Just a quick post today: my teacher N’s story “Lead Me” is up on The Yoga Diaries. N is an amazing person and she’s had a heck of a year. I’m always impressed by her serenity and her fortitude. I hope you’ll check out her story!
Bob Ross as Guru August 3, 2012
Today I wanted to share this video, which actually made me tear up a little: Bob Ross Remixed.
I grew up watching Bob Ross paint on TV. I even took a Bob Ross method painting class when I was 12 (my oil painting still hangs over the mantel in my parents’ house). I’ve always loved Bob’s calmness and gentleness, how every element he adds to a painting just makes it a happier place. I never met Bob, but watching him on TV, I always had the sense that he genuinely cared about me, that he believed I could create something beautiful. I think he did feel that way about his viewers and that’s why he appealed to so many people and is still so beloved years after his death.
Watching this video, it struck me that one could do worse for a spiritual guide than Bob Ross. He encouraged people to use their own creativity, to create joy and good thoughts. He said there are no mistakes, just happy accidents. At least in his television persona, he feels like the human embodiment of ahimsa, or nonviolence. We could all do a lot worse than to emulate Bob’s kindness and apply his words of wisdom about painting not just in our creative projects but throughout our lives.
The World’s Oldest Yoga Teacher July 5, 2012
Today I wanted to post a shout-out to the world’s oldest yoga teacher: Bernice Mary Bates, called Bernie, who is 91 years old. Bernie’s been teaching yoga since 1960 and continues to teach yoga in her retirement community in Florida. How inspirational is that? Look at that beautiful navasana!
Inspirational Link: Hey, Fat Girl June 1, 2012
Today I’m loving this post from Flintland: Hey, Fat Girl. I have some things to say about it, but you should read it first before you hear my thoughts. Don’t worry, it’s short. Go click on the link, I’ll wait.
So, I love how the writer has a completely different way of looking at the larger runner than what we typically see in our culture. I love his warm, encouraging, and supportive tone. I love how, throughout the post, he mentions several benefits of being a runner, but nowhere does he mention weight loss – only health, strength, and confidence. Yes! I hope that all the larger runners, walkers, and other kinds of exercisers out there see this post and learn that the jerks who heckle you are only a small minority. Plenty of us are cheering you on.
From a yoga perspective, this is the attitude I want to share with my future students. Yoga is hard: it takes strength and stamina and flexibility and concentration. But, like running, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it. It means, start now, and a month or six months or two years from now, look back and be proud of how far you’ve come and what you’ve achieved. I want to fill my yoga classes with all kinds of people, all different sizes and abilities. Yoga is not about size, and it’s not about judgment. Like running, yoga is a path to becoming your best, strongest, truest self.
Yoga and the Mind/Body Connection: On Being’s Interview with Matthew Sanford May 6, 2012
It’s Sunday morning, and after F and I had just woken up, he turned on the radio. I was a little annoyed at first because I’d been thinking I might go back to sleep, but we heard the most remarkable story on NPR, an interview with Matthew Sanford, a yoga teacher and writer who’s just published a memoir, Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence. In the interview, he had so much energy and joy, and everything he had to say really resonated with me. And about ten minutes into our listening, we found that Sanford is also in a wheelchair because he’s been paralyzed from the chest down since he was 13 years old.
Sanford was talking about the mind/body connection, and we missed the first part of the interview, but I think he was saying that it’s possible and good for anyone to deepen the connection between mind and body. He mentioned how, before he found yoga, he thought of himself as a disconnected torso, but now he’s totally rooted in his body, even the parts he can’t feel. His work on the mind/body connection has led him to some interesting realizations.
The interviewer read a line from Sanford’s book about how he’s never met a person who, after deepening his or her mind/body connection, didn’t become more compassionate. This was one of the things that really resonated for me, because it’s something that I’ve thought about and experienced, just not in those terms. Just a few months ago I was thinking about how I’m less able to tolerate violence in TV and movies. At the time I attributed the shift to the fact that, being immersed in yoga study and yoga philosophy, that the concept of non-violence and being one with all beings was seeping into my consciousness, bringing my spirituality forward in a different way. Sanford would say that I’d been deepening my connection with my body – he feels that when a person is truly present and connected to the body, that person feels more connected to others as well. And it’s true, throughout my yoga teacher training I became much more aware of and connected with my body. What an interesting way of looking at it.
Sanford seems to be really good at reversing common modes of thought. The interviewer asked about how people will often say things like “My body is failing me”, particularly as they age and find their skin sagging, vision blurring, and muscles not working the same way anymore. Sanford looks at it in a completely different way. For him, the body isn’t a machine that fails and needs repair – a classic concept we use to separate our minds from our bodies. For him, the body is always working, always striving to keep you alive. The body will keep on living and healing, even through the worst injury or illness, for as long as it possibly can. From this viewpoint, the body is your partner and your friend, capable of remarkable things.
I was so inspired by what I heard that I pretty much had to get up and write a blog post right away to share this with you. Sanford is truly inspirational in so many ways, and I can’t wait to read his book. Hearing this interview also deepened my desire to work with differently abled people. As a yoga teacher, Sanford teaches able-bodied people and also adapts yoga for those with disabilities and injuries, military veterans, everyone. And he does it from a wheelchair, or from a mat where he can’t move around. Sanford talked about the adaptive power of yoga, how yoga can be modified and adapted so that anyone can do it. It’s not about doing the “perfect” pose, it’s about doing the pose you can do and learning from it. There’s just so much power in yoga to help and to heal.
You can hear the entire interview here at On Being’s website, and learn more about Matthew Sanford and the work he’s doing.
Today’s Link: Half Moon Pose and the Writer’s Split Consciousness April 19, 2012
Today I was impressed by this beautiful nonfiction/memoir piece over on the Ploughshares website: Half Moon Pose and the Writer’s Split Consciousness. As many of you know, I’m not only a yoga teacher, I’m also a writer and poet, so I’m especially interested by the intersections of yoga with creative writing (and creativity, period). I think Jamie Quatro has done some interesting work here in relating the way she thinks about half moon pose to the way she thinks about her writing and her life.
Thoughts on Natural Childbirth April 10, 2012
Recently I read a fantastic article about natural childbirth that really excited me and made me glad to be planning one: The Most Scientific Birth Is Often the Least Technological Birth. Then I scrolled down to view the comments, which I don’t recommend doing, because it left me feeling frustrated, disgusted, and honestly quite shaken by the strength and depth of people’s vitriol. To sum up quickly, some people strongly feel that all birth should happen in a hospital with an epidural and supervised by a medical doctor, while others strongly feel that all births should happen naturally at home. The whole long comment string bothered me enough that I wanted to respond.
For thousands – heck, millions – of years, women have been giving birth naturally. This is a fact, because otherwise we wouldn’t be here talking about it. Before the advent of modern medical technology, childbirth was a dangerous endeavor: there was always a percentage of women who could give birth naturally and healthfully, and a percentage who had serious trouble. These percentages vary depending on the region and culture, but overall, childbirth was feared because you never knew until you got there whether you’d die. And what modern technology has done is to remove that fear and uncertainty by making childbirth safe for those for whom it would otherwise be dangerous. This is an amazingly wonderful thing. However, there is still, as there always has been, a percentage of women for whom a natural childbirth isn’t dangerous, and to insist on applying the same technology to this group, simply because it helped the others, is to introduce costly medical procedures that may not be needed, won’t necessarily help anything, and might introduce complications. That isn’t to say that the women who need those things shouldn’t get them – I have friends who are alive today with healthy alive children because of modern medicine, which I’m incredibly grateful for. But for some women, if it’s working all by itself, why change it?
I’ve been lucky enough to have a completely normal pregnancy so far – very low-risk. Considering that I’m a vegetarian yoga teacher who practices meditation, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that I’ve planned for a natural childbirth with a midwife. I still worry about the birth – what first-time mom wouldn’t? – but I have confidence in my caregivers, in the birth center facility I’ve chosen, and in myself that I can deal with the pain. I honestly feel less scared by the idea of doing it naturally than I do about the idea of having an epidural. Personally, I feel like a natural birth is the right choice for me; yogically (because this after all is a yoga blog), I feel like a natural birth fits in well with my other life choices. In a natural birth setting I’ll be able to be in touch with my body, to move around as I need to, to let my body lead the process, and I’ll be able to control my responses to pain and manage my pain with my own mind. This path seems to fit in well with the yamas and niyamas and other tenets of yoga, which I truly believe in and follow as best I can.
However, believe me, if there’d been any indication whatsoever that a natural birth could harm me or my baby, I’d be making different plans. What’s more, my birth center would immediately refer me to a specialist if any complications came up. My birth center has a very good record (approximately 500 births per year with a c-section rate of only 10% or so), but they know their target audience (healthy women with uncomplicated pregnancies), as well as their strengths and limitations. The health of mother and baby is most important, so my midwife won’t hesitate to send me to someone else for my care if a complication arises, or, if something happens during the birth, to transfer me to a hospital. That’s why my birth center is located right across the street from a major hospital with an excellent record of maternity care, so that if any problems arise during the birth, I can be transferred quickly and efficiently for whatever services I might need. The idea of a home birth really made me nervous – for trivial reasons (like worrying that I’d spend the whole birth worrying about who’s going to clean up the mess) and for more substantial reasons (that our home is 10-15 minutes away from the nearest hospital, which is not a hospital known for maternity care). Using a birth center seems like the perfect choice for me, because it will allow me to have a natural birth in a comfortable setting, attended by experienced professionals, with proximity to all the wonders of modern technology if I need them.
So, going back to that original article, I think that the people making virulent comments about the cult of natural childbirth are not exactly accurate. My experience so far has been that my midwives and nurse practitioners are all eminently reasonable people, knowledgeable and well educated in their field, and worthy of being trusted to put my and my baby’s health and safety above anything else. No, natural childbirth isn’t for everyone – and two months from now, depending on the circumstances, it may even turn out that natural childbirth isn’t for me. But technological interventions aren’t for everyone, either, and each woman should be able to decide for herself in conjunction with her caregiver about what path is best for her.
(In commenting, please remember that this is a personal blog and I reserve the right to delete any comment that I feel is rude or derogatory. Thank you.)
Swami Vivekananda featured in WSJ April 3, 2012
My father-in-law pointed me towards this great article in the Wall Street Journal Magazine: What Did J.D. Salinger, Leo Tolstoy, Nikola Tesla and Sarah Bernhardt Have in Common? Answer: Swami Vivekananda!! I was really excited to see such nice coverage of Vivekananda in such a major venue. The article describes Vivekananda’s history and the many people he influenced. Lots of photos, too – definitely worth the read!
Yoga Tips for Beginners: 5 Myths About Yoga Teachers March 21, 2012
Loving this post today from Rambling Yogini: 5 Myths About Yoga Teachers. When we find a yoga teacher we like, it can be very easy to put that person up on a pedestal and forget that he or she is a normal human being. I know I’ve gotten caught up in some of these myths before – when they’re dispelled, it can be heartening (like learning that J loves hockey almost as much as yoga), but it can also be painful when you expect something of your yoga teacher than he or she can’t provide. It can even be physically painful if the advice or adjustments aren’t what your body needs. Thanks to Rambling Yogini for putting some of these myths out there and setting the record straight.
Yoga in the News: Ashtanga Article in Vanity Fair March 19, 2012
I just read this interesting and detailed article on Vanity Fair’s website: Whose Yoga Is It, Anyway? Kind of a fascinating look at the inner circle(s) of the Ashtanga community, especially after the recent Anusara blow-up. It sounds like the combination of lots of money, commercialization, yoga superstardom, passion about the core teachings, and the passing of a revered teacher is making a lot of waves. Overall I found it interesting to learn more about the Ashtanga lineage and wider community, even if that community is feeling some tension of late.
I know that many people really value having a deep connection to a special teacher or guru. I do know my lineage as a yoga teacher – who my teacher J studied with in India, and who that teacher studied with, rooting the yoga that I teach in a tradition that I’m proud to carry on. But at times like this, I think I’m glad not to have a personal connection with a guru. As we’ve all seen with John Friend and others like him, even revered yoga teachers are still fallible humans, and even when the teacher is as kind and lovely as Ashtanga’s Jois seems to have been, his successors won’t necessarily have the same qualities or goals. I don’t intend to demean the personal and spiritual connection of working directly with a guru or being part of that sort of close-knit yoga community; not having experienced it, I don’t want to pretend to understand how enlightening or intense that could be. What I do have, though, is my yoga. Because I’m a generation or two removed from the renowned teachers, I can always find strength and comfort in the yoga I practice and in passing that tradition on to my students, without having to worry about personal drama or community upheaval, and that’s something I appreciate.
Rox Does Yoga 