Maragatham is the most authentic manifestation of Hindu culture flourishing in a foreign land. She has a website and a music association, called Ragamalika, that promotes carnatic music from southern India.
Kudos to my hometown paper and former employer, the Washington Post, for this new feature, On Being.
For at least 10 years, I've suffered from the sensation of a sharp pain, like a pin prick, on my right foot. Originally, it was located on my outside ankle, but it began to shift around and ended up between my third and fourth toes. During the day, I didn't notice it that much because my shoe pressured the skin and disguised the sensation. At night, it was hard to sleep because I found feel the pin prick (no shoes allowed in bed) and only by pressing my other foot into the spot could I achieve relief.
Well, this week, I suddenly noticed that I no longer felt the pin prick -- yoga has cured me! I suspect it was a pinched nerve and I somehow relieved the pressure on the nerve.
Now I just have to work on the other weird nerve sensation on my feet -- when I rotate my ankle, my toes go numb.
Well, just acceptance, pure and simple , really -- acceptance of myself and the world around me as a starting point for movement to change. Last year the intention that I repeated before each class was awareness. Acceptance is key for me now because I recognize that I frequently overreach, try too hard and generally act as the diligent student as a method for manipulating the world. That usually means that ease is not a predominant characteristic of my practice. Initially, I thought of the intention of acceptance as a short-term solution because I was in my first January class and could not think of anything else. But the more I've lived with the intention, the more I think that it's a worthy principle to lead off each session.
On Wednesday evening, with the slush and snow of Washington's biggest winter storm this year turning quickly into ice, I went to take my usual yoga class at Thrive and found that I was accompanied by only one other student who dared to risk the cold and winds. Our teacher, Lisa Johnson, even called in to say that she was trapped in her home with no plow truck in sight yet to clean her drive way. So Susan, the owner, offered to step in and led a threesome in which she would do the practice with us. She would give us audio cues for the poses and flows and we could keep pace with her or modify according to our abilities and needs. We ended with a long restorative phase during which we used bolsters, belts, sandbags, blocks and blankets to get us into Supta Baddha Konasana (Reclining Bound Angle Pose), something that we would not ordinarily have been able to fit into a normal class.
New York Times Deep Breath as Pitchers Rethink Routines American football and basketball have already had lots of stories about athletes incorporating yoga and meditation into their training routines. This is the first one that I've seen about baseball, but Alan Jaeger, training specialist for formative pitchers has been working along these lines for more than a decade.
When they finish stretching, Jaeger puts them through a variety of excruciating yoga poses, with names like Dolphin, Pigeon and Warrior. In one pose, the pitchers make like ballet dancers, placing their right ankles over their left knees and raising their arms.
In theory, they are improving their balance, sharpening their concentration and learning to take deep breaths in the face of high anxiety.
"If you can calm yourself down in the middle of those poses, you can do it in the middle of the game," said Errol Simonitsch, a pitcher for the Minnesota Twins. "That’s why, before every pitch, you’ll see me take a deep breath."
Now this story will be picked up by all the local papers who will run articles about how the new pitching prospect has perfected his fastball while practicing a Warrior sequence and chanting Om at the release.
From the NYT pictures, it's clear that the athletes need to discover jumbo-size yoga mats or buying bulk and cutting them to size. The "students" just spill over the edges of a 68" or 72" regular mat.
My daughter, Stephanie, gave her final demo class last Sunday and has completed the 200-hour teacher training program at Flow Yoga Center. She has some assignments to hand in, but, for all intents and purposes, she has graduated. We picked her up after the class and went to Starbucks for coffee and pastries (nothing more because she had to leave the next morning for a meeting in Las Vegas). Since September, despite illness, fatigue, travel, new work responsibilities, a long-distance romantic relationship and having less than two years experience in yoga, she has kept her eyes on the goal, prioritized her activities and slogged through to the end.
Stephanie even pressed me into service as a practice student so she could get her sequencing down, and she got plenty of critiques from her mom, Teresa, who always has a comment. I thought she had nothing to fear from the final exam since she had an imaginative but beginner-oriented sequence of poses. Now is the question of what she wants to do the knowledge and skills acquired -- start out teaching or just focus on honing her personal practice at a higher level. Although this may not be a big a milestone as graduating from college, it gives her invaluable tools to manage her life and career, and an encouraging environment.
I am taking two two-hour sessions this weekend at Thrive Yoga, led by Simon Park. Simon is a gifted teacher of "Prana Vinyasa Flow, an energetic approach to the flow of yoga offered by Shiva Rea and the Global Vinyasa collective of teachers. He is also an avid practitioner and teacher of Thai-Yoga Massage," as the brochure states (sorry, it's over a megabyte in size).
In the first class, Simon had a calming, steady pace that was easy to follow throughout the whole session. I never felt as if I had to take child's pose to regain my breath, though there were some advanced poses that I could not attain. He opened with about 20 minutes of pranayama, meditation and easy stretches, making me eager to get into the full vinyasa. He gave some really useful insights into poses, like forearm and hand stands. I'll see how I make out tomorrow, if I'm not too sore and tight to get out of bed.
Surprisingly, Simon does not have a website, like most teachers who live off of workshops, so I can't point to a reference. He's based in Aspen, at At One Yoga.
Rodney Yee used to have a blog at Yahoo Health. I checked it out a couple of times a while back, and then forgot about it. Yee has moved up in the online world. His new on-line home is at Lime.com's Yoga section. He has a TV show, as part of Lime's ambitious project to bring healthy living to the big time, and has been doing short video blogs.
Of course, Yee has been in the news a lot recently because of his marriage to NYC yoga studio owner, Colleen Saidman, which got covered in the NY Times (sorry, but the story has already been archived). But you can get a bitchier version of it at New York Magazine. Souljerky has another take on the mess. Yee divorced his wife of 24 years. A few years ago, he had an affair with a student, which became an example of how to betray the student-teacher relationship.
In my own home yoga studio, Thrive Yoga, we've gone through a stretch that calls into question of incarnating the yogic ideal : the two owners of Thrive Yoga have parted ways. Kim Groark was the more advanced teacher while Susan Bowen had the good business mind. Over the past two years, they lost their shared vision of what they wanted to make of the studio. I don't know any of the details, just that at the end the tension hung like incense in the air of the studio. Susan bought out Kim's share of the business, and Kim "decided to leave Thrive Yoga to pursue a different path," as the announcement stated. More experienced yoga entrepreneurs have told me that studio partnerships rarely work out. Yoga teachers who strike out on their own, setting up their own shops, want to have full control over their business and practice so there's going to be an innate contradiction in a joint venture.
I felt disconcerted by the whole shift: I had gone to Kim's classes more frequently because I was drawn to her flair for teaching (influences of Kundalini, Shiva Rea) and the classes fit my schedule in the evenings. I was also concerned about the long-term viability of the studio because I get classes (2-5 times a week) at no charge, in exchange for hosting, maintaining and updating the website. I would find it had to pay for a year unlimited pass, which is what I would need for the same privilege. The split took me out of my comfort zone on the mat.
I bought Yee's most recent book, Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga
