Breathing fast and slow

Photo by Mark Champlin     At the end of every led class, our teacher walks the room while we lie in savasana, and she blesses us, trailing the thin smoke from a stick of incense as she makes her way around the room. This is a sacred benediction, one of many rituals this teacher has shared with her students since she accepted her authorization to teach ashtanga yoga from Sri K. Pattabhi Jois more than 20 years ago. This particular ritual is a personal favorite and a great comfort. It comes to me from across many years, from an older ritual of celebrating the High Holy Days at mass in the Roman Catholic tradition of my youth. While I have since adopted other rites and ceremonies that make up my devotional practice, I am every so often visited by a strong memory from this religion that laid claim to me through the sacrament of baptism shortly after my birth. Catholicism, after all, was the principal container of my faith until my mid-twenties when I ultimately set aside the weekly

Goddess of compassion Quan Yin ... The phone rings in the middle of the night My mother says when are you going to live your life right                 Well, mother dear, we're not the fortunate ones Oh, girls, they want to have fun Oh, girls, they It's all they really want Those girls, they want to have fun Some boys take a beautiful girl Oh, and they hide her away from the rest of the world Well, not me, I want to be the one in the sun Girls, they want to have fun Oh, girls, they It's all they really want Those girls, they want to have fun In the typical ashtanga practice, our breath is the constant voice sounding in our ears. If it is a mysore practice, our teacher will occasionally speak with us during an adjustment, guiding us with both physical and verbal instruction into a specific posture. Otherwise, there is silence. Alternatively, during a led class, the voice of the teacher parallels the sound of our breath as she calls out the posture

My husband and I have been together long enough that when we find ourselves ready to dig into an argument, we have learned that it is best to cut the tension with some humor. Our favorite line for diffusing our most heated discussions is "I don't know who you are anymore." That pretty much sums up my feelings about myself at the moment. I think this is supposed to be a good thing. At least, this is what I am telling myself. But, I am having trouble finding the humor. In January, when news that Sharath Jois Rangaswamy, the grandson of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois and the paramaguru of the Asthanga yoga lineage, was headed to Los Angeles in May to lead the Ashtanga community in one week of practice, I was thrilled. I registered for the entire week within the first two days it became possible to do so. I focused on cleaning up those areas of my practice that needed attention so that I would be ready come May. A fool's errand, as the saying goes, but a necessary lesson for me t

Such is the way of the world, can never know just where to put all your faith and how will it grow Gonna rise up, burning black holes in dark memories Gonna rise up, turning mistakes into gold...                         --from Rise by Eddie Vedder The two most cherished texts of Hindu literature are the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. The Ramayana is said to have been written between 400 and 200 BCE, and the Mahabharata between 400 and 100 BCE. Both texts were written as heroic epic poems to highlight the lives and the power of the ancient gods and thereby serve as ideals for all of us normal people to follow. Think the Iliad and the Odyssey, Beowulf, even the Bible and the Koran. The Ramayana tells the story of the life of Lord Rama whose affection for his parents and his devotion to his dharma (duty) ultimately help him to defeat the evil King Ravana. But not before Rama is sent into exile by his parents and loses his wife, Princess Sita, when she is kidnapped by Ravana, the Ki

Author photo: Elemental weathering Beginning again and again using everything a continuous present                   --Gertrude Stein I am sitting here at the computer in the room where I do my writing imagining the quiet in that big space we occupied all week at UCLA for the visit of Ashtanga Yoga's Paramaguru Sharath Jois. It was a week--for precision's sake, six days--of practice, conference and community. Ashtangis from all over California and other states and nations came together to stand at the foot of their mats awaiting Sharath's call to practice together: Ekam, inhale . In Sanskrit, ekam means one. We begin this practice with the count of one, and as one, we inhale together the intention of those who established this discipline many ages ago, and which Patanjali, the transcriber of this science and discipline, set down in his first lesson or sutra, "Now the instruction of Yoga is being made." And what will that instruction of Yoga ultimat

" Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist..."                                                             Natalie Goldberg, Writing Down the Bones Many years ago, I read an article that described an early encounter between John Lennon and Yoko Ono. While I no longer recall every detail, I remember that Lennon had come to an art installation of Ono's. I believe the two had met on at least one prior occasion. In the room, among the rest of the art, was a ladder. In the article, Lennon talked about climbing the ladder where he discovered at the top a small word in very small print. The word was, yes , and it was all the affirmation Lennon needed to begin his life with Yoko Ono as his companion. For reasons I cannot explain, I recall this story often, and not so much the story but the yes in it. Yes is a powerful word. Right now, I am doing battle with it. It is a familiar battle, one that I engage in often when I take my seat

Vintage Ani, 1990 In a recent interview for Sun Magazine (May 2016), Ani DiFranco shared the following Facebook post chronicling an exchange between a mother and that mother's three-year-old daughter about the logo for Righteous Babe Records--DiFranco's independent label-- which uses the image of DiFranco at left. "The mother had on a Righteous Babe sweathsirt, and her little girl pointed to the logo and asked, 'Is that a girl?' She said yes, and her daughter asked, 'Is she so, so, so strong?' And her mother answered, 'Yes, she is so, so, so strong.' And her daughter said, 'That makes me happy, Mommy!' While I am devoted to my yoga practice and routinely read from the vast library of yoga texts, I also very often read books about Buddhist philosophy and meditation. I have a subscription to Tricycle magazine and have attended mindfulness seminars as well as lectures by Lama Surya Das, an American lama who started out as a Jew