Yoga room and meditations

I spent yesterday completely clearing out our "yoga room".  It's a big bedroom with a walk-in closet, and now it has one platform bed and one floor lamp and the rest is completely empty except for yoga mats, props, and CD player with relaxation CD's.  The walkin closet is my meditation room.  It has two zafu mats and a couple of meditation cushions, and a dog bed for my dog, Sid, who sees it as a space that he can go when he's really exhausted and doesn't want to be bothered.

 

The "yoga room" was originally my office, so now my new office is in a small cubbyhole in one corner of our master bedroom.  My life seems to be a constant, neverending shuffling of my stuff.  I change hobbies, interests, friends, etc. etc. etc.  Sometimes I think it stems from a childhood of being a military brat and never having developed the skill of bonding with anything or anyone.  At other times I wonder whether it's something that's unsettled in my innate being.  Luckily for me, this characteristics hasn't extended to my husband, family, or dogs.

 

Anyhow....  now we have a beautiful yoga room that is free of any outside junk save one bed, and a space for both John and I to do our practices at one time.  In the meantime, I work on our family room downstairs, which will be a REAL yoga room some day.  Right now it's in the middle of wallpaper stripping.  What exactly would "yoga room" wallpaper look like, I wonder as I wade through downy-soaked wallpaper and puddles.  I have not been able to find an answer to that, so we have yet to see where this activity will end up.

 

I didn't begin my practice until 10:30 last night, and I'm on the first day of week 4 of Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee.  I know that the first day of the week has a fairly long and intense practice, so I opted for doing day 2 of "Richard Hittleman's Yoga: 28 Day Exercise"'s revolving daily exercises.  Hittleman's yoga is different from Yee's.  Whereas Rodney Yee will have you do one pose for 30 seconds, Hittleman will have you do a sequence for 10-15 seconds apiece.  The poses are slightly different as well.  Rodney Yee's poses have made Hittleman much easier, although Hittleman poses still hit upon areas that are quite tender in my body, so I know that they are a valuable cross-yoga-training practice.

 

Another thing that's interesting is, Rodney Yee is much more formal in his meditation instruction.  Hittleman has some breathing or imaging exercise, and then the rest of the meditation is lying quietly.  I have very good meditations with Hittleman.  Last night I was pleasantly surprised to find myself sinking into a state of complete relaxation and mental calm.

Yoga practice with your spouse

I'm going to discover what it's like to share my yoga practice with my spouse.  At want for a place for him to begin his work with the book "Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee", I cleared out the other half of my office, and now he shares my space with me.  I gave him instructions to be quiet unless absolutely necessary, since my yoga practice is somewhat sacred to me.

 

Within about 10 second he said "I don't know how to set up my mats.  Do I really need two mats?  This one is curled up, I should turn it over."

 

"Work it out with yourself please, John.  You don't need to get me involved in this discussion." I grumbled as I faced the wall in my mountain pose, trying to concentrate on relaxing my face and body (and a positive attitude).

 

I still have a long ways to go in being a generous person.  Sharing my sacred space is definitely an act of love.  We'll see how long I can last :P

Wide upper back

Today as I walked the halls at work, I thought more about my posture and the proper way for me to hold it.  In "Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee", Rodney talks about keeping your back and hips wide.  And I can feel that as I relax my back, my hips and back widen.  I can especially feel it in my chair, where I have a lumbar support.  If I relax my back so that it feels widened, the I can feel a greater ability to curve my back over the lumbar support.

 

It feels as though if I relax my back when I'm walking, where I can feel my back widening, it brings my spine back (or up from the slouched position, if you want to word it more properly).  And then, it feels as though everything else begins to fall into place.

 

I'm still experimenting, though.  I'm the first person to say that when I'm in a touchy-feely class and the teacher asks "what are you feeling"? I inevitably am the person that makes a comment that's totally the opposite of what I'm supposed to be feeling.  Throughout my years and years of built-up stress, I find that I'm completely out of touch with perceptions about my body.

 

John made a wise statement the other day.  "You reach and age where you have to do these [stretching/exercising] things because they're serious business".  That is so true.  I've reached an age where my yoga and meditating and such are very serious pursuits, and I know that if I stop them, my body and my emotional health will slide downhill.

Graceful Sun Salutations and the Perfect Posture

I watched an online video on the Sun Salutation on the http://www.jogajournal.com/ site (http://www.yogajournal.com/video/learnposes/?bctid=1483914421 by Natasha Rizopoulos) the other day, and it showed ma a bit about how to do the transitions from pose to pose. I've read that the sun salutation should be done in such a way that the transitions themselves become part of the pose. I didn't quite understand that, and have been studying online videos of people doing it.

In the Natasha Rizopoulos video, I can see a couple of things which are interesting:

1. She spends a quiet moment initially in mountain pose before beginning the routine.
2. She brings her arms around when going from upright to down, and from down back to upright
3. When she moves to and from the lunges, she hovers her leg in the air before actually placing it in the new position
4. She begins her Downward Facing Dog on her toes (thereby keeping them in the exact same position as they are in the post just preceding) for a brief moment before lowering her heels into the full Downward Facing Dog

I've been attempting to mimic her style, and I'm feeling a lot more of the graceful flow that I think I should be feeling.

Yesterday when walking to my car after work I thought about what I wrote about curving my upper back when walking or standing, and that's not exactly correct. I don't actually curve it. I think the right term may be that I reposition it.

The finding of one's perfect posture seems to be such a complicated and introspective task. I'm constantly studying different holistic methods of posture and coming up with revelations. Hopefully with each new revelation, I edge closer to something that will hopefully become my perfect posture.

Reaching Nirvana through reading ebooks

In last nights "Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee" lesson (week 3, lesson 2), I did alternate Cobra and Downward Facing Dog poses. It was interesting because as I repeated this sequence throughout the lesson, I found myself thinking about the entire curvature of my backbend, especially the upper part of my back, which has a tendency to be very rigid. I could feel that thinking about the rounding of my entire back and trying to keep my legs active took the edge off of my lower back receiving most of the workload.

As I walked up and down the hall today at work, I found myself thinking about this, and as I walked, I had the sensation that my lower back even in the walking position seems to get more than its fair share of the workload. I concentrated on trying to give my upper back more of a backbend -- which to people with good posture it would seem more like my moving from a tendency to be hunched over, to a more upright position -- and felt that it helped to bring my spine upright into a more holistically balanced position.

I've had a funny revelation lately. I have had chronic sleep issues since my cancer treatments in 2001, due to all of the myriad of subsequent side effects and health issues that followed. I keep thinking that I need to resolve them the "spiritual" way, and use the awake time to put myself into a meditative state and clear my mind. The other night, I lay awake for about 3 or 4 hours. Finally I gave in, opened my ebook, read a page of it, and promptly fell asleep. When I told John about it in the morning, he said "if the ebook puts you to sleep immediately, why don't you just read it instead of laying there trying to meditate?" Now, I read my ebook to put me to sleep. If I wake up in the night, I read another page of it and then fall asleep within minutes. Another example of how I'm learning to live my life, not in the way that I try to put pressure on myself to (or feel pressure from the outside world to), but in the way that makes it work.

My question is, if I do not use this sleepless time to meditate, and instead us it to read ebooks, will it take more time for me and my subsequent lives to reach nirvana? A somewhat puzzling conundrum to me.

This morning I did a full headstand, legs in the air. I didn't feel at all uneasy about doing it, and found a nice balance where I was able to relax the muscles in my neck. Afterwards I got up and started for the bathroom to brush my teeth, and then it occurred to me that coming out of a pose as demanding as a headstand should have a more gentle transition, so I went back into my office and did a child's pose for a minute. As I walked out of the office, I wondered whether getting the blood to my head would help me think better at work today.

Yoga and headstands and back pain

This morning I successfully took my headstand another step and raised my legs into the air. For just a second or two. It feels good to see myself making progress in my poses.

I'm starting week 3 of "Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee". I loved how the last time I did this first lesson of week 3 I was amazed at how I was able to accomplish that backbend lifting my head off of the floor. Before Rodney Yee, I was doing Richard Hittleman's "Yoga: 28 Day Exercise Plan", and I could never lift my head off of the floor in the backbend. There is something very thoughtful in the lesson plan laid out in "Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee". The poses seem to build upon each other, and somehow, subconsciously, the mind develops an understanding of the body, so that by the time he asks you to do something challenging, the mind has already done 80% of the work needed to accomplish the pose.

I find that the yoga is not helping my back pain -- some of which I attibute to old age arthritis, and some due to scar tissue from breast cancer radiation treatments. This is guesswork on my part, since the source of my back pain has never been diagnosed despite repeated visits to many doctors, a host of tests, and a ton of physical therapists and holistic practitioners. The yoga in fact seems to make the pain worse. I think the reason is because, I imagine, the mobility of muscles that haven't been mobilized in 30 years and the breaking down of scar tissue mean that things around my spine are getting repositioned and resorted.

I may have to live with my back pain forever. At this point it's irrelevant to me, because I go about my life in spite of it. Even when I'm not doing the yoga now, I spend more time being aware of my body and what parts are tensing up throughout parts of my day. When I walk down the hallway at work, I feel when I'm slouching, because the Mountain Pose has taught me about finding that spot where my head and spine are balanced and the parts of my body that don't need to be working are relaxing. In that way, I can feel my body gliding with more ease. Part of what yoga is teaching me is that I can live with back pain AND ease of movement. It's a constant lesson, but that's what helps me see that motion (and my life) need not come to an end because of my various aches and pains.

Finding Enlightenment

I constantly struggle with the concept of enlightenment and the concept of "finding" it. One of the biggest roadblocks for me in a group of spiritual types is seeing everyone else as more enlightened than myself. It's especially vivid with zen buddhism where people work with koans. I can feel the whoosh as it all flies above my head.

On the other hand, sometimes I get into modes where I've been doing a lot of meditating and feeling myself becoming more grounded, and then it feels as though the entire rest of the world is so messed up emotionally.

I wonder if this means I'm normal?

More on headstands, as well as the relationship between scuba diving and meditating

In the past couple of days, I've started to do three full sun salutations (ala Rodney Yee) in the morning, and one headstand a couple of breaths long.

I love timing my poses through my breath instead of counting. It makes me mindful of my breathing, and helps me focus on my body.

I've noticed that yoga hasn't helped my back pain at all, which I believe is caused by scar tissue from radiation caused by my breast cancer treatments. The worst of the back pain is just behind the lung on my cancer side. But somehow the yoga makes the back pain less of a concern to me. My body feels like it's getting some understanding and acceptance of itself, and that's a very calming feeling.

The really nice thing about the Rodney Yee yoga is that he emphasizes mediation. The last 15 minutes or so of the practice are dedicated to relaxation poses, and if my body can't take a particular pose for too long, I'm able to do my meditating with the next pose. I feel that I'm learning alternative meditation positions. It's nice because I find that in my life my ability to meditate is directly connected with my spirituality as well as my entire attitude about life in general.

This morning when doing my headstand, I discovered that I can get my body into one particular position where maintaining the headstand is effortless. On either side of that position I either fall back against the wall, or fall forward onto my arms. So my goal will be to keep praticing so that I can reproduce that position reliably every time. I will stick to doing one headstand of 2-4 breaths duration each practice session so as not to strain my neck. I truly believe that learning to do this will do wonderful things for my overall well-being. This is one of the aspects of scuba diving that I believe causes such a calming effect. The other aspect of scuba diving is the pressurization, which I think must have huge positive effects on the body. I just don't know an easy way to simulate that on-land though.

Musings on comments (and why none)

I thought about commenting as I drove in to work today, and decided to turn off commenting in this blog. There's something about allowing comments in ones blog that I've noticed. A blog with commenting allowed implicitly invites others to be a part of your blog. Which is a really good thing in most cases, because it invites collaboration, which is a wonderful aspect of blogging.

But comments in blogs also change the blog. They guide the direction of the blog development, and also affect the writer -- and reader -- in a positive or negative way. I find that I tend to feel a certain degree of social etiquette in acknowledging people for their comments. If someone takes the time out to write something, then they deserve to get some sort of recognition for being an active reader. I also find that I tend to be driven by affirmation from my audience, and I'm wondering what will happen if I have no "audience" per se, but stand on my own, without any of that feedback.

I'm going to do something different with this blog and turn off commenting. I want my time and writing to be directed by what is within me to say, and not by comment maintenance.

So.... this is the groundwork that I am laying for this blog. I have neither traffic stats nor comments turned on. This will be all about my sharing a very profound part of my life with the world in words, and about my trust that there will be a connection to the world, without any need for proof.

Head stands

Since I'm gradually realizing the profound impact that yoga is having on my life, I decided to create a blog and see where this takes me. For the past 5 months or so, I've done the yoga every night. I began with Richard Hittleman's "28 Day Exercise Plan", and after doing that for a couple of month, I realized that I was beginning to reap both mental and physical benefits from my practice.

One day, at Barnes and Noble, I discovered a book by Rodney Yee called "Moving Toward Balance: 8 Weeks of Yoga with Rodney Yee". I discovered what a truly amazing teacher he is, and have been inspired in my practice by the care and mindfulness that he shows in his books and workouts.

Last night I did a yoga headstand for the first time. When I first began attempting the headstand, 5 months ago, I never ever thought I'd get to the point where I could do such a difficult (for a 50-something post-cancer woman) pose. I discovered that the yoga headstand doesn't come from the development of external muscles, it comes from an internal sense of balance and relaxation, and from a deep sensitivity to my body that is slowly beginning to come to me from doing 1 1/2 to 2 hours of yoga every night.