Heads to the floor, feet to the sky I had a great session last night at Flow Yoga. Angela, our instructor, had us gradually work towards doing Salamba Sirsasana (Supported Headstand). We ended up using the wall and "flirting" with the transition into headstand. Along the way, she point out several checkpoints that we needed to watch to avoid injury and ackward attempts at headstand. For instance, she made us aware of how our arms had to carry most of the weight and not our necks. By checking her students in the preliminary steps, Angela made sure that we all had the body strength to sustain a headstand.

At the end of the headstand preliminaries, we were all confident enough to make the leap [the wrong word for the physical movement, but correct for the mental predisposition that we acquired] into headstand.

After the headstand practice, my daughter, Stephanie, had some cramping in her chest and shoulders because she was using muscle that weren't used to the exercise so Angela had us do Ustrasana, Camel pose, as a chest opener to compensate for the strain.

  ¶ 10:10 AM 1 comments

  This writer comes clean I am adding another article to the one, How Yoga is Changing My Life, that I put up a few weeks ago. This piece is a little more explicit about why I became interested in yoga. Some people may have deduced this motivation by the books that I read or referenced, the news articles that I point to and the areas that I emphasize in my yoga practice. I am laying a heavy load on the reader but it's important for me to get it off my chest -- A Confession.  ¶ 3:53 PM 4 comments

  Great plans, but the body fails I wanted to do a lot of things this weekend, including writing about what has been happening in my practice. But the time just flew by, and I am exhausted from my morning practice at Thrive Yoga and a workout at the gym -- I probably overdid it. The aftermath of my cold this month has really depleted my energy and strength. I came home from the supermarket this afternoon and basically zoned out for three hours. I even nodded off to sleep while waiting for my lunch to cook.

Because my wife has been visiting her family in Peru, I've had to survive on my own, which means that I have more chores to do to keep the refrigerator stocked, the household under control and our two cats happy.

But this time on my own has given me a lot of time to read, reflect and explore my yoga practice, writing and changes that have been under way in my life. It's been a stimulating time, so much so that I've been pulled in too many directions. "Focus, focus, you can do this," I keep telling myself as my body lies me to the couch.

  ¶ 9:58 PM 0 comments

  Music reaches deep I bought Donna de Lory's CD called The Lover and the Beloved, put out by Ajna Music. I really like it, more than all the junk on the radio these days. It's mesmerizing. You can hear some extended sampling of the cuts at CDBaby -- and also buy it there.

I've also bought a couple of CDs by Krishna Das who is much more traditional in his approach to kirtan chanting. He will be performing in Alexandria, VA on Thursday, May 26. More information is on his site.

Why do these artists insist on publishing their sites completely in Flash?

  ¶ 9:26 PM 0 comments

  What a parent should teach his kid Before my class at the Flow Yoga Center last week, I paid for my daughter's pass, buying her a five-class one so that we can share a weekly encounter of sweat, deep breaths and bliss in the final savasana. As the owner was swiping my credit card through the reader, she said, "I wish we had more fathers like you!" I joked that it was my way of bribing Stephanie to give me some time. We go out afterwards and have a bite to eat or sip on a smoothie and talk about the practice, her career plans or her parakeets.

But seriously, giving yoga (or meditation) to your child is one of the smartest investments that you can imagine. I regret that I waited until she is 28 to give her yoga classes -- I wish I had gotten started 10 years ago, or when I was 28 or whatever. Yoga should be like sending your kids to summer camp (so they can learn social skills), making them take swimming classes (so they don't drown), paying for driving lessons (so they don't smash the family car and kill themselves). And let's not get started about the thousands of dollars into college education that almost any parent willingly undertakes.

When we approach yoga seriously and with reverence and awe, we acquire skills that allow us to deal with our bodies and our emotions. I call it a user's manual for the mind-body connection. I don't care if Stephanie will ever manage to do Bhairavasana, but I do want her to find the stillness that comes from quieting our tense muscles and mental ticks. Yoga teaches you how to be an adult living in balance. I wish I had known about it when I was on that steep learning curve that starts as a teenager and never seems to level off.

I know that you can only put your kids in a position to achieve fulfillment, but you can never make them actually do them (horse/water/drink - a hard lesson my wife refuses to learn). The frustrations of parenthood abound. I have given up all expectations about where my kids are going to end up -- I only hope that they are happy on the way to achieving it.

But I will pull the last dollar out of my wallet if they ask to go to yoga class with me.

¡No te aproveches, Stephanie!

This post was originally a contribution to my Open Mind Open Body online forum.

  ¶ 12:58 PM 3 comments

  How yoga is changing my life I have been working on a series of essays now that I've been practicing yoga for about a year now, trying to put things in perspective. This first piece turned out a bit longer than convenient for a blog entry so I have put it on its own web page.  ¶ 11:19 PM 0 comments

  People start to notice Meditate on This: A Nationwide Chain of Yoga Studios: "Since then, they have built Whole Body into a chain of 14 Yoga Works studios through acquisitions, and now own five in Los Angeles, four in Orange County and five in New York. They hope to add up to 14 more this year and envision a nationwide chain, with maybe 8 to 10 studios in each major metropolitan area." NY Times This article takes forever to get to the point: that two former Internet-boom guys have started a yoga chain. The business side is a small part of the story and yoga's benefits is extolled for two thirds of the article. This same story has been done better elsewhere -- in Yoga Journal in the April 2005 issue and also an LA Weekly that I linked to before.  ¶ 4:48 PM 0 comments

  Yoga makes it into the movies 'Down Dog': Tweaking Yoga's Poseurs: "The 22-minute film is a punchy, slick-looking satire of the Los Angeles yoga world, one in which the path to enlightenment is often paved with as much greed and avarice as serenity. The film's star, Jeffrey Johnson, who resembles Will Ferrell with a topknot, plays a smarmy guru with a bevy of gorgeous female followers, whose cover is finally blown by the arrival of a mysterious student (Chane't Johnson)." Actually, this picture is just a short because the authors behind it could not get the backing are building towards a full-length feature based on the material. They are also yogis themselves so it has an insider view. The film is was being shown at the DC Independent Film Festival. It is being shown around the country at other film festivals so consult the movie website.  ¶ 5:04 PM 3 comments

  Vulnerability and Courage As I was walking to yoga class last week, I found myself with tears welling up in my eyes. During savasana, I held back sobs. It was unsettling because I had gotten into yoga to strengthen my body and correct my bad posture. It was going to bring my life back into balance and give me inner peace.

I do sense that yoga is changing me in ways I had never imagined, but it is disturbing. I feel unexpectedly exposed, vulnerable, even raw. In our practice, we are constantly doing hip openers, heart openers, backbends that crack open the crusty exterior of our musculature, the hard shell that each of us has built up around me over the years.

I often wondered why there was all this military imagery in yoga -- Warrior's pose, Hero's pose. It seemed odd for a discipline that was based on ahimsa -- doing no harm. But it is clear that you really have to be brave, couragous to accept this sense of vulnerability and risk that comes out of a yoga practice. By opening up from within, we are exposing ourselves to the world around us in ways that we had avoided before. By opening up to the possibilities of inner change, we initiate a dynamic that breaks out of the hardened channels of our lives.

Postdata: This posting was originally written for the Open Mind Open Body forum. My yoga mentor, Kelly McGonigal, pointed me to The Heart of the Bodhisattva by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche, the head of the Shambhala Buddhist lineage, who describes the traits of the bodhisattva-warrior.

  ¶ 9:35 AM 3 comments