Yoga Off the Mat: Why, Charlie Brown, Why?

"Don't take it too hard. I've done a lot of stupid things in my life too" -Charlie Brown

#iamlucy

Charlie Brown needs yoga. Lately, yoga "off the mat" seems more challenging. That might mean that there is something off-balance, emotionally speaking. We all need to check in from time to time. We all have bad news from time to time, so how do we deal with it?

Yoga, meditation, going for a drive, a walk, playing an instrument. We need a filter in this life, so that we don't get so many grounds with the coffee in our cup. What do you do to check in with your body and mind? And equally important, is it working? Lord knows everyone needs to zen out a bit more....

Maybe...

"My life has no direction, no aim, no meaning. And yet I'm happy. I can't figure it out. What am I doing right?"
-Snoopy

Stretching the sides of your body. Moving the spine in its 5 directions, increasing flexibility and balance. Bending over to reach your toes. "Good grief!" You may say. What trouble! But this is the beauty of yoga, Charlie Brown. This is the beauty of making time for you. There are a lot of reasons to stretch and do yoga. For example, 1. Life asks us to be flexible, 2. Life asks us to recover 3. If you have tightness, you can take time, relax and breathe into it - and suddenly, you're not thinking about stupid stressors 4. It just feels good. Being conscious of our physical equilibrium can help us stabilize. We have all been weak or tight on one side. And then, the laws of compensation take over, causing more damage. The strong side compensates for the weaker side: Not good. This goes for living off-balanced too. Daily life involves every aspect of our being, even parts we are ignoring or shutting off. My recent hope and revelation: Balance on the mat can help with balance off the mat.

When facing some big decisions, a deliberate increase in physical activity / time on the mat gives the grounding we need to take some steps. When I was having a discouraging moment in my PhD process, I started hiking Stone Mountain 3x/week by myself. Seeing the sunset at the top gave me the oomph I needed to re-engage my commitment, and to be happy about it rather than discouraged with where I was at. It sounds trivial, but I promise it was fundamental to my wellbeing, and my wellbeing was fundamental to doing my best work and finishing the dissertation.

Charlie Brown, you need to relax!

Being there in your body, getting in tune,

releasing tension,

working those muscles, relaxing them

reaching through the toes, the fingers, ...breathing

Santosha: contentment

Yoga helps train our mind - and our body. When I think of the fact that behind this practice lies a beautiful, long, ancient Indian tradition built by devotees, then comes: respect, awe, wisdom. This peaceful tradition makes me (and you) want to respect the tradition's tenets and discover more the ethics of yoga, the yamas and niyamas (see my previous post). They are the gateway through which we connect deeper with the tradition that supports our yoga on (and off) the mat. 

Reading sacred texts
Scanning the body too

Listen to the body. We can listen to the silence through this movement, take air and light in through our senses - especially outdoors. The mind is calmed in this pose that enables us to breathe in a different way. Reading our body can help us address and cure any psychosomatic issues that may arise (psychosomatic issues: manifestations of physical imbalance in which emotional components have a strong part [source]). We can clear our body of negative energy, and our mind too. We are not empty-headed yogis: We are clearer-minded seekers.

Just as we wish both sides of our body to be balanced, strong, and as structurally supportive as possible, we also wish our mind to find balance. I know I do. Perhaps it is in yoga that one can witness the balance that one does in fact have - if we've been practicing awhile or if we've been keeping in tune other ways (running, dancing, walking, what have you). Physically, there it is. It's easy to see when you're doing balance and strength poses  that the right side & the left side can do about the same thing, though they may feel slightly different. Does encouraging our physical balance make us feel stronger or simply be stronger in life? Perhaps so. Some of us need that - and are happy to have yoga as that oil that helps make the engine run.

Test: Hold tree pose on each side, breathing deeply for a few moments, and see how you feel after. Or sit comfortably and breathe in slowly through one nostril and slowly out through the other a few times (use finger to close the unused nostril,), and then change sides. Or: Sit and enjoy nature this summer (easy yoga). Breathe.

Clarity may come with a little effort & a little balancing. And harmony and peace of mind-body.

I wish we could all go to bed like that, then awake: And sustain it.

And spread it like pizza dough.

We can try.

Feet, Wonderful Roots of the Body

The Pope washes the feet of Muslim refugees, a beautiful message for today's world. 

Pope Francis washes the feet of 12 young offenders
at a detention centre in Rome

Symbolically, the feet already have great meaning in the Judeo-Christian world. But do we pay attention to our feet? They can't just be the donkey of the body, can they?

If you want deeper understanding of the body during yoga, and of your body in daily everyday motions of life by extension, study the importance of the feet. How well are we appreciating all the weight that they hold up, all the balancing, all the weight they carry?

Look at your toes; wiggle them. Those two middle toes after the big toe are connected to the eyes. The little ones on the side, they are connected to the ears. This ain't no revelation I had -- it's what I read in a cool book that reprinted ancient ritual symbols of the bottoms of the feet. In one diagram, various hills and valleys of the foot were marked with a six-pointed star, a swastika (a symbol from the ancient world before Hitler abused it), a temple. In a foot reflexology diagram, we see how each part of the foot connects to an organ or part of the spine. The author of this modern compilation of ancient and new wisdom Yoga of the Subtle Body, Tias Little, also gives you exercises to feel how to spread the webbing between your toes, and how to appreciate the different arches in your feet, the different sides of the heel, and how to properly stand in mountain pose, for example: by engaging the lift in the arch, by pressing into the four corners of the foot - and he tells you where those four corners are - you can engage pada bandha (click on link for more on the bandhas).

This chapter on the feet does good: It's like becoming more aware of your blessed feet as you read, wanted to give them more attention and exercise in your next yoga session. You read that your toes are like the roots of a lotus flower or a tree that sip up the water, and somewhere higher in your foot is where the stream of chi energy that you're taking in becomes like a river, then gushing to knees to be redistributed via nadis to the various organs and parts of your whole entire body. Prana everywhere. The feet are how we ground ourselves to the earth, its magnetic vibe - it's basically how we stand stable. In activating them, we activate a whole current of energy, as Little says that they, along with the hands, are antennas of energy.

Tadasana,
or samasthiti

In tadasana, or samasthiti, you can feel your sacred axial line. What a beautiful phrase and thought: there is an axial line in our body, that gives us life. "In tadasana, we stand in the sacred midline of the body. In the meditative arts, the mountain is not limited to a postural stance but suggests the embodiment of wisdom" (27).

Zen master Dogen, founder of the Soto school of Japanese Buddhism in 1240, wrote that mountains  are "the bones and marrow of the Buddha ancestors" and the "realm where all buddhas practice."

Zen master Dogen

And if you think any of that is beautiful, then file this full length movie about Zen master Dogen away for later. (Bookmarking for myself too)

The feet. Mounds of hills and crevices, like another planet, storing the connections of our body to pressure points on our feet. Pressure points that Eastern arts know better than Westerners. But it's available, out there to pay for if you want. If I knew that any local acupuncturist was the best, knowing what the ancients knew, I'd go to him for sure. And even if he knows some...

Then, this blew my mind: "The feet help orient to a sacred axis through the temple of the body a pillar of self-organizing radiant vitality, revered in hatha yoga as the primary pathway for the movement of the deepest life-force (kundalini) Contemporary physiological renderings of this central axis involve the spine, spinal cord, and brain-that is, the central nervous system-yet we can imagine the central axis beginning in the inner foot." (29). A pillar of self-organizing radiant vitality, so perfectly said. I stopped and reread that a few times over my morning tea yesterday at Daylight Donuts (where you heard the old guys catcalling each other as they walked in and saw the whole group: "Rocky babyyyyyy!").

Our body has a pillar to conduct energy for our very life, breath, vitality - thus PRANA, what we work so hard for, and need to relax into and make time for, in yoga. That it why it is so important to take care of the spine and not lose flexibility. Vitality. That is why we breathe, and do yoga, and let the pose serve the breath, and let the breath help us extend along our axials... we are preserving and honoring our vitality, connecting to it, hoping to have some leftover connection and light to give to others who we meet with a smile, or peaceful nod. Recognition that we are all a body and soul, a breath.

So amazing. The feet.

Now I know why my Ballet teachers would say "Lift those arches!" and study our arches to see who had the highest one in class. Pulling up the arch, not letting it collapse, affects the gait and alignment and centering (or off-centering) of our whole body. Its amazing, when we really look at the interconnectedness of the body. And by extension, of the world.