The sage rules from the purest motives
Relying wholly on quiet and inner peace.

She watches the seasons rise and fall
And if she knows how things grow, she knows
They are fed by their roots

And they return to their roots;
To grow and flower and flow.

Every thing must have its roots,
and the tendrils work quietly underground.
This quiet feeding is the Way of Nature.

If you understand ch’ang - this principle of nurturing,
you can understand everything.
Not understanding it will lead you to disaster.

If a sage knows this, she can rule
And she will do so with patience and justice.

Any person can become wise in this
And she can walk the Way of Heaven

And if you walk that way
You will be royal in the mastery

Life can end in pain -
But if you live like this,
     under the Tao

You will fill your days with breath.

I may not rule an empire, but I have dominion over myself - whether I like it or not. The more time I spend in meditation as part of my daily practice, the more I come to understand this section of the Tao Te Ching.

Trees have roots which sink into the earth; I have roots which spread from my spine and mind to my physical edges, and vessels which extend from my heart to all of my ends. From them I feel, perceive, and live. They are the roots of my niyama: They tell me about myself, and react to that which comes in contact with me.

I have cultural and historical roots which help define me relative to their similarities and differences with what I perceive as my ‘self’. My words and actions, thoughts and perceptions spread to my network of friends, family, co-workers, acquaintances, and others who cross my path. They are my mirrors, sounding boards, adversaries and supporters. They are the roots of my yama: Thye tell me about my effect and place in the world.

Blood needs to pump, neural networks need to fire, relationships need to be fed - or they will all die. When I feel claustrophobic, starved, choked, restricted - I need to see where my roots are being thwarted and I can solve the issue. When my yoga posture is a struggle, unstable or weak, I need to breathe into mula bandha - the root lock at the base of my pelvis - to regain a center from which to expand and draw in to regain steadiness and ease in the pose. And when I am feeling ungrounded, restless, hungry, or anxious I need go no further than my meditation seat and breath to seek the source of that sense of lack.

Patiently, with breath, I develop mastery over myself.

• Explain the significance of “99% practice 1% theory” as it relates to your experience on the mat with yoga, and to your approach as a teacher.
• What are the advantages/benefits of Ashtanga yoga’s “outside-in” approach of beginning with the physical to progress towards samadhi? How does this approach compare to other yoga approaches (see Desikachar 135-140)?
• What modifications do you want to bring to your Ashtanga class and why?
• A classically trained Ashtanga yogi enters your class expecting a full Primary Series. How would you explain your modified class to someone in this mindset?
• Explain the difference for you between dogmatic dedication and conviction.

• Does yoga seem to be an easier road in life compared with just ‘making it through’? Why or why not?
• Why would/do we work so hard at removing samsara from our lives?
• How have you seen yoga relieve suffering thus far in your life or someone else’s?
• Do you share Cope’s optimism about suffering as auspicious?
• How can you imagine the process of embracing suffering will be for you, or how have you done it (in specific terms, what did you actually do)?

Feel free to go beyond these questions; they are only a starting point. Be sure to refer to at least one of the direct quotes below in your response. Have fun and come back to read and comment on others’ postings!

Stone:

We begin practicing yoga postures in an effort to relieve suffering and find a way to meet life with less effort and more flexibility. Yoga is a path out of suffering. (3)

This turning of the wheel of duhkha [suffering] is called samsara. Samsara is a metaphor for meaninglessness. (21)

Samsara is the sense of being caught in a wheel that spins and spins, yet we can’t find our way out of the cycle. (22)

Cope:

[L]ook carefully into the possibilities of transmuting ordinary struggle into a quietly extraordinary life. (xx)

[W]hat mature human beings require is … a reliable practice: a training program that may help the highly motivated student to realize the full potential of being human. (xxx)

In the yoga tradition, the kind of breakdown which Jake faced was auspicious. At its core blazes an urgent concern with authenticity, self-realization, self-responsibility, as well as a concern for the overall meaning of life … it was the classic portal into the deeper practices of yoga. (12)

The extended classes will run Mondays and Fridays 4:00-5:15pm, ending the week of April 12-16. This will keep you in the yoga groove a bit longer, as the next semester’s sessions won’t start again until the third week of May.

Drop-ins will be $10/person. Sign up for all 4 on either Mondays or Fridays for $32, or sign up for all 8 on both Mondays and Fridays for $60. Attendance will be taken, and multi-class passes cannot be shared or partially transferred to others, to keep it fair for everyone.*

Sign up online via PayPal, or bring cash this week or next week at your regular class. Guests are welcome - invite anyone who’d like to come!

I think I’ve finally started to get stable vision - wohoo!! This means I can be at the computer and reading for more than 45 min to an hour a day, so I will prioritize getting this website login section put up for you for next week. In the meantime, I’d like to have you do your assigned blog posting in the comments section of this post on the question we explored in class Sunday:

If you were the ruler of your very own empire (and you are, btw - it’s just less populated than an ordinary empire ;) ), what specific laws and ethics would you want to incorporate into the culture and legislation?

Ever thought about going deeper in your yoga practice but were unsure how? Feeling stalemated or limited by what you can do on your own or what you can get from an hour or two a week in class? Maybe Pranalife Yoga Teacher Training (YTT) is your next step. 

Don’t be intimidated by the “Teacher” title. Even if your interest isn’t to teach, this training is designed to take you beyond good to become something great - that something great you want to be. The work we do in these sessions will be vigorous and enriching. You will be challenged to grow, learn, and change.

I’ve posted the basic info on the upcoming YTT Module below. Visit my Teacher Training link for full details.

Open to the idea; you just never know where it might lead …

Module II: Living Yoga

This module will be an immersion into making yoga an integral and powerful cornerstone of your life. Building from a solid grounding in the basics of being a great yoga teacher, our focus will be on the Eight Limbs of Ashtanga Yoga, the psychology behind the practice, bringing intelligent and intuitive flow to the mat, gaining a deeper understanding of the purpose of practice and how to effectively personalize it, and how to harness your greatest powers - mind, body, and spirit - in order to draw the best out in others.

This module will include a two-week haitus from the Sunday class time to give you extra time for the reading requirements and homework, and to attend the Yoga Conference in Toronto. Going to the conference is entirely up to you and not required, but this module has been structured to allow you to take advanage of it by freeing up that weekend.

Dates: Sundays 8am-6pm February 28th through April 18th, 2010

No classes -

March 28th to let you attend the Yoga Conference (www.theyogaconference.com/toronto2010)

April 4th due to Easter Holiday

Cost: $1150.00 + GST 
DISCOUNT: 20% for previous Module graduates

— REGISTRATION OPEN — CLOSES February 14th, 2010

Download the reading list

Does my potential need to be limitless to be effective? I think that message burdens people with dishonest expectations. I am so weary of these head-in-sand prophets telling me how anything I can imagine I can make happen. Really? Okay, I imagine myself to be a horse. Yeah, exactly. What if I just have great potential, or even good potential? Most of us don’t actualize even a fraction of our potential energy anyway, and why? Are we all THAT afraid to find out that we’re limited beings? More limited, perhaps, than we want to believe ourselves to be? Uh - time to get over yourself and get in the game.

So how do we discover our actual potential? I think the only way to really know is to just keep actualizing - turning potential energy into kinetic energy by DOING instead of just WISHING or THINKING ABOUT things: tapas. And this means we need to be ready to hit our limits and accept them: santosa. Not resign to them, but be honest about them: satya. Then determine to keep challenging them until they change: abhyasa. That’s yoga, baby.

I’ve cranked up my drive to turn my own potential energy kinetic lately. I am throwing myself into the deep end in every sense, really putting my heart out there for the first time in … longer than I can remember. Risking more than I’m comfortable with. It’s kind of freaking me out, but I have let my comfort zone bloat and I know it. Time to get off the beach and catch a new wave.

As any surfer can tell you, surfing (once your’e in the water) is about 75% paddling, 15% waiting, 9% trying and 1% making it totally worth it with a sweet catch. This life is my one day at the beach, and I’ve been waiting more than my 15%. Time’s up. Time to get back in the game.

Now halfway through the book, I’m contemplating why people would go through the effort of making this life-altering commitment to align to a yogic philosophy and practice. It’s not always easy. One tends to become aware of a lot of one’s crap previously and conveniently hidden. Blech.

Michael presents the answer yoga offers: Practicing yoga can end our suffering. Yoga tells us that suffering is due to ignorance, misapprehension, fear of death, and a constant clinging to desires or resistance to aversions. If we can shed light on these sources of suffering in our own lives (become ‘enlightened’) then we can liberate ourselves from that cycle of suffering. Sounds pretty good, no?

Becoming enlightened involves a practice of becoming aware of habitual behaviours, detaching from hardened ways of being, and adopting a new perspective on life that encourages us to see the things we previously thought of as permanent (our bodies, our habits, our relationships, ‘the way life is’, etc) as in fact impermanent, always changing, fluid, transient. By the practice of yoga we bring flexibility back to all aspect of ourselves and reintroduce the opportunity for change because we realize that elements of life are actually always changing. 

But moving from old habits to new ones means going through a process of seeing our ignorance, fear, clinging and resistance for what it is. The stories we tell ourselves about why our ways of being are justifiable cease to work. We come to realize that we’re just kind of full of crap. This part can suck.

As a psychotherapist, Michael offers us a helping hand for this stage: Psychotherapists, like yogis, understand that we became who we are because we needed to function in the world before we really learned how. As creatures of habit, we tend to repeat what we’ve already done and thus reinforce the behaviour, so even in the face of new information we tend only to see what we expect and do only what we’ve done before. Yoga calls this samskara - the continual re-grooving of a pattern. Neuropsychology calls it neural patterning - the strengthening of certain neural pathways in the brain, often at the expense of other pathways that atrophy over time without use. The dog you feed grows stronger, if you will.

In other words, I am not inherently broken or bad. I’ve just been using my tools over and over without skill.

And the same goes for you. You are not broken or bad. You have just been using your tools without skill.

This realiziation can have a dramatic effect on how you can interact with yourself should you decide to take this yogic path. As you practice there will be such a strong temptation to be disappointed in some way with the gap you perceive between who you are and who you want to be. Understand this: Who you are (or who you perceive yourself to be) has come about because of genuine misunderstanding and lack of proper information. Don’t let this concept void your responsibility: You need the ability to respond to the change you will encounter. Instead, allow this understanding to help you see yourself with infinite compassion.

You formed most of your perceptions and coping skills as a child, so incredibly ill-equipped and inexperienced in the world. Forgive yourself for your stumbling thus far if it has fallen short of what you would like to be. Start now to let go of habits born of ignorance. Every movement towards compassion you make creates the possibility for liberation - for you, for anyone, for everyone. We all fell short. Exhale and let it go. Inhale and start anew.