Still, about 80 men and women, some from as far away as Honduras and California, placed mats on an island they shared with the armed forces recruiting station on 43rd Street between Seventh Avenue and Broadway during the morning rush and quietly demonstrated their yoga skills.

Guardrails surrounded the group of people as they listened to Douglass Stewart, a lead yoga instructor, belt out directions. Taxis honked their horns and fire trucks whizzed by, their sirens blaring. Yet the yoga practitioners remained unfazed.

I wonder if they practiced pranayama, too.

Labels: news

This article may help me decide what mat I should select after having wiffed on my first choice last month. Eco-friendly mats are tricky because they're new on the market and it's hard to know how they feel to the touch. Several that I've seen have a tendency to roll up at the ends. New York Times For Some Things, It’s O.K. to Be Sticky (Yoga Mats):

Some manufacturers are beginning to use natural and earth-friendly fibers and plastics instead. The resulting mats are not only biodegradable and free of hazardous chemicals, but their makers also say they provide more traction.

Labels: hardware

Alan Little tagged me and then forgot to tell me, and I did not check out his blog until two days later -- so I've already blown the eight-hour deadline. The premise is that I have write about eight random facts about me. Here goes:

1. I did the pre-production coordination in Peru (government liaison, media contacts, customs clearances) for Shirley McClain's bio-pic "Out on a Limb" and then failed to charge Hollywood rates for the work I did -- boy, was I dumb!
2. I was invited twice to spend extended weekends with my wife, all expenses paid, at Arthur Hailey's home in Nassau, Bahamas because he wanted me to read drafts of his novel about a journalist's adventure in Peru, The Evening News.
3. I don't write long hand, but print as if I was still in elementary school. I've done this since high school when I was bored with taking notes in history class and decided to add a degree of difficulty to the task.
4. I was the character Potzo in "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett in my senior year of college. The actor who was going to play Potzo backed out and I was the understudy. I was skinny so I padded out with blankets and towels, wore abundant makeup and a plastic skull cap so that I could be bald. During the play, I perspired so much that water poured out from under my fake nose in the middle of my dialogue. My friends told me that my acting was brilliant -- but since no one could recognize me under all the makeup and costume, I did not get any cred on campus.
   
5. I sang a capella in the madrigal singers of my high school. Now I can barely carry a tune.
6. When I was in college, I used to perform mime, picked up from watching a street mime in Lima, Peru.
7. My favorite novelist when I was an adolescent was Robert Heinlein.
8. I tried to sell Bibles and reference books door-to-door in South Carolina in the summer after my freshman year. It was sheer torture and I gave up after six weeks -- I was stubborn.
   

Here are the rules for the next generation:

1. Each player starts with 8 random facts/habits about themselves.
   
2. People who are tagged, write a blog post about their own 8 random things, and post these rules.
3. At the end of your post you need to tag 8 people and include their names. Don't forget to leave them a comment and tell them they're tagged, and to read your blog.
4. If you fail to do this within eight hours, you will not reach Third Series or attain your most precious goals for at least two more lifetimes.

I am tagging:

1. Stephanie
2. Raj Waghray
3. I'm even worse than Alan; I can't come up with anyone else off the top of my head or skimming through my e-mail. I guess my circle of friends and acquaintances don't have blogs that allow them to respond to being tagged.
   

Labels: blessing, inspire

I've been doing my body scans nightly as a kind of back-to-the-basics initiative to rein in my central nervous system. I have not had another bad scan in which I get jittery and overanxious for nearly two weeks. At most, I've had a couple of arm jerks in which my hand and forearm snap up. A more serious problem is not dozing off momentarily. Laying prone on the ground at 11:00 pm at the end of a long day is probably an invitation for sleep so I should not be surprised. I'll just have to find a coping strategy — maybe opening my eyes for the whole session.

This week, I've been fitting in my sudarshan kriya practice in the morning before heading off to work. It has really kept me upbeat the whole day. It's amazing how a breathing practice can change my outlook to sunny. Why do I ever skip my breathwork?

Labels: breathing, meditation, practice

Today I surprised myself when we were practicing inversions at Thrive Yoga. We were doing supported headstand (Salamba Sirsasana), which has always been problematic for me because when resting on my forearms, my shoulders tended to tense up and make it extremely difficult to sustain my torso and legs above me. I usually used the garden-variety headstand with my hands on the ground and using my elbows as a platform for lifting my legs up. Whenever the class was practicing an inversion, I would opt for a less demanding modification to work on strength in my shoulders.

Today, as we prepped by practicing dolphin pose, I notice that when I raised a leg it came up higher than I had perceived before. I took a couple of trial jumps and I knew that I was close to getting up all the way. I switched to the wall and tried the supported headstand with my forearms for support. I was able to easily bring both legs smoothly over my head -- without really kicking up, which is really a cheat because you have little or no control over the movement. It's like throwing mud against the wall. This time, I noticed that my weight was firmly over my arms and no much pressure was coming down on my neck and head. It would be a simple move to lift up to Feathered Peacock Pose (Pincha Mayurasana). I am still a long way from having the balance and core strength to do without the wall, but I passed another threshold.

The moral of this story is that if you do the prep work enough, you will eventually reach a point when you're within reach of the full pose you're aiming for.

Labels: class

New York Times In the Classroom, a New Focus on Quieting the Mind:

Mindfulness, while common in hospitals, corporations, professional sports and even prisons, is relatively new in the education of squirming children. But a small but growing number of schools in places like Oakland and Lancaster, Pa., are slowly embracing the concept — as they did yoga five years ago — and institutions, like the psychology department at Stanford University and the Mindfulness Awareness Research Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, are trying to measure the effects

This story has the potential of making it into the punch lines of Jay Leno jokes on late night TV. The story is also honest that the trial run of mindfulness in the classroom is still too early to predict an outcome. As someone who tries to cultivate mindfulness on a daily, even hourly basis (not much luck), I really cheer for this introduction of meditation in the school system. Expect a book to be written about this whole phenomenon in the near future because the kids can come up with jaw-dropping insights out of the blue or live compelling lives in the midst of urban mayhem (and that's not to say that suburban or rural kids don't have their own high-odds struggle to healthy adulthood).

Labels: meditation, news, reading

I am months away from being 58 years old and the 60-years-old milestone is just around the corner ("Do not go gentle into that good night..."). My generation may have been pioneers in introducing yoga and other Eastern disciplines in the States, but I don't see a lot of them out on the mat. What lessons have I learned from yoga and fitness in general? None of the following is earth-shattering, but I just want to list them.

1. A senior body is on a steady downward slope of entropy. Having a practice may slow the decline or, more hopefully, reverse it. Taking a week off can be a real setback to keeping fit. You need to do something everyday.
2. Muscle strength is acquired more slowly than during early adulthood, and recovery from exertion takes longer. For me, that works out to taking two days of vigorous yoga and taking a day off for more restorative or yang yoga.
3. Flexibility can be changed over months of work, not days or week. My sense is that it's much harder to change fascia than muscle tissue.
4. Balance seems to be the slowest factor to come around. I still feel that I need a wall nearby, just in case.
5. The natural weight gain that comes with age is really hard to get rid of. My extra 15-plus pounds really weighs me down through a 90 minute practice, and even gets in the way of certain poses.
6. My metabolism seems to function at a different level than younger practitioners. My breathing rhythm seems to be a lot faster than the pace given by instructors, too, especially once we've built up some heat. This may be due to pre-existing diminished lung capacity (I was a smoker for too long): I am still surprised by nuanced improvements from pranayama.
7. The key qualities that I need to cultivate are awareness and acceptance -- awareness because I need to perceive and know where I am and how far I can go, and acceptance because that's the starting point for change and emotional release.
8. Use it or lose it. Given these conditions, anyone should always have a fitness practice and never abandon it in the first place.

But in the end, yoga is yoga. Even if I cannot transform myself in the equivalent of Ana Forrest or Dave Williams, it will still reward me in other ways that have nothing to do with my body.

Labels: blessing, class, life style, practice

I did my Sunday morning session at Thrive Yoga with Jan pushing the crew hard. This was my first class since Wednesday so I was wary that I would feel the effect of lax practice. But she actually started us off at a leisurely pace and gradually led us into a well-faced class. I had to back off some poses because they were beyond my reach (mainly due to tight hips and shoulders and lack of core strength).

I'd like to write something profound about the class, something insightful about my practice or a pose. But I just made it to class, rolled out my mat, followed the instructions and did the best I could. Sometimes, that's all I can expect from yoga. Sure, there's a lot of truth and wisdom that can flow like the breath, but today was not one of those days.

Labels: class

I have a problem with savasana or more precisely the flat-on-my-back position that I take in order to do a body scan, following the audio instructions of Jon Kabat-Zinn. This exercise is part of a process to increase awareness of the body and sensitize the mind. In effect, I focus my attention on specific parts of my body progressively -- my toes, ankles, knees, thighs, hips, etc., up both legs, both arms, through my torso and up to the crown of my head. Kabat-Zinn recommends that a novice to meditation do this exercise for at least two-three weeks before actually starting to meditate in a seated practice.

What happens? After I settle prone onto my mat for five minutes, I start feeling really fidgety, antsy and with a strong desire to get out of there. My leg muscle become jittery and I feel tingling in my fingers. I feel as if there's a little motor running inside me and I can't turn it off. My mind becomes restless and all kinds of reasons for getting up bubble to the surface. I start paying more attention to this anxious sensation than to the narrator's voice. I am definitely not at ease. I've cut the session off a couple of times and on some evenings, I've avoided doing the exercise.

It's really disconcerting because I can easily maintain meditation in seated pose for 15-20 minutes. After a good yoga session, savasana is a welcome respite and I do not have the urge to bounce up. When I go to bed, I usually drop off into sleep immediately and do not lie in bed twitching. In this case, with the CD, I actually have a voice to listen to and explicit instructions to follow. I don't have to purge my head of mental processes or zone out everything but my meditative focus.

Three years ago, when I got my first Kabat-Zinn CDs, I tried to do the body scan and I had the same edgy feeling to the point that I did the exercise seated in a chair, rather than lying on the ground. After a while, I stopped doing it. Since then, I've been practicing meditation and added yoga to squeeze out the pent-up energy in body and train the mind to spiritual disciplines. I thought I would have outgrown this reaction to the body scan.

A friend of mine said that I should not get too uptight about the whole thing, looking at the phenomenon as a symptom of some kind of disorder. It may be a natural way that the body has of venting energy or it could actually be something like restless leg syndrome that might need medical treatment. But I am not going to cure the problem by fretting about it -- if anything, it will make it worse. I just need to observe dispassionately what's happening as I move through the process.

Labels: breathing, meditation

I have taken the moderator review function off of comments here. It was just a speed bump in the commenting process. Of all the comments up to now, I did not notice any uncivil remarks or spam. It also a bother to remember to review comments on a regular basis.

Labels: website

I have subscribed to the eMusic online music download service. I selected it because it had the most unrestrictive policy on digital rights and an extremely inexpensive subscription system. I pay $10 a month and I can download 30 songs. That can be deceptive because if I want to download Bach's Goldberg Variations, I am going to buy the equivalent of 32 songs and use up my monthly allotment. But it still comes out less than for most CDs and even the 99 cent per song services.

With eMusic, you are not going to get the latest pop and rock songs on the big labels. I've been interested in building up a collection of classical and jazz music, as well as world or New Age stuff that goes with my meditation and yoga. I've grown attached to some of the songs that the instructors play during a class. Because eMusic is dealing with a lot of small or independent labels, you're going to get a mixed bag of talent and repertoire, but it's going to be interesting exploring what's available.

Exception to the rule: Paul McCartney is distributing his latest album, Memory Almost Full, through eMusic, among other circuits, so you can get some top-billed musicians.

Labels: blessing, life style

A few days ago, I wrote about a couple of small milestones in the practice. I don't think they contained revelations about my yoga practice, but were simple, small changes that remind me that it has changed over time, even though I may not notice it at the time. However, an anonymous visitor posted a comment about that entry:

What about your breathe? Your tolerance for yourself? Your medi[t]ation? Equanimity? Now that would be most interesting to know!

I would like to know that too, but it's a tall order to uncover the most intimate aspects of my practice on the web. I've had some misgivings about "letting it all hang out" lately. I've already confessed that I suffer from depression and that I turned to yoga to heal my suffering. That's going to be hanging around in the archive.org for decades to come. I don't know if I want future employers to know what mood disorders I suffer from. But I crossed that bridge, and I have to live with the consequences.

It's a lot easier to write about bending over and touching my toes than it is to reveal the intimacies a yoga practice. For one thing, it requires me to be aware to all these facets of my body and mind. I know that there are whole regions of my body that I really don't feel, that seem to be numb. There are parts of my mind that baffle me. It takes time to write about them because language — at least, my command of language — may not always capture the nuances of spiritual practice. Sometimes, I just want to make a daily entry and get on with my life.

Of course, I never meant to confine this blog to my just physical practice on the mat. My tag line is: "breath, energy, life, spirit = self-discovery through yoga." That's why I write about my readings, my more intensive work with meditation, my pranayama, the intersection between yoga and the broader world as seen on the Web, and other twists in my life. But these internal process have their own pace of change, and I may have to wait until I can catch up with them or they reveal themselves to me. Certainly, the comments of the visitor remind me that I should aspire for something more insightful about this path.

Labels: practice, yoga

Here is a reason why it's almost futile to assemble an overwhelming inventory of links: Terry Slade's Ashtanga Yoga Links. In a simple format, Terry brings together a huge number of online resources — yoga studios, videos, books, web sites, all with abundant commentary. As with most large collections of links, there is the web rot, hyperlinks that are broken because sites disappeared or pages were moved to new locations. But it's still a cold mine for yoga-centric content. Don't miss Terry's favorite story.

Labels: yoga_resource