Rox Does Yoga

Yoga, Wellness, and Life

Yoga guidelines: when to eat? May 13, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 2:28 pm
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Let’s talk about food. The yoga guidelines that N & J gave me include #5, “Practice on an empty stomach.” I find this remarkably difficult, partly because I’m always hungry, and partly for practical reasons.

Before starting teacher training, I usually practiced yoga in the morning before work. F and I would get up, make breakfast, eat together, and then I’d do yoga while he took the first shower. Our usual breakfast is a bowl of cereal and a fresh fruit smoothie, so it’s not a heavy meal, but it’s still definitely a meal. Only occasionally did I find that the food was sloshing around in my belly or otherwise making yoga practice uncomfortable. I’m just the kind of person who needs to eat first thing in the morning, period. If I get up early and don’t eat right away, I’m likely to feel ill. It’s just the way I’m built, so for me if I’m going to do yoga in the morning I need to eat something first.

Now that I’m doing the training, I still sometimes practice yoga in the morning, but I also go to hatha yoga class after work at least one day a week. This throws my whole schedule into disarray. Instead of getting up early and doing yoga, I’ll now take the first shower and get to work early, so that I can leave early, so that I can eat something for dinner before going to a 6:15 yoga class. The 6:15 class runs until 7:30, which in reality ends up being closer to 7:45, and by the time I collect my things and drive home it’s after 8:15. Add time to prepare myself a healthy meal and it’d be after 9 PM by the time I was eating. My usual dinner time is around 7:00-7:30, which is smack in the middle of yoga class. I cannot wait to have dinner until after 9 at night. First of all, I would be starving and exhausted, and secondly, it’s not really very healthy to eat a meal before going to bed. Researchers say that it’s best to finish eating before 8 PM. I feel like my only option is to eat at 5:15 or so.

I brought some of these concerns up at the last training weekend. N says that, ideally, we would practice yoga on an empty stomach, but really you just don’t want to have a very full stomach when practicing. I can appreciate that; nobody wants to go out to a nice restaurant and then practice yoga, or practice yoga on Thanksgiving night. You can’t stretch when you’re stuffed, it’d be too uncomfortable. N further said that, ideally, we would all make lunch our main meal of the day. I have to say that, unless sandwiches and pre-packaged frozen meals are one’s idea of a “main meal”, that it’s really hard to make lunch the main meal of the day while working a full-time job. No matter what kind of job it is, if you’re in an office or a hospital or a factory, you just can’t cut out for 2+ hours at midday to go home and cook yourself a healthy lunch. There are many good things to pack for lunch, yes, but it just doesn’t feel like the “main meal” to me if I’m not cooking something. And financially, it’s not feasible to buy a hot meal for lunch every day, and eating out is proven to be less healthy than cooking at home anyway.

This turned out to be a pretty grumpy post, which wasn’t my intention. I just feel frustrated by the constraints of being a yogini in the world, I think. As J says, it would be easy to do yoga if you lived in a cave or an ashram all the time, but it’s hard to do yoga in the world. Living in a cave or an ashram, you could certainly arrange things to have lunch be your main meal of the day and set up your yoga practice to fall conveniently at an appropriate interval of hours after eating. But that’s a lot harder to do in the world, when you have to consider work schedules and commute times and, god forbid, dropping off small people at activities like soccer practice. You eat when you can, is what I’m saying, because we have to eat, and you fit your yoga in when you can, because you deserve to have your yoga. You try to be careful about what you eat before yoga (a salad or a pork chop? let’s go salad), but sometimes you just have to do your best and that’s all you’ve got.

What are your thoughts on this? I’m really interested to hear what you have to say about how you structure your day and fit both healthy eating and yoga into your schedule.

 

Vegetarian Update May 9, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 1:49 pm
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It’s been almost two weeks since my last official meat meal. I’m finding vegetarianism interesting so far. I think it must be different to make a dietary change for health reasons – if, when you eat shrimp, you go into anaphalactic shock, then you probably pretty quickly develop an aversion to shrimp. I don’t feel an aversion to meat, really, I just decided not to eat it. Although I feel strongly in an ideological way about meat consumption, I don’t have strong feelings about meat when I see it on a menu or on someone else’s sandwich. It doesn’t gross me out or make me feel ill, which I know happens to some vegetarians (and which does happen for me with broccoli, the one vegetable that I truly cannot bear). A dietary restriction not for reasons of health or taste but for ideological reasons seems sort of unnatural: if the food looks good and smells good, and I can reasonably assume it won’t make me ill, then it seems natural to eat it. I have to keep reminding myself that factory farming of meat isn’t natural. This is a conscious lifestyle choice I’m making for myself, and I guess I’m getting used to what that means.

Two restaurant incidents of note. Last Saturday, F and I stopped at Popeye’s Chicken for biscuits – just one biscuit each, to tide us over until dinner. When we walked in the door, the chicken smell almost knocked me over. I really like fried chicken. I practiced tapas and we got out of there without chowing down on bird flesh, but it was still quite an experience. Just the awareness that I couldn’t have the chicken made the smell more powerful.

Also, last Sunday I had lunch at Subway with my mom. I had never realized before just how meat-centric their menu is. Subway used to be one of my favorite fast food places; I have so many memories of getting the spicy italian sub with my best friend on Saturday afternoons in middle school. Now there is exactly one option on the menu for me – the veggie delite – and I’m not overly fond of Subway’s veggie selections, so this is kind of a letdown. (No pickles and no olives, please, and hold the sweet peppers too.) As soon as we realized that my choices were limited at Subway, Mom offered to go somewhere else, but I need to figure out how to feed myself at normal restaurants, so I said we should stay. My veggie delite was perfectly serviceable. No spicy italian, but pretty okay.

I had the thought that next time I could have them put marinara sauce on the sandwich – I often used to do that with the spicy italian, to turn it into a pizza sub, so this would just be a veggie pizza sub, something I could get excited about. Then I realized that the marinara sauce at Subway has the meatballs sitting in it. There’s likely to be little meat chunks throughout the sauce; I’ve encountered little meatball bits in my spicy italian pizza subs many times. This means the marinara sauce is out for me. I wouldn’t eat chicken broth even if there were no chicken chunks in it, so why would I order marinara sauce that had meatballs sitting in it? I guess I could, since unlike chicken broth the marinara sauce is not intrinsically made of meat, but it still feels like cheating. Overall, I need to measure how far I go with this, how fanatical I want to be. I think it’ll be a long learning process.

 

April Training Weekend: Saturday Teaching Practice May 7, 2011

Filed under: reflections,teacher training,yoga — R. H. Ward @ 1:28 pm
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Saturday’s teacher training class also included a round of teaching practice. We split into two groups of six, and round-robin-taught a class to one another. In my group, Tony started with child’s pose and rabbit pose, then I did side stretches, then Joanna half sun salutes, and so on. Each of the six of us got to teach twice.

This was an interesting exercise in a few ways. I kept noticing how as a group we weren’t really structuring a “yoga class” the way we’d actually teach one. Each person, when put on the spot, made interesting choices about which pose to teach next. We did balance poses twice, and sun salutations twice, and skipped warriors until I decided that was what I wanted to teach on my second round – they seemed too important to leave out. Even then, it was tricky trying to figure out how to get into the warrior pose, as each person brought the group up to standing when she finished her part. I ended up making everyone do another sun salutation/vinyasa, because that seems like a more natural way to get into the wide-legged stance for warrior than to just step a leg back (even though stepping a leg back was the way my old teacher Gene taught it – I don’t know, it would have been fine to do it that way, but I didn’t realize it until after half the group was in plank already). I could have just had everyone do a half sun salute and then step one leg back, but I wasn’t thinking and made them go through plank, up dog, and down dog before stepping one foot forward to get to warrior 1. I talked the group through warrior 1, warrior 2, and radiant warrior on each side before bringing them back to standing.

I was pretty pleased with how I did in this exercise, but I think it was more interesting to watch my classmates. This was what really inspired my post on voice the other day: listening to everyone else and hearing each person trying to establish his or her own voice as a teacher. Each person had strengths and weaknesses. Some people repeated the same things over and over; some people didn’t say enough to guide a beginner into a pose, and others talked too much. I’m sure I had similar faults. It’ll be just as interesting to observe my classmates growing as yoga teachers as it will be to see it happen in myself.

 

Being zen May 2, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 2:59 pm
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I’ve been slow with blogging lately. My life has been crazy lately – and as J says, everyone’s life is crazy, life is always crazy, it’s never going to be less crazy – but in my defense, life also rarely drops an overnight out-of-state business trip, a leaking kitchen ceiling and flooded kitchen, and a freelance job into a week where I’m trying to buy a house, have opera tickets with my mom, and need to plan and pack for a major trip that will include my only sister’s wedding. All while keeping up my regular work schedule and trying to fit in yoga time. I’m usually busy, but this is a little much even for me.

In all of this activity, my attitude has been to take things one step at a time. In buying a house, we are doing our best to plan for the future, but we can’t possibly plan for everything that could happen. All we can do is to make the best plans we can, and then we just have to take the risk. It’s inevitable that we’ll overlook something or forget something, and there will be plenty of things that don’t go according to plan, but we can’t do anything about those things yet. We can’t even predict which things they might be. But if we stop moving forward because we’re afraid of what could happen, then we’re never going to get anywhere. We do our best to plan and prepare, and then we have to take the leap.

This weekend was stressful and demanding. I tried hard just to focus on where I was and doing what I could do in that moment. There were a lot of things that needed to get done that I could not do while sitting at an airport or on an airplane, so I had to let go of worrying about those things. F felt stressed about our finances and about taking such a big step in buying a house, but it wouldn’t do any good for me to get all worried too, so I focused on being calm and supportive when he needed it. Last night F told me I’d been really zen all weekend, and I was glad to hear it. So often I get worked up over these sorts of things, but this time I was able to approach all the upheaval with a sense of calm.

This week will also be stressful and demanding. There are only so many things that I can do. I will do my best to do those things as well as I can, and then let go of the rest. Sometimes all you can do is just sigh and throw another few towels on the wet kitchen floor.

 

Yoga teaching voice April 30, 2011

Filed under: reflections,teacher training,yoga,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 7:50 pm
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As a writer in grad school, I really struggled with voice, trying to write poems that would stand out as MY poems. My thesis advisor would tell me how important it was for my poems to hang together as a cohesive group, with a voice to unify them; he said he wanted my poems to have a voice so strong that if someone dropped a pile of unattributed poems on his desk, he could pick mine out of the stack. At the time, I was 23. I had no idea really who I was as a poet, and was just beginning to figure out who I might be as a person, so when my advisor talked about voice it was hard really to understand what he meant. I didn’t have as much confidence as my classmates did, and that came through in the poems. In the years since then, I’ve made a lot of progress with developing my voice. The poems I’m writing now (or was writing, before teacher training started) have a much stronger voice, a voice that was influenced by many writers I admire but which is still definitively mine.

This teacher training weekend made me think about my voice as a yoga teacher. I don’t mean my speaking voice (although that’s important too), but who I am and what’s important to me as a teacher. I’ve been practicing yoga for over eight years, and I’ve taken classes with a lot of different yoga instructors, all of whom teach differently. The core poses are all the same, but every teacher is going to phrase things differently, is going to emphasize something different. My favorite teachers all live in my head somewhere: Gene in Boston, my friend Lucia, Jennifer Schelter, Adam and Lisie at Enso, now J & N, even the woman who taught my very first yoga class back in North Carolina. When I practice yoga, and even more when I try to teach a pose, I have their words in my mind to draw upon, but it does no good for me to just regurgitate another teacher’s class. That’s not helpful for me, and it’d be dead boring for the students. What I need to do is to synthesize the different voices I hear in my mind and add my own perspective – make my yoga my own. It doesn’t sound all that difficult, but practicing teaching this weekend, it was incredibly difficult! My classmates and I could all hear J’s voice in our mouths as we taught. Each of us needs to develop our own unique voice.

How? The only way to do it is practice, practice, practice. I need to dive deeper into my own yoga practice, not just doing poses but paying attention to each pose, noticing the little things I do to get my alignment right and figuring out how to tell those little things to someone else, how to describe those things in my own way. And I need to practice teaching. The same way I had to practice writing poetry to find my voice as a poet, or the same way that a student in a public speaking class needs to practice before giving a speech, I need to practice giving yoga instructions, practice hearing my voice in this new way, practice paying attention to what the students are doing and finding ways to guide and correct them. I’ll get a lot of this practice through the teacher training program, but still, I think F’s going to be getting a lot of yoga lectures for a while. This issue of voice is something I’d never really considered before, but it’s critically important to explore if I’m going to follow this path.

 

Yoga on a Monday April 26, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga — R. H. Ward @ 1:15 pm
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Yesterday, I felt a little sick, but took a tylenol and decided to go to yoga class anyway. I’m really glad I did, because it was the best practice I’d had in a while.

It was a small class – just seven of us, with J teaching. Three of us were more experienced yoga students; four were closer to beginners, and as I was practicing I reserved a corner of my mind to pay attention to how J gave the instructions for each pose, what he said or pointed out to help the less experienced students through the postures. I noted the little moments when J said something outside his usual wording, indicating that those words were a gentle nudge aimed at someone in particular. I was pleased that I remembered to start cultivating that awareness throughout the practice.

I did a little stretching before class started, and found that my legs were loose enough that I could press my forehead to my knees in paschimottanasana; that was my first clue that it was going to be a good practice. I felt strong all through the class. J had us do some poses, like Pigeon, that I hadn’t done in one of his classes before, and it felt good. My low and high lunges during sun salutations were nice and strong, and it occurred to me that just a month or two ago, the sun salutation lunges were killing me because I wasn’t used to them. During the standing poses, when I felt my thighs burning, I consciously whispered “tapas” to myself, lowered a little deeper into the pose, and lengthened my breath. I was able to straighten my right knee in Revolved Triangle (not my left knee, not quite, but I got closer than usual). We did Camel as our backbend, and it felt so good that afterward I lowered back into Hero pose and was able to comfortably get my tush on the floor. J saw me doing Hero (everyone else was doing Child’s pose) and gave me a tip about trying to pull my knees closer together to get a different stretch, so I tried that. At the end of class, I felt ready to do a headstand, which I hadn’t done in a while. I pulled my mat over to the wall, prepared myself, and was able to gracefully lift my legs straight up. J gave me some pointers on lifting my legs away from the wall, so I worked on that, and was able to hold my headstand a good long while.

I wish I could say that my sivasana was perfect and undistracted, but not really. (I can even tell you my train of thought: Hey, I haven’t seen Katrina in a while. I should call her next time I’m in Boston and we should go dancing, it seems like she goes dancing all the time from her Facebook page. I miss going dancing with Kris, too, she should come along, but I bet she’s busy planning her wedding. I’m glad Carlos came to MY wedding. I wish Bobbi and Jon had been able to come to my wedding too, or that I’d been able to go to theirs. I’m so happy they’re having a baby – Hey, sivasana here! My eyes keep flickering, I should get Sarah T to make me an eye pillow, I need to check her prices on etsy – Sivasana!) So yes, I felt some distractions, but I was able to (1) catch myself and come back to sivasana and my breath, and (2) follow my own train of thought. I feel like this is a little bit useful because at least I’m aware enough of the distraction to see where my thoughts are going and where they’ve been, and awareness is a good thing.

Overall, it was a really excellent practice, and afterward I felt relaxed and languid and peaceful and content. I wanted to remember this practice, to look back over it as something special. In the midst of everything going on in my life right now, all the stress I’ve been feeling lately, I needed this practice to remind me that I really love this thing, that there’s a reason I believe in this so much.

 

April Yoga Weekend: Friday’s group sharing April 25, 2011

Filed under: reflections,teacher training,yoga — R. H. Ward @ 2:19 pm
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So, Friday night’s teacher training session began with group sharing. What did studying the yamas and niyamas bring up for each of us? We all also had the chance to practice teaching last month, and N & J wanted to see how we were feeling about that. It was really interesting, and also really reassuring, to hear how each of my classmates is doing with the workload. We’re all struggling in different ways, but studying the yamas and niyamas affected each of us. Also, we all have conflicted feelings about the difficulties of actual teaching, which I’ll get into more later.

My sharing moment was interesting. In response to another student, J gave us a speech about how we shouldn’t discuss what we’re doing and feeling in teacher training with people in our regular lives; he feels it’s best not to talk to others about your spiritual practice, because other people might misjudge or misunderstand and it could cause difficulty in your personal life. When he finished, I piped up with, “Well, actually, I started a blog!” I explained that I’m a writer and that’s how I process my experiences best, and that with the TT commitment I wouldn’t have much time to write, so I wanted to channel my writing energy into something that would be helpful for yoga. I described how useful the blog has been for exploring my feelings on the yamas and niyamas, and how committing to regular blog posts has forced me to examine events and emotions I might not otherwise have thought twice about. And I told everyone how wonderfully supportive all of you, dear readers, have been. J looked at me skeptically and said he hopes that works out for me. It was a little awkward, and not exactly how I had envisioned telling them about this project.

I do firmly believe that starting this blog was the right choice for me. I think best on the page, so writing everything out has been incredibly useful for processing all that I’m learning, and for keeping track of my progress. I think the blog is also a good choice for me professionally: I don’t have a lot of by-lines or articles to my name, so when I do want to freelance as a writer in the future, I’ll have this blog to use as an example of what I can do, and it may lead to more and better writing gigs. And finally, I’m really glad I started it because of all the feedback I’ve gotten from readers out there, who have found my words helpful or inspiring, and that really means a lot.

It’s interesting to me how the teacher training process has made me examine all my choices carefully, even choices that seemed easy or obvious, even choices that I’d thought carefully about before. I think too that I’m incredibly lucky in my friends and family and in the abundant support I’ve received. Not everyone is so lucky; becoming a yoga teacher isn’t as obvious a career or lifestyle choice as, say, becoming an accountant, and I’m sure there are many yoga teachers out there who met with difficulty or derision as they embarked on this path. The fact that writing a blog seemed such a natural choice for me possibly says less about me than it does about all of you, and about my parents, who may have loved for me to be a doctor, but who love more the person that I’ve become. They were nothing less than delighted when I told them I’d signed up for teacher training, because I’d wanted to do it for so long. At every new turn, they listen and do their best to understand, and they may think I’m crazy sometimes, but they also know how much thought and work I put into this decision, and they respect that and support my choices. (Not to mention my amazing husband, who is quite frequently too good to be true.) So I do think that I am lucky, incredibly lucky and blessed. If I feel able to write freely about myself and my experiences, that writing at least in part stems from all the support I’ve received, and I’m so very grateful for that.

 

Allergy and cold prevention April 22, 2011

Filed under: Miscellaneous,reflections,yoga lifestyle — R. H. Ward @ 4:47 pm
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This has been a pretty slow blog week for me: I finished up all my reading last week, so this week I completed my homework assignments, which involved working backwards from my blog posts to create papers I can hand in. This was kind of challenging, as I’ve been generating an awful lot of content on here. I easily had over 10 single-spaced pages on the yamas and niyamas, and that was after I’d cut some stuff. I had to do a lot of work to edit that down to something reasonable for the assignment. So a lot of my blog energy went toward finishing the homework, and then it was nice to take a mental break from all the yoga. I still practiced this week and went to class, but I also read a romance novel and an Agatha Christie mystery, had a haircut, and went out for dinner with friends. It was nice to have some non-yoga energy to spend on the rest of my life, especially since this is a yoga weekend and I’ll be at the studio tonight and all day tomorrow.

In lieu of your regularly-scheduled yoga post, let’s talk allergies. Spring has come to the R & F household, and both of us have been itchy-eyed and sniffly all week. (We also live across the street from an arboretum, where all kinds of things are joyfully blooming and spewing pollen into the air, so perhaps allergy season hits us a little hard here.) When I get allergies, I’ve found that they’ll often develop into a cold, so in the interest of staying healthy, here are my tips for cold prevention:

  • The Neti pot. Seriously, it works. I got colds all the time last winter; this year, not one cold, and I chalk it up to the Neti pot. It’s like a little teapot. You fill it with warm water, then dissolve in a little packet of powder that turns the tap water into a salt water mixture. Then you lean over the sink and pour the water up your nose! It will flow in one nostril and out the other, cleaning all the gunk out of there. Clean out one nostril, and then switch sides. It sounds totally gross, but Swami Rama actually did advocate for nasal cleaning in The Royal Path (on page 51 in fact). Do this a couple times a week, or more often if you actually feel a cold coming on, and it will help. I hated it at first and now I’m a total addict. You can get a Neti pot in the pharmacy section of Target.
  • I also use Flonase spray. I got a prescription from my doctor because I’m one of those people whose nose just gets clogged up at night. I love the Flonase and use it every morning. Our bedroom gets really dry at night, so I also keep a saline nose spray by the bed so I can moisturize up there. (Now that I think about it, I’m kind of amazed at all the crap I pour in my nose, but it’s obviously working.)
  • For sore throats, try using oil of oregano. You can get this at a natural foods store. Drip 2-4 drops of the oil under your tongue, and hold it there for 30-60 seconds. It will burn. Practice tapas. Then swallow the oil – try to do it in such a way that it hits the sorest spot on your throat. This will also burn, and you will probably flail about making unpleasant noises, but for some reason it really works. Try to do the oil of oregano as soon as you feel even a hint of a sore throat.
  • If the sore throat sets in, give it a burst of vitamin C with cayenne pepper and orange juice! Yeah, you heard me. Fill a juice glass with OJ, and then sprinkle cayenne on top: enough to have a little cayenne lid floating on top of the juice. Then take it like a shot, so the peppered juice will hit your throat. It will burn. You don’t have to drink the whole glass of juice at once, but each sip should be taken in a gulp so the juice hits your throat. I learned this one from the daughter of hippies, and now I swear by it.
  • My eye doctor wrote me a prescription for Pataday eye drops. Put ’em in once a day and they really help with the itchy watery thing! I was never able to try allergy eye drops before because I wear contact lenses (and it’s a bad idea to drip medicine into your eyes while you’re wearing contacts – the medicine will cling to the lens and not get into your eye where you need it). However, the Pataday drops can be used first thing in the morning or even right before bed – you just have to allow 30 minutes before putting your contacts in, to allow your eyes to absorb the drops, and then you’re good to go all day.
  • You’ve probably heard this before, but local honey is supposed to be good for allergies, because the bees in your area are using all that pollen to make their honey, and, theoretically, consuming the pollen in honey can help you build up a resistance. So while you’re at the natural foods store looking for oil of oregano, pick up some local honey to help you ward off the sneezes.
 

Gilgamesh and the Yamas and Niyamas April 17, 2011

Filed under: books,reflections — R. H. Ward @ 6:25 pm
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Reading the yamas and niyamas this month, I was reminded of one of my favorite literary passages. Gilgamesh is an ancient epic poem, chronicling the adventures of a long-ago king. Badly shaken and grieving after the death of his best friend, Gilgamesh sets out on a journey in search of the secret to eternal life, but what he learns is that we can’t control life or the future. What he learns is to live the life he has as best he can. Here’s my favorite quote:

“Humans are born, they live, then they die,
this is the order that the gods have decreed.
But until the end comes, enjoy your life,
spend it in happiness, not despair.
Savor your food, make each of your days
a delight, bathe and anoint yourself,
wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean,
let music and dancing fill your house,
love the child who holds you by the hand,
and give your wife pleasure in your embrace.
That is the best way for a man to live.”
– Shiduri the tavern keeper, to Gilgamesh

I see the yamas and niyamas in every line here. If Gilgamesh follows Shiduri’s instructions, he’ll also be following the yamas and niyamas, and he’ll be a better man with a simpler, more joyful, more spiritual life. I love that this wisdom isn’t just in spiritual books like the Yoga Sutras but also in one of the earliest stories known in human culture. I love that this epic isn’t just about adventure and ass-kickery, but about coming home and finding the best way to live.

 

Niyamas: Isvara Pranidhana April 16, 2011

Filed under: reflections,yoga philosophy — R. H. Ward @ 3:26 pm
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The final niyama is isvara pranidhana, defined as surrender or devotion. The idea of isvara pranidhana is to surrender to a higher power: God, the Divine, the ultimate reality, whatever you want to call it. The idea is to put your faith in something larger than yourself. When we surrender the ego, dedicating ourselves to something beyond our own desires, we are practicing isvara pranidhana.

Satchidananda talks about surrendering in selfless service to God and to humanity (because how do we best serve God? by caring for others). Most of us have done some volunteer work at some point; how did you feel as you left the soup kitchen or the hospital or the community center? Probably tired but satisfied. You’ve worked hard, and your work is going to help others. Someone will eat dinner because of what you did; someone sick and alone feels comforted. You did that. That good feeling comes from setting our selfish desires aside in order to serve.

Devi discusses isvara pranidhana in terms of prayer and wholehearted devotion. Have you ever had an experience of the Divine that came from prayer? I have. Sometimes when I’m walking in the woods, the beauty of the world just overwhelms me. Sometimes when I work hard, I can forget myself in my yoga practice, so that in sivasana I feel truly peaceful. It doesn’t have to be a traditional Hail Mary to count as prayer.

My usual experience of isvara pranidhana is random; it’s a harder practice for me to cultivate purposefully. I’m so busy, I say, I don’t have time to volunteer. Even just in my thoughts, it’s hard for me to relinquish control, to “let go and let God” as they say. I’m always trying to imagine the possible outcomes of every situation, what will happen next, how other people will react, how I will deal with their reactions. It’s not useful, and it can get exhausting. I suspect that making a practice of isvara pranidhana would alleviate this: I’d like to say more often, “I’ve done everything I can, now it’s up to the universe.” And then stop worrying! It’s hard to imagine being able to surrender like that even once, let alone every day.

Satchidananda and Devi both say that isvara pranidhana can be one of the easiest paths to enlightenment if you can do it. It seems like it’d be a nice way to live: do your best, work hard, serve others, pray devotedly, and let your higher power take care of the rest. It sounds so simple. Maybe the first step is doing it once, or even just imagining doing it once. We have to start somewhere.