Breathing fast and slow

During the puja celebration to honor the reopening of Pacific Ashtanga Yoga Shala at its new location in Dana Point earlier this month, Director and Lead Instructor Diana Christinson presented each participating member of her ashtanga yoga community with a red thread. This red thread is known as a kalava and is used in Hindu ceremonies (or pujas ) as a symbol of unity for a community--in this case, the community of ashtangis who practice with Diana at her shala. When Diana presented these threads to us, she asked us to set an intention for ourselves and to commit ourselves to manifesting that intention in our lives. When we were ready, we were instructed to return with our kalava and share with her in a simple private ceremony the intention we had set for ourselves. Diana, then, would tie this thread around our wrists where it would remain as a symbol of what we were ready to welcome into our lives. For me, this puja thread is now a reminder of the following vow I have set for m...

For better or worse, change is always happening. So we are told. So I have written previously here. It is dependable in that way. Everything will turn into something else. Guaranteed. This is a comfort, the Buddhists tell us, the natural order of things. Consider for a moment how life constantly reveals this to us. A tree grows. A garden flowers. A child learns to walk. The laws of attraction, like momentum, keep life in motion: push, pull, yin, yang, ebb, flow. Hopes rise and fall. The moon waxes and wanes. And every once in a while, as it did this week, even this celestial body is eclipsed by the shadow of our blue planet. Strange, somehow, that we should think all the more of it then as it passes into shadow. The phenomenon increases our wonder perhaps because it increases our faith in our own transformations. A hummingbird has built her nest among the branches of one of our scraggly rose bushes outside our front door and just inside the front yard gate. I watched her build it for...

The history of ashtanga yoga sounds like the sort of tale J.R.R. Tolkien could have invented. While it is devoid of hobbits and wizards, elves and dwarfs, ashtanga's earliest beginnings include the stuff of legends: the curing of a British Lord; the granting of a wish; training from an old guru living in a cave in Tibet; rites of passage; an ancient unbound text, written in an old language--Sanskrit--on sheets of papyrus, kept in a library in a remote part of Calcutta; and a devoted student who goes in search of the library, visiting it daily to copy the text by hand. In the end, something ancient survives. There is no one ring--gold and precious--that is taken from deep within a mountain cave and out into the world of men where it threatens to wreck havoc. What emerges instead is a different kind of precious element, what the cave-dwelling Tibetan guru called "a jewel of priceless value" that his student, a young Krishnamacharya--the father of modern yoga--was instruct...