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The Wordpress blog is live! Please update your RSS subscriptions, links, and love to http://lifebloomyoga.com/. I won't be posting here anymore.

I'm Still Here!

Hey kids!

Just wanted to pop in and let you know I'm still around- still teaching, writing, and doing yoga. I've been very busy moving this blog into a fancy, grown-up Wordpress site. This process has been much like yoga: slow, sometimes difficult, sometimes amazing. I have a couple friends supporting me with webhosting and guidance, and they've all got a lot on their plates right now, so bear with me. It's getting there- expect an official "please update your feeds/links/bookmarks" soon!

If you're going through withdrawal symptoms, never fear! I was published in Elephant Journal a couple weeks ago: Bared Teeth, Clenched Fists, and Anger- an essay about using the centeredness and expressive capacity of yoga to deal with anger.

And from my meanderings:

• YogaDork: How Do I Know it's REAL Yoga? I'm all for telling purists and snobs to suck it (in a nonharming way, of course).
• Time Magazine ran an article that could have been titled OMGyogisspendmoneyWTFBBQ here, and there was a pretty great discussion about it over at YogaDork here.
  
• From Feministing: "When Cultural Appropriation Goes Too Far." This would definitely be the launch of a full post if I wasn't in weird-blog-transition time. Yes, definitely, something there went too far. Lately I've been asking myself a lot of questions about the relationship between my teaching and its Indian roots. Those of you who know me know that I eschew any kind of deference, reverence, or guru-worship. I'd still like to show some respect to the source of the teachings that have been so great for me. Can I be both irreverent and respectful? Stay tuned to find out!
• A lovely private lesson with a beginner student recently got me thinking about how incredibly uncomfortable yoga can be when you're first starting out. So for those of you new to the practice, I want to give some extra props to you for going outside of your comfort zone. Each time you practice, a few more little lego pieces will snap into place, and it will feel better, you will become stronger, and yes, more relaxed. I promise.
  

So you want to try yoga...

Just. Go. Some studios and gyms offer somewhere around 40 types of yoga. You could spend an entire afternoon, or more, researching which style might suit you best and asking around about the best teacher. But while you're doing this, you're not actually at yoga. You have the rest of your life to figure this out. Use your judgment, of course, Advanced Human Pretzel Thermodynamics might not be the best place for you at first, but any beginner-friendly class is a great start. Bonus points if it's a convenient time, location, and price for you to work into your regular schedule.
Yup, that means you don't have to read the rest of this article. But I know that first class can be a little daunting, and some people like to be armed with more information before they walk in the door, so I assembled a few tips that might be helpful.

Tell the teacher, if you want. Many teachers will ask if anyone is new as class begins, but not all of them. I suggest you introduce yourself at the beginning. Most will be pretty good about keeping an eye on you to make sure you have an enjoyable and safe experience- it's in both of our best interest that you walk out in one piece and want to come back! That said, if you're not comfortable outing yourself, then don't. The yoga police won't knock down your door, I promise.

Find a good spot in the back/middle. True, you're supposed to feel your way into the posture from the inside out, but ask anyone who tells you that if they didn't start learning yoga visually. Putting yourself in a place in the room where you can see other people practicing without straining your neck will make life easier.

Breathe. It's tempting to hold your breath when things get tough. Just don't. Most styles of yoga use ujayyi breathing throughout class. Try making an audible breath like you would if you were trying to fog up a window in the wintertime. Now close your mouth and do that through your nose. It should feel like you're contracting the back of your throat. This breath helps you keep your breathing steady and even, and encourages circulation so carbon dioxide is carried out of the muscles. Good stuff.

Back off. You have the rest of your life to get that split or backbend- and the day you slip effortlessly into that advanced pose, it won't necessarily mean you're a better person. But if you injure yourself today, you're a lot less likely to ever get there. As you progress in yoga, you'll learn to work your "edge" mindfully and understand what your body is resisting and why. But for now, just showing up to that first class might be as far out of your comfort zone as you need to venture. I encourage my students, new and old, to take child's pose whenever something doesn't feel quite right. It's a great "reboot" for the body, mind, and breath. Your teacher might have another idea about how you might want to rest, but a good teacher will understand and encourage taking breaks when you need to.

After class, let it go. You probably came in with a certain set of expectations about the class or how you would perform. You may be elated, or you may be frustrated with yourself. Let it go. It's over. If you didn't feel comfortable at all with the class or teacher, consider another time/teacher/studio. If you're disappointed in yourself, congratulations- you've found a challenge, and will soon learn how valuable that opportunity is.

Drink some water and rest up. You're going to be sore tomorrow, trust me. Having an extra glass or two of water will encourage that lactic acid to move. The sooner you're healed up, the sooner you can get back on the yoga mat. But give it time- it's during rest that muscles actually repair themselves and get stronger.

Namaste, and may the force be with you!

more goodies!

I was lucky enough to be featured as a guest poster this week at Florian Yoga Companion. My post was a how-to and why-to about practicing at home- check it out here, if you haven't already. And if you have, and you've done any home practice this week, let me know how it's gone! I have a feeling I have some new followers/subscribers from the post, so if you're new, welcome!


I've got some other posts cooking, but it occurred to me that you guys could also just tell me what you've been itching to read about. I set up a skribit account on the sidebar, or you can click here to suggest a topic or ask a question. I'll do my best to answer it!

Thursday night classes!

Print the flyer out! Post it! Mostly, just come on Thursday. It's all the fun of the blog with 100% less text and 100% more yoga.

It's right in between the Bedford Avenue and Lorimer Street L stops, so Manhattanites, Williamsburgers, and Bushwickers should have no problem. As an added bonus; the G stops at Lorimer as well, so it should be easy from Queens.
Please come early so we can all start happy at 7. You can get there as early as 6:30ish- 6:45 should be enough to get settled in.
This is your class as much as it is mine, so keep me posted. Let me know what works and doesn't work, and what you're hoping to learn from the class.

Thanks again to Sharlene Leong from Sparkly Doom for the great flyer art! She runs a fantastic and totally LBY-approved webcomic, so be sure to check it out.

Crow Pose, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Arm Balance

...or A Portrait of the Yogi as a Young Girl
...or A Brief History of My Relationship With Bakasana
...or What I Didn't Do Over My Summer Vacation

That's yoga for you. Always helping you find your edge. Today it's the edge of your tolerance for cheesy titles.

Anyway. Crow Pose. Cool stuff, right? To me, it's a point of departure where yoga goes from an earnest practice to stupid human tricks. And that's not a bad thing whatsoever. But in my more formal yoga education, arm balances and inversions were never really part of the discipline. But they just look damn cool and, it turns out, have some amazing benefits, so I have sought out to learn them on my own.
In addition to the "whee I'm flying!" factor, crow pose does this other cool thing- it plugs right in to the deep transverse abdominus that crunches can't even dream about touching. So when someone says "I used muscles I never even knew I had," in this case they could actually mean it.

I won't throw a tidal wave of how-to's at you- there are plenty of ways to describe the "keys" to floating in this arm balance, and they're all pretty good. None of that will help you without getting onto your mat and trying, over and over, with a curiosity and a willingness to faceplant. I had once read that to get the "tough" yoga poses, one only needs to try every day. For years. But some schools of yoga consider this pose easy-mode, and I'm pretty good and pretty cocky, and Judith Hanson Lasater suggests trying something tough every day for a month as an exercise in discipline. So I committed to trying it every day for a month, convinced that I would be a pro by the end.

Hubris won out. By the end of that month, I had made no tangible progress. I would slowly bring one foot up, and start to lift the other, only to find myself calmly returning to the mat a second later. Or on my less focused, yogic days, my legs would slip off my triceps and I'd collapse onto the mat, embarrassed that my cat had seen my failure. At the end of the month, I was minorly disappointed, but had more pressing life and work concerns and quickly forgot about it.

A few weeks later, the pose came up in a class. And I teetered a little bit longer.

The next week, a little longer.

A few weeks after that, I could take a few breaths in the air before returning my feet to the ground.

The whole ordeal taught me a pretty valuable lesson, that I think applies to pretty much everything- effort and discipline are not everything. It's equal parts discipline and letting go. It's making your best effort and then detaching from the results. My month of effort, practice and learning definitely contributed to my finally "achieving" the pose, but so did loosening my chokehold on the idea that I would ever actually get there.

So today, in your practice (whatever that may be- we use the term loosely here at LBY), experiment with the idea of making your best effort but letting go of the end result. I'm sure this isn't a new concept to most of you, but it's always good to recommit.

The Zen of Warcraft

One of my favorite yoga teachers, Sadie Nardini, wrote a fantastic article for the Huffington Post: Om Scampi: A Top Yogi Comes Out of the Meat Eating Closet. I have a scary visceral reaction to the "top yogi" phrase (what does that even mean?), but the article is an incredibly thoughtful and well written verbalization of things I have intuited for a long time. Mostly, that nothing in the yoga sutras explicitly translates to "thou shalt not eat meat;" that interpreting ahimsa as such is a totally valid interpretation on a personal level and that vegetarianism is an important part of the culture we are kind of assimilating yoga from; but also that dogmatic righteousness stemming from an interpretation choice on an ancient text (as SN says, sound familiar?) is somewhat in violation of the nonharming principle that is in debate in the first place.
I'm sure that horrible run-on sentence is also a violation of ahimsa. Anyway, I am also an omnivore, and pretty committed to living my own truth, which at this time, includes eating meat as a way of staying open to all sorts of experiences life has to offer.

So I wanted to come out, so to speak, about something I love that doesn't quite fit into the "yoga lifestyle" prescription either. Since I started eating meat again, I've been unapologetic about it, but I am a little bit more sheepish about my love for video games. Specifically, World of Warcraft. After work, when I've practiced, exercised, socialized, cooked dinner, and prepared for the rest of my day, I'll very often log into WoW to help my friends take down a boss or two. I set things on fire. And joust. There's lots of animated violence.
I also love TV. My current rotation is True Blood and Weeds.
Let me give you a bit of history here. As an awkward middle schooler, I played flute, and wanted badly to be first chair. I never was. But I developed an ethic where I practiced all the time. Then the requisite body image issues came into play and that energy got diverted into exercise. Then studying. Art. College. Teaching yoga. Somewhere along the line I figured out that one could improve at some of the things one is supposed to be good at and have fun too. So I would feel pretty guilty for doing fun things that don't quite make you a better person.
And the story of how all that changed is an entirely different post. But now, when I'm playing WoW or watching Weeds, it's because, for the first time in 13 years I am actually kind of okay with myself. It's a way of saying that, I've done a bit of work today, and I've done my yoga, and now, I am just going to be for the next hour or two. I'm nowhere near perfect. But I'm with friends, and I am content.

See, for me, yoga is about helping you get to the truth of your inner self. And for me right now, my inner self finds some pretty great expression through WoW-playing, trashy-vampire-TV watching, beef-chomping, margarita-guzzling, cursing, and other shenanigans - and plenty of yoga. It shouldn't take anyone 23 years, or more, to be okay with just having fun. Taking up a yoga practice should be transformative, but it doesn't need to be an austere commitment to be the perfect embodiment of some completely disenfranchising stereotype. Leave the caricatures to street artists, drop the front, and just live your yoga.

Home Practice 7/29/2009

Here's a sequence I've been playing around with. I notice that I hold a lot of tension in my stomach area, so I've been working on chipping away at that with muscle activation and breath- your mileage may vary, as usual, as will your needs.

This is not necessarily an advanced series, but should obviously only be practiced if you know the poses I am referring to. I apologize for the sloppy mix of Sanskrit and English and the poor grammar here- this isn't meant to be great writing or anything close to a teaching dialogue, just practice notes.



Start in standing, hands at namascar; get centered.

Some variation of Surya Namascar B, focusing on the utkatasana and high lunge. One cycle leading with right leg, one leading with left.

Surya Namascar B variation again, still lots of utkatasana love. This time, lower the back knee in the lunges, and place the hands on the front thigh to really work the stretch in both hips.

Bikram style utkatasana series, sloooowwww.

Standing side bends.

Forward fold, jump back to chaturanga, flow into downward dog.

3 core planks with the right leg: first time, knee to center; second time, knee to inside left for a twist; third time, knee to outer right tricep. Place foot down. Warrior I for a few breaths, focusing on opening up the front of the body, Warrior II for a few breaths, focusing on stacking the spine and opening up the hip. Flow, repeat sequence on left side, flow.

Come to stand and step out wide. Hold Standing Goddess pose/ squat for a few breaths. Straighten legs and turn left foot in, right foot out for triangle. Flow through from triangle to extended triangle 4 times, then hold in revolved triangle for a few breaths. Return to Standing Goddess, repeat on left. Finish with a wide-legged standing forward fold.

Step back to down dog, flow.

Flow through Warrior I and II, launching into Half Moon, hold this for several breaths each side.

Come down into Garland/squat, hold for a few breaths with hands pressing together, using the elbows to help gently open the hips.

Fold and lift into Crow, hold (or teeter!) for a few breaths.

Release to seated, legs out. Bend right knee into Janu Sirsasana, hold, focusing on the release in the stomach and lower back rather than hamstring. Sit up, lift right knee and place right foot flat for a seated spinal twist. Repeat sequence on the left side.

Any necessary inversions or savasana prep; Savasana.

Your Personal Practice: Changes

...sorry. Couldn't resist. My practice hasn't completely eradicated my poor impulse control, apparently.

Anyway, going to classes, if you have the money and access, is absolutely the best thing you can do for your practice, body, and mind. The online/video resources I've mentioned in the past are a great tool as well. You really do need a teacher to guide you, challenge you, and prevent injury. But once you're fairly confident with whatever "your yoga" is, I strongly encourage you to find a way to establish a consistent, self-directed home practice. The purpose of this series (which may or may not ever be continued) is to address what this might mean to you- the advantages and challenges in practicing at home.

Changes

A home practice, because it is self-directed, can change in infinite ways. Because we do yoga (ideally) throughout our lives and in varying conditions, I feel that a yoga routine should be able to accommodate that. (NOTE: practitioners of set-sequence styles will have a different, and equally valid, opinion. You might want to try both. As with anything, YMMV.) Here are some things to consider:

• Life cycle: They say that Ashtanga yoga was created to harness the somewhat erratic energy of adolescence with its challenging athletic style. If I were going to teach a class of 16 year olds, you bet I'd be pulling out the big power vinyasa guns (and challenging them with holding asanas, on occasion). A class of retirees new to yoga might benefit instead from a hatha class with an emphasis on alignment (throwing some vinyasa in there to mix it up). So on a personal level, I know that what's going to be most transformative for my body and mind at 23 won't be the same as the most beneficial practice for when I am 53.
  
• Climate/seasons: Your body is changing and adapting to the seasons, so why shouldn't your practice? Winter is a particularly challenging time, especially without access to a hot studio. Heat must be built slowly and steadily in order to prevent injury. In summer, when it is hot, you may want to avoid overstretching. Allergy and cold seasons may require a focus on strengthening the immune and respiratory systems.
  
• Physical fluctuations: A home practice can easily accommodate injuries and soreness (please, consult a certified teacher to make sure you're not aggravating anything). I personally don't believe in a mandatory abstention from inversions for menstruating women, but I would definitely recommend doing only what you're comfortable with. Feeling a flu coming on? Think chest openers and restorative poses.
  
• Mental fluctuations: I hate to use yoga too prescriptively (like I just did), but you can play with adapting your practice to your mental state. Next time you have some anger to work out, try embodying it in any Warrior pose. Feeling a little unfocused? A sequence heavy on tough balancing postures might help with that.
  

Amazing Meditation Video

In keeping with the theme of a few posts from this blog, check out this great animated short:

No-Excuses Meditation

To take the esoteric nonsense out of what you may THINK is meditation, I thought I'd offer a no-frills easy way to meditate. And by "easy" I actually mean "really effing hard but easy to start and so worth it." This has appeared on the internet before, but then, given Rule 34, what hasn't?

1. Find a comfortable seat. There are lots of ways to do this, but mostly your back should be straight and your legs either not squashed or squashed in a way that will remain comfortable.

2. Set a timer. If you don't have one, try e.ggtimer. If you're feeling timid, try 5 minutes. Ambitious? 30 minutes. Look at it long enough to make sure it's running, then close your eyes.

3. Pay attention to the breath. On each inhale, think "inhale," and on each exhale, number it. (Inhale, 1, inhale, 2, inhale, 3... etc). And:

• When you get to 5, start over.
• When you catch yourself thinking, mentally say "thinking," and start over.
• When you forget to count, mentally say "thinking," and start over.
  
• When you catch yourself at a number higher than 5, mentally say "thinking," and start over.

That's all there is to it, really. Try to let go of your concerns as to what the pattern actually looks like. One day it might go "1... 1... 1... 3... 1...," another might go, "5... 5... 7... 9... 5...," and yet another might go "1... 1... 4... godihatemyjobmyfootitchesWHYHASN'THECALLED... 1..." And it's all good.

Lineage and New Media

If you read anything related to yoga, other than this blog, you know that Sri K. Pattabhi Jois passed on this week. Coincidentally, I had been reading Jivamukti Yoga, by Shannon Gannon and David Life (owners/founders of the studio by the same name), specifically their chapter titled "Guru: The Teacher You Can See and Feel." This is a meaty, ballsy book and there is a lot I like and don't like about it, which may make for a post later, but in the meantime, this chapter talked about the role of a guru and they named Jois as one of their three gurus.
Now, I have never studied with a guru. I met Amrit Desai once, and attended a pretty amazing talk of his, but the rest of my training and education has been American and decidedly non-guru-ey. That said, I can trace a lineage back to another guru, and I am not sure if that has benefitted me or my teaching or not. And I have a lot to thank Jois for- he's cited for bringing Ashtanga to the West, and the power Vinyasa flow style I became serious about, studied, and teach is almost a "child" of Ashtanga, meaning that without Jois' work, there's a chance I'd never even become involved in it.
I also wonder if the way yoga is taught and learned isn't changing. I am not going to argue that traveling to India and studying with a guru isn't an amazingly valuable experience, but I think there is enormous opportunity for growth from right where you're sitting. I've seen some really amazing, potentially transformative teaching online:

• Sadie Nardini offers some fabulous vinyasa flows and meditation via YouTube
• Yoga Today: free, hour long classes. Every day.
• Florian Yoga Companion has a 30-day series running right now addressing the connection between emotional wellness and physical health. I like this one.

I'm not arguing that the days of traditional teaching and passing on knowledge are over. But that so many other avenues have become available over the past 40 years or so, and that if we really care about sharing all that yoga can offer, it's time to embrace new media and explore its uses. I have a feeling a lot of people won't agree with me, but I think a truly loving and open-minded guru, the kind I'd want to follow, would want it that way, too.

Troublemakers

Those of you who know me know that I have been pretty rageful the last month or so. Happy, yes, but also a raging mess of fire and venom. Current "spiritual friends," as she calls them, are hipsters, the MTA, and, more often than I would like to admit, my actual friends.
I also really love Pema Chodron, and love this talk. My initial feeling is that Troublemakers are only "spiritual friends" if you approach them from that angle and are able to detach from your annoyance and understand that it is not you, in order to understand what it is really telling you about yourself. The story she tells at the end, however, would imply that these people have value to you even if you are identifying with how much you can't stand them.
As with anything in the realm of yoga, thought, and meditation, there isn't really a conclusion. But the idea I am working with right now is that there is potential value in such things, much like there is potential value in a piece of soil. Make of it what you will.

Lines of Inquiry

You are so young, so much before all beginning, and I would like to beg you, dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
(full text available here)

I am trying to come up with a yogi analogy for "I'm a poet and I just don't know it," in reference to Rilke.
And just like that, this blog exists as an exercise in what many would perceive as futility- trying to answer unanswerable questions. Here are some of the things I wonder about, and would like to continue wondering about in text and on the internet:

• How can I, a non-skinny, proudly non-serene, 20-something American woman live and embody yoga without giving up all those things that make me ME?
• What does it mean to do yoga in New York, in the 21st century? What can we find in our lives and popular culture that can inform the practice?
• What does a "perfect" asana practice or class consist of, for me or anyone else, and can it be found in an actual class? How do the changes in our lives reflect in changing needs for yoga, on an individual and cultural level?
  

On Practice

On practice, and the name of this blog:

"The Western idea of practice is to acquire a skill. It is very much related to our work ethic, which enjoins us to endure struggle or boredom now in return for future rewards. The Eastern idea of practice, on the other hand, is to create the person, or rather to actualize or reveal the complete person who is already there. This is not practice for something, but complete practice, which suffices unto itself. In Zen training they speak of sweeping the floor, or eating, as practice. Walking as practice."
-Stephen Nachmanovich, Free Play: The Power of Improvisation in Life and the Arts, p. 67

We talk about doing yoga as a practice, but what about talking about yoga? What about the way we interact with each other, online or otherwise? If eating can be a practice, surely blogging can be, too.
So go, get on a mat, or open up a text box, or even a comment- just do something.

Teaching Schedule

THURSDAYS, 7-8 PM

• 281 North 7th Street, Ste. 7. Brooklyn. 2 blocks from Bedford Avenue L stop, 4 or so from Lorimer Street L/G stop. Come early!
• Hour long vinyasa flow class
• $10 suggested donation