.000Z

Using what inspires you in the world to find the expansiveness within relies on your being able to discern between the transcendence itself and the doorway to it.

It's no good thinking that it is the sunset that makes you feel transcendent, so you must always see the sunset in order to be happy. It's no good becoming addicted to another human being who makes you feel oneness and acceptance, so that you can experience love. If being in church helps you to feel peace, then by all means go to the church to find that sense of stillness, but don't make the mistake of thinking that you can only find peace in that building.

We all have things we do/people we see/places we go for inspiration. However, it is important that you don't mistake the things that inspire you to feel joy, peace and love for the reason you feel that joy, peace and love. The potential for that feeling is constantly within you, it does not go away. Finding and doing the things that inspire it in you is a good start, the work then is to learn how to maintain it so that you can allow that joy, peace and love to imbue your whole life, not just certain parts of it.

Don't mistake the trigger for the source. Great love is always within you and it is possible to feel great love for all things, if you try. It is what most of the major spiritual paths are all about. We know it's not easy by how few people we meet that are able to do it, but those people do exist. And they do not exist because they are different or special, they exist because they have made the most of their talent for love.

Tantra 1 - Transcendence

2011-12-14T12:23:00.002Z

The word tantra has unfortunate connotations, but in truth is one of the most beautiful explanations of the human condition and our purpose here that I have ever found.

Tantra contends that everything in this universe is nothing but consciousness, the word used to denote the common basic substance behind all ephemera, all life. Different people call this different things (spirit, Holy Spirit, God, Divinity, grace, love, soul, heart). Tantra calls it consciousness.

For tantra, the human form is the highest stage of development before enlightenment (or complete merging with consciousness), for it is through being human, with our will, our intelligence and our capacity to act, that we are able to more clearly feel the consciousness within and therefore unite with it.

Tantric philosophy tells us that humans are nothing but contracted consciousness. As water vapour is to ice, we are to consciousness. The substance is the same, but its form is a contracted version of it. The work of tantra yoga is to realise this fully in this lifetime. The task is to expand outwards and to keep on expanding. This is transcendence. In doing this, we transcend beyond our limited sense of self (who we are, what we do, what we think, where we have been, where we are going) and dissolve the boundaries between our small body (the place in which our consciousness lives in this lifetime) and everything else that is manifest.

The various tantric texts (from 12th Century onwards) give us many practices for finding, loving and holding on to this inherent transcendence within. One of the simplest and most sophisticated is given in the first chapter of the Shiva Sutras:

udyamo bhairavah I.5
The inner upsurge of energy is the Supreme*
or
That effort, the flashing forth of active awareness that instantaneously makes universal consciousness shine, is Bhairava**

When you are walking and the sun in shining and the world is beautiful to you, you experience within yourself an upsurge of energy, a rush of joy. This is transcendence. When you are with a friend or lover and you feel love and connection and oneness. This is transcendence. When you are eating, mindfully, a delicious meal and you feel sated and content. This is transcendence. When you are excited by a fast car journey and you feel vibrant and alive. This is transcendence. When you scream on a roller-coaster and feel that rush of adrenaline and wonder. This is transcendence.

That upsurge of consciousness/energy/love/awareness/joy is your clue; each time you feel it is one small gift of transcendence. Your job as a yogi is to learn how to stay mindful to it so that you see it when it arises and learn how to hold on to it. The task is to recognise that it exists within you permanently and to let it radiate from you more of the time ... all of the time. As a yogi you comprehend that each upsurge of radiance has nothing to do with the thing that caused it, rather that whatever caused it simply opened you up to the potential that is always present within you. The potential to be more than you are, to be united with life, to radiate with a spirit that encompasses everything with love.

Namaste.

*Carlos Pomeda
** Swami Lakshmanjoo

Prana

2011-12-09T10:41:00.001Z

Prana is an ancient Sanskrit word that first appeared in the vedas, it is translated by Georg Feuerstein as life, or literally, breathing forth. It is the word used in yoga philosophy for vital energy, life-force, or the pulsating energy common to all living things (similar to the concept of Qi in Chinese medicine). The action of prana is behind all life, all thought, all movement.

Like the energy meridiens of Chinese medicine, yogic texts speak of channels of energy within us (nadis) which convey prana around the body. When prana runs through the nadis of the body freely, one enjoys vibrant good health; but when the nadis are congested or blocked, one experiences poor mental and physical health. Hatha yoga works to unblock the nadis and invigorate the flow of prana in the body through the means of asana, pranayama and meditation and some kriyas (cleansing processes). Thus, the clear-eyed radiance and vitality that we witness in many experienced yogis (or indeed, feel in ourselves after practice) is ascribed to the yogi having improved the free flow of prana through the nadis in their body.

In addition to the purely physical aspect of prana, there is an inseparable connection between mind and prana. As Saint Thirumoolar wrote, "wherever the mind goes, the prana follows" or conversely as Swami Satchitananda puts it, "if you regulate prana, you regulate the mind." The control of consciousness, the ultimate aim of all yoga practice, is therefore intimately linked with the control of prana. Desikachar writes: "The more content a person is ... the more prana is inside. The more disturbed a person is, the more prana is dissipated and lost." Indeed, one definition of the word yogi, is 'one whose prana is all within his body.'

It is said that prana follows attention, so by drawing our attention to our breath, or by quieting the mind through meditative practices, and by not over-burdening ourselves with external stimuli, we may experience an increase of prana within. As Swami Satchitananda writes:

"... it is easier to control prana in a grosser manifestation than in a subtle one. So, we first learn to control the physical body, then the movement of the breath, then the senses, and finally the mind. It is very scientific, gradual and easy."

So you begin by learning how to conserve energy during your asana practice, this means maintaining your inner focus, resisting the urge to look around you/fiddle with your toes/lose yourself in thought while you practise. It means controlling your breath, so that it is even and full throughout your practice. It means breathing in and out through your nose and trying not to talk during yoga. During your asana practice you are opening your body and working out the knots and blocks that exist within you; your aim should be to try not to lose all this positive work and increased energy by expelling it through misdirected attention.

On a day to day, practical level, we are talking abut conserving our energy so that we can put it to good use for the things that make ourselves and those around us, well and happy. We probably all know people who haemorrhage prana, flying off the handle at the slightest provocation, or indulging in extreme emotional states and finding themselves exhausted as a result.

When you practise yoga with regularity and dedication, you experience a growing equilibrium in mind and body and a growing capacity to meet the daily challenges of life with equanimity; to remain calm and to keep your breath long and regular even in the most trying of situations. Your energy levels increase and you find that after your asana, pranayama or meditation practice you tend to feel energised and alive, no matter how exhausted or low you felt when you arrived at your mat. All of these positive effects can be ascribed to the building of prana within your body and the free flow of energy throughout your body.

Dharma 1

2011-11-30T07:14:00.001Z

The Sanskrit word dharma is often translated as 'duty', this is correct,although the word duty brings with it, I think, certain connotations of thingswe have to do, but which we would rather not. The word itself comesfrom the root dhri to hold, to establish, to support and I think thisis more helpful in understanding dharma and how it relates to our lives. Dharmais that which we are meant to do; dharma is our work in this life, our purpose. It is the link between the workings of your inner, spiritual purpose and the outward activities and intentions of your life. Dharma therefore is holding/ establishing/ supporting a link between your inner soul-work and your outer life and livelihood.

In yogic terms, your individual soul chose tobecome manifest in your physical form for a reason. Your job in your one life is to polish onefacet of this beautiful soul that you have inside you. Dharma is your soul’s purpose in this life.

We can have more than one dharma and many different dharmas over alifetime. For example, if you have veryyoung children, then your chief dharma is in dedicating yourself tonurturing them; if you have teenage children, your dharma is still to love andprotect them, but also to let go a little, to give them the gift of independence. So the role is the same, but the dharma has changed over time. Being alert to how dharma changes over timehelps us to stay awake, to stay in tune with what is best serving our personaldevelopment and those around us. Beingalert to how dharma changes over time helps us to choose courageously and notto cling to outdated, but comfortably familiar, ways of being.

Staying true to more than one dharma at a time might mean that we work in the city, but also dedicate ourselves to a local charity;we might be a parent, but go back to college to learn how to do something new. Knowing that there is room in your life for more than one purpose can be very liberating. You realise that you can nurture yourself in the ways that you need, while still fulfilling your role as Sales Assistant / Film Producer / Teacher / Parent / Child.

Your dharma is unique to you; only you can discern it and only you can learnhow to fulfil it. Aadil Palkhivalarecommends tuning in with your dharma in the following way:

“… we must regularly step out of our frenzied routine and quietly ask, “Whyam I here? What is my purpose? What is the reason for my existence? Why did my spirit choose this body and whatdoes it want to experience?”

You do not need to believe in reincarnation, soul, spirit and the Divine tobenefit from this practice. Simplyasking yourself every morning, What is the purpose of this day? will help youto clarify your personal purpose and to live your life in its bestand highest form; it will help you to stay on track; it will help you to beclear about what you need to do in your life and this will help you to be boldabout clearing the unnecessary impediments out of your way in order that youfulfil this purpose to the best of your ability… Does drinking too much in theevening sap your energy the next day and make you less effective? Get the drinking out of the way. Do you have a friendship that seems to stealyour energy and never replenish your sense of vitality? Devote less time to that friendship and moretime to those that help you to fulfil your purpose. Does being unfit keep you from doing thethings that you long to do? Commit tobuilding your level of fitness by taking a long walk every day.

Your longing is your cue – what is it that you really want to do? Do you feel that you work all day every dayonly to feel unsatisfied at the end of it? Why do you think that is? Isthere something else that you should be doing for yourself or for the worldthat would alleviate that sense of dissatisfaction? Should you be doing that thing as well as orinstead of what you currently do? Onlyyou know. So ask yourself the question; and be prepared to acknowledge the answer.

"You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough."

Mae West

A letter to my friend 2

2011-11-25T08:57:00.001Z

Don't push your feelings away or ignore them, be they physical, emotional or mental. Watch them, feel them, listen to what they have to teach you about compassion (for yourself and for others) and about love and loving.

Your heart knows. First learn to listen. Then to hear. Then to live according to it. This takes great courage (from the old French, corage, meaning 'heart, innermost feelings, temper', this word itself from the Latin cor, meaning 'heart'*), but you can do it. Look to others who have done so before you, or for people around you who are doing it right now; people who are making brave choices and living authentically. Let them inspire you. Don't deny the truth of your Self.

There is self-reliance and this is good (when it is based on a strong sense of self); and there is reliance on others and this is good (when it is based on a strong sense of self): we all need to receive love, care, attention and recognition. We all need nurturing. Let the people around you love you and take care of you, as you do for them. Even children can give you the support you need, if you let them; sometimes the nourishment you need comes from the most surprising sources: let it. There is strength in letting people love you and in admitting when you are in need of tenderness.

Let your beautiful heart be your guide. Be brave. Be happy. Have fun. And when feelings come, think of them as sign-posts along your path; allow them space and time in your life; know that alongside difficult emotions and physical pain, joy and love co-exist constantly.

Love.

*Thanks to Brene Brown for the etymology

Recognition

2011-11-15T09:07:00.001Z

I've been thinking about the concept of recognition for a long time. Someoneasked me about it and I have been considering what it means to berecognised by another human being, by the world, for exactly who you are. I'vebeen meditating on how it relates to yoga practice and what it means for thequality of your life.

I'd come to the conclusion that being recognised is a key element of yoga,but I was finding it hard to articulate why this is so. I felt that it wasrelated to the concept of darshan (to see and be seen by another), which is thetreasure that Ram Dass, Krishna Das and others found in their gurus: that rare feeling of being seen by another, really seen, beyond thesurface of what we say and do and all of the techniques that we have developed,consciously and unconsciously, for dealing with the world and being loved absolutely anyway, for who we are at heart.

Then this morning, I read the following from the book, True Love, by the Buddhist monk,Thich Nhat Hahn and it all suddenly feel into place inmy mind and in my heart:

"To love is to recognize; to be loved is to be recognized by the other ... When we are loved we wish the other to recognize our presence, and this is a very important practice."

We have all developed our different ways to interact with a world that is unpredictable and which is always changing. Some of us do too much for everyone else, perhaps too little for ourselves; some of us close off important, perhaps vulnerable parts of ourselves so that the world (we hope) cannot hurt us; some of us come out fighting, aggressively defending our space, our feelings, our softness; others fill the world with noise and bluster, talking all the time, filling all the silences, so as to never have to be truly seen or have to admit who we truly are; some show off, shouting 'look at how wonderful I am and all that I have achieved' in order to hide their weaknesses. But beneath all of that, we are all vulnerable; we all need to be loved.

To be recognised by another is to be loved. Through loving and recognising you, they are saying: I see all of your hurts and defences and foibles and weaknesses, the things that you do right and the things that you do wrong and I recognise that beneath all of that you are truly a unique and wonderful person; I see into the heart of you and the heart of you is beautiful and good. They are saying that you do not have to be anything else, you do not have to act a certain way, prove yourself, change yourself, be someone else, they are saying that they recognise you and love you for exactly who you are now. Imagine someone feeling that for you, or expressing those feelings for you, and you will understand what a gift it is. The gift of recognition is the gift of true love and acceptance.

And recognising ourselves is just as important and just as much about love. The idea of loving oneself has negative connotations: we talk about someone 'loving himself' as a way of saying they think too much of themselves, that they are big-headed. This is unfortunate, because truly loving oneself is one the hardest, most subtle, most profound aspects of our yoga practice. Can you look into your heart and see all that is beautiful there? Can you appreciate your own self, behind and beyond all of the surface actions of your personality and ego? Only when you can do this are you truly able to love others, for when we recognise ourselves as essentially good and true and made of love, then it follows logically that we recognise every other human being as essentially good and true and made of love too, no matter what traits they are projecting to the world.

Yoga practice asks us to look deeply into our own hearts, to be honest, and to recognise that we are each an expression of Divine love. Then, having recognised it in yourself, to recognise it in everybody else, not just your family, or your friends, or the people that you have chosen to surround yourself with, but everyone.

Practising recognition is not easy, but it is a rare and wonderful gift to give and to receive.

An Unfolding - Ishvara Pranidhana II

2011-11-10T15:37:00.002Z

continued from An Unfolding: Ishvara Pranidhana...

Yoga practice is all about noticing our habits and tendencies: eliminating those that lead us towards suffering and cultivating those that lead us towards a peaceful, content, more wise way of living.

One of my own tendencies has been my resistance to surrender - I find it hard to trust the unfolding. My habit is to think that I can work it all out intellectually and then make a positive decision about what to do; that through sheer tenacity and the force of my will I can make things happen a certain way. Of course I can't and I'm working on breaking that way of thinking! The concept of ishvara pranidhana is helping me to do that.

After writing about ishvara pranidhana last week, from the point of view of one who seeks to control the world, one of my students asked, what if you are coming from the opposite direction? What if the world feels permanently out of control and that you have nothing solid to cling to? What if you often find yourself feeling fearful about the way the world tosses you about? What if, instead of trying to control the river's flow (as I have done), you feel that you are at the mercy of it, with no ballast to keep you steady?

Ishvara pranidhana is as relevant to you as it is to me. Whether you feel a victim of life's happenings, or you take up arms and fight against them, we are still all subject to the fact that life just happens and all we can do is to meet it where we find it, with as much strength and peace in our hearts as we can muster. We know when we look back that life is random and curious: some of the best times of our lives came out of darkness; some of the saddest dropped from the clear blue of a sunny sky; still others are that bittersweet combination of bliss and pain. With the wisdom that comes with time we see that sorrow is as crucial for our personal development as joy. Ishvara pranidhana is accepting that life is there to teach us if we are willing to watch and to learn from it.

The key to the practice of ishvara pranidhana, whichever side of the control fence you are sitting on, is discovering your own centre; finding your essential core of peace and personal wisdom and resting within it. Every human being has within them balance, the capacity for love, wisdom, peace and patience. Yoga is called a practice for a reason: you have to do it yourself and you have to keep on doing it; learn how to centre yourself in the good times so that you have the tools ready to cope with the harder times.

This is also a question of personal power. Some of us don't like the idea of power - it seems hard and strong and not at all like us. But as Brene Brown points out, the opposite of being powerful is being powerless... and I don't know anyone who enjoys being powerless. By personal power I mean the humble kind of personal power that is brave enough to admit one's own frailty and to seek the support of loved ones in times of crisis. I mean the kind of personal power that makes you resilient, rather than come crashing down or go running from the slightest challenge to the status quo. I mean the self-reliance that stops you from reaching out to others in the hope that they will save you or give you the answer, the magic pill to all of your questions and problems. I mean the kind of power that lets you sit quietly with tough feelings rather than hiding them behind busyness and noise so that you don't have to think about them (they don't go away, you know).

So no, we cannot control the fates and life is surprising. But neither are we powerless victims of life's vicissitudes. Yoga helps us to locate and develop our sense of personal power; our steadiness; it helps us to stay loving, kind and resilient even in the face of life's most difficult challenges. Through yoga practice we find we can maintain strength, integrity and equilibrium through the good, the bad and the indifferent times. In our practice we seek our own wisdom and find the courage to take notice of it and to live by it. And the next time you feel yourself blown about by life's storms, you find you have become your own anchor.

An Unfolding - Ishvara Pranidhana

2011-11-05T11:31:00.000Z

Patanjali tells us that ishvara pranidhana is one of the key routes to peace of mind; to your centre; to your heart/soul/God, whatever it is that you call it. It is so important it is one of the few things that he mentions twice.

Ishvara pranidhana: surrender to that which is bigger than you; feeling your connection to everyone else and to every other living thing; letting go of the idea that you can control anything at all and learning instead to meet life where you find it and how you find it; where you find yourself and how you find yourself. If your life is a river, then invoking ishvara pranidhana is learning to go with the flow of it: staying steady through the choppy bits, learning to allow yourself to love and enjoy the easy-flowing bits, being patient through seeming stagnation, knowing that a river never truly stops moving. It is understanding that you do not - cannot - control the way the river flows. Ishvara pranidhana is feeling yourself as an inextricable part of something much bigger than your small individual self: you are simultaneously small and insignificant in the midst of its vastness and yet an absolutely crucial, invaluable part of it.

Your yoga practice is, and will continue to be, a conscious turning back to love; a deliberate move towards silence, that you might hear all that the universe, your heart and the love of God has to tell you.

Ishvara pranidhana. Life unfolds. Let it. Don't push. Learn how to wait, watch and be alert; learn to trust that unfolding. There is a rightness to it that you, with all your intellect, effort and knowingness, could never have achieved.

oOo

And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,

and I look upon time as no more than an idea,

and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common

as a field daisy, and as singular

Mary Oliver

Hamstrings

2011-11-01T10:35:00.000Z

Here's an easy daily practice for anyone who would like to lengthen their hamstrings.

1. Get a yoga belt (or any belt you have)
2. Lie on your back on the floor
3. Raise one leg and put the belt around the heel end of your raised foot
4. Stretch the other leg out along the ground
5. Ensure that the back of both hips is in contact with the ground (the hip of the raised leg will want to curl up off the floor)
6. Hold for at least 2 minutes, each side

If you do this once a day, every day this month, you will see a great improvement in your hamstring length by December.

Do it to improve your asana practice, but also do it to improve your posture, mobility and your sense of comfort in your own body.

Namaste.

The Journey

2011-10-31T10:54:00.000Z

Life is not a straight road from from birth to death; it is a random, wonderful journey full of surprises, detours, seeming wrong turns, dead ends, hills, unseen potholes and steep upward climbs.

The thing is that we think we have the map, don't we? The result of a+b=c; if I do this thing/behave this way, I will end up in that place over there. But we need only give the most cursory glance back along the path that we have trodden already to know that this is certainly not the case. Things come out of nowhere and knock you off your feet, in good and bad ways, and you deal with them all the only way you can: in the moment, to the best of your ability.

If you already have an established yoga practice, then you are better equipped than some to stay true to yourself in the midst of life's ups and downs.

Staying centred and true to yourself is only one of the gifts that yoga practice brings to a life. The other is the understanding that the journey is your life. The fun bits, the painful bits, the excitement, the hardship, the sorrow, the luck, the pain, the loss, the love, the change. All this is the fabric of your life; every thread and stitch, every snag and tear will make up the tapestry of your one life.

In the middle of important life-change or self-questioning; on embarking on a new way of life, or job; at the beginning or the end of a relationship, the tendency for some of us is to long to know the outcome; the end; the resolution. Like people who read the end of the book before they begin it, we want to know that it's going to be worthwhile; that our new choices are good ones; that everything will be ok in the end.

We cling to the happy times, that they might last longer, and we shun the hard times, wishing they were over and done with. And all the while, life keeps on happening and you are here, where you are and there is nothing for you, but to live it now with as much love, heart and openness as you can.

The only certain destination for all of us is our death (I am going to die one day, aren't you?) To long for the end is to wish your life away and to miss the gifts of the present. The journey is your friend; let it teach you.

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

C.S. Lewis

Time Enough for Yoga Practice

2011-10-20T15:45:00.000+01:00

It took me ages to understand that not every asana practice has to be a 90 minute sweat-fest to be worth anything. Looking back, I've always been the all or nothing kind - when I learnt how to play the violin if I made a mistake playing something, I would always have to go back to the beginning and start again, so that I could play the whole thing through perfectly. I watch my son play his cello now and observe that if he makes a mistake, he just goes back a bar or two to repeat the bit that he got wrong until he gets it right. Once he's mastered those tricky bits, the whole piece comes together naturally.

That's how you learn, not by aiming for perfection every time, but by patiently applying yourself to the task at hand, with whatever time and tools you have at your disposal. I'm glad that he seems to have learnt already what it took me the best part of 35 years to realise.

I wonder why we dissuade ourselves from applying ourselves to something because we don't feel that we have time to do it properly, or as well as we could if all of our stars were aligned and everything went perfectly. Is it a way of being hard on ourselves: if it doesn't hurt, it can't be working? Or is it because we think that if we can't do it perfectly, then we shouldn't bother at all? Or is it just an excuse - a way of letting ourselves off the hook, because in truth we can't find the motivation to do it?

Speaking for myself, I think I was sabotaging myself with my own mental image of what a 'good' asana practice looked like. If it wasn't going to look like that, then I felt that it just wasn't worth doing it. In addition, when I am warm and have worked for a long time, my muscles are gratifyingly long and my ego liked that I could get deeply into poses and stay there for a long time. Harder to accept my creaky old self on a cold morning in Autumn when even a standing forward bend felt difficult. Lastly, I think lack of focus was an issue: it used to take me a lot longer to get to that place that we're all seeking in our yoga practice: that peaceful, calm, centred state. If it was going to take me half an hour to get anywhere near that feeling and I only had half an hour available for practice, that meant that my mind was scattered and fragmented for the whole thing.

So what's that? Imagination; ego; self-criticism; lack of patience. Ouch. It turns out that it wasn't my asana practice that was at fault, it was my whole mental attitude to it.

This applies to asana in another way too. There are always things that we can't do, either because we are not physically open or strong enough, or because we are not mentally ready. Should we avoid handstands completely, because they make us feel afraid and we can't see ourselves ever being physically able to do it? Of course not, we know from our efforts to learn simpler poses that improvement comes with time, effort, patience and humility. So we apply ourselves diligently to each aspect of a pose, accepting our current limitation, knowing that with persistent effort we will move gradually, but inevitably towards being able to do it.

Our asana practice waxes and wanes too: when the days get shorter and colder our bodies naturally contract and we have to face the fact that the expansiveness of the warmer months (that saw us attempting hanumanasana and challenging arm balances) are over. This is when we learn to accept and love our bodies and our practice as they are - we work with whatever we find in ourselves in the moment, rather than trying to fit ourselves into a pre-set mould of expectation.

It is the small practices, when we find ourselves with half an hour and seize the opportunity to practice, that make all the difference - these practices lay the foundations for the greater focus, strength, confidence, flexibility and calm of our asana practice in general.

Nowadays, with a busy teaching schedule, two children, a dog and a house to look after my practice usually lasts half an hour. I know that there are yogis out there who practise for 2 hours a day and good luck to them. I know that my asana practice won't ever look like theirs - some of them can do amazing things. But in terms of the true meaning of asana practice, and it's true purpose, I know that I am as focused, calm, humble and happy in my 30 minutes as they are in their 120

Your practice is beautiful and will only become more beautiful. Don't throw blocks across your path by intimidating yourself or talking yourself out of yoga practice. Talk yourself into it! Whatever it is you do (this doesn't just apply to asana practice), the cumulative effect of little and often is of more benefit to you than a once a week marathon. And if you miss your once a week marathon, you'll have done nothing. How often does that happen to you?

Sit quietly. Ask yourself why it is that you hold your particular attitude to practising at home with whatever space, time and body you have that day. Once you have found the answer to that question, you can shift it out of the way and get on with your yoga.

"Nothing would be done at all if we waited until we could do it so well that no one could find fault with it."

John Henry Newman

The One You Are Looking For

2011-10-10T22:20:00.000+01:00

"The One you are looking for is the One who is looking" So wrote St Francis of Assisi.  I find this reassuring during those periods when I feel that I am not sure where I am going, or what the point is. Those times when you feel that you have lost your way a little bit, or when you don't like yourself very much; when you start being hard on yourself or when you feel like giving up; when you have lost your clarity or you just feel low on energy. Whatever your particular way of getting lost is.

What I think he means is that what you are looking for is already there; the peace of mind that you seek is within you. It is not so much a finding of it, but a letting go of all the stuff that lies between you and it.

Here's how Rumi put it: "This longing you express is the return message." In other words, your longing, your seeking for truth, your understanding that there is something else, is your answer; it is your calling.  Erich Schiffman writes: "The solution to anything is to slide into a feeling of peace instead of thrashing around to find the answer ... When you experience your essence, you will feel this natural lovingness within yourself without having to do anything"

When we take these teachings (from those much wiser than us) to heart, what we realise is this: that we don't have to keep running so fast - either towards the things that we hope will prove our worth (to ourselves; to others) or away from the truth of who we really are and what we really need and want from this life. Most of all, we don't need to waste energy on being who we are not; we should only work to reveal the beautiful truth of who we already are.  It takes courage to trust that you are already enough.  It takes faith to believe the path is rising to meet you. Are you brave enough to let the world know exactly who you are and to trust that that which you are seeking is seeking you right back?

On Feeling Overwhelmed

2011-10-06T23:33:00.000+01:00

I suppose that we all know what it feels like to be overwhelmed by all that need to get done in our lives; to be snowed under by a to-do list that never seems to get any shorter; or swamped by the need to make important decisions that could alter our lives irrevocably, yet without the time to think them through properly. Sometimes we are overwhelmed because we have positively chosen to add something to our lives (an evening class, a training course, voluntary work), at other times, we have situations thrust upon us.

In some of us this feeling might inspire anxiety (accompanied by shortness of breath, sleeplessness, tense muscles), others might fall into a kind of torpor (low mood, hopelessness, lethargy), or feel confused and unable to navigate through maze of things we have to do. Perhaps we start to ignore the problems or things that need doing in the hope that they will magically disappear.

Whatever your response to feelings of being engulfed by problems or by the work you have to do and the stuff you need to get done, here's the thing that yoga has to teach us: the past and the future are your imagination. Only the present is real. All you can do is what you are doing now. So do that one thing and do it well. Try not to rush halfway through one thing, only to stop to begin something else and all the while your brain is on tomorrow's appointment or yesterday's meeting or that essay you need to get finished for the end of the week. Engage fully in this moment - it's an exercise of mind and the more you practice, the more you are able to do it.

What else? Try to keep things simple! I can't tell you how many hours I wasted baking cakes into the night for school fetes; making sure that my house was immaculately clean for an in-law's visit, thinking everything had to be perfect. Henry David Thoreau said: "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail." I couldn't agree more. I wonder if my desire for perfection had more to do with my fear that others would find me lacking than anything else... and really, why stay up all hours making things look perfect only to arrive in the midst of that 'perfection' frazzled and lacklustre and unable to enjoy it fully?

That we don't need to do everything is a fact that some of us find hard to encompass. I know people who can't sleep on aeroplanes because they need to keep concentrating on keeping the plane in the sky! That we don't have to do everything ourselves is an equally important lesson to learn. How does it feel to help someone out? To give someone a hand when they really need it (without needing or wanting recompense or thanks)? The truth is that it feels pretty good to be of service to someone. Think about how you can empower others to share that feeling of generosity by asking them for help; do you dare to show them your vulnerability by telling them that it would really help you out if they took Johnny to school or sorted your laundry so you can catch up with yourself? And if you have children, you can teach them to be the independent and generous souls that you hope they will become by asking them to help you when you need a hand. Sometimes asking for help can be the hardest thing; rather than ask, we try to demonstrate our needs and then compound our pain when those needs are not met. Try asking clearly for what you need (from your colleagues, your boss, your partner, your kids) and see what happens - if you're still disappointed, you might have some work to do with them, that's all! For the mostpart, people don't know you're feeling swamped unless you tell them.

As for your yoga practice... you already know that the days when you feel like you have no time for yoga are the days that you need yoga the most. You already know that yoga will give you what you most need when you are busy: serenity, a relaxed body, mental clarity. You already know that if you practise being present, just living this one moment fully, that things go better for you. I would add to this that yoga helps you to leave aside the stuff that doesn't matter and identify that which does, so that you have more time for the things you need to do and the people that need you to be around.

If you're overwhelmed just now, good luck. Keep breathing. Keep doing the things you need to do (in your heart, you know what they are) to stay sane. And do them every day. Apart from that, do the only thing you can ever do: your best in this moment, right now.

“There is nothing perfect...only life.”

Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

Ripening

2011-10-03T16:03:00.000+01:00

It occurs to me, wandering through the fields near my home in the sunshine, how everything in nature ripens and then yields to something else, completely without struggle, in its own way and in its own right time.

The leaves on the trees just now are such beautiful colours and vibrantly alive, but they are about to die, to drop from the trees, form carpets of leaves on the ground and then to yield once again to become the earth. The hedgerows are ripe with bursting fruit, the trees full of apples, the last of the flowers around here are blowsy with life. Animals make free with this richness, filling their stores, making the most of the last days of plenty before the winter comes. At the tail-end of summer everything reaches its culmination.

How stark it is, at this time of year, to compare this natural, circular ripening and yielding to what we do as humans and how we live.

I feel that I have spent a lot of my life fighting. When I was a mother to two small children, I was impatient with the little amount I felt I could achieve in a day; I felt held up by my duties as a mother and constrained by the things I had to do for them. In retrospect that time was so brief (they are now much bigger and don't need me so much) and what I learned from them was so profound (how to live in the moment, how to love, how to nurture and support) that I see I was a fool to ever have resented it. Watching friends with small babies now, I realise how time-consuming looking after small children is - of course you don't get much else done! But I also observe how mother and fatherhood mellows us; teaches us; leads us on into new experiences that make us better human beings. What I mean to say is that it felt like I was achieving little, but in truth I was learning some of the most important lessons of my life. My understanding of life was deepening without my even being aware of it, let alone fighting for it. Things ripen in their own time.

We fight against our natures too, don't we? Whether it's hardening ourselves against life's pain and the people who might hurt us; or toughening ourselves up to deal with corporate life; steeling ourselves against the possibility of failure lest people discover we are not perfect; or putting our vibrant selves away in order to fit into a mould of who we think we ought to be and what we think other people need from us.

And we battle too, when we are unable to see the way ahead clearly, when life gets difficult and the path ahead is obscured. Hard then to trust that hiatus can be an important, meaningful and beneficial part of our lives. Hard then to have faith that each period of our life has a purpose and a meaning that we might not be able to appreciate until a long time afterwards.

I hope that the older I get, the more I will trust in the rhythm of my life. That I will remember that, like the natural world around me, at times my life will burst forth, blossom and bloom. I hope that when those times come, I have the courage to seize the opportunities presented and to make the most of them. At other times, my life will seem to contract and I will feel a sense of withdrawal and hiatus. I hope that in those times, I can find the faith to understand that sometimes we must draw back in order to take stock and consolidate, before moving forward again. I hope that I can trust that the movement will return in its own time and in its own way.

I hope that I can align more purely with my own nature; truly understand it and allow it to be; absolutely trust in who I am and that my life is exactly as it should be in any given moment. I hope that I am able to confidently seize all the opportunities for growth and enlightenment that life offers me. But I hope that I can also yield, as nature does, when the time is right and that in yielding, I can accept loss and change, in the knowledge that nothing stays the same and that sometimes one thing must give way to make space for another, better, more enriching experience. As summer gives way to autumn, so let me give way to that which I do not know and cannot see. And let me do it with faith, trust and courage. As my life has taught me in the past, so let me trust that it will teach me in the future.

All yoga asks of us is that we come to understand our true selves and to live honestly in alignment with that true self; to engage fully in this life and to give wholeheartedly of ourselves; to learn from life and to love it in all its forms. I hope that I can yield more and fight less while staying true to that which I am.

Namaste.

What do you need today?

2011-09-28T13:16:00.000+01:00

What is your yoga practice for? This is a good question to ask yourself as you come to your mat to practice at home. This simple question, when considered quietly and with focus will lead you to understand and to give yourself exactly what you need from your asana/pranayama/meditation practice on any given day.

Sometimes, it will be right to push yourself beyond your previous boundaries, to test your courage, your strength and your flexibility, to attempt asana/breathing practices/meditations that you have previously found challenging. On other days, it will be more appropriate to move slowly and mindfully, or to sit quietly to meditate on something familiar. The trick is in understanding your differing needs; over time, you will learn how to respond to them appropriately.

Some people find it hard to motivate themselves to get to their mat at all, and once there the feeling that they don't really know what they are supposed to be doing and can't remember any of the poses leads them to give up easily. But some cat stretches, a standing forward bend, savasana, or some simple breathing practice (of the 'I am breathing in; I am breathing out' kind) is sufficient and could lead you to your intended outcome.

Other people find it hard to believe that 10 minutes of gentle stretches constitutes a worthwhile yoga asana practice; that yoga should be 90 minutes of sweat and hard work, or nothing at all.

But I have come to my mat for 90 minutes of hard work and for 10 minutes of very gentle stretches and emerged feeling more whole, more happy and more centred from both.

Every yoga practice should draw you nearer to kindness, focus, gentleness, strength, serenity, peace and joy. It should always bring more ease to your body and mind. But how you get there will differ from day to day. Sometimes you will find your centre by working hard; sometimes you will find it by giving yourself gentleness. And it might not even happen on your mat. Sometimes it's enough to take a walk in the countryside (having left your phone at home); sometimes it's curling up with a good book; going for a swim; knitting a jumper... In your heart, you know what does it for you.

No yoga practice is ever a waste of time. If you start with that premise, then you can't go wrong.

"On this path effort never goes to waste and there is no failure. Even a little effort towards spiritual awareness will protect you from the greatest fear."

Bhagavad Gita 2:40

Life without a Plan

2011-09-25T13:03:00.000+01:00

Here's an easy trap to get caught in: the sham security offered by always having a plan. Plans for your career, plans for how your house is going to look one day, or where you are going to live, plans for what you are going to be like when you've lost weight/got fit/run that marathon, plans for your relationship or for your children.

What do you think is the real reason for all the plans that you have for yourself and for your life? What do you think you are protecting yourself from? What do you think you are missing out on?

It is true that we need to make some plans - if I don't go to the supermarket, then I won't have anything to cook for dinner later. But I wonder if sometimes we don't make plans to protect ourselves from the fear of not-knowing. In truth, not-knowing is an ever-present state. We don't know where we will be tomorrow - we think we might be at work, sitting at our desks with a coffee and this might well be the case; but we could fall ill, or need to be somewhere else with someone who needs us, or any number of other things that might come to us out of nowhere. When they do, we will have to respond to them in the moment - the only way we ever truly get to respond to anything.

I wonder also about how making plans for the future gives us a way of avoiding the truth of situations in which we find ourselves now. If we are unhappy, or stressed, or living in ways that aren't making and keeping us well, then in many ways it is easier not to think of that (and what changes we might have to make to create a new way of living), but rather to project our imaginations into a rosy future, where the promotion, increased salary, new relationship, world trip makes everything ok. Of course, what we need to do is to look at our lives how they are today. If something is wrong, we need to put it right, not by making sunny plans for the future, but by honestly assessing where we are here, now, this moment.

There might also be things that we miss out on because we have been so invested in a plan; in an idea of who we are, where we are going and how our lives are going to be, that we inadvertently close ourselves off to the many opportunities that present themselves to us out of nowhere.

Being without a plan can feel vertiginous, scary. We might feel that we are floundering in nothingness, without direction; we might panic because we have nothing to hold on to; we might lose ourselves, because we had so much invested in a plan that we had let it define us. This is when you practise presence. Go and meditate; go and practice asana; go for a walk. Give yourself some peace and time not to be flummoxed by the directionless state you find yourself in. Wonder to yourself if it might actually be an opportunity, a necessary hiatus. Be brave, have patience, wait and see.

There is a spiritual element to not-knowingness, summed up by the term ishvara-pranidhana - surrender. When you look back on your life, you see that some of your best-laid plans came to naught, but that everything worked itself out somehow; that you have learnt even from the periods of sorrow, pain and grief. In this way we are able to make sense of our past, and yet we don't trust that future has the same rightness to it. If only we could trust that much; have that much faith; surrender to the idea that there is a wisdom inherent in our life-path, and one day we will be able to see it.

Try to trust in the rightness of where you find yourself in the world, however discombobulating it might feel to not have a plan for what's next. Stop fighting so much; try letting go a little bit; try having faith in the path you're walking on, even as you realise that you will never truly know what exactly is coming round the next bend.

The Four Brahmavihara - Loving Kindness

2011-09-20T14:25:00.001+01:00

The mind becomes clear and serenewhen the qualities of the heart are cultivated: friendliness toward the joyful,compassion toward the suffering, happiness toward the pure, and impartialitytoward the impure.

Yoga Sutra I,33 Translated by AlistairShearer

The first practical instruction that Patanjali gives to a yoga aspirant comes inchapter one, verse 33 of the Sutras and it is to do with our socialrelationships. It is obvious really, that our spiritual fitness should betested first in the fire of our relationships with others, since it is in ourinteractions with others that we demonstrate our personality, our capacity forkindness and love and our propensity towards judgement and condemnation ofother people's behaviour.

Ram Dass writes that if you want to test how well you are doing on yourspiritual path, you should go and visit your family. It is they who will pressall of your buttons, reignite all of your childhood petulance and stir uplong-cherished grievances. He recounts how his father always wondered aloud when hewas going to get a proper job (he was by this time a world famous spiritual teacherand author of many books), but his father was an East Coast lawyer and having ahippy for a son wasn't ever going to cut it.

In Sanskrit, this sutra reads as follows:

maitri karuna mudita upeksanamsukha dukha punya apunya visyanam bhavanatah cittaprasadanam

Maitri means friendliness, kindness, love. It is one of the highest virtuesin yoga and is a quality inherent in all enlightened beings and bodhisattvas.Later in the sutras, Patanjali advises maitriyadisu balani (YS III,24):that by practising friendliness and other such virtues towards all others, notonly does our capacity for friendliness and love grow, but our moral andemotional strength is increased.

Karuna is compassion. The giving of our time and our empathy to anotherhuman being, animal, or living thing that needs it. It is taking time tounderstand another person's pain, suffering, or point of view and relinquishing the idea of personal ownership of misery. It's holdingsomeone's hand while they work through their stuff and just being there forthem. We all know what we need from other people when we are at a low ebb: we don't need anyone to take the suffering away from us; we don't need to be told what to do to make it better; we don't need it pointed out to us how foolish we are to have gotten into this situation; or how we've had it easy, because they've had it so much worse; andwe certainly don't need that kind of sympathy that leaves us feeling patronised. Compassion is that brand of kindness that gives you a hug, talks andis silent, listens and seeks to understand and which is entirely accepting andloving of you in your hour of need.

Mudita is gladness, a positive state of mind to be consciously radiated.How nice it is to be with someone who radiates gladness: someone who can makeyou smile while you're waiting in the rain for a late bus; someone who can seeand point out the beauty in a somewhat desolate city landscape; someone whohelps you to remember the simple joys of life (a nice sit down and a cup oftea); or who shares with you the things that make them happy and wants to know all about yours. Learning to be this person;becoming this person, is part of yoga practice. It's connected to the practiceof gratitude: we've all been in the presence of those who drain thelife-blood from us with their complaints about the things they never had; thethings they'll never get and the way life has been so hard. It's easy to bedown on the world; the hard work is to remember to look for the beauty and to keep onbeing glad for it and to carry on sharing that gladness with everyone that youmeet and know. Happy people aren't luckier than anyone else (all humans suffer), they just work harder at being cheerful.

Upeksha is equanimity. I think this might be the hardest of the lot. Toregard with equanimity those people who constantly make mistakes; who repeatedly make damaging life-choices; or live in waysthat differ from the path we have made for ourselves. Upeksha is aboutremaining open-minded and balanced in the face of other people's faults andimperfections, rather than rushing to judge and condemn them for theirweaknesses. The flipside of upeksha is realising that we all have our shortcomings;we all say and do things (known or unknown to us) that annoy or challengeothers. Our way of living is not perfect; it's just our way. Other peoplehave their ways of doing things based on their best efforts and it is not for usto judge or condemn, nor to congratulate and encourage. According to Patanjali,it is our job only to remain peaceful and calm in the face of this and to attemptto see through people's foibles to the beauty that we know to be presentin everyone.

It's worth noting here, that I do not believe that maitri, karuna, muditaand upeksha mean that yogis should be passive in the face of injustice. Anyonewho thinks this is the case should look to the life of Mohandas Gandhi, or theDalai Lama, or Aung San Suu Kyi - these are peaceful, non-judgmental peoplewith the fortitude to take on repressive regimes and to continue to fight forwhat they believe in the face of extreme repression and hardship. However,these concepts do feed into protest, as Ram Dass wrote: "You canonly protest effectively when you love the person whose ideas you areprotesting against as much as you love yourself." Protest and movement for change comes not because we hate the person against whom we are fighting, but because we hate what they do and believe wholeheartedly in a different way.

The projection or conscious radiation of friendliness and compassion istaught in the Yoga Sutras as a method of pacifying the mind. Pacifying the mindis the true purpose of all yoga practice. Thus yoga is love and love is yoga. The practice of kindness and compassion is your yogapractice. It is a tangible, constant testing of your progress in yoga. In time,kindness and compassion become less something you practise and more somethingthat you are. And it can only run in circles... you must allow this love and kindness intoyour heart and soul as well as projecting it outwards, or else you will beforever limited in the amount of kindness, even-handedness, love and acceptanceyou can give. Be generous enough to give it to yourself and to receive it from others; for some of us,that's the hardest part of all.

"A coward is incapable ofexhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave."

Mohandas Gandhi

20 Minutes to Change your Day

2011-09-10T14:38:00.000+01:00

I once met a man called Hugh who did a lot of yoga. We were on a yoga weekend and ended up sitting next to each other at lunch; apropos of nothing I commented that on the days I practised yoga, the day seemed then to roll out more evenly and beautifully afterwards, as if there was all the time in the world for everything (as opposed to that horrible, I'm-never-going-to-have-enough-time-for-all-I-need-to-get-done-today feeling that has become the default setting for too many of us). Without missing a beat he replied that yoga makes you realise the things that matter and the things that don't, so that after you have practised, you don't waste time on the small stuff. You breathe more deeply, you take more time, you trust more that everything will get done in its own right time. I'm not sure that I had put two and two together before and made this realisation, but it was so obvious when he said it and of course, he is absolutely right. Yoga reframes your day, and when you have practised regularly for long enough, it reframes your life. Yoga helps you to acknowledge what is important and to leave aside the other stuff. It teaches you to live with your brain fully engaged with whatever it is you are doing and that helps you to do things better, more successfully, more easily. You rush less and make less silly mistakes. You improve the quality of your attention to any given situation and action and this improves both the way you perform that action and your experience of it.

Try to remember that the days when you feel that you have no time for yoga, are likely to be the days that you need yoga the most.

Try to remember that you have it within your power to take 20 minutes out of your day for yoga and thereby to make your whole day better.

How to Meditate 3 - Sitting with Yourself

2011-09-06T10:01:00.000+01:00

Try not to turn your meditation into a battle, or to make it into another thing to beat yourself up with (I can't do this, I'm too impatient, there's something wrong with me because my brain just won't stop thinking).

When you sit to meditate, you inevitably find that you are sitting with yourself. This can be uncomfortable and/or frustrating. It might be that you are a planner, or a dreamer; that you relive the story of your past life, or that you imagine your future. You might get stuck on a person, or a conversation, or a thought you've had. You might feel something (pleasant or unpleasant) that you can't let go of: reliving a romantic encounter, for example, or going over an argument or past hurt.

Whatever it is that you find in yourself, know that at least the first stage of your meditation will often be a period of reconciling yourself to whatever it is that has been occupying your mind of late (consciously or subconsciously). This is an important and valid part of the meditation process. If our yoga practice is about observing ourselves and assessing our actions with clarity, then it is important that we do not flinch from the things that occupy our thinking minds. Moreover, learning to sit quietly with whatever is present in us, can be the most challenging thing of all. Sometimes I have longed to lose myself in my mantra, because it is SO much more settling than sitting with me, me, me, for the duration of my practice.

The proportion of your allotted meditation time that is taken up with thinking, will vary each time you sit. Some days I have spent 50 minutes with thoughts buzzing around my head, finding only 10 minutes of peace at the end of my practice. Very rarely (beautiful days), I sit and almost immediately fall into that deep, quiet space that exists behind everything. Other times it comes and goes. And the curious thing is, that sitting with beauty, joy and peace can be as challenging as sitting with your thoughts. Sometimes I feel so unbounded, energetic and free that I can barely stand it!

But it is important not to judge. There is a kind of wisdom to meditation that we cannot understand, but that we must trust. The days that I sit with my thinking brain are as instructional, as motivational and move me along as much as the days when I fall into instant peace.

Accepting your practice as it comes to you is part of the practice. That's faith. That's trusting the process and trusting yourself.

If you continue to come up against blocks; if you find yourself forever mired in painful thoughts or lost in reveries, then you may wish to consider the amount of time that you are giving to your meditation practice. In the past, I would sometimes emerge from meditation feeling irritable. It turned out that I wasn't giving myself time to get beyond the busy brain part of my practice to the untroubled, dissolution into peace that comes after it. Or you could ask your teacher or reach for a good book on meditation; sometimes a kind word and some advice from someone who's been there is all you need to help you along.

Meditation is a practice that moves along in its own sweet time. We're not used to having to wait for things; we're used to getting what we want as and when we desire it; or else we work harder to get it. Meditation is the opposite of this: try less, wait more, trust, and watch what happens without judgment.

"You can't always get what you want,

but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need."

The Rolling Stones

Unconditional Love - Satchitananda

2011-08-26T14:33:00.001+01:00

There are many different types of love, but the only kind that really matters is unconditional love.

When Ram Dass first met his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, he saw in Ram Dass all of the good and all of the bad; the shameful secrets; the deepest, darkest hidden things that Ram Dass would never have revealed to anyone. Neem Karoli Baba saw all this and he loved Ram Dass anyway. More than this: he loved Ram Dass absolutely and completely, needing absolutely nothing in return. This is how Larry Brilliant describes the wonder of Neem Karoli Baba's love: “what ... staggered me (was) not that he loved everybody, but that when I was sitting in front of him, I loved everybody.”

It’s what a mother and father’s love should be for a child, but too often isn’t.

It’s the kind of love that says: here, in this moment, exactly as you are, you are good enough, you are loved for being exactly this. Regardless of your dark bits, your spiky bits, your goofs and missteps, the things you do wrong, the things you do right, the days that you are dark and the days that you are light. Those things change on a daily basis, but unconditional love does not.

This is the love, I think, that Jesus spoke of.

It is the love that is written of here by St John of the Cross:

How peacefully, how lovingly

You awaken my heart,

The secret place where you alone dwell within me!

Your breath on my face is delicious,

Calming and galvanising at once.

How delicately, how lucidly

You make me crazy with love for you!

Or in this passage from Rumi:

Be certain

In the religion of love

There are no

Believers or unbelievers.

Love embraces all.

This love is satchitananda (sat=truth/existence chit=consciousness/ananda=bliss). As Georg Feuerstein writes, “this bliss is not a state of mind, but the condition that remains when all psycho-mental phenomena have been transcended”. Yogis speak of this unconditional love lying behind everything; always there. We do not need to ‘find’ it, only to remove the things that stand between us and it; that is the work that we are doing.

We might find this love in another human being... our spiritual teacher, perhaps, or in someone we know who embodies all that we value in humanity and who gives us something strong, yet intangible and asks for nothing in return; we might find it in prayer or during meditation; we might read of it in books from teachers and poets alive or dead; we might see it in the example of people who do good in the world and who ask for no recompense. So many paths to the same source.

The work of yoga is to find it, connect with it, and let it run through us so that we may express it in our lives.

Ram Dass writes, “once you have experienced unconditional love, you have nowhere to go. You can run, but you can’t hide. The seed is planted, and it will grow in its own time. You can only grow into who you truly are.”

Renunciation (Vairagya)

2011-08-25T17:58:00.000+01:00

The idea of renunciation doesn't feel particularly modern or attractive. When I think of renunciation, I think of personal sacrifice. When I think of renunciants I think of the ash-covered saddhus who wander around India on their spiritual quest, having given up all their belongings and human friendships. I suppose that the word also makes me think of giving things up for a good reason, but having that renunciation backfire on you - in other words, that you end up wanting the thing you have given up more than you ever wanted it when you were allowed it!

There is a more positive way to think of renunciation. Renunciation as the taking away of whatever is standing between you and whoever/whatever it is that you want to be. So, if you want to be healthy, then you might renounce cigarettes or your afternoon cake; if you want to maintain your energy and clarity, you might give up that nightly glass/half bottle of wine; if you want to be peaceful you might commit more deeply to your meditation practice. Only you know what's in your way at any given time.

It might be said that most major religions incorporate the idea of renunciation into the spiritual year; that there are specific periods given over to playing with the idea and practice of renouncing things (fasting prior to Yom Kippur, for example, or giving up something for Lent).

An important part of yoga practice is deepening our understanding of our attachments to things and loosening the grip of those attachments. Put simply, the philosophy is as follows: we ourselves and all of our possessions are entirely impermanent, we will live our lives and then we will die and be gone and all of our belongings will be lost to us. Yet, for yogis there is something beyond this temporal world, something enduring and lasting with which we seek connection. Understanding the impermanence of our bodies and possessions and loosening our grip on our ego (sense of individuality) and sense of ownership facilitates this connection. An investigation into our attachments by playing with renunciation can therefore be an enlightening element of our yoga practice.

I once gave up buying anything (except for food) for 30 days, that was a good test! Bargains had to go unpurchased, no new books for a month (that was hard) and then the concern that once the month was over I might go on some crazy spending spree to over-compensate (I didn't)! It was a thought-provoking month and it was a challenge sometimes to stay mindful and committed to it. The great thing about that month, though, was that what began as a restriction ended up feeling like freedom. It was a bit like the feeling that I got when I gave up smoking: at first it is terribly difficult and your body and mind scream out for the thing you want, but cannot have. Once that initial stage is over, however, my overwhelming sense was of being free of cigarettes and I've been free of them ever since.

We don't renounce because it's holy, or because it's the right thing to do, or because it's been imposed on us. In truth, when we renounce for those reasons, it backfires and we either end up wanting that thing more (to the point of obsession?), failing (and then beating ourselves up for it?), or being miserable about it. We renounce because in doing so we make ourselves free; we renounce because we want to explore our attachment (to coffee, to buying things, to seeing someone) to find out where the attachment comes from, what we can learn from it and the ways in which we might be free of it; we renounce to get lighter (as Ram Dass puts it) and to help ourselves move towards our best version of ourselves. If you reflect over your months or years of yoga practice, you might realise that there are things that you have quite naturally renounced as you have progressed along your way - attachment to proving yourself through asana, for example, or attachment to talking too much (you are quiet more; you listen more). Chances are you didn't think of it as renunciation and that it just became part of your path; sometimes you are just ready for it and it happens, without you needing to make any effort at all.

"Vairagya is a practice through which the sadhaka (seeker) learns to be free from desires and passions and to cultivate non-attachment to things which hinder his pursuit of union with the soul"

BKS Iyengar

Emotional Awareness

2011-08-23T22:37:00.000+01:00

In yoga we practice mindfulness and self-awareness. We seek to maintain clarity in our everyday activities so that we don't get swept away by emotion or wrong-thinking; so that we can make wiser, kinder choices; and so that we can be honest with ourselves about why we have behaved in certain ways. If we understand what lead us to shout at that person/eat or drink too much/ignore our needs, then when we are in that situation again, we can make a more prudent and positive choice about how we react to it. In this way, gradually and with regular practice, we get to live happier, calmer, healthier lives.

Yogis do this by making time to reflect every day. It's as simple as being quiet and being still. It is very difficult to hide from yourself when you are being very still and very quiet (that's why so many of us spend so much time being noisy and rushing around).

This practice doesn't make you free of anxiety, pain, grief, jealousy, fear or frustration - these things are all part of being human; we can't live without them any more than we could live without love, joy, serenity, hope or amusement. It gives you the capacity for self-awareness; the ability to stand slightly aside from your emotions and to observe yourself honestly and clearly in any given situation; it's the gift of perspective... You notice an emotion; you feel it; you watch where it came from and how it manifests itself in you; and a natural pause finds its way into your life; the pause before you act. That pause is the difference between flying off the handle and being able to explain yourself lucidly; it's the difference between noticing the source of your jealousy and allowing it to consume you; it's that pause that allows you to be the best version of yourself, instead of the one that gets the same thing wrong, over and over again.

Keep Moving Forward

2011-08-20T10:12:00.000+01:00

It is said that yoga is the oldest form of self-improvement in the world; it has certainly been a form of self-improvement for me. People sometimes tell me that I am looking very well, or that they like my air of calm, that my eyes are radiant or else they are surprised by the flexibility and strength that I have (even at my age!). It's very nice when people say such things, but I know that it is not me, Sarah, that they are complimenting, but yoga.

Regular and dedicated yoga practice has brought more peace, more energy, more joy and more good health into my life; it has enabled me to be more of the person I want to be (strong, calm, loving and kind), more of the time. Regular asana, meditation and pranayama practice will do this for absolutely everyone who practices it with faith, strength and love. Patanjali knew this 2,000 years ago

sraddha virya smrti samadhiprajna purvakah itaresam

Samadhi is preceded by trust, faith, memory and wisdom

YS I:20

There were other reasons that the ancient yogis practised yoga, the attainment of magical powers, for example. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, from around the 15th Century, talks of yoga adepts being able to levitate, the ability to shrink, the ability to move instantly across great distances; the Yoga Sutras speak of perfected yogis being able to understand the minds of others and attain knowledge of past lives, among other things.

However the ancient texts also talk of more familiar and less esoteric benefits of yoga, more in line with the ones I have described in myself. The Svetasvatara Upanishad describes how asana brings: "Lightness, freedom from disease, steadiness, clarity of complexion, sweetness of voice" II,13 The Bhagavad Gita tells us that yoga practice brings "nirvana, the state of abiding joy and peace" VI,15 and this, from the Hatha Yoga Pradipika: "one gets steadiness of body and mind; diseaselessness and lightness of limbs" I,17

So yoga practice brings profound personal change and helps us to live well.

But yoga practice also brings us to deeper self-awareness, and that awareness can at times be deeply uncomfortable. In my own practice, and in observing the dedicated practice of others, I have experienced and witnessed difficult times, when something that has lain buried within, sometimes for many years, rears its head and cannot be ignored. It is said that yoga either transforms you, or else you stop doing it. In other words, it is impossible not to be transformed by yoga. But of course, we are human and we always have the choice of turning back; of turning away from painful transformation.

Ignoring personal difficulties, unresolved problems and old hurts that have not thoroughly been dealt with takes up a lot of energy. Energy that could more positively and usefully be used in living your life fully, vibrantly and for the benefit of others; for those you love. Therefore moving through pain and difficulty, resolving it and being able to move on from it is part of your yoga practice. In addition to this, pain within you that is being ignored does not go away; it is always there and can raise its head when you are at a low ebb, or when life is difficult - you'll know how your unresolved inner demons manifest themselves in you: in jealousy? in anger? in being judgmental? in weakness? in tears and self-pity?

I have written before of these moments of profound transformation as of standing at the threshold of a door. Sometimes these doors are heavy and old and the hinges are rusted and it takes an awful lot of energy, practice, faith and courage to open them and once opened to step over the threshold. But here's what I can tell you about my own practice: once you step across that threshold, you are free of whatever it was that was blocking your path and you can move forward unencumbered by it. Life feels lighter and you end up having more to give (to yourself and the world) because you are no longer carrying that weight of pain and problem around with you.

As always, we can look to Patanjali for guidance, and he tells us that during these troubling times you need three things: faith, memory and strength. Faith in the practice: it has worked for you before and it will work for you again; and faith in your teachers, who have gone before you and who can report back that the view from higher up the hill is freer and more beautiful than where you are standing now. Memory of your practice: when you feel that it's just too difficult; when the process hurts; when you would like to turn away from the pain and put it back in the box in which it has been stored, sometimes for years, remember previous transformations and how they have had a positive effect on your life. This might be something physical, such as reduced back pain, or something more subtle, like the ability to maintain calm clarity in stressful situations. Use this memory to bolster yourself through whatever it is you are experiencing in your practice and your life right now; remember that the process has worked for you before and it will do again. And know your strength: don't turn back; don't hide; don't settle for what your life has been when you could have so much more; when you can be so much more.

Right now, this moment, I am going through a period of difficulty. I look to my teachers, from Patanjali and the Bhagavad Gita, to friends and fellow yogis for help and encouragement during this time. This a pretty solid old door and it's a tough one to budge; in fact, this door has been holding up a part of myself for many years, so when it opens, I feel that some of the plaster's going to fly from the walls. But it's ok. I trust the process; I'm tired of this door being in my way; I wish to be free of it. I'll keep moving forward, because going back is not an option for me.

I hope that you find the teachings to help you when you come up against doors like this; I hope that you can ask for the solace of having somebody hold your hand while you work on it. It's your journey. Have the courage to free yourself from the things that are holding you back. Keep moving forward through your life.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson

Practising Gratitude

2011-08-08T21:49:00.001+01:00

Just a quickie before I go away for a week and might not be able to write... gratitude is a practice. It doesn't necessarily come naturally or spontaneously, but you can commit to making sure you make time to be grateful for the good stuff in your life. Even when your life isn't feeling very positive. And it will make you feel better.

Today I am grateful to a friend who listened to me talk about myself, for what felt like ages, without getting bored with me/judging me/asking me to hurry up; I am grateful for the excitement of my children, packing their things for a beach holiday; I am grateful for my dog, who I love, and who I had to drop off at the dog hotel today (I'll miss him!).

It's not much, but it's the 'not much' that ends up being everything, isn't it? The cups of tea with friends; the quiet moment with a book; a comfortable bed; a hot bath; a sunny morning.

You can make a space in your yoga practice, or in your journal, to think of three things that you are grateful for every day. You don't need to do this for long before you notice that the same things come up time and again, and that they are not the big things, but the small, quiet happinesses of love and friendship and an ordinary life.

The God Question

2011-08-07T18:43:00.000+01:00

Surrender is an important, but challenging, part of all yoga practice. We are many of us familiar with the idea that yoga is (or should be) a combination of effort and surrender and I have written about it before in this blog. But what or whom we are surrendering to is an important question. Yogis are lucky, I think, in that the word God is never used; we have no prescribed image of a deity or anthropomorphised figure issuing judgment or calling the shots. Patanjali entreats us only to surrender to that which is greater than us: ishvara pranidhana.

I think it is important that we find a definition of spirituality that works for us. For some of us, spirituality involves belief in a specific religion and in the idea of God as omniscient, omnipresent creator of the universe in whom we find refuge; others might find this notion of God judgmental or threatening in some way; still others reject the idea of God entirely.

Whether or not you hold with a specific religion, whether you are an atheist or agnostic, whether you find the idea of God appealing or threatening, in yoga we all need to find a way to connect. Connection with that part of ourselves which is beautiful and eternal; connection with other people, in whom we recognise an essential sameness, beyond elements of personality, race, gender or upbringing; and connection with the whole universe, in which we are simply a small part of the whole.

I don't think it matters how you describe this connection, but I do think that cultivating humility before it is crucial to our practice. When humans believe that they are greater, or more important, or more powerful than the rest of the natural world; when they forget that they are just one small part of the whole, then they forget to respect it; they forget to replenish what they take from it; they forget to look after it. When humans think they can control life, or nature, they are misguided and they run into trouble. Nature shows us time and again that it is more powerful than we are and that even the smallest creatures will spell the end of so much, if they cannot survive.

Surrender is a potent word. It inspires strong reactions. But I am not suggesting that we become passive; on the contrary, a life lived through yoga is an active life, it is an exuberant grasping of life and all the opportunities it presents us with. I am thinking of surrender, not as giving in, but as going with... go with life; try not to fight it. Accept that you cannot control everything; be grateful for your little place in the great scheme of things; remember your sense of wonder at the world on a daily basis.

This idea of surrender; this humility before something greater than you are; this wonder, love and joy at the world is something that we can cultivate in our yoga practice and in our life. This idea of surrender, for me, is spirituality.

What works for me is being in nature; what works for me is getting very quiet during yoga practice; what works for me is being in the sea: I never quite feel so strongly the glory and power of the world, my connection to it, and my small, but perfect place in it, as when I am in the ocean.

The way spirituality feels for me is the sensation of being very small and very big at the same time; perfectly insignificant and yet absolutely essential. It is sensing my place in the world with certainty, and an utter connection to every other thing; each of which has its place too. The way I express this spirituality is through love, that's all.

In finding a definition of spirituality that works for you, you are finding for yourself a pathway to this sense of connection and your place in the order of things. You belong here. Your definition doesn't have to look like anyone else's and nobody has to validate it for you. Call it God, or don't. It's not so important what label you give it; you know it's right for you when it feels right; this is something you feel in your heart, rather than understand or know in your mind.

'what the soul is, also

I believe I will never quite know.

Though I play at the edges of knowing,

truly I know

our part is not knowing,

but looking and touching, and loving,

which is the way I walked on,

softly,

through the pale-pink morning light.'

From Bone, by Mary Oliver

Pranayama

2011-08-06T22:35:00.000+01:00

Somebody asked me to write about pranayama, because they don't get it. So, with pleasure, here it is.

The word pranayama consists of two words: prana, meaning vital energy or life-force (similar to chi in Chinese medicine) and ayama, meaning stretch or extend. It is the practice by which prana may be maximised, contained and channelled within the body by various breathing and breath retention practices. Pranayama involves the regulation of the inhalation, the exhalation and retention (holding) of the breath, after both the inhale and the exhale. This regulation is achieved by modulating the length of the breath and breath retention for a period of time as well as directing the mind into the process. Each component of the breath should be long and uniform.

Desikachar describes pranayama thus: "Pranayama is the conscious, deliberate regulation of the breath replacing unconscious patterns of breathing. It is possible only after a reasonable mastery of asana practice."

Pranayama is therefore the practice of focusing the mind on the breath, thereby increasing our sensitivity to the movement of breath within us. It is the practice of controlling the inhalation, exhalation and retention of breath so as to steady the mind, clear energy channels and to maximise and contain prana (energy) within.

The Hatha Yoga Pradipika tells us

"When the breath is unsteady, the mind is unsteady. When the breath is steady, the mind is steady and the yogi becomes steady. Therefore one should restrain the breath." II,2

In truth, we know this instinctively. We know that when we are angry or anxious our breath shortens and is shallow; we know that when we are relaxed our breath is longer and tends to move more deeply within our body. Through yoga practice we learn how to manipulate our breath, so that when we are angry and anxious we can replace short breathing patterns with deeper ones which calm our body and mind and help us to maintain clarity even in the most difficult situations. Patanjali writes that "calm is retained by the controlled exhalation or retention of the breath" Yoga Sutras I,34

One of the aims of yoga is to retain energy, rather than allowing it to dissipate; breath control (pranayama) helps us to achieve this.

Pranayama practice also encourages stillness of mind and prepares us for meditation (raja yoga). The goal of yoga is the attainment of a serene mind; pranayama helps us to prepare for that and to retain it once we have achieved it.

There are many different pranayama techniques, which all promise different effects and outcomes. It's worth remembering, before we get too involved in complicated pranayama practices, that one of its chief purposes is simply to give us techniques for following the breath and that this can be achieved with the most basic of breathing practices.

Pranayama is the subtle practice of using time-honoured techniques to deepen our awareness; because it is subtle and because its effects are cumulative it is not often taught in classes in any deep or meaningful way; it is therefore probably necessary to take a course, to ask your teacher to advise you, or to buy a good book to help you to begin your pranayama practice. Pranayama practice is also deeply personal - everyone's experience (even of the same practice) is markedly different - and you may therefore find that you need the support of a good teacher to guide you through what can be a profoundly transformative practice.

Pranayama practice interrupts the disorderly flow of the breath, bringing steadiness to the mind and reducing our susceptibility to distractions, thus leading us on to meditative practices. It is the practice of retaining and maximising our energy so that we may use and direct it in a more positive way and so that we can move through daily life with more clarity and wisdom.

Practice

Because finding an appropriate pranayama practice for each individual is important, I am loathe to give a general practice here.

If you are my student and would like to embark upon a personal pranayama practice, please ask me and I will happily advise you.

If you are not my student and you do not have a teacher that you can ask, then I can recommend Swami Satyananda Saraswati's book Asana Pranayama Mudra Bandha or Desikachar's The Heart of Yoga, you could also click here for instruction on how to do nadi shodhana, one of the more generally beneficial pranayama practices.

Don't underestimate the power of pranayama; it is a subtle, but powerful practice and can transform the way you practice yoga, the way you think and feel, and the way you act in the world.

How to Meditate 2 - Mantra

2011-08-05T20:01:00.001+01:00

The word mantra means a thought or intention expressed as sound; it might also be understood as prayer, hymn, plan or counsel. We talk nowadays of having a mantra, as of having a phrase or set of words which are meaningful and which motivate and inspire us. In truth, a mantra might have a meaning, or no meaning at all; it might be a word, a sentence, a sound, or a set of sounds with no meaning. And it's purpose is not to spur us on to action, but to draw us inward.

Ram Dass describes a mantra as "something that protects the mind from itself ... by giving it some fodder other than the thinking process." Carlos Pomeda describes it as something that unifies your thought waves, so that instead of myriad thoughts, you find one continuous thought wave going through your mind.

When I sit to meditate, I tend to go through several typical stages. The first stage, for me, is usually thinkingthinkingthinkingthinkingthinking thoughts. Thoughts about people; thoughts about myself; memory; things I've just remembered I've forgotten; things I think I might forget; things I have to do.... on it goes. Some of the thoughts are particularly seductive, so if I remember that I have to buy someone a birthday present, I might follow that thought along the line, planning what I'm going to get and where I'm going to get it from, until I notice what I'm doing and come back to what I'm sitting here for and return to watching the thoughts pass by, rather than following them anywhere.

I use a mantra almost every time I sit to meditate, because I have a very busy brain and it helps me to concentrate. I was also given a mantra by a teacher who is important to me and I find that this mantra in particular has a profound effect on my meditation practice.

The mantra I usually use is Om Namah Shivayah. As with all translations from Sanskrit, there are many ways to translate this... adoration to Shiva; I bow to Shiva; I bow to God/the Divine (of which Shiva is a manifestation). There are other mantras, from the simplest Om, to things like the Gayatri Mantra, spoken daily for centuries...

tat savitur varenyam

bhargo devasya dhimahi

dhiyo yo nah pracodayat

let us contemplate the beautiful splendour of the divine Savitri (sun God) that he may inspire our visions

But your mantra might be as simple as thinking love with the inhalation; peace with the exhalation. Or any other words or invocations that feel good to you.

Mantras repeated silently are more powerful than those spoken aloud. Eventually, when you have practised with a mantra for a while, you end up feeling like you are hearing the mantra from inside yourself, rather than consciously thinking it. It's a very peaceful and beautiful feeling when you get to that point.

Practice

Choose a mantra that feels good to you. If you are not sure, then choose Om namah Shivayah. It's a simple and beautiful mantra that works for everybody.

Set your timer (if you use one)

Close your eyes; find your usual comfortable position for meditation.

If you have any mala beads, you can hold them and move your fingers along them with every time you repeat your mantra (I find this helps me to concentrate).

Settle your breath.

If you are not too shy, you can repeat your mantra aloud three times, before beginning to silently repeat your mantra, once with every inhale; once with every exhale.

Every time you realise that you have stopped repeating your mantra, simply notice (without judgment) and return to it.

See if you can allow the beauty of the sound of the words to fill your mind and body and thereby lull you into ever deeper meditation.

"The mantra and the reciter of the mantra are not separate from one another, and the power and effect of the mantra depend on the readiness and the openness and the faith of the one who's doing it"

Ram Dass

Darshan

2011-07-23T07:28:00.000+01:00

The Sanskrit word darshan translates as vision, or sight, but as with many Sanskrit words, it has a deeper and more beautiful meaning. People talk of receiving darshan from their spiritual teacher and it means to be in the presence of someone who is living in a state of grace; to get a glimpse, through them, of the possibility of living in a higher state of awareness, compassion and bliss; to see God/divinity/peace in them so clearly that it helps you to find it in yourself.

In the Hindu tradition, one seeks out a teacher specifically to receive darshan from them, so thousands of people every day go to visit Amma, the hugging saint, or visit the ashrams of renowned teachers, to be in the presence of beauty in another person.

Ram Dass describes first receiving darshan with his guru as being the mind-blowing experience of having his teacher see in an instant everything that was hidden and dark in him; everything that was secret and shaming; and loving him anyway.

In other traditions, the word Darshan is not used, but I thought of it when I read a story by a Buddhist monk, who described travelling with the Dalai Lama. Every day the Dalai Lama would say hello to everyone he passed in the hotel in which he was staying; by the end of their stay, every day, there was a queue of people waiting by the lift so that when he emerged they could say hello to him and have him say hello to them.

I believe that there is a more prosaic meaning of darshan and that is simply to see and be seen by another human being.

I think of a friend who told me last week that she felt she was invisible; working mother, busy lady, vibrant, wonderful, vital person that she is, she feels that the world is not seeing her. I have felt this too. The world can sometimes be in too much of a rush for us to feel noticed; or perhaps we have ceased to take the time to truly notice ourselves and to acknowledge our need to be seen.

I think of a neighbour of mine, who told me that when you get old, people don't see you any more. She wasn't sad about it, so much as resigned to the fact of it.

And I think of the people that we deliberately don't see, because it makes us uncomfortable: the homeless person begging, who we don't want to give money to; people who are handicapped or different, who make us feel awkward because we don't know how to respond; people who annoy us and who we therefore avoid.

When someone really looks at us, specifically and with all of their attention, we know it in that moment as the greatest gift. When someone looks at us and sees all of the mistakes and the flaws and the pain and the sorrow and keeps on looking, then they see the very essence of you, which is beautiful and is of God. It's a gift you can give every day and it's perfectly reciprocal - if you really look at someone, they tend to really look back at you. And then you find all of these little connections firing off all over the place. The more you practice darshan, the more you receive it.

But you don't need to go round staring meaningfully at strangers! Just look at people when you talk to them, wherever you are - in a shop, in the street, at home, at work - see them and (just as important) let them see you.

When someone truly sees us, it is deeply meaningful. When someone really sees us it is love.

Mending my Sails

2011-07-19T09:13:00.000+01:00

Sometimes there's no wind in your sails, everything stops and you have to accept that it's time to just give in and let go for a while. The way we live now doesn't make this very easy. Everything still needs to be done; you have set yourself the highest standards and it feels like a little failure to compromise them. But life has a rhythm. The quieter you get, the more easily you can tune into its rhythm. And sometimes that rhythm slows almost to stillness. To grit your teeth and dig deep and push on through at your normal speed feels like to best thing to do, but it's exhausting, trying to keep up with yourself when times are difficult and your energy is low.

But how about this - accept that there are days, when just putting one foot in front of the other is enough effort; when just getting up and going about your day in peace is enough; how about accepting that some days the wind doesn't blow and it's time to mend your sails; take care of yourself; let the quiet times unfold in their own way. Soon enough your energy will be back, or the difficult moment will have passed and you'll be off again, flowing with a faster rhythm of life. But for now, just let yourself be who you are, how you are. Don't be afraid of it; don't hide from it; go with it. Everything will be fine.

Learning Late

2011-06-21T18:57:00.000+01:00

Here is something that I have only just understood.

The fact that I have been practising yoga since 1995; have studied with some amazing teachers from all over the world; have read and studied many of the key texts of yoga philosophy and have chosen to spend my life practising and teaching and writing about yoga, demonstrates how much we have to learn, how far yoga practice can bring us along and how it's never too late to learn some really fundamental things, which can change the way we live forever.

What I realised is this: that I don't need to be perfect to be loved. In fact, it is for my imperfections that the people who love me love me.

It's such a relief! Not just to know this intellectually, but to feel it too.

Did you ever have one of those breakthrough moments when you realise that the answer was just staring you right in the face all along? Did you ever realise something momentous and wonder to yourself how you could have missed something so obvious for so long and yet at the same time, feel that you found out at just the right time; just when you were ready and needed to learn it? Well, then you'll know how I felt when I realised this small, simple thing, insignificant to most people, probably, but very important to me... I can make mistakes and say the wrong thing and forget stuff and all the other things that I regularly do that make me feel like a plum... and the people who love me, will still love me. And in spite of all that silliness, I still deserve (like everyone does) to be loved.

What is it that You're Looking For?

2011-06-19T21:51:00.001+01:00

What is it that you are looking for in your yoga practice, your spiritual practice or in your life in general? Where do you think your practice, whatever form it takes, is going to take you? Where do you want to be?

Our mistake, too often, is that we feel that we need to be moving towards some other place in order to be getting anywhere. We're hooked on the deferment of happiness... when I have that job, I'll be happy; when I move into that house I'll be content; when that person is out of my life, things will be better; when I've finished that project, things will be easier...

The truth is, that any spiritual practice should be a journey home; a trip into the heart of yourself. In your heart, you already have everything that you will ever need.

This can be difficult. If we believe that we already have in our hearts everything that we will ever need, then we must accept and love who we are now, not some idealised future version of ourselves. It might also make us face up to some serious questions about the way we live now, because if there are things in our lives now that are making us deeply unsettled, or unhappy, or unhealthy, then we need to address them; not ignore them on the basis that in some imagined future, things will be better.

In your yoga practice, you are not adding to yourself, or taking yourself to any new place; you are stripping away all the stuff that you fill your mind with, so that you can look honestly and quietly at what is. This can be very uncomfortable, but ignoring the things that make you uncomfortable does not make them go away. It can also be emboldening: you don't have to hide! You don't have to be afraid! Who you are today is just right, so go out and do stuff on that basis - not because of what you'll get, or what you'll earn, or who'll be watching, but just because you can and are living your life to the full.

Here's something by Maya Angelou that I saw from a bus in San Francisco; it was written on a school building, built into the brickwork:

"I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself."

This is the work of our practice: to be at home in this one body, in this one life. It is simply not possible to be anyone but who you are, anywhere but where you are right now.

Tips for Meditation

2011-06-14T09:37:00.001+01:00

Here are some things that have helped me to find peace in my meditation practice...

1. Go to the same place every time for your meditation practice. Over time, just being in the right place helps you to fall more quickly into meditation.

2. Meditate at more or less the same time every day. Mornings are best (your mind is much fresher, you won't fall asleep and it's great to start the day with a clear mind). If you have a lie in at the weekend, but usually practice in the morning, go to your mat as soon as you are up, so that even though it's not at the same hour of day, it's still the first thing you do.

3. If you need to loosen up before you sit so that you can be comfortable, then do a few twists/forward bends/back bends/hip opening poses before you sit. Whatever you feel your body needs. Make it part of your meditation.

4. Be comfortable. It's just no good if all you're thinking about is how much your hips ache and your legs hurt. Use cushions, sit on a chair, lean against a wall, but be comfortable.

5. Once you've found a comfortable way to sit, try to keep still and resist the urge to fidget. Only move if you are positively uncomfortable.

6. Find a path that works for you... you could bring a leaf or a beautiful stone to contemplate; you could use a mantra; you could meditate on your chakras or on your breath. It's good to find something to help your mind grow steady - it's very difficult to find that steadiness without using some kind of prop. However, try not to chop and change technique too often - try something for a week or so before leaving it aside and moving on to a new method.

7. Let your family know that this is where you meditate and that you'll need some quiet time. Very young children can't be expected to leave you alone, but older children can certainly do without you for 10 minutes or more and partners need to know to leave you alone if you are meditating.

8. Light candles and incense, wear a special shawl or jumper, sit on your favourite blanket or mat. Make the whole experience of meditating pleasurable and restorative and create a positive atmosphere for yourself each time you come to practice.

9. Use CDs and YouTube for meditation scripts and inspiration. There are lots of wonderful meditation teachers around and tons of resources to help you to deepen your experience of meditation and to help you on your way.

10. Be nice to yourself. Your mind is going to think. Your mind is not like a light bulb that can be turned off every time you come to meditate. The fact that you are still thinking does not mean that you are failing. Watch your mind move like you watch your breath move, then try to fall behind the thoughts at the top of your mind to see/feel/touch what lies within. Watch what is; don't imagine what might be. Like all yoga practice, meditation takes time, patience and perseverance.

11. Be patient. Sometimes you won't like what your mind brings you; you might be feeling things that you would rather not think about. When things are difficult, see if you can find a way to sit calmly through it. See if you can wait and watch and perhaps find what is at the other side of a strong/painful/uncomfortable emotion or thought. Think of it as a part of the process.

12. If you need to move (to talk to a child/free a fly from the room/answer the door) try to do so mindfully (don't instantly snap out of your practice and rush off). When you have dealt with what has come up, return to your practice for however much of your allotted time you have left. If you are agitated by whatever it was that disturbed you, notice that and see if you can watch and wait for the feeling to pass, or trace it to its source.

13. Have a notebook handy so that if you have any urgent thoughts (something you need to do, but might forget) you can make a note of it and leave it aside for the duration of your meditation. A notebook is also handy for writing down any insights that might come to you during your practice.

14. Find a meaningful way to conclude your practice. You might want to make a resolution for the rest of your day; you might bring your palms together in front of your heart and bow your head; you might take a moment to be grateful for the time you've had to practice or to thank the teachers that have helped to bring you on your way.

15. Don't rush back to the world when you are done. Try to take your meditation with you as you move on through your day.

These are just some things that have worked for me. They work just as well for asana practice too.

The 8 Limbs of Yoga - Dharana, Dhyana, Samadhi

2011-06-13T17:43:00.000+01:00

The last three of Patanjali's 8 Limbs of Yoga represent the true purpose of any yoga practice: the ability to sit quietly in meditation and to achieve the calm state of total equilibrium known as samadhi.

The first stage is dharana, or concentration (from the root dhri, to hold or retain). The Yoga Sutras define this as the binding of consciousness to a single point. Dharana is the practice of continuously holding your attention to a single focus; it is this single-pointed focus that precedes meditation. A variety of objects may be used in the practice of dharana - mantra, for example, or concentration on a chosen deity; you might focus on your breath, or an object that inspires you. Through this focus of attention, the functions of the mind are controlled and brought to one focal point. The more you practice, the more you find that you are able to maintain this steady focus for a longer time without becoming distracted.

The deepening of dharana leads naturally to dhyana, or meditation. Dhyana is the practise of an uninterrupted, constant flow of intense focus and concentration; it is total absorption; it is the maintenance of a steady and profound contemplative observation. Meditation is a fundamental technique common to all yoga paths and it takes practice and patience. Recent scientific research demonstrates the manifold physical and mental benefits of meditation, but it's main benefit is an abiding sense of calm peacefulness.

Both dharana and dhyana may be experienced during yoga asana practice: dharana is found in that one-pointed concentration on breath and movement that you bring to your mat, when you deliberately focus your mind and your efforts on your yoga practice to the exclusion of all else. Dhyana is experienced when you find yourself in that wonderful state of being completely absorbed in your practice, with your mind clear and focused; when you are 100% in the flow.

oOo

Samadhi is the final stage of Patanjali's eightfold yoga path - achieving lasting samadhi is the ultimate goal. In dharana or dhyana we may find ourselves back in our own minds, or distracted from what we are doing. In samadhi, we have blended seamlessly into the experience, so that we have no sense of ourselves as separate beings 'meditating' or 'doing' yoga; rather, we have become our practice and it has become us. The Brahmana-Upanishad calls it the "perfect forgetting" of the state of meditation that precedes it. It is the dissolution of our sense of separateness and union with the divine/the perfect centre. It is connection; it is a feeling unbounded by our physical selves; it is bliss. It is love.

The teacher and former monk Carlos Pomeda explains that samadhi is our natural state. Viewed in this way, Patanjali's 8 Limbs of Yoga provide a process for getting yourself out of the way so that you can experience the essential beauty of who you already are. Thus, by practising the yamas and niyamas, you develop emotional stability; by practising asana you maintain physical health and vitality; through pranayama practice you learn to conserve your energy and to maintain your equilibrium; through pratyahara you develop willpower and learn to detach from worldly distractions... Dhyana, dharana and samadhi form the last few steps (each of them intimately linked with each other) to the peaceful, calm centre of ourselves, which is always there, waiting to be rediscovered.

"Samadhi is your very nature in its absolute clarity, in its absolute purity, in its absolute awareness. Samadhi is your natural home."

Swami Rajneesh

Wearing Kindness

2011-05-26T19:15:00.000+01:00

Last week, getting ready to meet my friend for lunch, she texted me to ask what I was wearing. I went to text back, I am wearing linen..., but my auto-text wrote instead, 'I am wearing kindness'.

I like that. Today I am wearing kindness. I'll be wearing it all day and I'll be giving it to you and giving it to me. It feels good, to be wearing kindness.

Finding time for yoga practice

2011-05-25T17:13:00.000+01:00

There's a story about a monk in a monastery who was every day thinking, when I've done my chores I'll go and meditate. He'd be washing up, say, and think as soon as I'm done I'll go to my cushion and meditate. But every day, after his chores were done his teacher would send a message asking him to come and see him. So every day, when his chores were finished, instead of going to sit on his cushion and get comfortable and close his eyes and begin his meditation, he found himself with his teacher doing something else instead.

This went on for a while and the monk got more and more frustrated with his teacher. He wanted to go to his teacher every time he called for him; he wanted to know whatever it was his teacher wanted to tell him and learn everything his teacher had to teach him, but still... he needed to get to his meditation.

Eventually he realised something quite important: as good as it is to set aside a special time every day for your practice, it is also important to bring your practice into your life as you live it. To blur the distinction between the times when you are practising and the times when you're living your life.

So the monk decided to turn everything into his meditation: from then on, if he was doing the washing up, he would meditate while he was doing it. This meant that he would give all of his attention to what he was doing - he was not physically doing the washing up while his mind flew about thinking about what he was going to have for dinner; a conversation he had earlier that day, or listening to the radio. He was just standing doing the washing up and giving it all of his focus. And he turned that into his meditation practice. And it worked.

I was reminded of this in something I heard Ram Dass say once... Ram Dass is a very clever guy and always has a lot to say, but several years ago now he had a stroke, which affected his ability to speak. Sometimes he's sitting on stage, looking at the audience and they are waiting for his wisdom and the words are somewhere in his head, but they just don't quite make it to his mouth. Then there is silence and everyone is waiting for the words to come. In one of these moments Ram Dass said, "Don't waste time waiting." What he meant (I think), is don't sit there waiting for my words to come; you could be finding your own words right now; you could be finding your own wisdom. Don't waste time waiting; get on with your work.

If you have small children; if you commute to work; if you have a hectic work and social life, it is not always easy to find your way every day to a special place where you can shut the door, be in silence and give yourself over 100% to your yoga practice. Life doesn't always work out that way for us. And anyway, yoga is intended to be a practice for life - our life is the gift; that's the whole point. The world is where you get to work all this stuff out. As Vivekananda put it, the world exists to set you free.

You can turn anything, any part part of your day into your yoga practice, if you commit to doing it with mindfulness. I am not suggesting that every single moment of every day is dedicated to it, but that one or two tasks or journeys can be transformed into your yoga practice for that day, simply by your commitment to doing it with total focus.

For example, here's Nancy Roth talking about walking mindfully... "During these walks I understand the presence of God in yet another way: as if I were reading a spiritual book written with the alphabet of the seasons and processes of the natural world ... I see a design ... of interconnectedness, beauty, and, always, new life issuing from death."

On Woman's Hour I heard about a woman who cycled to work mindfully. The interviewer asked how safe it was to be mindful when you cycle, but she missed the point entirely, because when you are mindful, when you are totally present in each moment, you give yourself to that task and that moment fully and completely. If you are cycling mindfully, you are thinking only about cycling: about the feel of the wind in your face, your feet on the pedals, the road before you, the sounds of the cars passing you by; you are paying attention completely.

So if you are bathing your child, choose to do it wholeheartedly. Don't wish it were done already so that you can get on with something else. Take time to appreciate the simple pleasure of a small body immersed in water; share the time with them. If you are coming home from work, opt not to fly from one form of transport to another, imagining yourself already at home, relaxing on the sofa; instead, take time to feel your feet on the pavement; your breath in your body; relax your shoulders; look around you; enjoy the journey, rather than fixating on the destination. If you are eating, put away the newspaper, turn off the television and radio and give all of yourself to your meal, to the taste, feel and enjoyment of it.

With mindfulness you can turn any task, however mundane (and sometimes, the more mudane the better), into something elevated and beautiful. You can make it into your meditation or your prayer.

Look for the Beauty

2011-05-21T15:44:00.002+01:00

It's easy to find the hardness, the selfishness and the lack of understanding in the world. And we're masters at finding justification for our own selfishness and for the reasons why and how we judge other people.

We're so very good at noticing the shortcomings of other people that we forget that most people are just doing their best. Sometimes our best doesn't look like much: if you are afraid of heights, then getting on an aeroplane is a big deal for you, taking up a lot of energy and courage - if you're not afraid of heights, then you can't understand why on earth getting on a plane would be a problem for anyone. But what is it that you are afraid of? I know people who are afraid of birds, bats, heights, open spaces, small spaces, crowds, the dark, being alone... is there anyone who doesn't have an irrational fear/dislike of something? My point is that we are quick to judge other people's weaknesses, yet find our own perfectly understandable.

The man who likes the sound of his own voice; the shy person who never contributes much; the person who talks about themselves the whole time; the one who worries about every little thing; the person who always complains of being unwell; the one who's always late; the show-off; the argumentative person... There are reasons for all of these behaviours and we should make it our job to understand more and condemn less.

We could start from the position that most people have kindness and love in them. We could start from the position that most people are simply doing their best. Sometimes our best falls short of the mark; sometimes our best intentions get misconstrued, but for the mostpart, our best is all that we're trying to do too.

Spend this weekend looking for the beauty in everything. If in doubt, look up: the sky is an endless source of beauty and inspiration. Look for the kindness in yourself and in others. Share your kindness and your beauty with the world.

I know that when you open your heart to the world it means that the world can hurt you, but really, what is the alternative? There are enough people around with walls around their hearts, rationing their love, giving it to only a few people - family and close friends, or those they think are deserving of it. Our task is to find the beauty in everyone. Our task is to be kind. Our work is to understand and where we cannot understand, to forgive.

And of course, I am a work in progress myself... I was walking with my dog this week and I got really cross. He disappeared and then turned up with a rabbit's pelt in his mouth (which might have made him ill), having lost (another) ball. I was grumpy and annoyed and stalking along grumbling to myself when a bird flew overhead. I looked up and was rewarded by the sight of a young short eared owl sitting in a tree not 6 feet away from me. It observed me impassively. I watched it with wonder. Then it swooped away through the trees leaving me feeling blessed.

Life's like that isn't it? Things feel bad and we start languishing in bad thoughts (about ourselves, about our family, about other people) and we forget to look for the good stuff; the stuff that inspires us and fills us up and reminds us that life is beautiful.

So, smile at the checkout girl, no matter how surly she is. Hold the door open for people and forgive them if they don't say thank you. Be understanding of other people's weirdnesses and weaknesses, no matter how they manifest themselves. Take your eyes off the chewing gum on the pavement and fix them on the sky.

How to Meditate 1

2011-05-17T18:00:00.002+01:00

It’s curious how hard we find meditating, given that all we have to do is to sit quietly with ourselves and watch what happens.

I suppose we all have images of the Buddha in our heads, sitting impassively in bliss beneath his bodhi tree; or of the smiling face of the Dalai Lama, who always seems so cheerful and inexhaustibly kind. People who are meditating always appear calm and at peace from the outside and we've no way of telling how busy their minds are inside, so it's easy to think that they can do it and we can't, because when we sit our minds just go crazy.

When I sit to meditate I spend a good amount of time watching my mind thinking, chattering and darting about. It will be projecting into the future, making plans for supper or wondering what to pack for a weekend away; it will wander into the past, remembering something someone said or did and wondering about it; it will fantasise, about someone or something, or some imagined possible future event. So often, to start with, my mind will be everywhere except right here, in my meditation, being still and quiet and focussing on a mantra, or whatever focus I have chosen for my meditation that day.

Don't think you're failing if your mind won’t keep still... it is the nature of your mind to think. That’s what it’s for. What you are actually looking for in your meditation is to drop behind all of those random thoughts to the quiet space that lies behind everything. What you are actually trying to do is to draw the diverse strands of your mind together into some sort of focus and to find a space in your mind where you can watch the never-ending movements of consciousness without getting involved in any of it. You're seeking to foster a sense of detachment, so that your mind can do it's thing while your focus is elsewhere, somewhere deep inside where you can be quiet and find peace and listen to whatever comes to you out of that silence. All this takes time and practice.

You don’t need to sit in lotus pose on a yoga mat to meditate. Not many people find lotus pose comfortable and if you’re not comfortable then you'll be preoccupied by your internal commentary on your position (...my hips hurt, especially the right one, why does the right one hurt more than the left? My foot’s going numb, maybe I should move, but I’m not supposed to move, I’m sure I’m meant to sit still while I meditate, now my lower back is aching, maybe if I sit up a bit straighter my back will stop hurting, but ouch now I’ve done that my foot has gone completely to sleep...). The chatter in your mind is enough without adding bodily discomfort to it. Perhaps one day, a seated cross-legged position will be comfortable for you, but until then find something that works for you now...

Sit on the floor on a cushion with your back against the wall
Sit on a hard backed chair, feet placed evenly on the floor (put your feet on a telephone book if your feet don’t reach the floor
Kneel and sit on a stack of blocks/books
Kneel with a bolster, or rolled up quilt between your legs

There are some beautiful places available for meditation – incense-filled rooms lit by candles, chapels, churches and yoga studios... there’s an Indian tradition of retreating to a cave to meditate. But the truth is that you can meditate anywhere. When I worked in London I used to meditate on the train (as long as I could get a seat) by listening to a guided meditation on my ipod. There's something very calming about being in a public space and moving towards your destination, but being lost in a good meditation.

The amount of time you spend on your meditation will vary according to how much time you have and where you are with your practice. When I started meditating, 5 minutes seemed like plenty to me. I couldn't seem to sit for longer without becoming irritated or uncomfortable in my body or my mind. And 5 minutes felt like enough; even that short amount of time left me feeling calmer and more clear in my mind. Now I sit for more like an hour and wish I had more time to give to it, but the essence of my meditation is the same now as it was in the beginning... periods of mental chatter, mixed up with images and fascinating daydreams, interspersed with beautiful moments of unclouded contentment and peace. Sometimes I sit and get lost in that feeling. Sometimes I sit and get lost in thought. Mostly it's a mixture of the two. Still, I keep my appointment with myself; I keep turning up to sit quietly and see what's there.

So meditation is really simple, it's being patient with yourself that's hard; it's being able to gently forgive yourself each time your mind takes you off track and to gently, calmly turn yourself back inwards every time. And it doesn't matter what you call it, either... quiet sitting, collect, prayer, meditation... It's just sitting with what is and learning not to judge it or colour it or try to make it different; it's listening and watching and learning how to be emphatically who you already are.

A letter to my friend

2011-05-15T21:32:00.000+01:00

A letter because I might not get to talk to you this week. A letter because you've been having a little mid-life crisis. A letter to send you lots of love. I hope you're feeling fine again.

Life's a funny thing and it doesn't really make sense or add up, even though I always got the feeling when I was growing up that it should make sense. Did they teach us that, or did we assume it?

Take heart, lovely one. You are strong and kind and beautiful inside and out and sometimes the most troubling times bring the deepest and most meaningful gifts and revelations.

Get lots of sleep and find time to be quiet and reflective. Remember that you don't always have to be doing something for there to be something doing. Often it's when we stop that we realise where we're at and why, and out of the stopping comes the impetus to get moving again.

Most of all, be kind to yourself. Practice being as kind to yourself as you are to those you love. Practice being as forgiving to yourself as you are to those you love. Think of the love you have for those dear ones and feed yourself with a little of that love too. I know it's hard and it doesn't come easily - no one knows our faults and shortcomings as we do ourselves. And no one's ever going to be as hard on you either, as you are to yourself. But it is possible to give yourself some of that love and forgiveness and in doing so, to free yourself from some of the things that bind you. It takes practice, but you can do it.

There's only love - everything else is just the stuff we fill our days with.

How Yoga Works

2011-05-10T14:35:00.002+01:00

That yoga works is obvious to those who have been practising regularly, even if only for a short time. We tend to feel more comfortable in our bodies, stronger and more flexible, kinder to ourselves and to others and more quickly able to recover our equilibrium when thrown off balance by strong emotions or difficult life events.

How yoga works is down to a unique combination of physical and psychological effects, discovered by the ancient yogis through continued practice, observation and study, many aspects of which have now been proven scientifically to improve physical and mental health.

Firstly, yoga teaches you how to breathe properly: a full, deep, even breath which inflates your torso from collar bones to belly, in each cycle of which the exhale is at least as long (if not longer) than the inhale.  Breathing deeply and mindfully in this way helps to improve and maintain the elasticity of the muscles between your ribs, giving you increased lung capacity and a more efficient breathing pattern. In addition, breathing deeply sends signals to your nervous system that your body can relax.

Through a combination of increased physical fitness and improved breath control, regular yoga practice can lower both blood pressure and heart rate. In this state your body is more able to be efficiently at rest. The experience of stress is necessary for humans and has helped us to survive as a species, but it is supposed to be a temporary state – for too many people it has become a permanent way of being.  Practising yoga helps you to switch off the responses of your sympathetic nervous system (which releases catecholamines such as adrenaline) and stimulates the side of your nervous system that lets the body rest and digest efficiently – in this state your muscles relax fully, your mind becomes more calm and your breath deeper, your digestive system works optimally and the quality of your sleep is improved. There is also some evidence that regularly calming your body, mind and breath in this way improves the function of your immune system.

As you learn how to maintain deep, even breathing patterns when your body is under stress in your yoga practice (when working hard through vinyasa sequences, for example, or when approaching postures that you find physically and mentally challenging, such as handstands), you learn how to remain calm in all stressful situations.  This has positive benefits for your health and your relationships with others, but it also increases the chances of your remaining calm under pressure and maintaining your mental clarity during difficult situations. Life is sometimes difficult and uncomfortable - breathing well through stress/ upset/strong emotion can transform your experience of those difficult moments.   In addition, as I have discussed here before, when you are happy and at peace with yourself, you are more likely to be kind to other people, which improves your relationships with others (see here for more on this subject).

Yoga helps us to learn how to feel emotions without repressing them or letting them consume us. Yoga teaches us to sit with what is, to accept it as part of the process and to be kind to ourselves (and others) while it passes through.  Taking time to reflect on why we behaved a certain way in a certain situation helps us to act more wisely in future and to minimise the pain that we cause ourselves and others. Krishna Das describes how yoga has helped him to handle strong emotions, so that when he feels anger these days, it surges up over him and ebbs away again, where it used to engulf him entirely. Taking time to constantly observe our patterns of behaviour in this way helps us to be more wise in the future, turning away from behaviours that cause pain and towards habits that benefit us and those around us.

Yoga gives us the tools we need to observe ourselves and to notice patterns that lead us away from contentment. The simplest advice I ever heard for living well came from the Dalai Lama in his book The Art of Happiness: find out what makes you happy and make sure you do it. By becoming more sensitive to ourselves we learn that the temporary pleasure that we get from a gin and tonic or a new car (nice as those things are) is not the deep abiding contentment that we are seeking. As the Tibetan saying has it: ‘Seeking happiness outside yourself is like seeking the sun in a cave facing north.’

Life is so busy and only getting busier, when we carry our e-mails, computers and telephones everywhere with us; everything is always in motion and the world is so noisy... this busyness can be dynamic and wonderful, but it is important for our well-being that we find time to stop; to be still. It is in the midst of this quiet that we are able to see more clearly what is, and to confront ourselves honestly. The answers don't come straight away, but in silence and with patience, resolution, forgiveness and peace come. Distracting ourselves with chatter, noise, stories and more possessions does not take away or resolve difficult emotions and situations; it does not bring understanding. Understanding comes from silence. Yoga helps you to develop the habit of silence.

We think so much, that it is easy to come to the view that your body is just the vehicle for carrying your brain around. Yoga practice reminds us that our mind does not define us - there is something much deeper and more important that is really who and what you are. In your yoga practice you get to reconnect with it every time you come to your mat in whatever form your yoga practice takes. Humans have found many different words to describe the feeling of deep contentment and joy that exists within, but words fall short of the experience. All I know is that regularly turning my attention towards that deep, quiet centre of myself helps me to live better and be kinder - and that's all I'm really trying to do with my life.

So your joints get more flexible, your heart gets stronger (literally and metaphorically), your lung capacity improves, you find the deep seat of peace inside yourself, you reconnect with your body, you discover deep reserves of compassion within yourself and realise that they are unbounded, you get to know yourself, you get to reconnect with others, you emerge calmer, kinder, more resilient... You might as well go and do some practice now.

"Start where you are and with what you have and watch your horizons broaden"

Julie Gudmestad, Summer 2010

Dealing with Strong Emotions and Yoga

2011-05-03T19:19:00.013+01:00

There’s a popular image of a yogi as being someone who is always on an even keel, always calm, kind, balanced and even-tempered. And while it is true that you can look through history for teachers who seem to embody these attributes (Ramana Maharishi springs to mind), and while yoga does help us to find more peace and equilibrium within, for most of us dealing with strong emotions like anger, fear, sadness and shame is part of being human.

I practice yoga every day and have done for years, but I still get angry and cross, upset and embarrassed. I'm not accustomed to feeling fear, but when someone I love was very ill last year, I felt like I was walking on a never-ending conveyor belt with no hand-rail. Life felt precarious, uncertain and slippery. It was hard not to let it overwhelm me and it some moments, it did. Am I to see this as a failure? Or a success... I am a lot less angry, cross and upset a lot less often thanks to the lessons that my yoga practice and my teachers have taught me. And certainly my yoga practice helped me to get through that very difficult time when my friend was ill and to support them to the best of my ability.

But here’s the wonderful thing about yoga and what it has to teach us about strong emotions: you are, in and of yourself, a perfect part of a perfect universe. Life is not always easy, but it’s beautiful and you are part of that beauty. All the other stuff, the rage, the upset, the disgrace, are a part of your make-up as a human being. They are part of what it means to be human – but they are not who you are. You are not an angry person – you are a human being experiencing anger. You are not a frightened person – you are a person experiencing fear. And so on.

The difference between being an emotion and simply feeling it is huge and can have a profound effect on the way in which we learn to experience strong feelings. If we permit a strong emotion to consume us and allow ourselves to be ruled by it, then it brings unhappiness, discontent and stress, moreover we might inadvertently feed it so that it escalates to new heights. If, on the other hand, we accept these strong emotions as part of our life, observe them, watch them rise and pass away again over time, then we might notice the lesson in the emotion; which might make us stronger and more compassionate to others who are suffering; and might make the next episode shorter and less disruptive to our lives.

Patanjali called our over-identification with our emotions and this ignorance of our essential beauty and worth, avidya, or wrong-understanding. Avidya leads to suffering.

The cure for avidya is first to acknowledge it’s existence: we accept that something is wrong and that we want to make it better. Even if we do not truly feel that we are essentially good, then we at least accept intellectually that it could be possible.

Then, through practice (asana and pranayama), we start to develop skills of concentration and focus; come to understand ourselves a little better and gain the ability to view the events of our lives with more clarity. Through practice, we make ourselves stronger and more patient and develop compassion, both for ourselves and for others.

Through meditation (and by bringing a meditative aspect to your breathing and asana practice), svadhyaya (self-study) brings clarity and understanding of ourselves and the way we cause ourselves and others harm through our actions.

Strong emotions are a fact of life. The trick is to see that they pass through us and move away; the trick is not to get stuck thinking that we are an emotion – we might be feeling something pretty strongly (fear, shame, anger), but it does not define us. Life is choppy and it doesn’t always make sense; yoga helps us to learn to ride the waves rather than drowning in them. In the end, what we learn from strong emotions (if we are prepared to let them teach us) are some of the most important lessons of our lives. In the end, when we let go, surrender to the journey and refuse to either reject or embrace strong emotions, we emerge stronger, kinder and more understanding – both of ourselves and others.

"A spiritual warrior's life is an endless challenge, and challenges cannot possibly be good or bad. The basic difference between and ordinary person and a warrior is that a warrior takes everything as a challenge, while an ordinary person takes everything as a blessing or a curse."

Carlos Castenada

Keep on Growing

2011-04-28T13:49:00.001+01:00

I was once on a surfing course with a kindly, warm, plump, 60-something year old grandmother called Barbara. The youngest person on the course that day was in his late teens; Barbara was the oldest. She'd been surfing before and loved it - she was the only person to stand up on her board that day. She did it over and over again, riding the surf into the shore with a big grin on her face.

In the Land Rover on the way home at the end of the day someone congratulated Barbara on her surfing skills. She told us that her interest in surfing had begun when she'd brought her grandsons to the beach and watched them body-boarding. She thought it looked fun and wanted to join them, but she couldn't swim and was afraid of the water. Watching her grandsons that day, she realised she was missing out. They inspired her. The following Monday she found a swimming course and booked herself onto it; 9 months later she could swim, so she booked herself onto her first surfing course; 6 months after that she was merrily telling a truck full of wannabe surfers how to do it!

Obviously this is inspiring stuff and we all hope to stay as open-minded and courageous as Barbara. It's great to think that we'll continue to embrace new challenges, put ourselves in new and potentially uncomfortable situations and keep on pushing the boundaries of who we think we are and what we think we are able to achieve.

What Barbara taught me is that the joy of anything is in the doing of it. She didn't want to be a world-champion surfer, she just wanted to have a go at something that looked like fun; something that made her feel vibrant and alive. Nor did she hold herself back with self-restricting thoughts, along the lines of "Grannies don't surf", or "I'll never be able to do it", or "Old dogs can't learn new tricks".

Barbara didn't get stuck. And through not getting stuck she found that she had the capacity to continue to grow and to learn, and the courage to embrace new and fulfilling experiences.

Every week when I teach yoga, I see people come up against their own ideas about the things that they can't do. The faces that express fear, surprise or doubt when a certain pose is mentioned. And I regularly get to see the joy people experience when they find that they can do it. The joy is not in the performance of a perfect magazine-shoot yoga pose, but in the realisation that you can attempt poses that you thought were beyond you, and learn something from them, and gain something from them, and even do them, if you approach them with confidence, humility and commitment. It doesn't mean that it's easy - it can take hard work to achieve something new. It doesn't mean that it's without risk - Barbara will have fallen off her board a lot of times before she was able to stand up on it. But I bet that each time she pulled herself up from the seabed, with sand in her hair and water in her eyes, there was a big grin on her face.

Yoga helps us to keep our idea of what our lives can encompass as broad and positive as possible. We confront the self-limiting ideas we have about ourselves every time we come to our mat... by attempting yoga poses that we thought were for other people; and by meditating on the myriad ways in which we hold ourselves back and then tell ourselves it's for the best.

We tend to find it perfectly ordinary for those in their late teens and early twenties to be experimenting with who they are and finding out what it is in life that invigorates them; there is really no reason why this should ever stop.

"Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure, nor this thing nor that, but simply growth.
We are happy when we are growing."

WB Yeats

Meditation and the 8 Limbs of Yoga - Pratyahara

2011-04-02T16:14:00.001+01:00

The foundation for the practice of meditation according to Patanjali's system of yoga is pratyahara, or the drawing inward of your senses.

For so much of our time our senses are directed outwards. The world is a distracting place – there is nature, there are other people, there are conversations and plans to be made and there are the projections of the human mind (books, tv, movies, radio stations, music) to distract us.

Meditation begins with the simple desire to recoup your energy and focus by drawing your senses inward. It makes sense when you think about it – you cannot meditate while your focus is directed to the outside world; you can’t be peaceful in the midst of all of the activities of the world without first learning how to maintain your inner focus no matter what is going on around you.

There are many techniques and methods for drawing your senses inwards. The simplest way is to follow your breath. This works on a number of levels. If you take some time to focus on your breath, then it naturally follows that your breath slows down and this in itself promotes a feeling of inner calm. Your breath is a very subtle thing and bringing all of your attention to it requires concentration, absorption and attentiveness - following it with your mind literally leads you inwards. Taking time to appreciate the uncomplicated miracle of your breath is a simple, quiet pleasure far removed from the myriad distractions of modern life, but ultimately more deeply fulfilling and restorative.

Here is an easy three-step practice to help you to experience pratyahara.

Practice

Sit comfortably with your spine straight and your chin level.

Begin to deepen your breath.
Close your eyes, or soften and lower your gaze.

1) Place a palm on your belly. Breathe into your palm. Feel your belly move to meet your palm as you inhale; feel your belly draw back towards your spine as you exhale. Count 20 deep and even breaths and watch the movement of your breath and your body as you breathe. This is the way your body moves when you breathe, but you don’t ordinarily notice it. You are not in the habit of noticing yourself.

Bring your raised palm back onto your lap.

2) Now imagine your breath travelling with your inhale from the base of your spine, up your body to the top of your spine and beyond that up to the top of your head. Imagine with your exhale the breath travelling back down your spine to the base of it. Count 20 deep and even breaths.

3) Lastly, bring your attention to the bridge of your nose. Notice the movement of your breath across the bridge of your nose; across this small, but sensitive part of your body. Feel your breath, cool on your inhalation, warmer on the exhalation. Listen to the sound of your breath in your ear. Enjoy the sensation of your breath as it moves effortlessly in and out of your body. Continue for 20 breaths.

oOo

I was waiting for an appointment at the doctor’s surgery and he was running late. I watched a man opposite become increasingly irritated by having to wait for his doctor to call him through. He huffed and puffed; he muttered under his breath; once in a while he got up and stalked impatiently across the room and back to his seat again. I sat and waited. My breath was deep and calm. His breath was short and fast. My body was still and calm. His body was tense and contracted. We were both waiting. We both had other places to be. We were in the same situation exactly, but our mental and physical experience of it was totally different.

You can transform your experience of life by understanding how your tendencies lead you towards suffering and pain. You can improve your experience of life by learning how to wait, remembering how to enjoy the simple things, and how to stay calm in the face of frustrating situations.

"Wherever the mind wanders, restless and diffuse in its search for satisfaction without, lead it within; train it to rest in the self. Abiding joy comes to those who still the mind."

The Bhagavad Gita 6:26-27

A Simple Meditation

2011-03-29T18:42:00.000+01:00

Meditation doesn't have to be difficult. You don't have to find hours every day for it; you don't need to have a mind that is quiet, live like a monk or bring a huge set of skills and understanding to it. You don't need to sit cross-legged on the floor and you don't need to know complicated techniques or use any fancy props.

In its simplest form meditation is just a way to quiet a busy mind and to allow a tired body to be still; it's a way to find clarity when life is crowding you out with things that need doing and decisions that need making; it's a way to find peace in your life, whatever it brings you each day.

Once you start meditating, you will find your own way, but here are some things that might help to get you started:-

Sit comfortably with a straight spine. You could be on the floor; on a cushion; leaning against a wall or sitting in a straight backed chair.
Find a place and time when you will not be disturbed by pets/family members/phone calls/beeping computers, etc.
Set a timer for however much time you have to give, then you can close your eyes and relax, knowing that your alarm will tell you when your time is up.
Make it your intention to ignore the door/telephone/other demands on your attention. (If you are unavoidably interrupted, move slowly and steadily, trying not to break the mood of your meditation and return to your meditation as soon as possible)
Do your meditation at about the same time every day.
Commit to meditate every day for at least 10 days, so that you start to get some idea of what benefits meditation might bring you. 5 minutes a day is better than an hour once a week.

There are lots of different methods available and some wonderful teachers around, but if you're looking for a simple meditation to get you started, then I can recommend this one which is based on a Zen practice. It's really easy, gives your mind just enough to do to keep you focused and can last for as long as you have available.

PREPARATION

Sit in your chosen position, spine straight and close your eyes/soften and lower your gaze

Invite your entire body to relax and to feel steady

Take a moment to deepen your breathing

PRACTICE
Count each exhalation down from 5 to 1, when you get down to 1, go back to 5 and count down again.

That's it. Simple.

oOo

Your mind may wander - never mind - as soon as you notice that it has, bring your attention back to counting down each exhalation starting from 5 (or from where you were when your attention wandered, if you can remember).

You might like to keep a notebook beside you to jot down any thoughts or insights that arise during your meditation.

When your alarm goes off, finish the round that you are on and get ready to move on with your day. Try not to rush too quickly from your meditation.

"Meditation brings wisdom, lack of meditation leaves ignorance.

Know well what leads you forward and what holds you back,

and choose the path that leads to wisdom."

Buddha

When yoga doesn't feel good

2011-03-25T11:00:00.000Z

Doing yoga feels pretty good. Whether it's stretching the tension out of your muscles, or finding deep calm and peace in your meditation; deepening your breathing, moving your body, or lying still in savasana. You arrive at your mat feeling stressy, tight and hunched and absorbed by your own thoughts and you leave feeling refreshed, stretched out, more generous and content. All this goodness that we get from our yoga practice is the reason why we keep on coming back to it, day after day, week after week, year after year.

But there are times when your yoga practice doesn't feel quite so right.  Your body might feel tight, or you might be cranky and no amount of sun salutations seem to shift your mood. You might be injured and frustrated that your body has 'let you down', so that you are unable to practice some of your favourite poses or in your usual way. You might be annoyed by your teacher, or bored by your practice. You might feel like you've hit a brick wall and that you are failing to take your practice deeper, because your body or your mind won't seem to open up any more than it already has. Or perhaps you feel like you're going backwards! You used to be able to do this pose in comfort, now it's pulling you about in an uncomfortable way; yesterday's meditation was a smooth journey into yourself, today's is a bumpy ride to nowhere....

It's easy when these things happen to become cross and impatient, perhaps to step away from your practice for a time. But when you're having a hard time with yoga, take a moment or two to ask yourself what the difficult days might teach you.

They teach you to be resilient and to bear discomfort with good grace.  You don't want to turn away from your yoga practice, so instead you have to learn to endure the hard times with patience and kindliness towards yourself. So too in life. Sometimes it's going to be difficult. If you can learn to endure those times with patience and a good heart, then you will be able to minimise your own pain and distress when the hard times inevitably come.

You may find that it's your expectations that spoil your enjoyment of your practice. If you come to your practice with a picture in your head about how it's going to be, you have fallen into the trap of using your imagination to project into the future instead of arriving on your mat with a fresh mind, a beginner's attitude and the desire to simply be in the present and experience what is.

And even in the hardest practice, when nothing's going right, or when you are confronting things in yourself that you'd rather not consider, there are glimpses of the sweet gifts of yoga. However fleeting, they are enough to remind you that it's worth it - being here on your mat, doing your practice in whatever form it takes today.

Working through the challenging times teaches you to trust in the process and to be patient while you wait for things to move on in a more positive way. Once you've worked through your first difficult time, you realise that on the other side of a troubling set of practices or meditations, lie deeper experiences that you would have missed if you had turned away. Everything moves along in it's own time. And your practice deepens according to its own rules, regardless of your personal desires and hopes. The process carries on, even though it might not feel like it and it is often the biggest blocks that bring the greatest breakthroughs.

I think of yoga practice as an opening of doors. As you practice, in your own patient and persistent way, doors open for you along the way... your body gets stronger and more flexible; your mind seems to drop more readily into deep focus when you come to your mat; you notice and understand more about yourself. The doors to self-awareness, peace and contentment just keep on opening.  But sometimes we feel blocked. The doors stop opening. In fact it feels as though where there should be a door, there is a brick wall instead. What to do? You might end up frustrated; angry; disappointed or cross with yourself or your teacher. You might back off, or try to push through, or walk away from practice for a short time or forever... But if you carry on, you realise that what felt like a brick wall was just a very big door with particularly strong hinges and a rusty lock. As you continue to practice, this big old door eventually bursts open and you cross the threshold with a new perspective or a new understanding of yourself or your practice.

These are what one of my students calls 'eureka moments' - when a problem or block that you felt was intractable suddenly becomes clear and makes sense. And each 'eureka moment' is the result of all the steady hard work and perseverance that you have brought to your yoga practice in the preceding weeks, months or years.

So take heart when your practice feels uncomfortable or wrong - you could be on the verge of something brilliant.

The 8 Limbs of Yoga - The Niyamas - Ishvara Pranidhana

2011-03-17T14:12:00.000Z

The word ishvara translates as foremost ruler, or that which is greater than we are. Pranidhana means devotion or dedication. So this niyama means surrender to that which is greater than we are.

In the modern west we tend to think of ourselves as individual entities and masters of our own fate and we are therefore attracted to the tapas element of the niyamas. The idea of effort, discipline, increasing mastery over our bodies and minds appeals to us, while the idea of surrender is a more alien concept. We might equate surrender with the idea of giving in, or giving up, or not making much of an effort.

As modern technology brings us ever more control over the natural world and our communications with others, we might be fooled into thinking that we have more control over our lives these days than those in Patanjali's time (c.200BC). Perhaps, with the existence of modern vaccinations, fertilisers to enhance and protect food crops, efficient transport systems to get us from place to place, we feel insulated and protected from the bad things that can happen in a life.

But the truth is more difficult than this. Life is random. Good things happen to bad people and bad things happen to good people and a life that seemed to be travelling with certainty in one direction can be turned on its axis in a heartbeat.

There is simply nothing we can do about this, other than get better at accepting it. Ishvara pranidhana, then, is the practice of going with the flow of life; learning how to relinquish our false sense of control and to become more resilient, flexible and adept at surfing the waves of life.

Through yoga practice; by staying present in each moment; by learning to maintain clarity even under the utmost pressure; we stay open to new opportunities and adventures; we remain open-hearted towards others; we continue to live life fully and with courage.

This is not a passive practice. Yoga practice is all about being fully engaged in the world; living your fullest version of your life. There is effort and discipline (tapas), we make plans and move our lives on in new ways. But we accept that we don't have control over outcomes. It's like the way you plan a party and you work hard to make sure everyone has fun, food and plenty to drink, and that they are comfortable and that the place looks good. But when it rains and everyone has to run inside and the food is ruined, you still have a great time, because although it doesn't look how you thought it would, it's still great to be surrounded by your friends and family. Those of us who can't let go of the way the party looked in our head and who can't accept that in reality it turned out differently suffer as a result. They miss the party!

Ishvara pranidhana brings to life the strength, flexibility and openness that our yoga practice brings us on the mat. So that our gratitude for the times when life is on an even keel is matched by our resilience when the waters are more choppy.

The 8 Limbs of Yoga - The Niyamas - Svadhyaya

2011-03-12T17:03:00.000Z

svadhyayat istadevata samprayogah

self-study leads towards the realisation of God or communion with one's chosen deity

YS II,44 translation by BKS Iyengar

The fourth of the niyamas (the second limb of Patanjali's eightfold yoga path) is svadhyaya. Svadhyaya means self-study - literally sva one's own / adhyaya going into.

Svadhyaya has two meanings - the first is study of sacred scriptures such as the Upanishads, or the Yoga Sutras, the Bible, the Torah... (wherever your heart and interests lie), and the second meaning is the study of yourself.

From the earliest times of the Vedas, teachings were passed down orally from teacher to student. As Georg Feuerstein describes it "in Vedic times, study meant the memorisation of the sacred tradition through repeated recitation." This is another reason why many yoga texts take the form of sutras (sutra means thread and each of the Yoga Sutras represents a perfectly succinct teaching, which can be extrapolated to infinity by teacher and student). In a climate where paper rotted quickly, oral transmission was practical; making teachings short and pithy enabled easy memorisation. Ultimately the chanting of sacred texts became a spiritual practice in itself, leading to deeper states of meditation and understanding.

In this sense then, svadhyaya means personal study. Going deeply into the texts that inspire you. For some people this could be Bible study, for others it will be daily reading or recitation of the Yoga Sutras. But this might also mean reading books or poetry by people whose view of the world and the human condition resonates with you, or whose writing or teachings inspire you.

Practice
You could try this... read something every day that inspires you. You could try poetry, or read a paragraph a day of a book by a teacher you admire, you might have one of those diaries or calendars with a daily meditation from the Buddhist tradition, or you might have a set of angel cards and choose just one word a day to consider. You might want to frame each day with a particular piece of writing, so that you read it in the morning (as you brush your teeth or wait for the kettle to boil), then let it percolate throughout the day and come back to it in the evening, last thing before you go to sleep. You might be surprised by how much it has subconsciously absorbed you during the day and how much more meaning you bring to the same passage when you come back to it in the evening.

I consider reading a book by a teacher that I admire to be travelling along with that teacher for a short time. It's a great luxury.

The second meaning of svadhyaya is the study of oneself.  Yoga practice of all kinds brings us greater clarity about our motivations, passions and behaviours. We learn to regard ourselves with a clear eye and to approach ourselves with honesty and compassion.

So, for example, we might face up to the fact that we have not behaved well. The first step is in admitting this to ourselves (difficult sometimes, when we have felt justified in our anger or selfishness, our greed or bad temper); the next step is to delve deeper and ask why. What was it about that situation or person that caused you to behave that way. The answers to this can sometimes surprise us. More importantly the answers to this deep self-enquiry can help us to do better next time. Through this practice we move away from patterns of behaviour that lead us towards pain and suffering and away from habitual responses to certain situations or people.  Through this practice we move towards being able to remain calm and compassionate in the face of stressful or trying situations.

And of course, we can work through the same process with positive feelings and actions too,  thus deepening our understanding of what makes us happy and why. If the Dalai Lama is right and the key to happiness is simply finding what makes you truly happy and doing it, then svadhyaya is the method.

Practice

Bring yourself to a quiet place where you are comfortable and set your timer for 5/10/15 minutes - however long you think you have.
Sit on a chair or on the floor or against a wall (anywhere you are comfortable), but make sure that your spine is straight.
Take your mind on a journey from your toes to the top of your head (and everything in between) and invite each part of your body in turn to relax.
Feel your body heavy, relaxed and still.
Calm your breathing and ensure that your exhalation is long and smooth (this calms your nervous system)
Once you are happy and quiet, bring to mind a time when you felt really happy. remember how it felt in your mind and in your body to feel happy and content. Allow those good feelings to radiate throughout your body.
After a short time, bring your mind to a time when you have been troubled by your response to something (perhaps you regret shouting at your child or your partner; perhaps your found yourself jealous of a colleague or angry with someone in a traffic jam). Avoid berating yourself for what is natural human behaviour and remind yourself that you are not here to judge yourself or to find yourself lacking. Be kind.
Ask yourself why. Why?
If you're a visual person you might find yourself confronted by images. Or you might find that (from somewhere deep within) you answer yourself. When that vision or answer come to you, simply ask yourself again. Why?
You can go deeper and deeper and create more and more self-understanding just by following this line of questioning - why? - with patience and kindness and by delving into yourself from a quiet calm place of peace.

Ram Dass has a wonderful phrase for this kind of process, he calls it "wisdom distance" - it's the difference between wallowing in bad feelings or self-justification and getting stuck there, and watching those feelings, emotions and actions from a non-judgmental, calm and peaceful state of mind, so that they can pass by and you can move on.

The world exists to teach you, svadhyaya is the technique.

The 8 Limbs of Yoga - The Niyamas - Tapas

2011-03-09T16:10:00.000Z

Kaya indriya siddhih asuddhiksayat

Through the intensity of self-discipline and purification comes the dwindling of all impurities and the perfection of the body and the senses.

YS II,43 translation by Mukunda Stiles

From the root to burn, tapas means self-discipline, effort, purification. It is the discipline you bring to your practice, it is the turning up on your mat every day/week to practice, it’s the effort and the work and the dedication that you put into your yoga practice. Tapas is the passion you feel for your yoga practice and the commitment that you bring to it.

The word tapas also implies purification - the elimination of impurities, blocks and barriers that stop us from deepening our practice. These may be physical barriers, such as an inability to sit comfortably for meditation; mental barriers, such as a resistance to allowing the mind to be still during practice; or spiritual barriers, such as our inability to accept ourselves as we truly are.

Tapas may also be translated as asceticism and in some scriptures it means the kind of extreme emaciation and practice that we sometimes see performed by saddhus in India (the yogis who hold their arms above their heads for decades; those who deny themselves food). However, in Patanjali's sytem of yoga, extreme asceticism is not prescribed.

On an esoteric physical level, the Hatha Yogis expounded the belief that there are thousands of energy channels within the human body that get blocked and knotted and which stop the good circulation of energy and spirit within us. It is tapas that burns through these knots and blocks, releasing them and their associated tensions and thereby freeing us to move along with our practice. Strange things can happen during a yoga practice... we might feel tearful after a deep backbending practice, or fizzy with energy after a tough hip opening sequence, meditation can leave us feeling light and spacious. These (often) unexpected results of practice can affect us powerfully and may be said to be the effect of tapas clearing through the blocks and knots within us, so that our energy can move freely.

Without tapas, nothing happens... yoga cannot be given to us by someone else, or understood through any intellectual process. You must do the work yourself; experience your yoga in your own totally unique and individual way. This is of course true of anything that requires effort: learning a language, or an instrument, exercising the body or motivating oneself to do something new. If you want to learn how to meditate, start meditating; if you want to strengthen your asana practice, then practice. Yoga teaches yoga. Only through practice can the fruits of yoga be attained. If we tend towards laziness and to falling into habitual ways of living, it is tapas that gets us moving, seeing, learning, doing and improving our lives in myriad ways.

Your body is your vehicle for the duration of your life. It is the only one that you are going to get in this life. It behoves you to respect it, to look after it and to keep it well. Admiring your body for what it can do; taking care of it and nurturing it is important and it's an ongoing process. We might say that modern humans spend rather too much time worrying about the bits we don't like about our bodies: the weaknesses, the body parts that are too big or too small or too pale or too dark, rather than rejoicing in the miracle of it all.

Sattvasuddhi saumanasya aikagrya indriyajaya atmadarsana yogyatvani ca

When the body is cleansed, the mind purified and the senses controlled, the joyful awareness needed to realise the inner self also comes.

YSII,41 translation by BKS Iyengar

Freewheeling Yoga

2011-03-04T11:27:00.000Z

Can you remember what is was like to be at the top of a hill on your bicycle and about to set off. No brakes. Flying down the hill at top speed. Exhilarating.

Or maybe roller-skates were more your thing - I remember the fear and excitement of starting the roll down the steep hill beside our house, knowing that I could fall (that I had fallen in the past), but doing it anyway. Just for the fun of it.

I'm not sure when we start to put our brakes on (metaphorically speaking); when we stop doing handstands and being confident in our bodies and cycling down hills without touching the brakes. Puberty maybe, when we don't want to stand out from the crowd and our bodies become more often an awkward embarrassment than something to be gloried in.

But imagine riding a bicycle with the brakes on a little bit, imagine how much harder you will have to work to propel yourself forward; how frustrating it will be; how much more energy it will take you to get anywhere; how you will hamper your own progress. Putting our brakes on like this holds us back in life, as in our yoga practice.

You might want to spend some time thinking about what form your brakes take: it could be fear, or an internal voice that tells you that you can't, or shouldn't. Or it might be an intellectual thing, a doubt that something will work, or a suspicion that as there is no scientific proof for an experience, then it can't be viable (but in yoga all sorts of things come up that are powerful and transformative, but are an affront to science). You might have lost your confidence somewhere along the line. You might hide behind your conviction that you have to do everything for everybody else before you attend to yourself. So many different ways to hold ourselves back.

Consider your asana practice and the things you think you can and can't do... the postures that you will never be brave enough to attempt, the ones that are for other, stronger, braver people.  Notice how this mindset limits you.

Next time you practice, come to your mat with the intention of freewheeling through it.  Ignore your inner critic. Every time a doubt comes up - throw it in the long grass.  Every time you feel impatience, fear, irritation, hesitation, uncertainty, scepticism, whatever your thing is - consciously set it aside. Take your brakes off. Bring the boldness and the courage you brought to freewheeling down the hill on your bicycle to your yoga practice. See what happens.

A good way to tune into this feeling is to practice with your eyes closed. Invoke kalpana (imagination) and visualise your perfect pose; feel it as perfect from the inside, rather than looking at it critically from the outside. It's not someone else's body or someone else's pose - it's wholly yours and your version of it is wholly perfect in that moment.  Give yourself the freedom to fully commit to each pose and see what that feels like.

In meditation, just dive right in. Notice as you do this what form your 'brakes' take... it might be doubting the point of what you are doing; it might be the feeling that there are other more important things you should be doing; it might be that you are impatient to finish up and get on with the day; it might be your never-ending thoughts that keep you stuck. These are the ways that you limit yourself and your potential.

As you continue to deepen your meditation practice, you'll notice them more readily ('Hello, old friend') and perhaps you'll find a place to put them - somewhere out of the way while you get on with the business of meditating.  Here are some things that work for me...

Imagining a drawer or jar in your mind's eye where you store distracting feelings when they come up. You could have one labelled for each distraction... fear, for example, or impatience. When those feelings come up you mentally scoop them up and store them away. Put a cork in the jar; push the drawer shut.
Consciously moving the distracting thoughts out of your mind and down into your body where you can let them melt away, or soften into nothing. An effective place to move painful thoughts is the the space behind your breastbone in the centre of your chest (your heart-centre). You can breathe the thoughts there and feel them warm and melt.
Visualise thoughts; see the sentences and the letters and take them down into your body and visualise them melting away... they might be ice melting in warm water, or sugar dissolving.
If you are confronted by images or scenarios that are unpleasant (and all sorts of things come up during yoga practice, be it asana, or meditation) you could try welcoming those images or thoughts and enquiring into them to see where they come from and where they need to go. Try not to get intellectually involved with them; just feel how they feel and notice where in your body they are. Once you have noticed, you can let them go.

However you manage it, see if you can move those distractions out of the way so that you can get on with the work of your yoga practice.

This is also an opportunity to ask yourself how you limit yourself in your life. Have you become someone who doesn't do this or that? Have you become set in a certain way of doing things that makes you resistant to change? You might have become a certain person for friends and family - the one who's always available? The one who's reliable? The one who is disorganised? Do you embrace these definitions, or do they restrict you?

So, try taking your brakes off. Like freewheeling down a steep hill it will be thrilling, dangerous, enlivening and inspiring. Imagine what your unlimited self might look like and how vibrant and powerful that self could be.

The 8 Limbs of Yoga - the Niyamas - Santosha

2011-03-01T12:22:00.004Z

santosat anuttamah sukhalabhah

From contentment, unsurpassed happiness is gained

YS II, 42 translation by Alistair Shearer

Santosha. Contentment. How do we get to be happy in a lasting and meaningful way? Patanjali draws a distinction between lasting happiness and temporary pleasure. The yogis believe that we are unhappy because we are ignorant of our true nature, which is unbounded joy. The practice of yoga therefore is not so much the attainment of contentment from somewhere else, but rather the rediscovery of the abiding contentment that already exists within you. The peace and calm that you find in your yoga practice is always there – you have just forgotten how to access it.

Your yoga practice is therefore merely an unwrapping of yourself. It’s getting back to that part of yourself that is essentially you. The more you practice, the more you find that you are able to stay with that uncovered and content version of yourself for more of your day.

Santosha feels like a calm and quiet happiness; it feels like peace. For some people it means connection with God or spirit, for others it is love, gratitude or satisfaction with what is. Whatever words you use to describe it, it is a deep and abiding contentment which surpasses fleeting flashes of pleasure. So if pleasure is the happiness gained from a new pair of shoes or eating something good, then santosha is that wonderful feeling of being in exactly the right place at the right time, with everything is in its right place and nothing left wanting.

You can bring a sense of santosha to your yoga practice by practising being content with what is – yes there is effort, there is commitment and work, but there is also a sense of gratitude for that which you already have and that which you can already do. We’ve probably all had days when we feel creaky and out of sorts, when we wish that we could perform a full back bend as apparently easily as someone else in class, or that our hips were more open, or that our mind would shut up and be still during meditation... Bringing the concept of santosha to your practice means consciously bringing your mind back to what you have and being grateful for it. Some days it might just be that you are grateful for finding the time/having the money/living somewhere that you can practice yoga; other days it will be that you are grateful for having had the courage to try that thing you never thought you’d do; or for finding a way in to a posture you have found challenging; or for finding the patience to sit quietly with your self in meditation.

Santosha means hoping only to uncover the best of yourself, not striving to be a different person than the one you are. Somewhere between the start and the end of your practice, you will find it and although it might slip away from you occasionally, with consistent focus you can spend more of your time with a sense of santosha.

At the end of your practice, when you come round from savasana, or from meditation, it’s important not to rush back into the world. Take your time so that you can blur the line between your practice and your life off your mat. We use mudras (such as anjali mudra – placing the palms together at the heart) to symbolically seal in the good effects of our practice. So when you finish your yoga practice, bring a sense of consciously keeping yourself open to the good feelings you have found in your practice - resist the putting back on of the tense, unsatisfied, impatient layers of being.

Imagine it like a heavy, many layered coat that you shed during your practice – while we’re not paying attention life puts each layer back on, one at a time, so that we are soon walking around carrying a heavy load and feeling disconnected to the joy inside again. But with conscious effort and by regularly returning to your practice, you can spend more time with fewer layers weighing you down. Eventually, Patanjali promises us, you can spend your entire life in a state of joy.

"Joy is not in things; it is in us"

Wagner

Yoga for Stress II

2011-02-28T17:40:00.002Z

I’m visiting India this week – staying in Chennai. I was travelling in a rickshaw yesterday when we got caught up in a political demonstration outside the Governor’s Residence. The roads were gridlocked, there were people everywhere waving flags, it was hot and humid and the rickshaw I was travelling in was stuck behind a couple of enormous 4x4s which were full of men.

I started to get a bit nervous. I am the only Western woman that I have seen travelling in rickshaws alone and I had no way of knowing exactly which street I was on or how I could get back to my hotel on foot should I need to.

So here’s what happened: I started to imagine the terrible things that could happen to me... my handbag (containing all of my money and my passport) might get grabbed and stolen; I might draw the attention of some of the people milling around in the road and someone might take exception to me; I might get attacked or verbally abused... My mind went on creating horrible scenarios and simultaneously wondering what I should or would do in any of these terrible situations... would I run away? How fast could I run in my sandals? Or would I kick off my sandals in order to be able to run faster?

While all of this was going on in my brain, I noticed what had happened to my body. My shoulders had drawn upwards towards my ears and were tense; the muscles in my legs were tight; my chest was concave as my shoulders drew forward and my arms were crossed around my body hugging my handbag to me. My breath was very shallow and at times even stopped. I was physically braced against a totally imagined threat.

I was in the fight or flight stress response. And not because of any real danger (I am happy to tell you that I was in fact perfectly safe and with some nifty driving around and between the bigger cars the rickshaw driver soon had us on our way), but because of the danger I had dreamt up in my mind.

The trouble with the body’s stress response is that the body doesn’t know if a threat is real (you are actually about to be attacked and you know this because you can see the approach of your attacker) or imagined. So that any situation in which we imagine danger, threat or impending discomfort sparks off the fight or flight stress response in us. That's why we sometimes end up unable to sleep, with body tense and mind full of worries or why we sometimes end the day with tense shoulders or stress headaches - the troubles in our head have caused a physical response in our nervous system and it can be difficult to switch that stress response off.

Patanjali wrote about imagination in the Yoga Sutras:

“Imagination is thought based on an image conjured up by words, and is without substance”

What Patanjali is telling us is that we have a choice – we always have a choice. So I can choose to sit in my rickshaw and get tense, or I can choose to sit in my rickshaw and remember that it’s just my imagination running wild; I can remember to breathe deeply; I can soften my muscles and loosen my body. I can choose to perceive the situation in a different way and by choosing a different way take the fear and the stress out of the situation and stay relaxed and content, instead of feeling fear.

Think about the times that you might have imagined something terrible happening... How often you were right? Of course terrible things do happen, but rarely how we imagined them. Sadly, tragedy comes out of the blue. Imagining the worst that can happen neither prevents it, nor prepares us for real tragedy and pain when it does occur.

One of the gifts of yoga is not only this increasing capacity to notice ourselves and our habitual (and sometimes negative) responses to things, but to offer techniques for creating a more positive and healthy way of moving through life. Experimenting with different techniques will bring you the methods that work the best for you. Here is another practice that you might like to try.

Practice: Visualisation

Set a Timer for 10 minutes.
Sit comfortably on the floor or in a chair with your back straight.This meditation might help you on nights when you feel too stressed to sleep.
Bring your attention to your breathing. Consciously deepen your breath, paying particular attention to the length of each exhalation.
Count 20 deep breaths.
Invite your body to relax, starting with your feet and moving gradually up your body, so that your whole body feels relaxed, heavy and still.
Now bring to mind a time when you felt stressed, uptight or anxious about something.
Remember the scenario, run it through your mind.
Remember how your body felt when you were feeling this way. What parts of your body were affected by the stress you felt?
What was your breathing like? How was its rhythm? Was it deep or shallow? Fast or slow? Did you hold your breath? Where in your body did you feel your breath move? Where was it restricted?
As you recall those anxious feelings and the effect they had on your body, enquire into yourself a little more deeply. Whereabouts in your body do you feel the stress? Is it a particular colour or shape? Does it have a sound or vibration? Does it feel hot or cold?
Continue to enjoy deep and even breathing.
Now consciously breathe into the space where you feel the stress.
Imagine the stress (whatever colour, shape or feel it has) melting away. As the stress melts away, you can visualise it dispersing and moving out of your body.
As you breathe, you might want to repeat the words ‘let go’ silently to yourself.
Continue to allow the stress to melt away until your feel its edges soften and until you feel able to fully let go of it.
Continue to breathe deeply until your alarm goes off.

It is also a good practice for when you are in the middle of a stressful situation.

You can teach your body to learn how stress manifests itself in you, to recognise the signs (as I did in my rickshaw) and through breath-work and focus, how to let go of it a little so that you are more able to maintain calm clarity even in the middle of stressful situations.

The 8 Limbs of Yoga - the Niyamas - Sauca

2011-02-25T11:19:00.001Z

So, back to the 8 Limbs of Yoga... The second limb of Patanjali’s eightfold path of yoga are the Niyamas, or restraints. There are five niyamas and they represent Patanjali’s advice for personal well-being; they are the things you need to do to form the basis of a successful and productive yoga practice.

The five niyamas are as follow–

Sauca - cleanliness
Santosha - contentment
Tapas – austerity, fire, heat, effort
Svadhyaya – study, self-study, self-knowledge
Ishvara pranidhana – surrender to that which is greater than you

Sauca - cleanliness. Patanjali states simply that cleanliness is an important starting point for any yoga student - both outer cleanliness (it is traditional in India to ceremonially wash one's feet before practice) and inner cleanliness (the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, for example, lists various kriyas, or cleansing practices, such as jala neti - cleaning out your nostrils with saline water).

Of course, moving your body in your asana strengthens your muscles, moves your joints, increases your lung capacity and increases your heart rate, all of which are simply the movement of bodily fluids and movement (as opposed to stagnation) can be regarded as a cleansing process.

But in addition, Patanjali tells us that from sauca comes:

“Purity of mind, cheerfulness, mastery of the senses, one-pointedness and

readiness for self-realization follow”

YS II, 41 translation by Alistair Shearer

The mental clarity that you gain from your yoga practice is a form of sauca – we often begin our practice with a mind clouded by thoughts, but find that somewhere along the line we have been able to let that busyness of mind go, so that by the time we get to our final meditation and savasana, our mind is much more clear and calm than it was at the start. So the word sauca also describes a mind which is clear, uncluttered and straightforward.

Through invoking the idea of sauca in our practice, we are more able to maintain our focus without being distracted by physical discomfort, illness, or mental chatter.

Through the practice of sauca we bring a simplicity to our practice. It doesn’t need to be that complicated. We come to our mat, set aside all the to do lists of the day and begin to move in a way that we know will bring a calm strength to body and mind. We meet resistance (mental or physical) with an open mind and without judgement. We enquire into it rather than push against it. So that if, for example, we feel irritated by a teacher or a particular asana or practice, we ask why we feel that way, rather than indulging the irritation by languishing in it and getting crosser.

So when in your practice you find yourself getting bogged down by technique or philosophy, when your mind feels full of distracting thoughts, when you feel the worries of the day clinging to you as you begin your practice, try bringing a sense of sauca to it: simplicity, purity and clarity. Let your yoga practice itself develop the feeling of clarity within you and when you have finished your practice, see if you can take that cleanliness of mind and body out into the world with you.

A word about the Yoga Sutras...

One further word about the Yoga Sutras in general here – sutra means thread (from it comes our word suture). Patanjali’s sutras are aphorisms – succinct, pithy sentences that present the seed of a teaching. Each yoga student, with the help of a teacher (in person and/or through commentaries published in books), extrapolates each sutra to fully understand its wider, deeper meaning and brings the experiences of their own practice to their study. It’s not inconceivable that entire dissertations could be written on the subject of just one 15 word sutra... from each seed of thought come great banyan trees of meaning.

If you are looking for a good translation of the Yoga Sutras, I can recommend Alistair Shearer’s The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, published by Bell Tower and available on Amazon, I think. It’s got a great commentary and is clear and approachable translation.

My Top 10 Reasons for Doing Yoga

2011-02-24T12:07:00.001Z

In no particular order...

1. Perspective. The feeling of calm and clarity that I get after practising. Things that had niggled me before my practice seem to be less of a problem; things I couldn’t work out before seem simpler and more easy to deal with. It puts things into perspective, helps me to remember the things that are important and to let go of the stuff that doesn’t really matter.

2. The lightness I feel in my body when I’m practising regularly. It’s to do with being stronger and more flexible in my body, and also with letting go of unnecessary tension. It also makes a lot of things easier... running up and down the stairs, avoiding injury, gardening (all that forward bending!), better posture which helps digestion and lets your body work the way it’s meant to. It just makes everything feel better.

3. Health. I have no scientific proof, but for me one of the benefits of regular yoga practice is that I seem to get ill less often, and when I am ill I tend to get better more quickly than I used to. A yogi would tell you it's because yoga opens up your energy channels and frees you of the blockages that cause illness. I think it's a lot to do with learning how to listen to your body and to give it rest when rest for recovery is needed (instead of ploughing on regardless).

4. Energy. The strength, flexibility and improved lung capacity you get from regular practice gives you more energy, of course, but it’s also that once you have taken time to remember what’s really important to you, you leave aside the unnecessary things and choose to give your time and energy to the things that matter instead.

5. Happiness. Yoga makes me happy and when I’m happy I’m a better, kinder, more generous person. Yoga helps me to be the person I hope to be, more of the time.

6. Acceptance. Going with the flow. I have wasted so much energy in my life wishing I wasn’t somewhere (on the tube going to work, in a queue at the supermarket, at a family party I didn’t want to go to)... yoga helps me to accept where I am with good grace and stops me wasting all that energy on things I can’t change. Erich Schiffman calls it being wholehearted... we learn (or begin to learn) that being wholehearted about everything we do in life means that all our energies are directed towards the positive and not wasted on the negative.

7. Gratitude. I don’t know why yoga makes me feel grateful, but it does. I emerge from my practice feeling grateful for the things I have and for the freedom and opportunity to practise yoga.

8. Fun. I have fun when I am practising yoga – the people you get to meet through yoga are great, the practice is challenging and it changes every day, there's tons to read and study and lots to learn about life and about yourself.

9. Peace. Yoga makes me feel peaceful inside and it’s a feeling I love. The more I practice, the more peaceful I get, the more peaceful I get, the more peace becomes a priority for me. It’s a good feeling and I want it to permeate through more of my life. Different people describe this peace differently... for some people it relates to a feeling of being with God or a sense of the Divine, for others it's a connection to nature, some call it love. However you define it, it’s one of the most important goals and outcomes of yoga practice.

10. Patience. Yoga itself is a lesson in patience – hamstrings don’t lengthen overnight, your body opens more readily with gentle persistence than with force, deep meditation and all its benefits come only with time and practice. Having patience means that you can wait for things without losing your rag; it means you have time for things; it means you can stay calm in the face of delays or setbacks, which makes you healthier, which makes you happier, which makes those around you happier, which can’t be a bad thing, can it?

If you’re out there and you have time, let me know what your favourite things about yoga are... and what I’ve forgotten...

Yoga For Stress I

2011-02-22T10:55:00.000Z

Your body’s response to stressful situations is effective and efficient. When you perceive a situation that is threatening your nervous system sends glucose to your muscles so that you have the strength either to fight an attacker or to run away from them. Your pupils dilate so that you can be alert and responsive to changes in a dangerous situation. Your heart rate rises and the force of contraction of your heart increases so that you have the energy to deal with the threat.

This is known as the fight or flight response.

When you are in a safe situation your body can rest and the other side of your nervous system comes into play: the hormones released when you are at rest manage your digestive system, salivation, lacrimation (tears), urination, sexual function and defecation.

None of these bodily functions are crucial when you are dealing with a threatening situation, so your body directs all of your energy to the things you really need to fight off or escape an attacker.

It’s a wonderfully balanced system.

The trouble is that too many of us are spending too much time in the stressed state for too long. Instead of being an effective short-term response to stress, for many people the fight or flight bodily response has become the default setting.

This means that we inhibit all those bodily functions that our body arranges to have happen when we are at rest and this has myriad repercussions for the health of body and our sense of well-being.

In the short term inhibiting digestion is not a problem, but in the long-term it can cause illness and pain (IBS, constipation, bloating and cramps). Likewise, it is good that our heart rate increases in response to stress, but in the long-term it can have serious health implications such as high blood pressure.

Your body might lose the skill of switching off the fight or flight response, so that you stay in it, even when it is time for your body to relax - this might mean that you suffer from sleeplessness or insomnia, or from pain from stressed and hyper-alert muscles. Your body has forgotten how to be at rest.

Stress also inhibits your immune system, so you might find that you get ill frequently, or take a long time to recover from illness. Long-term stress has also been linked to infertility, disruption of menstrual cycle and loss of sexual function.

Our nervous system needs to be in balance. Many of us have forgotten how to get that balance.

The good news is that yoga is very good for teaching us how to bring our nervous system to equilibrium, so that we can experience the fight or flight response when necessary (before a big presentation), but can return to a non-stressed state quickly afterwards. It can also help us to manage stressful situations so that we are more able to remain clear and calm in the face of daily pressures, rather than being run ragged by living in a state of permanent panic.

Different techniques will appeal to different people, but I hope to give lots of options on this blog over time. Really simple things that you can do wherever you find yourself. Try some out. Give them a chance to work (so be consistent, choose a practice and try it over the course of 2-3 weeks, don’t chop and change from one thing to another). Let me know how you get on and if you need any techniques for specific situations (like giving speeches, or insomnia).

Practice 1 – The Three Part Exhalation

Here’s a really simple thing that you can do anywhere. Begin by bringing your attention to your breath. Breathe in for the count of four and out for the count of four. Do this for 5 breaths. You might already feel a bit calmer.

Now divide each exhale into 3 parts. So breathe in for the count of four and then exhale and pause, exhale and pause, exhale and pause. Repeat for at least 5 breaths – up to 10 breaths if you have the time.

If you lose your focus, don’t worry, just bring your attention back to your breathing and re-establish your smooth inhale and the 3-part exhale. You will find your ability to focus grows over time.

Try not to bring too much force to the pauses (make it a gentle pause, not a strong feeling of holding your breath).

Be patient with yourself. Set yourself a timer or a number of breaths that you are going to do and stick to it. See how you get on.

When you have finished take 3-6 ordinary breaths, in and out for the count of four again.

Why it works: when you deepen your breath and lengthen your exhale your body sends messages to your brain that you are in a safe and relaxed place and it can therefore switch off its fight or flight response (thereby switching off all those things your body needs to do in an emergency and switching on all those things it gets on with while you’re relaxed).