Category Archives: Yoga

Seeing Yourself from the Inside Out

  By |
2 Comments

Looking in the mirror is always a crapshoot, isn’t it?  Some days you can do it and feel pretty good.  Other days you do it with no noticeable reaction.  And then there are the days when you look in the mirror and think “Oh my heck, what happened to me?”  Depending on who you are, the proportions of one to another experience can change pretty dramatically.  But, there is another way to look at yourself, and that’s from the inside out.

I’m not talking about who you are emotionally or socially, though that is important too.  I’m talking about your body awareness and the image of body that you carry around in your head.  Now, I would guess that for most of us this is not a static thing.  There are times when we think about our bodies from the inside and the image we get is bad – very bad.  But, there are other times when it’s not.  When you are very happy and enjoying yourself, if you try to picture your face, isn’t it a nice face?  Isn’t it a lovely face – with no bad judgments about wrinkles or bags or age spots?  And for the rest of the body the same is true.  There is probably some thing, some time, that produces for you the internal image of a beautiful body.  Perhaps it’s when you are running.  Maybe it’s during meditation.  It could be when you are pushing a child on a swing.  Maybe it’s when you are performing on stage or even during sex.  Whatever it is, at that moment, you see your body from the inside and it’s beautiful.

For me, not too surprisingly, this most often happens during yoga.  At some point during  many yoga practices, my body suddenly “looks” graceful, fluid, long, and lean.  I don’t see saggy arm backs, or belly wrinkles, broken capillaries, or a slouchy back.  Recently, I was trying to check how I was doing a pose and what I needed to adjust to get my shoulders/hips in the right position, so I did some yoga in front of a mirror.  And, I was shocked and not so happy.  During poses where my internal image was of a beautiful flat back, I was still slumped over.  During the forward bend split, where my leg felt like it was beautifully extended high into the air, it was barely above my hips.  It was not a pleasant surprise.

So, here is my plan.  I’m not doing yoga in front of a mirror any more.  I have good instructors who don’t hesitate to give me tips about what I can adjust and how, so I will trust them to do that when they think it’s right.  Otherwise, I’m just going to go with what my internal image says.  Because it doesn’t matter.  Maybe I’ll consider this issue more when I make my decision about pursuing certification (because I don’t want to create a whole new generation of yoginis with bad posture) but for my own practice, what I see on the inside is good enough, and those moments when my body is a beautiful thing to me are rare enough.  Why let them go for the sake of a more “realistic” view?

Beautifully yours,

L

It’s Like Herding Cats

  By |
2 Comments

Minds like to wander.  They do.  And they are hard to rein in, because even if you get the alpha mind headed in the right direction, suddenly you realize that the beta mind is off in the corner thinking about something completely different.  So, you head over and nip at its heels until it comes in line.  And… then you notice that now you are thinking HARD about what you are or are not thinking about and how short your attention span is and how hard it is to stop thinking – and you’ve completely forgotten to meditate or breathe.

I’ve been really trying to work on this lately during meditative yoga poses and during Savasana.  Sometimes, I feel like it’s working, and other times I get part way through and realize that I am so busy thinking about how hard I need to try not to think that I haven’t really even begun to meditate.  Or, I notice that my “back mind” has been sneaking around planning dinner or writing a blog post (ahem) while my “front mind” is trying to cooperate.

What to do, what to do?  Nothing.  And that’s the catch, isn’t it?  We aren’t very good at doing nothing.  Our minds aren’t very good at doing nothing.  Busy! Busy! Busy!  I don’t actually think it’s a lack of attention – I think it’s more that we cannot stop attending to all the things we have going on long enough to be in the moment.

So, here’s what I’m trying now – we’ll see if it works!  First, at this moment, concentrating on breathing is just not working for me.  My brain wants to be busier than that.  So, I need a mantra.  Sometimes it’s extremely simple, like “be here now.”  Sometimes it’s a little more complex (last week in yin it was “I release stress; I release anger;  I cultivate happiness; I cultivate peace”).  If the surroundings or my physical position are more distracting, like in yin poses that I find very uncomfortable and even painful if I think about the physical sensations too much, then I go for a more complex mantra.  For Savasana, I tend toward something simple.  Second, I made a very unfancy set of mala beads (in bracelet form for easy portability) to bring with me when I’m meditating or doing yin.  I gave it a trial run last week with a crochet row counting bracelet that I had recently made, and I liked it.  So, that’s another tactic I’m going to work with for now.  And last, I’m really really going to try to stop berating myself for thinking when I’m trying not to be thinking, because then the judging becomes its own thinking, which increases the self-critique and so on in an infinite cycle.

Now, if you’ve ever seen a dog actually try to herd cats – and I have – you know that it’s one thing to have a plan and a strategy and it’s quite another thing to actually end up with the cats where you want them.  And I’m pretty sure my dogs’ frustration strategy, which consists of running up and barking in the cat’s face, won’t really work with my thoughts, so I’ll have to do what I can.

Nameste,

L

Why I’ll Never Be a Yogi – or – Who Needs the Brain/Mind Dichotomy? They Both Annoy Me!

  By |
1 Comment

UPDATE: I’m feeling much better now about all of this, but I’m going to leave the post as a reminder that I’ve been here before!

So, as you can probably tell from the title, I’m feeling a bit annoyed right now.  I just finished an at-home yoga practice and it was not all I had hoped it would be.  I’m frustrated with my recent inability to get in a good home practice – which really seems necessary if I’m going to progress, because I can get to  the studios 4x per week max right now.   There are two different problems that cropped up in this practice – one related to mind and one to body – that I want to be able to control, even though I know that the only way around them (really) is to let go of that control.

First, the mind – I drug my stuff to the basement for this practice to get away from the family, thinking it would encourage mindful and attentive practice.  Apparently, that was not the best selection.  I just could not seem to stay on the mat.  I pondered the cardboard boxes that are all over the room from unpacking furniture (Why did they leave them there? When should we take them to the curb? Why is there so much waste in packaging?).  I worried about what the two pets that came to “visit” my practice were doing  (Is Charlie scratching the carpet?  Is Charlie eating that plastic? What is Charlie doing under the box? Oh, look, Luna is rubbing her eye on the carpet – that can’t be good.  Did Luna just jump on the new couch? She’s going to get hair everywhere.).  I thought about what I needed to do tonight and what I was going to make for dinner.  I even pondered a work call that I had this afternoon.  Time and time again, I told myself to come back to the mat, but to no avail.

Then there was the body – Today’s practice made me feel a little bit like I’ve actually been losing ground.  After what felt like a long time (from my body), I glanced at the clock and realized it had been barely 35 minutes.  The energy just seemed to be missing.  Poses that I normally love, even as they challenge me, just felt counter-intuitive and wrong.  I had to kick up several times to get into Pincha Mayurasana, and then when I got there, about 10 seconds in I realized that I was panting and my heart was beating like a snare drum and had to come back down.  Headstand was better, but not by much.  I managed to stub the crud out of my toe practicing forward/back jumps (which I’m never good at) and scraped all the skin from my elbows doing yoga in a scratchy long sleeved cotton shirt.  It was all just silly.  I want my body to “cooperate.”

I know, really, I know.  This is not a yoga way of judging myself.  Clearly, I’m a long way from being a yogi.  : /   So, tell me about the walls you have hit in your yoga practice, or meditation, or running/swimming/whatever and what you did to get past them.