Breathing fast and slow

"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...