Charleston Yogi

There is a class at Jivamukti Yoga on Sundays at noon that is called Family Yoga.  It is intended to be for all people of all ages and can be shared by any and all family members.  The teachings are simple and useful, there is a sense of fun, and songs that help students easily learn the movements.

It is my favorite class that I have the honor of teaching.  I am often so touched by family togetherness that I am moved to tears.  There have been students who bring in their sisters who visit from out of town, there have been father-son moments, and grandparents and small children who delight us all.  But most regular has been one family, who, come almost every Sunday, because they make it THEIR Family time.  Their time to BE and grow together!  Their time to stretch, and breathe, and SEE each other.  Often they go on a picnic or to the beach or even to the grocery store together afterwards.  But for that one hour, every Sunday, they practice together.   I revel in their beauty every week. 

Last Sunday they were telling me how they invite other families to join them, how they spread the word because they have experienced such value from the practice together.  They inspire me and I am so grateful to their dedication and enthusiasm.  They humble me and are a living example of light.  So may this, my first blog, be a sincere offering to this family who has shown me so much love.  Thank you. 

And thank you for coming to practice yoga together in my presence so many times over.  We invite more Charleston yoga families to join us! And look forward to growing, being, and seeing you more often.

“Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving” (Colossians 4:2).

We come to our mat over and over again with expectations, striving for poses, looking for a feeling of peace, swimming around in our thoughts, to find that those natural feelings are part of the practice.  That is why we continue to show up, observe the breath, and offer thanks for the present moment.  For me, my yoga practice is a physical expression of body prayer. Prayer is a practice, but it does not have to be separate from the body. The body, mind, heart, and soul are a unified whole.  When we bring our hands to heart center in prayer (Anjali Mudra) it’s a symbolic hand gesture that reflects reverence and union with the Divine.

With our fast pace culture during the holiday season,  our stress levels are on the rise with an increase of depression, anxiety, missing past loved ones, arguing with loved ones, who is not talking to who….we all can identify with the chaos that happens within our bodies and our surroundings. The paradox is we are celebrating Thankfulness and often times get swept away into the spirit of ungratefulness.

So like brushing your teeth is a daily practice, so can prayer!

Stand in mountain pose (Tadasana) with hands at heart center in prayer

Ground your feet steadfastly into the earth

Watch the breath fill your heart with thankfulness

Breathe in from your toes, shins, thighs, hips, belly, ribs expand, chest lifts, throat, nose, third eye to the crown of the head

Breathe out from the back of your crown, neck, shoulder blades, lower back, backs of thighs, knees, ankles, and heels

Continue to the cycle of the breath ebbing and flowing from the front side of the body and feeling the breath roll off the back of the body.  Whatever is causing stress in your life, allow that to roll off with the breath of Peace. And inhale whatever you are grateful for.

May your holiday season be filled with Love, and as you pass the salt at your Thanksgiving feast, may your conversations with loved ones be seasoned with salt and light.

I seal all my prayers through my Master Guru, Jesus Christ (Yeshua Sat Nam).

This morning I practiced janu sirsasana. This pose became an analogy for the art of surrender unto God.  Upon entering a pose, we have a tendency to resist in certain spots of the body.  In this particular one, I engaged my hips and lower back, which prevented full fold over my right leg.  Guided by my breath (my anchor), I began to relax into the fold and experienced that full release, the surrender.  I felt my chest and face graze my leg as my exhale and gravity carried me down.  I interlaced my fingers around my foot and pressed my heart toward my toes.  It was beautiful and peaceful.  I felt deeply loved.

And so it is with the surrender unto God.  We resist initially because he is the mystery, the unknown, the unfathomable.  But there are some things that I do know – that he is steadfast in his love for me and wants to encapsulate me in that love.

After some time, the body begins to resist the pose again.  There are a number of reasons for this.  The exertion could be tiring or the position uncomfortable.  More often it could be a slack in concentration.  We grow accustomed to that ecstasy we experience in theasana and then begin to shift out of it inherently.

Despite my desire to bask in the glory of God, I become distracted in my heart and my focus.  My attention diverts to something else and I drift out of the sacred space we cultivated together.  But then I remember.  I realize that something has changed.  I am conscious of the absence of that deep seated love.

When we regain our drishti both with our eyes and our minds, we sink back into physical release.  Concentration returns to the full manifestation of the posture and we enter back into its benefit, this time with greater intention and maybe even more deeply.  Somehow, it is even better than before.  There is less resistance after shaking off the initial resistance.  There is simply being.  Instead of a glimpse of ecstasy, we bathe in it and saturate.

Remembering the Lord, I bring myself back to his feet.  I enter into surrender with more trust and experience.  My diversion actually provides evidence for the goodness of being one with God.  My lack of concentration actually reminds me that nothing is greater than tying my heart to his, being completely his.  I release all tension and engagement.  I sink into his presence.  Instead of momentary vision and light, I bend beneath the weight of his glory and soak in the substance of his love.

I recently read an amazing article in Yoga Journal on “Your Brain on Meditation,” by Kelly McGonigal (www.yogajournal.com/health/2601). She teaches yoga, meditation, and psychology at Stanford University and is the author of Yoga for Pain Relief. It is so inspiring that there is now scientific evidence that your brain on meditation actually changes its structure in different regions of the brain depending on the meditation. For instance, “over the past decade, researchers have found that if you practice focusing attention on your breath or a mantra, the brain will restructure itself to make concentration easier. If you practice calm acceptance during meditation, you will develop a brain that is more resilient to stress. And if you meditate while cultivating feelings of love and compassion, your brain will develop in such a way that you spontaneously feel more connected to others.”

Meditation in the Christian faith is often read and talked about, but not often taught. Meditation is compared to learning a skill like playing an instrument or a sport. In the Message version of Matthew 6, by Eugene Peterson, Jesus say’s “Here’s what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won’t be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense his grace.”

Prayer and meditation are two integral practices that join or unite us to our Creator. Prayer is talking to God and meditation is listening to Him. However, they both are forms of communication and require practice, patience and time. Our brains are so complex, yet we are designed in such a way that when we take the time to meditate a physical manifestation of gray matter in the brain is produced in different regions. According to “Eileen Luders, a re-searcher in the Department of Neurology at the University of California Los Angeles School of Medicine found that increased gray matter typically makes an area of the brain more efficient or powerful at processing information.”

How do we put meditation into practice and deepen our faith? Meditation is an ancient old practice and is used in many religions to connect with God and non-religious meditation techniques link the breath or repeat positive phrases (mantras) to calm the nervous system.  When Jesus visited Martha “her sister, Mary, sat at the Lord’s feet, listening to what he taught. But Martha was distracted by the big dinner she was preparing. She came to Jesus and said, ‘Lord, doesn’t it seem unfair to you that my sister just sits here while I do all the work? Tell her to come and help me.’ But the Lord said to her, ‘My dear Martha, you are worried and upset over all these details! There is only one thing worth being concerned about. Mary has discovered it, and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:38-42). Learning to be still and quiet in our inundated culture and living up to the expectations that we place on ourselves and others requires discipline.  By practicing just 10 to 90 minutes a day you can experience immediate results of calm and peaceful feelings.

This meditation was taught to me at Yogaville, an Ashram in Virginia.

Connect to God in Meditation

1. Go to a quiet secluded place
2. Close your eyes
3. Draw your shoulder blades on the backside of your heart as you melt your shoulders away from your ears
4. Expand from your heart center and smile with your collar bones
5. Ground in through your sitting bones by pulling back any access flesh
6. Inhale and Exhale:”Be still and know that I am God.” Psalm 46:10
7. Inhale and Exhale: “Be still and know that I am.”
8. Inhale and Exhale: “Be still and know that.”
9. Inhale and Exhale: “Be still and know.”
10. Inhale and Exhale: “Be still.”
11. Inhale and Exhale: “Be.”

I treated myself to a pedicure today and lo and behold I experienced what we hear so often from our yoga teachers, “take the practice off your mat.”  Never would I have thought it would transfer over to the pedicure chair!

As I put my feet in the water, I envisioned Jesus washing the disciples’ feet.   I contemplated on His words…”Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. I tell you the truth, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them” (John 13:12-17).

So I am sitting and playing around with the lovely massage chair and chose “kneading.” Closed my eyes and asked God to knead the planks in my own eyes, roll it out, wash away the things I don’t see, that I so easily point out in others. Breathing deeper and moving more inward, the guy washing my feet, must have thought I was crazy, but I am free from worrying about what others think of me these day; so I bathed him in prayer, asking the Lord to bless him and work through his hands as he touched my feet.  As he took the buffer and scrubber to my feet and spent what felt like an eternity on one foot, I thought…so like our God to slough away the calluses, so gentle, thorough, and firm. I have been receiving pedicures for who knows how long now, and think I will never experience them the same again.  At that moment I realized I was experiencing a pedicure meditation.

What is meditation?  I like the way Wikipedia defines meditation:  “Meditation is a holistic discipline by which the practitioner attempts to get beyond the reflexive, “thinking” mind into a deeper state of relaxation or awareness. Meditation is a component of many religions, and has been practiced since antiquity. It is also practiced outside religious traditions. Different meditative disciplines encompass a wide range of spiritual and non-spiritual goals; achieving a higher state of consciousness or enlightenment, developing and increasing compassion and loving kindness, receiving spiritual inspiration or guidance from God, achieving greater focus, creativity or self-awareness, or simply cultivating a more relaxed and peaceful frame of mind.” Just reading that makes my shoulders melt away from my ears. Experiencing higher states of consciousness is not limited to our “yoga mat,” although our mat serves as a tool to discipline the body so that we can become more aware and conscious beings off our mat.

Meditation for me is “receiving spiritual guidance from God to develop and increase more compassion and love towards others.”  T.K.V Desikachar a yogi master and author of “The Heart of Yoga, Developing a Personal Practice,” defines the term bhakti. “The term bhakti comes from the root bhaj, which means to ‘serve.’ By following bhakti yoga, we offer all our thoughts and actions to this higher power. In everything we see, and in every other human being, we recognize God-truth.  We act out of a conviction that we are serving God. We always carry his name within us. We mediate on him. We go into his temples. We are completely devoted to him. That is bhakti yoga.”  Even in a pedicure char!

So the next time you treat yourself to a pedicure consider experiencing bhakti yoga.

1. Greet the person with your eyes and heart. Bathe them in prayer and send them love.
2. As you place your feet in the water visualize Jesus washing your feet.
3. Close your eyes and take deep full breaths.
4. As the pumice stone sloughs away calluses or hard edges bring to mind something that needs to be smoothed out in your heart or mind.  Observe with the mind’s eye and see it wash away in the water.
5. Finally,absorb, receive, soak it all in and then go “love your neighbor as yourself.”