I was in my twenties when I started dabbling with yoga and meditation. For a long while, it was like many things are with me: all or nothing, coming and going in fits and starts. Looking back through the lens of years of experience and the patterns of thousands of students, I can see it for what it was. In the beginning, I did just enough practice to make me feel better. I did what was needed to take the edge off the pain of being human. And once that sharp edge was smoothed a bit, I fell back into old habits.… Read the rest
discipline
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If I know a single thing about yoga, it’s that no matter the state of the world or the state of one’s inner landscape, finding any semblance of okayness begins and ends with daily practice. Feeling great? Get on your mat. Feeling sad? Get on your mat. Feeling steady and centered? Take a seat. Feeling distracted or lost? Take a seat. While any one practice taken in isolation may not be especially interesting, provocative, inspirational, calming, steadying, or anything else, there’s a special magic when you add up the cumulative benefits of all of the practices day after day after day.… Read the rest
Tapas: austerity, discipline, fire, the heat necessary for birth or transformation. To practice tapas is to intentionally put ourselves into discomfort in the service of our own growth and transformation. Decidedly not the delicious Spanish snacks. Tapas is the intentional practice of getting out of our comfort zones to be stretched; to consciously step into the fire which creates change. This might sound crazy when the outside world already has us in a pressure cooker, but if it’s true “as within, so without,” the discord, unrest and anger we see at every turn must also have root within us. We need to put it in the fire.… Read the rest
Happy New Year! Or in the words of my friend Jonathan, “Welcome to twenty-twenty: The Year of Perfect Vision.” Wow. Now there’s a worthy resolution.
I hid myself away from the many humans for a couple of hours on December 31 to write away the last of the year. I try to do this annually- a summary of what stood out, what was gained, lost, learned. An inventory of sorts, of the preceding twelve months, that I might wrap up the past and truly start anew. In short, 2019 was not a banner year. Not at all. Perfect vision sounds like perfect timing and I’m all in.… Read the rest
I had a great exchange with Kathleen this week about a student complaint. If you haven’t been in class with Kathleen, or have never had the chance to read anything she has written, you might put it on your to-do list. She has a sharp, clear mind and a way with words that I find to be so brilliant, so true, funny and precisely to the point every single time. In our chat, she was talking about being “in your practice” a turn of phrase from another teacher, from another time. To be more accurate, she was actually going on about what it looks like when you’re not in your practice, but that exchange, and the one which inspired it have been with me these past few days in a churning way.… Read the rest
Do your practice. All is coming.
by Jill Sockman
This came through my inbox this morning: “On the path of transformation, you will experience acceptance, which entails accepting your own inner condition exactly as it is, without reacting to it or defending against it.” Also in the inbox, from a different source: “You can have all good things – wealth, friends, kindness, love to give and love to receive – once you have learned not to be blinded by them, learned to escape from disappointment, and from repugnance at the idea that things are not as you want them to be.”… Read the rest
The thin line between discipline and self-aggression
Discipline is an essential component in a yoga practice, and life in general; as much as I enjoy a day of unstructured time, if left to my own undisciplined devices I would quickly devolve into a life of sleep, snacks, and slow walks leading nowhere. That isn’t the life I want to have. (Well, maybe on Sundays….)
So, we can’t do this thing without discipline. But there is an important quality we need to apply alongside our discipline, and that is gentleness. I suspect many of us have a hard time discerning the line where discipline becomes self-aggression—and I’d put myself at the top of that heap.… Read the rest