Saturday Samskara

These days I've become a bit of homebody... It's not that I'm actively avoiding group socializing on the weekends but, with our cold and wet weather and adjusting back to my daily work routine, I've just been rather enjoying the regular date with my couch on Saturday night. An engrossing book, delicious meal, glass of red wine or steamy mug of hot chocolate and I'm all set! It's become an easy and even enjoyable pattern.

In Sanskrit, my Saturday night habit (or RUT) is called a samskara. Like a deep groove in the road, a samskara is a tendency/habit/path that we keep tracking into. It is easy, comfortable, and almost inevitable that no matter which way we steer, we will tend to fall right into it. There are only two ways to break out of a well dug samskara. First, we have to be aware of and acknowledge our tendency or habit AND second, we have to create a new pattern.

Happily approaching preparations for last Saturday's evening meal, I received a last minute invitation from a good friend offering a new possibility. Party. People I didn't know. All the way across town. She dangled enticing descriptions of the house, the people, all of the planned activities.... But you know, my first instinct was still to say no. The deeply entrenched pattern emerged.

However, some delicate, whispering voice inside my head said, why not? The voice got louder. Why not do something completely different, completely random, completely new? What my friend Diane offered was enticing and beguilingly so. It was outside my usual plans and so much so that I made a quick and intentional decision to open up to the possibility of something new.

Where did this choice take me? Homemade pizzas cooked in a homemade outdoor pizza oven, a decadent hour baking in a homemade outdoor sauna, an invigorating post-sweat swim in the winter sea (ME? I don't even swim in CHCH during the summer!?), bowl after bowl of decadent homemade ice cream, and a rocking all night jam session (drums, guitars, piano, trumpet, and various creative uses for nearby cutlery, glassware, and/or pots and pans) in the warmth of heat pump and high energy fueled living room. Fantastic.

And these people do this almost every weekend?!?! Where have I been...?

Before any asana, before any finer detail of anatomical alignment, the very first principle of Anusara Yoga is Open to Grace. Feel the breath and open to the bigger picture. This means that I make the choice to take a pause and actively release my usual and oftentimes self-limiting ideas of who I am, what I think I can do, and where I think the ceiling is on the roof of possibility.

On the yoga mat this means I open up to the belief that maybe this pose is possible for me today. That maybe I can turn to my breath and follow it for just an extra count longer this time. That maybe if I just move and breathe and celebrate the glory of my existence in this body, this place, right at this very moment that all of the trouble I left behind at home may have a new perspective when I return.

And on last Saturday, this meant that I left behind my couch, my book, my mug of hot chocolate and simply showed up open and willing to discover one of the most fantastic gatherings I have been to in a very long time.

Savour the Sweetness

Sometimes intention is a tricky thing...

As I taught all of my classes last week using intention as my theme, you could say it has been definitely on my mind. In general, I would consider myself a fairly intentional person. Perhaps even sometimes a fairly intense person. A good many of us that come to yoga are. Brimming with passion, enthusiasm, dedication, and a healthy dose of discipline, we are very practiced at investing our actions with a certain level of meaning. But what happens when the intention (or perhaps, aka assumed result) we have placed on an action, or a particular set of actions, needs or is required to change?

Chaos emerges. Or so I discovered last Monday morning...

Being this fairly intentional person (yes, also a Capricorn), I plan all of my yoga classes in advance with postural sequences relating to theme, theme relating to the bigger picture, and the bigger picture keeping me in love with this practice that I teach and try to live. However, on this Monday morning, fifteen minutes before I left for class, I realized that I had misplaced my very intentional class plans...

My big picture went out the window!

What came in was anger, annoyance, and frustration. NOT the emotions you want to experience right before you go to yoga class. ESPECIALLY not if you are the teacher :)

What my well meaning intention lacked was the softness, the sweetness that would enable it to be adaptable. To be (no pun intended) flexible. Instead, my intention was rigid, fixed, immutable.

While I did eventually locate my notebook, I felt blessed for this gentle reminder that it is not just the making of an intention that matters but also the character, the “flavour” that it maintains. The Sanskrit word “rasa” describes this wonderfully. Rasa means the essential taste or flavour of a particular experience of thing. What sort of taste do I want my intention to leave in my mouth long after its made??

A sweet one!

In my yoga classes, I teach my students that we always want to find the sweetness in what we do. This applies to our asana! I’ve never valued the no pain-no gain model of yoga or life practice. If there’s no joy or sweetness in it, there’s something wrong. In fact, if there’s nothing sweet in it, why even bother?

At the same time, there is a formula or a structure to support our experience of sweetness in the fullest way. In every single pose, we use the Universal Principles of Alignment as a recipe to literally unfold the best and sweetest taste the moment offers. A formula you say? How “scientific”. Rather rigid, don't you think?

Exactly the opposite. Think for a moment about the difference between a large spoonful of raw sugar and a large spoonful or warm, cinnamon-y, homemade apple pie with ice cream. Both are obviously sweet but the experience, the rasa of each is radically different. One sweetness has been crafted by intention. And the intention is expressed in each spoonful through the language of a tried and true recipe.

On the mat, we build each pose from the inside out. Using the Universal Principles of Alignment like a recipe to creatively unfold more and more of our sweetness.

However having the recipe doesn't guarantee that you won’t drop the pie on the floor :) SO we practice with a framework, with a structure, with support but also always with softness and openness to whatever this life, this body & this mind, presents to us on this particular day.

Whatever deep intentions you set in class last week, whatever intentions you keep bringing into your life, I encourage you to make and hold them softly. Let their form frame and shape your actions but be open to the ways that life may compel us to change the form. Let go of the things that do not serve us. Remain open to all the blessings that life may present in its own mysterious ways.

“Soul drunk, body ruined, these
two sit helpless in a wrecked wagon.
Neither knows how to fix it...

But listen to me, for one moment,
quit being sad. Hear blessings
dropping their blossoms
around you. God.”

Rumi

Meaningfulness

What a joy to be back in Christchurch and teaching again! It’s been wonderful to see my familiar faces and also meet many new and enthusiastic yogis in classes. I feel recharged and reinspired after my studies abroad and will continue to share the shakti when I see you!

In every class I teach, we work with a theme. This theme inspires the physical yoga postures and sequences I choose for class, the postural languaging and instructions that I use to verbally guide our practice, and always appeals to the students to make their own personal practice on the yoga mat connect to the bigger universal picture.

Last week, my theme was intention. Meaningfulness more specifically. One of the hallmarks of the Anusara approach to yoga is that we place importance on making meaning. Setting an intention. As you’ll often hear me say in class... It’s not what we do. It’s how we do it. This simple idea is at the heart of this practice. When our actions are infused with meaningfulness, with intention, they are transformed. The smallest moments of our lives are no longer ordinary and mundane but are rather extraordinary and sacred.

Think for a moment about the last time you prepared a very special meal for (or with!) a loved one. Cooking and eating are two activities in which we regularly and often thoughtlessly engage, BUT when we bring our intention to all aspects of the event -- perusing old Cuisine mags for the perfect recipe, heading to out to the local farmers market to hand pick ingredients, playing soft sweet music while the smells and sauces simmer on the stove, carefully laying a beautiful and intimate table -- we savour both the act of cooking and the act of eating what’s been created in a deeper, richer way.

Whether we are on or off our yoga mat, our experience is defined by how we choose to participate.

Next time you take your seat on the mat, sit quietly and contemplate an intention for your practice. Why have you set aside this time for you and your yoga? What is is that you hope to gain? What is it that you hope to offer? Let whatever arises formulate itself into one or two clear sentences. Throughout the rest of your practice, weave and embody this intention into every movement and every breath!