Category: yoga

The Yoga Teacher Leads the Women in Camatkarasana In the Time of Fetal Heartbeat Bills

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The Yoga Teacher Leads the Women in Camatkarasana In the Time of Fetal Heartbeat Bills

Nothing is born and nothing dies, she says.
Wheels of light keep spinning, circles
of energy that turn through the spine.
As you arch the back from root to crown,
cinch the energy with your rad corsets–
light your abdomen and lumbar from within.
Indigo waves pulse at my third eye, in sync
with Tibetan bowls and gongs sounding
in the background, a flashpoint of understanding,
a head rush. Ground your feet, she says,
shine your heart toward the sky, extend
one arm to the clouds. You’re wild things,
wheels of astonishment glittering in the sun

***

This is a poem of resistance in the face of State efforts to curtail women’s rights over their own bodies. I wrote it when this bill was passed in Georgia and elsewhere, and although a judge has placed an injunction on applying this law in Georgia until the case is settled, another case in LA is heading to the Supreme Court. It’s hard to stay focused on each limitation, each attempt to oppress the people, so in this poem, I focus on internal liberation, available to each one of us.

Camatkarasana photo

What I Need Is More Yoga

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Tree in tree pose

Tree in tree pose

When I woke up yesterday morning the light in the room was still dim. The closed door, stained dark walnut, looked like an open portal, a deep black tunnel.

At the end of yoga class yesterday afternoon, when our teacher said to allow the mind to go into the deeper states of consciousness, this ink black portal, a door made of shadows, opened before me once again.

Corpse pose is a preparation for death, not a moment to fear, but rather a letting go. I slide into the velvety, warm blackness, this state of consciousness where poetry is born.

Yoga on the Porch

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This past April, my father passed away after a six-month illness. It’s too soon for me to write about the experience we went through as a family, but I can talk about my own health.
I had been experiencing early morning anxiety since November, around the time my dad got sick, and then I started waking in the night with panic.

By the end of April my nerves were completely shot and my “fight or flight” response was firing 24/7.

I ended up finding a wonderful doctor whose integrative approach is helping me recover, and in the meantime, I’m spending my mornings practicing gentle yoga on my back porch. 

My backyard is completely wild and overgrown, a place that could definitely be tagged as a wildlife refuge in the middle of the suburbs. All I hear in the early morning is the wind in the trees and birdsong. 

May we all experience healing and wholeness, the feeling of wellbeing, of feeling safe and secure and at peace.

After Yoga Writing Circle

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Writing after practicing yoga and meditation is one of the best ways to release creativity. With a relaxed body and mind, we can touch our inner feelings. Writing with a group where we feel safe and nourished, we can take small risks with our writing and reveal heartfelt truths.

For the past six months or so, a group of us have been meeting once a month after our wonderful yoga teacher’s Saturday class to generate new writing. I’ve been leading the writing circle because of my certification with Amherst Writers and Artists, a writing circle method devised by Pat Schneider.

For the warm-up prompt, I read these lines from Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the Tao Te Ching:

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening the knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

I wrote these lines based on the prompt:

Overflow

My heart is a bowl
that, today at least,
brims with anger.
Rage spills over the rim,
pulses into my chest, my throat.

But rather than opening my mouth,
I take to the street
and walk with my anger.
Inhaling the fresh fall air,
I release my bitterness.

The last yellow and orange leaves
hanging on the lowest branches
of a cottonwood tree
glitter in the breeze
like Tibetan prayer flags.

TreeCampus

Meditation on Sounds

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Click-click, a metal zipper taps against the drier drum.

Click-click, the house birds have come back to reclaim

their timeshare above my window.

A fledgling creature clicks and mewls from the upper branches of a tree

outside my window.

A crow creaks a greasy call across the street.

The whoosh of tires on asphalt, wind parted by metal hulks.

The cool swish of air on the in-breath, the warm puff on the out-breath.

Drawing air up to clavicles, I hear the click-click

of spines expanding along my upper back.

A thin click as lips part then close.

The muffled click of a wooden bead as a mala passes through my fingers.

***

Many beginning meditations instruct practitioners to listen to the sounds that come and go outside the room where they are sitting. We notice the sounds rise and fall away, without labeling them or trying to find out what is making the noise.

We then focus our awareness on sounds in the room where we are sitting. The point is to notice how sounds come and go, just like feelings and thoughts come and go. In between the sounds, feelings, and thoughts, we continuously draw the mind back to the breath.

I found that today I kept labeling the sounds. I knew I was going to spend time writing after I meditated, and so my mind kept sifting through the sounds and placing words on them.

But when I think back to all these tiny moments of small noises, I remember a gentle popping, clicking, humming– these are the continuous sounds of life. They are always there, rising and falling like waves in an ocean. We swim in a broth of sound waves.

Day 13: Mindfulness Writing, Writing Our Way Home.

A Clear Stone for a Clear Mind

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Yesterday, Elizabeth started yoga class with a meditation. She asked us to think about our “feeling-tone” and to notice how it felt to be us at that particular moment. She said she was referring to lessons she learned from her teacher, Erich Schiffmann, who writes about levels of stillness in his book, Yoga, The Spirit and Practice of Moving into Stillness. 

In this book Schiffmann advises the yoga practitioner: Immerse your conscious awareness into your own unique feeling-tone, the feeling-tone of the Universe expressing Itself as you are. Do this deliberately in order to experience the truth of who you are. (7)

Elizabeth put her instructions to us within the context of the New Year and the Western tradition of making New Year’s resolutions. She suggested that we learn to accept our current feeling-tone, to even celebrate it, while being open to the potential for change. This is a much different way of looking at goal setting and resolutions. A gentle, self-accepting approach.

In yoga we often refer to sankalpa, a sanskrit term that is roughly translated as a resolve or an intention. During a state of deep relaxation, the yogini forms an intention, and then keeps that intention alive in her heart until she realizes it.

At the end of class Elizabeth recalled us to our initial feeling-tone, and again asked us to think about our potential for change. She asked us to think about an intention for the coming year that would involve our feeling-tone, and then she offered us a talisman to keep as a physical reminder of our sankalpa.

She had drawn symbols on smooth glass stones of different colors–the OM symbol, flowers, a peace sign, a cross, etc…, and she then had us choose a stone from her selection.

Image

Om Talisman

I chose a clear stone with the OM symbol. My sankalpa  is to cultivate a clear mind, clear speech, and a clear heart/body. I intend to meditate every day to tune into pure, clear awareness, to dive beneath the waves of mind chatter and to listen for the deep hum of primordial sound.

Peaceful mind, peaceful heart, peaceful speech, peaceful actions.

Mindful Writing Day 10, Writing Your Way Home.