Breathing fast and slow

Sometimes, I miss my yoga practice, as in, I don't make it to the Shala for practice. Some mornings, I'm too tired to rise early enough or a family obligation interferes or I accept the responsibility of some extra duty that takes me away from my yoga practice for a couple of days. Of course, I also have a work schedule, and I'm generally pretty diligent about arranging my practice around it. Still, I have never been able to practice the requisite six days at the Shala. Occasionally, I will practice the asanas at home, but more often, my home practice involves pranayama and meditation. From time to time, I am envious of my fellow ashtangis who seem able to practice every day, and sometimes more than once a day. Quickly enough, however, I am able to reign in the envy, reminding myself that this practice is a journey and its path, and the manner of its unfolding, is as unique as the many practitioners who come to the Shala to roll our their mats on the floor. The practice

Monday, I walked out on my yoga practice. Like a disgruntled lover, I rolled up my mat and left right after completing the opening sequence. Nadi Shodana-Nadi Schmodana, I thought. I even told Itay, "This isn't fun anymore." The surprise registered. I saw his eyebrows go up. And because Itay is a good teacher, he offered the following wisdom without passing judgment, which was a good thing because I was judging myself most harshly at that moment. He put his hand on my back and said, "Take it one day at a time." Then, I left. That's when the surprise I had seen on Itay's face, just a flash, mind you, registered with me. Only mine was like a blow to the gut where I do believe the ego goes to hide out from time to time. What had I done? I love this practice. What was I doing walking away from it? Why was I so upset? In those first moments, it felt as though I had removed an anchor, and I had, really, only I didn't see it that way just then. I had made

For several weeks now, I have been nursing a sore lower back, which means I am very aware of every twitch in my lumbar region. The soreness is due to my progress with the Intermediate Series of ashtanga. Yeah, I know. If I'm making progress, then, why am I sore? Ashtanga's Intermediate Series--or Second Series--is known as Nadi Shodana , which means "nerve cleansing." Nadi Shodana is all about the spine because the spine is the equivalent of nerve central in the body. Our overall health and flexibility, both physical and mental, are determined by the health of our spine. According to ashtanga master David Swenson, the Second Series practice is intended to create and maintain a suppleness and flexibility of the spine on the physical level, while opening energy channels on a subtler level to allow for the free flow of prana , or breath. Yes, it's true. We not only breath into our diaphragm, we breath as well into the back body. Or, rather, we should be breathing th

"Life is all about living with obstacles. Everything's an obstacle."  When your twelve-year-old utters a statement like this, you cannot help but remain quiet for fear the wisdom will fly straight out of the window instead of settling about you like fairy dust, ready to grant you, not necessarily the next desire on your long list of wishes, but a bit of perspective that had momentarily gone missing. Of course, such an utterance makes you speechless as a parent, too, because you suddenly become aware that your child is doing the thing she was meant to do. Not only is she growing up, she is growing beyond you as her parent, and, one day, she really will be living life on her own, which also means on her own terms. It is a brave and foolish thing, raising children. From the get-go, they are both obstacle and source of transformation. (Not so very unlike all those yoga poses you intend to master.) Throughout your lives together, you are engaged in a dance of guilt and fo

I consider myself lucky when I am the first to arrive at the Shala and can engage Itay in conversation for a few moments before practice begins. He is generous with his counsel and willing to share whatever new insight he has discovered. And, like a true ashtangi, he's always discovering something new. Last Friday, the subject was pratyahara . Pratyahara is the fifth limb on the eight-limb path of yoga. This is where the practitioner turns inward and away from the external world to tend to the internal realm. From Patanjali's Yoga Sutras 2.54, pratyahara is the "withdrawal of the senses, mind, and consciousness from contact with external objects, and then drawing them inward toward the seer." Explained differently, this is the point in our practice where we temporarily suspend all interaction with the external--with cognition and expression--to experience the depths of meditation. This is not about suppressing or repressing or stopping the feelings and memories tha

It's right about this point every new semester that I begin to drag a bit. I'm an associate professor at a local community college where we have completed week number five, and I'm tired. At home, my youngest daughter, my husband and I have just about adapted to not only my new school schedule but my daughter's, which of course is completely different from mine. And while summer only officially ended yesterday, in Southern California we're accustomed to having our warmest weather throughout the fall. We live close enough to the beach to occasionally make a mad dash for the sand after school and before the dinner hour. Naturally, we have to squeeze in two afternoons of soccer practice, a game on the weekend and an extra game or two where I help out as an assistant referee. Luckily, the after-school clubs at my daughter's school do not begin for another two weeks. I haven't even mentioned my daughter's homework, the lessons I routinely prepare, the student

"Here is your new common sense: Less Thinking + More Listening = More Knowing." According to Master Teacher and accomplished yoga practitioner Erich Schiffmann, this is our equation for abundant awareness. It's the new math in very old clothing. Or, maybe it's the old math in the age of the Internet because, in addition to this equation, Erich gave us the following mantra, which he practiced with us by repeating many times throughout his lecture, "Be online all the time." Only a Master Teacher can make the Internet sublime. And what sort of sacred counsel has Erich embedded in this technologically inspired mantra? It happens to be the oldest story there is, and, according to Erich, at this time in history we happen to be waking up to it more and more. And, yes, of course, love does enter into it; however, Erich's instruction to "be online all the time," was intended to encourage us to be more infinite. His counsel was a reminder to us that Con

One of the most difficult experiences we will go through in life is the experience of confronting grief, which only occasionally is a close second to the experience of raising teenagers. In either case, there is no remote with a fast-forward button or a clever app for escaping it. Grief is an in-your-face proposition, and while there are many ways to circumvent grief, there is only one way through it. I was reminded of this last night when I joined close to 200 other intrepid souls who gathered together to collectively grieve the loss of a mutual friend. I know that out in Joshua Tree, the fourth annual celebration of Bhakti Fest is blissfully underway, and I am not there. Earlier this year, a friend and I made tentative plans to drive out to the desert together to participate in one of the festival's four days. We were going to saturate our ears and our auras with kirtan. The Fates, however, took a pencil to our calendar and offered us not only alternate plans, but a different t

"Somebody's being born right now; somebody's dying right now; somebody's laughing right now; somebody's crying right now." This is a thread from one of the countless conversations my daughter and her friends shared together on the sand, under the sun at the beach Friday. I was there, too, at the beach, on the sand, with a circle of my own friends. We were the parents, so we kept to the perimeter where we shared other conversation, taking turns being vigilant and staying out of the way. When a friend called yesterday to tell me that her husband--also a good friend--had only hours before ended his life, I thought of my daughter and the children of my friends innocently sending these proclamations about life into the wind and out across the ocean the day before. Here now was the truth of them, rolling back in with the tide, and crashing down upon our lives. It makes no sense to ask "why," even though I spent the better part of yesterday on the phone

Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. It is said that when Robert Frost sat down to write what has been called by some his most perfect poem Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening , he did so in one inspired push. Frost would likely have said he was merely following delight. But he had the good sense to stay in his chair as delight took form, and surprise followed surprise, until at last he had on the page in front of him something resembling wisdom. Frost says as much in his essay The Figure a Poem Makes , in which the venerable poet attempts to describe the process involved in writing a poem. It could also be described as the process of getting out of the way of the poem that wants to be written.  As any good crafts person or artist or parent will tell you, the process involved in bringing anything into being--whether it be a poem, a painting, a piece of furniture, or a chi

Sometimes, when life interferes and I am prevented from practicing yoga as much as I would like to, I have to remind myself: This is why there are eight limbs on this path. Balance, as it turns out, is about more than the practice of postures. In yoga, the creation of a balanced life-- Artha --is one of life's primary aims. I recently went with my family to the Eastern Sierras for a backpacking trip. We hiked with a group of friends out of Lake Sabrina, which is located approximately 14 miles from highway 395 off Main Street in downtown Bishop. It was a great trip. My youngest daughter caught her first fish--a very small trout that was thrown back into the lake. Catch-and-release, another first for my daughter. Joining us on our trek was our nine-month-old puppy, a Chihuahua-Jack Russell mix we adopted from our local shelter at the end of March. Señor Chico, the runt of the litter, mind you, completed a 10-mile round trip hike and camped out like a seasoned vet (no pun intended)

Last Saturday night, I traveled to India, but I only had to drive as far as Laguna Niguel to Itay's Shala where I joined my fellow yogis and met India's many deities by listening to and learning about the divine music of this vast land. Sangita Yoga, the yoga of music, is a devotional practice intended to reunite the physical practice of yoga--known as asana--with chanting or, more importantly, the voice of the practitioner. Along with my fellow ashtangis, I was introduced to this vital aspect of yoga by Naren K. Schreiner, director of Sangita Yoga, who believes that our breath, and hence our voice, is a channel for our divinity. Hatha Yoga is known as the the yoga of postures, or, as I mentioned before, asana. Bhakti Yoga is known as the yoga of devotion, and kirtan, or chanting, is part of this devotional path. According to Naren, the physical and the devotional aspects of yoga were traditionally practiced together. Movement and Music. This makes sense to me. We begin the p

A few weeks ago while driving home from work on a Monday evening, I listened to an interview conducted by Dick Gordon on his radio show The Story. The Story is broadcast nightly by the public radio station KPPC, and the interviews I hear never fail to intrigue. Many times, these interviews I hear reveal an answer I've been seeking or they impart wisdom I didn't even know I needed. They're sort of like a horoscope that way only with more erudition. On this night a few weeks ago, I heard a newlywed couple speak about marriage and their mutual and individual ideas of commitment. You would expect that from a newlywed couple, yes? What I did not expect about this newlywed couple was the age of the husband and wife: He is 90 years old, recently widowed, and she is 67 years old, and for her, a first-time bride. They have not been married all that long, but they sound as though they have been married for years, and not in a bad way. What I mean is, they sound as though they truly f

I first practiced yoga in college during the late 70s. It was offered as a one unit PE class, and was taught by a gentleman I will always remember, Professor Ken Ravizza. My fellow yogis and I did not see Dr. Ravizza as our professor, and, no, he was not seen as a peer. Rather, he was a beloved leader--a guru, if you will, though we did not address him as such--intent on bringing the practice of hatha yoga into our lives. And bring it, he did. Thirty-five years later, I am still practicing yoga, and, although the journey has not been one long bliss-fest, I recognize it as mine, a living, breathing human adventure that I continue to wake to. In the thirty-five years since I began to practice yoga on a mat on a concrete floor in a university gymnasium, the discipline has become practically mainstream. It took a couple of decades, but now elements of hatha yoga, which is another way of saying the postures or asanas or the physical limb of the yoga practice, show up as standard routines