spinning your wheels

Lam

Vam

Ram

Yam

Ham

OM

silence

Into simulating your chakras? Begin at muladhara, the root, and work your way up the sushumna, singing these mantras to awaken Kundalini, the latent consciousness coiled at the base of your pelvic floor, encouraging her rise to the crown of your head, and the balance of your energy body.

Lam at Muladhara, your center of support, then Vam at Svadhistana--the seat of the vital forces. Follow with Ram at Manipura chakra, where will and ego reside, Yam at the focus of love at Anahata chakra. Next comes Ham at Vishuddha in the throat, the powerful centre of communication, and Om, at Anja, the third eye of Insight. Silence is the song that completes the sequence at the seventh chakra, the sahasrara, envisioned as a thousand-petalled lotus at the crown of the head, with the ability to create integration.

Tap into the battery charge of each spinning energy disk, amassing prana as you travel upward, until your feel the vitality surging through you--free and as strong as a river in spring.

good stuff...

All yoga poses should be therapeutic...should be therapeutic. But what does this mean? What component is necessary to transform our asana from simple exercise to therapy?

Alignment, certainly. But is elegant alignment enough?

Therapy--whether physical or psychological--begins with a process of investigation, and the goal is curative. Etymologically, the word therapy actually means healing. Therapy is meant to have an ameliorative effect; it is curing, beneficial, good.

So to be good yoga, we want our postures to help heal us, to be beneficial to our well-being--inside and out. And what can we do to make this happen? It all starts with being clear in our intention.

When we have therapy as a goal, and move toward it, alignment becomes something we participate in with such true caring, engagement becomes as critical as breath. We bring a commitment to become something more, to deepen our knowledge--our awareness--of ourselves.

As the subtlest nuances of our physical and emotional landscape become known to us, we grow more sensitive to our body's innate intelligence. We give it what it asks for, and in return, it responds with what we need. We become more fully ourselves, as the sphere of our life grows and deepens. We expand into our potential, leave the ordinary behind. Wings wide open, heart wide open, we fly free and discover our uniqueness.

pretzel logic

In the world at large we act from the skin out. In the morning, we shower, dress, check ourselves out in the mirror--witnessing our outer selves, as others see us. All the long day, our senses are busy retrieving the outside information necessary to navigate our lives.

In our yoga class, though, we are invited inside. We think about our muscles, our fascia. We position/ re-position our bones with meticulous precision. Listening to our breath, we move with it, work with it, directing our energy within. We taste ourselves--what stock we're made of.

With this interior focus, we establish a radical reference point, a radical view of ourselves; we perform that greatest of magical tricks--The Change In Perspective.

From this new vantage, we find new challenges, new satisfactions. New cares, and new commitments.

People may think yoga is about bending into a pretzel, but they have no idea that our goal is actually to turn ourselves completely inside out. To see the seams, then erase them, knitting ourselves a deeper, more expansive, and more integrated reality. Discrepancies minimized. Partitions dismantled. Seamless and whole.

BTW...have you noticed that a pretzel is shaped like a heart? Just another unexplained but delicious moment of synchronicity.

we are stardust...

Geoffrey Burbridge, the renown astronomer who traced all life on earth to stardust, died this week. It was Dr. Burbridge's research which led us to understand that the chemical constituents of our bodies come from an exploding star--the same star--and introduced a scientific underpinning to the idea that we are all brothers and sisters under the skin.

Composed of cosmic building blocks, of stardust,"luminous beings are we, not this crude matter," as Jedi Master Yoda says.

Kinda raises the bar, doesn't it, when you think of life like that?

I hope they name a star after him.