The 3 stages of a man's life, as delineated by the great yogi Bob Marley:
Stage one 0-18 years. Separated from the womb, seeking re-connection. "No woman? No!!!....Cry!"
Stage two 19 - 45 years. Taking on the mantle of responsibility, a sturdy shoulder to lean on. "No woman, no cry".
Stage three 46 - 99. Finished with procreation, validation of that role no longer required, moving toward contemplation and silence. "No woman = no cry".
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
It's about your yoga..I'm afraid there's been some complications
I'm going say it.
Yoga is too complicated. And I mean this sincerely. I teach this stuff for a living, and I've watched eyes glaze over as talk of tattvas and kleshas and the various states of samadhi are outlined by those of us who have not experienced a stable state of this experience. Therefore, I submit that all of us who talk about this stuff should speak from experience, period.
Why do we love yoga? It is because of the way it makes us feel. The way it makes me feel is difficult to put into words, but if I need a flow chart and a Sanskrit dictionary I'm already in trouble. Because yoga is an experience of assimilation, of digestion of our experiences. Hatha yoga balances opposites - inhale, exhale, determination, surrender. These states do not dissolve, oh no. The problems of life do not go away. Rather we may become more able to digest our experiences. They move through us, and as they do, we witness from a place of.... the best word I can come up with is - poignancy. Poignance is the state of holding two contrasting feelings at once, like bittersweet. A bittersweet experience is the full acceptance of life's ups and downs. We don't get better at feeling both ends of the spectrum by trying to manage them, by withdrawing or by utilizing complicated yoga inner technology. We get better at feeling by...feeling. Feeling what life brings. So instead of rationalization, or in any way attempting to mask our sometimes painful experience of life, how about simply saying "this too." I feel bad. Yes, I do. And there is no shame in that, I am not less spiritual or valuable because I feel like crap sometimes. But I can hold it, hold the experience, and when it shifts, it shifts.
Yoga is too complicated. And I mean this sincerely. I teach this stuff for a living, and I've watched eyes glaze over as talk of tattvas and kleshas and the various states of samadhi are outlined by those of us who have not experienced a stable state of this experience. Therefore, I submit that all of us who talk about this stuff should speak from experience, period.
Why do we love yoga? It is because of the way it makes us feel. The way it makes me feel is difficult to put into words, but if I need a flow chart and a Sanskrit dictionary I'm already in trouble. Because yoga is an experience of assimilation, of digestion of our experiences. Hatha yoga balances opposites - inhale, exhale, determination, surrender. These states do not dissolve, oh no. The problems of life do not go away. Rather we may become more able to digest our experiences. They move through us, and as they do, we witness from a place of.... the best word I can come up with is - poignancy. Poignance is the state of holding two contrasting feelings at once, like bittersweet. A bittersweet experience is the full acceptance of life's ups and downs. We don't get better at feeling both ends of the spectrum by trying to manage them, by withdrawing or by utilizing complicated yoga inner technology. We get better at feeling by...feeling. Feeling what life brings. So instead of rationalization, or in any way attempting to mask our sometimes painful experience of life, how about simply saying "this too." I feel bad. Yes, I do. And there is no shame in that, I am not less spiritual or valuable because I feel like crap sometimes. But I can hold it, hold the experience, and when it shifts, it shifts.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Yoga and math
I think I may be getting why it is so hard to explain yoga. Usually, we are involved in a process of addition - getting a new thing, taking a course, buying a book. We collect experiences too - going to warm climates, eating great food. These experiences "add" to our lives. But yoga is really a process of subtraction. Yoga practice has the tendency to "remove". Yoga removes stress, removes the disconnection between deeper parts of ourselves, removes some of the need for external validation. It removes muscular imbalance, and internal toxins. Meditation can remove thoughts. So, it's tough to introduce a subtraction way of thinking to an addition based culture as a "positive" benefit. Yup.
Thursday, February 17, 2011
My heart is Canadian
My heart is Canadian,
and so is my body
my muscles and bones
live in a socialist society,
communally.
No dictator, but strings
of tendons, tissues and
bones listening to one
another.
No celebrity muscle.
no part that needs
more attention because
it feels distant from the others.
Sometimes my Canadian body
gets sick. But have an internal
medicare system, and thanks
to Tommy Douglas, an external one too.
I move into postures in a Canadian way;
I go for a beer afterward because that too,
is union.
I try to teach yoga as a Canadian.
A melting pot of practices
no need to brand it. We are
in this together, aren’t we?
and so is my body
my muscles and bones
live in a socialist society,
communally.
No dictator, but strings
of tendons, tissues and
bones listening to one
another.
No celebrity muscle.
no part that needs
more attention because
it feels distant from the others.
Sometimes my Canadian body
gets sick. But have an internal
medicare system, and thanks
to Tommy Douglas, an external one too.
I move into postures in a Canadian way;
I go for a beer afterward because that too,
is union.
I try to teach yoga as a Canadian.
A melting pot of practices
no need to brand it. We are
in this together, aren’t we?
Thursday, October 21, 2010
The fabric of sound
Just gotta write this down before I forget it...I realized something about music and vibration today. When we create any vibration - emotion, sound, thought - If our universe is truly one fabric, then we forever change that fabric every time we create a vibration. If I play a note on my guitar, the silence afterward is different - literally feels different - than if I had not played a note. This little ripple in the space/time continuum may be small, but like a stone thrown in a still pond, it's ripples continue to move outward - an there is only one pond with no shore!
So now I have a really god reason to practice.
So now I have a really god reason to practice.
Monday, October 4, 2010
Yoga as a tool
"Is Yoga a religion?" is a question I hear a lot. As teachers of yoga, our response is often to downplay, or to reinforce the idea that yoga is for everyone and won't get in the way of you and your religion. I'm not so sure we are being truthful as teachers when we say this. It is true yoga is a discipline and not a religion. However, as a tool yoga is so effective it's like using a titanium shovel with a homing device to dig for the truth. Religion generally puts belief first and practice second. This can lead to a real lack of inquiry. If you decide to start practicing yoga, get ready to start asking yourself some really interesting and possibly uncomfortable questions about what you hold to be true.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Communication Breakdown
Hey, girl, stop what you're doin'!
Hey, girl, you'll drive me to ruin.
I don't know what it is that I like about you, but I like it a lot.
Won't let me hold you, Let me feel your lovin' charms.
Communication Breakdown, It's always the same,
I'm having a nervous breakdown, Drive me insane!
Robert Plant-
Robert Plant is a fabulous singer, but it has to be said his best mode of communication is probably not the written word. The hard sciences are often very particular about defining terms - knowing exactly what the definition of a word is. This is a really good idea. When you are being operated on, you want your doctor to say to the nurse “hand me the scalpel” not “hand me the thingy”. Same goes for pilots, nuclear warhead...guys, and anyone else in charge of something important.
A friend of mine asked me to prepare a talk on communication for an I.C.B.C. (that’s a government insurance corporation) conference. So, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by writing a blog about what I plan to say. By the way, killing two birds with one stone would be really, really hard. Even getting close to one bird with any sizable rock is tough (I just tried). Just carrying around a rock and looking for a bird raises some suspicion apparently.
There are probably a zillion ways one could approach the topic of effective communication, but I think for brevity’s sake we can whittle it down to a few basic principles. When we communicate, we do it through the vehicle of the 5 senses:
Sight
Sound
Touch
Smell
Taste
If you are a cook, you probably use all of these to communicate. But if you are interacting with another person on the street, you’ll probably just use:
Sight
Sound
Touch
Unless you are Robert Plant. Or you are really, really friendly.
Further whittling will reveal we use language more than any of the other faculties of communication. My friend Oscar asked me to prepare something about communication from a “Yogic perspective”. So I considered that. One could say that from a yogic perspective, we’d want our communication to be:
Effective
As concise as possible
Worth listening to
So that brings us to an interesting question - what is worth saying? We use language to interact, to get things - “pass the salt”, and to describe our inner state - happy, sad, poignant, furious and so on. But to do this we need a listener. Good listeners are a very well paid bunch of folks. This is so because the act of listening literally creates space for the speaker to fill. And not only that. When we are really listened to, it encourages us to give our best as a speaker, to craft our language to be as palatable as possible, and to say what we mean. Ahhh - to say what we mean!
There are at least 8,000 homophones and homonyms in the English language. New words are being created daily - some statistics say over 20,000 English words per year are being added to our language. Some of these are scientific or medical terms that we may never use, like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis - just hope you don’t get a lung infection in an African mine. All of this makes choosing the right words pretty tough. So how is it that we do it?
I think great speakers are great listeners. They never stop listening, even while they are speaking. They have honed their sensitivity to pick up non-verbal cues from their audience of one or a hundred. I have seen this ability in all the great speakers I’ve heard, and it is a function of awareness. This awareness is present when the internal babble of our minds is quiet enough to allow us the sensitivity to really regard another and receive who they are and what they might understand and have an interest in. Great musicians have the same ability. Rock musicians. They can even be seen flicking their hair away from their ears in what appears to be a sultry way, but which is actually a very methodical and sophisticated way of listening better.
Hey, girl, you'll drive me to ruin.
I don't know what it is that I like about you, but I like it a lot.
Won't let me hold you, Let me feel your lovin' charms.
Communication Breakdown, It's always the same,
I'm having a nervous breakdown, Drive me insane!
Robert Plant-
Robert Plant is a fabulous singer, but it has to be said his best mode of communication is probably not the written word. The hard sciences are often very particular about defining terms - knowing exactly what the definition of a word is. This is a really good idea. When you are being operated on, you want your doctor to say to the nurse “hand me the scalpel” not “hand me the thingy”. Same goes for pilots, nuclear warhead...guys, and anyone else in charge of something important.
A friend of mine asked me to prepare a talk on communication for an I.C.B.C. (that’s a government insurance corporation) conference. So, I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by writing a blog about what I plan to say. By the way, killing two birds with one stone would be really, really hard. Even getting close to one bird with any sizable rock is tough (I just tried). Just carrying around a rock and looking for a bird raises some suspicion apparently.
There are probably a zillion ways one could approach the topic of effective communication, but I think for brevity’s sake we can whittle it down to a few basic principles. When we communicate, we do it through the vehicle of the 5 senses:
Sight
Sound
Touch
Smell
Taste
If you are a cook, you probably use all of these to communicate. But if you are interacting with another person on the street, you’ll probably just use:
Sight
Sound
Touch
Unless you are Robert Plant. Or you are really, really friendly.
Further whittling will reveal we use language more than any of the other faculties of communication. My friend Oscar asked me to prepare something about communication from a “Yogic perspective”. So I considered that. One could say that from a yogic perspective, we’d want our communication to be:
Effective
As concise as possible
Worth listening to
So that brings us to an interesting question - what is worth saying? We use language to interact, to get things - “pass the salt”, and to describe our inner state - happy, sad, poignant, furious and so on. But to do this we need a listener. Good listeners are a very well paid bunch of folks. This is so because the act of listening literally creates space for the speaker to fill. And not only that. When we are really listened to, it encourages us to give our best as a speaker, to craft our language to be as palatable as possible, and to say what we mean. Ahhh - to say what we mean!
There are at least 8,000 homophones and homonyms in the English language. New words are being created daily - some statistics say over 20,000 English words per year are being added to our language. Some of these are scientific or medical terms that we may never use, like Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis - just hope you don’t get a lung infection in an African mine. All of this makes choosing the right words pretty tough. So how is it that we do it?
I think great speakers are great listeners. They never stop listening, even while they are speaking. They have honed their sensitivity to pick up non-verbal cues from their audience of one or a hundred. I have seen this ability in all the great speakers I’ve heard, and it is a function of awareness. This awareness is present when the internal babble of our minds is quiet enough to allow us the sensitivity to really regard another and receive who they are and what they might understand and have an interest in. Great musicians have the same ability. Rock musicians. They can even be seen flicking their hair away from their ears in what appears to be a sultry way, but which is actually a very methodical and sophisticated way of listening better.
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